#in our mutual torpors

[dyns33]

Truth and Dare(devil)

My favorite cute idiot, Matt Murdock x reader 

Y/N and Matthew had been friends for years.

They had met in college, thanks to Foggy who loved talking to everyone, and whom Y/N had found both funny and friendly. The future lawyer had then invited her to meet his roommate, best friend and, if all went well, avocado at law.

Right away, it had been obvious between Y/N and Matt.

They got along perfectly well, two gentle, empathetic humans, wanting others to be happy, being caring, and awfully stupid.

Foggy often made fun of the two saying they were like twins or soulmates.

Matt considered himself very lucky to have two such wonderful friends, and he didn't care what his roommate might say.

After graduation, they kept in touch, calling each other often and meeting regularly at the bar whenever they had time.

Their friendship was still the same, and that was why Matt felt he had to confess to Y/N that he was Daredevil, after all his other friends found out, that he nearly died several times, and the danger being there even for those who didn't know.

It was difficult, she was afraid for him of course, she asked him a lot of questions, but since she knew Matt very well, Y/N knew that he wouldn't stop even if she begged him.

They had known each other for years, she accepted him as he was, and there was no reason for there to be any resentment or secrecy between them.

Or almost.

     "There is still a secret between us."

Karen looked at Matthew for a long time, who had obviously had too much to drink, displaying a big smile as he pointed his beer at Y/N, while Foggy got up to go to the bathroom.

     "Which one ?" asked Y/N, curious, not seeing what he was talking about.

     "You know. Of course you know. Marci's party."

     "I need more details."

     "Marci's party ! Truth or dare."

     "Truth or… Oh, no. Matt, no, not that again."

     "What ? What ?!" Karen said shaking her friend's leg.

     "Y/N ! Y/N here didn't honestly answer a question during the game and she always refused to tell me the answer."

     "It's been over ten years."

     "Exactly ! Tell me. Tell me your secret."

     "What was the question ?"

     “Who is hrt crush." Matt repeated proudly, finishing his drink.

The evening at Marci's had been complicated. They didn't remember everything, Foggy threw up in a closet after kissing a girl, Matt fell asleep in the bathroom, and Y/N didn't really have fun, because of this stupid question.

     "I should have taken dare."

     "But you took truth !" sneered Matt. "And what did you answer ? 'Yes, there is someone, but it's nothing, it's not mutual, I don't want to talk about it.' And, I don't care who it was, but you seemed so sad. Because they didn't like you. I want to know who that idiot was to tell you that they didn't deserve you, and that you had no reason to be afraid to talk to us. To talk to me."

     "Matty..."

     "Y/N."

He continued to smile proudly, his eyes focused on her chest, showing that he wouldn't give up, and he smiled even more when she sighed.

     "Fine. You're right, it's been ten years, so I can tell you."

     "I can't wait to find out." Karen whispered.

     "It was you, Matt."

The smile froze then, becoming strained, before starting to fade. Karen's was accompanied by a small cry of surprise.

     "No way !"

     "Yes. From the first day, when I met him. it was hell, he flirted with all the girls, then there was Elektra, then more girls. Foggy asked me all the time if it was not too hard."

     "Foggy ?" Matt wondered, coming out of his torpor for a moment. "Foggy knew about it."

     "Of course, everyone knew. You were the only one who didn't know, it was painful. Why do you think they asked me that question ? I was so ashamed. But that's okay, it's in the past."

     "What is the past ?" Foggy asked, finally finding his place, completely not noticing the expressions on his friends' faces.

     "My crush for Matt."

     "Oh, that ? Did you tell him ? Shit, I wanted to tell him at your wedding."

     "You are not funny."

     "I am extremely funny, thank you, I am the comic element of our group, in addition to being the most handsome and the most intelligent."

Matthew then listened, still hearing that sadness he had heard years ago, at Marci's party, as Y/N answered without answering that stupid question, avoiding looking at him.

She had said that was in the past. Speaking of this evening.

But was this the case for her feelings ?

Her heart was beating fast, like every time they were in the same room, and now Matt only heard that, not concentrating on Karen's laughter, or Foggy's gentle teasing, or Y/N's soft voice.

When it was late, he offered to walk her home.

     "Given your condition, it is rather me who should accompany you." she said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

     "I'm fine, I haven't had that much to drink. I'll sleep on the couch, if you're afraid I won't find my way in the dark, jumping from roof to roof."

     "Haha. Now that you've said that, you're definitely sleeping on my couch. Come on."

He let her take his arm and lead him to her apartment, even though it was absolutely unnecessary.

Before, the gesture would have been natural. Welcome. Matt had never asked himself the question, he liked that Y/N touched him. He liked having her near him. He... He loved her. A lot.

     "Truth or Dare ?" he said as they waited to cross a street.

     "Matt..."

    "Do you want to start ? Alright. Truth for me."

     "I don't feel like playing."

     "I'm sorry... It's just... I had a crush in college too. I guess. I never wanted to admit it, because she was someone I loved very much, who made me happy, and since I always scare away the people I love, I think I was scared and always preferred not to change anything between us, to make sure I didn't lose her. But tonight, she said she had a crush too. On me."

Y/N stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, letting go of his arm and letting him walk alone. He stopped a few meters away, still listening to her heart beating faster and faster.

     "... Truth."

     "You still love me ?" he asked almost shyly. "You love me, despite everything you know about me, everything I've done ? Everything I've done to you ?"

     "... You already know the answer."

     "I didn't even think you didn't just consider me a big brother until tonight. Foggy must think I'm an oblivious idiot."

     "No, you're wrong, the whole campus thought you were an oblivious idiot. No big deal."

     "You're still avoiding to answer." he noted, continuing to turn his back on her. Because he was scared, because maybe he was wrong, and he wasn't sure he knew her answer.

He heard her heart move closer to him, and he tried not to tremble as she wrapped her arms around his chest to hug him, pressing her face to his back.

     "Is it bad if I still love you ?" she whispered, very quietly, but knowing he could hear her.

     "Only because it proves that we are two idiots who have wasted a lot of time."

     "I don't think so. I had a great friend until now, and now I have... I have... I don't know what people call it these days."

     "Luck ?"

     "No, I think they say date, or thing."

     "A thing ? I'm a thing ?"

     "A wonderful thing." Y/N scoffed. "A great thing. An incredible thi..."

