#i'm not a scientist whatsoever

[thelittlestspider]

the way i feel matt's radar interacts with peter's spider sense is matt's radar puts out a vibration subtle enough that most people can't pick it up, but peter can because he's part spider.

[arcxnumvitae]

Daileas is precisely that type of scientist archetype in movies that fucks around a little too much and so everyone ends up finding out because of it.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Pretending like biological sex isn't real is ridiculously stupid. You say that you believe in science but you think that humans are the one primate to not have two sexes?

Also stop using intersex people as pawns, it's actually offensive

a) I'm intersex. what is with tumblr anons and assuming I'm not in a particular group I talk about with experience? Ffs. First ableism now this.

b) Biological sex *isn't* real. It's a model. Much as species aren't real. Yes, there are "two sexes", but sexual characteristics don't form two pillars on either end they form a reverse bell curve, with much variation in the middle.

c) I don't believe in science. I know science. I am a scientist. which means I know it's not as simple as "two sexes" for any organism whatsoever.

nice try.

[tinydumpsterdiver]

So I've been thinking about Axle's early past a bit.. uhhh

Yeah here are a few doodles and a sketch. Along with a small bit of Axle's early childhood life. I got carried away

Just some simple doodles of Axle's childhood. He technically grew up in a lab although he wasn't born in captivity. Most of his early childhood was doing puzzles or tests, lots of observation as well.

His development is similar to that of a human in terms of brain growth and physical form. He grows at about the same rate as a human just on a far smaller scale.

For the most part in his younger years he mostly did cognitive testing and development. They mostly used simple tests, and some general animal psychology experiments. Such as seeing what he did for fun, for food, and some logical reasoning.

The odd time the scientists still would do a surgery or two on a young Axle, but it wasn't the norm at that time.

However as time went on they began to do more invasive tests.

Axle had always liked the scientists growing up, as he was younger he'd seen them as a sort of family, having favorites and having preferred caretakers. But at the age of about 12 years old even the nicer caretakers had begun to grow sour.

People were being more careful around him, using gloves more often, constricting his movements more often, and other things of the sort which Axle noticed.

The experiments eventually began to get more invasive, such as when he was 13 he had his first brain vivisection specifically. It was a procedure to place wires into his brain to do more invasive tests on his nervous system.

He tried asking more questions, which quickly he learned would get him nowhere. Soon even the nice humans he'd barely see anymore or they would just leave all together. It was at the age of 13 he'd decided he didn't like the humans or how they kept him captured. He didn't know what else there could be, but he knew from the little bits and pieces he was able to listen to that there had to be more than the lab.

At the age of 14 Axle was being treated more like the mice he'd been raised with than a person that the scientists would talk to passively. Axle only grew more resentful as the months went on and the rotation of scientists got more harsh.

At 16 he was being treated as though he was completely feral. He refused to cooperate with the humans but they would refuse to let him feel like he had any form of control over the situation whatsoever.

Ok so this was just a doodle that got out of hand and colored. It's not great but it's the best I got rn. I'm pretty stressed out lol

Anyways. Axle had a pretty traumatic upbringing, but it did teach him to never trust humans which was probably the best thing he could have learned for when he did eventually escape one day.

He did have his mother with him at one point in captivity, but one day she disappeared and he never really figured out what happened to her. Current Day Axle likes to think she managed to escape one day and was free somewhere.

Axle after that day grew up around mice, usually a circulation of mice that were young enough not to be a danger to Axle. But this really took a toll on him when eventually all his mice friends would get taken away and he'd have to get attached to new friends all over again.

Sometimes the scientists would have him do experiments alongside grown mice, sometimes he would remember them but usually not. Under normal circumstances the mice were never aggressive with Axle, but were usually more curious about him.

Ok my unorganized ranting is over. I'm not sure. I think it's fun to share my silly cringe lore.

Thanks for reading it! Or thanks for just looking at the art ^^

Sending positive vibes y'all

Till next time

[chaichaiiskai]

Hi okay so if you're still doing a request can I get a (baki) Pickle x bottom male reader. So I want public sex where Pickle FuCks Reader Hard infront of everyone kinda like the reporter scene but you know with consent but if your not comfortable with that just normal rough sex in a bed room or forest since that's where Pickle is from.

If your not comfortable with this then that's okay i understand.

notes: OKAY, so, I did not see this until I wrote the last pickle request so I'm gonna connect this ask with that one— it's right here if ya wanna read it, deffo recommend it bc of lore :D hope ya enjoy this too !!! can't even lie, I'm thoroughly invested in the story of Pickle and Cucumber and I'm honestly thinking about keeping these two as reoccurring on my blog ngl.

warnings: mdni, homophobes do not interact, amab reader, he/him pronouns, violence against others that aren't reader, murder, blood and blood depictions, brief description of violence against woman and their wombs, mxm, pickle is very protective and basically yandere but who wouldn't be during the jurassic time period, rim jobs, lack of prep before anal, noncon mentioned but not against reader, reader is called cucumber by the facility and is basically a nickname, cumflation, belly bulge, size difference, very massive, very long, giant cock that is more weapon than genital, rough and unprotected sex bc duh they're both primitive men, hunting of animals, drugging // food tampering— I think that's it, lemme know if I missed anything.

The ultimate goal of the experiment was to further test the pure, raw strength of the primitive man when fueled by emotion and longing, going without food for a week. And their experiment proved to be true, far too true as a matter of fact. Multiple casualties would be forever staining the pages that reported the experiment and any sane person would have ended the experiment then and there to reunite the two lovers again.

However, a man at the top, who thought of nothing but himself, wanted to see just how far Pickle would go, even if that meant more casualties would have to be made. And so, the bloodbath ensued.

As Pickle roamed the facility halls, wave after wave came at him, rubber bullets aimed his way and raining on him that proved to have no impact on him whatsoever. He easily swiped aside the nuisances that are in his way, swiping away the small people until they go flying, hitting nearby walls— the sound of cracking bones, splattering, and coughing is sickening. So sickening that some of the scientists, though they love their jobs, find themselves going against the higher-ups.

One bravely moves in front of Pickle and holds his hands up, attempting to seem as if he was defenseless and then began to point behind him, pointing at a large door that was down the hall the primitive man was currently stalking down.

"He's there! There!"

He quickly announced, and then used his other hand to wave in the direction of the security camera he knew was currently watching the entire sight.

And on cue, the giant doors opened. To your surprise, the wall opening woke you out of your forced slumber that was brought onto you by a primitive form of depression sparked by your loss of companionship.

With heightened abilities, Pickle smelled you before he saw you, and as soon as he laid eyes on you, he was unable to make a sound, simply getting into all fours again and bounding towards you at full-speed. Despite being weakened by the lack of nutrients, you slowly sat up onto your hands and knees before feeling yourself being tackled back to the ground, bodies rolling until the two of your slammed against a tree, Pickle's back took the blow and nearly uprooted the thing. He rolled again onto a patch of grass, still holding you comfortably in his arms until you were in a patch of grass, dropping you onto your back while he buried his face into your neck, starting to nibble onto any part of it that he can reach, sharp fang-like teeth scratching over your skin and leaving indents.

The door to this new enclosure is shut and on the outside, the cleaning procedure begins, but not without some scolding to the researchers who went against the higher-ups. Cucumber and Pickle did not seem to care about whatever was going on outside of them, far more focused on each other and keeping each other close.

From then on, Pickle cannot be more than a foot away from you, and he can only sleep when he's on top of you, shielding you from whatever threatens the outside.

The only scientists he allows inside the enclosure are small, fragile-looking women. He'd already killed a few of the male scientists who dared to enter, a warning and a threat. And recently, in hopes to appease the two primitive men and get back on their neutral sides, wild animals have been introduced into the enclosure, giving the illusion of a hunt for the both of you, and unfortunately, your enjoyment in fruit had been ruined thanks to the scientists and their cruel, cruel experiment.

