#imagine being functionally a sex worker but like without the money to make up for it

[greasydumbfuck]

metafrank but like the bits that make it obvious they are like really terrible together

[loadednachosao3]

what I make is WILDLY inconsistent from month to month, which is inconvenient, so it needs to be planned around. I could make $600 or $8k depending on the customers, my health, whether or not I made any content for passive sales recently... my average when you take into account my best customer is about $200/hr, but if I were to just talk to a rando on the phone instead of fucking around with my whale, my rate has me earning about $120/hr. that doesn't include anything extra, like tributes (tips, basically), content buys, or things like that.

that also doesn't mean I WILL make that much just by being signed on. I could wait for hours for a 2-minute call, or I could talk for 3 hours to the same guy and rake in bank. it all depends.

for me, with the niches I've picked, it comes pretty naturally. I've always been a very sexual person, so this career progression wasn't too difficult for me! the hardest part is making sure at the start to learn all the common scams so you can stop yourself from falling for them.

and BOUNDARIES! especially for people who have been socialized not to "rock the boat," it can be difficult to enforce them at first. but you need to be able to do that in this business! even if you market as submissive, stand firm!

but as far as the actual work goes... some guys are more difficult than others because their kinks aren't as familiar to me, or they're really picky, or I need to be tuned the fuck in the entire time... usually though, it's a lot of being mean, laughing at their tiny dicks, and taunting them with my body, which is easy peasy by now!

ok, I guess I lied a bit... when you're independent, there's also the matter of things like marketing, graphic design, audiovisual editing... the clerical work is a SLOG! so be aware if you try to go into it that that's what you're in for. it's a job like any other, so it's not a total breeze!

TAXES TOO!! you have to do them on your own, or get a sex worker-friendly accountant (lots will turn you down if you do 18+ work). so set aside 30% for that (or however much for your area)!

as for its similarities to 1-800-SALAMANCA, I actually based a lot of the content off of my real experiences! I modeled early Nacho off of some of my most annoying customers, lmao. the stubbornness, the hanging up without saying bye, the "you're the Dom, aren't you supposed to tell me my own kinks without me giving you any info???" bullshit, deleting and remaking the account... a little bit of a vent story there, LOL!

now, I don't have as glamorous a career as Lalo, nor do I have nearly as many finsubs. but I've done my fair share of findom before, so Lalo's personality is sort of a mixture of my persona and how I'd imagine him as a character to act! also, the site they use is named the way it is because it's a parody of the site I mainly work on, lmao. but with improved functionality.

I got into it because I had health issues that caused me to quit my vanilla job. I tried to be a freelance writer for a while... what a mistake! I should have gotten right into sex work, then maybe I wouldn't have had to piss through all my savings. I just figured, I like sex, camgirls make money, I'm hot... why not?

alas, camming was a LOT more work than I was expecting, especially with a physical disability! I found out through camming that phone sex was still a thing, and got into that instead. whew! much better! I also create content to sell on several sites. that's good for passive income, which is great on bad days!

as for whether I'd recommend it... I'd say yes, but with caveats. you have to be a certain type of person: firm with boundaries, decently creative, strong stomach, resilient to negative comments and insults directed toward both your body and personality, strong sense of marketing and design (or willing to learn), and the drive to keep going even when it's slow.

what you do NOT have to be: conventionally attractive, allosexual, a nymphomaniac, non-monogamous, white, skinny, cis, big-boobed, attracted to men, completely confident with your body, a total master of everything, into every kink. of course, having some or all of these things will certainly help you (hello privilege), but ANYONE of any sex, gender, color or creed can do this! trust me: there are men attracted to EVERY type of person. and they WILL pay to get what they want (your attention/content).

so I'd say go for it if you think you'd like it, but DO. YOUR. RESEARCH. FIRST! lots of it! you're NOT going to make it big selling feet pics on onlyfans as a total newbie. you CAN make a decent (or amazing) living off of it if you have dedication, creativity, patience, and time, though!

thanks for the thorough questions! let me know if you guys have more!

[nyuksw]

The Shop — Sunwoo, smut

warnings: sex toys, kinda public sex, unprotected sex, masturbation, oral (my old work being modified and re-posted)

You were walking towards the shop you’ve seen so many times as you drove by almost every day. You decided to wear a hoodie despite the warm weather just to pull on the soft material over your head, wearing some dark shades and hugging your bag closer to your chest. Anyone that could see you right now would think you were buying something else. You parked just in front of the shop, yet the walk through the short distance felt way too long for your liking.

Walking through the big front doors, the sensor bell goes off making you pursue your lips. Why did it have to indicate someone coming in?! You took a deep breath, hoping no one would come to greet you or even offer their help, a blush already creeping up your cheeks just by thinking about it.

You looked around the shop, plenty of toys decorating the walls and the shelves, some that you have never seen or even imagined existed. Different sizes, uses, what even are those?! Your eyes widening upon seeing a weird long shaped object by one of the shelves.

“Okay maybe I should leave, I shouldn’t have listened to my friends.” you whispered to yourself, turning around and ready to sprint towards your car.

But before you could even take a step, a male voice spoke behind you. “Hello, welcome to Cupid’s Box. Looking for anything in particular?”

You closed your eyes, suddenly feeling too shy to even move. You turned around slowly, coming face to face with a tall and handsome guy, flashing you a bright and friendly smile. You scanned his face, eyes moving down his tall body. Luckily you were still wearing those shades or he would’ve noticed you were checking him out.

“I was uhm, I was just looking around.” you said, your voice coming out hesitant.

He raised an eyebrow at you, eyeing you quickly and biting back a smile. It’s not the first time he has encountered customers like you, coming in in disguise to shop, some even leaving without stepping inside. You were nervous and embarrassed, he clearly could see that.

Bringing a hand up to your face he took the glasses and removed them from your face, revealing your pretty eyes that were already wide in surprise and frantically looking at everything and everyone but him.

“If you’re going to just look around, you should remove these at least so you could see better.” He said while chuckling, “I’m Sunwoo by the way, I’d gladly assist you today.”

“Thank you, Sunwoo. But I was just passing by, not really shopping.” you said one more time, rather than trying to convince him it sounded more like you were trying to convince yourself of it.

“Are you sure? I mean, based on your outfit, the dark shades and the way you’re holding your bag, I can tell that you entered the shop with plans of buying something but you got too embarrassed and if it wasn’t for me talking to you, you would’ve ran out. Am I right?” He tilted his head to the side slightly and raised an eyebrow at you.

You pulled your hood away from your head, fixing your hair with a huff, “Fine, yes. I wanted to get a.... toy.” you said, still avoiding his eyes.

“Do you have anything in mind? A dildo, vibrator, perhaps both in one?” he asked and for the first time you locked eyes with him, he was very handsome and that smile, ugh that smile was enough to get your knees buckling.

“I don’t know, I came here without a clue of what exactly I'm looking for.” you laughed nervously but he smiled at you yet again

“Don’t worry, that’s why I'm here. First of all I need to know something, do you prefer clit or g-spot stimulation?”

“Well I have never had a g-spot orgasm,” you chuckle awkwardly, remembering how your ex never really focused on your pleasure and rather on his own, as well as other casual one night stands you’ve had here and there, which is why you’re currently standing on a sex shop. Hoping to get something to pleasure you the way no guy has ever done, and when you look up at him again he is just looking at you expectantly, “so I think a clit one will work better.”

“A vibrator it is then!” he said excitedly, clapping his hands together, “please follow me.”

You followed him through the shop towards the other side, glancing around and seeing the amount of toys there were besides the typical ones you knew. There were nipple clamps, butt plugs, whips, cock rings, lubes. Eyes wide and a deep pink blush over your cheeks as you eyed them, quickly turning around and gluing your eyes on the back of the tall and handsome worker.

“Here it is, our most famous vibrator.” he said, suddenly stopping and making you crash on his back, letting out a small sorry you took a few steps back and observed the pink colored device on his hand.

“This guy here is made from body safe silicone, it has 10 ultra powerful vibration intensities and 6 vibration patterns. It’s usb rechargeable and shower friendly too. Pretty good for someone who is just starting to get into toys.” he explained, extending the toy out for you to take it and see it yourself, but instead of focusing on the pink toy, your eyes were glued to his long pretty fingers. Unsure if it was because of the shop’s atmosphere or because you were that needy, your mind started to wonder how those fingers would feel if he- wait, no. You blinked rapidly, quickly glancing up at him and nodded, “I’ll buy that one.”

He raised his eyebrows at you, “Are you sure? You don’t want to see other options? There are some other ones with more functions.” he suggested but you quickly shook your head.

“Alright then.” he grinned and started to walk towards the cash register.

“Would you like to buy anything else?” he asked as he started to scan the code, looking up at you a few seconds later only to see you looking at some cuffs that were on the counter next to you.

“Perhaps those?” he suggested.

You looked at him, shaking your head and looking down as you took out your wallet, “I don’t have anyone to use those with so I’ll pass. How much do I owe you?”

He raised an eyebrow at you, biting his lip to prevent a smirk from forming on his lips as he just learned that you were single, but you caught it and yet again, just by it you were somehow getting aroused. Damn it, you really need to get out of there soon and get home right now.

“That would be $95.” he said and you immediately handed him the money.

He started to work packing your order, and you noticed he was hesitant about something. Eyeing him curiously until he finally decided to speak up.

“You don’t remember me?” he questioned.

You frowned, “Remember you?”

“Yeah from school, I’m Kim Sunwoo. We were classmates pretty much from kids until highschool.” he chuckled.

Your eyes widened in shock and horror, your life almost flashing right in front of you. As if this wasn’t already embarrassing enough, the guy working there and helping you get a sex toy, was an old friend.

“I thought you would recognize me. I guess I changed?” he chuckled, trying to hide the small disappointment from you not recognizing him.

You took the bag and tried to hide it in your purse but it was too big so frustrated you simply rolled the plastic bag with the box trying to cover the name of the shop on it and held it closer to you.

“Thank you for purchasing here at Cupid’s Box. I hope to see you around here again.” He said smiling at you but you quickly nodded and muttered a quick thank you before turning around and quickly walked towards your car, totally missing the way he made emphasis on the last sentence.

You arrived back home, already feeling a little bored as it was still a little too early. Your mind going back to Sunwoo, there was something about him that caught your eye. Just thinking about him already made you feel that tingling sensation down there, biting your lip you took the toy from the bag and went into your room.

Laying in bed after removing your clothes, hands exploring your own body, sliding your hand down your body, thinking all the time about Sunwoo, wishing it was his hand the one touching you right now. A soft moan leaving your lips the moment your fingers came in contact with your already sensitive clit, squirming a little as you started to rub it slowly.

You extended your arm to the side where you left the vibrator, taking it and turning it on in the lowest mode, you opened your legs a little more, fingers spreading your own folds as you lowered the toy against your clit. Moaning loudly as it sent waves of pleasure, throwing your head back, thinking about how that pretty face would look between your legs with those pretty plump lips eating you out. You clicked on another button, putting the vibrator on a higher mode, the sudden shock making you close your legs with the toy still between them as you became a whiny mess.

You were getting closer to your orgasm, but before you could even reach it, the vibrator stopped working. Snapping your eyes open, you clicked continuously on the buttons trying to get it on again.

“This can’t be happening.” you groaned in frustration, taking the toy from between your legs and continued pushing every button. You stood up from bed and grabbed the charger, maybe it ran out of battery. But plugging in you realized the battery light didn’t turn on, which meant the vibrator completely died out of nowhere after purchasing it just an hour ago.

“Best one my ass.” you muttered angrily, quickly putting on some clothes again after cleaning up and throwing the toy into your purse, storming out of your apartment and driving all the way to the shop again.

It was almost closing time, Sunwoo was preparing everything to close when he saw a car carelessly pull up in front of the shop, sighing and thinking that maybe it was another weird customer doing some last minute shopping before their night wild adventures. But to his surprise he saw you walking into the store, hair a little messy as well as the clothes, it was like you just threw on whatever and didn’t even look in the mirror.

Raising his eyebrows as he watched you walk towards him, hand going inside your bag and pulling the vibrator you got earlier that day, slamming it down on the counter right in front of him and looking down at it with a questioning look before looking back at you, this time noticing your flushed cheeks.

“I want a refund.” you said glaring at him.

“I’m sorry but our policy says we can’t refund money for us-”

“This thing died on me right before I was about to orgasm. It didn’t even last 20 minutes and it simply stopped working. It seems I just can’t get pleasure, not even with a damn toy. My ex, who was a total asshole by the way, never cared about satisfying me too, no guy has ever for that matter. I came here hoping to get something better that could do the work they don’t but I just got scammed because this thing didn’t do anything.” you rambled and Sunwoo only stared at you. You were very frustrated, sexually frustrated to be exact, so you didn’t care at this point about rambling to a hot old classmate at a sex shop.

“I’m really sorry for the inconvenience, some toys come with malfunctions from the factory. Since the toy has been used I can’t give you a refund, but I can offer you some amazing deals for another toy.” he suggested, quickly glancing at the clock to his side.

“No, I don’t want another toy! Or maybe I do, I don’t know. I just want to be fucked either by a dick or a toy, I don’t care anymore.” you groaned, throwing your hands in the air.

Sunwoo glanced at the clock again, 9:00 PM finally, closing time. Smirking, he turned around to look at you again. “Here at Cupid’s Box, our customer’s satisfaction is our priority. So let me make it up to you and not exactly with a toy.”

It took you a moment to fully process what he just said, opening your mouth to talk only to close it again. You were taken aback, but you weren’t even sure if he really insinuated that or you just misinterpreted his words.

“How?” you asked, decided to play along and maybe get to somewhere with it.

“Let me be the one to pleasure you,” He smirked, walking behind the counter until he was out of there and in front of you. Placing his hands against the counter, making sure you cage you in his arms, he leaned closer to you, lips ghosting over yours as he kept talking, “let me be the one to make up for the toy and all those assholes you’ve slept with that doesn’t know how to treat you right and give you what you need.”

“Do it already then.” you said and he crashed his lips against yours, hands messily touching each other. You weren’t the only one who wanted this, the moment he stepped in Sunwoo laid his eyes on you, so timid and innocent yet you wanted to buy a sex toy. But then when he took off your glasses he recognized you, the person who he always had a crush on, old feelings surfacing again and seeing you buying toys really turned him on. Leaving him the entire day alone with his imagination thinking about you using the vibrator and maybe, just maybe, thinking of him as you did.

He lowered his hands, unbuttoning your pants and dragging them down. He grabbed you by the waist and lifted you up, placing you on the counter without breaking the kiss. He settled between your legs, moving his hands up to lift your shirt and remove your bra. Licking his lips when he saw your exposed body, his cold fingers ghosting over your nipples, watching them get hard before leaning down to wrap his pretty lips around one.

He explored your upper body with his lips and tongue, attacking your neck and chest, leaving marks as he lowered a hand until it was on your clothed core, making you gasp and buck your hips against his hand. He smirked against your skin, liking the way you were reacting to his touch and he didn't even start yet. He pressed his fingers against it, feeling your wetness through the material.

“You’re already this wet for me?” He murmured, trailing kisses all the way up to your neck.

He pushed your panties to the side, fingers tracing up and down your slit before pushing two inside you. The coldness of his fingers just made it feel even better before they warmed up, he moved his head and captured your lips once again as he kept pumping his fingers in and out of you. He pulled his fingers out of you and pulled down your panties, spreading your legs again and kneeling down until his face was in front of you.

He decided to tease you painfully slowly, looking up at you with a smirk on his face before sticking his tongue out and giving you a quick lick, lips leaving kisses all over your thighs before moving back and started giving you short kitten licks. The movements of his tongue were slow but precise, starting from your slit all the way up towards your clit. Flicking the sensitive bud with the tip of his tongue, earning a moan from you. Smirking proudly against your folds, he decided to speed up his work.

Thrusting two fingers inside you again, his lips wrapped around your clit and started to lick and suck on it, feeling you clench around his fingers making him groan against you. The sounds coming out from his throat sent vibrations against you, lowering a hand you ran your fingers through his curly hair, pulling on it as you started to grind against his mouth. He curled his fingers inside you, pressing on your sweet spot as his tongue quickly laped over your clit.

“that’s it, cum on my mouth.” he murmured, tongue going back to doing its job, pushing you over the edge seconds later and orgasming. You let go of his hair, slamming your hand on the counter for support as you leaned back, shaking and moaning in pleasure as he kept licking clean your folds.

You opened your eyes, looking down at him as he placed one last kiss on your inner thigh and stood up, licking his lips.

“You taste so sweet.” he said, hands sneaking around your waist pulling you towards him, lips meeting yours again into a slower but still heated kiss. He lifted you up from the counter, helping you to get off.

Hands quickly moving to unbutton his pants and pulling them down along with his underwear, his erection touching your thighs making you pull away. You looked down, licking your lips at the sight, quickly getting on your knees you wrapped a hand around it and took him into your mouth, humming in satisfaction as you did. You bobbed your head, taking him fully before pulling away, using your hand to jerk him off. Your tongue giving him a long lick from the base to the tip, lips wrapping around it again.

“Oh fuck, fuck Y/N.” he said under his breath. Looking down, eyes fixed on how pretty you are looking with his dick in your mouth. You started to speed up your movements, making him shut his eyes and groan. But before he could even get closer to his own climax, he pulled you away and helped you up. A hand wrapped around your neck and the other one cupping your boob, thumb playing with your nipple.

“I want to fuck you, I want to cum with my dick buried inside of you.” he said, lips hovering yours as he spoke before pressing them and kissing you, biting your lip as he pulled away.

“Wait, what if someone walks in?” you said, remembering you were still in the shop.

“Are you worrying about that now? Someone could have already walked in and see your pretty pussy being eaten by me or you sucking my cock.” he chuckled, “this is a sex shop, weird and kinky people walk in every day. I don’t think they would have a problem seeing me fuck you right here, doesn’t being caught excites you? Hm?” he said, murmuring against your skin as he trailed kisses down your neck.

Those words alone were making you wet again already, throbbing and clenching around nothing as he whispered next to your ear and neck, his hot breath fanning over your skin and sending shivers down your spine. He turned you around, bending you over the counter and spreading your legs with his knee. He removed his shirt and threw it somewhere on the floor along with the other clothes, pumping himself a few times as he took a good look at you all bent over, throbbing and waiting for him.

He teased your entrance with the tip, pushing in slowly and taking it out again, making you whine. “Sunwoo, please. Just put it in already, please. Fill me up, I need to feel you inside me, I need you...” you begged, eyes shut and fingers gripping the edge of the counter.

“You really want it? Do you really want me to fuck you Y/N?” he asked, slapping his cock against your clit, what a tease.

“Just do it already Sunwoo or I swear t-”

He thrusted deep in you, making you gasp. It felt better than what you imagined, he filled you up just right, thrusting at a fast pace just like you needed, making sure you felt every inch as he was balls deep inside you. Your nipples rub against the cold surface of the counter as your tits bounced with every snap of his hips, adding more pleasure to the whole thing.

You were soaked, aching for him ever since you saw him earlier. It has been quite a long time since anyone has been inside of you, let alone fucking you this good. It was a pleasure that you never felt with anyone else, and definitely not even with the short period of time that vibrator worked. You hissed as he pulled out of you and slammed back in, hands sliding down from your hips to squeeze your ass before slapping it, his hand leaving a red mark.

His hand slid down your ass and towards your thigh, lifting your leg up until your knee was resting against the edge of the counter, the new angle giving him not only a better view but better access for him to sneak his hand between your legs and start rubbing your clit in circles. The new position making his cock hit your g-spot with every single thrust, “oh fuck.” you wailed, starting to clench around him.

