#having a post go viral is a fucking nightmare but at least i get to see how many people are on that friendfucker life

[thisvegetabledoesntfallinlove]

reblog to fuck your friends nasty, platonic-style

[andypantsx3]

BAKUGOU KATSUKI : MASTERLIST

please be respectful! do not repost, plagiarize, translate, or otherwise share on other platforms. all my reader characters are fem + afab unless otherwise specified. please see individual fic posts for nsfw ratings and other warnings!

bakugou writing tag | universal masterlist

MULTI-CHAPTER

incendiary (30K) : complete

When you accidentally go viral in defense of quirkless people, an extremist group puts a target on your back. Pro hero Dynamight is the last person you want watching it.

you’re the one that i haunt (15K) : complete

Ghosts aren’t real. At least, that’s what you tell yourself when the spirit of pro hero Dynamight suddenly starts haunting your apartment.

statistically significant (24K) : complete

You’re the scientist who developed a neural net to model the value of assists. Now that your work is feeding into the hero rankings, pro hero Ground Zero has a bone to pick with your results.

cover shot (through the heart) (16.5K) : complete

For years, you’ve been the only assistant in the business equipped to handle foul-tempered supermodel Katsuki Bakugou. That is, until he catches on to your weak point.

war paint (28K) : complete

Desperate times force you to disguise yourself and join the kingsguard. When a suspicious string of crimes strike the palace, however, Captain Katsuki Bakugou starts paying extra close attention. (A Mulan AU)

savvy (17.5K) : complete

You’re a business course third year who’s good at being bossy, organized, and data-driven. You just want to use your business savvy to help all heroes. Well, all heroes except one. [smutty one shot follow on: defiant]

barbarian-verse au (various) : in progress

You find yourself traveling with barbarian Bakugou. Things get complicated quickly.

ONE SHOTS

fruit first (ask questions later) (3.6K) - gn!reader

When the grocery store you’re in becomes collateral in a villain attack, pro hero Dynamight comes to your rescue. When you become armed with a handful of oranges, however, someone may need to come to his rescue…

abs-olutely worth it (3.5K) - gn!reader

You’re an amateur hero photographer whose shots of Bakugou’s abs keep going viral. Everything is going great…until Bakugou catches wind of it.

defiant (4.5K)

There are a lot of benefits to managing your pro hero boyfriend, but dealing with the PR nightmares he generates is not one of them. After Katsuki gets way too mouthy with a hapless reporter, you take it upon yourself to put him in his place. Katsuki, however, has other ideas. [a smutty oneshot companion to savvy; you do not need to have read savvy first!]

DRABBLES + PROMPT FICLETS

general bakugou x princess reader (1.1K) -> part two (3.2K)

Your father is ailing and with no sons in his lineage, your country risks dissolution and open war if you do not marry. There is only one man you can stomach the thought of assuming the throne.

always (1.5K)

Best friend Bakugou helps you through a breakup.

todobakureader domestic fluff (1K)

The sound of muffled arguing in the kitchen wakes you up on Saturday morning.

destruction (1.6K)

"Are you this stupid on purpose?"

wine & dine (0.3K)

“Oh my god, I am gonna fuck whoever made this apple pie so hard they see stars for weeks.”

always first (0.7K)

“It’s not a double date, we’re just third and fourth wheeling."

just can’t weight (0.8K)

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?" + gym bro Bakugou

personal chef (0.4K)

Living with Bakugou is like living with your own personal chef.

fan art (0.2K)

Bakugou has an embarrassing secret (ft super cute art from Merms!!)

[babyb1ues]

About Xavier’s online presence, virality and what it could mean for his identity

I find it interesting that he often ends up in front of a camera somehow, someway despite wanting to be “lowkey.” It makes sense that he’d avoid any type of photograph or video since he’s been around for so long, and having records of his existence could be detrimental and suspicious, but I wonder if meeting MC just has him throwing caution to the wind. Or maybe it’s because he thinks it’s his last “spring” so it’s like, whatever.

I always believed that he definitely had gone viral before, and the 4 star card that just dropped validates me, lol.

This text above happened before the myth card, aka before the movie, so I also think he got the gig from this. Wouldn’t be surprised if producers especially asked for him.

So, he has a sort of online presence. You’d probably could search pictures of him online. He’s been on a TV ad, has interviews and pictures of him going around, has his name in the Lumiere movie credits, not to mention his face was posted for promo by the movie’s account. It’s like if your face got posted on twitter by Marvel. Like, it’s not lowkey… at all.

Lumiere is a huge IP. It’s a brand at this point, of course it’s huge, there’s nothing people love more than /based on a true story/ and /superheroes/. Lumiere is beyond celebrity status and has become an icon in its own right. But that also means, he’s immensely talked about. There’s probably forums and online discussions about his identity—who he is, where he’s gone. Like, he probably has a Netflix documentary. Zooming in and dissecting grainy pictures of Lumiere, trying to get whatever detail they can. Mannerisms, physical appearance, fighting strategy, and god knows what else. I imagine he’s been picked apart to exhaustion.

With fame and mystique comes the conspiracies. So, they got his basic characteristics—build, hair color, fighting strategy, his fucking /evol/. And maybe even add in a witness report. Imagine somebody saw his eyes, heard his voice.

And then there’s Xavier, a notable and talented hunter who just so happens to sort of resemble Lumiere, and sort of fights like him, and his evol sort of looks like his. And you know this because it’s all fucking online.

It’s not hard to put two and two together. But hey, it’s just a conspiracy.

You think that with him being around for so long, he’d be wary of cameras, of leaving a trail. But he doesn’t seem to mind, or at least doesn’t act paranoid about it. I don’t know if it’s nothing or if it’s an intentional thing planted by the devs. To have his real identity leaked would be a mess—the public reaction, the pr nightmare. And there’s also the actual bounty on his head, how easy it would be to find him now.

I think somebody’s bound to find out. And for the sake of the plot and my own entertainment, I kinda hope they do 😁

[pathogenliliaceae]

Thoughts on Jill Valentine

Hello, friends! My responsibilities for my trading company job have abated in the interim, so I thought perhaps I would come back around to Jill, as promised. 

Thoughts on Jill Valentine:

I will begin this by saying that it is appropriate that she was asked alongside Mia because there is one outstanding issue that I have between the both of them: The need to be saved. Though I find Jill to be leagues more competent.

We’ll get to it in full a bit later. 

I will make no secrets that Jill has never been my most favourite of protagonists. Most of those issues stem from “3: Nemesis” and Five, though I am not adverse to including bits from One and Revelations. In one word, Jill is tolerable. Though, if given a choice (depending upon who my choices are) I will usually pick someone else.

A bit of background on Miss Valentine: I am utterly convinced that Capcom has changed her birthdate. I remember quite vividly scoffing that they made her birthdate Valentine’s Day, but now that I look it up again it seems its in May. Well, that’s at least a half a point in her favour. It’s become less mind-numbingly stupid. She is French-Japanese-American, whose father was a professional thief. In addition, she received Delta Force training through the US Army. Unusually adept at lock-picking, she then (apparently) gains the moniker - the Master of Unlocking. She also, again apparently, is adept at bomb disposal, though I cannot remember an instance in which this is exhibited. Though I can remember many instances when this would have come in handy. Jill. 

Post-Delta Force and US Army tenancy, Wesker recruited Jill for STARS - described as an elite special forces operation for the RPD comprised of military veterans and weapons specialists (put a leaf in this for when I eventually get to Rebecca Chambers). Joining her in STARS are Forest, who she already had a friendship with prior to working together, and Chris. She is the only female officer on STARS Alpha Team, and works as a Breaking and Entering specialist. Forward onto the Mansion Incident.

Again, I’ve mentioned that if given a choice, I will usually not pick Jill to play as. However, that is not to say that I have not played Jill’s scenario in One. My primary complaint about Jill’s Scenario is as follows: It is fundamentally easier than Chris’. She’s got the lockpick set, so she doesn’t need to find Old Keys. She has more inventory space. In the space where she finds the zombie in the bathtub, she stomps his head mid-cutscene and does not have to fight him. She starts with the handgun and receives higher powered weapons whilst Chris has a higher chance of critical headshots. She can mix chemicals to weaken Plant 42 and cut the boss fight in half. Jill can skip certain puzzles in Arklay with Barry’s help, one under the guise of “saving” her from the falling ceiling where you retrieve the shotgun. No need to find the broken shotgun, and you have access to the shotgun as soon as you unlock the area which makes accessing the Armour Key much easier. I used to believe that this was a reflection of the character, but now I believe it is a bit of thinly veiled misogyny on Capcom’s part. ): 

About the opening to her scenario, after running amok in the forest and into the mansion - “There are only three STARS members left now. Captain Wesker, Barry, and myself. We don’t know where Chris is.” YOU’VE JUST HAD HIM AT THE DOOR! HOW HAVE YOU LOST HIM? Also, check your maths, Jill. That’s four STARS members. We have one negative point here in that she’s managed to lose her partner in the amount of time it takes to cross a threshold. Anyhow, like how it is when you play as Chris, the other is locked in the cell in the labs and must be released with the MO discs prior to the T-002 battle. Canonically, Jill escapes with Chris and Barry. Chris escapes with Jill and Rebecca. Rebecca does not make an appearance in Jill’s game, nor Barry in Chris’. Brad is there in the background, flying the helicopter he had damned them with at the beginning. It’s a bit of a flub.

Moving on to 3: Nemesis and the Remake and whatever happens in between the events of Arklay and the destruction of Raccoon City. Gathering from memos in Two and Three, shortly after the Arklay Incident, Chris and Jill take their concerns to Chief Irons, requesting the launch of an investigation into Umbrella and all the related shenanigans. Irons, being involved and heavily steeped in wrongdoing, denies this request. STARS all but disbands, as Chris leaves for Europe in August 1998, Barry moves his family to Canada and follows after Chris, Rebecca is doing fuck-all, and Irons has suspended Jill and ordered her confined to her flat. That leaves... Brad Vickers as STARS. The only member. In office. Everyone else is dead, suspended, or AWOL. I suppose one way to operate as a corrupt organisation is to keep the most inept person as your only functioning operative. I digress, this is about Jill and not the bucket of maladroitness that is Brian Irons.

Jill remains in Raccoon City under the pretense of attempting to locate NEST, with the intention of following behind Chris, Barry, and Rebecca(?) a bit later. I believe also she was intending to sort through the rumours of the development of Golgotha, but I cannot find accurate citation of that. Things that she manages to do whilst confined to her flat for a month behind the departure of the other STARS members: Not that at all. I have long wondered what it was that was actually keeping Jill in her flat, aside from orders from her no-longer boss, when she had intentions of leaving on 30 September. I don’t imagine that with what remains of STARS poking around, save for Brad, that Irons would put a definite date on the lifting of her suspension. “Yes, now you may leave to bring down the organisation that I am tangentially working for”. The Three Remake expands on this a bit, as it seems that perhaps Jill was not emotionally nor mentally suited for travel outside of the flat. In which case, I question whether steeping herself in all things Umbrella was perhaps exacerbating her condition. I do believe that there is a fundamentally large difference between Three: Remake Jill and 3: Nemesis Jill. First off, trousers. Enough said. I don’t do my personal investigations sitting in a pleather mini-skirt and a tube top with a rather practical jumper tied around my waist, and neither should you. I much rather imagine a suspension to be carried out in pyjamas, but again I am not the type of person to dress at home if I’m not needed to.

Secondly, Three: Remake Jill holds up much better against Nemesis without the help of Carlos (who is also rather incompetent and sexist), than her original counterpart. Her reactions to goings on are much more believable, and for much of the game she has absolutely no issue putting Carlos within appropriate boundaries. He tries to explain to her what a radio is, she snaps at him. He touches her, she tells him not to. You are a stranger, sir, please observe courtesy. Not to mention, a stranger who is working for the organisation we’ve just found out is responsible for the development of bioweapons and viral agents. At least bother to ask her name, first. A bit of a hint, Carlos: It isn’t “supercop”. If we are to continue on with this Jill further on in the series, I will support it. I would quite enjoy a long-standing female protagonist that has no issue scoffing at male protagonist foolishness and scolding their perspectives. Perhaps it is a good thing that she and Leon have never met in any official capacity.