Grabbing her hands for her to let go, Matt turned to kiss her, making her stop talking nonsense. This made her laugh, while totally disrupting her heartbeat. The most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

     "No more secrets ?" he asked between two kisses.

     "I promise. You'll still sleep on the couch tonight."

     "Of course."

Matt slept on the couch. For eight minutes. Then Y/N came to get him, because he wasn't wrong, they had already wasted a lot of time, and they weren't that stupid.

[reccord-raccoon]

I need help guys, I'm looking for a fic I read a little while ago but I can remember what it's called or anything

it's a zosan fic where they find zoro's mom in wano and she had been like a prostitute (or smth similar) and had zoro really young and whatever and then went back to wano after she left him at the dojo

there's mutual pining (I think they get together?) but sanji has this nice talk with his mom on the beach and stuff

please I have an idea inspired by it and I really want to credit the author

UPDATE: ITS BEEN FOUND!

[aikainkauna]

I just want to, basically, sleep for about 100 000 years. Where the fuck are we, as humanity, when we’ve reached the year 2018 and there’s *still* no button to do that with? Just... a hiberation switch?! Please?

[alwaysalreadyangry]

most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?

so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS              Jan  3, 2020                    BY PHOEBE CHEN

EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.

This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.

Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.

Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).

Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.

WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.

But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.

In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.

Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”

Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Pain is a reprieve from mediated experience. It cannot be coopted by language: in its visceral alertness, pain disrupts the torpor or "language rules" and denials. As such, it closes what Harris (1998) calls the hallowed split between word and deed; it forces denial to succumb to that absolute knowing that exists outside of linguistic knowledge. Whatever torture is called, whatever "principle" is used for its justification, the victim's body registers the elemental truth of violation. If to witness pain is to experience doubt (as per Scarry, 1985), it may also be to experience an existential seduction. Through the veil of doubt, the witness encounters another for whom all doubt has been extinguished. In pain's ultimate moment, just before the suffering self disappears into oblivion, the tortured exists at the very apex of full presence and full revelation. Such a moment possess an elemental allure: it is a breach in the wall of human insularity and isolation. It is this breach of human isolation that partly accounts for our pop culture of violence. The more family and culture alienate us from experiencing ourselves and others as really real, really present, and really embodied, the greater the seduction of human violence. And because the alternates of agony inevitably collapses into the inertia of disappearance, because coma, death, and dissociation render opaque that which has just been exquisitely revealed, the perpetrator may require the endless repetition of pain. And for the survivor-perpetrator, the awakening of torture and the disappearance of the torture victim comforts even as it frustrates. It reassures the survivor-perpetrator that it is possible to disappear from bodily extremity; it is the disappearance of the survivor who perpetually longs to disappear. But it is also an illusory encounter in the execution itself. This time, the survivor can watch, vigilant and alert, for the precise moment when the tortured shift from presence to absence. This time, the perpetrator imagines he will miss nothing, and so, finds mutuality in the area of solitude.

Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective

[theinsatiables]

First Impressions: High Life

The way Wim Wenders tells it, it was his co-producer on the set of Paris, Texas who insisted she’d found her. The perfect assistant. A young woman who would, according to Wenders, guide him “safely through this journey into unknown territory.”

Thirty-six years later, and calling to mind Wenders’ West Texas desert—how it cites the pure vacancy of a lunar landscape—we enter real space. But not the sort of space one hurtles through, dutifully. And not the sort of space flecked with stars and dust, sanctifying some great, beautiful beyond. No. This space, as conceived by director Claire Denis—that young woman who once guided Wenders safely into unknown territory—is decelerated and grisly, spiraling yet carnal. It’s the filmmaker’s English-language debut, a difficult albeit awing movie cleverly titled High Life. In it, Denis administers somatic doom at nearly every turn, telling the story of Monte (Robert Pattinson), the sole survivor—along with his infant daughter, Willow—of a twisted, failed mission where the government has sent death row inmates into space to collect energy from a black hole.

Monte and Willow’s life is incremental. Hermetic and isolated. One tiny step at a time, one lullaby, one sleep. Like the three notes of a familiar tune, reprising over and over, Monte and Willow’s life is eerie-anticipant. Somehow amateurish. They are the only ones.

What is it about fathers and daughters that feels predisposed to imagery of what’s left? Or of what’s been left behind. Of winging it while on the road. What is it about a father and daughter that so easily resembles two souls on the lam? Seeking and lost in a lovely way, but not free.

**

Paper Moon (1973) is a movie played by a real-life father and daughter. Ryan O’Neil and Tatum O’Neil are Moze and Addie, con artists during the Great Depression. Polly Platt’s unequaled production design and her material vision of Midwestern flatlands, windswept and wide open, give rise to an environment—much like space’s inhospitable wonder—that evokes the end of something or the very start. The film’s poster features father and daughter, sitting on a crescent moon, cold sober among the stars. Theirs is a high life, too.  

The poster for High Life. Two hands, holding on. The tagline reads “Oblivion awaits.” Like some fugue-state invitation playing into that funny feeling which exists so long as the outcome isn’t fully known: anticipation. That the father-daughter pair are in space is clarified only through the father: his fingers are gloved in his space suit. Hers are pudgy. A baby’s wrist marked by how it doesn’t totally taper. A baby’s grip marked by its remarkable strength. We cannot help but remark on the baby’s grip. So strong, we’ll say.

While Moze and Addie are sitting on a crescent moon, as if the moon were a swing bench, Monte and baby Willow are holding hands among lush, medicinal-green growth. Little yellow mushrooms sprout. This zone is damp, misty, cared for. The sort of green not associated with space but with sativa. Green is High Life’s incongruous strange. It’s the film’s attempt at Arcadia, so long as Arcadia—in true Denis form—is portioned and untenable. Denis’ vision for High Life is both void and overgrown. This paradoxical, amazingly plotless torpor represents only a small portion of why High Lifedefies category. Of why High Life is near impossible to metabolize. Of why High Life’s use of green is matched only by its use of red and magenta (green’s opposites on the color wheel). The inmates’ uniforms are dyed a maroon-red. (André Benjamin plays Tcherny, an inmate who wears his uniform while nursing the garden.) The ship’s interiors radiate an oxidized red. (Juliette Binoche plays Dr. Dibs, a wanton doctor wearing a Renata Adler braid, who navigates those interiors, deliberately, lasciviously.) Red, in this case, represents what’s cosmic but also what’s bodily. Glowing, pulsing, planetary light. Blood, fluids, insides, throb. The red and magenta, and the green, recall Paris, Texas. Harry Dean Stanton as Travis Henderson, lost in the film’s opening, wearing his red baseball cap—a panorama of green mountains behind him. Nastassja Kinski’s Jane Henderson. Her bright pink sweater. That room with red accents like a phone, the lamp, the curtains. She’s separated by a pane of glass like Monte in space, in his red room, also separated by a pane of glass: his helmet, the shuttle.