Leaning down to kiss your shoulder as he kept thrusting and stimulating your clit, “come on baby, cum for me.” he murmured, your whimpers filling his ears making him groan by your hot sounds.

You felt it bubbling up in your stomach, slowly washing all over you until you were screaming out his name, still clenching around him as you rode out of your orgasm. You managed to lean back a little, just enough to turn your head to the side just enough, he cupped the side of your neck and leaned in to kiss you. He thrusted hard a few more times before he came, grunting and moaning your name against your lips. Feeling him twitch inside of you and filling you up with his cum.

He moved slowly inside you, making both of you whimper at the overstimulation. Letting go of your face he leaned back, pulling out of you and resting his forehead against your shoulder, you could feel his warm cum leaking out of you. He took a few seconds to steady his breathing before taking a step back just to see how his cum was dripping down your core, smirking proudly.

He extended a hand behind the counter and took out some wipes and paper towel, helping you clean up before handing you your clothes. You leaned back against the counter for support, your legs still shaking from the action. He finished putting on his clothes and turned around to look at you, a warm smile and fond look over his features now.

“You do that with every customer?” you questioned, unsure of what to say, trying to lift the mood even more in a playful way.

“Not really, you’re the first one.” he chuckled, making you raise an eyebrow at him. “And the last one because once my boss finds out what I did here, he will fire me. Not that I mind, I was planning to quit anyway.”

There was silence between you two, glancing at him to see him fixing his hair, probably not knowing what to say either.

“Thank you, Sunwoo. That was amazing.” you whispered, and you really meant it.

He turned around to look at you, his eyes getting lost in yours and a smile making its way on his lips. Shaking his head slightly, as if telling you that you don’t even have to thank him.

He took a step closer to you, “I, uh…” he was getting lost in his own words, not knowing how to properly phrase them. “I don’t want this to be just a one time thing and I don’t mean it just for the sex. Even though it was indeed amazing, I also want to be able to take you out and let me treat you right, like you deserve.”

You bit your lip, a blush creeping up on your cheeks and a smile already forming on your lips, “I would love that.”

His smile grew bigger, his eyes turning into cute crescents and you felt your heart swoon. “I have to close up, how about we get some dinner?”

“Sounds just perfect.” you said, leaning in and pecking his cheek, “i’ll wait.”

But before he could turn around to lock the front door, he extended an arm, taking something from the counter beside you. Wriggling in the air the handcuffs you were eyeing earlier that day, “better get these for the next time.” he said, shoving them into his pocket and winked at you, finally turning around to lock the place.

[mirkosintern]

Crawlin’ back to you

pairing: dabi x fem!reader

genre: smut with a lil angst and fluff if you squint

notes: reader is a member of the lov, set in the meta liberation army arc (before the war!), possessive dabi, wowee this is my first work!! I never expected myself to be able to write a piece but here we are ehehe this was inspired by a certain tiktok actually. U may have already noticed but the title is from the song do I wanna know? by the arctic monkeys<3

warnings: 18+, unprotected sex, breeding, cum play, dubcon-ish?, toxic relationship, degradation, vulgar language, alcohol

word count: 3k

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That the nights were mainly made for saying things that you can't say tomorrow day Crawlin’ back to you Ever thought of callin’ when you've had a few? 'Cause I always do Maybe I'm too busy bein’ yours to fall for somebody new Now I've thought it through

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Dabi wasn’t one to do feelings. He’s screwed numerous women, but they were nothing more than some toys to fulfill his sexual needs. Neither did he want to have feelings, nor did he need to. Afterall, his side hoes who begged to stay with him even after all the degradation he’s given them disgusted him the most. He would snicker at their pathetic attempts and cut them off ruthlessly.

However, you were an only exception.

No, he did not have feelings for you, he swears he never did and never will. But you were different from his other disposable sluts--he kept you around. He didn’t ghost you, instead, he kept coming back. It is only because you’re a member of the lov as well, he thinks. You are easy to access since you’re always around the lov base, and he doesn’t even have to worry about getting caught by civilians or stupid bitches who suddenly decide to turn him into the police. You guys were practically co-workers with benefits, fuck buddies where the “buddies” part is questionable.

Dabi didn’t mind that he made an exception for you until that night. That very night where you sleepily decided to crawl into his arms after a rough round and whispered him how you loved the rough texture of his skin against yours. That very night where you pressed delicate kisses beneath his jaw. The moment of intimacy—making his heart pound and warmth spread beneath his cold skin—was threatening. You were threatening.

That’s where he cut you off completely. He did not knock on your bedroom door located in the lov base anymore. He stopped sending those “you up?” texts at 3am. He didn’t even lock eyes with you or talk to you anymore.

It feels as if something heavy dropped inside you, squashing your heart to the point where it’s painful. You try your best to ignore the pang in your chest and remind yourself that you guys were nothing more than co-workers with benefits. However, the enduring heartburn only functions to make you realize how attached you were to him. He’s Dabi, the biggest scumbag you will ever meet, what did you expect? What were you thinking? It should be no surprise this happened, right? But having to encounter his stupidly handsome face every day was not doing any help. You are a girl with dignity, you tell yourself, trying your best to ignore his strong scent of campfire and cologne drowning you every time you guys are in the same room.

The pain is suffocating you for weeks, and you finally decide to completely get over him. The night Dabi brings a bimbo to his room and fucks her loud enough for everyone in the lov to hear—for you to hear—you’re done with everything. You step outside, get drunk, do anything to numbify the pain the raven-haired guy has caused you, and even meet a nice-looking guy who seems to be interested in you.

You are doing good without Dabi.

You don’t need Dabi anymore.

You are not letting him get to your head.

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A party.

League of villains is all about privacy, but they also started having some fun after uniting with the meta liberation army. Now they had sufficient money, people and place to throw parties every now and then without the danger of getting caught by civilians. Afterall, a number of heroes were in their side as well.

“Not gonna lie, you guys do know how to host parties.” Keigo smirks, picking up a glass of bourbon whiskey. “It’s fuckin’ lame,” Dabi answers as he downs a glass of liquor.

“So, what happened with y/n?” Keigo throws a suggestive smile.

“The hell you mean what happened with her?” Dabi frowns.

“Y’know, didn’t you guys used to be a thing or something?”

“Nah, she was an occasional fuck and that’s it.”

“Oh really? The Dabi I know never fucks a same bitch twice though. I thought she was something special.”

“Special?”

“Yeah, thought maybe you actually wanted her.”

A smug grin appears on Dabi’s face. “Never even liked her.”

“Have you seen her and her new boyfriend?”

The smile is quick to vanish from his face after hearing the word boyfriend. Dabi’s eyes widen, immediately glaring at Keigo. Before he could say anything, Keigo tilts his chin to point something.

“There they are.”

Dabi turns his head only to find you clinging onto some guy’s arm. Your cheeks are flushed –a pretty, pink glow on your face—as you bat your eyelashes at the guy. Bubbly giggles escape from your lips while you stare at him through half-lidded eyes. The guy’s arm is secured around your waists, pulling you closer to him.

Dabi sees red.

His entire body freezes as his grip around the liquor glass tighten. Dabi doesn’t say anything for a moment, but there is no way Keigo wouldn’t pick up how his cerulean eyes are flaming at the sight. “Well, I thought you knew.” Keigo pats Dabi’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t matter anyways right? You never liked her.”

“…Right.” Dabi takes another sip from the liquor, his eyes still fixed to you.

Keigo’s words are true; at least they are supposed to be true. Dabi didn’t have feelings for you. He doesn’t do romance. No feelings were ever involved with any of the women he’s slept with, and he made sure of it. It was so clear for Dabi without a question.

But why is it unable for him to erase the sight of you with some guy as he forces himself to sleep that night? Why are your sweet giggles echoing his head? Why can’t he get rid of the thought of you in that tight, black dress that perfectly complements the curves of your body? Why is the moment where the guy places his hand on your inner thigh replaying in his head? Why are thoughts of you messing with his mind?

“Fucking hell.”

Dabi gets up. This was fucking annoying. You were truly fucking annoying.

 ⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅

You tilt your head to check the glowing digits of your digital clock on the nightstand. 2:15am. It’s late, and you haven’t even taken off the dress you wore to the party. You are too tired both physically and emotionally. You’ve done quite a decent job in entertaining the man who’s accompanied you through the whole party, but it was truly an energy-consuming task. You and him walked around as if you guys were the happiest couple in the party; but the truth is that you guys aren’t even properly dating yet. Solely because you have constantly been refusing to properly answer him asking you to be his girlfriend. It’s not that he’s bad looking or anything, but the idea of being with him just doesn’t sit right with you. Ever since you’ve met him, he couldn’t keep his hands off you without asking you anything about consent. You always had to pull his hand away with an uncomfortable smile, yet he never took a hint. However, when a dating rumor about you and him started and spread quickly, you didn’t try to correct anything. Maybe it was because you wanted to pull out a reaction from a certain villain. Maybe your unusual actions at today’s party; clinging onto the guy and laughing at every single word he spoke; was to make Dabi witness how happy you were.

 Truthfully, you were dying inside.

 What was even worse was that none of your attempts seemed to bring an ounce of reaction from Dabi. When have you become so pathetic and desperate? You feel tears welling up in your eyes, hot and burning, but you don’t want to cry. Not for an asshole like him. You take out your phone, find the guy’s name, and text him that you don’t want to see him anymore. You feel a little guilty, thinking that you may have used him to provoke something from Dabi, but your thoughts are too worn out for you to comprehend anything. You flop onto your bed and bury your face in your pillow. You huff out a deep sigh, and the soft texture of your cotton pillow feels warm on your cheeks. In all honesty, you were thinking about Dabi the whole time you were at the party. Whenever the guy’s hand creeped up your thighs or gripped on your ass, you imagined it was Dabi’s, trying your hardest to feel something from the contact.

 You weren’t over Dabi. You never were. Realization hurts, leaving a sour feeling in your mouth.

 Your body shoots up at the sudden, loud slamming sound emerged from your door. Your teary eyes widen at the lean man slamming the door shut. “Dabi?” You ask, not believing your eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?” Without an answer, Dabi’s one hand reaches for your throat as his other hand grips your wrist. His large body is towering over you, and you feel your bed shift as he dips one knee in the mattress. His sapphire eyes pierce through your soul, and you can feel his raging anger just from looking at him.

“You’re such a pain in the ass, y’know that?”

“Dabi, what are you-“

He doesn’t let you finish the sentence, pulling you in for a heated kiss. Your lips open reflexively, enabling him to deepen the kiss. The kiss is aggressive, and he doesn’t know whether it is because of his anger or his pent-up desires towards you that he has been suppressing. The kiss gets sloppier over time, hot and wet with saliva and tongue. He lets go of the grip on your wrist and starts tracing your inner thigh with his thumb, and you let out a soft moan. You finally pull away from the kiss to catch your breath, but he doesn’t cease to caress your thigh. Instead, he lowers himself to your ear. “You seem to really love thigh touches, don’t you?” His low voice and hot breath brushing the shell of your ear sends chills down your spine.

“Huh?”

“I always knew you were a slut, but never knew you were this much of a whore. You would bend over any guy who offers you some touches, right?”

Tears swell in your eyes again at his vile words, but it’s hard to talk when his knuckles are repeatedly brushing your clit.

“I’m… not a slut…nngh.” Suppressed moans escape your lips.

“Yeah? Why are you making those sounds then?”

“Dabi…”

He yanks your dress up and dips two fingers inside your lace panties, making you let out a weak yelp. Dabi raises his brows with a smug grin on his face.

“Oh, so she indeed is a slut huh? You get this fucking wet from a kiss?”

His two digits start pumping inside you, and you grip on his white shirt at the sudden sensation. Your gasps and moans get louder, and you suddenly feel his wet lips against your neck. Dabi sucks hard, making sure to leave dark purple marks from your jaw to your neck and shoulder, as he repeats the step of curling his fingers and pulling them inside and out your hole. “Dabi…too fast.” You whine out. “Yeah?” A sadistic grin appears on Dabi’s face. “Be a good slut and take what I give you.” His thumb reaches for your clit, making your legs shiver.

“Nngh…stop, I’m gonna… Dabi I’m gonna cum.”

“Stop? You want me to stop?”

“No!”

“Do you deserve it though?” he slows his pace while teasing your clit. “Beg.”

It’s humiliating, really—but do you have any other choice when you are this close?

“Please, Dabi… I’ll be your good slut. Please let me cum!” Your desperate cries have him pumping his fingers fast again, and soon you’re seeing white. Hot drops of release coat Dabi’s fingers as he pulls out.

“Say ah.”

“A-ah.”

You obey, and Dabi sticks his digits inside your mouth. Your mouth wraps around them immediately, sucking as if it’s a pacifier. “Good girl,” Dabi says as he pats your head, and it makes your stomach swoop with sick pride.

The bulge in his pants is becoming painful, and he contemplates on fucking your mouth. But he’s too impatient; He feels the need to abuse your cunt right now. He wants to hear your screams and cries as he proves who you belong to.

“Take that off.” Dabi gestures at your dress, and you start undressing as he demands. Dabi pulls down his sweatpants and boxers, causing his cock to spring out. It’s so pretty, you think, and you can’t help but admire his red tip, glistening with precum. He pumps his length a few times and lines it up with your entrance. You inhale a sharp gasp as you feel his whole length inside you. It feels so full; it feels as if he’s gonna split you in half if he starts moving.

“Ah, too big.”

“I know.” Dabi looks down on you. “Take it like a little slut you are.”

Before you could even talk back, he is moving inside you. Your moans blend with the noise of the bed creaking; a perfectly harmonized orchestra to Dabi’s ears.

You knew Dabi wasn’t one to prep you or go slow, but you feel like he’s going way rougher than usual. His wild thrusts have your head lolling backwards, and Dabi does not miss the chance to take a hard bite on your neck. You scream out of both pain and pleasure, and you feel two hot streams of tears on your flushed cheeks.

“Aww, she’s crying.” Dabi says in a mocking tone. “Bet you love the pain.”

Humiliation fills your chest and you turn your head away, but Dabi quickly grabs your chin with one hand, forcing you to directly face him.

“Who’s the one making you feel this full?” he asks.

“Y-you.”

“Did he ever make you feel this way?”

Wait, he? Who does he mean by he? Your alleged boyfriend? Could it be possible that Dabi was doing this out of jealousy? You try to comprehend, but it’s impossible for you to think clearly, not when Dabi is fucking you stupid. “No!” You shout.

Dabi’s free hand reaches for your clit and starts rubbing circles. “Tell me, who does this pussy belong to?”

“You…” You try to answer, but he suddenly lifts up your lower body and slams into your cervix in the right angle. It has you moaning even louder, your insides spasming around his cock.

“I can’t hear you.” He smirks sadistically.

“You, Dabi, it belongs to you! I belong to you!” You’re screaming his name like it’s the only word you know, making his cock twitch. “That’s right. You are all for me, all for me to use. Just a pathetic little slut for my cock.” A satisfactory grin appears on Dabi’s face.

Dabi lowers his body down and grunts directly into your ear as he thrusts even faster. The sound of his skin slamming into yours is so erotic, and you can feel how close you are.

“You wanna cum huh?” His words have you nodding frantically, babbling incoherent words. Yes Dabi—wanna cum so bad—wanna be yours—wanna be your good girl—please, dabi.

“Then do it. Make a mess on my cock.”

“Nngh, Dabi!” You scream out his name as euphoria washes down your body. His release follows you soon enough, painting your walls white. You feel warmth filling your belly while his groans echo in your ear. You’re still sobbing and panting after he pulls out, without any energy left to move. As your blurry vision starts getting clearer, you feel his warm skin and the sting of his cold staples against your back. His long arms wrap around your oversensitive body, pulling you closer to him.

“You’re messing with my head.” Dabi rests his forehead on the back of your shoulder.

“Huh?”

You’re confused, but Dabi doesn’t elaborate. His ego doesn’t let him do such thing.

“When you said you belonged to me, did you mean it?”

You bite your lower lip, not knowing how to respond to his sudden question. Millions of unspoken words and feelings are hanging in the back of your throat, creating a huge lump. You swallow them all and spit out a question instead. “Do you want me to belong to you?”

“Yeah.” Your eyes widen at his unexpected response, butterflies fluttering inside your chest. “Be mine.” His low voice vibrates against your soft skin. Your heart melts at his words, and you cannot stop your feelings from overspilling anymore. At that moment you both realize; you and Dabi were meant to crawl back to each other, no matter how hard you both try and struggle.

“I’m yours.” You smile, “I’m all yours.”

[true-blue-megamind]

Fan Theory Thursday – The Not-So-Evil Overlord?

Shhh… Want to hear a secret?  Come closer... SPOILER ALERT!

Okay, this one delves a little deep into the imaginative side of Megamind fan theories, however I believe it holds enough interest and has enough support to be well worth discussing.  There is a supposition which I frankly love: our favorite blue alien was an Overlord of sorts before he briefly took control of Metro City, and he had good reasons to be so.  That might sound a little crazy, but bear with me.

This idea has appeared in several fan fictions, and essentially goes as follows: Megamind was more than a supervillain; he was also a crime boss, and he chose that path for the most unlikely of reasons. Bizarre though it may seem, his primary drive was bettering Metro City.  (And, yes, I’m aware of how contradictory that sounds.)  However, it’s logical when considered more closely.  By making himself the de facto ruler of the city’s underbelly, Megamind was able to control crime to an extent, probably even setting limits on certain activities, and guidelines for others.  In the majority of fan fictions using this concept, that includs things like reducing violent crime, setting purity standards and purchase limits for narcotics, and ensuring sex workers were neither underage nor abused.

I’ll be the first to admit that, on the surface at least, this seems like nothing more than fans seeking to justify or even moralize a beloved character, but research reveals that there is actually some support for this theory.  Firstly, there is the fact, touched upon previously in the Fan Theory post concerning the Warden, that Megamind was clearly already establishing control over other criminals at a young age.  While writing a truly wonderful blog article, Demishock actually went through the trouble of deciphering the newspaper clipping shown at the beginning of the film’s title sequence.  It contains, among other things, a reference to the fact that, although an elementary school age child, Megamind was feared and obeyed by other inmates at the prison where he grew up.  A quote from the Warden reads: “I've got experienced, hardened criminals in here who are afraid of him.” The article goes on to mention an incident which involved a few other inmates, adding that “the other prisoners refused to point fingers for fear of retaliation.”

It is quite possible that Megamind was already building and consolidating a base of power.

Next, there is the fact that the blue man seems to have lines he won’t cross, even as the self-proclaimed Evil Overlord. In one of the storyboards, when Megamind is approached by the Doom Syndicate, he clearly holds them in disdain, yet they are careful to placate him.  Obviously they have somewhat different standards.  When Agent Orange—who was later reimagined as Psycho-Delic before being cut from the film entirely—compares Megamind’s “inspirational” defeat of Metro Man to “a car crash on prom night,” the blue alien looks rather disgusted. Although they refer to celebrating his victory, it also seems the Doom Syndicate may be indirectly asking Megamind’s permission to go on a crime spree. While this may be because he is the new Overlord, it seems odd that other villains would immediately leap to the assumption such approval is necessary if they were accustomed to acting on their own. However, if they were already in the habit of requesting the blue alien’s sanction, their actions make more sense.

Whatever the case, it seems that, once again, Megamind and the Doom Syndicate may have very different ideas of what sorts of crimes are acceptable. The Destruction Worker refers to “really putting the screws to the city,” while Agent Orange adds his desire to “swim in the torment of the innocent.”  However, these suggestions don’t seem to match what we actually see Megamind doing.  In the movie, Megamind does, indeed, go on a crime spree, but none of it appears to be violent.  He certainly causes chaos, but no one seems to ever be injured.  In fact, in the DVD commentary, one of the creators even states outright that the supervillain never goes beyond vandalism and theft because he doesn’t really want to hurt anybody.  (Indeed, in the film it rather seems that, by being raised in jail, bullied, and constantly rejected, Megamind was pushed into supervillainy.) This, together with the previous evidence, paints an image of a man who has been forced to do some harsh things, but who nonetheless dislikes violence and, deep down, possesses a certain moral code, albeit a skewed one.  