Three: Remake Jill still falls prey to damsel-syndrome, as I’ll call it, upon being infected by Nemesis. Carlos comes in as the knight in shining armour, having become infatuated with her after knowing her for exactly four hours. I like to imagine that this New Jill could wake up from her comatose state, shout about her autonomy, and then go back to sleep. This is however, remedied by some sort of favour-trading as she does save Carlos in a quid-pro-quo a bit later. I do have concerns about how far Jill allowed Nikolai to get without shooting him down, but that’s unimportant in the long run. There is also a bit of inconsistency between games in how Jill and Carlos escape Raccoon City and what happened just prior, but those are unimportant to our examining of Jill.

All in all, New Jill is portrayed as a competent individual, which I think serves much better to support her character in instances such as the Fall of Umbrella chapter in The Umbrella Chronicles, which leads into the formation of the BSAA and her involvement with them.

Functionally, from 2003 until at least 2009, Chris and Jill mostly function as a singular unit. 2005- they work together to subdue T-ALOS. 2004- The Queen Zenobia, Queen Semiramis fiasco in which Jill carries Parker through a sinking ship as Chris slams doors in her face- as loving partners do. (I do want to mention in an aside that so many people find themselves in trouble whilst looking for Chris. It is the plot of NO FEWER than four games. One, Two, Code: Veronica, and Revelations. Maybe even a bit of Six. Call it four and a half). Revelations does delve into a bit of why I find Jill to be competent amongst the ranks of highly amateur BSAA agents. First off, she reads the manuals for things. She realises the importance of memos! Secondly, she is shown deducing and explaining quite a bit about the situation they find themselves in to Parker, who is often none-the-wiser. An argument could be made that Parker is a newly ported FBC emigre and therefore does not yet have the same expectation but I disagree having seen the... eptitude of other agents. She is rather instrumental in uncovering the whole FBC - Veltro - BSAA mess and quite honestly tends to hold her own in that installment. If only the dodge function worked better. Anyhow, back to her partnership with Chris- it canonically ends with the Lost in Nightmares campaign in Five. In which she quite literally bowls Wesker out of a window in defense of Chris and (sort of) the world. If there is any secret method of getting me to enjoy a character, it is self-sacrifice for the sake of another. There is something so beautiful about it. Except Ethan, nothing can redeem him. Jill functions best as a character when she is partnered with Chris. I cannot say that in any of these scenarios I have profound issues with her. Forward onto the events of Five and about where we will end this tangent.

Jill and Wesker, obviously, both survive the fall from the Spencer estate. Jill is kept for experimentation due to the existing muted strain of T in her body from the events of Three. The antibodies she possessed were used by Wesker in attempts to make Uroboros more accepting of human host bodies. During the time that she was “in his care” (poor choice of words, I know), he repeatedly injected her with Progenitor strains and took the resulting antibodies. As a result of the testing and antibody removal, Jill’s hair, skin, and eyes lightened in cryostasis (I am still trying to make sense of this bit). Once she had reached the extent of her usefulness, Wesker volunteered her for the P30 project, a Las Plagas extension that utilised chemical compounds for mind control. However, due to the high expulsion rate, the chemical had to be constantly injected, explaining the injector attached to her body.

This requires her, again, rescue at the hands of Chris and Sheva. Once the injector is removed, the other two move on after Wesker, and Jill promptly collapses into unconsciousness. She is found by BSAA Delta Team Captain Josh Stone, who escorts her to a helicopter and initiates a rendezvous with Chris and Sheva on the volcano.  I will stand up for Jill on this one- I do not at all believe that if Jill was on the helicopter, that Sheva should have been the one to wield the rocket launcher. That honour should have belonged to the two original STARS Alpha Team members alone. It’s simply poetic, and I am sorry for Sheva, but it would have been much more perfect. 

Currently, we’ve not seen anything from Jill since Five. The only mention to her current condition is that she is at the BSAA undergoing testing and rehabilitation for her time spent with Wesker. In her words: “...ever since getting back I've been locked up in this lab as they run tests on me day in and day out. It's every bit as boring as it sounds”. We leave Jill’s chronology with her being bored. Fitting. In short, I believe that Jill has quite a bit of potential in her competency, and I am actually quite interested to see what her reaction would be to the BSAA using bioweapons. We’ve not heard from her in twelve years, so one can only assume that she is still alive somewhere, being bored. If they are going to take her character in the same direction they appear to be going in the Three: Remake, I would not at all be adverse to seeing her again in a future standalone installment.  That being said, I have quite the backlog of characters to talk about! Please give me the benefit of the doubt when waiting on these. I’ve got work to do, tea to drink, games to play, and characters to analyse.

[thetaoofzoe]

FIC Pt 3: Watch your hands, August Walker! People might talk.

Summary: You are a medic and a member of what’s left of  The Apostles. And it’s not rumour anymore. August Walker is definitely not dead. You might be in love. 

Word Count: 730

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 Want to read more? Click for my Masterlist

Want to start from the beginning of the challenge? 

The Obligatory Intro Post to the Challenge

Prompt 01 August - Please come back, August Walker

Prompt 02 Hello August Walker I heard you were dead

Author Note: Part two should be read before Part three for the situation to make sense.

You were wrong.

It didn't take a few days for the helicopter to arrive. It took two weeks. Although the cabin was well stocked and had nearly everything you needed to tend to August's wounds, it wasn't enough. 

Ayami wanted to leave and take August the long way through the mountains. They had the power to transport him over land and it was fucking stupid to leave him at the cabin to succumb to something that could be fixed. His body was fighting a raging infection and frankly, he was losing. You explained to her your reasons for why it would be tough for August to try to drive with him through such hard terrain.  He was in a fragile state and jostling him all around in an unstable car could exacerbate any internal injuries. A chopper ride would be better. 

Ayami understood that, however...

'We've got plenty of antibiotics,' she said reasonably. 'Why can't we give him some?'

'Because we don't know what he has. He could have a bacterial or viral infection and just picking something to give him might do more harm than good. I don't want to take that risk.'

It wasn't as if you didn't want to pump him full of all of the pills you had, just to scattershot the infection, but incorrectly dosing him, in his weakened state,   might kill him. August Walker was alive and you were going to keep him that way.

So you did your best. With Ayami's help, you kept him clean and dry and in order to manage his temperature, iced. August, however, foiled your attempts to tend to him effectively. He was delirious and unaware of  what was happening to him. More than once you had to extract yourself from his vice-like grip as he held onto you and growled guttural threats of violence to your person. All you could do was try to soothe him and mop his brow and use the aspirin to dull his obvious pain.

**

During the wait for air transport, you stayed up some nights with August. Sometimes you just sat at his bedside and read by the light of your headlamp. Sometimes you just watched him, held his hand and stroked his hair when nightmares haunted his sleep.

He would heal pretty well, you observed, and, without too much lasting damage to his face. He was fortunate that the hot oil missed his eye, although it ruined his ear. You lightly touched where the thick padded bandage covered his ear. But you knew that too could be reconstructed.

'We're gonna get you back on your feet August,' you murmured on those nights when he was at his most fitful. 'And we're gonna get those people who did this to you.'

Even though you weren't sure he could even hear you speaking, you continued to encourage and comfort him.  It was the least you could do.

**

'You met John Lark before?' Ayami asked over breakfast one morning, using August's real name for the first time.

'When he was going by John Lark?' you asked for clarification and she nodded. 'No. Not then. He had already assumed the new identity and was in the CIA when I turned up.'

'He was not always like this,' she said a bit cryptically.

'How was he?'

She shook her head.

'Just different. Maybe he'll tell you someday.'

Ayami smiled at you and you turned, alerted by the soft groan coming from the bed.

'God, he's waking up again,' she chuckled and then asked you, 'Top or bottom.'

You laughed inspite of yourself and gave the choice a moment's thought. ‘Top' meant that you got to administer medication, clean up his face and check his bandages, while 'bottom' meant that you would have to wrestle with his strong flailing arms and risk getting punched in the face. Ayami looked at you expectantly and you grimaced.

'I had top last time, so...'

She smiled and got up, patting your arm in passing. 'Then you get top this time.'

'Ayami, c'mon,' you protested rising from the chair. 'I don't want to be unfair.'

'Yeah, sure,' she said lifting her arms and flexing her biceps. 'But, I need my workout.'

-end 

Again, thank you for your support. Please like/reblog/comment/follow. :D

[doberbutts]

On the same topic re:yesterday of tiny dogs and how people treat them:

At this point I’m sure I’m known as the dog blog that writes all those “in defense of brachy dogs” posts (hi) buuuuuuuutttttt...

Having been doing a lot of research lately regarding well bred chihuahuas, because reasons, I must admit I’m pleasantly surprised. I tried not to include them in my previous posts regarding brachy breeds- despite them being brachy- outside of specifically my dog Tiki because she specifically had some problems due to being brachy (which directly contributed to her death), just because my experience with actually well bred chihuahuas is/was fairly minimal... But now that I’m looking more into the ins and outs of health testing requirements and suggestions, I must say that I sort of wish all breeds had such rigorous testing as a general rule. Sure, not all breeders go into the details like this, but even still, I’m quite liking what I’m finding.

First: COI is automatically estimated on their breed pedigree website based on the known pedigrees of the dog (this is a somewhat flawed way of doing things, but is also more effort to track COI than most dobe pedigree websites I’ve seen)- and the average COI I’ve seen thus far has been less than 5% with more than half of the dogs I’ve checked being under 1%. I don’t need to explain why the first time I saw 0.25% as an estimated COI my first instinct was to say HOLY SHIT.

Additionally I noticed that breeders that were inching close to or just over that 5% range would immediately breed those higher COI dogs to dogs that were completely unrelated within a 10-15 generation pedigree, thus producing puppies well under 5% again. As many of you well know, my breed (dobermans) has an absurdly high COI as a general rule with the average dog being in the 40% range. Creed’s COI is considered lower for a doberman and his is around 35%. An upcoming litter is bragging about the lowest COI they’ve heard of in the breed- 22%. Keep in mind that nearly every piece of research regarding COI percentages recommend that no breed get higher than 10%.

Adding onto the breed pedigree website- it lists all available health testing results of the dog, both good and bad, cause of death and age of death, and what titles the dog has (the most used american dobe pedigree website does the same)- and that led me to an important discovery:

Chihuahuas are the only breed that may show with a molera- a soft spot in the skull that may or may not close in adulthood. Moleras are weird because they are not a guarantee the dog has hydrocephalus, but the presence of them (especially if the dog has several) may indicate a problem. With the large, dome-shaped skull that Chihuahuas are known for (”apple-head”), this creates a problem where it can be difficult to see if the dog has hydro and that’s why the head is so big... or if it’s just the bred-in head appearance. Brachy dogs are also especially prone to the condition, which makes things even more difficult because Chihuahuas are brachy too. Tiki had two moleras, and also according to her specialist “almost definitely” had hydro which also complicated her condition and led to her death.

The Chihuahua pedigree website also tracks moleras and hydrocephalus, and states which dogs carry moleras into adulthood, and also which dogs have or have produced puppies with hydro. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many breeders do xrays, ultrasounds, and CT scans of the head to ensure that their dogs are not affected by this and will not pass it on!

Which finally brings me to the elephant in the room: CHIHUAHUAS ARE BRACHYCEPHALIC!

And... I was actually quite impressed, as even the illustrated standard and related articles to the Chihuahua breed discuss the need to ensure proper dentition and bites as an early warning sign that the brachy skull was beginning to warp to negatively effect the breed. Demands that the nares be open wide and the nose moist. That the sound of the dog breathing should be as natural as possible. The dogs should be spry, active, capable of exercising on a hot day. The recommendation to use the aforementioned xrays, ultrasounds, and CT scans to also double check that the sinus cavity and nasal passages were wide open to ensure healthy breathing. A shorter nose with a large skull, but not to the detriment of the dog in question.