**

Why does High Life feel like a Western? Its irreverence? Or maybe it’s all this talk of Wenders. Sam Shepard, who co-wrote Paris, Texas (finishing it over the phone), feels close to a Monte. That cowboy sensibility that neighbors monastic, that feels like poetry. Like Monte himself, who practices quiet, measured restraint. Who keeps to himself. Whose proximity to violence is indistinct.

In Denis’ Nénette and Boni (1997), Gregoire Colin, who plays Boni, also has shorn hair and sharp features. He is a brother caring for his estranged sister, Nénette, who re-enters his life seven months pregnant. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “They form, if you will, a couple. Not one based on incestuous feelings, but on mutual need and weakness: Boni provides what emotional hope Nénette lacks, and her pregnancy adds a focus and purpose to his own life.” Denis gives the family a feeling of fringe. Denis portrays family as an impression; as the people we can count on to interrupt our lives.

**

What is it about fathers and daughters, in film, that seems suited for the sky? That certain stupor that being up there delivers. There’s Armageddon, for one. Fly Away Home and Interstellar, too. Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann was certainly, perfectly, out there. Monte is an outlaw. Moze is a conman. In one of High Life’s earliest lines, Monte is tending to Willow. He says, “Don’t drink your own piss, Willow. Don’t eat your own shit. Even if it’s recycled. Even if it doesn’t look like piss or shit anymore. It’s called a taboo. TAH-BOO. TAAAAA-boo.” The first word he teaches his daughter explains who he is, in part, or how Monte is categorized: someone, something, banned. And yet, the way Pattinson says TAAAAA-boo, seems to hint at what High Life raises and dismisses. The closeness between father and daughter. This isn’t a story of what gets passed down.

While Wim Wenders was preparing production for Alice in the Cities (1974), the first film in his road trilogy, a friend took him to see Paper Moon. Wenders—shaken by the film’s similarities to Alice (the black and white; the road; the searching men Philip and Moze; the girls, nine-years-old yet persuasive, tough equals)—nearly cancelled his film. Eventually, and thanks to the advice of Samuel Fuller, Wenders rewrote the script to differentiate it. His poetic, plainspoken script which brings to mind Platt’s dusty, terrestrial design for Paper Moon, is perfectly articulated by a line in Alice. Describing the view from a plane, as captured in a Polaroid—the plane’s wing, its shadow, the sky’s vast cozy of clouds—Alice says, “That’s a lovely picture. It’s so empty.”

**

In an essay by the writer Siri Hustvedt, titled “My Father Myself,” Hustvedt describes how as she got older, there was a shift in her relationship with her father. “He seemed unavailable to a degree that startled me,” she writes. “It could be difficult for him to say, so sometimes he would do.” Hustvedt recounts a tearful, painful visit to the orthodontist where she was fitted for braces. On the way home, her father stopped at a gas station, left the car, and returned with a box of chocolate-covered cherries — her father’s favorite. “I was eleven years old and, even then, I felt poignancy mingle with comedy.” She didn’t like chocolate-covered cherries and couldn’t possibly eat them having just been fitted for braces. “The mute gesture has stayed with me as one of infinite, if somewhat wrong-headed kindness, and as a token of his love.”

Monte calls Willow his “little package.” She was delivered to him; he carries her though he didn’t carry her. Monte is a reluctant father who studies his daughter’s approach to life, like some kind of loving, curious reconnaissance. The soothing doesn’t come naturally. There is no intense identification. He handles her undecidedly. Theirs is a solitude that feels both invented, but also, a means for recovery. Wordless gestures that seem to say, we’re in it together. The film’s last line—“Shall we?”—submits to this notion, as if answering High Life’s tagline. “Shall we?” is less of a question and more of a pact.

**

My father recently spent a month in the hospital, in isolation. One evening, I went to see him after work. I stayed with him for four, five hours, not saying anything while he slept. He was in agony—of which he tried to show little. But there it was—the pain—in how he slept, curled up and head covered by his blanket. He’d become thin. He wasn’t eating. There were tubes and beeping sounds, masks, and hospital gowns. I sat on a daybed near the window, my palms growing sweaty in latex gloves. It was dark and we felt deserted. Like the entire world outside my father’s hospital room no longer existed. Or if it did, once, it was now abandoned. That particular hush, like an aftermath, like the phone lines had been cut. That hush, like the science of a hospital room—engineered to monitor life, yet devoid of it, somehow. There was nothing to do but be the company and comfort my father’s subconscious needed. My mind wandered to a singsong Bengali refrain my father used to say to me before bed, when I was a kid. It went:

Akashey aakta chand, arekta chand koi?

(There is a moon in the sky, where is the other moon?)

And I would shout: Eiijey!

(Here I am!)

Sitting in the hospital, on the daybed just five or so feet from my father, I kept wanting to whisper, Eiijey! Eiijey, Baba!

In that dark room, we felt like two moons alone in the sky.

-Durga Chew-Bose

[sometimesalwaysmusic]

DEATHSTICKS

Deathsticks have been called 'controlled chaos', employing 'feedback, crashing drums, roaring power chords and screaming solos' to devastating effect. Personally, I hear elements of Death From Above and Pretty Girls Make Graves - doesn't matter, just listen to it, OK!? Transplanted from Peterborough, they have been destroying eardrums with their live shows and powerful releases, such as 2018's Deathsnacks and In The Motors. We spoke with guitarist Matt Post (MP). Check out their tunes, and a live show, if you'd be so lucky! 

VITALS

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buysomedeathsticks/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dethstyx/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Deathsticksband

BandCamp: https://buysomedeathsticks.bandcamp.com/

Latest Release: In The Motors (Single, Sep 2018)

Upcoming Shows: Friday, May 10 - Gleneagle at CMW. Cherry Cola’s, Toronto, ON. Friday, May 17 - Deathsticks, Torpor, Death Ex, and more. Pressed, Ottawa, ON. Sunday, June 9 - SOTO FEST III. Off Peak Green Barn. Ottawa, ON.