You were only able to eat what Pickle hunted, and in another week, you looked more alive again, even helping with the hunt and relishing in Pickle's presence yet again. So far, it seemed that Pickle seemed to enjoy crocodile meat quite a lot, whilst you had your own preferences. And once you were back at a healthy level of energy, Pickle immediately recognized it and let his instincts win, one could not blame him for feeding into such carnal desires.

After an especially filling meal, you find yourself being hunted just like your previous meal, but it's the kind of hunt that gets the hair on the back of your neck standing. Your primitive partner growls at you in a suggestive manner and suddenly, he's chasing you around the enclosure, getting the adrenaline pumping in your veins and his. And when he's had enough, he's got you pinned down onto the ground, pulling at the loin cloth that keeps you from him until it comes off, making him toss it aside. He's hurried and hungry, yanking his own loin cloth off as you roll onto your stomach, eager for him to mount you, hardened cock swinging between your legs while a bead of pre dribbles out the top. You're on your knees, propping your body up in the ideal position for— breeding essentially.

Pickle is eager himself, lining his massively thick, veiny dick up with your rim, nearly growling at the anticipation as he presses the head against it and starts to push. Every part of the tanned man is large, including his third leg that was just a few inches over a foot in length and thick like a world record-breaking, sizable anaconda. He tried to force himself into you, but you push him out, obviously because it's been a while and it seems to frustrate the beast, eliciting a growl from him as he eyes your little hole with his brows furrowed. Everytime you breathe, it winks at him, almost like it's taunting him and you can't help but to grow frustrated, huffing at him from over your shoulder, but he can't stop staring at your hole, curious eyes drilling themselves into your ass.

Then, yet another instinct comes over him as he leans down, shoving his tongue past the first ring of muscle, the fat thing nearly longer than his cock. The sensation is strange but it only makes more pearls of pre dribble from your tip, your own cock seemingly throbbing as his wild tongue throbs around inside of you from behind, forcibly stretching you with its width. The muscle thrashes around inside of you, wildly moving about, darting in and out of you like an excitable puppy drinking water from a lake. His tongue movements are uncoordinated and hungry, so much to the point that it's darting about with no clear destination, even causing a few stray licks to the underside of your balls that makes you flinch every time.

Pickle isn't particularly sure what he's doing or why he's doing it, but he couldn't stop himself from feeding into the curiosity. It surprised you as well, considering he's never done to you before and you had never felt so good down there like this.

Shamelessly, a group of researchers and scientists were watching this ensemble unfold in real-time, gathered around with food in their hands like shameless perverts watching an adult film.

For science! They would most likely say, ignoring their own instincts to shove a hand in their pants at the scene in front of them.

The licking, although pleasant, was becoming too much and there was a buildup you were feeling in your shaft that had you panting like a dog, clawing at the ground and smashing your skull against the dirt. For some unknown reason, Pickle took your sounds as a signal of sorts and he remembered his own issue, heavy uncircumcised cock seeming to throb and lift with eagerness. Yet again, he pulls himself back to position himself properly, lining himself up with your hole and then pushes the tip in, a chirp of excitement escaping him as he plunges in deeper, going in about halfway before you feel as though the insides of your stomach are literally being rearranged. Fertile balls are pressed up against yours as he manages to jam every inch into your awaiting hole, somehow you're able to take every inch, an impressive feat within itself. Perhaps, this is why he took you as a lover. A flash of memories comes to mind to both you and Pickle.

. . .

Pickle had his share of sexual partners— instinctually he went after women, who he ultimately killed by accident after ripping through their wombs with the deadly length between his thighs. He had found a woman once, able to take him fully, but she did not recuperate his feelings and escaped him after a session of breeding. Eventually, Pickle stumbled upon Cucumber, a man of smaller stature than him, but strong in his own way. Their first meeting was anything but friendly, both of them going after the same prey of a Jurassic animal, looking for their next meal, fighting each other while simultaneously fighting the creature in hopes of getting meat. Ultimately, they ended up killing the beast together and bregrundingly shared, taking from the hunted beast without acknowledging each other much after.

But through unfortunate events, you continued to run into each other at different points in both of your traveling journeys, but continued to ignore each other regardless. And on one of those fateful meet-ups, however, Pickle had made a mistake— a mistake that brought on a sense of fear that he'd never once had to deal with before.

Consuming a wasp.

The pain he'd felt from it made him more vocal than ever, scaring away beasts and other people alike. However, Cucumber was not fearful, instead, he went a pang of sympathy for the man who he'd considered somewhat of a companion.

Immediately jumping into action, tapping into a nurturing side that he sometimes would ignore, he wandered hurriedly to the nearest lake of water, cupped his hands and gathered a healthy amount of it into his hands and wandered towards the other man. He growled at that primitive man who was still in excruciating pain, opening his mouth in an attempt to get the message across to him and with tears in his eyes, Pickle obliged, reminding Cucumber of a whimpering babe who was hungry for milk.

Dumping the handfuls of water into Pickle's mouth, you watched as he held the water in his mouth for a moment and then spit it out, along with the wasp, coughing up quite a storm. You frowned as he coughed, hesitantly patting his back afterwards, and after a while, you left to gather something to soothe the residual burning— fruits, which you forced Pickle to eat, despite his disdain for eating things that he did not hunt himself. But when he did as you wanted, the burn disappeared and you were ready to take your leave after helping him— only to have the man hot on your tail, everywhere you went, following you closely from behind.

Surprisingly, you didn't shoo him away, and that was what began the true extent of your strange relationship. It didn't take much longer before he would develop something new, love, and you returned the feeling. And in a moment of intimacy one late night, under the stars, he'd mounted you for the first time like a woman and breeded you under the moonlight. It was somewhat romantic, even with the guttural sounds of pleasure and delight that came from you both. And when you took him in his entirety without complaint, he was even more infatuated with you than he'd already been.

. . .

The primal man is grinning at this point as he's able to properly mount you, beginning to thrust at a pace that has your body rocking back and forth, his mouth and the area around it shiny with his own saliva as he plunges further. You're lucky you're stronger than the average and modern man, claws digging further into the dirt to keep yourself from toppling forward. Pickle is pounding into you, thrusting his hips with a tenacity that's enough to shake the trees around you, you're lucky your body is built for the brutality.

Watchful eyes are carefully observing, even going as far as to have a discussion onto why the two of you had chosen each other as mates since there was no chance of either of you reproducing. Then again, did reproducing matter much to the primitive people of your time? Apparently not, though Pickle seemed to be /breeding/ you as if it were indeed, possible.

Poor Cucumber was experiencing the true strength of Pickle's excitement, quite literally being fucked into the ground by a beast of mass destruction. The researchers collectively feel a sense of great respect for you as you handle the creature on top of you with gritted teeth, groaning and growling as you take every inch. It's a rough experience that leaves you teary eyed, wobbly lipped, and whining, just like all the other times he has his way with you. Pickle doesn't seem to let up, not even when your teeth chatter as a familiar and growing pleasure comes over you, blossoming in your hips and cock, strings of white spewing from your tip and onto the ground beneath you in spurts that seem to last far too long. Your cock seems to soften after cumming a second time, though it continues to twitch and swing with the pistoning of barbaric hips that continuously drive you forward. Squelching and the sound of skin repeatedly colliding is nearly as loud as the proud growls Pickle does, his chest vibrating with an animalistic equivalent of pride when you cum, squeezing his erection enough to milk him just right.