And this is what I am frequently talking about when I say that I have seen brachy dogs that are not suffering from the negative effects that everyone on the internet likes to harp on about. Chis are a brachy breed. They are just as much at risk for all of the brachy problems as pugs, frenchies, bostons, bulldogs, and more. They are almost always included in diseases that distinctly affect those “flat faced” brachy breeds, despite the fact that Chihuahuas do actually have some length to their muzzle and the standard specifically states that a flat-faced chi would be so faulty it might as well not be called a chihuahua anymore. This is why I am constantly losing my mind at the concept that adding an inch or two onto a pug or bulldog face will magic all the problems away- it won’t! Chis are just as likely to be affected by these problems, and in many cases chis are affected by these problems.

I lost my 10 month old puppy to brachycephalism and an autoimmune disorder. Full stop. My dog fucking died because of these problems, and she! had! length! on! her! snout! But that didn’t matter, because the inner airways were pinched, her warped skull put her at high risk for dangerous pressure to build up in her brain case, and her shitty genetics failed her body’s natural defense system that could have otherwise allowed her to survive these conditions. I spent more than 6000USD to try and give her a chance at life and she died anyway. Horrifically. Tragically.

I never want to see anyone acting like adding an inch onto the snout of a brachy dog will snap its fingers and magic away all the brachy problems ever again. I will continue making my In Defense Of Brachy dogs posts, because I’ve actually lived this nightmare and it’s been awful. Tiki had 2 inches of snout that stuck out of her face and still died because she was brachy. If whatever brachy fix has gripped the internet isn’t also doing what the Chihuahua standard and breed club recommend- xrays, CT scans, ultrasounds, scopes into the airways, tracking the instances of other characteristics such as poor dentition, bad bites, hydro, and more... then what they’re actually doing is selling you some well-marketted pseudo-science and hoping you won’t call them on it. Those dogs are not healthier. They’re ticking timebombs. And at some point, someone’s going to get one, and lose another puppy to the same thing.

I don’t ever want to see anyone saying that dog traits they happen not to like are specifically the cause of inbreeding, when the “bad traits” dogs are at such a low COI percentage they’re under a single percent at some points, and the “good traits” dogs are touching on 50%.

I don’t ever want to see anyone saying that mutts are always healthier than purebreds, when Tiki was almost guaranteed to not be purebred and died at fucking 10 months old meanwhile most purebred chis live well into their late teens and even early twenties.

Researching deep into chis has shown me there is actually a way to do these things correctly. And if whatever viral page isn’t at least living up to these standards, then you are absolutely being taken in by someone who is either ignorant or someone who is betting you are.

[sanderssideswriting]

Youtuber Life Chapter 4

Ships: familial sleepxiety and eventual Prinxiety

Words:???

triggers: attempted suicide mention

first  last  next

Summary: Remy Sanders is a famous beauty vlogger and just moved to LA with his teenage son Virgil after their location was leaked by fans. Remy AKA CoffeeAddiction has several million subscribers. Virgil also has a secret Drama channel, where he doesn’t show his face and uses a voice modifier. He just hit a million subs and grows more everyday because of the level of production his videos have, the mystery around who he is and the fact that he ALWAYS has the latest information regarding youtube drama.

“Welcome back to another episode of “the fuck did she say now? I have a DID drama update. I’ve been waiting awhile to gather information to do a long segment. Since she first came out about having DID which has been disproven time and time again she’s tried to make it more believable in the stupidest way possible. By reviewing Chick-Fil-A’s spicy chicken sandwich, five fucking times. I watched all those videos plus others to see if she’s trying to keep up the lie. She’s really not. I swear every time I have to give her my views to tell you all what’s going on I die a little inside.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“DAD! Read the fucking sign! I’m recording!”

“Are you talking about Trisha?”

“Yes dad, now let me tell them about her.”

“She’s a total bitch! I fucking hate her!”

“WE KNOW! Damn it, now I’m going to have to edit all this out.”

“I’ve been looking into DID. And it’s actually a very interesting topic, and I encourage everyone to learn more about it. There will be links to videos and article on DID in the description. DisociaDID has not been on social media very much since all of this. I know they attempted suicide. Not because of Trisha or atleast only partly. Nin the systems host was dating someone in another system called Team Piñata who was discovered to be doing some shit I will not mention because it’ll get demonetized. I actually feel really bad for they system, it seems like they have been going through a lot recently. Now for all the OTHER shit Trisha has said and done over the past few weeks.”

Virgil edited the video and posted it, making sure to edit out the bit where his dad interrupted him and called Trisha a bitch.

Roman texted him.

Roman: You’re a meme Virgil: I’m well aware, fucking Jake Paul Roman: I thought you hated the guy, why are you fucking him? Virgil: I’m so fucking done with you

“VIRGIL!”

Virgil rolled his eyes “What?”

“I have in idea for a video get your ass down here!”

Remy was in front of the camera “K, so what if I mixed all of my eyeshadow together into one?”

“First of all Cristine did that with nail powder and polish and Safiya did that already in one of her weird make up science videos. Second, scraping the eyeshadow would kill you to watch.”

“UGH! You’re right, what else could I do?”

“A Bob Ross painting on your face. you could use only drug store products for something,”

“Bob Ross painting with drugstore shit!”

Virgil shrugged “yeah sure, you could also get lip gloss mix it together and try to make something really fucking weird, or do that with gel polish”

“I refuse to touch lip gloss, it’s fucking gross.”

“Bob ross painting not on your faces with lip gloss and other lipsticks.”

Remy nodded “thanks Virgil, you’re helping my buy it later.”

“No, people at school could see me, you can order it,”

“that’s less fun though,”

Virgil rolled his eyes “fine dad, I just need to make sure that no one can recognize me.”

He was ready pretty fast, with a light brown wig and blue contacts he also had close that where black and purple reserved for the occasion.

“Hello everyone! We are in the car today at our local Walgreens because we’re going to be buying lipstick, lip gloss and lip liner to make a Bob Ross painting!” 

“Not on your face.”

“Not on my face, fuck lip gloss.”

“I wasn’t aware that was a kink or whatever.”

Remy glared at Virgil “smartass, you can walk home.”

“Gladly, I’ll be laughing when I see you trying to film and carry everything and talk and pay the cashier. You’ll be a meme.”

“You already got memed once this week, I’ll meme you myself if I have to. Or I could turn you into an E-Girl, you did lose that bet.”

“I absolutely despise you,”

Remy laughed “no you don’t.”

“I really do, and you can’t make me e an e-girl.”

“No, but the people can, there’ll be a poll right here, vote should my intern be an e-girl for the day?”

Virgil groaned “times like these make me wish I was aborted.”

Remy laughed.

The rest of the video went ok and no one recognized Virgil.

Raccoon: I hate life Dukey: I saw, I voted yes, you’d make a wonderful e-girl hiss hiss motherfucker: so did I, suffer bitch Raccoon: you’re both traitors  hiss hiss motherfucker: at least we’re not going to be an e-girl

Virgil was pissed the whole week. “What’s up with you Dr. Gloom?” Roman asked.

“Made a bet with Remus, and lost, I’m going to commit toaster bath.”

Roman made a face “why would you make a bet with my brother? nothing good comes out of it.”

“I thought I’d win, turns out he’s totally willing to eat deodorant if it means I’ll have to dress like an e-girl for a day and make a tiktok.”

Roman laughed “I cannot wait to see you dressed as an e-girl.”

“I can, I’ll be locking myself in my room all day.”

“I’m surprised Remus didn’t say you’d have to walk around in public like that.”

“He did, but he can’t see me, so I’ll be in my room.”

Remy was in front of the camera. “Time for you to become an e-girl!”

“I’d like to say a very special fuck you to everyone who voted yes and that after this I’m going to commit toaster bath,”

“It’s one day, you’ll be fine.”

“One day in my room with the door locked and curtains closed.”

Remy laughed “oh no gurl, you’ll be going out, I suggest you make plans.”

“WHAT? That wasn’t part of the deal!”

“I thought it would go without saying you’d have to go outside.”

Virgil just glared, happy his face wasn’t in frame.

The makeover took well over an hour. when it was over he looked almost unrecognizable, thankfully.

Virgil: Hey, anyone want to hang out, my dad’s kicking me out of the house for the day says I need to be “social” whatever the means Princey: So you do need to go out as an e-girl Virgil: unfortunately, anyone free? Logan: I have to study and Patton is out at the animal shelter volunteering, Roman? Princey: I’m free, meet you at the mall? Virgil: Sure

“Dad! I’m going to hang out with Roman see you later.”

“Have fun on your date!”

“dad! It’s not a date!” He slammed the door and left.

Virgil waited in a café for Roman. He got an iced coffee as always.

Someone shoved him while he was waiting in line.

“What are you? A boy or a girl make up your mind,”

Virgil didn’t look up from his phone “gender is a spectrum and gender norms are fake and I refuse to give into toxic musicality and if you have a problem with that you can leave because I already ordered and payed for my drink and am not leaving until I get it.”

“You can’t change your chromosomes, it’.” the guy said in a feeble attempt to get back at Virgil. basic biology

“How about you stop relying on basic biology and come back when you can argue the same statement with complex biology. If you really knew anything about biology more then the basics you’d know that scientifically there are at least three genders according to chromosomes. Male, female and intersex, and that once again biology isn’t fucking basic otherwise everyone would be a biologist. I can wear a skirt if I want to.”

He grabbed his coffee and left, Roman had arrived a few minutes prior.

“Damn emo nightmare I didn’t think you’d go all out on the E-girl look.”

Virgil shrugged “go big or go home, and I was kicked out for the day so I had to go big. Dad said I needed to go outside. For some reason, no idea why. I mean last time I left the house of my own free will not for school was only six months ago.”

Roman looked at him in doubt “I’m pretty sure you’ve been outside of your own free will sooner then six months ago.”

“Outside? Yes, of my own free will? not so much. Oooh hot tpic.”

Roman laughed.

“Shut up princey, they have cool stuff, including gay stuff.”

Roman shrugged “could be gayer.”

“You’ve been in hot topic?”

Roman shrugged “a few times with Remus, he makes me go, bribing me with Disney.”

Virgil smirked “why am I not surprised you can be bribed with Disney?”

He started looking around at My Chemical Romance t-shirts and other things. He also grabbed some purple hair dye.

“Where to next princey?”

Roman shrugged “Game stop?”

“Sure,”

They hung out at the mall for awhile longer before guess what another youtuber came.

It was Safiya doing a weird makeup science vlog.

“Virgil, planning on becoming a meme again?”

Virgil rolled his eyes “no, besides Safiya’s cool, I like her make up science videos. I just hate vloggers who do shitty content and make to much money through it.”

They left shortly after going their separate ways.

“How was your date?” Remy called from the basement.

“Not a date! You made me get out the house!”

“Come down here and finish filming!”

“So, how was your day of being an e-girl?”

“Got harassed about my gender and whatnot, I fucking destroyed the idiot, that was fun.”

“And who did you hang out with?”

“I told you and again, it wasn’t a date, everyone else was busy.”

Remy looked towards the camera in doubt.

“Well I’m never doing this again, I’m going to go change.”

The video went viral when it was posted several days later.

I saw a kid at the mall dressed like an e-girl a few days ago. They got harrassed at the Starbucks.

[alrightinbed-betterwithapen]

Clever Little Things — Part One — David Dobrik x Reader

A/N: hey guys so this one’s based off an awesome ask! I’m writing my asks a little slower at this time (and taking sometime away from Datalie until inspo comes back) to ensure better quality. I’m also turning this one into a series. Lemme know if you have any ideas of where you want this story to go. Anywho, thanks for taking the time to read, love ya!!

Masterlist

Summary: You don’t like David, and he plans on changing that.

Anon Asked: Hey !! Love you're writing, nobody ever does my requests so hopefully u can break that pattern :-), can u do a david x reader where it's an enemies to lovers sort of thing, where he's really charming and smug to her and like a huge flirt and she kinda just rolls her eyes and tells him to fuck off (maybe it could be a series??) Thanks !!

——

David fucking Dobrik.

Fuck that guy.

Yeah, you said it. Repeatedly and sometimes out loud. You couldn’t give a fuck about YouTube’s resident golden boy. You have lived in California far too long to be impressed with young, ridiculously wealthy men and their expensive cars. David seemed like a guy who fell face first into a vat of luck and wore humbleness like a cloak, hiding who he was underneath.