SA: How did Deathsticks first start playing music together? MP: Deathsticks formed in late 2015, originally with Evan Moore on drums (now of Toronto band Blankscreen). Laura joined a couple months later and we played our first show with this lineup in Feb 2016. Laura and I grew up in Durham region, in Oshawa and Whitby, but started playing together because of the Peterborough music scene. Laura was in a band that I was a big fan of and I sort of became their roadie. We had a mutual respect for what we’d been working on separately and just got along well.

SA: What bands or musicians would you cite as the biggest influences on your sound? MP: We were definitely influenced by local Ontario bands when we first started out. I had seen some Toronto bands like Soupcans and New Fries, anything that was on like Telephone Explosion, Pleasance Records or Bruised Tongue in Ottawa was stuff I thought was cool and wanted to do something like that. Laura and I saw Holy Fuck together and I tried to rip off some of their vocal effects on the earlier Deathsticks recordings. The first Peterborough show I saw was at a fest Laura organized, noise veterans Nihilist Spasm Band played and also a local artist called Paulabulus. I didn’t really know you could make ambient/drone/noise music like that and saw that there was an audience for that kind of thing in the Peterborough community. More recently my friends bands like WLMRT and the London crowd around Isolation Party, Shoobies, Manager and Disleksick have helped guide me back to making music fun.

SA: Thus far in your career, what has been the band’s biggest success? MP: We’ve been 100% DIY, with no help from booking agents, larger labels, publicists, or producers who would shape our sound. Of course everything is harder this way and takes longer but at least we’re not looking at spending the next decade locked in a record contract or something for art we could just continue doing the way we want to, on our own.

SA: Conversely, what is the biggest challenge you have faced, and how have you dealt with it? MP: This past winter we recorded about an EP’s worth of material and just scrapped it. It was all getting to be too self-serious and un-fun guitar post punk whatever. I’ve gotten over the angrier direction we had in the past and am trying to make music that’s still light-hearted while also still being destructive and cathartic. It’s difficult to look at something you’ve made and decide not to release it, but it’s important for a band to be real with themselves and understand that not everything you make is automatically worth listening to. We’re moving on with different instrumentation and new ideas we’re more excited about, rather than go through the trouble of paying for vinyl or tapes of music we don’t even care about any more.

SA: How do you guys approach the song-writing process? MP: With great difficulty. Usually we get a song either on the first time we play it. or from like weeks of cutting down a longer jam session to its bare bones. As long as the songs end up being like 2 minutes long or less I’m happy, and as long as it’s catchy then Laura’s happy, I think.

SA: I understand you guys are transplants to Ottawa. What are your thoughts on the Ottawa music scene? MP: Ottawa has been kind to us. We just moved to the suburbs and that’s where it’s at. But we’re really grateful to have great venues like House of Targ, Pressed and Black Squirrel Books. Promotional things like Sitting on the Outside, Ottawa Showbox and Side By Side Weekend are showing the larger Canadian and international scene that Ottawa is worth playing and that there’s some great bands no matter what genre you’re into.

SA: What is your favourite show that the band has played, and why? MP: Our first show, but we spend way more time talking about our weirdest shows ever. We have a running list of strangest experiences and when you play hundreds of times across Canada in a lot of unconventional venues like ice cream parlors, people’s living rooms, or Chinese food restaurants (don’t worry none of those are the weirdest ones, those ones were all good) it’s more fun than just playing the same kind of bar all the time. If you put us on a bill literally anywhere we will play it and have a great time.

SA: Thus far in the band’s repertoire, what is your favourite track, and why? MP: I like whatever the newest song happens to be. Once I’ve played it a few dozen times I can get tired of it though. Some of the songs haven’t left the live set in the whole 3 years so far. People still respond to them, so they work. “Buzzkill” is definitely a fan favourite and it’s been the opening song for a couple years. I like playing “Fridge Nachos” I guess.

SA: Are Deathsticks cigarettes!? I feel like they’re cigarettes?!?! Are you guys fans/haters of NO FRILLS grocery stores? I can’t tell from the album art. MP: Deathsticks refers to Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. In high school no one wanted to be in a band with me which is for the best but at the time I thought it would be funny to call a band Deathsticks because that band would be saying “you don’t want to buy this, you want to go home and rethink your life.” It still is funny.  

SA: What comes next for you guys in 2019? Good luck this coming year! MP: We’re going to tour the USA for the first time. We started a label called Not My Car so we’ve been working on releases for that. Our EP Deathsnacks just came out on 7-inch through the label, and we’re recording some other bands we like in our home studio. Not My Car is DIY label where I do all of the production and recording in-house. Most immediately we’re doing a lathe cut split with Disleksick aka London’s most dangerous band.

[milkshakedoe]