There are, in fact, several other details that point toward Megamind being far from truly evil despite being a supervillain.  As I mentioned in Megamind and Identity, he displays several redeeming qualities, such as his largely friendly treatment of Minion, his respect for Roxanne’s intelligence, and his playful, affectionate game of fetch with the brainbots.  However, I won’t go into a long explanation about that here as it can be found in the aforementioned post.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe we can seriously expect that the former villain has never once hurt anyone in his life.  Keep in mind that, as discussed in the post How Strong is Megamind, the blue alien almost certainly had to fight in order to survive.  However, his unwillingness to attack citizens suggests that he only injured others when it was absolutely necessary.  Similarly, the aforementioned “news article” indicates that he may have limited his physically aggressive responses to other criminals only. (After all, the reference to prison inmates fearing him is the sole evidence of possible violence we have.)  I have seen it suggested here on Tumblr that he may have taken over Metro City in part because he believed that, if he didn’t, someone worse like the Doom Syndicate would.  It may even be possible that he was afraid of appearing soft and thus losing control over the criminal underworld.  

Of course, it has to be mentioned here that Megamind also fought with Metro Man, who certainly wasn’t a criminal.  However, there are two factors that I believe need to be considered.  The first is that it is very likely that Megamind didn’t expect he could truly harm his nemesis. This is evidenced by both the his apparent shock when Metro Man seems to actually be dead, and by his overt statement during the museum scene that he “didn’t think it would really work.”  The second is that, as young Metro Man was a bully, tormenting Megamind without provocation and encouraging other children to do the same, Megamind may have mentally placed him in the bad guy/threat category.

His lack of violence is not the only proof that Megamind had a better heart than most credited him for even when he was a supervillain. Keep in mind that he had a holographic disguise watch and a hoverbike.  Presumably, Megamind could have simply fled Metro City when Titan turned evil, but he didn’t.  Instead he went to Roxanne for help, stating that if they could not find the new villain’s weakness Titan would “destroy the whole city.”  And this was after Titan had tried to kill him.  Clearly, despite being a supervillain, Megamind cared enough about his home town to put his life in danger.

The final support for the Benevolent Overlord theory is less obvious: Megamind had to have been getting funds from somewhere even when Metro Man was still functioning as the Defender of Metro City. (Indeed, in some of the early concept art, the Evil Lair was imagined as a luxurious space boasting things like a huge library and a sleek laboratory.  Some fans still picture the living quarters in much the same way despite the creators stating that he built his inventions from whatever he could get his hands on.)  Near the beginning of the movie, Minion mentions a supplier in Romania, and presumably he and Megamind had to be getting food and other necessities somehow.  While it’s true that the blue villain was clearly not above thievery, we also know that his plots were always defeated by Metro Man, so it’s safe to assume that he rarely if ever got away with stealing anything before the former hero’s supposed “death.”  Of course, it also seems extremely unlikely, even laughable, that Megamind would have had a day job.  Where, then, did the money come from?  Many fans theorize that, as the local crime boss, he received a cut from all illegal activity. It certainly seems like the most probable explanation.  

Art by Kory Heinzen, found in The Art of Megamind by Richard von Busack

So why would Megamind build his technology and machines largely from scrap if he had a constant cash flow?  Given his concern for the city, several fan fictions have imagined the blue man secretly and anonymously donating a significant portion of his ill-gotten money to various charities and non-profits.  That idea is not directly supported by any evidence, but it does fit with what we know.  It’s also consistent with Megamind’s character: a feared supervillain who possesses a surprisingly good heart and, given his past, knows too well what it’s like to be thrown away by society.

So, was Megamind a crime boss as well as a supervillain?  Did he use that position to secretly better life in Metro City?  If so, is he still doing that now that he is the Defender of Metro City, thus curbing criminal activity from within as well as fighting it from without? (For the record, given that there is no apparent gang war happening during The Button of Doom, I would propose that the answer to the last question may be yes.)  These are certainly interesting ideas to consider, and the mere fact that this animated film offers enough details to argue the point is a testament to just how well-constructed the movie is.  I consider it yet more proof that the film Megamind is truly an underrated masterpiece.

[haich-slash-cee]

Is the print publishing world picking up online/fandom terms? How they are using them? How do we feel about this?

So this is... attention-getting, for folks who like to follow publishing and meta stuff.

https://twitter.com/sapphicxrey/status/1215065948677443584

https://twitter.com/TorDotComPub/status/1233391556750647299

(2nd tweet -- TW, mentions of non-con)

Are we seeing the beginnings of book publishers directly borrowing from online/fandom culture in promoting their books? How do we feel about these examples?

More below cut.

Exhibit #1: screenshots of Bonds of Brass promo from Jan 8 2020. (Which is probably going to have reactions of “haha, cute” at most.)

Transcript of blurb: 

“If you like... 

forbidden romances, “there’s only one bed”, cityships, weaponized umbrellas, powersuits, secret princes, best friends, best friends PINING, fake dating between PINING best friends, tactical streaking, the minivan of starships, cigar-chomping cyborg ladies, scary empress moms, galactic-level bisexual disasters, LEGACY (WHAT IS A LEGACY?), rooftop hopping, golden trios, rumblin’ drums, bootleg fireworks, BIG SPACE BATTLES PEW PEW, a surprisingly functional public transit system, mob trouble, one hell of a pilot, the inherent DRAMA of empire, a nice interlude in a river, smoking a joint that’s been on the floor, sick stunts, slick grifts, hiding in a dumpster, or any combination of the above,

 Then you might like 

BONDS OF BRASS”

The Twitter responses seem to be generally enthusiastic. (And also, “FinnPoe! FinnPoe!”)

Personally, I’m intrigued from a meta-view of “oh so that’s definitely pulling from online world and fanfiction world, interesting. I wonder how much fanfiction culture is starting to influence print book culture and promotion.” Maybe I’ve got some questions like, “Ok so moneymaking companies such as Penguin are now using culture developed by the not-moneymaking-world of fanfiction? How do we feel about this?” Anyway, the book looks cute, I’m interested enough and I might get it from the library.

I suspect many people’s reactions are along the lines of “hm, interesting”, “sounds like a lark”, or “haha they’re using AO3 tags as promo”, etc. 

Exhibit #2, screenshots of DOCILE promo, from Feb 28 2020 (today is March 1 2020), and screenshots of Twitter responses so far:

(*CW, non-con discussion)

Tweet transcript:

“DOCILE by @KMSzpara:  

-Dubcon/Noncon 

-Dramatic Trillionaire Content 

-BDSM and then some more BDSM and then a lot more BDSM

 -Hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort

 -Cinnamon roll of steel 

-The most scandalous kink: love 

-Courtroom, bedroom, & Preakness drama

[Tor book website link]”

So this is getting mixed reactions on Twitter. All dozen or so reactions, so far. Here’s text transcripts and bio info from repliers, below. I’m being a little obsessive, mostly to show that there’s a mix of queer, book-ish people in the replies (including the author).)

Noncon is nonconsentual sex, rape. Even in fandom it's a content tag, not a promotional term. I can't imagine being a rape survivor and seeing this come across my TL. -- @WriteSomeGood [queer rainbow] [Cis queer homemaker, aspiring author, maker of incredible cinnamon buns. She/her] [has a Tumblr page]

I’m not a survivor but it was an instant “no thank you” from me. And I was sincerely looking forward to this prior to. This is the most immediately off-putting marketing push I’ve seen for a book in a long damn time. -- @AGAWilmot [Author, editor, artist. Co-EIC of @anathemaspec. @SFU alum. The Death Scene Artist/W&W 2018. Ace/enby. They/them. Horror is my comfort food.]

Whichever intern wrote this tweet, deserves a full time job. With benefits. -- @simeontsanev [Aspiring writer, post-aspiring musician, and overall geek  He/Him /[queer rainbow]/ To the world we dream about, and the one we live in now! http://simeontsanev.com]

Idk why everyone thinks it’s always an intern writing copy and not a team comprised of extremely skilled social media experts, editors, publicists and marketers, and their assistants  I worked on those tags with my editor and a good friend!! -- @KMSzpara [Kellan. [queer rainbow]  Speculative fiction writer. Queer agenda.  Hugo & Nebula finalist.  DOCILE 3/3/20 from Tor Dot Com Publishing.  He/him.  Rep @suddenlyjen] *The author, bio page and twitter page.

this is CUTE! -- @MSSciarappa  [queer rainbow] I do books. he/him.

I am Extremely Ready for this content thank u -- @JessicaBCooper [Journo ☽ Writer of faerie, villain fuckery & cruel desires ☽ Lestat & Loki's love child ☽ Aleksander Morozova's side-hoe ☽ Rep'd by Kate Testerman @ktliterary]

I’m listening -- @MerynLobb [Government worker. Weightlifter. Nihilist. Aspiring cult leader. Avid user of words, often bad ones. #AMM R6 Mentee. she/her]

Soon! Soon!! -- @castrophony [Geek. Gamer. Cosplayer. Bibliophile. Scientist. She/Her.]

[happy reaction gif] -- @TorDotComPub [Providing a home for writers to tell SFF stories in exactly the number of words they choose. All our titles are available globally in print and DRM-free ebook.]

[throwing stuff in dumpster, unhappy reaction gif] -- @cursedgravy  [name's xavi, im a transman and i like to daydream about making content] 

For more context, here’s the blurb from the author website. Below is the blurb from the publisher’s site:

“Docile

K.M. Szpara

K. M. Szpara's Docile is a science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a challenging tour de force that at turns seduces and startles.

There is no consent under capitalism.

To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.

Elisha Wilder’s family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family’s debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him.

Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family’s crowning achievement could have any negative side effects—and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.

Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.”

So that’s a lot of info and reactions.

Personally: at first glance, I absently skimmed the tweet and “hurt/comfort” popped out, and I was like “What? Mainstream publishing is cool with this now? I was wondering if ‘hurt/comfort’ would one day become commonly used in publishing [related post]. But this is way sooner than I thought.” And then I read the rest of of the tweet and thought, “Wait, what?” 

And then I started reading through the tweet replies and thought, “OK, at the risk of getting a bunch of Tumblr drama, I want to bring this to the whump community and see how people feel."

As for myself, one of my squicks is non-con, and I’m not really interested in hurt/no comfort. So just from the tweet, I know the book is not for me. The official blurbs confirmed that. In this sense, this is like skimming Ao3 tags on a fic and saying “pass” on a story.

However, I have questions about the specific promotion of the book. So the official blurbs are pretty standard. What about that tweet, which Tor (and the author, who helped put it together) put out? Because I think an official publisher’s Tweet comes with different context than Ao3 tags.

First, the different internet spaces. You can filter tags on Ao3 and Tumblr. I know you can mute words on Twitter, but is that the same thing? Also, would people be expecting these tags on Twitter? Compared to Ao3 or Tumblr or Tumblr Whump spaces?

Within the Tumblr Whump community, from what I’ve browsed, the community attitude (guidelines?) seem to be “Write and discuss what you want. Be sure to tag it, use content warnings, or otherwise clearly communicate if you have things that may be triggering. Respect people’s squicks/triggers. Walk away from what you don’t like.” Like, tumblr whump has a very specific culture of trying to balance discourse/stories about potentially very dark stuff, but also wanting to make sure the IRL people and Tumblr users are okay. There’s always posts going around about how to do this, are we doing this in the right way, ethics, so on. Also -- and people can correct me -- the whump tumblr space might be where tags are content warnings for people to stay away, and also what people might actively look for. So if any space is going to discuss if this promotional tweet checks out, I feel like it’s this space. 

Also, to note again, Tor Tweets are in the money-official-publisher-world, not unpaid-tumblr-people or unpaid-fanfiction-fandom-world.

Maybe I just want to ask, “Hey those first two tweet responses, does they have a point? Tor using ‘noncon’ as official promotion? On Twitter?” I mean, I’ve previously written, “The CW and TW tags that Ao3 writers use, I really wish those were used with published books as well.” But somehow, the Tor tweet was not quite what I was expecting. Maybe for reasons similar to that first tweet response. (I guess one could debate if a tweet is really promotion or just information... you know what someone can correct me, but I’m gonna say that a Tor.com tweet is promotion, compared to information like Ao3, and that tweet was there for promotion.)

Those tags operate within specific Ao3 and Tumblr cultures and infrastructure. I don’t hang around Twitter for whump stuff, IDK what the culture is. Anyway, does dropping these tags into a promotional tweet from Tor.... translate?

The tweet is evidently gathering the people who are there for it, and the people who aren’t there for it are quickly realizing that they are not there for it. But personally, the Tor website blurb does a better job at that, using writing that I’d expect from a publisher for communicating fictional non-con situations. (Maybe the blurb content warnings are what I wanted more of, when I said I wished for CW and TW in books.)

Anyway, there’s no huge drama about that Docile book promo on Twitter, as far as I can tell. So this is a niche thing, right now. But. The promo for Bonds of Brass and for Docile might be the beginnings of a trend of well-known book publishers borrowing from online writing / fandom culture and terminology in order to promote or categorize their books. These two promos might set a precedent or have other significance.

So if anyone has discourse on the tweets or potential future trends... 

[innuendostudios]

We hit 200k subscribers! Holy heck! Here’s a small, celebratory video collecting my favorite bits and pieces that got cut from other videos.

If you like this, or the videos these bits were removed from, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

The Artist is Absent

If I tell you about what I did yesterday, you do what? You take a bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells from your experience and stick them together in your head into a complex picture of my experience? Well, that’s what I’m doing when I use my memory. I don’t have a prefab image of what’s happened to me in my life that I break down into pieces when I describe it to you; the act of remembering is building up from pieces, reconstructing reality from a mass of tiny sensations, and all a memory is is a set of instructions for which ones to assemble and how. This act is performed every time a thing is remembered. And the difference between my memory and your imagination is that, having lived it, I have way more sense memories than I could ever communicate, and the knowledge that mine actually happened to me. Those are really the only differences; you could characterize memory as “imagining things that actually happened,” or imagination as “remembering things that didn’t.”

The Artist is Absent 2

OK, quickie sidebar on what the meaning of “meaning” is in this context. I don’t want anyone to trip over this term and think I’m saying all art is part of some grand design, like I’m going to argue The Avengers is an allegory for the Bay of Pigs or something. I’m not using “meaning” in a lofty sense. If you wanna argue that the only substance to The Avengers is “it’s fun,” that’s cool. That’s still a meaning, but it’s perfectly valid if that’s all there is to it.

...I mean, that’s not all there is to it, it’s also about family, and about how being in a family with people who are different from you can make you a better person. It can teach you the value of selflessness, or the value of compassion over mercenary coldness, or the value of accepting yourself and your flaws, or help you fit your idealism into the modern world, or… deliver exposition, because Thor doesn’t have an arc in this movie.

But you see my point! All I mean by “meaning” is that there is an answer to the question, “Why does this exist?” If someone made it, they had to have a reason, anything from “I wanted to change the world” to “I wanted to make money” to “I was bored.” Those aren’t all great answers, but they’re answers.

Also, all creators exist within their culture, which means their works are products of that culture, and their contents will either reflect or differ from that culture’s values. Like, the fact that all the central characters in The Avengers save one are white, and all save one are men, means something. We can debate the whats and wherefores of that meaning and how much that meaning matters, but since things like race, gender, the military, and New York City, mean things to our society, they can’t not mean things in our movies.

And, let’s be honest: following The Avengers, Tony has PTSD from being a rescue worker during Something Very Bad that Happened in New York, and SHIELD dramatically expands the surveillance state and employs Cap in fighting terrorist threats, so, while not the Bay of Pigs, The Battle of New York is doing work as a 9/11 allegory. Both of these movies have been praised for exactly that.

But, let’s follow through: in our 9/11 allegory, the US government could not have possibly predicted nor prevented the bad Guys’ invasion, America is wholly innocent and has had no political or social impact on the Bad Guys, the Bad Guys are literally inhuman, and any amount of violence against them is justified, up to and including the Good Guys nuking them.

But whatever.

Bringing Back What’s Stolen

OK. A lot of psychoanalytic film writing comes from the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s, including gender analysis of horror films, and it can read a little Freudian: gender essentialist, heteronormative, and obsessed with the D. “Does this empowered woman look feminine? Well, she’s holding a gun, and I’ve got news for you: guns are penises. She’s smoking a cigarette, and cigarettes are penises. She’s wearing high heels, and high heels are penises. That slit in her dress that shows off her long legs? [Long Legs Are Penises]”

It’s a bit Second Wave-y. And not completely off-base! Like, I get it, Laura, sometimes a knife is a dick. (Symbolically, I mean.) But sometimes a stiletto is just a stiletto.

Bringing Back What’s Stolen 2

I want to stress that a trope does not define a character, and does not, alone, make her or the movie around her bad. I love a number of the characters I’ve cited. But when a movie, even a great movie, tells me, “Don’t worry, this woman is violent, but we’re not saying women at large are as strong or violent as men,” I feel condescended to. The lengths some movies go to soothe my ego, like I’m a seven-year-old who’s going to throw his toys against the wall, strike me as a big waste of time that could be spent on the more interesting parts of the movie. I’ll take another shootout any day.

WSGT3

Imagine you’re called onstage to do a cold reading of a two-person scene from a play you’ve never read. You don’t know the story, the characters, or even the stage directions. And the director hands out only one script to the other actor. You will have to improvise all your lines. The other actor knows the premise, knows the story, but they still need you to make the scene work. The person who knows what happens is trying to signal everything you need to you without straying from the script, while you attempt to discover your role in the story and perform it at the same time. That is the attention that must be paid. And, together, you try to make a story.

This is an exercise my acting teacher used to do with us, to get us listening to the other actors in a scene instead of just waiting for our cues. And this is how an adventure game feels.

DOOM

It was 1993, and we all knew about DOOM. It had a reputation. Many of us learned it existed with the same breath that forbid from playing it, in the same way we were forbidden from watching Beavis & Butt-head or Terminator 2. We didn’t have those kinds of parents. But most of us knew someone who did.

We came to learn three things about DOOM: that was intended for grown-ups, that our access to it was scarce, and that having not played meant getting teased by those who had. Some of us never asked if playing it interested us, we simply knew playing it was important.

And when we played - and we did play, on whatever computer someone had secreted the shareware version onto - it was like nothing we’d ever seen before. Amazing and terrifying, in the way that a kid alone in the house watching their first skin flick finds it shocking, because half-naked women and simulated sex are so far outside their limited experience. We had never seen anything close to this, and it unsettled us at first. But we played.

The titillation of an art student drawing a nude model lasts for the few moments between the dropping of the robe and the touching of charcoal to paper. Then nakedness becomes just another series of lines to render. We acclimated. When we fired our shotguns into an enemy, soon enough all we saw was an obstacle neutralized. We saw a series of lines elegantly intersecting a series of boxes. That’s not what our parents saw. Our parents saw an imp howling in pain as its ribcage burst from its chest.

And so part of playing DOOM became learning how to defend it. “I play DOOM for the gameplay” became a generation’s “I read Playboy for the articles.” When we got caught, we tried to explain the the lines and the boxes: The bullet wounds were just there to let you know when you’d hit your target. The space marine’s bleeding face was just there to tell at a glance how your health was doing. The enemies were Satanic hellspawn just to make it perfectly clear their function was to be dispatched by your shotgun. What we wouldn’t say was that all these things could be accomplished through other means, without blood, but we didn’t want to play Chex Quest.