You were bound to run into him around Hollywood, your job as a freelance editor had you working with a ton of people in the industry he dominated. You had once preferred working in TV and film, but when a girl named Gabbie reached out to you, getting your info from a colleague, you were yanked into the YouTube world. Gabbie loved your work and had given your name out to all her influencer friends. The calls came rolling in.

Hey, it was a paycheck. These viral sensations actually made bank, and you were getting a more steady source of income from them than you did at any other job you’d worked in the city of angels. It even led to a pretty long contract job at a decent media group. Where you had to attend events and mingle and really learn about the world you were working in. It was mostly good.

But David, he fucking annoyed you. Whether it was hanging all over Instagram models for clout, or holding up the entrance line at a club to take paparazzi around his car, laughing and playing it up to an extreme, he fucking irked you. You had made the mistake of following him on Snapchat, one of his stories accidentally rolling over from a friends; he had two bleach blondes screaming about merch and then the camera flips around to his smug face telling you to swipe up. Yeah. Fucking. Right.

In your mind there were the Paul’s, Ricegum and David Dobrik: the premier fuckboys of YouTube.

So, there is no way you’re actually going to call Jason Nash about becoming his steady editor. You tell Gabbie as much over coffee.

“But, it’s a job, like long term and well paying... and he asked me about editors I knew the last time I saw him. Plus, if you last for a while, you can put that shit on your resume. And he’s great, like the coolest, chillest dude ever,” she’s explaining, trying to win you over. She had told you all about his kids and ex wife, how stressed he was. And that he could pay big money because he was racking in the revenue from his relationship with Trisha Paytas. Still, working for one of the vlog squad basically meant working for David, and you weren’t interested in that at all.

“Yeah, no. I’m sure he is, but the vlog squad? C’mon. Why would I do that to myself when you noped the fuck outta that mess years ago,” you tell her, sipping on your latte.

“Because I’m not an editor, (Y/N). It’s not like you have to hang out with them. You just hang around Jason and edit his shit. It’s not that complicated,” Gabbie says, looking at you like you’re dumb. You roll your eyes at her.

“Maybe I don’t want to be associated with David Dobrik and his loyal servants when their party comes crashing to the ground. You know it’s coming. He’s the next Shane Dawson expose for sure,” you ramble, “Like, Dobrik is the next Jake Paul. At least that’s what I get from his Snapchat’s, does he do anything but try to sell his shitty hoodies? And prank people until they cry?”

“Yeah. He gives people cars all the time.”

“PR move!” You yell, a little too loudly for nine in the morning at a coffee shop. Gabbie jumps a little and brings her hand to her mouth, shushing you. Ignoring her, you continue, “Yeah, it’s sooo genuine, Gabs. ‘Hey guys, I sent my friend to the hospital last week for a poorly thought out, unfunny stunt. This week I’m buying my assistant a car! No motive, no PR team screaming at me from the sidelines. Nope, I’m just a super awesome, humble guy who appreciates the people who obediently follow me around like a puppy so I can make content that’ll have 16 year olds everywhere buying my shitty merch!’ Gimme a break.”

“Holy fuck, I know you’re a cynic, but you have gone full pessimist lately,” Gabbie laughs at your impression, shaking her head. “They aren’t bad people, (Y/N). David isn’t either, he’s just young and rich and a little dumb. And Jason is probably the most down to earth one of them. Just think about it.”

“Ugh, fine. Fine, just no more talk about it. How’s your book coming?”

You change the subject, firm that the phone number she programmed into your phone will never get any use.

——

Then Defy Media goes under and Clevver, the main source of your rent lately, is done. You are out a decent paying job and next months check, you are royally fucked. Staring at the number in your phone, bent over on your couch, your thumb hovers.

You need the job. You want work, being at home with nothing to do all day makes you stir crazy. But all your points listed out about this still stand.

Fuck it.

You type out a quick message to Jason about Gabbie and his need for an editor with a link to your reel. You press send before you can talk yourself out of it. Then, it’s a waiting game. You’re scouring the internet for job postings when you get a message in return.

Hey! I’m so glad you hit me up. I desperately need help and would love to have you as my editor. Your reel is great! Can you meet for coffee in like 2 hours? I’m behind already and we can talk logistics.

You’re shocked. He must be desperate if he’s hiring you sight unseen and already getting you to work. But it’s a saving grace and more than you could of wished for. You’ll get a paycheck sooner and not have to worry about eviction. You let him know that’s fine and arrange a place.

The meeting goes well, Jason is a cool dude who doesn’t seem as wound up as your usual content creators were. You agreed on a wage (like 35% higher than your last gig, fuck yeah) and got to understand Jason’s edit style and post dates.

What didn’t shock you about the job, but you were hoping you could circumvent, was that you would be working closely with Trisha and David, as Jason often traded footage with both of them. And unlike Jason, they both edited their own vlogs because they had either, fewer responsibilities in their lives (Trisha), or were anal about their edit and wanted to do them personally (David). Great, great, great.

A jobs, a job though. You’ve survived working with some shitty people in your time and honestly didn’t think you’d have any problem on your hands.

——

There are problems though.

Yeah... there are a couple.

——

The first is Trisha. Well, she wasn’t a huge problem, but an obstacle. She was super insecure (you knew this going in) and the first time she came over to Jason’s and you were chilling on the couch, finishing up a vlog, things got tense. She knew you were hired, but she hadn’t met you before. You’d introduced yourself and shook the woman’s hands, wearing your usual editor getup of jeans and a giant hoodie, no makeup, hair not really done up but presentable enough for the public and giant headphones, to tune out the world around you.

You think that helped you because Trisha made a comment about how you were at least not trying to look good for Jason. You laughed at that, and looked her straight in the eyes with meaning behind them, and maybe a little intimidating,

“You couldn’t pay me into retirement to sleep with Jason.”

She’s taken a back for a second and you both look over to the man. You say no offense softly as the man shrugs, but don’t apologize or try to take it back. Trisha just snorts and says she likes you, claws retracting and a calmness returning to the room. Jason looks like a bomb’s been defused and ever grateful for you.

Bullet dodged... hopefully.

——

The next problem is David...

He’s actually the rest of the problems you have with your new job.

See, Trisha got over her bullshit pretty quickly and began texting you once a week for specific footage with Jason. She would describe them well and stay on the phone while you found and verified the clip, and then you’d send them to her. No muss, no fuss. She was an editor’s literal dream.

But, David fucking Dobrik was a nightmare.

Constantly texting you about clips from things that weren’t recorded, but he’s “sure they were because Jason was holding his camera like it was recording”, or waking you up in the middle of night to make sure you weren’t using a certain song for a montage or outro because he was going to use it in the next week.

And that was besides the ridiculous amount of times David was reminding you not to post certain things that were gonna premiere on his channel first. Like, yes, it’s fine to tell you. If it makes David feel better that you’re hearing it from him and not Jason, FINE. But to text you every post day, over a dozen times? It was a fucking joke and has been going on through week four of your new job. And you’d had enough. You’d mentioned it to Jason, but he’d just shrugged it off as David being David.

Well, fuck David.

You’d never even met the man in person at this point in time, but he was living up to every one of your terrible expectations. That’s when the 14th text comes in, as you’re exporting Jason’s latest vlog and just leaning back to relax on the older mans couch. That’s also when you snap, hitting the call button on the text and calling the douchebag.

“Hello? (Y/N)? Why are you callin-,” he starts after a few seconds of waiting for it to connect.

“Hey David! Nice talking to you finally and not just reading your utterly demeaning and demanding text messages!” You start in, just letting loose all the irritation he’s caused you over the last month. “Super appreciate the literally DOZENS of messages you leave me on post day, not to mention in the middle of the god damn night the rest of the week. I’m glad you understand what an invalid I am and how the constant texts actually do help me! It’s absolutely not a slight to my four year education and years of experience in my profession. Or the fact that I do heed your words the FIRST time I hear them, because it’s my literal job. A job I have that actually doesn’t revolve around you. Crazy, I know!” Your voice is just dripping with sarcasm at this point. In your brief pause you can hear a soft, amused breath from his end of the call. It doesn’t stop you at all.

“Anyway, I just wanted to call and let you know how productive you’re making me, and thank you! I really don’t know how I would function in my chosen career without your undying, unrelenting, un-asked for guidance. Hope the vlog that just posted meets your standards! Leave a comment if it doesn’t. Just please, please don’t text me about it.”

And you’re slamming the end button before he can respond. You look up and Jason is standing in the entrance way to his living room, jaw dropped. And all he can say after lifting it off the ground is,

“I didn’t know he was texting you in the middle of the night! Yeah... fuck him.”

You’re glad this ends with you both laughing and not you being fired.

——

“Your editor’s got some mega fucking attitude, dude,” is the first thing David says to Jason, picking him up in the Tesla the next day. Jason just starts cackling at that.

“Yeah, whatever. Don’t text her in the middle of the night. Most people’s work schedule doesn’t extend to 3am, Dave. And I thought she had quite a few points. Like, she works for me. And she does in fact know how to skillfully edit my shitty vlogs,” Jason’s laughing this out and is glad to find David just as amused.

“I wasn’t expecting to get ripped a new asshole is all. I was in an Uber to some event and Natalie heard the whole thing,” David replied, kinda sheepishly.

“You’re just butt hurt that there’s someone in this world that doesn’t give a fuck who you are and is willing to talk shit to your face. And that now Natalie and I know someone put you in your place,” the older man retorts, pointing at him accusingly before going on, “I’m not reprimanding her for having enough of you. She’s doing great AND Trisha likes her. Fuck off dude. Just text her less.”

“What do you mean she doesn’t give a fuck who I am?” Of course this is the part of what Jason was saying that David focuses on.

Shaking his head, he explains, “Well, she knows who you are and is absolutely comfortable enough to basically call you a dick within the first month of being my editor. Also, Gabbie told me the first time we talked about her that (Y/N) hates working for the bigger creators on the platform, and that she thinks they’re all materialistic and out of touch assholes. So, you know, I thought she would be a perfect fit for me. I’m basically nobody. But you? There’s no love lost there from the beginning, but she’s obviously professional enough to keep from snapping on your ass for like a month. I don’t know, Dave. What? You want me to force her to care who you are?”

“No! That’s not what I meant. I guess I just figured-“

“Sorry, dude. Not everyone loves our golden boy. But she’s not a mean person. She’s never even mentioned it. This is what Gabs told me forever ago. Either way, she doesn’t have to be blown over by you to be my editor. Right?”

“No, yeah, right. I guess I didn’t think I was bothering her. I’d always hit you up the same amount.”

“Yeah, but we’re friends. She works for me. It’s different,” Jason’s explaining as David nods along, eyes on the road, thinking.

(Y/N) doesn’t like him? Everyone likes him! YouTube world or not, David was charming as shit. It perplexed him, stirring uneasiness in his chest. This was just going to be a challenge in his eyes now.

She doesn’t like him? That’s fine. She will though.

David guar-an-fucking-tees it.

——

David Dobrik sends you an apology Edible Arrangement. The good kind, all chocolate covered fruit.

There’s a card attached that says,

Jason’s last vlog def met my standards, so you obvy don’t need my help. I’ll stop being such a dick.

(See? I didn’t text you.)

-D

It makes you laugh fucking hard.

You find it a little endearing but also, yeah, you deserve an unhealthy Edible Arrangement. He probably has a contact at the fruit company for appeasing all the people he steps on to run his empire. You’re not special, but the thought is at least there. Whatever. He had stopped bombarding you with texts and had been much more polite in general, so you were more than fine with the whole situation now.

You had hoped this was the end of it.

——

It wasn’t.

——

[samtheflamingomain]

zeke the survivor

I'm always late to the game on things, so I just recently decided to see "if" Survivor has a subreddit. Of course it does. It has like 6.

Anyway, I sorted by most popular of all time, and what do my eyes have to read? A fucking novel of an excuse for Jeff fucking Varner. By a former player, no less. She’s "a friend of his", she said.