The World of Credit and the World of Interest (part 2) Over time, this led to an increasing disjuncture of  moral  universes. For most, who tried to  avoid entanglement in  the legal system just as much as they tried to  avoid the affairs of soldiers and criminals, debt remained the very fabric of sociability. But those who spent their work­ing lives within the halls of government and great commercial houses gradually began to  develop a  very different perspective, whereby cash exchange was normal and it  was debt that came to  be seen as tinged with criminality. Each perspective turned on a  certain tacit theory of the nature of society. For most English villagers, the  real font  and focus of  social and moral life  was not so much the church as the local ale-house - and community was embodied above all in the conviviality of popular festi­vals like Christmas or May Day, with everything that such celebrations entailed:   the sharing  of pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the physical embodiment of what was called “good neighborhood.” Society was rooted above all in the “love and amity” of friends and kin, and it found expression in  all those forms  of everyday communism (helping neighbors with chores, providing milk or cheese for  old widows) that were seen to flow from it. Markets were not seen as contradicting this ethos of mutual aid. It was, much as it was for Tusi, an extension of mutual aid-and for much the same reason:  because  it operated en­tirely through trust and credit. England might not have produced a  great theorist like Tusi, but one can find the same assumptions echoed  in most of the Scholastic writers, as for  instance in Jean Bodin’s De Republica, widely circulated in  English translation after 1605.  “Amity and friendship,” Bodin wrote, “are  the foundation of  all  human and civil society” - they constitute that “true, natural justice"  on which the whole legal structure of con­tracts, courts, and even government must necessarily be built. Similar­ly, when economic thinkers reflected on the origins of the money, they spoke of "trusting, exchanging, and trading.“ It was simply assumed that human relations came first. As a result, all moral relations came to be conceived as debts. "For­give us our debts” - this was the period,  the very end  of the Middle Ages, that this translation of the Lord’s Prayer gained  such universal popularity.  Sins are debts to  God: unavoidable, but perhaps manage­able, since at the end of  time our moral debts and credits will be all canceled out against each other  in God’s final Reckoning. The notion of debt inserted itself into even the most intimate of  human relations. Like the Tiv, Medieval villagers would sometimes refer to “flesh debts,” but the notion was completely different: it referred to the right of either partner in a  marriage to demand sex from the other, which in principle either could do whenever he or she desired. The phrase “paying one’s debts” thus developed connotations, much as the Roman phrase “doing one’s duty"  had, centuries before. Geoffrey Chaucer even makes a  pun out of "tally” (French: taille) and “tail” in the Shipman’s Tale, a  story about a  woman who pays her husband’s debts with  sexual favors: “and if so I be faille, I am youre wyf, score it upon my taille.” Even London merchants would occasionally appeal to the language of sociability, insisting that in  the final analysis, all trade is  built  on credit, and credit is really just an extension of mutual  aid. In 1696, for instance, Charles Davenant wrote that even if there were a  general col­lapse of confidence in the credit system, it could not last long, because eventually, when people reflected on the matter and realized that credit is simply an extension of human society, “They will find, that no trading nation ever did subsist, and carry on its business by real stock [that is, just coin and mer­chandise];  that trust and confidence in  each other, are as  nec­essary to  link and hold a  people together, as  obedience,  love, friendship, or  the intercourse of speech. And when experience has taught man how weak he is,  depending  only on himself, he  will be  willing to  help others, and call upon the assistance of  his  neighbors, which of course, by  degrees, must set credit again afloat.” Davenant was an unusual merchant (his father was a  poet).  More typical of  his class were men like Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan, published in 1651, was in many ways an extended attack on the very idea that society is built on any sort of prior ties of communal solidarity. Hobbes might be considered the opening  salvo of the  new moral perspective,  and it was a  devastating one. When Leviathan came out, it’s not clear what scandalized its readers more: its relentless materi­alism (Hobbes insisted that humans were basically machines whose actions could be understood by one single principle: that they tended to  move toward  the prospect of pleasure  and away from the prospect of pain), or its resultant cynicism (if  love, amity, and trust are such powerful forces, Hobbes  asked, why is it that even within our families, we lock our most valuable possessions in strongboxes?) Still, Hobbes’ ultimate argument-that humans, being driven by self-interest, cannot be trusted to treat each other justly of their own accord, and therefore that society only emerges when they come to  realize that it is  to  their long-term advantage to  give up a  portion of their liberties and accept the absolute power of  the King-differed little from arguments that theologians like  Martin Luther had been making a  century earlier. Hobbes simply substituted scientific language for  biblical references. I  want to  draw particular attention to the underlying  notion of “self-interest.” It  is  in  a  real sense the key to  the  new philosophy. The term first appears in  English right around Hobbes’ time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from /interesse/, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it  was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life  can be explained as the pur­suit of self-interest as  a  cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores.  By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense. But why “interest”? Why make a  general theory of human motiva­tion out of a  word  that originally meant “penalty for late payment on a  loan”? Part  of the term’s appeal was that it derived from bookkeeping. It was mathematical. This made it seem objective, even scientific. Saying we are all really pursuing our own self-interest provides a  way to  cut past the welter of passions and emotions that seem to govern our daily existence, and to  motivate most of  what we actually observe people to  do (not only out of love and amity, but also envy, spite, devotion, pity, lust, embarrassment, torpor, indignation, and pride) and discover that, despite  all this, most really important decisions are based on the rational  calculation of material advantage-which means that they are fairly predictable as well. “Just as  the physical world is ruled by the laws of movement,” wrote Helvetius, in a  passage reminiscent of Lord Shang,  “no less is the moral universe ruled by laws of interest.” And of course it was on this assumption that all the quadratic equations of economic theory could ultimately be built. The problem is that the origin of the concept is not rational at all. Its roots are theological, and the theological assumptions underpinning it never really went away. “Self-interest” is first attested to in the writ­ings of the Italian  historian Francesco Guicciadini (who was, in fact, a friend of  Machiavelli),  around 1510, as  a euphemism for  St. Augustine’s concept of “self-love.” For Augustine, the “love of  God” leads us  to benevolence toward  our fellows; self-love, in contrast, refers to the fact that, since the Fall of Man, we are cursed by endless, insatiable desires for self-gratification-so much so  that, if left  to  our own devices, we will necessarily fall into  universal competition, even war. Substituting “interest” for “love” must have seemed an obvious move, since the as­sumption that love is the primary  emotion was precisely what authors like Guicciadini were trying to  get away from. But it  kept that same assumption of  insatiable desires  under the guise of  impersonal  math, since what is  “interest” but the demand that money never  cease to grow?  The same was true when it became the term for  “investments­” - “I have a  twelve-percent interest in  that venture” - it is money placed in the continual pursuit of profit. The very idea that human beings are motivated  primarily by “self-interest,” then,  was rooted in the pro­foundly Christian assumption that we are all incorrigible sinners; left to our own devices, we will not simply pursue a certain level of comfort and happiness and then stop to enjoy it; we will never cash in the chips, like Sindbad, let alone question why we need to  buy chips to  begin with. And as Augustine already anticipated,  infinite desires in a finite world means  endless competition, which in  turn is  why, as Hobbes insisted, our only hope of social peace lies in contractual arrangements and strict enforcement by the apparatus of the state.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (pp. 329-332)

[kyisalwayshigh-blog]

Fifty Shades Of Grey Movie Review

The "Fifty Shades" set of three may have first surfaced in 2009 as a work of "Twilight" fan fiction, however it immediately separated itself as its own particular colossally fruitful, completely questionable pop-lit wonder (100 million duplicates sold and checking). A long ways from Stephenie Meyer's professional forbearance dream, James' startlingly express story demonstrated enormously famous with ladies everything being equal, introducing unthinkable subject of subjugation porn into the mother well disposed standard. What's more, for all the merited reactions of Meyer's writing style, she truly had nothing on James in that division, as shown by sentences like "Want pools dim and lethal in my crotch" and "The muscles inside the most profound, darkest piece of me hold in the most delectable form." Is it sadomasochistic aching or is it bad tempered entrail disorder?