What we couldn’t put into words, most especially under threat of punishment, was that, while the blood and gore wasn’t why we wanted to keep playing, it was usually why we sat down in the first place. DOOM was good, but being good wasn’t what made it important; it was important because it was illicit. Yes, we were kids, and we probably would play a game that offered us nothing but brutal violence, but if the lines didn’t pleasingly intersect the boxes we would soon stop playing. DOOM is loved today because there was more to it than that. Blood was captivating, but it wasn’t enough - we sat down, but we did not stay, for blood alone. What our parents could rarely put into words was that us no longer seeing the blood was part of what worried them.

Indivisible Talk

These are some fundamentals I want you to keep in mind as we look at the Right.

Everybody’s people. When I talk about the difference between the Right and the Left, I’m not saying “the Right does this and the Left does that.” I’m talking about things all humans do, and the difference between the Right and the Left is a matter of scale and proportion. If I say “the Left values data over gut feelings” or “the Right values family over extended community,” obviously everyone values all of those things. It’s a question of how they’re prioritized. But small differences in our priorities can lead to dramatically different worldviews. So when I say “the Right does X,” don’t get too hung up on whether the Left also sometimes does X, but try think about how it manifests on the Right versus the Left and what those differences between them mean.

People vote their beliefs, not their self-interest. The Left tends to ask things like, “Why would working-class voters who depend on Obamacare vote for the party that wants to repeal Obamacare? They must have been lied to.” And I won’t deny that a lot of lies were involved, but it’s a mistake to think people only vote for what’s good for them. It seems like this should be obvious; I mean, why do I vote to have my taxes raised to pay for someone else’s education, someone else’s food stamps? We tend to answer that by arguing it is in my self-interest, that a well-fed and well-educated population leads to a stronger economy and a richer culture, and that this will trickle down to make my life better in the long run, and I could make that case, but, really, that’s not why I do it. I believe in education, I believe in fighting poverty, and if you proved to me that neither would ever benefit me personally, I would still fight for them, because it’s the right thing to do. So when someone across the political spectrum does something that confuses us, it may be true that they are misinformed, but we can’t assume that simply correcting them will change their minds. Right or wrong, they are acting in accordance with their beliefs, they trust misinformation because it aligns with those beliefs, and, if you don’t understand what those beliefs are, you’re going to misdiagnose the problem.

Tolerance and sectarianism. A tolerant view of society is the melting pot, the idea that Real America is the combination of many different walks of life, all of which are valid and deserving of the same rights. A sectarian view thinks of one walk of life (usually one’s own) as the Real America, and this walk of life is one society should trend towards: that America is a Christian nation, English should be the national language, or the ideal family as nuclear and heterosexual. I think it’s obvious which ways the Parties lean.

But, again, these are human traits. Everyone is balancing both these impulses every day. And I don’t want us to split these into “tolerant good, in-groups bad.” Democrats who over-commit to the melting pot run into the Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: that, if you treat every group as equally valid, including Nazis, fascists, and the Klan, you create a less tolerant society. And treating one group as a greater priority than others is logical when that group is persecuted; there is a degree to which all minority activism is defending one’s family. So it’s a matter of knowing when to be tolerant and when to be familial, and coalition-building is all about being both at the same time.

End

Um. So. I’m not sure how to end this. Uh. 200k subs! Wow! I find that number very humbling. Thank you all so much. And back me on Patreon, if you want to and if you haven’t already. There’ll be a proper video soon. Uh. What do people usually do in these things, they do Q&A’s, right? People ask you “what’s your favorite movie, book, game, comic, anime, musical, poem, album, joke”? I’ve been wondering what it says about me that all my answers would be things I experienced in my 20s, or earlier. Is it that I don’t love things the way I used to? Or is it just that, the more art you experience, the harder it is to be blown away? Like, something can be better than anything I’ve seen before, but it can’t shatter the record the way it could when I was younger. But I’m not making a video essay about that, so: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany, LOOM, Sandman, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Woman is Talking to Death by Judy Grahn, a three-way tie between In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, Lincoln by They Might Be Giants, and Onomatopoeia by Jonny 5, and the lemon cookie joke.

[caddy-whump-us]

Some questions/food for thought: Why can Lucian never be a Black Swan? Has he done something to discount him from that entirely? Does he ever beg to be treated like one (and get suitably punished for his insolence)?

Oh anon~ This is about to be a Deep Dive into the Lore and Backstory. Spoilers ahead for some of the unwritten bits of the vampire series. And this is seriously long, okay? And, more importantly:

CAUTION/TW for referenced non-con, sex work, and forced/non-con sex work, and physical violence. Nothing is described outright; all mentions are only oblique references. Still, please proceed with caution!

Okay. Lucien. This snide little asshole. Let’s talk about him!!!

Lucien could be a black swan–in theory. But he’s been passed over because he’s actually not entirely human. O wat? O yes.

So the “red light district” of this city (which needs a name; I generally picture something like Yharnam from Bloodborne but with fewer monsters and more of a functional city) is called Smoketown. And it’s off to the southeast corner of the city, on the other side of the river. And this is the part of town where the drugs, gambling, dance halls, and sex workers are found. To use the local slang, there’s grindhouses and ponyboy stables, and dollboys around Smoketown. 

There’s a bit of a hierarchy, I guess, in all this, with the “dolls” and “dollboys” being the top tier (charging the most), down to the ponyboy/ponygirl stables (middle tier), down to the grindhouse boys/girls (lower tier), on down to the “crib hoors” and “street hoors” (generally regarded as awful and only suitable for the most broke and desperate). This is a real simplification, but I guess that explains the basics? 

Lucien was, some time ago, a dollboy (so was Maggie Magpie, actually). They’re regarded as the prettiest and most expensive–if you want to be fancy you could almost call them courtesans. And, ideally, they’ll get themselves a particular patron and be a sort of love affair for pay.

An aside: so this imagined world has different views on sexuality (and to some extent gender? but not quite so much). Basically, when one is young, go ahead and fool around. You’re young, what you do now is less important than what you do later. But because this culture still very much holds to primogeniture, you had better be married to someone with whom you can have a biological child. That’s the ideal. But while you’re young, a teenager, a 20-something, go ahead and fool around–ideally not in Smoketown, but if you’re a boy and you find yourself drawn to a boy classmate, well, that’s just how it is when you’re young. And if you’re a girl, and you find yourself drawn to a girl classmate, well, go on ahead, because young love is passionate but rarely lasts. You can like whoever during this period of particular romantic and sexual freedom.

Once one gets a little older, it’s considered mature and responsible to “grow out” of this phase of experimentation and rampaging passion. You settle down, you marry someone with whom you can have biological children, and your firstborn will inherit your estate, &c &c. But, of course, some people just…won’t. Because this is how they are. In some cases, like Nikolai and Jonathan, they go on with their relationship and don’t grow out of it but rather into each other (this is why N&J staged a secret wedding between themselves, with rings and all; they can’t marry in the eyes of the law, but they consider themselves married). And, yes, this is not considered mature or wholly acceptable, so they keep these (quite committed) relationships as secret as possible.

In other cases, especially among the titled, the gentry, the upper-class, who all marry each other as one does, if you must indulge in this misplaced youthful exuberance, there’s Smoketown. And if must go to Smoketown, at least pay for the services of one of the sex workers of equally high status. (Does that always happen? No. But you get the idea.)

So you have this set of “houses” of highly-paid, highly-regarded “dollboys.” And these houses are both in competition with one another but not a strenuous competition. Any competition mostly plays out in trying to find or recruit new workers (Maggie, as an example, was born to a sex worker and, presumably, a client and was kept as a kind of a household servant in that same “house” until the proprietor of the Aviary encountered him and essentially bought him and kept on using him as a household servant until he was of age to actual start work; he’s in debt at this point). 

And, of course, the different houses have different aesthetics. The Aviary tends to have boyish workers that play to that nostalgic “school romance” or “university romance” aesthetic, Lucien’s house (no name yet) tends to play more with gender especially re: clothing and makeup. Lucien likes feathers and leathers and silk and lace and painting his eyes. He knows he can kind of saunter along and blur that line. And it works well for him.

So that’s Smoketown. Now. Off north of the river and outside the city (northwest of it, I think?) is a district called “The Five Churches.” And there are, indeed, five churches, that all share a large plaza or square onto which their doors open (p.s.: weddings are conducted on the porch of the church; just a fun fact there). The sixth side of the plaza is open to the city. Beyond and behind the churches is a massive, massive cemetery–it is absolutely the cemetery for the entire city (please picture Highgate Cemetery or the Glasgow Necropolis).

And somewhere out in or beyond or (actually) under the cemetery is a secret, hidden, exclusive…club, I guess. It’s not a cult, but it’s extremely secretive. A secret society, is I guess the best way to put it. And it is called The Red Circle.

The truth is, the Red Circle is really just a giant whump party. The rich and powerful (men, almost exclusively) have at their disposal a selection of whumpees to use as they see fit, to release the tensions of the lives or to satisfy urges that otherwise cannot be soothed or just because. 

Now it’s time to introduce a new character. His name is Cyprian and he is a vampire. And he is also under the control of the Red Circle (for reasons I haven’t figured out yet). They’ve got something to use against him if he betrays them, IDK. 

Etienne has actually found evidence of Cyprian but doesn’t know it. There are tally marks in a book hidden in Viktor’s library that add up to about 3 years and change and at the end are the initials C. G. That’s Cyprian from back when he was Viktor’s black swan. And, yes, Viktor turned him into a vampire. And, no, Cyprian wasn’t happy. He should have been Viktor’s heir, but that didn’t work out. And now he’s under the command of the Red Circle. But why?

Well if you have a bunch of whumpees and you love whumping them, how do you keep whumping them without constantly killing them and then needing new ones? The answer came from some of Cyprian’s research (he started digging into the whole “black swan” custom among other things): it is possible to create a kind of ghoul, a kind of half-vampire by carrying out the procedure used to turn a human into a vampire but carrying that procedure out only partially.

Rather than draining the human of all (or almost all) of their blood and then feeding them blood from the vampire that drank their blood, a vampire can inject a human with a small amount of their blood (not taken from the human victim in question here) and you’ll end up with what’s been termed a ghoul.

Ghouls are worthless to vampires: their blood is disgusting, they smell like rust and iron to vampires. And they don’t get many of the benefits that full vampires have–they can’t move so fast, they don’t have the sharp teeth, &c. they do have better vision at night but their eyes are inclined to reflect light like a cat’s eyes will. 

Instead, ghouls are more like humans but still have the vampiric sensitivity to sunlight (neither ghouls nor vampires burn in the sun, btw) and are bound by what’s called the Obligation of Flesh. Where vampires can sustain themselves with blood only, ghouls have to eat raw meat with some regularity. This both keeps them essentially sane and (more importantly to the Red Circle) helps them to heal inordinately quickly. Deny them meat and they heal like typical humans. Feed them some raw liver or brains or raw chicken and raw eggs and they’ll start mending right before your eyes (no, it isn’t comfortable, thanks). Yes, they can die and much more easily than true vampires and some of the Red Circle’s ghouls have, in fact, died.

Now you’re probably way ahead of me by now: Lucien is, in fact, a ghoul. 

The Red Circle’s method goes like this: one or more of them identify someone they want to add to their collection. This decision is discussed and debated until consensus is reached–and they’re very careful about how often and who they add to their collection. At that point, lower-ranking members are sent to the target’s working house and pay for their services–whereupon they whump them up but badly. 

This happens sometimes, even in the best houses, even in the Aviary. The target is allowed to heal but this means less money for the house. As soon as the target is back at work, someone else comes in and repeats the process: payment, whumping. The proprietor is not likely to put a bruised boy out on the floor in a good house, so back he goes to heal and, again, money is lost. And this repeats as long as is needed until word gets out that the proprietor is getting a little fed up with this pattern but it’s not one obvious person or one obvious group doing it. At that point, a messenger from the Red Circle will arrive with an offer to buy the target outright at an extravagant cost, enough to make losing this one boy worth it, especially if it means an end to having an unworkable boy so often. It may take time, but the proprietor is eventually coerced into accepting the offer and the target is spirited away by members of the Red Circle (or aspiring members maybe? pledges, if you will?) and to their secret meetingplace. 

Everything about this sucks, including the part where Cyprian makes them into a ghoul, because that alone hurts like hell. And then they’re stuck there, getting whumped regularly, then patched up and/or fed raw meat. One of the higher-ranking members serves as a kind of proprietor there; Cyprian is as much a servant (or slave?) as any of the ghouls.

So that’s how Lucien ended up being completely undesirable to vampires. But how did he get out of the Red Circle? Mostly because he was a very bad element to add to the collection and there was an uprising against the members of the Red Circle and there may or may not have been some revenge whumping and even cannibalism (gotta meet that Obligation of Flesh somehow). 

At that point, after the Red Circle was broken, everyone in the collection kind of went their own ways. Even Cyprian was free. Lucien, though, kind of fascinated by Cyprian and the things he talked about, sought out Viktor and offered himself as a postulate. And, as we all know, Viktor accepted him. And Lucien set out to be the best and most devoted because that’s how you get rewarded in the world he comes from.

But the first time he offered his blood to Viktor, Viktor laughed and called him a monster and refused his blood. And here Lucien, having learned of the whole black swan tradition mostly from being in Viktor’s house, had been hoping for such a place of honor and now it seems like it’s been absolutely denied to him forever–because he’s a monster with blood Viktor can’t consume. And, yes, Lucien is unbelievably angry and bitter about the whole situation, especially when Etienne enters the picture (unexpectedly).

I hadn’t thought about him begging for the chance to be treated as a black swan and then being punished for daring to ask for such a thing but, damn, now I want to think about that. He probably would–albeit in private. There’s a lot of jockeying for position among the postulates and Lucien has worked his way up to the top, almost a class by himself, and he will not let that go easily. So to be seen begging for something could weaken his position and that won’t do. And yet…and yet…he does want it…

He might get what he wants someday. But it’s going to take some interesting circumstances.

So that’s a bit of a deep dive into the lore, worldbuilding, and backstory that’s running along and behind the vampire stories. If you made it this far, thanks for reading all this! Bits of this will come out as I get more of the stories sorted out and written. But there you have it~

[theculturedmarxist]

Tomorrowland

As ridiculous and irrational as bourgeois behavior appears on the surface, the bourgeoisie aren’t stupid. You don’t need an advanced understanding of Marxism to be able to read a chart or understand history, and whatever their opinion on Capitalism as a system, they still know and can see as well as anyone else that even under the best conditions, the economy runs in cycles, with booms and busts occurring in somewhat predictable patterns.

They know too the extent of the ecological damage already inflicted as the effects that these developments will bring. While the bourgeoisie are collectively opposed to workers as a class, the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. While the Oil Tycoon and his Green Energy counterpart might be united as a class against the interests of their employees, the financial interests of the oil capitalist and the solar capitalist are diametrically opposed. Or, put another way, it’s in the interest of the oil capitalist for people to remain ignorant of or otherwise ignore the effects of climate change, while the insurance capitalist that profits from the guarantee of the property in coastal cities for example stands to lose considerably. The latter profits by getting government to build sea walls to protect their investment, while the former stands to lose from any official or public recognition that their business is causing such catastrophic harm.

The mistake many people make is believing that the capitalist class is ignorant of what is going on in the world or what they are doing to it. They are just as aware as anyone what the consequences of their actions are, the bourgeoisie. They know that climate change is here already and only going to get worse before it gets better. They know too that a reaction to the decade of economic negligence and pillage committed after 2008 is on its way as well. Many people make the mistake of believing that these things aren’t being noticed and acted upon, that “something needs to be done now” about global warming, or whatever, themselves ignorant of the fact that, yes, actually, something is already being done about it, and has been in motion for some time.

Teachers and schools get defunded in favor of cops and prisons. Vital government services and branches are shut down while the military is given a blank check. The ocean eats away the coast and increasingly severe storms make the inland progressively unlivable. It is true that the wealthy can certainly insulate themselves enough to honestly have no knowledge of these things, but the reality is that these things aren’t happening due to incompetence, or the out of control effects of a system with no one at the helm to guide it, but that in fact these are all deliberately executed plans meant to prepare for the consequences that were foreseen long ago.

The global economy as we have understood it since the end of World War 2 is on borrowed time. The so-called “consumer economy” is undone by the natural functioning of capitalism. Any given capitalist enterprise is designed to take in more money than it expends. Naturally, a business that spends more money than it takes in doesn’t stay in business for very long at all. The net effect is that all the unclaimed capital, represented as the money in the pocket of every person that has to buy the things they need to live, eventually becomes claimed, collected, and ultimately concentrated into the hands of the owner of the business, where it is more or less trapped. It accumulates more quickly than its new owner can spend it, resulting in a hoard of wealth for these few people, but also in the exsanguination of the consumer economy itself.

The lifeblood of the consumer economy is restored largely by two ways: wages, and credit. As a rule, wages are pushed down as low as they can possibly go, despite the necessity of this resource’s renewal. Increased wages out means diminished profits in. However, the tendency following this rule is what you’d expect: with less money with which to buy, people buy less, damaging the economy both as consumption drops and as companies with increasing desperation seek to secure the ever diminishing stock of funds available to collect. This has been the tendency since the 1970s, to keep wages as low as possible, regardless of the effects on the economy.

This tendency has been facilitated by the rapid and aggressive expansion of consumer credit. Credit is attractive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its ability to produce money from only the simple promise of having money at some indeterminate point in the future. The more a creditor lends, i.e, the less money it has, the greater its income, which in turn allows it to lend more in the future. In effect, none of the creditor’s personal cash is ever jeopardized. They’re theoretically guaranteed both the principle of whatever they’ve paid out, plus whatever fee they’ve charged for the use of this theoretical cash. In many retail environments that offer credit, the employee discount has gone the way of the Dodo, replaced with store credit schemes where the employees basically pay the store for the privilege of not being paid enough to buy any of the things in the store with their regular wages.

The major defect with credit is that however much money is loaned out, the value of the loan fluctuates in relation to the borrower’s ability to pay it back. The loan itself could be for five or five-million dollars, but it isn’t worth either if the individual borrower can never repay that amount. Even if all the money from the loan was placed into a briefcase and dropped into the Marianas Trench, despite the factual existence of that money, without the ability to either retrieve it, or replace it via the labor of the borrower (which at, say, minimum wage, would take quite a while), the loan itself is effectively worthless. Naturally, the “debt load” an individual can carry varies based on numerous circumstances, like their employment, age, sex, wealth, health, and so on. There’s a whole system for appreciating, grading, and assigning value to this sort of debt. In fact, a major contributor to the 08 financial crisis was the various types of scheme run by banks to try and make worthless debt, so-called “toxic assets,” to appear valuable.

The problem now is that the public at large is reaching its debt “carrying capacity,” which is to say that they are reaching the limits of what they can borrow with any reasonable expectation of ever paying it back. The total amount is reaching beyond what any person or collection of people will ever be able to pay back in their own or collective lifetimes.

So, the post-WW2 paradigm of high pay, high education, and strong worker protections which made the conditions possible for the consumer economy in the first place have long been dead and buried, killed by Carter and entombed by Reagan. All the wealth poured into the economy by the US government and the New Deal is gone, and the credit system that replaced it is reaching critical mass. There can be no consumer economy if those meant to consume have nothing with which to consume.

In light of these facts, what have we seen instead? Wages continue to stagnate and shrink. Subsidies that offset the costs of necessities like education or food continue to get slashed. Inflation ticks upward every year while the ability of people to pay is eroded with every wave of economic distress. We see the economy imploding around us in real time, and it looks like nothing is being done to stop it.