I know this happened like a year ago, but long story short, at Tribal Council, Varner was on the chopping block. Having not eaten in several days, having the toll of Survivor on his psyche, (these are his words, NOT mine,) he tried to paint Zeke as a liar by saying (basically), "How can people trust you? Zeke's not who you think he is..." and continued hinting at the reveal that would "save him" and "prove his point": "Why are you lying about being transgender?"

Fucking EXCUSE ME? Again, I know this was ages ago, but I'm still pissed. I hate bringing attention to Varner, so I will talk about Zeke in a minute, but first, let's review the facts.

Varner outed Zeke to every single person on the planet. NOW, I MUST POINT OUT, that the editors of the show CHOSE TO KEEP THIS IN. I think it's because they knew they'd get some virality from it. That aside, Varner literally endangered a man for life by outing him. He's recognizable. He's from the South. He wouldn't be the first trans person to be assaulted for being trans.  Maybe people don't get it: Outing. People. Can. Get. Them. Killed.

Every person on that tribe is starving to death in the blistering heat with intermittent extreme cardio workouts. Nobody has EVER used a personal attack of that volume to try and make a move. That's part one of why I don't believe his bullshit "apologies".

Part 2: He hints at it. I don't have a transcript in front of me, but for a good few minutes the two are bantering, both at risk of going home. Varner keeps saying things like "There's stuff you don't know about Zeke" etc. This was not a spur-of-the-moment "temporary insanity" as it is put in the reddit post trying to paint him as a victim.

But there are some other facts I must point out. He is, by the dictionary definition, a victim: of online harassment and death threats. Nobody deserves that. That is illegal. But as I mentioned earlier, Zeke, as a result of what Varner did, probably recieved a lot of the same shit he did. But if Zeke got death threats (I have no source, but I'd bet my last dime on it), that's because of his gender. Varner got hate because he did a terrible thing.

Now, another mitigating point I must concede: I do not think Varner is a transphobe. He says it was a lapse in judgement, I think it was a planned, specific move, and the plain fact is that it got him unanimously voted out. He was nearly in tears at the post-tribal confessional. You could see it in the man's eyes the moment the words left his mouth. Instantly, he knew he had completely, irreversibly fucked up. It cost him a million dollars. It cost him his job. It cost him a lot and he knew that in an instant. He truly is sorry. I believe that.

But the fact that he follows up that apology with the excuse he did kind of renders it moot.

But here's another thing, the one thing really, that makes me absolutely despise Varner and have absolutely 0% sympathy for him: he wrote a goddamn book. "Surviving Shame". Bitch, you shouldn't survive that shame. That should linger with you till the moment you die. And to make MONEY off the fact that he OUTED A TRANS PERSON ON TV is absolutely sickening. I don't care enough to look it up, but I do think he mentioned that "all royalties will go to some trans charity" but I don't care. You're still getting a fucking book. You are now a public figure of sorts.

You know who should have a fucking book? Zeke. The moment the camera moved from Varners stupid face to his, I was prepared for all-out war. It was almost like he knew this would happen. It's all of our worst nightmares.  But he sat there, his face calm. And he said something beautiful: “I didn’t want to be known as ‘the trans survivor’. I wanted to be ‘Zeke the survivor’.” I think we all want to be X the Y, not the trans Y. 

He took it like a goddamn champ. It helps that the entire tribe supported him and they immediately voted Varner out, and Zeke talked a bit about it at the finale, before Jeff interrupts him to PLUG. VARNER'S. BOOK. I shit you not, go back and see, it's the very last thing that's said before credits.

The post talks about how Varner was very depressed after the episode. And people were commenting saying they hope he gets better. And I hope he does too; nobody deserves capital-D Depression, but that's not what happened. He was depressed and ashamed about a horrible thing he did. He SHOULD be depressed and ashamed, at least for a while. You know who else might've been pretty depressed? Zeke.

Look. I don't think he's a bad person. I think he's like everyone else: desperate to save face when possible. I don't know what on Earth he was thinking when he decided on a book, but I'll charitably chalk that up to general stupidity and ignorance.

Before I close, I want to throw you back even further to Worlds Apart, just to point out that this shit isn’t new. Remember Shirin? Kinda annoying, but had a really awful story (abuse, neglect, no parental contact) and was absolutely HAMMERED by this ASSHOLE for NO FUCKING REASON, AT CAMP, IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. He said something very very close to "You have no reason to be here. Nobody loves you. Nobody's waiting for you back home." And everyone at camp just kinda sat there. She went into the jungle crying alone. There was a good bit of outrage, and she used that episode to raise awareness about bullying, but I think, to make one last point, we need to talk about the show itself.

There are already limits in place on how “survivor-y” Survivor can get. There’s medical help, menstrual products, meds. They’ll even fix your glasses! That department is obviously completely separate from the editing department that decided to keep these moments in, but if they’ll allow you to retain your physical health, I think (to a point, without ruining the point of the show) they should put more thought into mental health. Part of me wonders if anyone intervenes if someone has a panic attack. Probably not. That’s part of the problem.

But they also need to make more careful editing choices. I assume they would’ve consulted Zeke on whether that would air or not because I like to believe the world is a nice place sometimes. 

And I hope nobody buys Jeff Varner’s goddamn book. Fuck him.

Anyway, I post this because I've been up all night getting lost in rabbit holes, and this was one of them. Stay Greater.

[acsversace-news]

Step-touching his way through the halls of the fictional Dalton High School—the hair perfectly parted, the navy blazer impeccably tailored, and amplifying an a capella rendition of a Katy Perry song through the sheer wattage of his all-American smile—a then-22-year-old Darren Criss, fresh out of college and making his debut as Blaine Anderson on a 2010 episode of Glee, was the epitome of the teenage dream.

Now, he’s the 30-year-old stuff of nightmares.

Well, he isn’t, exactly, but the serial killer he plays on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story certainly is.

In many ways, Criss’ revelatory performance as Andrew Cunanan, the 27-year-old gay man who, after murdering five people including the famed fashion designer, became one of the most wanted serial killers in American history, is all the more unsettling because of its stark contrast to the genial crooner we were introduced to on Fox’s burned-fast-and-bright musical dramedy.

But then again, the surprise of a certain clean-cut progressiveness has been the hallmark of Criss’ still-young career.

“I think it’s really given me an alley-oop,” Criss says, referring to the initial shock a Glee fan might have to watching the actor as Cunanan, say, bind a rich john who hires him as an escort with duct tape and then gauge him with a hammer. “I’d like to think [audiences] would be interested and compelled anyway,” without this lingering image of Criss as Blaine, the consummate Nice Guy. “But I think it’s an extra nudge when you have that to juxtapose against.”

When we first met Darren Criss several years ago, he was wearing a thigh-length kimono and tending to his favorite blonde wig, remnants of sweat-sticky glitter smudging just about everything in sight—aided and abetted in its mission by the runoff from his sparkling go-go boots. We were in his dressing room backstage at the Belasco Theatre, high off the energy of his stage-scorching performance in as the titular transgender rocker in the 2015 musical revival Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

It was Criss’ first major gig after wrapping his run on Glee, and a thundering opening salvo in proving the breadth of his talents, let alone taste in projects.

Things are decidedly bleaker, or at the very least chillier, when we reunite two-and-a-half years later at a café in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York to talk Versace, inarguably the biggest and certainly darkest project of his career thus far. Still, Criss’ fashion choice is doing its part to dial up the fabulousness of the morning: a knee-length, forest green mohair overcoat he pets with pride when we compliment it. “One of the kids from Boy Band on Good Morning America this morning was like, ‘Yo bro, it looks like you skinned the Grinch!’” Criss laughs. “I’m like, that is indeed an apt observation.”

Just as when we talked before, Criss bubbles over with the kind of giddiness, but also navel-gazing introspection, that one might expect from a lifelong theater kid—which the 30-year-old actor absolutely is, having grown up attending performance arts schools and raised in the San Francisco theater scene he joined at a young age.

And so there’s a certain amount of objectivity and pragmatism as we discuss the arc of his career, not to mention a pinch-me enthusiasm in promoting a leading role in Ryan Murphy’s follow-up to the blockbuster The People v. O.J. Simpson series. There’s also a refreshing eagerness to engage thoughtfully in conversations about his sexuality and sex appeal—oh yeah, we talked about those nude photos—especially in relation to the coincidence that, though he identifies as straight, the three defining roles of his career have been gay characters.

For all the talk of teenage dreams and historical crime nightmares, Darren Criss is nothing if not woke.

The fact of the matter is that, while Versace’s 1997 murder is the catalyst for the series and crucial in instigating the conversations about sexuality and fame in ’90s America that it explores, Versace (played by Edgar Ramirez), his longtime boyfriend (played by Ricky Martin), and sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz), are all minor characters. This is almost exclusively a showcase for Criss as Andrew Cunanan, the highly intelligent sociopath with tortured feelings about his own sexuality, driven to murder.

“The thing I keep saying is I feel like I made varsity,” Criss says, about leading the starry ensemble. “I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to be invited into the school, into the program. I put in enough games on J.V. Now they’re like, alright kid, it’s your shot.”

Murphy first floated the idea of playing Cunanan to Criss three years ago. Their working relationship on Glee only bolstered a purely superficial argument for the casting: Criss and Cunanan look uncannily similar, and share almost identical Filipino-American backgrounds. “I would have been happy to audition,” Criss stresses, grinning sheepishly. “I masochistically relish that process.”

He’s fully aware that people are fascinated by the idea of the Tiger Beat cover boy thwarting that image playing the sociopathic serial killer, just as they were by the idea of the straight cisgender teen idol actively pursuing the role of a transgender rock star when he booked meetings for Hedwig when Glee was ending.

“I keep telling reporters that I’m curious what the conversation would be if I started with Versace and then three years later I do this musical comedy,” he says. “And I do think the questions would be the same: ‘Darren you’re sort of this dark brooding dramatic guy and that’s what you’re known for. It must be such a departure to be playing this happy go lucky. When I was watching Versace I never thought I’d be watching this guy singing and dancing on Broadway.’ But we have to categorize. It’s how we keep ourselves sane.”

He chuckles. “My goal in life in all respects is to keep people as off-kilter as possible.”

Well, speaking of throwing fans for a loop, let’s talk about that naked Instagram photo.

While Blaine on Glee was certainly made out to be a handsome, crush-worthy romantic lead—all the more groundbreaking, of course, because the romance was a same-sex teenage one—there was something chaste and sort of juvenile about it. Not anymore. Now, Darren Criss exudes sex.

He’s damn hot, too, and clearly leaning into it. Ryan Murphy, god bless him, is nothing if not the Patron Saint of Sexualizing Male TV Stars, and thus had Criss shooting in nothing but a red Speedo very early on in the Versace shoot. One particular day ended with a sunburned Criss as red as his skimpy wardrobe. So, after getting the blessing of his girlfriend of seven years, Mia, Criss thought it would be funny to post a nude selfie, covering his naughty bits with the crumpled up bathing suit, on his Instagram.

The gay community collectively gasped in unison.

“I learned what the word ‘thirsty’ meant after that,” Criss laughs.

“My favorite part of the post was the caption, which was completely upstaged,” he says.

Uh, there was a caption?

“Exactly! That’s what’s so funny about these things. When something goes viral, all context gets thrown out the window.” (For the record, the caption mocked his sunburn: “So what’s more red? My sunburn, my Speedo, or YOUR FACE???”)

Criss takes it all in good humor, of course. “It tickles me, and I think it’s, in a weird, twisted way, endearing,” he says when we mention that his nude scene from the Versace premiere—a lingering look at his naked body and butt from behind—has already leaked and is circulating on gay porn sites. But he gets a little weary when all that becomes the focus of discussion around Cunanan. At the premiere in Los Angeles, for example, gossip rags bombarded him with questions about how he got into shape for the show, the usual tired questions about an actor’s exercise regimen. “I freaked out,” he says. “Like, no, no, no. Andrew’s not supposed to be a sexual object.”

You can take sex appeal out of the conversation, of course, but you can’t take sexuality out of it. And it’s an interesting, if complicated, conversation in relation to Criss’ career. As we mentioned earlier, Andrew Cunanan marks the third time Criss has played a LGBTQ character, after Blaine on Glee and Hedwig.