And fortunately, your poor hole doesn't need to take much more abuse before Pickle reaches his edge as well, unleashing copious amounts of his load into you, cum spilling out the edges where your bodies connected, dribbling out in the dirt like lines of salt. You'd felt full like this before, never able to get used to the feeling but still enjoying it regardless, a strange after result is the slight pouch in your lower belly that is made due to an immense amount of cum. Pickle holds himself there for a bit before pulling out and he's /still/ coming, ropes of the sticky white landing on your back and your rear, the insane amount he's dumped into you beginning to spill out and trickle from your gaping, spasming hole. Your lover lets out an affirmative, satisfied groan and then lays down onto the ground on his side right next to you. He wraps one of his lengthy arms around you and pulls you towards him, your chest neerly flush against his, and you rest your forehead against his shoulder, panting as you attempt to catch your breath, almost as if you'd been running after an especially fast prey. Pickle shuts his eyes and rests his chin on top of your head as he slowly shuts his eyes, having been drained of energy. It's not long before he's asleep and his body naturally locks in place around you, almost like a protective barrier. One of his legs is draped over yours, hooked behind your knees, his monstrous cock nestled between your thighs while yours is squeezed between your stomach and his abdomen, lower bodies entangled where it's almost difficult to distinguish between limbs. His arm is still wrapped around your back, the other had joined, slipping beneath you as his hands interlocked behind your back. This position is new, he's usually laying right on top of you when he sleeps, completely covering you up like a shell on the back of a turtle, making it nearly impossible to see you beneath him unless one looked from very specific angles.

You're tired as well, hole still leaking with Pickle's cum as your eyelids grow heavy. Your body is hot and sticky with sweat, making your skin stick to his, but you always find comfort in his presence, snaking your own arms around the massive man's body the best way you can before you drift off to sleep as well.

To the researchers and facility crew who are still watching on the security cams, they see the cuddling session as wholesome— despite the previous actions of you both— and nearly coo at the cuddling session.

Perhaps they would need to adjust their research and find different questions to think about...

[the-glorious-evolution-fanart]

It's crazy how cringe Arcane S2 Viktor is. He's a Machine Herald without the "machine". It's just like calling Mordekaiser as the "Iron Revenant", and taking away the "revenant". It makes no sense at all, and destroys the whole character. It's like making Jhin with his face visible, when everything that makes Jhin himself is the anonymity of his face.

Suffice to say, I'm disappointed, and if they choose to make Arcane Viktor as the in-game one with the VGU & Rework, I'll quit playing Viktor. I don't want to play as another corrupt mage like Brand or Xerath. I want to play as a cyborg man from Zaun. Closest we have is Urgot, but even then, he's not a ranged character. Camille? Again, close range character, and from Piltover. And they're not quite the same as Viktor, who is fully set on prosthetics, and helping people, and being a scientist who builds golems.

It's like Viktor will become a completely different character, and I'll continue to prefer his current LoR version as the in-game canon since I love that version of him right now. Welp, guess the only place where we can play as his original version will be LoR. Such a shame.

The whole plotline of "Piltover-Zaun becoming one against Viktor's and Noxus' armies" makes me cringe so hard, you have no idea. Weren't we supposed to have an animation series about Piltover and Zaun? When did it become about "Noxus vs Piltover and Zaun"? But I liked Jayce. He's become Giga Chad, basically. Sure, doesn't fit his S1 character, but which character stayed loyal to their S1 versions? I didn't like S1 too because it didn't set up the base for Viktor becoming the Machine Herald at all (not into robotics, no comment on human emotions, etc.), or for Jayce to be an arrogant guy who's very hard to work with. No, instead we had their "better" versions. It makes me so angry. 😭 I'm not even starting with what kind of abomination they've turned WW into. He's supposed to talk. Not act like an animal %90 of the time and just speak one word the whole season.

Swain crows and Mel allying with LeBlanc was cool, ngl. Doesn't make a lot of sense as to why Swain doesn't move a finger to stop Ambessa and her army whatsoever, but whatever. Also what was the "subtle foreshadowing" they did on the last episode? Geez.

Ambessa fighting scene is literally what happens in every movie: the guys who are shooting all the time suddenly stop and let the main character(s) kill them. What a classic.

Betrayal wasn't expected but didn't surprise me.

Viktor model is just outright cringe. Mask looks ridiculous. Hair looks ridiculous. Cane? A whole another level of ridiculous. Voice not at all Machine Herald's. Human face still visible under Reddit Upvote button, disgusting. Halo of runes(?) behind his head, forced Biblical stuff. Has magical husk slaves like Evelynn in LoR who has the ability to fly and infect, apparently. SUS. He also has gone to the full "people shouldn't have control" mind-set, which I don't appreciate since even the Convergence Comic Viktor at the start was hating the cult, blaming them for twisting his ideology for their own sick beliefs. His third arm just looks like a horrid monster from S.O.M.A. game, but in a really bad way. Also wow, Viktor now apparently has the power to telekinesis.

Wow, apparently Caitlyn is such a powerful and lucky(!) character that she can fight while being stabbed by a dagger. Wow. Not plot-armor at all.

I appreciated how Ambessa's men literally do nothing to help their commander, which should have happened since Noxians use any and all means necessary to win. They used Singed's chemical weapons during the invasion of Ionia. Guess they forgot about their own principle: "Guile" 💀

WW can teleport now?! Wtf. Also impenetrable skin. They're really going for that "Shuriman Ascended WW", huh? Everyone can fly now, apparently.

Wow, galactic god Viktor. So cringe. Old Viktor. Viktor paradox. How worse could it have been?

Aaand, "happy" ending because why not. 💀

Jinx using herself as a bullet? Now that's a first. Was Jinx's death supposed to be sad? Sorry, I was cringing over every other thing wrong with the act that I couldn't find it in myself to feel bad.

What I didn't understand is how did Orinna came to be??? Hello??? Can we get an explanation please??? Because she's not the Orianna we know at all.

NOOO THEY'LL DESTROY NOXUS NEXT!!! NOOOOO 😭😭😭

^^^ it's over.

Orianna got injected with Viktor's and Warwick's blood I guess, so now she has 3 dads!

[saxspielercaderface]

I'm not a Dragon Age blog whatsoever but I love Emmrich so I must make this Post:

I work at a contract research organization that operates directly under the FDA, bound by the tape of GxP. At the end of the day and distilled down to its basics of GMP/GLP/GDP, this means "if you do not document it, it did not happen." To be honest I wouldn't work anywhere else when it comes to the expectations of brutal honesty and meticulous documentation of lab occurrences and results.

That one time in the game Emmrich talks about the benefits of accurate documentation I let out an audible hallelujah. An ethical necromancer who works under GxP??? An old man after my own shriveled, ace, scientist heart.

[stillness-in-green]

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 423: One For All vs. All For One

At the request of a few asks, have some chapter thoughts. I will warn everyone in advance that some portions of this post are extremely bitter. This is less salty than it is bile-flavored. It's also not quite as thorough as other posts have been, as my disillusionment with the material limits my willingness to comb the chapter for details to muse about beyond the ones that jump out at me.

None of which is to say that this post is short.

CONTENT WARNING: Confrontational rhetoric about irl prisons and the hypothetical of committing suicide to avoid them. I have strong personal feelings about some of the language I've been seeing from defenders of this chapter and I'm in no mood to prevaricate around them.

o Danger Sense continues to be some real bullshit.  My initial response to the leaks was that it was yet another dumb contrivance to make things arbitrarily harder for the villains than equivalent things would be for the Heroes, but reading the official release, I actually just think it's dumb that AFO thinks Danger Sense would have alerted him to his/Shigaraki's failing body at all.  Why would it?  Danger Sense nominally (nominally) activates based on hostility, and where's the hostility in super-regeneration failing?  If it were the remnants of Shigaraki/OFA attacking him from within his own body, that'd be one thing, but that doesn't seem to be what the first few pages are getting at. 