At any rate, it might mostly clarify why our courageous woman spends a significant part of the film looking not by any stretch of the imagination responsible for her lunch. An anxious, dim haired English writing understudy at Washington State U., Anastasia "Ana" Steele (Dakota Johnson) has been allocated to compose a school daily paper article on Christian Dim, a 27-year-old business financier and college promoter who ends up being not simply vulgarly well off and effective, but rather (as played by Jamie Dornan) outlandishly attractive to boot. Talking with Ana in his glass-walled Seattle office, Christian fixes her with the iciest of come-here gazes, his cheekbones basically cutting through the account torpor. Ana, as far as it matters for her, reacts by looking unobtrusively entranced with desire, refining the rich and confused subtext of James' novel — gracious my god, he's so hot — into a solitary goodness my-god-he's-so-hot articulation.

Following their interview, Christian and Ana heighten their mutual attraction with a couple of not-so-chance encounters. He sends her some rare 1st editions (happily, not “The Iliad”), hits on her at the ironmongery shop wherever she works, and eventually whisks her off to his living accommodations by non-public heavier-than-air craft — at that purpose James’ up to date Cinderella story begins to reveal its Angela Carter facet. It’s not simply that this American-psycho suitor shuns standard romance and conducts his relationships on a strictly transactional basis. As he notes early, Christian may be a man of “many physical pursuits,” that embrace piloting, stalking, topless piano enjoying, and recreational bondage: Specifically, he selects and grooms young girls willing to be certain, gagged, clamped, lashed and probed for his pleasure and presumptively their own. Imagine Bruce Wayne with a Red space of Pain in role of a Batcave and you’re quite halfway there.

Depending on the exhibitions of two engaging, new confronted leads with minimal earlier onscreen stuff, the producers have turned their form of "Fifty Shades of Gray" into a wily tragicomedy of conduct — Jane Austen with a riding crop, maybe, or maybe Charlotte Bronte with a peacock plume — that concentrates no deficiency of giggles from the anxious pressure between Ana's sentimental dream work out as expected and the psychosexual bad dream seething just underneath the surface. By cheerfully shedding the book's 500 or so pages of numbingly dreary inward monolog and including the essential point of view of the camera, the movie producers have additionally made Ana a to some degree harder, more wary courageous woman, played by Johnson with an extremely engaging combo of young lady lost naivete and bit by bit extending confidence. One of the motion picture's all the more amusingly offhanded minutes finds the two leads situated at inverse finishes of a meeting table, instituting maybe the most erratic contract arrangement scene since "A Night at the Opera."

Normally, Ana's horrifying deferral of her choice — regardless of whether to wind up Mr. Dim's own sex slave — doesn't shield them from inspecting each other's products meanwhile, beginning with a scene at generally the 40-minute check in which Christian strips her of that annoying virginity in a protected, cuff free condition, before gradually acquainting her with the perfect joys of torment. By the by and large pedantic models of the standard, the room activity in plain view figures out how to be considerably more unequivocal than the studio standard while avoiding anything especially questionable.

Tits and ass are pampered with matter-of-actuality consideration in d.p. Seamus McGarvey's correctly encircled widescreen creations, while a trio of editors — including Oscar-winning veteran Anne V. Coates, whose numerous striking credits incorporate "Unfaithful," "Out of Sight" and "Striptease" — explore easily among closeups and full-body shots, their each cut keeping up a watchful visual parcel around the on-screen characters' humility. (Obviously for a film with this specific control/submit dynamic, the typical sexual orientation based twofold standard wins: a lot of Johnson, however just a temporary look at johnson.)

James' books were pilloried in a few quarters for extolling injurious connections, and hailed in others for subverting servitude and pretend with a striking vision of female strengthening. Whatever one's elucidation, the story they advise is intended to be one of recovery, in which Ana ends up being herself to be the genuine overwhelming by drawing the mishandled, harmed Christian out of his den and into the universe of practical human connections — one spoke to here by his assenting mother (Marcia Gay Harden) and Ana's sweet yet diverted mother (Jennifer Ehle) and lively closest companion (Eloise Mumford), all gleaming signals of mental stability and enthusiastic dependability. Tragically, it's a show that can hardly support one film, not to mention three, and as our courageous woman turns out to be perpetually mindful of exactly how dull Christian's dim side is, "Fifty Shades of Gray" begins to lose its comical inclination and evoke the wrong sort of chuckles — peaking with an entertainingly exaggerated S&M montage weighed down with such a significant number of ease back movement breaks down as to recommend that Ana wasn't the just a single wearing a blindfold amid the get together.

The last half-hour or so is rebuffing in something other than an exacting sense, conveying us to a not as much as sparkling cliffhanger in the now de rigueur way of book-based, fan-driven establishment admission. Dornan, an appealling nearness, to a great extent nails (in addition to other things) the blend of exceptional custom and fun loving obscenity that characterizes Christian Gray, yet he demonstrates rather less gifted at enlightening the complex inward existence of a sexual freak. "I practice control regardless," he notes from the get-go — talked like a man who doesn't understand he's still got two continuations of go.

[lbcybersecurity]

A Thanksgiving Carol: How Those Smart Engineers at Twitter Screwed Me

Thanksgiving Holiday is a time for family and cheer. Well, a time for family. It's the holiday where we ask our doctor relatives to look at that weird skin growth, and for our geek relatives to fix our computers. This tale is of such computer support, and how the "smart" engineers at Twitter have ruined this for life. My mom is smart, but not a good computer user. I get my enthusiasm for science and math from my mother, and she has no problem understanding the science of computers. She keeps up when I explain Bitcoin. But she has difficulty using computers. She has this emotional, irrational belief that computers are out to get her.

This makes helping her difficult. Every problem is described in terms of what the computer did to her, not what she did to her computer. It's the computer that needs to be fixed, instead of the user. When I showed her the "haveibeenpwned.com" website (part of my tips for securing computers), it showed her Tumblr password had been hacked. She swore she never created a Tumblr account -- that somebody or something must have done it for her. Except, I was there five years ago and watched her create it.

Another example is how GMail is deleting her emails for no reason, corrupting them, and changing the spelling of her words. She emails the way an impatient teenager texts -- all of us in the family know the misspellings are not GMail's fault. But I can't help her with this because she keeps her GMail inbox clean, deleting all her messages, leaving no evidence behind. She has only a vague description of the problem that I can't make sense of.