At a time when the visibility and normalization of gay characters is trumpeted in tandem with a cry for opportunity for LGBTQ performers and creators, it’s a coincidence that invites a certain amount of scrutiny for a straight actor whose career has benefited from these characters.

“I’ve been really fortunate in that, while I almost bizarrely invite that, there hasn’t really been any scrutiny,” Criss says. “As a straight, cisgender white guy, I can definitely see how people in the LGBTQ community could be a little weirded out about the consistency of these roles. But it’s not conscious. I’m not going, ooh, I’m going to go after all these queer roles. It’s sort of no different than a gay actor only doing straight roles. I think in our political climate those things are important to talk about and important to notice.”

“Especially for a community who’s had to fight for its voice to be heard and recognized for so fucking long, I completely understand the sensitivity to what my approach or reasonings are,” he continues. “But I think hopefully the art transcends the politics in that I’m an actor. Just plain and simple. Maybe that sounds pandering, or maybe it sounds like I’m trying to put that curiosity down. I’ve been thrilled that no one’s ever really given me grief for this. Because I think we all agree the stories are more important than the pieces that make them.”

Rather than shy away from questions about this, skittish that something he says might be deemed controversial, Criss actually continues to elaborate, saying “there’s so much to unpack here.”

“I like talking about it,” he says. “Because I feel like the gay community has embraced me when it really didn’t have to. I am aware that I’m an outsider. I didn’t grow up gay. I didn’t go through the same journey that a lot of gay men and women went through. That is something that binds the gay community together in a very real way. I would never deign to say that I deserve to be included, but I’ve been so touched and privileged to be a voice and connected to a part personally and professionally that I’m just thrilled there hasn’t really been any visible or audible backlash.”

Plus, he reaps the benefits of being a satellite member of the community, such as trusting whoever encouraged him to wear that fabulous—and hardly heteronormative—green overcoat.

“That’s true!” he laughs.

It reminds him of a joke that was in Hedwig at the expense of an actor, whom he’d rather not name now, talking about how he enjoyed “all the privileges of homosexuality and none of the responsibilities.” It always got a big laugh, to the point that when co-star Lena Hall filled in for him as Hedwig, he suggested that she make the same joke but using his name instead.

“I tend to step outside my body and look at this all from the back seat. I was like that is a really, really funny joke,” he says. “Because it’s true. I’ve been really lucky to have all the privileges, all the fun things of the gay community without all the responsibilities and burdens that come with it. And I’m so aware of that.”

He then launches into a story that he apologizes several times for having told before to other media outlets, but which seems to so genuinely reflect his attitude about his place in the gay community as an outsider who plays these characters.

“This is the nerdiest analogy,” he starts, before likening the experience to being given the Green Lantern ring from some LGBTQ powers-that-be and being told to be a symbol for the community, thinking in response: “Me? Are you sure?”

“But I’m glad it was me,” he says. “I’m glad that these things have fallen on my plate, and that things have happened in my life that I think actually make me a good candidate for being put in the position that I was put in, having grown up like I did in San Francisco, being raised basically by gay twentysomethings in theater. These are people who I looked up to. These are people who I wanted to be around. These are people who raised my adult consciousness without them even being aware of it. So later in life, yeah, fuck yeah, those are the people I want to be connected with. It is really cool. I really lucked out.”

Teenage dreams grow up, and even become realities. Darren Criss is in the midst of his.

[princess-of-embarrassment]

Some 3 am realizations about life, relationships and maybe more?? idk whatever have fun.

Ok before i start on this shit I am going to say it is 3 am and i am just dumping some thoughts like i usually do. Sorry for the shit grammar, disorganized thoughts and all that jazz... In a sense i feel like this is a letter to myself and what i have been trying so damn hard to understand so yeah i am talking to myself and to this website. I think. Idk. i will probably delete this in the morning when i am back on bad bitch mode and go back to posting memes pero por ahora vamos a ver como nos va. Mayb ei will leave it up bc i forget or because i dont care who sees it. sorry for the shitshow of a post you are about to read but you probably already kinda know me so yay! I debated posting this shit because the internet is a wildin place but oh well!!1!!11

ok tumblr it is 3 in the morning and i have 100% regressed into being a 15 years old on this damn website shitposting and reblogging some corny ass posts but it feels right, so here i am attempting to process it through the only form i know how to actually know how to cope with things. I mean memes are cool and all but lets be real, they don’t address the problems. this is the one place i can brain dump all of my thoughts and not really care about where they go because they will eventually disappear in the tumblr algorithm.

My old blog was often the only separation I had between my reality and the life i really wished i had, but now I have that life that I always wanted so why the hell am i back at square one? To be fair, the life that i have right now may not be envied by many but its a pretty darn good life to me. Im safe 99.9% of the time. The other .1% is a story for another day. I have been trying to figure out for months as to why i’m back to being so active on here and now that it’s 3:00am I realize it’s because of self isolation (thanks corona!). 

Let me start off by saying this; my reality is not something I am going to be able to escape. Ever. It has brought me to where i am today, allowed me to meet some really incredible people and i am so so grateful. I have learned so much in the past few years. i am grateful what happened happened. Wild, i know. I escaped it physically but i cannot escape it mentally, at least for now. School, work, writing, dealing with my freshmen’s problems was what kept my brain occupied and away from having to face the part of my life that I really just want to forget. To be fait my trauma response has taken pretty good care of fucking up my memory and all of those fun things but ironically the things i want to forget about so badly are the things i think about every single day without skipping a beat. brains are weird like that.

I am ok now but sometimes i forget and fall back into my new reality. That is ok. People that know my story ask me why i don’t write about it on a public platform because it’s inspiring?? or hopeful?? or whatever cliche people want to use when addressing a topic that makes them uncomfortable and they want to feel better about the life they live. 21 year old latina girl faces adversity and lives the american dream (barely)..i mean, i did run a whole ass magazine and wrote a piece for graduation including some details of my story but that was like the rated g version with only the little sad parts that people are able to handle without feeling like their comfort zone is being violated. MEdia is a wonderful place isnt it???  so i get where they are coming from, but what they dont understand is that an international platform is not where i can share any of these thoughts... Listen, I know this is cryptic and confusing and you are probably really curious about what the hell happened to me but i don’t feel safe to type it out on international platforms with public access. I don’t know if i ever will... Yeah i can talk to people i trust about it because i am in control of the space and the situation and who is obtaining that information but you never really know with the internet. 

maybe in the future i’ll write a book on it. even then i will probably use my alias make it a YA fiction with an added love story that ends in a happy ending. Maybe one day one of the school girl crushes I have will turn into that YA story and i dont have to make any of it up.

If i am honest...this blog is the only safe place i will probably ever have where he wont find me. He can find my school and my address and phone number and work and everything in between because that is just the way things work. Yeah yeah i get it stop posting shit on social media that is how he finds you whatever. What people dont understand is that I cant stop living my life again. I already started so i cant go back to giving him that power. It makes no sense. Also, his family is too confused by all of the ups and downs of the last year that they dont really know where i am going or what i am doing. So anyways, long story short - That’s why i am back on here, because it has become the same written safe haven I had when i was 15 and tried to escape my physical reality. Only difference is that i am trying to manage the mental reality of it all...

I also have so many questions about what to do next. Like i mentioned in another post, i didnt think i would make it to 21 but i did. I didnt think this far ahead so i guess i will just figure it out along the way but hear me out. How do i face a new reality that no one can relate to. At least not the people around me. How do i make friends and know when the “right time” is to tell them hey btw if this happens lmk lol. Even more importantly (because it relates to my future as world famous YA novelist.. lol sure grace...) How do I even date someone??? many questions are tied to that. like... I know theyre going to ask. “what happened?” “who is it?” “how can i help?” “Isnt there something we can do?”. i am more than willing to answer these questions because fuck, if im dating someone i would be curious too.. but do i even answer those questions. How do i know they are ready to handle that kind of information? how can i guarantee theyre not going to leave. How can i know that they arent going to be frightened by what has happened. how do i know they are not going to think differently of me. How do i explain to this person “yeah i have stress nightmares about what happened and when i wake up i think i am back in that situation and not where i live and i have to remind myself i am in a whole different area code but then its fine lol so if we share a bed at any point in time dont be alarmed if i wake up in a panic.” or how do i explain to them when something triggers me and all i can do is freeze because maybe it is him. Maybe he finally found me. but then i am back to reality and move on with my day because that is the only thing left to do. I cant throw myself a shitty pity party thats generic as fuck and i dont have time for it but whatever. moving on. next question. How do i know theyre not gonna walk away because they have the misconception so many people have?? Just because i went through some shit doesnt mean i am unstable or unloveable or whatever bs people think. This isnt going to go away. This shit is a aprt of me but it doesn not define me. it is not who i am.I dont have the option to make it go away but people have the option to pick up their things and go. seems unfair to me sometimes. It seems unfair to generalize people like that. I am always open to a new relationship but people expect me to be sitting at home scared to go out into the world and live my life. I have a life to live and i am so ready to explore it by myself or with someone by my side but quarantine has brought me back on here to deal with the fact that i am back to being stuck inside. Mentally and physically. One sucks less than the other. 

I have so many other questions but i am feeling tired again and its almost 4am so maybe i should go to bed. Y’all dont know how happy i am to have this trash site to vent to in the middle of the night. theres some relly judgy people on here but at least i know my feed wont judge me or try to fix what has happened. it will just listen.

Anyways, i doubt anyone will read this because this post got long as fuck but if you did i give you a high five and a virtual hug for getting through the clusterfuck of sentences. Thanks tumblr. If i ever go viral again on this shitshow of a website i may have to bring back my studyblr and go underground lmfao jk maybe. I cant wait to hug my friends and the people i have met that have become a part of my daily routine (yes even during social isolation, get off my ass I am still socially isolating). All i can do for now is wait for someone who cares about me for me and isn’t scared of my past or the pieces of it that linger in my present. I deserve nothing less. if they cant do that they are not worth my time and i hope they drop their keys every single time they go to open their front door. oh... they also better be ready for the hours i spend typing away my thoughts on my computer. Maybe one day they will be allowed to read them too... lol maybe not. whatever who knows. Peace out kiddos stay healthy xoxo.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

THIS IS HAPPENING TO YOU. PAY ATTENTION.

It’s hard to know how much to say about Trump-Russia reports because they’re mostly confirmation of things that we’ve known for ages. But last week there was a wave of information about how the disinformation attack happened, and it’s really important to understand.*

Maybe even more important, it’s been confirmed where the attack happened: everywhere. Every social media network, whether or not it has a conventionally political slant, was infected by viral disinformation. Google! Pinterest! Tumblr! Pokemon Go! Is nothing sacred?!???

It’s important to remember: just because this operation was to help Trump, does not mean that all the misleading online content was overtly targeted at Trump supporters. We’re talking about disinformation – ie, lies. They impersonated and exploited people all over the political spectrum. White supremacists. Conventional registered Republicans. Sanders supporters who don’t identify with any political party. Texas secessionists. Racial justice activists. Environmentalists. And on, and on. The idea was just to crank up the volume and turn the environment hostile and irrational. That would always benefit Trump because nobody does hostile and irrational better than Trump and the Pepes, which was a big part of why he was the Kremlin’s guy.

This infinite list of feigned viewpoints is possible in part because compared to television and other older media, political ads on social media are cheap and unregulated. (Snapchat, which does screen the content it promotes even if it hurts their bottom line, doesn’t seem to have been hit with the disinformation campaign.) If you’ve targeted your audience as carefully as you would if you were selling homemade soap, your target audience will pick it up and pass it on for free, doing most of the work for you. They might even take a meme from one platform and pass it along to another, infecting a whole new group of people with the disinformation.

It doesn’t even all have to be ads, which at least leave a money trail for us to catch. Some of them are just fake accounts, pumping this stuff out for free. During the election, the people leading the Trump campaign regularly shared content from at least one Twitter account which was a Kremlin sockpuppet. (Which, tbf, was a pretty good impersonation of a standard-issue #maga supporter.)