If they venture to imagine that what is happening can be stopped, the natural bourgeois thought is, why stop it? Maintaining the economy only makes sense if its maintenance means increasing profits. However, what profit is there left? The money has been drained from the economy. To get it started again would require a truly awesome injection of liquid capital. This is politically unfeasible for numerous reasons, but in particular, that money would have to come from somewhere, and the only two possible sources of such a disbursement of wealth would have to come either from the bourgeoisie itself, or the government. Naturally, the bourgeoisie aren’t eager to give up “their hard earned” wealth, nor are they willing to let the government start “giving away” money to working class people. It would completely implode the political paradigm they’ve been constructing for the past twenty years. They’re perfectly fine with the government printing money, to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, but only so long as it goes to them. Yes, capitalism’s obsession with “efficiency” would hardly let them imagine the “wasteful” step of the government giving money to consumers to buy bourgeois commodities when the government can just print the money and give it directly to the bourgeoisie themselves. This is to say nothing of the dangers of a precedent of the government helping people, or the public admission that the government can’t run out of money, and that all the suffering that emerged from the era of Austerity Politics amounts to a needlessly inflicted criminal act.

Any beginning student of Marxism can tell you: capitalism evolves. It needs must change with the times, and the circumstances that surround it and propel it. The circumstances of the 20th century are gone and rapidly becoming an increasingly distant memory. Capitalism no longer needs a massive reserve army of labor to move it and provide it with sustenance. Technology does nothing but obviate human labor. A single secretary with an ipad can do what used to take a whole secretarial team to accomplish. Personal computers have eliminated the need for lots of large, expensive industrial equipment in industries like typography. The internet means not just competing with the people in your town, city, state, or even country, but with every other qualified candidate around the world. Teeming billions of people now are not only “unnecessary,” but in fact exist as a direct, existential threat to the existence of the bourgeoisie. We see what happens to “useless people” all the time under capitalism. They’re discarded, beaten, imprisoned, persecuted, left to die. Without money, you’re disposable, and the fact is that most people have no money, no real reserve of cash or even tangible assets to their name.

The bourgeosie know all of this and are acting, rationally, logically, in their own self interests. With neither the ability nor willingness to avert whatever is to come, they instead invest in preparing for the inevitable fallout. We see on the news what they’ve been investing in. Weapons, weapons, weapons—weapons for the cops standing between angry crowds and the glittering towers of their oppressors, weapons for every little tin-pot dictator and bloodthirsty tyrant ready to kill his own people for a portion of the looting of their country, weapons for the militaries of competing capitalist states and interests, up to and including new nuclear weapons. They’re content for now to let “natural” disaster, disease, and conflict to take its toll on the working class while feigning only the most mild concern, but they know that when it finally happens, their only recourse to the needs and demands of the people is going to be raw, naked force. Whatever disaster comes, they will be largely immune, kept safely insulated in their cities and private fortresses behind walls, fences, armed checkpoints and armored mercenaries. The public can bay and bark all they like at the army of goons paid for out of their own pockets, and eat cake or lead, as they choose, while the wealthy that ruined their lives and their planet go on obliviously.

And when it’s all said and done, and the plutocrats emerge from their warrens to find the country beyond the city walls covered in working class skulls, just imagine how heartbroken they’ll be watching all those bones ground into dust for their country-club’s sand traps or the sparkling, clean beaches they’ll be able to enjoy, and no fucking poor people around to mess it all up.

[aion-rsa]

Squid Game Questions Season 2 Could Answer

https://ift.tt/3ogAXLK

Squid Game came into our lives as a strange and complicated mystery, one we’re enjoying obsessively poring over for every last detail. Even as Netflix’s South Korean contemporary social horror series revealed secrets in the final episodes, they only brought about bigger questions surrounding the game’s origin, Il-nam’s relationship to the game, how the game continues to operate with impunity, and what might happen next. While there’s no indication there will be a second season of the show, here are some of the biggest questions Squid Game left hanging after nine episodes.

How does Squid Game work globally?

The fact that the in-show audience for Squid Game is international, much like the real world one has ended up being, is an interesting quirk that begs a few questions. Why use such country-specific games that would be foreign to the very VIPs that Squid Game was created to cater to? During the last few rounds they came to South Korea and had the Front Man and his staff on hand to explain the rules and answer any questions, but the show indicates that didn’t happen for previous games. Did the VIPs have questions about what everyone was doing during the dalgona round, and why it was set at a playground?

Read more

Culture

Squid Game Competitions, As Played By BTS

By Kayti Burt

TV

Squid Game: What Could Season 2 Look Like?

By Kayti Burt

The VIP audience is surprisingly small, with only a handful of men. At one point while drinking and joking, one asks who brought somebody in, meaning each VIP is vouched for personally by someone who was already in the inner circle. While they’re all high rollers, it seems like an incredible expense to have so few people attending, and seemingly no one betting remotely. Heck, they don’t even seem to pay for concessions! Although maybe if everyone is as painfully rich as Oh Il-nam told Seong Gi-hun, they truly don’t care about the expense. Are these the kind of unknown millionaires and billionaires who exist away from the eye of the general public, who literally couldn’t give their money away fast enough if they tried (not that they have, in this case)?

How many other countries have Squid Games? Setting the game on a private island seems ideal, in that no one can escape and the game can be kept out of sight from local law enforcement. Sourcing disposable personnel and players (a deeply dystopian phrase if ever there was one) is a bigger hurdle. When hundreds of people disappear and never return, someone, somewhere, should kick up a fuss. It helps that the people behind the Squid Game seem to know who to target – during the first round, Gi-hun’s family assumed he was off on a gambling bender, and Sang-woo was assumed to be running from the law. Considering that, it’s surprising there weren’t more people from the typical profiles that criminals (because make no mistake, the people behind Squid Game are just that) like to target, because they know they won’t be missed or their friends and family can’t afford to make a fuss, such as sex workers and runaways. 

How are the Squid Game staff recruited?

If you’ve heard a theory about Squid Game, it’s probably this one: the color paper that people choose when playing ddakji with Gong Yoo determines whether they become workers (red) or players (blue). It’s a cool theory, but when video footage of players is shown, a few pick red. So then where are the workers coming from?

Read more

TV

Squid Game’s Scathing Critique of Capitalism

By Delia Harrington

TV

Why is Squid Game’s English-Language Acting So Bad?

By Kayti Burt

The man who tried to take on the Squid Game soldiers asked a question that was never answered by the series: what did they do to you to make you do this? From the staff members that we saw, it seems that they’re young men from South Korea. The fact that the Front Man killed them without hesitation means that he knows they won’t be missed – or that the powerful people backing him can make any problems related to their deaths disappear. There are easily fifty or more staff people. When the game is over, what happens to them? It’s hard to imagine that they will be allowed to simply go home. While they might sound as foolish as Gi-hun did when he went to the police, it seems like an unnecessary risk. Does the Front Man kill everyone below him when he’s done?

How did In-ho become the Front Man?

The Front Man was a mysterious figure throughout the season, in part because he wore a mask, but revealing his face and his identity as Hwang In-ho, brother to Hwang Jun-ho, only left us with even more questions. It’s clear that the front man is just that – not the creator or owner of Squid Game, but the front-facing person who deals with the VIPs, the staff, and other issues, allowing the Host and whoever else might be behind the game to keep their hands clean. But how did he come to have this job at all? Jun-ho learned from the meticulous records that his brother actually won Squid Game years ago, yet somehow he became the Front Man. When we first met Jun-Ho, he said his brother was only missing for a few weeks, which means he had been keeping up a double life quite successfully up until recently. How did he explain his annual Squid Game absences? Why was he living in such a spartan apartment? Did In-ho burn through the cash, or was he, like Gi-hun, unable to spend it? It almost seems like he isolated himself from his family because of who Squid Game had made him, and perhaps he became the Front Man because once he had done what he needed to do to win Squid Game, he saw no path to redemption.

Did Jun-ho survive?

Throughout the series, people are shot frequently, their deaths shown unflinchingly. When the Front Man kills people himself, he goes with a kill shot, often in the head. Deaths on Squid Game in general are shown in detail, with clarity and blood spurts. In contrast, when pursuing his brother, Jun-ho, the Front Man, In-ho, shot him in the shoulder and he went over the cliff into the water. Far from definitive. The only other death that wasn’t clear and explicit was Player 001’s – and he turned out to not only be alive, but running the whole game. All that is to say, if Squid Game returns, we’re banking on Wi Ja-hoon, the incredibly popular actor who plays Jun-ho the cop, to paddle his way to safety and season 2. 

The mystery of Player 001/The Host, Il-nam

At the end of the season, Il-nam revealed himself as one of the founders and the Host. However, there are still questions surrounding him. He references the idea that others in his circle might have also helped to found the game – who are they? Are they still alive? Il-nam doesn’t attend the finals with the other VIPs, with the Front Man passing on his apologies and the message that he has something personal to attend to. After Il-nam dies in episode 9, there’s a flashback to when he told the Front Man he wouldn’t attend, saying, “There’s no way watching it could be more fun than playing it yourself.” Narratively, this was likely to preserve the Il-nam reveal for the very end of the episode, but it still leaves something of an open question. Where did Il-nam go and what did he do with his remaining time, while he was still well enough? 

Read more

TV

Squid Game Ending Explained

By Kayti Burt

TV

Squid Game’s Most Heartbreaking Hour is Also Its Best

By Kayti Burt

Perhaps he went in search of his son, whom he referenced throughout the show. Some hypothesized Gi-hun could be Il-nam’s son, since Gi-hun’s father is never shown and the thread of Il-nam’s family is never resolved. Gi-hun reminds Il-nam of his son when he asks for chocolate milk, and the neighborhood from the game of marbles was based on Il-nam’s home, and also reminds Gi-hun of his childhood. 

Whatever the case, the two clearly look out for each other. Is it possible that Il-nam gave Gi-hun something of an in-game shield, like an extra life or a golden ticket? After Gi-hun gives his jacket to the older man to hide his incontinence and preserve his dignity, Il-nam offers his jacket, with 001 on it. He says it’s for protection, so that others in the arena won’t think less of him, perhaps he means it at face value, the way Sang-woo told Ali to hide the fact that he has missing fingers. But throughout the game of marbles, there were a couple of times when Il-nam could have been shot for losing. Other players were shot more quickly by the soldiers nearby. Instead that soldier waited for Gi-hun to be out of sight and presumably shot wide. It would make sense for all of the staff in red jumpsuits to know not to kill Player 001 (it really feels like they could have picked a less obvious number), so that they wouldn’t accidentally act rashly when breaking up a fight. If that’s the case, then perhaps in handing over his jacket, Il-nam was hoping he could give Gi-hun a small amount of extra insurance, even if it only helped him outside of the officially announced games. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Squid Game is a wild ride, and if it remains a one-season wonder with an open ending, so be it. But there are still quite a few mysteries lingering and big, unanswered questions that could be explored, whether in spin-offs or follow-up seasons. 

The post Squid Game Questions Season 2 Could Answer appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[pacegerld1989]

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[trekwiz]

UBI anon here (💚). I understand your position on UBI and I don’t necessarily disagree with it. I suppose my verdict on it is still out. But I’m an asshole, and love advocating for the devil... To me, your positioning is quite interesting. Especially considering the reasoning behind the Corona virus stipulations... as I could use the same logic during normal years to justify a UBI as part of the role of governance. (I.e. Lack of livable wages -> crime -> government duty) (crime affects all)

Hi anon. I apologize in advance for the long post.

I would address your comment in three parts: first on the difference between population and personal issues, second in terms of defining "need" in regards to government duty, and third in regards to personal rights.

I would suggest there needs to be a pretty bright line between population issues and individual issues in regards to government action. When that line is blurred, we get really weird agenda-driven communal values. As I mentioned in my previous answer, that is especially apparent to LGBT people who were on the receiving end of that logic.

I'm not sure if you saw the news and public reaction when gay kids finally started demanding the right to participate in dances with same sex partners in the early 00's. But schools and communities argued for a communal value that went something like this, "We need to protect our children from becoming gay, so these gay kids should sacrifice a bit of joy for the good of everyone."

Ultimately, the country was meeting the needs and desires of one group, at the expense and detriment of another. They chose who has to lose something, without their consent.

No one ever sees themselves as the bad guy. Universally, your beliefs are protective, or positive in some way, from your perspective. It's very easy to argue for a personal bias/agenda to be seen under the lens of collective behavior, when there's no reason it should be seen as anything but an individual desire.

Any individual concern can be reframed to appear as a population issue by focusing on numbers. Having eggs for breakfast wasn't a personal experience; millions of people had eggs for breakfast. But having eggs for breakfast really was a personal choice, and it didn't impact my neighbor; having eggs didn't make them eat eggs. The outcome was the same, but the decision was independent. As another example, it's the difference between listening to loud music on a farm, vs listening to loud music in a densely packed apartment complex. One is inherently a personal action, and the other is inherently communal.

A virus is inherently communal. Individual protections, at least with this kind of virus, are impossible. Your behaviors won't protect yourself; there is nothing you can do to avoid getting infected by acting alone--unless you're super rich and can hide in a bunker for a few years.

And, like the loud music in an apartment complex, your behaviors have a distinct impact on other people. It might sound dramatic, but you literally have the power to determine if someone else dies, or ends up with a lifelong disability. There's a distinct, and undeniable communal need, and it's similar to the reason we ban indoor smoking. While it's a soundbite, the old standard, "your right to swing your first ends at my nose" is the driving force here: once your behavior affects others, it's up to you to change, not them. By taking actions that hurt other people, you're infringing on their right not to participate--it's a decision you don't get to make.

On the second point, I would suggest linking government to crime via livable wages muddies the idea of governmental need in a particularly dangerous way. I briefly suggested that police don't need to be militarized, and so that's not a necessary government expense. I'll expand on that as an example, as I think it demonstrates how a muddy standard like that can be abused.

Those who have come to defend police brutality and a police state suggest that military equipment is necessary for police because it protects them. Their job necessarily involves danger that puts their lives at risk. Protecting law enforcement officers is certainly a government interest; they spend money on training, and wages theoretically correlate to experience that would be lost when an officer dies. Military equipment protects the people and the investment.

But is it necessary? Necessity is a combination of factors, with no one being the sole decider--and this list isn't exclusive, just a good start to the conversation. Does it make them more effective? Can the same goal be achieved through alternative means? Will the government cease to function in an important way if it doesn't have this funding?

When we examine militarized police in that lens, it doesn't really meet the standard for necessity. They're less effective when they have this kind of equipment: they increase violence and violent crime in communities as an instigating force, and they decrease communal trust, which necessarily impacts their ability to investigate real crimes in the future. It also encourages vigilante justice when the police are seen as this ineffective and untrustworthy--people are circumventing the law, which has a serious impact on governance.

The intended goal can be achieved through alternative means; there's good science around de-escalation tactics, and they're known to work in other developed countries. Ending the arms race between criminals and police generally reduces overall violence rates, and is protective to communities. And by foregoing the funding for militarized gear, no function of governance has been impacted. Laws will still be enforced; there's no negative impact on governance. The idea that it's a "need" is weak; it serves a personal agenda, not a necessary governmental function.

During a pandemic, there's a strong argument for governmental need for UBI. I won't outline all of the reasons, I'll stick with the most easy to apply one: if every member of government does everything right, someone in their community who didn't have the means to stay home could still infect them. If we think only about those we can reasonably care about, (so, assuming we're all unswayed by the impact of Trump being infected because--well, fuck that fascist) what happens if CDC employees become compromised due to an infection in the community, and that infection spreads throughout the agency?

The impact isn't temporary or localized. We'll be losing a large amount of expertise necessary for running the agency. An agency that works solely to protect populations, rather than individuals. The expertise that could prevent another botched pandemic response would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, with people who may not even be familiar with the relevant government processes. That will necessarily impact the government and the public for an extended period of time. We're already feeling some of that impact just from it being merely mismanaged (maliciously); imagine how much worse it would be if that expertise were simply wiped out and not available again when Trump is out of office?

UBI is an effective way to back up a stay at home order, and other similar precautions. It means bills won't go unpaid, and people can still eat. They won't be forced to choose between eating and preventing spread; if they're in a position where they can't choose to stay home, that risk to government personnel remains. There isn't really a great alternative; suspending regular bills won't reduce the need to pay for food, and deferring payments only increases the risk of someone needing to defy stay at home orders to prevent bankruptcy later. And depending on who is impacted--which is hard to predict--parts of government can cease to function without it, during a pandemic. A pandemic of this nature could theoretically wipe out the whole judicial branch of government, as an example. That would be disastrous.

Under situation normal, there's no real argument to be made for a government need. There are other ways to reduce crime, especially from a regulatory standpoint. Education is a start--and preventing education funding from being tied to property taxes is a good way to ensure poor communities don't get stuck in a cycle of poverty fed by poor education. Putting money into infrastructure explicitly meant to undo the impact of redlining would help.

And if you've tried to apply for a job in the last 15 years, you know there's a lot the government should be doing in regards to regulation and enforcement of labor laws. The issues leading to unlivable wages are relatively well known. It's no secret that many companies are using illegal unpaid internships (unpaid internships are only legal under a narrow set of criteria), or are misclassifying employees as contractors--which is a serious tax evasion scam at the worker's expense.

There are no enforcement mechanisms against companies that advertise these practices until a worker complains about it, even if they state their intentions to ignore the law in a job listing. And sometimes--with Uber as an example of a company breaking long-standing law about employee classification--enforcement doesn't happen unless workers spend a lot of their own money suing.

Stronger minimum wage laws tied to the local cost of living (and by local, I mean reasonable commute--employees should not be expected to live an hour+ away from where they work because the company doesn't want to pay them enough to live locally) is a good start, but the loopholes related to that need to be closed.

For example, companies react to wage increases by cutting hours and hiring more people in retaliation--there's no real need to do it, it's just an excuse to coerce employees into acting against their own interests. The true impact on pricing from reasonable wages is negligible. One possibility is to lock the ratio between part time employees and full time employees, with some exceptions based on necessity. If you have 4 part-time cashiers, you can probably do well with 2 full-time cashiers.

Whereas a workplace that needs extra bodies for a short period of time--for example, maybe a facilities management office that sometimes handles construction will need additional people to transport and handle materials every so often, but not regularly--should be able to operate that way with evidence that there's truly a need.

Arguably, a shorter work week would make a difference as well. 40 hours is a lot to begin with, and some salaried people are regularly working 50-60 without additional pay. Balancing a living wage for a 30 hour week would greatly assist people in getting more education to aim for even better paying jobs. And the additional leisure time should reduce the stresses that lead to crime.

Hiring practices are currently obtuse, and a lot of resumes are never seen by a human. Banning the use of screening by ATSes (and by people unfamiliar with the relevant field--a scientist shouldn't be screened out by an HR employee who failed intro biology) could make hiring a bit more fair for everyone. And blinding interviews as much as reasonable could help--look up information about how gender ratios started to become more even when orchestras switched to blind interviews using carpeted floors, it's really interesting. (The sound of heels on hard surfaces led to decreased hiring of women when blinding alone was in use.)

I'd even suggest that a wage ratio cap would be reasonable. Largely because it doesn't prevent the top members of a company from making unlimited money, so long as they pull up everyone below them.

And it all necessarily needs to include regulation and enforcement against predatory lending practices in regards to student loans, housing, and "payday loans." Crime and poverty are a complex interaction of systems, and you can't choose just one area to focus on.

Back to the point: there are alternative ways to solve the underlying problem. It doesn't necessarily make the government more effective: it's addressing one facet of crime when a coordinated effort against multiple causes could do it better through acts of governance*. And ultimately, parts of the government won't fail because it doesn't have UBI.