Rather, it's just that the power of OFA is being too much for his body, in the same way it was for Deku at the beginning.  As if, you know, Shigaraki hasn't already been surgically modified to handle both AFO and, presumably, OFA the whole time.  Ujiko only mentioned the former specifically, but given that the plan was always for AFO's new vessel to be able to steal OFA, why wouldn't that also be accounted for?  The best I can think is that AFO and Ujiko didn't know that OFA would put such strain on the body, but it's not like AFO couldn't have observed that the quirk's been growing stronger over the generations.  If he and Ujiko just failed to calibrate the body correctly, it's a failure of Ujiko's warped genius as a mad biologist and quirk scientist—which again takes us back to dumb contrivances that make things harder for the villains than they would be for the heroes.

    

o The Kurogiri scene would be very touching if it, you know, actually amounted to something.  If it didn't apparently end with Bakugou coming in to murder him.  Except we don't even quite get that level of commitment because Kurogiri was falling apart already, so you get the impression that he would have collapsed with or without Bakugou's intervention.

    

o This in turn makes Bakugou's intervention really silly and pointless.  My god, I don't care.  I do not care!  I do not care about Bakugou pushing Deku two steps forward past a barrier that was already failing.  I do not care about Bakugou getting one last stupid victory lap when he's already dramatically endured a severe beating and emotional assault, stood back up from the stupidest heart surgery in the history of fiction, and faced down everything AFO could unleash on him, far outstripping that same villain's climactic efforts fighting All Might in Kamino in what remains AFO's only semi-emotionally resonant battle in the whole manga.  As it is, this is just one more ludicrous handwaved magical cross-country teleport like every other one the Heroes have been enjoying through this whole fight.

    

o Yoichi paying attention to AFO now?  Man, imagine if we could have just skipped a bunch of bullshit and gotten this way back in Chapter 368, when Yoichi first told AFO that it was over.  Imagine if Vestige Yoichi had something like this when his actual for-real flesh-and-blood brother died, rather than having zero reaction to it whatsoever, not even looking over Deku's psychic shoulder and making a sad face about it.

o It actually kind of offends me that Horikoshi thinks he can get away with taking a stab in the direction of making AFO "sympathetic" now.  Now, after he's spent the entire endgame portraying AFO as a two-dimensional Demon Lord who was literally Evil In Utero.  And, you know, I'd buy AFO as being Evil In Utero but also capable of loneliness, sure. And I'm even more than on board with interpreting AFO as a man who's spent the last century working 24:7 to convince himself that he's heartlessly evil to deal with the loss of the only family he ever had. But the fact that this statement has been put in the mouth of Deku, who has never indicated the faintest trace of sympathy or understanding, much less compassion for AFO?  Fuck off.

    

o All that Yoichi hyping up Deku's incredible finesse in attacking Shigaraki with the stored-up OFA quirks makes me think is, "Welcome to My Hero Academia, where the stakes are made up and the past doesn't matter!"  I am so abominably weary of the endgame's—and the series in general's—willing to just baldly lie to the audience's face about what is actually happening at any given point in the story.

That was the moment when we should have had a response from Yoichi, what with Shigaraki having apparently torn AFO's vestige limb from psychic limb and Bakugou overseeing as the real man rewound out of existence.  That Yoichi didn't respond back then just made him seem like he'd written off his brother generations ago; it makes his sorrowful-yet-grateful act in this chapter incredibly unearned.  Of course, the actual reason we didn't get a beat like this back then wasn't for any reason consistent with Yoichi's feelings about his brother, nor because Yoichi was too far away to know that the brother he has a psychic bond with was dying.  No, it was because Horikoshi was already writing towards this beat instead, so he didn't need to bother.  The last time Yoichi looks the real AFO’s way was the chapter-ending Bakugou blast of 409, when it takes the first eight pages of 410 for AFO’s Rewinding death to finalize itself.  The Hawks vestige talked more to All For One in his last moments than AFO’s own brother did.

    

Internal monologue is placed where internal monologue cannot possibly exist.  Characters' plans are backdated to points in the story which are completely irreconcilable with how those characters were behaving at the time.  Surprise and dismay are pantomimed from characters who are revealed to have anticipated and planned for the very eventuality they're acting so shocked about.

The main character, a kid who was once characterized by his tendency to mutter his thoughts out loud, who had a running gag of tightly packed, densely worded speech/thought balloons, has been reduced to an empty marionette, devoid of internal monologue, scoured of thoughts more complex than the multiplication tables of his quirk combinations.  The story can retroactively say that Deku did—intentionally and willfully!—anything it wants and not have to worry about belying its phony stakes and made-for-Twitter cliffhangers because it has deprived Deku of his own capacity to reflect.  He can't spoil twist reveals of his own true intentions if the narrative completely locks us out of his head!  Nevermind how much of his final battle has occurred inside a shared goddamn psychic space.

All of this has made it totally impossible for me to read the story as a story.  Not only do I see the strings, the strings have become all I can see.

Of course the vestiges are back one last time for a dramatic punch, despite multiple chapters swearing up and down to us that we were seeing a big emotional sacrifice play.  Last chapter we witnessed the word vomit that was Horikoshi trying to justify Star's pilots surviving their planes blowing up, because that's how determined Horikoshi is that no one on Team Hero actually die.  Of course the vestiges came back.

Who cares?  Truly, who the fuck cares?  I don't care about them; I don't care about whether they'll be back again in the epilogue; I don't care about why Vestige Might and Shinomori are missing from the punch; I don't care about the story finally trying to pretend that anyone in its pages has ever given a single starving river rat's ass about All For One's humanity.

—NOW ENTERING FULL-FLEDGED RANT ZONE—

I care about the only characters who have ever been facing actual stakes in this war: Shigaraki and his followers.

    

o Even though I care, I don't have it in me to weigh in much about Shigaraki's seeming death here, and especially not his last words.  I'm far too jaded about Horikoshi's cliffhangers to think that anything I say now about Shigaraki dying and what it means for both Hero Society and the people Shigaraki leaves behind can be assumed to still be accurate two weeks from now.

I hope it's a fakeout.  I hope a chunk of Shigaraki's body fell through Kurogiri's last portal and the hyper-regen can kick back in once he's no longer being assaulted on all sides by the allies of the kid who was trying to “save” him.  I hope Horikoshi has one last stupid asspull up his sleeve.  I hope for a complete Karma Houdini ending for Shigaraki and the rest of the League.

If we don't get that, it's gonna suck, and it's gonna turn Deku into a fraud and a liar.  I don't care if the story wants me to think Shigaraki was saved; I don't care if Deku is satisfied with having saved "that crying boy."

I have not forgotten that "that crying boy" gently refused to accept Deku's "save" when the bell rang to go home. He wanted to go back to his friends, instead; he reiterated his desire to be a Hero for the Villains.  The crying child returned to the form of Shigaraki Tomura and then AFO devoured him.  Deku didn't save the child then, and he hasn't saved him now.

Remember how Eri didn't count as truly saved from Overhaul until the first time she could smile fully and freely?  Guess what stops you from doing that?  Right—being fucking dead.

And those touching last words of Shigaraki's won't do Spinner much good on account of him still being brain-damaged from a bunch of extra quirks no one can remove, because the only people who could are, again, fucking dead.

Unless, of course, the theorists are right and Deku is going to be not only not quirkless in the epilogue (meaning all that drama and emotion about sacrificing OFA is going to be another fucking lie), he's going to have the "unified" OFA+AFO quirk via Shigaraki's fistbump.  Meaning Deku can remove the extra quirks, presumably just before telling Spinner that Deku saved-via-killing the love of Spinner's life.

Solidarity among outcasts is false and toxic.  Everyone should just rely on Heroes more, no matter how much Heroes have failed them in the past.

o One last thing I want to address, less about the canon and more about the reactions I've been seeing elsewhere to the prospect of Shigaraki (and any combination of Dabi, Toga and Spinner) being dead: the idea that being dead is the best possible outcome for them because if they don't die they'll only have to spend the rest of their lives "rotting in jail."