This last March, I tried something to resolve this. I configured her GMail to send a copy of all incoming messages to a new, duplicate account on my own email server. With evidence in hand, I would then be able solve what's going on with her GMail. I'd be able to show her which steps she took, which buttons she clicked on, and what caused the weirdness she's seeing.

Today, while the family was in a state of turkey-induced torpor, my mom brought up a problem with Twitter. She doesn't use Twitter, she doesn't have an account, but they keep sending tweets to her phone, about topics like Denzel Washington. And she said something about "peaches" I didn't understand.

This is how the problem descriptions always start, chaotic, with mutually exclusive possibilities. If you don't use Twitter, you don't have the Twitter app installed, so how are you getting Tweets? Over much gnashing of teeth, it comes out that she's getting emails from Twitter, not tweets, about Denzel Washington -- to someone named "Peaches Graham". Naturally, she can only describe these emails, because she's already deleted them.

"Ah ha!", I think. I've got the evidence! I'll just log onto my duplicate email server, and grab the copies to prove to her it was something she did.

I find she is indeed receiving such emails, called "Moments", about topics trending on Twitter. They are signed with "DKIM", proving they are legitimate rather than from a hacker or spammer. The only way that can happen is if my mother signed up for Twitter, despite her protestations that she didn't.

I look further back and find that there were also confirmation messages involved. Back in August, she got a typical Twitter account signup message. I am now seeing a little bit more of the story unfold with this "Peaches Graham" name on the account. It wasn't my mother who initially signed up for Twitter, but Peaches, who misspelled the email address. It's one of the reasons why the confirmation process exists, to make sure you spelled your email address correctly.

It's now obvious my mom accidentally clicked on the [Confirm] button. I don't have any proof she did, but it's the only reasonable explanation. Otherwise, she wouldn't have gotten the "Moments" messages. My mom disputed this, emphatically insisting she never clicked on the emails.

It's at this point that I made a great mistake, saying:

"This sort of thing just doesn't happen. Twitter has very smart engineers. What's the chance they made the mistake here, or...".

I recognized the sanctimonious words coming out of my mouth, but dug myself deeper with:

"...or that the user made the error?"

This was wrong to say even if I were right. I have no excuse. I mean, maybe I could argue that it's really her fault, for not raising me right, but no, this is only on me.

Regardless of what caused the Twitter emails, the problem needs to be fixed. The solution is to take control of the Twitter account by using the password reset feature. I went to the Twitter login page, clicked on "Lost Password", got the password reset message, and reset the password. I then reconfigured the account to never send anything to my mom again.

But when I logged in I got an error saying the account had not yet been confirmed. I paused. The family dog eyed me in wise silence. My mom hadn't clicked on the [Confirm] button -- the proof was right there. Moreover, it hadn't been confirmed for a long time, since the account was created in 2011.

I interrogated my mother some more. It appears that this has been going on for years. She's just been deleting the emails without opening them, both the "Confirmations" and the "Moments". She made it clear she does it this way because her son (that would be me) instructs her to never open emails she knows are bad. That's how she could be so certain she never clicked on the [Confirm] button -- she never even opens the emails to see the contents.

My mom is a prolific email user. In the last eight months, I've received over 10,000 emails in the duplicate mailbox on my server. That's a lot. She's technically retired, but she volunteers for several charities, goes to community college classes, and is joining an anti-Trump protest group. She has a daily routine for triaging and processing all the emails that flow through her inbox.

So here's the thing, and there's no getting around it: my mom was right, on all particulars. She had done nothing, the computer had done it to her. It's Twitter who is at fault, having continued to resend that confirmation email every couple months for six years. When Twitter added their controversial "Moments" feature a couple years back, somehow they turned on Notifications for accounts that technically didn't fully exist yet.

Being right this time means she might be right the next time the computer does something to her without her touching anything. My attempts at making computers seem rational has failed. That they are driven by untrustworthy spirits is now a reasonable alternative.

Those "smart" engineers at Twitter screwed me. Continuing to send confirmation emails for six years is stupid. Sending Notifications to unconfirmed accounts is stupid. Yes, I know at the bottom of the message it gives a "Not my account" selection that she could have clicked on, but it's small and easily missed. In any case, my mom never saw that option, because she's been deleting the messages without opening them -- for six years.

Twitter can fix their problem, but it's not going to help mine. Forever more, I'll be unable to convince my mom that the majority of her problems are because of user error, and not because the computer people are out to get her.

The post A Thanksgiving Carol: How Those Smart Engineers at Twitter Screwed Me appeared first on Security Boulevard.

from A Thanksgiving Carol: How Those Smart Engineers at Twitter Screwed Me

[sarahburness]

The Delusion of Separation: We Don’t Need to Feel So Lonely

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” ~Yasutani Roshi

You know those moments? Those brief, fleeting moments that shine through the grey of everyday life like motes of glitter caught in a sunbeam. The moments when you suddenly feel a connection to the world around you, when the quotidian alienation of modern life falls away and color pulses back in.

Walking through the torpor of another generic day, the background static of depression distorting the colors of the world, I often don’t realize I’m on a downward spiral until I look up and realize the sun seems a long, long way away.

The spiral staircase in my mind has steps that aren’t just worn smooth from use, but more often than not seem to be lubricated, too. At the bottom, the door marked “suicide” is always standing there, waiting… and how much easier it would be to push it open and walk through, rather than trying to climb back up those endless, slippery steps.

And then, out of nowhere, I lock eyes with another person and, unplanned and unplannable, we see each other.

I don’t mean we just notice one another, or that we look and immediately glance away before continuing our automaton stomping along the street. No, I mean we actually share a moment of mutual recognition: we see each other and share, for a long second or two, something fundamentally human. A connection.

Stereotypes and defence mechanisms flicker, before revealing themselves to be the smokescreen of fear they really are—a hazy distortion field which blurs our vision of what’s right in front of us. A barrier that we hide behind, but which has no more substance than fog.

The mind loves shorthand and shortcuts, but nobody can be accurately reduced to these crude symbols, and nobody really fits into the boxes that we’ve learnt to shove them into to make the complexity of the world more manageable.

“Manageable” is the spreadsheet, not the thing itself. It’s a lens, but like reading glasses, it helps us see something at one level, but distorts everything else if we look up and try to see anything more.

If stereotyping reduces, then these moments of connection distill. The essence rises and we can taste the purity of it. In these moments, looks aren’t deceiving, but revealing.