A few examples:

Then there’s these clowns: 

One of the posts from that month includes a link to a story about Hillary Clinton wanting to censor New York’s Laugh Factory comedy club. “Hillary must be in prison for this!” the account wrote with the link attached.

The pair also promoted a shirt labeling Bill Clinton as a rapist in an October video called “A word of truth about a rapist’s wife.”

“To say the truth, Bill Clinton is a rapist. And there is a lot of fact to prove it,” the host says, before saying the Clintons are “serial killers and they are going to rape the whole nation.”

The video concludes with the line: “We have to do all we can to not allow this racist bitch to become the next president.”

In an August video, one of the hosts explicitly endorses the movie Clinton Cash and begins the video by saying, “I support Bernie Sanders.”

“Today is old bitch Clinton time,” the host says before a title card informs people watching that the film will premiere the day prior to the Democratic National Convention.

Most people aren’t dumb enough to think this is logically substantiated, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to overload people with this firehose of vitriol until they lost track of where all the ugly was coming from, until they bought into the slogan here:

“Everyone Sucks, We’re Screwed 2016” was not a reasonable assessment of reality, which was that all the suckage was coming from Trump. But somehow it became a mantra repeated constantly by Trump skeptics on the right, Bernie fanatics on the left, and smug comedians on late night television.

Because it was fucking everywhere, including on Tumblr. (Those links are to the Wayback Machine and just posts that I could find easily. I don’t know if they’re troll accounts or suckers, but they’re examples of the propaganda.)

It’s going to be a while before we know how widespread this campaign was. For now, you can flip back through your own tags from last year. Did you interact with Wikileaks posts? Links to right-wing propaganda sites from accounts that otherwise seemed progressive? People questioning the legitimacy of the Democratic primary process? Jill Stein cheerleaders? Then you got dragged into this, too, and you deserve to understand as much as possible about how it worked.

Some of it was more or less straightforwardly what you’d expect from an operation with the Kremlin’s goals. Remember, they wanted to install Donald Trump in the White House if possible, and if that didn’t work, at least damage Hillary Clinton enough to hobble her presidency. So, although these guys weren’t the only targets, it makes sense that there was lots of Breitbart-style trash targeted at conservative-leaning voters. But that kind of stuff isn’t only absorbed by people already inclined to hear it. When it gives the rabid right-wingers something to splash all over their social media networks, it makes the political environment downright hostile for people who were sincerely excited, and as those voices are silenced, all that’s left to worm its way into the subconscious of people who are largely apathetic is loud ugliness.

They also targeted voters who were inclined to be anti-Trump by trying to gin up apathy or outright hostility toward Hillary Clinton from the left. Some of this was the same misogynist tropes as the pro-Trump ads, just swapping out Trump for Bernie Sanders or Green Party nominee Jill Stein. The left isn’t nearly as bad as the right, but we do have bigots, nihilists, and weak-willed Billy Bush types who accommodate them, which allowed the propaganda to take hold. That failure was particularly destructive because the left tends to have a lot of impressionable idealists and young people who are forming their political outlook based on general vibe of the current election. So you had a lot of people cynically expressing, passively validating, or actually believing this idea that there wasn’t a meaningful choice between the candidates. By the way, weeks before the election, Steve Bannon was openly boasting about the campaign running exactly this digital strategy. What a shocking coincidence! 

There’s an even more devious layer. Remember the dress from a couple of years back? 

There’s studies about something called priming: basically, when you remind people of social outgroups, it can actually activate some people’s subconscious biases against those outgroups. So a Kremlin troll looking to turn Americans against each other could target ideologically opposed groups with the same ad. Conservative-leaning whites would see what appeared to be an uncompromising Black Lives Matter post, get defensive, and become more susceptible to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. The exact same post would win credibility with members of the multiracial progressive coalition who were young or otherwise new to politics, making the troll account more effective when it told them not to bother voting. Other troll accounts made similar efforts with the LGBTQ movement and with at least one defunct Muslim organization – appropriating the activism and the very identities of the people the Trump and Putin regimes threaten the most.

It can be subtle.

After an American admirer of ISIS massacred 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in June 2016, the community quickly created an event titled “Support Hillary. Save American Muslims!” that presented Clinton’s name in an Arabic-style font.

The fake United Muslims of America page was quick to point out Clinton was “the only presidential candidate who refuses to ‘demonize’ Islam after the Orlando nightclub shooting,” and boasted that “with such a person in White House (sic) America will easily reach the bright multicultural future.”

Insofar as you can evaluate the words The Daily Beast quotes, they’re either true or aspirational. If you’re a person who was disgusted by Trump’s Islamophobia, you probably did support Hillary at least in part to protect Muslim Americans from the nightmare they’re experiencing now. It’s very true that Clinton was the only candidate who refused to demonize Muslims after the Pulse Nightclub murders, and she was as clear as could be that demonizing Muslims is wrong. If you’re a person who understands that was the right thing to do, you probably didn’t think that electing her would “easily” bring about any “bright multicultural future,” but you certainly hoped it would be a step in that direction – and it hardly seems unfair to Clinton, since it seems pretty clear that if she could wave a magic wand and get rid of xenophobia easily, she would. So you have to squint for the tells that it’s meant to push people away from her and toward Trump:

The timing. American Muslims are normal, decent people, as much as any other group of Americans. They didn’t make the Pulse shooting about themselves as Muslims. They showed up for the people who were attacked. Or they kept their heads down, specifically because saying things like this while the attack was fresh in everyone’s mind would have the priming effect on some people, reminding them that Trump and his supporters believed it was socially acceptable to use the tragedy as a club against Muslim Americans.

The Arabic-style script. If the ad was for Arabic speakers who would have a harder time reading the Latin alphabet, the ad would be in Arabic. It’s in English because it’s not for them. It’s there in a distinctive script to prime the audience to associate Clinton with the foreign and unfamiliar.

The phrasing. Voters who were susceptible to Trump’s rhetoric were likely to have a deep anxiety about the changing demographics of the future. The confident assertion that Clinton’s America would “easily” bring about its multicultural future aggravates that anxiety. Also, and this may have been an unintentional error but the effect would be the same, the ad doesn’t refer to “a” hypothetical “bright multicultural future.” It uses “the,” a definite article, suggesting that this multicultural future is imminent and inevitable. Basically, this endorsement pushes the same button as “taco trucks on every corner” guy. (Reason #22,909,002 to stay mad: WE COULD HAVE HAD A TACO TRUCK ON EVERY CORNER.)

This attack could not have worked if there weren’t already deep fissures in American society. That’s no excuse to take this lying down! First of all, if the divides were as deep and poisonous as they could be, nobody would’ve bothered with an attack. If the Kremlin had not interfered in last year’s election, if we had only been up against our own undemocratic demons like voter suppression, campaign finance failures, and the Electoral College, we’d be living in a world where President Hillary Clinton was solidifying the gains of the Obama years, Associate Justice Merrick Garland was striking down voter suppression laws, and we were all arguing about Empire and Riverdale instead of fighting for our lives every fucking day. If not for this years-long foreign assault on our hearts and minds, we’d be alright. We’d be far from perfect, but we’d be able to keep working on bridging those divides. Hell, without Russian help, Trump may not have made it past the New Hampshire primary. There’d still be a bunch of boneheaded racist misogynists who abandoned the GOP to support him as a third-party candidate and they’d still be a problem, but they wouldn’t be running the show without an international criminal conspiracy to get them there. (But we’re the “globalists.” Sure, Jan.)

On top of that, though? There’s a reason that they attacked the Democratic candidate and were so desperate to demoralize progressives. There’s a reason that they could take over the GOP. The Republican Party is already a party of intolerant extremists who are doing everything they can to destroy liberal democracy – or, worse, people who know better but have enabled them for decades. The left-of-center coalition has to hold the line right now. Not just on principles, either, but in giving a shit what’s true. That’s not even about moral superiority, though if moral superiority keeps you on task, by all means, go with it. It’s strategic. We’re never going to beat them at their own game. The Democratic coalition is too diverse to agree on some fantasy, and too young to avoid the long-term consequences of ignoring reality. We’re going to have to keep on being the party that autocratic oil baron pigs hate. That means hone your bullshit detector, and start expecting the people around you to do the same. Do more call-ins than call-outs. Start watching out for sites or situations that push your buttons more than they inform you. These kinds of attacks aren’t going to stop, so we need to start building immunity now. I’m sorry, I know this is the hard way, but them’s the breaks.

Further reading:

There’s a deep dive at The Guardian.

A researcher at Columbia University, ran the data on six – six – of the 470 profiles Facebook has acknowledged were Russian troll accounts. The results are sobering – as was Facebook’s response to the scrutiny. 

If you’re curious how this worked on the Russian side of things, read the summary of an investigation done by Russian independent media and an interview with a paid troll who worked out of St. Petersburg. This won’t get at the size of the operation, but there’s some insight into how it worked.

And no, we still haven’t done the kind of forensic audits that would tell us if this years-long intensive cyber operation successfully hacked the final vote. Sleep tight.

*An illustration of how this news flow works: this post was mostly done by Monday. New reports that were worth adding into the description have come out at least once a day since then.

[biologyweeps]

Introduction to Genetic Engineering: Part 2

Today’s topic: Horizontal gene transfer in nature

Now, horizontal gene transfer in nature isn’t in itself genetic engineering, however a lot of the mechanisms have been used for it, so better explain it now, in a fairly concise form.

Now, first things first, what is horizontal gene transfer (HGT)?

It’s also called ‘lateral gene transfer (LGT)’ and is the opposite of vertical gene transfer (VGT), VGT is what happens in normal inheritance patterns. You have genes that you got from your parents that they got from their parents and so on. It’s called ‘vertical’ because if you’re looking at a family tree, you’re moving up and down, read: vertically.

HGT now is the transfer outside of that, from one already existing organism is another. Say, if you could transfer a gene from your cousin to you, that would be HGT. 

In nature, this is most common among prokaryotes (which is also where it’s annoying as all fuck for humans, but more on that in a second). Now, as I told you in the first part of this series, in bacteria (which are prokaryotes), the DNA is just a twisted up loop swimming around the cytoplasm. That’s true. However, some bacteria have something like a other, smaller loops of DNA swimming around inside them, too. This smaller loop is called a ‘plasmid’. Depending on the specific nature of the plasmid, they can be very common inside the bacterium’s cell (high copy) or rather more rare (low copy). If they’re the right kind, they can be copied without any input from the main bacteria DNA.

Now, why are we talking about this when the topic if HGT? Well, some bacteria have the mean-ass ability to exchange whole or partial plasmids. What happens is essentially that one bacterium grows like a little ‘arm’ that attaches to another bacterium. That ‘arm’ is called a pilus. The pilus attached to the other bacterium and draws them together, so far as they cells are not just snuggled up to one another, they’re open. Things can be transferred from one cell to the other. And that’s where the plasmids come in. Basically, a plasmid rolls up to the touching point of the two cells (called a ‘conjugation bridge’) and gets replicated there, but instead of of the new singe strand staying inside the cell it came from, it worms over into the new cell. The two bacteria cells part ways again, but now they both carry the same plasmid. 

Source

Now, these plasmids can carry all sorts of information, but they can be broadly grouped into five kinds: Fertility (allows the new donor to make a pilus of their own), Resistance (to toxins or antibiotics, and here you can start to see why this is a problem), Virulence (makes an otherwise harmless bacteria into a pathogene, the other reason this is a problem), Col (which allows the bacterium to kill other bacteria) and degradative (which allow the digestion of substances the cell otherwise wouldn’t be able to digest).

These plasmids exist because they provide some sort of evolutionary benefit to the bacterium in question, under the right circumstances. 

Other bacteria don’t need the transfer like this but can instead absorb ‘free’ DNA strands that they just sort of come across as they swim around in whatever medium they’re swimming around in. 

Now, how common is HGT under prokaryotes? A fuckton. Depending on which group of prokaryotes you’re looking at, up to 15% of their genes (here) can come from HGT, which makes family trees for them an absolute nightmares. Think less ‘tree’ and more ‘confusing ivy covered blackberry brambles’.