Great job, team; nice message to take home.  Everyone pack it in.

    

Firstly, and to get this out of the way, that is a false binary that totally ignores the long history of Shounen Jump villains getting absurd Karma Houdini endings where they walk off into the sunset free as birds because they've changed their minds and resolved to be better, or at least have decided mass murder is no longer worth their time and effort.  (Vegeta wasn't the first mass murderer a Shounen Jump story rewarded with freedom and friendship, nor was he the last.)

But more importantly, that false binary is one that could only be presented by someone who truly does see prison as a fate worse than death.  No rehabilitation is possible.  No supervised release or house arrests in the care of assigned guardians who want better for them.  No lenience can be granted in recognition of the League's mental states; they can be admitted to no mental hospitals focused on therapy.

The "better death than prison" line is the product of a perspective that has never had to seriously consider the prospect of living behind bars.  It's a childish imagination of prison as a nebulous Bad Place where Bad People go to be Punished For Being Bad, or a self-righteous fantasy of a cold hell where sinners are sentenced to suffering eternal.

People can tell that the League have suffered too much to sentence them to Forever Bad Times, so they comfort themselves with the idea that at least they died happy, instead of living forever in a pop-culture-informed crayon doodle of concrete and solitude.

I’m not here to tell these readers that there aren't people in the world who would rather die than live under watch for the rest of their lives.  I won’t deny that Japanese prisons are bleak and there’s every chance that the prisons in Horikoshi’s fictionalized Japan are even worse.  But I am asking people espousing the view that death would be better than incarceration to seriously consider all the angles on what that sentiment means.

If it were you facing the life sentence, are you so sure you would prefer to take your own life?  If it were someone you loved who would rather die than face imprisonment, would you help them—hand your older brother the gun, or your younger sister the knife?

Or would you want to hope that they could get some help instead, have an opportunity to connect to something meaningful—find religion, take up reading classic literature, connect with someone inside or via letters?  Would you want them to accept the lawful punishment for what they'd done rather than evade it by ending their lives?  Would you want them to hold on in case their case could be reassessed someday, that they might eventually finish serving their sentence or be moved to someplace that would focus on helping them rather than punishing them?

Would you want a glorified cop in a cape making that decision for them—or you—based on that cop's ability to "forgive"?

If you think prison is a fate worse than death, why is it okay that people like Gentle Criminal or the Shie Hassaikai Trash Trio have to endure it, while mass murderers, serial killers and insurrectionists like the League get to escape through death?  Think of every purse snatcher who gets paraded in front of cameras with their arms bound and their face muzzled; think of Twice at sixteen; think of Mr. Compress now.  Do these people deserve to suffer in the kind of torment you're imagining prison must entail?  Would it be better for them to die rather than endure it?

If prisons in BNHA's Japan are so terrible as all that, isn't that something the kids should try to fix?  Shouldn't that be a part of the mass societal improvement project people are swearing up and down the kids will have nicely sewn up in the epilogue?  If the kids aren't going to fix these prisons—these places that take suicide risks like Ending and spit them out worse than ever; these places like Tartarus where the wardens call the people in their charge monsters and animals—then why should I believe the kids are going to fix literally anything else?

Or is it simply the case that it's perfectly fine that prisons should be this way; shitty prison conditions are only bad when it's the villains whose sympathetic backstories we know who're facing them?

"It's a shame, but the League has to pay for their crimes."  But why does that “have to be”?  Isn’t it because no one involved—not the characters, not the author, not the people who accept this ending—can envision a world where the “has to be” could be otherwise?

That's the problem with, "Killing someone can be a way of saving them," and, "They would have just spent the rest of their lives in prison anyway."  It's a stunted mentality that leaves no room for the radical reforms and systemic improvements that are necessary to stop this whole cycle from repeating.  Worse, as I very much suspect we're going to see in the epilogue, it's a mentality that says the system is actually fine as it is—the only real problems were caused by a tiny handful of bad actors, and now that they've been removed, everything else will self-correct, and things will go back to normal.

    

That precious, perfect status quo that Deku swore to return: this is the way he brings it back, it and everything that comes with it.

    

o In summary: if this ending sticks, then what we have in My Hero Academia is thus:

A world that played at being grounded, but which turned out to run on arbitrary rules, magic thinking and Evil Babies.

Characters that were presented as radically kind, but whose endgame resolutions represented a cruel underlining of the status quo, in which only those who suffer in silence deserve not to have to.

A story that wanted to be staunchly idealistic but which ultimately entrenched to hollow, meaningless platitudes.

o P.S. So like, Nana’s vestige saved Shigaraki off-screen, right?  So even after all her fear that Shigaraki would have to die, even after all the efforts she and Deku made to help Deku break him down, at the very last moment, she wanted to save him.  And she did so in the only reason she could, as one psychic scrap to another: she held his soul together when he was shattering apart.  But when Deku comes to the very last moment, when Shigaraki’s body is shattering apart, does he do anything to try to hold Shigaraki together?  Try to tell Shigaraki how to use Black Whip to hold his body together, call for Sero and his tape, Aizawa’s Erasure, anything like that?

If it doesn't stick?  That I'm less sure of.  But I'm pretty sure Deku's fucked as the Symbol of Hope no matter what.  There’s no way, at this point, to fix his portrayal as the kid who has a drive to save that eclipses all common understanding.  Every part of the story, before and after that declaration of Yoichi’s in Chapter 287, has served to undermine that claim.  This is just the last nail in the sky coffin.

    

Nah.  Instead, he just administers one last punch to finish the job.  The boy with the drive to save that eclipses all common understanding, everyone.

[a-very-tired-jew]

I was just reminded that the art collective Forensic Architecture exists and once again I’m disgusted.

For those of you who don’t know, it’s a collective of various artists who play at forensic science, conduct “forensic investigations”, and then make art exhibits of their “results”. Their reports and exhibits will make statements such as “the evidence shows that X is linked to Y” but the statistical output that they share will show something like a 5% confidence in the match.

That's right. They make art exhibits of their "investigations".

You want to talk about fandomizing tragedy? Making “forensic investigations” into art exhibits is the bougiest version I can think of, and it's only to serve an echelon of people who enjoy that kind of stuff. If any of the people in this art collective had a background in forensic science they would have taken ethics courses that would tell them how horrid putting on an art exhibit like this actually is. You don't honor the victims by putting on an art show for the rich and powerful to gasp and faint over so that you can fundraise for your next show.

Their founder has even stated that they’re not in forensics but “counter-forensics” and "counter-investigation". They eschew the practices and norms of the scientific community for telling their own version of investigative “truth”. They’ve even gone so far as to quote post-truth philosophies in their work and the controversial Nietzsche quote about there being no facts, only interpretations. Both are dangerous philosophies to hold in forensic science as it presents the evidence as subjective rather than objective. This is why they're an art collective and not a forensic science research group as they purport, they're rejecting objective scientific outcome for subjective interpretation.

You can go to the group's website and they have profiles on all of their team members. Almost every person is labeled as a "researcher", but once you click on their profile it quickly tells you that they're an artist, designer, activist, or some combination of the three. No mention of any scientific background whatsoever. That indicates their ability to actual conduct forensic science research is not great as they don't have any training or education on the methods involved. In fact, their entire program and personnel are out of an arts college with no science programs or faculty outside of anthropology.

That's weird, right?

A group that supposedly made a new discipline of forensic science, according to them, has no members with actual backgrounds in forensic science or scientific disciplines relating to it?

None of the team member profiles detail any scientific background that would be relevant to forensics outside of a few people with engineering and computer science degrees. Neither of the aforementioned disciplines typically train you in forensic practices anyway unless you take certain courses. Because these profiles are public you can go and checked LinkedIn profiles and find the CVs for each member as well. Guess what? No forensic science or relevant scientific backgrounds listed there as well.