*I'm generally very uncomfortable when the government takes action that's outside of "governance." That kind of behavior is too easily abused by personal agendas. Governance is, generally, regulation and enforcement. When you creep out of that scope, you get into my third point: infringement of personal rights (in contexts that are personal and not population).

Ultimately, we're not a hive-mind; we're not a collective. While issues with a population-scale impact should necessitate individual action, the status quo should have the minimal impact on our ability to lead our lives as we see fit.

We've lost our understanding of what the freedom of religion clause of the 1st amendment is about. It was meant to put a barrier between religion and government, so the government couldn't coerce you, even minimally (like, say, the 10 commandments in a courthouse), to follow someone else's religious beliefs. But there's an underlying "why" there.

If I force you to eat Key Lime Pie because my religion demands it, or I force you to eat Key Lime Pie because it's simply my favorite dessert, is there a difference? The clause was created not because forcing religion on others, in specific, is bad. It was created because religion was a common method of forcing your way of life onto someone else, and that is bad.

It's couched in secular terms, but UBI is based on a set of personal beliefs about how we should behave, with an underlying assumption that we should all be collectivist. It compels collective financial support on an issue with a personal scope. I've seen how that plays out, when homophobia was a communal value. And it's the most easily abused model of governance.

You win, so you get to have your personal values made standard for the next 2-8 years. Great. But then you lose, and your opponent now has the power and means to have their personal values made standard for the next 2-8 years. Trump should be a caution against this mindset; the things you think you're doing for good, offers someone like him the power to do similar things for bad. You want to give out a basic wage, Trump wants to give out militarized weaponry to police and Nazis.

A system that permits personal belief to be the driving force of tax and government policy is a system that permits these kinds of wild, dangerous swings. Gerrymandering is the result of a system that empowers personal beliefs to rule over others.

As a final thought, consider this: in the US, something like UBI could be weaponized by people like Trump. Take part in protests? Sorry, no more income for you. Formed a union? You're not eligible. The government agent who sends the UBI payment has religious-based bigotry against gay people? Sorry, they have a right not to pay you. You're writing politically "hostile" news? You and all of your coworkers have just lost a significant chunk of your income. Convicted of a felony? Income suspended, sorry, good luck staying out of prison.

If your ability to survive is heavily tied to a government payment, AND the system permits and encourages personal beliefs to be a valid reason to guide government policy, marginalized people will always have the most to lose.

[arcticdementor]

In 1924, the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane coined the term “ectogenesis” to describe how human pregnancy would one day give way to artificial wombs. “It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child,” Haldane wrote, imagining how an earnest college student of the future would describe the phenomenon. “Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 percent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.” By the year 2074, Haldane imagined, ectogenesis had become a popular technique — with “less than 30 percent of children... now born of woman.” Writing at a time when debates over contraception and eugenics raged on both sides of the Atlantic, his prediction was an understandable outgrowth of these new efforts to control fertility. “Had it not been for ectogenesis,” Haldane prophesied, “there can be little doubt that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.”

Today, we have inched slightly — but only slightly — closer to perfecting the technology that would realize Haldane’s vision, albeit for reasons other than the eugenic improvement of the race. A small knot of scientists in the United States and Japan are experimenting with both live animals and human cells to mimic the functioning of the womb. And while their work is in its early stages, it is worth exploring the scientific prospects and ethical implications of research on artificial wombs.

Haldane’s chosen title — Daedalus — is perhaps telling. In Greek mythology, Daedalus, “the cunning worker,” was an ingenious practitioner of the mechanical arts, a figure whose inventions proved, at best, ambiguous contributions to humanity. His most famous invention — wings crafted from bird feathers, wax, and string, built to escape with his son Icarus from the clutches of King Minos — became the tool of his son’s destruction, when “the boy, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven.” The hot sun promptly melted the wax wings, Icarus plunged to his death, and Daedalus was left “bitterly lamenting his own arts.”

…

The question is whether these different avenues of research — at the beginning of pregnancy and the end of pregnancy — will one day converge. “I’ve talked to researchers who are doing research on partial ectogenesis — interventions for premature births, mainly — and I’ve talked to in vitro fertilization researchers who are trying to extend the period of time an embryo can live outside the womb,” says Scott Gelfand, Director of the Ethics Center at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, who organized a conference on artificial wombs in 2002. “Put the two together and eventually we’re going to be able to do this.” Of course, many scientific and biological hurdles remain, and physicians who work with assisted reproductive technologies are hesitant to predict the future. “The uterus is a complex organism,” says Dr. David Adamson, Director of Fertility Physicians of Northern California and past president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. “There are still issues related to immunology and cardiovascular development that are extremely complicated and not very well understood. In terms of putting together all of these and having a clinically successful artificial womb,” he says, “my personal perspective is that it is decades away.”

…

Artificial wombs are just the kind of technological prospect that radical ethicists love to celebrate. In 1985, philosopher Peter Singer gave them a ringing endorsement: “I think women will be helped, rather than harmed, by the development of a technology that makes it possible for them to have children without being pregnant,” he said. Singer’s vision echoed that of feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone, who made a similar argument in 1970 in The Dialectic of Sex. Once the “freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology” occurred, she said, they could finally reach full equality with men. Viewed this way, artificial wombs are merely another step in the ongoing advance of human reproductive technologies and women’s social equality. They would both expand the range of reproductive choices and make the differences between men and women matters of technological convention rather than biological nature.

…

But many ethicists are not so sure. “I think artificial wombs could lead to a commodification of the whole process of pregnancy,” says Rosemarie Tong, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a leading scholar in feminist bioethics. “To the extent that we externalize an experience like pregnancy, it may lead to a view of the growing child as a ‘thing.’” The further we erode the mystery of the development of human life, the more appealing it becomes to think about improving upon it, or demanding greater control over it. Even given developments in fetal surgery, the human womb still insists that we not breach its protections too often. But with artificial wombs, the transparency of the technology itself would invite greater intervention.

At stake in this debate is the very meaning of human pregnancy: the meaning of the mother-child relationship, the nature of the female body, and the significance of being born, not “made.” Let’s say, for example, that scientists perfect the artificial womb to the point where it becomes a “healthier” environment than the old-fashioned human version. Artificial wombs, after all, wouldn’t be threatened by irresponsible introductions of alcohol or illegal drugs. They could have precisely regulated sources of temperature and nutrition and ongoing monitoring by expert technicians in incubation clinics. Like genetic testing of unborn fetuses, which is fast becoming a medical norm rather than a choice, people might begin to ask: Why take the risk of gestating my child in an old-fashioned womb? With an eye to avoiding costs and complications, insurance companies might begin to insist that we don’t. (Imagine “expectant mothers” stopping by the incubation clinic once a week to check up on their “unborn” child.)

In the near term, most women would almost certainly gestate their children the old-fashioned way, even if they had the choice. “Relatively few people, with tons of money, who are unusual, would use artificial wombs,” says Tong. But even the option of artificial wombs might change the way we view pregnancy, and perhaps the way we view women. Feminist critics of science, particularly those who embrace an “essentialist” view of women, have long claimed that artificial reproductive technologies threaten women’s social status. Australian sociologist Robyn Rowland has argued that the creation of artificial wombs would spell the end of women’s innate power. “We may find ourselves without a product of any kind with which to bargain,” she writes. “We have to ask, if that last power is taken and controlled by men, what role is envisaged for women in the new world? Will women become obsolete?” Rowland and other feminist critics are hardly shrinking violets; they called their 1984 conference on the subject “The Death of the Female.” They view the medical establishment as irredeemably male — a monolithic, misogynistic institution that views women who are not pregnant as, literally, idle machines.

More thoughtful feminist critics note that even without the possibility of manipulation by the medical establishment, artificial wombs would create serious disruptions in our relationships with our children. “It would weaken the mother-child bond,” says Tong. “Indeed, I think it would weaken the bonds between parents and children in general. On the whole, I think the physicality and embodied nature of pregnancy is a real and material way for one generation to connect to the next... Without that rootedness in the body, relationships between the generations become more abstract, less feeling-filled.”

…

There has always been an incalculable mystery surrounding the womb, as religion and folk wisdom attest. “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all,” says Ecclesiastes. In the Hebrew Bible, interventions in the womb were considered to be solely the province of God, not man. In the story of Rachel and Jacob, when the barren Rachel says, “Give me children, or else I die,” Jacob responds in anger, saying “Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?” For centuries, folk tales warned pregnant women against walking in graveyards, looking at deformed people, witnessing a solar eclipse, or even strolling around after dark, lest they damage the developing child.

Our feelings of awe and curiosity about the womb are a reaction both to its physiological function and its potent status as a symbol of fertility, procreation, and the continuation of the species. It is not quite an organ, although it can be donated and transplanted; and it is more mysterious than the heart or the lungs, which both men and women share. It is freighted with meaning because it is the site, or the potential site, of such a fundamental and in many ways still deeply mysterious thing — the emergence and development of a new human life.

In an essay written just before he died, the philosopher Hans Jonas observed that “natality,” as he called it, “is as essential an attribute of the human condition as is mortality. It denotes the fact that we all have been born, which means that each of us had a beginning when others already had long been there, and it ensures that there will always be such that see the world for the first time, see things with new eyes, wonder where others are dulled by habit, start out from where they had arrived.” In the end, artificial wombs are different from current technologies like IVF and modern arrangements like surrogacy, because they represent the final severing of reproduction from the human body. There is something about being born of a human being — rather than a cow or an incubator — that fundamentally makes us human. Whether it is the sound of a human voice, the beating of a human heart, the temperature and rhythms of the human body, or some combination of all of these things that makes it so, it is difficult to imagine that science will ever find a way to truly mimic them. We should remember this truth as we expand the reach of our powers over the very origins of human life, lest we give birth to a technology we will live to regret.

[geek-patient-zero]

Part 1, Chapter 11

Or: Oh Boy, Here I Go Killing Again

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Death Trilogy Volume 1

Washington DC—March 12, 1994

We’re back with Makish as he continues his contract work for the Red Death.

Normally, a city the size of the nation’s capital could support a dozen Kindred comfortably.

It’s implied any more than that and people will start noticing the disappearances, or all the people waking up with less blood in them than the night before and no memory of why that is. I think it’s also a holdover from the tabletop game, where you’ve got the established canon characters living in a city, the player characters, and a few of the storyteller’s OC’s. You don’t expect the poor storyteller to come up with a whole functioning Kindred community, so your average game might have about a dozen or so vampire characters. Though, that population number makes many vampire conflicts seem sillier and pettier. All that political maneuvering and deception just to rule over about eleven other dudes.

Despite half of the city being a warzone where even the police fear to tread, the city still gets over ten million tourists visiting a year. Disaster tourism, I guess. Combined with the regular political changing of the guard resulting in a constantly shifting population, a city that can usually fit in a dozen vamps can fit several dozen.

Last night, the Red Death had lowered that number by two. This evening, Makish planned to continue that trend. Following the instructions of his grisly employer, the Assamite intended to wipe out more than a quarter of the Kindred residing in Washington. It was an ambitious plan, but Makish enjoyed challenges. The Red Death had proposed a sliding-scale bounty for each vampire slain. The greater the number killed, the larger the reward per Final Death. Tonight, Makish was feeling very greedy. And quite lethal.

Makish’s target this chapter is in a “popular private men’s club” called The Deadlands, located in Anacostia.

It was located east of the Anacostia river in one of the worst neighborhoods in Washington.

Hopefully Anacostia’s being portrayed like this because it’s the World of Darkness, a Harsher, Crueler Version of Our World, and not because it’s a low-income black neighborhood.

No one visited The Deadlands without a bodyguard. Or tried to enter without an invitation.

The club’s owned by an eighth-generation Toreador named John Thompson, a Camarilla liaison with the U.S. government who controlled several powerful politicians by, well, pimping to them.

Well connected with the most corrupt power mongers in the capital, Thompson worked hard to satisfy the most decadent wishes of his establishment’s exclusive membership.

Unfortunately for his “employees”, Thompson’s pimping style seems to be a Littlefinger as Jeff Epstein kind of deal, his services ranging from offering your typical vanilla paid sex to crueler fair.

No desire was too extreme for those who frequented the Deadlands. Sex and drugs were the norm. Orgies took place every night. Sadism, torture, even ritual sacrifice could be experienced—for the right price. More than one tax increase had been passed to help pay Thompson’s fee for a Congressman’s outrageous request.

You know what’s sad? In this real life hellworld, if politicians were paying to torture and murder prostitutes with their constituents’ tax money, would we even be surprised at this point? Plus, a chunk of the country would suddenly become openly pro prostitute murder and pay more money in taxes to “trigger the libs.”

Despite being Camarilla, Thompson’s business practices sound like something a Toreador antitribu would do, those guys finding beauty in the suffering of others. Makish seems to agree.

Makish was, in his own twisted manner, a highly moral individual. He considered Thompson a necessary but unfortunate link between the world of the living and undead. To ensure their safety, Kindred needed control over important people in government. That much Makish accepted. The assassin, however, found extremely distasteful the constant pandering to the basest instincts of the politicians. He felt such acts put the Camarilla on the same level as the hated Sabbat. Removing Thompson promised to be an enjoyable artistic endeavor.

Makish arrives at the club just after 1:00 am, with a bag full of handy assassin gadgets. He’s already in high spirits because he killed three racist thugs who tried to jump him on his walk to the club.

Before attacking, they had stupidly made several insulting remarks about the color of his skin and the nature of his ancestors. It had been bad judgement on their part. The Assamite had strangled the trio with their own intestines. Makish considered the horrified look of stunned disbelief in their eyes as they choked to death adequate repayment for their affronts to his dignity.

The club’s front entrance guarded by a half-dozen brick shithouse ghouls openly carrying AK-47′s.

No police patrolled this section of the capital. None dared.

More likely the ghouls look white enough to carry assault rifles in an American city, so the cops leave them alone.

Makish smiled and shook his head. Like too many of the Kindred, Thompson had grown complacent. He believed himself invulnerable. Dealing with ordinary humans had dulled the edge of his wits. Ghouls were stronger and faster and deadlier. However, they lacked imagination and realization what a truly powerful Kindred could do if provoked.

The Red Death mocked Kindred who depended on basic technology like security cameras. Madeleine Giovanni tore through the Mausoleum’s defenses and criticized its dependence on ghouls. Now Makish is doing the same. Is there any kind of security method these undead pricks don’t smugly look down on? I’m starting to think Vampire: The Masquerade should have kept the “vampires need to be invited in” rule.

Wait, I remember now. Madeleine couldn’t infiltrate Don Caravelli’s hideout. ‘Course, what defenses he has, beyond Kindred bodyguards, are suspiciously unmentioned. Maybe next book.

They were no match for an Assamite assassin. Especially this particular Assamite assassin. A direct assault would take too much time and give Thompson a chance to escape the surroundings. But there was more than one way to enter a fortress. Any fortress.

The Assamite Clan was renamed as the Banu Haqim in V5, and the term “Assamite” was changed into a disparaging nickname. At first I thought this change was because Assamite may have been a slur, but every google result leads to something V:TM related. It looks like Assamite’s just the word “assassin” changed up, making phrases like “Assamite assassin” sound redundant. No insensitivity in this case. Just a stupid name.

Makish does some rooftop hopping to get to The Deadlands.

The club was less than thirty feet away. The ghouls never looked up.

John Thompson exclusively ghouls stealth game NPCs.

The Deadlands is a rebuilt and reinforced Victorian mansion. Pretty extensively rebuilt too, since it’s five stories tall and Victorian homes typically had only two or three. It has alarms and motion detectors embedded in the roof and gables, which don’t go off when Makish lands on it.

The Assamite had mentally locked them into their present setting. Makish possessed incredible powers over machinery.

This again. I did some digging and learned there’s a branch of Thaumatergy called the Path of Technomancy. It could allow Makish to do this, but it was introduced in the Revised version of the Camarilla sourcebook released in 1999, four years after Blood War was published. It could also be a form of telekinesis. Whatever the case, it’s still a bullshit power to bust out so casually. It isn’t even unique to Makish.

Sensing that the only people on the top floor are two humans “engaged in an act of passion,” he hardens his fingers, peels off a section of the roof, and jumps down.

Thompson was two levels down, talking business with a pair of potential customers. Running on a tight schedule, Makish had no time for subtlety. He planned leaving no survivors of his attacks. While he disliked killing innocent bystanders, these lawmakers could hardly be described as guiltless. Murdering them was probably doing their constituents a favor.

The moment Makish enters, his stealth rating is immediately ruined. Those two mortals banging in another room? The ones Makish specifically noted and decided were unlikely to notice him entering? Makish was so busy fantasizing about killing corrupt politicians that he didn’t notice one of them, a high-priced prostitute, rush out of the room until she starts screaming. He quickly reads her mind, because he didn’t have enough powers. Look, he’s a thousand years old, so he gets a shmorgishborg of disciplines. He learns that her john, an old fuck of a senator, had a heart attack during his throes of passion. Classic scenario, I know. She ran out to find help, only to find this random Indian guy breaking in through a hole in the roof.

I’d like to say things go well for the woman. That Makish can also erase memories and wipes her mind so she forgets ever seeing him, or that he just knocked her out. But this is a dark fantasy story, and typical of dark fantasy, the sex worker dies.

“My apologies,” said Makish regretfully and slapped the screaming woman hard across the temple. The blow instantly shattered her skull and she collapsed on the floor in a pool of blood.”

Oh Makish. You were almost the most heroic character in this book. But hey, at least he feels sorry about it, eh? Eh? Eh.

He then checks on the senator in the room she ran out of, dragging her corpse along with him.

The senator lay on the bed, clutching his chest, gasping for breath. He had suffered a minor coronary. Enough to incapacitate him, but not to kill. Makish completed the job by tearing out the man’s heart.

Unnecessary, but I’m not going to judge him for that one.

“Casually, he threw the woman’s body across the politician’s. United in life, he felt it proper that they should be united in death.”

This I’ll judge him for. You already killed the poor woman, you don’t have to make it worse by trying to symbolically link her with the gross old guy she was paid to fuck. Friggin’ artists...

Alarms, activated by the girl’s screams, were ringing throughout the house.

You ask me, scream-activated alarms aren’t a good idea to have in a whorehouse.

Seriously though, a guard must have heard the screaming and sounded the alarm. Makish doesn’t use his maybe-tehcnomancy to turn them off.

He preferred minor chaos when he worked. Confusion served him well.

See? He meant to blow his cover the instant he entered the building.

Makish hurries downstairs and bumps into three armed ghouls. Pretending to be a terrified innocent bystander, he points them upstairs, telling them the now-dead senator might be dying. Then he tears out there throats as they run past him.

There aren’t any more interruptions on his way to Thompson’s office. He slips in, nods pleasantly to the two politicians inside, then kills them by smashing their heads together.

Thompson, a short, squat man with a huge handlebar mustache, gaped in astonishment.

Toreador are stereotyped as the Beautiful Vampires, but for every sexy male Toreador you get an average-looking schlub like Isaac Abrams and this guy. And no, I’m not giving him any points for the mustache. People with handlebar mustaches after 1900 are compensating for having no personality.

“Who-who are you?” he asked.

“I bring justice,” said the assassin, aware of the hidden camera and tape machines recording his every word and action. His rather stilted dialogue had come directly from the Red Death.

On the one hand, I love that Red D.’s canonically a bad writer. On the other, this is coming from an actual writer who’s allergic to contractions, and it’d be hard to notice when the dialogue is intentionally stilted without us being told so.

“For too many years your presence in this city has offended the Sabbat. Tonight that insult ends.”

You’d think being recorded claiming to represent the Sabbat would cause Makish future trouble getting Camarilla contracts, but he doesn’t look worried about it.