Now this, and the ‘just vaccum up DNA you happen across’ (called Transformation, btw)  approach are just two ways that HGT can happen in prokaryotes. 

Another one is called Transduction and uses viruses and there are two kinds, broadly speaking:

general transduction and specific transduction

The general kind if s a little faster to explain. Basically, the virus hits a bacterium, injects its DNA into it and the viral DNA hijacks the cells mechnisms to 1) cut up the bacterial DNA into small bits and 2) build proteins for more viruses. 

Once that is all done, the DNA snippets of the virus get packaged into the virus proteins, the cell bursts and the cycle starts anew. Now, in this soup of ‘many random small DNA bits some of which are virus and some of which are bacterium’ it can happen that instead of viral DNA, bacterial DNA just stuffed into the virus protein shell. If that protein shell now lands on another bacterium and injects that DNA, the DNA can potentially insert into the new bacteria cell, and you moved genes from cell A to cell B without A or B being anywhere close to one another.

(Source)

Now, the second kind of transduction, the specific kind is a touch more complicated because the viruses here are a touch more complicated. Instead of being injected into the cell and just chopping up the host DNA, they insert into it. The viruses can do this only at specific regions of the genome that vary from virus to virus (HPV does that! which is how it causes cancer.) and once it’s inserted, the viral DNA can stay there for a good long while and every time the cell divides, it also copies the viral DNA along which its own (which is great for the virus, because it’s zero effort!). Now, if the cell the virus is sitting in gets stressed, this can activate the viral DNA again. The now active DNA proceeds as in the picture above, hijacks the bacterium’s mechanics to built its own proteins, kills the cell and fucks off to greener pastures. However, since the viral DNA was inserted in the bacterial DNA, it has to be cut out again. If that cut out is a bit imprecise, it’s possible that more or less small bits of bacterial DNA get cut out alongside, packaged, and sent to the next host cell. So, this is called specific transduction, because only the genes right next to the insertion side of the virus can get transferred that way, instead of ‘random bit of DNA’. 

Now, viruses don’t just happen to bacteria, they happen to all of us, and accordingly, horizontal gene transfer via viruses can happen to all of us, too. But not just that. There’s a bacterium that’s know for lobbing its own DNA into plants. It’s called Agrobacterium tumefaciens  and we’re going to talk about in detail in the future because boy is this bacterium important to GMing of plants. Or at least it was, we got newer techniques now. But, important anyways, will get its own post.

We also know that horizontal gene transfer happened between at least one fungus and an aphid (here), bacteria and nematodes (here), bacteria and insects (here) and - drumroll please - between bacteria and humans (especially often in cancer cells, go here).

So, honestly, HGT is a lot more common than people think (if they think of it at all) and has been driving evolution for a longass time. Hell there are cases where organisms seems to have made it a career movie to beg, borrow and steal genes that they can use (here). It’s part of what makes antibiotic resistances such a bitch and proper hospital hygiene so important and it’s been happening to all of us at some point, most likely. 

So, that concludes our quick overview on how horizontal gene transfer works in nature. Next up: we start on GM breeding methods! What did we do, how did we do it, is it still in use? 

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I recently watched season one of Amazon Prime series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I found hilarious and thoroughly entertaining. I don’t watch a lot of comedies—I find the writing is better on serious shows that also happen to be funny. However, I found The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to be the perfect blend of plot and humor. SPOILER WARNING: This review contains spoilers for season one.

As a creative person, I noticed the show, while entertaining, also offered many truths to be learned about pursuing a career in the arts. Now, the show is set in 1958, and there are obviously hundreds of things that are different about pursuing a career in show business, or other creative pursuits, today. Social media. The internet. Society. Stupid people going viral and stealing my spotlight. And not just people. I mean, a rat dragging a piece of pizza down the street can go viral but I can’t get 100 claps on Medium? Anyway….

This show revealed so many epiphanies about pursuing a creative career that are still true today. Here are 4 funny (okay, some are not so funny) epiphanies I learned about the creative life from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: 

Lesson 1: If at first you succeed, fail, fail again. The main character, Midge, embarks on a career in comedy after her husband, a would-be comedian himself, leaves her for his secretary. She—Midge, not the secretary—gets drunk and goesto the  humble nightclub where he performed earlier to collect a pyrex dish she used to bribe the club’s manager for a good time slot. While there, she wanders up on stage and drunkenly explains her very bad evening to the audience, who finds her hilarious. Later, the nightclub’s scheduler, Suzie—one of my favorite supporting characters ever—offers to manage Midge’s comedy career. Midge has a few more good shows, then some not-so-good shows, after which she decides to quit. She later realizes she wants to keep performing.

As a writer, I want to quit pretty much all the time. I’d probably be a lot happier if I did. It occurred to me a few months ago that if I’d known just how much work there is in writing—not just the writing, but the editing, the rewriting—I probably would not have started. I’d have a lot less stress and a lot more time to sit on my ass and watch Amazon Prime, that’s for sure. Hell, I might even have time to vacuum my room twice a year instead of once. But I probably wouldn’t, because I don’t care. Anyway….

But I don’t quit. I keep failing. I try to learn something from my failures. On the show, Midge goes to comedy clubs, watches the most successful comedians, takes diligent notes. Then she tries to apply what she learns to her own writing. She figures out what works for her, what doesn’t, how long to ride the laughs, how to plan her show instead of just rambling and hoping something funny comes out.

This can be applied to other creative pursuits. I read a lot, and have always read a lot, but now I really try to notice how my favorite authors do things. How do they explain back story so seamlessly you don’t even notice, instead of just making a big infodump on page one? How do they explain a fictional world without spending three pages on the scenery? How do they disseminate a large amount of info in snappy dialogue?

When I think I figure it out, I try to do these things myself. It doesn’t always work. I’m still learning, and more importantly, still failing.

Lesson 2: The more privilege you have, the better.

This one sucks, because privilege isn’t usually something you can gain through hard work, and you can’t buy it on Amazon, either. It would be nice if pursuing a creative career was equally easy—or hard—for everyone. But that’s not how the world works. It wasn’t in 1958, and it isn’t today.

In trying to improve her act, Midge finds an ad in an entertainment magazine and hires a guy to help her. She tells him a few things about her act, and he tells her he can write five minutes of material for $15. Now, that’s a pretty cheap rate today, but back in 1958 it would have been pretty expensive.

Can everyone afford to hire a script writer, or an editor, or a cover designer, or whoever they need to help hone their craft? Can we all afford to take acting classes or singing lessons or improv classes? No. Midge lives with her decently well-off parents after her husband leaves and her father-in-law kicks her out. She seems to have some cash left over from the marriage as well, and could probably sell some of their nicer items if need be. She gets a job at the department store so she can buy a television for her room. If she wants to spend fifteen dollars on a script writer (who turns out to be a scammer), she can do so without thinking too hard about it. She can also call her husband and get $200 for bail after being arrested for swearing and flashing her boobs during a show. That shows a tremendous amount of privilege not everyone has. (Money, of course, is only one of many kinds of privilege.)

The one benefit to not having money privilege is that it somewhat protects you from lesson #3….

Lesson 3: Scammers are everywhere.

The best thing to do is ignore them, or be unable to afford them in the first place.

There is no area of show business in which you’ll fail to find grifters promising fame and fortune for a price. Midge meets one when she hires the script writer, who gives everyone the same tired jokes for “$15 for five minutes.” Hollywood is full of acting coaches, voice lessons, etc. who aren’t worth the money. There are, of course, people who are worth the money. Good luck figuring out the difference!

Unless, of course, you have no money to spend on classes in the first place. That’s a surefire way to avoid getting ripped off. It’s also a surefire way to spend all your time working five jobs, leaving you with little time to write, go to auditions, paint, or whatever.

In the publishing world, there used to be a thing called vanity presses, where you paid them to print your book. Today, thanks to the magic of Amazon—aside from Prime, I mean—you no longer need a vanity press to self-publish. Anyone can publish anything on Amazon. Now, some people take the time to learn Photoshop and make their own covers. Some edit and format their own books. These things are time-consuming and not every writer is a cover designer. Not to mention, it’s a really good idea to have at least one other person besides yourself edit your book because it’s hard to do all your own editing.

So there is a genuine need for these services. However, many vanity presses have morphed into “self-publishing services” firms that charge an exorbitant amount of money to edit, design covers, and promote self-published books. Some packages run into the thousands. Again, the way to avoid this nightmare is to either A) do a whole lot of research or B) Just be too broke to pay for any of it anyway.

If you are in the market, read reviews, inspect the company’s website thoroughly, check its ranking, do a search to see what people are saying about it on social media, etc. Also quiz friends who have purchased such services about what they paid to make sure your price is reasonable. In general, avoid spending money if at all possible.

Lesson 4: Trolls Are Everywhere

Every performer gets heckled, but Midge gets a lot of heckling from guys who think women can’t be funny. And say so. It would be nice if we could write this off as a backwards view common in the 1950’s. Sadly, it’s also a backwards view some people still have today in the 21st century. In 2007, there was even a Vanity Fair article in which Christopher Hitchens attempted to mansplain why women aren’t funny. (Apparently, we never evolved this skill because we already appeal to men, and obvs., that’s the only reason for anyone to be funny!)

Midge learns to handle hecklers with aplomb. When an audience member calls her a bitch, she puts her hands on her hips and says, “Who told you?” The audience laughs, and the heckling loser is forgotten. She’s funny, he’s not. It’s a great scene.

Of course today, it’s not just hecklers at shows. There’s the morass of social media, and the evolution of hecklers into what we call “trolls.” (Also known as “hecklers who hide behind computer screens.”) Trolls are happy to attack women, minorities, people who disagree with them politically, and pretty much anyone they don’t like because, I don’t know, it’s Tuesday. As long as you have a big following, of course—for some reason, trolls rarely seem to take offense at people who have, like, 3 followers. Could it be they’re desperate for attention? Or just jealous of anyone who’s even slightly more successful? Anyway…

If you’re going to have a creative career, you’re going to need social media, and if you manage to get a decent following, you’re going to have to deal with the trolls.

I follow a lot of my favorite writers on Twitter, including one who was accused of “ruining science fiction.” Which is pretty bizarre. I mean, it’s one thing not to like an author’s books. I’ve read or tried to read lots of books that just weren’t for me. But the idea that any one author can ruin an entire genre by writing a book you don’t like is pretty fucking ridiculous. (Of course, this particular troll was also upset because the author supports things like diversity in the genre.)

So a few days ago, the writer posted a screenshot about his ruination of an entire fiction genre, with an addendum about how he’s made a lot of money in royalties lately, and “ruining science fiction” is apparently really profitable. It is now my goal in life to ruin science fiction…okay, make it ruinier…and also ruin satire. NOW I know why I’m broke—I haven’t worked hard enough at ruining things!

Of course, if you don’t have the time or desire to personally respond to every troll, there’s another option: Just block and ignore the haters. This advice is easier to give than take. I know I shouldn’t engage with trolls, but, well, sometimes I can’t resist. If you can’t either, at least try to find a clever way to do it, instead of sinking to their level.

One last thing…

So, those are the 4 funny epiphanies I learned from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Before I conclude my review of season one (love it, you should watch it if you haven’t already), I’m going to leave you with some epiphanies I had watching the first two episodes of season 2:

My new favorite quote from any TV show ever: “My goal is money. I don’t have any and I want some.” Suzie, who speaks for me and my goals as well.

Also, I wish my parents would go to Paris, rekindle whatever romantic feelings they must have once had for each other (which I REALLY don’t want to think about), and leave me alone in their house. I’d be so much happier.

Forcing students to take four semesters of a foreign language is just a way greedy colleges make money, because after four semesters of French I still need subtitles when characters speak French. I want a refund from my university.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish watching season 2 and see what other great epiphanies I can find. Hey, the idea for my next novel would be great….

V. R. Craft is the author of Stupid Humans, a thought-provoking science fiction book series that asks the question, “What if all the intelligent humans abandoned Earth—and we’re what’s left?” Her first political satire book, Fail to the Chief, will be released soon.

  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s 4 Funny Epiphanies for Every Creative I recently watched season one of Amazon Prime series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I found hilarious and thoroughly entertaining.