But for some reason this art collective has received funding from governments and NGOs for "creating" a new discipline of forensic science. They're a "trusted" source for forensic investigations. That's worrying. That's terrifying.

I'm a forensic scientist and to make an objective field based upon methodology and empirically supported practice into one that is subjective and throws out the empirical aspects is terrifying. Everyone should have klaxons going off in their head whenever they see Forensic Architecture's name appear in a publication. I've reviewed a few of their "investigations" and they are rife with bad practice, manipulation, and misinformation. In fact, it appears that they present their work in art exhibits more than they testify to it in court due to their methods being questionable and their intent being not to help the investigation but to be a "counter-investigation" that can be judged by the court of public opinion. What do I mean by this? In many of their investigations the collective does not actively have personnel at the scene. Meaning they are not getting first hand physical evidence and measurements. Now, it's not always possible to be there personally and as such you rely upon crime scene techs, investigators, and other personnel to collect this stuff. Typically if you're a consultant or outside firm you are getting the evidence after it has been collected for analysis. You want the physical evidence in your hands as much as possible so that you can analyze it properly. Sometimes you have to request going to the scene yourself to get the measurements and evidence you need. The worst type of evidence to receive is honestly digital images of the scene as you are now having to analyze something a general investigator, who likely does not have specialized training, took a picture of.

In situations where you cannot have the physical evidence for analysis and you are left with only photographs then a forensic expert should be tempering their responses and conclusions. You cannot confidently come to conclusions based simply on looking at photos. This is something that is hammered home repeatedly in forensic programs and professionals.

In the case of warzone crime scene analysis, as FA typically does, they are, typically, not collecting evidence first hand from the scene, nor are they receiving evidence secondarily from actual trained investigators (when they are there first hand they also rely excessively upon expensive technology instead of best practices). They rely upon third party photos and satellite imagery to do their analysis.

Time and time again, forensic experts who rely solely upon digital photos and media to make their analysis get ripped apart by a good lawyer. Being confident in conclusions based upon photographs is the easiest way to lose your credibility. But again, the art collective playing forensic scientist primarily puts their work in art exhibits where they are not scrutinized by experts. Hell, I don't think I've ever seen them present at one of our professional conferences nationally or internationally (I would love to be a fly on the wall when that happens).

And finally, if this was an actual credible scientific group that produced credible investigations and had created a brand new field with methodology that stood to scrutiny there would be publications in the forensic journals detailing this. Especially from the "creator" of the field Eyal Weizman.

Guess what there isn't?

But in the end all they’re actually doing is crime scene reconstruction from people who want to cosplay as forensic scientists.

(for more reading on the group see this article that highlights issues with FA from another perspective https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/forensic-architecture-fake-news-1234661013/)

[cocoa-rococo]

Koopaling Headcanons: Iggy

Larry | Morton | Wendy | Iggy | Roy | Lemmy | Ludwig

The wild child, the mad lad, the resident scientist himself! I think about him a regular amount.

Left-handed.

His powers are more plant-based, and he's very good at controlling them, but inventing is a big hobby of his that plays into how he attacks. To put it in other terms, he's got Artificer software running on Druid hardware.

His eye color is a rare mutation of his draconic koopa biology, though it does give him some issues with his vision, hence the glasses.

He's definitely wacky, but he's not actually ‘demented’ or ‘insane’ like most think he is. That being said, he likes to play up the whole ‘mad scientist' act around other people because he enjoys their reactions. Maybe a little too much…

April Fool's is a banned celebration in the castle because of him. Not that it stops him from pulling pranks on any other day of the year.

His favorite fruits are more tropical things; kiwis, pineapples, and starfruit.

Prefers Chain Chomps and other animals to people, as he's not great with conversation nor predicting people. Rumor has it that he can actually speak with them, but whether it's true remains to be seen.

He occasionally gets nonverbal when an experiment goes awry, or when he’s so upset he can’t find the words for it. His siblings check in on him every once in a while, and he does end up speaking again after a few hours / a day.

His hair naturally falls into a mohawk like in his earlier depictions; he just likes styling it back to differentiate himself from Lemmy.

Doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, but he's a big fan of savory things. That said, he does have a fondness for carrot cake.

He actually made his glasses when he realized his eyes didn’t see well with traditional lenses… and because he needed something that was fireproof, blast-proof, and freeze-proof, just to name a few. When he realized he could market it on a professional basis, Iggy’s Glass was created.

He's a big fan of his veggies! He's not a strict vegetarian, nor is he opposed to meat whatsoever, he just likes his greens more. Like I said, Druid hardware.

Speaking of food, if he's craving something, he often decides what to have not by flavor, but by texture. He looooves crunchy stuff or things he can rip into, like sandwiches with hard bread or jerky sticks.

He helps Wendy with her baking hobby! Baking is just another form of chemistry, after all, and he likes having something to do with his hands. He doesn't like cooking much, though. Too much guesswork.

He makes so many things for his siblings for holidays and birthdays, and is always touchingly surprised if they get him something personal or practical (not that he shows it).

He got Morton a camera for his tenth birthday to support his scrapbooking hobby, and is secretly very pleased that Morton takes such good care of it. He also denies crying when Morton showed him the page he made of the two of them with the photos he took.

His handwriting is the worst out of the seven. Given how fast he needs to write to keep up with his experiments, and his habit of using short phrases that only he understands, it's really legible to just him.

He genuinely is pretty funny. His humor is skewed towards shitposter memes thanks to Roy and Larry, but his sense of comedic timing to drop a bomb or punchline is perfect.

Will respond to highly cursed memes and images along the lines of "Oh, that's AWFUL. I LOVE IT."

His currency is amusement. You wanna get on his good side or impress him, making him laugh. This is harder then it sounds; if he can tell you’re trying too hard, he’ll just blast you with sarcasm.

Ludwig is teaching him how to play the accordion. It’s just as chaotic as it sounds.

He's a big fan of bad B-movie horrors, making fun of them while also unironically enjoying how terrible they are. He's got a few posters of them in his room.

He was the dog version of a warrior cats kid. I'm sorry, but it's true.

He likes to collect bugs! It's not a very big collection, seeing as the Darklands is uninhabitable by a majority of insects, but he likes learning and talking about them to anyone interested.

One of the most terrifying generals out of the Koopalings to the troops; not because he’s especially mean or strict or anything, but because you’ll have no idea how he’ll react to something. He is, however, perhaps also one of the the least military-inclined out of his siblings, much preferring his lab to a war room.

Will wear the UGLIEST shirts with zero concerns. Will also wear socks and sandals. Wendy loathes him.

Doesn't like coffee; the taste makes him nauseous. He's more of a soda guy, anyway.

He and Larry are huge sci-fi nerds, and enjoy bonding over comics and mecha anime and going to cons together. Also a big fan of horror; the more gore, the better.

Cannot draw people for shit. Animals and plants he can do okay at, but more in an anatomical kind of way then any artistic sort of style. Blueprints, however, are a different story.

Genuinely likes pistachio ice cream. None of his siblings know why, nor do they want to know.

Like Lemmy, he's very much a fan of pulling a prank and doing the "ohhhh I'm just a little guy, and it's my birthday, I'm a lil birthday boooy" routine. Unlike Lemmy, this rarely works for him.

His lab is his safe haven; it may be a mess in some places, but it's his mess. If you touch something you shouldn't, be prepared to get whacked.

Can and will pick up bugs and eat them. Bonus if they’re dipped in chocolate.

He doesn’t have any particular favorite flowers, but he's got a side hobby of cross-breeding and mutating plants for both science and in the sense of, in his own terms, “fucking around and finding out.”