Thompson tries to stall for time, saying they can make a deal, but Makish already read his mind and knows about the already-pressed security button under his desk, and the hidden emergency escape passage nearby.

Makish toyed with the idea of letting Thompson escape into the passage, extending the hunt by a few minutes. It appealed to his sense of irony. But business was business and he had numerous other killings to perform tonight. Sometimes art had to be sacrificed in the name of expediency.

And sometimes expediency is needed to get an artist to make art at all. Am I right or am I right?

Makish reaches into his assassin bag and pulls out a big-ass wooden stake. Thompson shrieks and tries to escape, but Makish quickly stakes him in the heart.

Contrary to popular belief, a wooden stake didn’t kill a vampire. However, it did paralyze the Cainite until removed. Thompson was unharmed, merely immobilized. Which was exactly what Makish wanted.

I’d like to thank Weinberg for not subjecting us to yet another one of those “everything the movies say about vampires is bullshit” speeches that’s in every other vampire story. Even Bloodlines couldn’t resist one.

Also, “unharmed” like stabbing someone in the chest with a big wooden spike leaves no mark.

Next out of Makish’s bag is a roll of gray tape and “a small circular device two inches in diameter.” He also technomances all the recording devices off.

He preferred not displaying his special toys to the eyes of either the Camarilla or the Sabbat. His fondness for Thermit was well known. Death by high explosives was Makish’s favorite artistic expression.

This is one of those scenes that’s stuck with me since I first read this book all those years ago. The way Makish kills Thompson is actually pretty awesome, and is a better example of an “artistic kill” than just disemboweling someone in one quick blow. Just ignore how he’s able to do all this before the ghouls Thompson summoned reach the office.

“Open wide, please,” said Makish politely, and with one hand forced the round ball into Thompson’s mouth. A thin strand of wire connected the device to the stake buried in the vampire’s chest. Carefully Makish wound the heavy-duty tape around his victim’s mouth and upper body. Reinforced with optical fiberglass threads, the tape was nearly indestructible. It could not be torn, only unraveled. Taking it off required hours of hard work. Removing the stake, though, took much less effort.

“Your ghouls should arrive shortly,” declared Makish cheerfully. “Seeing you frozen on the floor, they will immediately think to withdraw the cause of your anguish. You will not be able to tell them not to. Unfortunately, when they pull out the stake, the action will activate the trigger of the plaything in your mouth. It is a small but extremely powerful Thermit bomb. The resulting fire should burn your body to ashes in seconds. The colors will be spectacular. It will be an artistic finish to your existence.”

Taking his bag, Makish stepped into the secret passage. It was a quicker, easier escape method than returning to the roof.

“Goodbye”’ he said to the unmoving Thompson. “Thank you for your cooperation. Enjoy the wait.”

Funny story about this scene.

Like I said, this kill made such an impression on me I still remembered it twenty years later. But over that time, I forgot certain other details about the story. Like Makish. As in, I forgot the character existed at all. The same thing happened with Mad-Eye Moody between Harry Potter books. I read Order of the Phoenix when it came out, several years after The Goblet of Fire, and thought “Wait, who’s this guy with the fake eye? Is he important?”

While I was forgetting details about Blood War, I’d been reading online discussions about Bloodlines after it came out. I’d never played the game before 2019, but I knew a bit about the plot, characters, and notable events... I’d say through cultural osmosis, but let’s be real, Bloodlines was hardly popular enough to be called part of a culture. I was just good at remembering useless geek crap with no real-world applicability. The stuff I knew about the game included a character in it who also made an impressive kill using explosives. 

What I’m saying is, memories blurred together and for several years and until now, I would have sworn the killer in this scene was Smiling Jack.

Now I know Jack was introduced in Bloodlines, but just a year ago I’d thought that maybe he was a character from the tabletop or an early novel, like Beckett. Also, I misremembered his name as Mad Jack. Long story short, I read the book, learned about Makish, went “oh”, remembered that my family has a history of senility, and sunk into existential despair.

The explosion was so loud that Makish heard it two blocks from The Deadlands. He nodded in satisfaction, deciding it was an excellent beginning for the evening’s endeavors.

[dalehalaway]

Align Your Life With Your 7 Energy Centers

You may have heard of chakras, but how much do you really know about them? Do you understand the impact they have not only on your physical body, but also in how you experience your life? Some people dive deeply into learning about the chakras, while others may have briefly heard about them or seen a picture somewhere with different colors cascading down the center of the body. Whether you’re familiar or unfamiliar with the chakras, or as they are referred to in this article, the “energy centers,” they are the core of your life.  Many who are working with their chakras are missing a key component in creating lasting change with the work they are attempting to do. You see, each one of your energy centers represents a chunk of your personal power. If any of these centers gets jammed, you will become temporarily disconnected from an aspect of your power. Further, if you are not living in an authentic way, the work you attempt to do will feel much like spinning in circles - you’ll have the sense that you are making good time, but in reality you’re getting nowhere. As I take you through these centers and we dive into what each of them means for you and how they directly influence your life experiences, you'll have a deeper knowledge and a solid foundation to operate from. This will greatly support you in keeping your energy centers open and moving them towards alignment and unified ascension.  It is important to note that in whatever way you are currently living your life, you are living it from these centers. Everybody does. If you're living from a jammed-up or constipated center, you'll know because something in your life will jam up. You'll feel like you're blocked or being held back from something. Learning how to decode what’s happening in your world, trace it back to these centers, and then ultimately heal it is priceless knowledge. But you must be willing to get honest with yourself. You must have the courage to look at what isn’t working in your world so that you can heal it. That’s how you begin real, authentic change – the kind of change that alters your life and the way you experience it – the kind of change that heals health problems, restores relationships and empowers you to live an authentic and fulfilled life! Each of your energy centers, like all energy, is made up of light. When an energy center in your body is healthy, it spins in a circular fashion. It's bright in its light. If the center is jammed, then you’ll experience dysfunction in some part of your life, or possibly in a part of your body that corresponds with its energy center. As we go through each center, you're going to make connections to the areas of your life that are and aren’t working. Whatever is going on in your life that you feel might be holding you back from experiencing a greater good – you’ll more than likely get an answer within these seven centers about where it’s coming from. That’s because you’ll discover that one or more of these centers is jammed within you, and you might not even be aware of it.  Isn’t it exciting to know that you have a road map to the answers for a more fulfilling, peaceful and enlightened existence - and it is imprinted within you? All you need is a deeper understanding of how to read the map... So, let’s get started! # 1 The first center is the Grounding Center. This center is responsible for anchoring. It is also referred to as the Root Chakra. When the Grounding Center is open, fluid and healthy, you will feel really anchored and rooted into your life. For example, if you really value your career, then you’ll feel grounded, centered and supported in your career. You will have a sense of knowing that your career is the right place for you. Think of a tree. What’s the purpose of its roots? Yes, it’s the roots that determine how large and strong that tree can ultimately be. In order for the tree to grow, however, it needs to be in the right environment. For example, most trees will not do well in just water. A tree needs soil, and the type of tree will determine the type of soil or environment it specifically needs to anchor into and grow. Just like we too need the right environment - as in the right career or the right relationships with co-workers, family and friends. When we have this in place, we feel grounded in our own lives. As this happens, we naturally start to grow. In other words, without being grounded in our lives, personally or professionally, our growth becomes inhibited. It’s the depth of the roots that determines how much you’ll grow and expand in your life. When you're grounded properly, you will feel a safety that is real. You’ll feel rooted. You'll be able to trust in a higher and greater good working on your behalf - or a higher and greater process at play in your life. You’ll be able to trust in yourself and your own intuitive voice.  Everything that's important to you comes more alive when you're well-grounded. We’ve all had at least one person in our lives who when we’re with, or when we hear their voice, can ground us within minutes. It’s because they feel safe in their Grounding Center, which can cause us to feel safe as a result of simply being around them. 

If you're not well-grounded, you’ll have experiences that are quite the opposite because you haven’t taken the time to anchor yourself properly. You won’t feel as alive. You won’t be in touch with your greater abilities. You won’t feel as connected with your inner, intuitive voice. As a result, you could even become something that you're not.  You may find yourself in a relationship, business or career where you are constantly trying to be someone that you're never going to be. You could end up in a relationship with somebody where you feel like you're never good enough. You might have a deep-seated safety issue, making it challenging to trust anybody in your life. And you clearly won’t be able to trust yourself. You won't feel rooted to anything and you most certainly won’t feel anchored. Therefore, it will be nearly impossible for you to be who you were intended to become from the very beginning. On a scale of 1 to 10; 10 being strong; 1 being not very strong; how grounded do you feel: In your career? Why did you choose this number? What could you do starting right away to improve this number? With your friends? Why did you choose this number? What could you do starting right away to improve this number? With your family? Why did you choose this number? What could you do starting right away to improve this number? In your relationship? Why did you choose this number? What could you do starting right away to improve this number? Do a visualization exercise in which you envision yourself as a tree. Take a deep breath. See your feet firmly planted on the ground. Now, imagine roots growing out from the bottom of your feet extending deeply down into the ground anchoring you into the earth. Whenever you realize that you are feeling uncertain, unanchored and unrooted, you can do this exercise to further anchor yourself and help center yourself in your root chakra. # 2 The second energy center is the Creativity Center. This center is the sacral part of you, also known as the Sacral Chakra. Our creativity is to be seen as something sacred, but you probably know people who just don’t see their creativity that way. Or if they do, they clearly don't act like their creativity is really sacred to them.  Consider the act of conceiving and giving birth to a child. Creating life is an act of natural creativity. It's clearly a second energy center function. In fact, that's how all of us got here! Two people came together and were willing to activate their second energy center and conceive a child. Perhaps at the point of conception, those two people saw this as a sacred act of creating life. But that may or may not be true. Maybe they were drunk or high as a kite that night and could have cared less. Maybe they were just being reckless. In other words, it was not seen as sacred. If that’s the case, then this center is jammed or is going to jam - it's just a question of time.  Needless to say, the Creativity Center rules our sexuality and our expression of it. Some people have a healthy form of expressing their sexuality. Others might be addicted to sex and have an unhealthy sexual expression. An addiction going on within our field of consciousness could contribute to jamming up this creative center as well, resulting in dysfunction. Another area this center rules is our finances and our relationship with money. Some, for example, have a healthy relationship with their money. As a result, money shows up in a consistent, abundant way for them. On the other hand, those who have an unhealthy relationship with money could generate a lot of money and still find themselves struggling with not having enough, falling behind on their bills, overspending, etc.  This energy center also rules our ability to feel. This ability often gets suppressed. A lot of people shut down to their feelings and literally don't feel them because they have a difficult time connecting to their emotions. Therefore, they also have a difficult time connecting to the feelings of somebody outside themselves. If someone’s “inner feeler” is not working properly, then they’ll take their feeler to the negative. They won’t feel well. As a result, they’ll get swallowed up by their own negative feelings or by the negative feelings of somebody else. They’ll get consumed by conversations when somebody does something wrong and all they’ll want to do is talk about it. The Creativity Center also controls passion. If this energy center is alive and flowing properly, then you'll have something or someone in your life that you're very passionate about - and it's a genuine passion. If you’re in a relationship, you’ll feel really alive and passionate about that relationship. If it's a career, you’ll be extremely passionate and driven in the career that you genuinely want to pursue. If it's a role in life such as parenting, you’ll be passionate and invested in being a parent. Whatever it is about, your passion will bring you a feeling of excitement. As a result, you’ll feel vibrantly alive.  The Creativity Center is also connected to the feminine part of ourselves. When the masculine and feminine are out of balance, this can further jam the Creativity Center. This doesn’t mean that one has to be extremely masculine or feminine, but rather that there is a healthy balance between the two. When the Creativity Center is wide open, it's seen as sacred because it's coming from the sacral within you. There's a part of you that wants to reside in this sacred chamber, but if one or two of your energy centers is malfunctioning, you'll have a difficult time getting into this chamber. This is because the only way you get into this chamber is with a part of your Soul. This energy center has to be spinning properly. It has to be in a functional mode and it has to be healthy.  Ask yourself the following questions: Do you express your sexuality in a healthy way? Do you hold yourself back from expressing your sexuality? Think of someone who you believe is expressing their sexuality authentically. What do you see with how this person is authentically expressing their sexuality? How could you change in authentically expressing your sexuality? How would you define your relationship with your finances? In what ways could you improve your relationship with money?  Does your creativity flow freely? On a scale from 1 - 10; 10 being highly creative; 1 being non-creative; rate your degree of creativity. What are some ways you could unblock and help foster your creativity?  # 3 The third center is the Identity Center, also referred to as the Solar Plexus Chakra. There’s a tremendous amount of power that sits in your solar plexus, such as your personal power and your willpower. When this center is closed, it results in an abuse and misuse of power.  Somebody who’s dysfunctional in this center will have a deep-seated control issue and will always have a need to be very controlling. Therefore, they'll use their power in a way that's not in their highest and greatest good. They'll misuse their power from an unhealthy and needy place, desperately trying to control their environment, relationship and/or career.  This center also rules wisdom. It determines how much wisdom you're going to gain in the context of a lifetime. If the Identity Center is functional and spinning well, then you're probably going to gain a lot of wisdom in this lifetime. If this center is plugged, however, good luck with how much wisdom you can ultimately accumulate! It becomes impossible to open yourself up to the wisdom and lessons learned from mistakes if you don’t have a relatively solid connection with your own identity and personal power.  The Identity Center also rules your willpower. Everybody starts off with a certain amount of will. Over time, if the center closes and becomes dysfunctional, then the will becomes weaker. When this center has been jammed up for years, eventually people can come to the place where they no longer have a will to live anymore - they no longer have a will to be in a relationship anymore - they no longer have a will to pursue their career anymore - and/or they no longer have a will to transform themselves anymore. It's because their Identity Center has been weakened.  If willpower is being used properly, this identity center is functional and spinning correctly. More importantly, wisdom can now be gained. The beauty of this is that when it's all said and done, your Soul wants to become wiser than it currently is. Your Soul wants to evolve and grow. But in order for that to happen, you must have a healthy relationship with it and a good understanding of how to use your willpower for a higher good.

For example, if someone makes decisions to hold themselves back from experiencing their fear, that is a misuse of their power. They’re using their power to literally create a wedge between them and whatever they’re so afraid of. This is different than discernment, which is important for making decisions. But holding yourself back when you are to really be stepping into something, simply because you’re afraid, is not a good use of power. You aren’t going to accumulate wisdom that way. The only way you accumulate wisdom is when you're correctly using your willpower in concert with your Heart Center, which I refer to as your Connecting Center, this is the next center we’ll explore. You must choose to become courageous as you face, own up to, encounter and step through whatever the experience is that you’ve been so afraid of.  Any of this can be corrected, but first you need to recognize that this center is malfunctioning. Ask yourself questions such as, “Do I have an issue with using my power properly? Have I abused or misused my power? If so, then when? How am I going to utilize my power today? Do I have a malfunctioning Identity Center?”  Consider for a moment the power of your will when it comes to addictive behaviors such as overeating, sugary foods, drugs, alcohol or shopping. On a scale of 1 - 10; 10 being really strong; 1 being really weak; give your willpower in these areas a rating. Why did you give yourself these numbers? What could you do to increase these numbers for yourself? The power of your will when it comes to addictions is just as crucial to your success as is using your power properly in other areas. These are all check points when it comes to manifesting and living the life you were truly meant to live. This can help you greatly now that you know what to ask yourself in order to keep moving forward. # 4 The fourth center is the Connecting Center. This center is also known as the Heart Chakra. One of the ways you can tell somebody has disconnected here is that their heart space will have an energetic shield of armor around it. Those who are open in their second center (Creativity Center/Sacral Chakra) and have the ability to feel energy, can literally feel the shield of armor when they hug someone who’s Connecting Center (Heart Chakra) is closed off.  This is somebody who's disconnected not only from others, but also from themselves. They live in their head a lot of the time, over-analyzing most everything. They easily get sucked into mental fixation and can become mentally obsessed with things. They can get caught into what's known as mental looping, where they start spinning, much like a broken record going over and over the same thing in their head. This eventually results in a lack of fulfillment in their life. This is all because they are disconnected in their fourth energy center.   Someone who has an open and vibrant Connecting Center naturally invites and welcomes in heart-to-heart conversations with a family member, or a friend, associate and/or client. If we are open in this center and find that the energies between us and someone else in our life have become stuck, or perhaps have gone to a more negative place, we will call for a heart-to-heart conversation right away. We won’t let this sit for weeks and weeks. There simply won’t be an issue around stepping into this type of conversation when this center is open and healthy in our lives. And we find ourselves fulfilled by these conversations, as they usually leave us feeling more connected to the other person and feeling even more connected to ourselves.  The Connecting Center literally rules the physical heart. If someone is always disconnected, meaning they are not really connecting properly at the level of their heart space, their physical heart will manifest the pain of that disconnect over time. This person who disconnects really well can eventually have a heart attack or end up with heart disease. It might take 10 years or more to get there, but that’s where it will land if they stay on the path to shutting this part of themselves down.  It is important to have an understanding of the connection between the Connecting Center (Heart Chakra) and the Grounding Center (Root Chakra). These two are literally connected, meaning that if there's a shield of armor in the Connecting Center protecting your heart, then the Grounding Center will also be off. You will be off in both centers because in order to be in your heart, you've got to be grounded. If you're not grounded, the most you can do is go in and out of your heart. This can cause a serious trust and safety issue.  If you are wondering if this might be you, check in with yourself over the last five hours; How much time have you spent in your head? When was the last time you got fixated? When was the last time you became obsessed? When was the last time you started looping the same set of thoughts over and over again?  On a scale from 1-10; 10 being greatly fulfilled; 1 being discontent and unfulfilled; ask yourself, “How much of the time am I truly content and fulfilled in my life?” Why did you give yourself this rating? Is there someone in your life that would be beneficial for you to have a Heart-to-Heart conversation with?  What is something you could do to bring more fulfillment to your life starting right now? And can you make a commitment to do whatever you discovered in this exercise that could bring you more fulfillment? The answers to each of these questions are all indicators that your Connecting Center might not be functional. If this resonates with you, then make a note of these questions and ask them to yourself every day for the next 7 days. This will help you become conscious of the dynamics within you so that you can begin to make different choices with your thoughts. Then you can start incrementally healing this part of you, opening your heart and leading you to a life with more joy and fulfillment.  # 5 The fifth center is the Expressive Center. This center regulates the throat, which means it affects the voice and communication. It is also known as the Throat Chakra. When somebody has communication issues with someone they're in a relationship with; such as one of their kids, a boss, co-worker, friend, romantic partner or even with themselves, this is a direct effect of a dysfunctional Expressive Center.  Take, for example, someone who is always getting sick in their throat. They've often got a cold or sore throat - or maybe not always, but approximately every six weeks on a cycle almost like clock-work, something happens in their throat area. They really should pay attention to this because that's their physical body working to let them know they have a challenge with their Expressive Center.  Physical throat issues are an indication that someone is not expressing properly. They might be expressing in a way that often goes combative. Have you ever been around somebody who’s really aggressive and comes at you almost like you're under attack? That's somebody who’s got a dysfunctional Expressive Center. In terms of the energy centers, they've got issues literally sitting energetically around the throat area of their body. It clearly shows up in how their voice is being used. When we’re using our voice properly, we’re expressing our power from a higher and greater place. Your words carry incredible power. If the Expressive Center is dysfunctional, then your words will not only be negative, but they can also have a destructive effect on the lives of others. If this power is being misused because you're not using your voice correctly, there's going to be a consequence. There's going to be an unnecessary pain for you and others as a result of the misusing of your voice. Some people have issues around speaking up. Others don't speak the truth and live more inauthentically versus living authentically. Others have issues around articulating and communicating with people outside themselves when it's appropriate to communicate how they’re feeling or what they want. On the flip side, some people project onto others without thinking it through. Ask yourself, is it always appropriate to just blurt out a thought just because you have it? Or might it be more appropriate to gather more information and be with it for a little while before you speak up?  Is the knowledge you’ve now gained from learning about this center bringing an awareness to your throat area? Check your throat to see if it is tight or tense. Bring your attention to your throat area and give yourself permission to relax into it. Choosing to relax into this area allows you to connect with the tight or tense energy that might have a specific message for you around why the throat area in your body became tight or tense in the first place. You can use this technique to help you release that tense energy, which will loosen up the Expressive Center in order to get it moving again. Because this energy center governs the throat, it becomes a question of time that if people don't get a handle on this, then the throat is going to experience some kind of an issue. Think of the last time you had trouble speaking up. How did you feel afterward? What could you do differently the next time you’re in this situation? By learning to speak up correctly, this will free the part of you that is jamming up this center. It may seem frightening at first, but it is one of the most empowering things you will ever do for yourself. The various things I have mentioned here are all things that someone who has a challenge in the Expressive Center gets to learn. Should they choose to recognize whatever those lessons are and actually learn them, this energy center can become vibrant and radiant. And as it does, they might be pleasantly surprised with what they’re actually able to do as a Soul through the correct use of their voice. # 6 The sixth energy center is the Knowing Center, also known as the Third Eye Chakra. This center works hand-in-hand with the Creativity Center (Sacral Chakra), which governs the ability to feel. However, people can often confuse their Knowing Center for their Creativity Center because they think that knowing is feeling. Knowing is actually deeper than feeling and resides in a different place within us. People sometimes confuse these two concepts and get themselves snagged. This is because knowing comes through the feeling body and the two centers are deeply connected. So, learning to discern between the two centers is important.   If, for example, somebody is imbalanced in their Creativity Center, then their Ego will be able to use this dysfunction to bring forth a false knowing. They will feel so strongly about someone or something in their life that they are convinced they know it’s the right situation for them. They will believe this is coming from their Higher Self, when in fact, it’s coming from their Ego. They may not want to see any unpleasant truths about the situation because they’re hooked into it, so it may never even reach the Knowing Center. They may even try to convince others that “God spoke to them,” and they’re completely sure this is right for them. Then they might have a rude awakening 5 months down the road when they begin to learn the painful lesson that God actually wasn’t speaking to them. It was really their Ego using their feelings through the Creativity Center to convince them it was a knowing.  As a result, they’ll get to learn the so-called “hard way.” And if they put themselves on the line by telling a bunch of people they knew they were seeing it correctly, they’ll now have an added pressure. So they may end up staying in an experience that doesn’t serve them for another year, or even 10 years. And when they’re finally said and done with it, they’ll realize it was a tough road and wish to never have another one of those experiences again. This is because this was a false knowing from the beginning.  A true knowing does not come from the Ego. A true knowing comes from the Soul. It's deeper than a feeling. In other words, this is a higher intuition. It's super refined. It's like a martial art or fifth-degree black belt. As you ascend to each increasing degree, it becomes more refined within you. As it does, higher intuition can come in the form of an awareness that floods the body with its message. This message is something that you just know. There is no denying it. You’ll know what’s really going on with yourself, or possibly with someone else, and exactly what to do next. For example, this can come when someone that’s close to you is about to die. The cells of your body are flooded with the message that they are near their death. You might even get the exact time of their coming passing. It can literally be that refined. The release of this intuitive knowing energy flows out of the upper center in your physical body. It is a phenomenal energy center that governs how you see things. When this center is really healthy, you’ll see things correctly. Remember, life is perceptual. So, if this center is jammed up, you won’t see things correctly. But there's a chance you'll be convinced that you are seeing things correctly. If this center is really healthy, you’ll see things exactly as they are. Part of what you’ll see is the deeper purpose and the perfection in our imperfect ways. The Knowing Center also rules our imagination. Your imagination is a gift, an ability and a powerful resource.