[localcanadiancreature62]

Additional lore for Perfect Plan/Perfect World au

EVEN MORE of these guys cuz i love them dearly and i'm planning out a entire story as i type this out. This time,i give you all the characters besides Bill and Ford.

There's a non sentient copy of everyone in canon within Ford's perfect dream world. Fidds,Stan,Dipper,Mabel,Wendy,and Soos. They're non sentient because.. they have no independent thought whatsoever. Their job is to be in Ford's favor and make him happy,keeping him busy so that he doesn't go insane from the lack of company besides Bill and the Henchmaniacs. Making Ford happy means that they aren't capable of going against him or having their own wants and needs,they're just soulless puppets that are only there to entertain or talk to the genius. Fidds is Ford's lab assistant and Co-C.E.O at the Oregon Institute of Oddology,he doesn't have a wife or child or Mcgucket Labs as he devotes his entire life to Ford's cause regarding the company as he literally exists to make the researcher happy and so he doesn't NEED his own desires or dreams :],he still acts as the old friendly kind and slightly unhinged Fiddleford from Ford's og world but with no more flimsy things like conscience and feelings and stuff like he ACTS that he cares about Ford but in his heart there's nothing but a random set of instructions,he mostly helps Ford with his anomaly research or his gadgetry experiments as well as paperwork in the company that the genius dumps all on him so that he could spend more time with his husband which he doesn't mind at all cuz he DOESN'T *HAVE* A MIND AHAHAHAHA. Stan is a highly successful businessman who makes money off of his comic book franchise called SCC (Stanley Co Comics) while he gets the rest of his million dollar net worth by robbing banks and pickpocketing and committing various other crimes,showing that he's still as chaotic and crime obsessed as the Stan from Ford's og world,he has a big heart and supports Ford in EVERYTHING he does,even when it hurts him or bothers him such as a law that replaces paper money with plastic money in order to conserve the environment and Ford did this despite knowing that stand prefers the paper version more because it isn't "scratchy" like credit cards whenever he swims in cash,he cares about Ford SO MUCH that his comic company is often sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Oddology and there's comics about the man's research which ends up advertising both companies as a whole. Dipper is Ford's apprentice and heir in taking over the Oregon Institute of Oddology for him,he idolizes Ford with every inch that the og Dipper did but somehow more extreme as this boy will die for the researcher if it means being included in his experiments as a test subject,Ford doesn't once suspect that this isn't normal child behavior because he's too busy being happy with his "family" and his triangular husband. Dipper isn't as anxious or insecure as the og version,he's more confident and unhinged as a result of spending more time with Ford than his parents,he often spends his time researching anomalies with Ford or hanging out with Mabel,he wants to run Ford's business while doing his own anomaly stuff on the side specifically more biology based studies however this is fake as Bill MADE him think that. Mabel is a little ray of sunshine who makes Ford happier than he already is just by existing,she makes a buncha pins and hats for herself that she changes a lot while also helping her Grunkle Stan with his comics by putting in her own cutesy scenes into them,she wants to be an artist like Stan but that's just another set trait made by Bill,she is just as wild and optimistic as og Mabel but without her dreams. Wendy is an assistant scientist that works at Ford's Oregon Institute of Oddology for the summer,she is just as chill and badass as og Wendy however she's probably TOO chill considering that Ford could be doing an experiment involving ripping people's limbs apart while she just watches with a passive thumbs up.

Soos is Ford's bodyguard and the resident handyman for fixing the Institute's machinery,he's just as goofy and weird and silly as og Soos plus he thinks of Ford as his father figure which is why he's so loyal to him but he isn't actually attached to Ford as his father figure cuz he doesn't really care on the inside as he is a hollow shell of a person like the other copies :D.

Only Fiddleford is the "advanced" one out of the non sentient Perfect World copies,as he displays independent thought at times such as wanting to explore the world beyond the isolated town of (dream world) Gravity Falls or desiring to take on a different job than the one assigned to him by Ford but Bill makes sure to fix it immediately by snapping these thoughts away with his fingers. Although the triangle doesn't know that this particular copy will be the very cause of his downfall in the future.. Bonus - Robbie is an emo jerky but slightly less depressed and irritable teen who's in a successful rock band Robbie V and the Tombstones,he also works part time as Stan's comic story writer at the Stanley Co Comics company. Pacifica lives with her rich mudflap factory parents Preston and Priscilla Northwest,and she's NOT getting abused as Preston lets her do what she wants while still keeping an eye on her like a good parent. She is nicer and more kind as well as less entitled but is still sassy as ever,plus she has a hobby of making clothes and she wants to become a fashion designer one day. She's good friends with Dipper and Mabel,with Mabel being her best friend/friendly rival when it comes to having the best crafts (instead of the one sided hostile rivalry in canon). The Northwests have no influence in the Perfect World,as Bill reigns supreme although they're known to have history with the town regarding it's founder Nathaniel Northwest who is ACTUALLY the founder rather than him being a fraud that took Quentin Trembley's place (except these are also lies that Bill made up to make the Perfect World more believable to Ford,what kind of history is historical events that never even happened?). Gideon is a kid psychic that owns the Tent of Telepathy,except he ACTUALLY has psychic powers given to him by Bill rather than him tricking people for his own gain. He's a nice boy who's sassy and cute but NOT manipulative controlling or creepily obsessed with a certain bubbly artist girl,he happily lives with his parents Bud and Erin Gleeful (hc name) who wholeheartedly support his sideshow endeavors while Bud works as the owner of a successful car dealership called Gleeful Auto's (Bud's auto shop but it's actually a serious business instead of a quick get rich quick gig).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

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

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[tyrantisterror]

At Sea Without a Map pt. 54

"In the interest of weighing my options," you say. "Would you be able to just... send me home?"

Dr. Warefore glowers at you with supreme disappointment. "How pedestrian. Yes, if that's all your ambition can aim for, we can send you home. Outpost 851's Veil Needle Drive is already attuned to our home reality - all we have to do is lock in on one of the veil knots in a suitable intersection of ley lines and we'll be able to open a portal that you can ride straight back to our reality."

Her eyes flicker over Calibani before she smiles smugly at you. "But you'd have to leave behind your little girlfriends, of course. You might be able to take the boat, though if it survives the trip it'll return to being a normal, lifeless vehicle. Why give up what you've gained when you could keep them? We can fit up a nice little aquarium for your two lady friends here, keep your boat docked when you're not at sea. And you could visit home from time to time - there's a generous vacation plan at Spindle, you get one day off per month!"

You look to Calibani. "I can't take them with me?"

"Oh feel free to try - if they survive the trip, they'll likely just end up vivisected in a lab somewhere. And that's if the three of you even remember what happened on this side of the portal - I don't have authorization to give memory preserving drugs to non-employees." She smiles again. "I really think-"

A horrific sound tears through the air and more, for you feel it rippling through your skin and flesh, banging against your bones, and indeed sending shockwaves through the very fabric of your being itself. It accompanies a bright flash as a beam of light lances into Dr. Warefore and sets off a chain reaction that your brain struggles to fully witness much less understand, as in a matter of seconds the very atoms of her being tear apart and disintegrate into pure, true nothingness within thin air, leaving not a single trace of the scientist to be seen. With your ears ringing and your eyes stinging, you try to make sense of things by looking in the direction the beam came from.

Bob sits in her wheelchair with one of the strange needle guns the hazmat suit goons had been wielding. "Oh," she says quietly, "So that's what it does."

Calibani's ear-like fins pop up as her glamour completely fades away. "What the fuck, Bob?" she shouts as her tail slithers out from under her skirt. "Where did you get that thing?"

"Stole it," Bob says.

"...what," you say flatly.

"I wanted to know what it does!" Bob protests. "So I waited till one of those marshmallow guys wasn't looking and stole it." She looks at the spot where Dr. Warefore once stood, which, while bearing no physical trace of the scientist whatsoever, still seems to vibrate angrily from what just occurred there. "Do you think she's alright?"

You look at the spot where Dr. Warefore was. "No, Bob, I'm pretty sure she's dead."

"...oh." Bob frowns and looks down at the gun in her hand. "...whoops."

So, you've just disintegrated this sea station's boss. Whatever you do next, you need to do it quickly. You consult your compass.

[wheredidhiseyebrowsgo]

Hi! Hopre youre fine and all! Can you give me som military fics like Squared Away? Where no real countries are involve but they are fighting monsters or something? Thanks <3

Sure!

Squared Away by Suaine

(1/1 I 15,809 I Teen I Sterek)

Alpha LT Derek Hale gets a promotion, a pack, and a mission. Stiles is a complication.

***

We Fight Monsters Together by scarlettletterr

(1/1 I 11,555 I Explicit I Sterek)

Derek Hale doesn't trust humans anymore and is determined to pilot his family’s mecha alone. Too bad he doesn't get a choice when he's paired up with the brightest most sarcastic human mind to ever come out of Beacon Hills in the form of Stiles Stilinski.

Second Galaxy to the Right and Straight On Til Morning by spurklie

(1/1 I 16,679 I Explicit I Sterek)

Stiles is reading reports on his tablet and drinking from a bottle of water in the base mess hall when he realises there is someone standing at his table. Dragging his eyes up from the calculations, he chokes on his water and then spits some all over Derek, who barely flinches.

Ultra Violet by ElisAttack

(3/3 I 16,836 I Teen I Sterek)

"There's no way he's a quarian. Least of all the quarian prince we're supposed to be escorting." Erica whines, and Derek wonders why he named her his staff lieutenant, she has no tact whatsoever.

"I'm sorry, but you must be a level 4 friend to unlock my tragic back-story." The prince jokes. "And call me Stiles, even I can't pronounce my actual name."

Or the one where Derek and his crew are assigned to be the glorified babysitter of an alien prince, and everything is not as it seems.

Triton's Folly by Kaye_Fraser, S3anchaidh

(8/8 I 46,185 I Teen I Sterek)

As an officer in the United Earth Alliance, Major Derek Hale understands the order of things and his place in the world. Yet, a decade of war and a lifetime of dedicated service have taken its toll. The only thing that has kept him sane all these years is the video logs of a scientist he’d found years ago, buried in the rubble of a research station on Callisto. He knows that the man in the videos – Stiles – is long gone, lost to the vastness of space, but to Derek, he’s alive. In fact, he thinks he has fallen half in love with the boundless energy and bright-eyed optimism of the image he sees on his screen. Then, everything changes when a fateful mission strands him on the surface of a desolate moon … and brings him face-to-face with a man he had only ever dreamed of meeting.

Relationships That Start Under Intense Circumstances by seraphina_snape

(1/1 I 59,448 I Explicit I Sterek)

In a world where werewolves are a normal part of life and the Argents have turned from being hunters into leading one of the biggest pro-wolf organizations in the US, Stiles is the newly promoted assistant head of the Argent Weapons International R&D department. When he uncovers a conspiracy and finds evidence of an anti-werewolf movement that spreads into the highest positions at AWI, he knows he must do what he can to stop Kate and Gerard Argent from destroying what the rest of the Argents (and the rest of the world) have worked for so hard.

Things get a little complicated when Kate and Gerard turn the tables on Stiles and accuse him of treason and espionage. On the run and with killers on his tail to shut him up, Stiles has to find a way to stop the release of a dangerous product, prove his innocence and find a way to implicate Kate and Gerard in the conspiracy. With his dad, Scott and Allison in danger from Kate and Gerard, Stiles is incredibly grateful when he meets Derek Hale who promptly saves his life. But it soon becomes clear that Derek is hiding something that could be the undoing of Stiles and everything he's trying to do.

Specialized Technical Intelligence and Logistics for Earth and Space (S.T.I.L.E.S) by Yiichi

(10/10 I 73,419 I Not Rated I Sterek)

“What the hell kind of a name is Stiles?” he asked.

“You know, a series of sounds spoken in a particular sequence that represent my identity, primarily, referring to me?“ the AI – Stiles – answered cheekily, crossing his own arms in front of his chest, mirroring Derek’s position.

“Ooh, this one’s feisty,” Peter smirked.

War Crimes by loserchic

(69/69 I 81,840 I Mature I Sterek)

In a fantastical military state, Stiles, an orphaned nobody, street smart omega was rescued as a child by war hero alpha, Commander Derek Hale. Six years later, Stiles still maintains an obsession with taking care of himself and a blatant mistrust of alphas. Stiles becomes the first omega to be accepted into elite training with the Black Wolves, the military's special operations force. Derek has always intended to mate with Stiles and is furious at the idea of him entering training. However, Stiles' guardians only agree to allow Derek to mate with Stiles if he allows Stiles to attempt Black Wolves' training. Derek becomes Stiles' commanding officer and the war between them begins. Also a lot of fraternization.

[mamawasatesttube]

💚 for the ask game

💚: What does everyone else get wrong about your favorite character?

.............man what DON'T they 😔 i dont even have to get into headcanon territory here bc everyone gets his CANON wrong 😭

a brief list of corrected popular misconceptions about kon-el:

his original character concept did not have anything to with lex luthor. for the first 10 years of his existence, he was a clone of a cadmus scientist that was genetically engineered to be as similar to superman as possible, then soft retconned into being simply a clone of superman. lex luthor had nothing to do with him whatsoever until a retcon in 2003.

he does not have a bad relationship with superman. he loves superman and superman loves him. superman never rejected him. you are mixing up comics canon with that animated tv show. comics clark and kon adore each other.

he is not banned from gotham city (lol??). there is no such thing as the "no metas in gotham" rule.

he's a huge geek. he loves star trek, star wars, wendy the werewolf stalker (in-universe buffy), plays magic the gathering, has watched akira, has a final fantasy poster in his room...

he and cass cain never were any sort of actual boyfriend/girlfriend. they went on one (1) date, at the end of which they decided they preferred to be friends.

he has had actual relationships with three people ever, two of which were instances of grooming and abuse.

he has strong feelings about clone rights and bodily autonomy. by which i mean no, he would not just be chill and fine with the idea of someone cloning him while he was dead. he would feel violated. please i'm begging you people to read superboy (1994) #87-90

[shmorp-mcdurgen]

PROJECT: FREEMAN

Okay i'm done waiting i'm dumping my new Half Life au here

The plot of the au is that the events of Half Life 1 (or at least. parts of it. vaguely.) are a large-scale experiment on Gordon (One he is unaware of by the way) to test a new HEV suit model, one that can heal normally fatal wounds, and even bring its user back from the dead. Said test is also used to simulate a possible resonance Cascade scenario in a safe environment. (well. safe for nearly everyone.) to try and prepare just in case one takes place.

(read more for more information.)

This is the HEV suit Mk. 5 (not to be confused with the one from half life 2, which is not canon in this au.) a suit made in 1998 with the sheer purpose of keeping its user safe and, more importantly, alive, no matter what. It is to be noted that this suit can not be removed by the user themself, rather it has to be removed by an authorized personnel. (being why Gordon doesn't just. remove it)

The test runs on for a full week, and Gordon is made unaware of the test even taking place, nor what is being planned for him during it. Scientists and other Black Mesa staff alike are ordered to not inform Gordon of the test taking place whatsoever, with the worry that it will "affect test results". The entire time, Gordon is only left with a vague feeling that its not real, but is constantly told that it is. (think. The Truman Show.)

However, as the test goes on, things start to go. wrong with the suit. resulting in. terrible things happening to Gordon himself.

I'm unsure if I want to elaborate further here, so for now i'll leave it at that. Lemmie know if you wanna hear more about this au cause. yeah /VLH