If you're going to get good at creating things in your life, you've got to get hooked up to your imagination. More importantly, you've got to be able to use your imagination in the most productive of ways. People with a dysfunctional sixth energy center do not use their imagination correctly. They constantly imagine something negative or the absolute worst that might happen. They imagine all these nasty, negative and destructive things. They misuse their gift and resource of imagination. Most of us know how important it is to stay focused. Somebody who's got a weak Knowing Center might be able to get focused, but cannot sustain it. I'm sure you've come across these people. They’re really focused in the moment, but two weeks later they’re somewhere else. When the Knowing Center is healthy, you won't just give your focus to anyone or anything. You’ll be very discerning with and where you put your attention, focus and imagination. Can you think of a time when you knew something was going to happen and it did? Can you think of a time when, all of a sudden, you had a sense something had just happened and upon your investigation of it, you learn that it did? On a scale of 1-10; 10 being highly imaginative; 1 having little imagination; how imaginative are you? Why did you give yourself this number? Whether you gave yourself a low score or high score, a simple exercise you can do to further ignite your imagination is to go outside and lie on the ground. Look up at the clouds and take 5 minutes to see shapes of animals in the clouds. This is a fun practice to do with other people or all by yourself.  What was your reaction to the thought of lying on the ground and looking up at the clouds? Did this seem ridiculous to you or did it sound like fun? Your reaction to this exercise is also a good gauge on how functional this energy center is. The more you can reinvent what is right before you, the more you can begin to reshape your own reality and bring your jammed energy center back online. Increasing your imagination will aid in other areas as well such as your ability to manifest, meditate and to connect with and raise your inner child. If you lack focus, it is a good idea to set some small goals for yourself and check back in with yourself on a regular basis. Setting some reminders is a good way to bring yourself back to the awareness of what you are attempting to turn into an effortless routine. Just remember that there’s nothing wrong with helping yourself get into the habit of bringing these dormant thought processes to the conscious present.  Listening to educational audio programs while driving in your car, exercising or cleaning your house is another way to help open this center. Listening to something that stimulates you and gives you a new way of looking at or thinking about something, can greatly improve your perspective and strengthen the Knowing Center. Every time I teach a class or seminar, I always encourage my students to adopt this habit of listening to audio programs for these reasons. Your focus, intuition and imagination can be refined with some of these simple, yet powerful exercises and habits. The awareness you gain will take you further towards keeping this powerful center open and moving.  # 7 The seventh center is the Truth Center. This is where authenticity and honesty come from. This center is also known as the Crown Chakra. Some people are honest about what happens in their life, no matter what it might be. Even if it’s an ugly truth, they don’t keep it inside. They are honest because they have a healthy seventh energy center. Somebody who's got an unhealthy energy center will tell lies. They could even become a pathological liar over time because they’ll make up stories designed to make sure their dishonesty never gets found out. This person might even get so deep in hiding the truth that they hide it from themselves and begin to believe their own lies. They're not living authentically. The Truth Center is also where we find our light and the light of our "beingness". If this center starts to malfunction, the light gets cut off. This is the person who, over time, starts to experience their life becoming darker, denser and more depressing. It's because they're temporarily cut off from the light. This is a painful consequence of a dysfunctional Truth Center.  Who you really are, is made up of this light. And who you really are, as in your real self, is found through this energy center. So, if this energy center is malfunctioning, the best you'll be able to do is intellectualize what your real self might become in this life. If this center is healthy, vibrant and radiant, then you've dramatically increased the odds of discovering your real self. This is the center that gives you all access to truth, whether the truth is pleasant or unpleasant.  So, what happens if someone doesn’t want to see the ugly truth? What happens if they don't want to see the truths that are going to cause change in their world? When someone is in denial of the truth, this is how the Knowing Center (6th Center/Third Eye Chakra) can shut down. They might not be as honest as they could be and they most certainly won't be living their life authentically. They’ll shut down the Truth Center because it’s the only way they can survive. This is because when this center is open and fluid, vibrant and radiant, it gives immediate access to truth, twenty-four seven.  The Truth Center also governs the values of one’s Soul. If this center gets shut down or jammed, then there will be a disconnect from the values that are encoded in the DNA of their Soul. At the very best, all they can do is connect to a false value that's coming out of the creation of their Ego. And then how do they determine the difference between those two values? They will get tricked by their Ego into believing that it’s their real value, when in fact it's not. As long as this center is backed up, they’ll be temporarily disconnected from their Soul’s core values.  When this center opens, our dreams take on a different experience because we’re accessing our truth from inside ourselves. We’ll get answers to questions quickly. They can come through something as simple as a dream during the night. Then the next morning we’ll have the answer - and we’ll know we have the answer because we’ll feel it in our bones. And then as long as our power center is active and healthy, we’ll consciously follow through on that answer. This will bring a positive result right away. In the beginning, when you start doing this, it will blow your mind how simple and easy it can actually be, how good it can work for you and how authentic you will feel. Speaking of authenticity, I ask you, “Are you living your life authentically?” I encourage you on a day-to-day basis to ask yourself at the close of your day, “Did I live my life in the most authentic of ways today?” Keep in mind, you must first be willing to ask yourself the question in order to open yourself up to receiving the answer. This will give you a better understanding of what's going on so that you can see whatever you are to be seeing. After all, only then can you actually start making the corrections.  Think of the last time you told a lie. Did you justify the lie with a reason it needed to be told? How did you feel afterward? What would the outcome have been if you’d told the truth? And now think of the last time you considered telling a lie, but chose to tell the truth instead. How did that make you feel? You likely felt a sense of power after making the choice to be truthful. This is because each lie weakens our personal power and each truth strengthens it. Making a conscious choice to always tell the truth may seem inconsequential, but it is one of the most empowering things you will ever do for yourself. And if you are living your life in a way that lies are no longer necessary, you are moving towards your true power and a life of authenticity.

Remember, everything is energy. So, when a center is functioning properly, that part of your body also functions properly. If that center is dysfunctional, then that part of your body will start to show itself to you. It might not happen right away. It could take a couple of months or might even take years, but it will reveal itself.  Everybody has these 7 energy centers within them - and with an understanding of them, they can keep these centers open and functioning optimally. When you really understand the purpose of these centers and how they are able to communicate with you, you’ll see the perfection. You’ll want to stay connected with this internal road map, which will lead you to peace, harmony and enlightenment. This system has been designed for us to succeed in life - to be enriched on all levels and aspects of our lives, both personally and professionally - and ultimately for all of us to be living our lives authentically. - Dale Halaway

  For a deeper dive into this life-changing practice of balancing your energy centers, check out the full Align Your Life with Your 7 Energy Centers: Energy Center Alignment Course >   About Dale Halaway: Dale Halaway has been influencing the lives and careers of thousands for almost forty years. Dale is one of the World’s leading authorities on personal and business transformation, entrepreneurial success and real leadership development. He is an international speaker, master teacher, success coach, strategic advisor and transformational authority. Dale is a leader in the movement for awakening and change, and is the author of a new guidebook for lasting change, entitled “Being Called to Change”, which has become a #1 best seller on Amazon.   Read the full article

[httpjoi]

New Year. New Me. {Peter Pan Imagine}

Part One  Part Two Part Three

Peter Pan Imagine

Author: Joi A. Wade

Tagged: @tmrhollandkay, @ arfrona

Requested: Yes,  HI CAN I HAVE A EXTREME FLUFF IMAGINE WITH ROBBIE KAY OR PETER PAN WHERE YOU GUYS GET INTO A REALLY REALLY BAD FIGHT AND YOU DECIDE YOU GUYS SHOULD BREAK UP AND HES LIKE NO BABE WAIT IM SORRY AND YOURE LIKE NOPE I CANT DO THIS ANYMORE AND THEN YOU LEAVE AND HE CANT FUNCTION WITHOUT YOU SO HE TRIES TO WIN YOU BACK AND IT TAKES A WHILE BUT ONE DAY HE FINALLY WINS YOU BACK EXTREMELY FLUFFY PLEASE

Note: Thank you all for being such amazing people and being patient with me! Thank you for loving my slow ass, and my stories, it means a lot that you guys stick with me!

It’s been a while since Y/n had seen him. Never had she thought the time would come that he’d be finally calling her phone, in such a long period of time. Six an a half years is a long time to wait. Especially for an ex. 

“I’m glad you had time to see me, Y/n. It’s been so long.” 

Y/n smiles politely, looking down at the cup of tea her company had ordered for her. 

“Well, I gotta admit, it was quite the surprise when you called, Newton.” 

“Newt. Please, call me Newt. You’re one of the very few that I allow to, and…I miss how it sounds coming from your mouth.” He chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck in nervousness. “S-Sorry, that um..sounded bloody creepy, but you get my point.”

Sighing heavily, her politeness was slowly starting to fade away. She knew what this was, she wasn’t stupid. In the past six years Y/n has gotten not one phone call or text message from this guy, and then all of sudden here he is acting all awkward and charming at the same time. Setting her cup down after taking a short gulp of it, she finally makes eye contact with the man before her.

“Look, Newton. Things didn’t work out between us because you loved your music more than I.” 

“That’s not true-”

“Let me finish,” She holds her hand up, silencing him. “I was understanding, I was fair and actually wanted you to be happy and let you go. I moved on. Which was a mistake, I’ll admit, but it helped my unhappiness turn into something else. I fell in love again. And now that I am once again heartbroken, you decide to turn up, saying sweet nothings to me as if all of what you put me through never happened. Now how is that fair to me? ” 

“Love, I came back for you because I realized my only dream was with you. You were my dream.” 

“Oh, cut the bullshit.” 

Newt’s eyes widen at her venomous tone. Last time he had spoken to Y/n, she had such a sweet demeanor about herself, everything about her was kind and gentle. Earlier on this little gathering she was calm and collected, but now she is speaking to him in such a way he had never heard her speak before. 

“What’s happened to you?” 

“Life, Newton. Life fucking happened to me. You wanna know what I’ve been through? You leave me for your stupid music career, not even returning my calls or emails or letters. Then, when I finally move on to another guy, I find out he’s cheating on me with some bitch for nearly half of the time we’ve been together, then trying to make me seem like the bad guy! And now that I’m somewhat over him, you show the fuck up! Out of nowhere!”

“Love, calm down-”

“Don’t you tell me to calm down! I deserve to be fucking mad! I put up with so much, sticking up for guys that don’t deserve it, and I wonder why I end up the same way! Heartbroken!” By now, she was starting to draw attention to their table, alarming a certain few while the others watched with anticipation. Newt stands up slowly with his hands up, trying not to provoke her any further. 

“Y/n, please, I didn’t mean to struck a nerve-”

“Bullshit!”

“Can you please talk to me without cursing at me, for bloody sake?” 

“I just think it’s a coincidence how you show up, right when I start to get out of my funk and feel better about finally leaving that dickhead. Were you just waiting for the perfect opportunity to make your way back into my life? When I was at my most vulnerable? Well, news flash for you, buddy! The only thing you’re getting from me, are these hands!”

Y/n was about to jump right over the table and tackle the poor, confused, Brit. Luckily, someone was able to grab her by the waist at the right time before she could even cross the table. Holding her close to their chest, Newt was able to take a few steps back, while making eye contact with the person behind her. Y/n squirmed against their hold, until the familiar scent of pine clogged her nostrils. Her squirming ceased. For now.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” 

“Oh, you don’t remember me, Newtie? I’m hurt, I thought we had something special.” 

Once Newt’s eyes actually scanned his face, he glared. Lowering his hands from his self-defense stance, he crossed them over his chest. “Very funny, Pan. I see that you didn’t change at all. Except for getting uglier, of course.”

“And you’re still the same after all these years, as well. Except you’re still single.” 

Y/n pushes away from Peter with great force, nearly knocking him backwards. Straightening out her shirt, she huffs in anger. “What the hell are you doing here? Where’s your little sex toy?” 

Peter drew his attention to Y/n, the playful glint in his eyes turning melancholy. 

“Y/n, I know I am the last person you want to see right now, and I understand that. I was a completely asshole, and deserve to burn in hell for what I did behind your back. But, if you give me a moment to explain-”

“So it’s you.” Newt connects, as a grin started to form on his face. “You’re the one who cheated, while you were still in the relationship with Y/n. Did you honestly think you would get away with that?”

“Can we talk somewhere a little more private, love?” 

“No. And don’t call me that. We can settle this right here, right now. I’ve been waiting to actually kick your ass, now that the tears finally stopped. Do you realize how humiliated you made me feel after that night? How absolutely filthy you left me? And you had some nerve to try and blame me! The only person that saw good in you, cared for you, loved you!” Each word spoken was a shove to his chest, which he happily took. He was just glad that she was actually talking to him. 

“I understand that you are in pain-”

“Oh, you can’t even begin to understand! Giving your love to someone who you thought was the one, only to have it blow up in your face, you have no idea what that feels like!”

“I could’ve warned you in the first place, Y/n. It’s your own fault for thinking a bloke like Pan would ever-” Before he could finish his unneeded input, Y/n picked up his cup of tea and threw what was left of it into his face. It was just hot enough to prove a point: for him to shut the fuck up. “Ahh! Mother of fu-Jesus Christ! Shit, shit, shit, shit! Bloody, burning hell!” 

Newt rushes to find the nearest bathroom, a few workers following behind him, as others just stare in shock or gaze in amusement. Placing the cup back on the table, Y/n turns back to Peter, with rage darkening her eyes. 

“Y/n, I-”

“I thought I told you to stay the hell away from me. How did you even know I was here?” 

“That’s not important, what’s important is us fixing this problem that we have-”

“We don’t have a problem! You do, and only you! I was perfectly happy being with you, I didn’t care what people said about your past relationships because none of that mattered, it’s in the past for a reason! I didn’t care when they called you bad news, I didn’t care that my parents didn’t approve of you, and I didn’t care how much we argued over stupid shit! What I cared about was you, and how much I loved you. You were there when Newt left, you were my friend, someone I could talk to when I needed it. You listened, you cared…And when you asked me out, I thought moving on was too good to be true, but you changed that. And look where it got us! Five fucking years I gave to you, and this whole time that was just a game to you.”

“It wasn’t a game-” 

“Hearing a lot of bullshit today, you know. You knew exactly what you were doing, Peter. And you knew the person you did it with I despised, yet you still did it anyway.” Tears were starting to form in her eyes, as the heat of the moment was dying down and reality was coming back to her. The man that broke her already bruised heart was standing right there, with the guts to say that he didn’t mean what he did. What does he take her for, a fool? 

“Y/n, what I did was unforgivable, we both know that. But, love, I regret it.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Three words that don’t matter at all to me? I regret giving you my time, mind, body and soul. I regret thinking that scum like you could ever change. I regret loving you, Peter Pan. So I’ll say it again, since you obviously didn’t listen the first time. Stay. The hell. Away. From me.” 

With that said, Y/n left money on the table and took her leave. Storming outside the door, she roughly wiped the single tear that escaped her eye before anyone could see. 

She was so over crying.

But, the sound of the door chimes made her stop only for a second. He seriously could not be trying to chase after her, could he? The rapid footsteps confirmed that prediction, making her bite the inside of her cheek, to stop herself from doing anything she’ll regret. Again. 

“Y/n, please! You gotta listen to me, love-”

“I don’t want anything to do with you, Peter. Just crawl back to wherever you came from, and forget we ever existed. Let me move on! Live your own life, so I can get on with mine!”

“Y/n, baby, I’m begging you!”

“Nothing you can say or do will change my mind, Peter-!” 

“ M A R R Y   M E ! ” 

In that moment…everything just stops.

From the noisy traffic, to the beating of her own heart. 

It was silent.

With her covered mouth agape, Y/n stands there in complete and utter disbelief. Seeing that he now had her attention, Peter slowly descended to one knee, staring up at her with eyes that were filling with tears. 

“Y/n L/n. Will you marry me?”