Recently I was walking across a narrow footbridge over a stream, heading back to the flat I was staying in. Just a few paces ahead of me, a couple of young men in tracksuits are leaning on a railing, chatting quietly. They hear me coming, and one of them looks around, a little tense as his instincts alert him to my approach.

We lock eyes. We don’t smile; we don’t exchange reflex pleasantries. But we both nod slightly and in that small moment wordlessly exchange several deeply human things.

A greeting; an acknowledgement that we see each other going about our day without need to intrude, question, or interfere; that we’re both enjoying the bright, beautiful morning; that there might theoretically be cultural and class divisions between us, but we are not bringing them into this simple interpersonal moment; that, in some ephemeral but weighty sense, we respect each other.

But even that sounds too cold. Because this, like all such moments, is definitely warm. The stranger on the terrace raising a glass to you in silent toast; the knowing look you exchange with a parent trying to control their young children; holding a door for a stranger and sharing a smile, or waving to someone on a distant ship and seeing them raise a hand in return.

These aren’t rituals, politeness, or other rehearsed and mechanical behavior. This is what all the meditation teachers are talking about when they exhort us to be present with what is, rather than the stories we impose on ourselves and the world around us.

It’s a brief mutual knowing, a wink around the corner of the matrix, when you both silently acknowledge the absurdity of the conventions that we live inside.

It’s the barista who doesn’t reel off the heavily scripted line when they pass you your coffee, because in the moment before they do, you see each other and smile, acknowledging in no words at all that the artifice is all pretty silly and you don’t need those lines to appreciate the exchange that’s taking place.

I’m not saying that we’d all become great friends and enjoy each other’s company if we actually got talking. But beyond those layers of accreted cultural, social, and personal compost, there’s a core of shared humanity, which, in these brief moments, we instinctively recognize and feel heartened by. When the zombie apocalypse breaks out, perhaps we will, after all, be able to rely on our fellow humans.

Zombies aside, I’m not being flippant. Disaster movies and the mass media love to scare us with visions of society and basic humanity rapidly collapsing in the face of major disasters.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was soon portrayed as a terrifying regression to a Hobbesian world of man-as-wolf-to-man, but this was simply untrue. The fears of the government, police, and media became the lenses through which they and then we perceived and approached the situation. The reality was altogether different.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her fascinating book A Paradise Built in Hell, not only do the vast majority of people not turn savage in the face of disaster, they rapidly begin helping complete strangers, setting up ad hoc shelters, kitchens, search parties, and hospitals.

And the survivors of the natural and manmade disasters Solnit describes, even if they experienced terrible personal losses, they frequently look back on these periods as some of the best in their lives. In large part, this is because they felt that rarest of things in the modern industrialised world: that they had meaningful and consequential things to do.

Why? Because they were suddenly talking and cooperating with other people in the same boat as them, from complete strangers to neighbours they’d never spoken to in twenty years, despite living next door.

It was as though external circumstances triggered a different human mode of operation, back to something more fundamental and less complex.

Studying the same phenomenon, Sebastian Junger calls this a return to tribal existence, but this isn’t a story of reversion to an idealized pre-modern existence. It’s simply the rediscovery of what’s already there: it’s the collapse of the fiction Yastunai Roshi described—the delusion “that I am here and you are out there.”

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of times when I find myself actively avoiding any connection with the people around me. When I’m standing on the street, some part of my mind often starts whirring away hoping no one strikes up a conversation with me. What if they want something from me and make me feel bad for not giving it to them? Why can’t I just be left alone to my thoughts?

And yet being closed off to those external inputs isn’t much of a way to think or to live. It is, after all, based on fear. Fear of change, fear of disruption, and fear of a loss of control.

Those fears are simultaneously completely valid and entirely foolish: change is the only constant in life, so there’s no benefit in fearing it. And control is always an illusion and a constraint.

We imagine the moment of interruption as inherently negative, and yet we’ve got no idea what might happen next. Maybe this person simply wants to know the time, or they’re lost, and when we can help them out we end up feeling really good about it.

So far, so nice. And perhaps familiar. But why highlight these little moments, if we all know them?

Because each one seems to come as a surprise, or a slight relief. Because until they do, at least for those of us in big cities, we’re surrounding ourselves with countless Schrödinger’s boxes of uncertainty regarding the people around us. And so we cast our eyes downward, or keep our gaze frictionless when we look at the people around us, avoiding contact for fear of rejection or accusation.

It can feel so much easier not to open the boxes and keep things unknown, but the vertigo of what Pema Chödrön calls “groundlessness”—of leaning into the unknown with heart and mind open—is precisely where life happens. 

We must learn to relax with groundlessness—of having no certainties, nothing solid to which we can cling, and no promise our smile will be returned. As Chödrön explains, Buddhism encourages us “to remain open to the present groundless moment, to a direct, unarmored participation with our experience,” with no guarantees at all that everything will work out the way we might want it to.

The trick is not to look for a reaction. Not to expect anything at all (and thereby avoid the ego’s spluttering outrage that this or that person was so damn rude for not returning our smile or greeting). That’s just giving with strings attached.

Instead, moments of connection happen when something is given freely, without the higher functions of the brain coming into play. In the same way we smile at a cute animal or a child laughing, we can remain open to everyone around us, because they are also us, living a different life. There’s no need for “why”; we can just do.

When we act without expectation, there’s no disappointment. Which isn’t to say something nice will definitely happen, but whatever does happen will simply be data��not something weighed in the scales of our prior expectations and found wanting.

For me and many others, depression creates a sense of desperate isolation; it seems to close us off from all connection. But while the sun can seem so far away—a pinprick of light at the top of that spiral staircase—this is just another distortion.

In truth, that light of Bodhichitta—the “awakened heart”—is still inside us and always accessible. Like the idea that we are separate from other people, it’s another delusion to think that we can ever be separated from the heart of Bodhichitta within us.

Being alone isn’t the same as being lonely, and in those fleeting glances and connections we can be both alone and yet deeply connected with the people and the world around us. We just have to be present enough to be open to them.

About Jon Waterlow

Jon Waterlow is a writer and podcaster who has trouble staying in one place for very long. You can find him at www.voicesinthedark.world, a podcast dedicated to Learning How To Human. He talks and writes about psychology, philosophy, spirituality, social dynamics, mental health, psychedelics, and more. Check out his free series on The 48 Laws of Power.

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The post The Delusion of Separation: We Don’t Need to Feel So Lonely appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/delusion-separation-dont-need-feel-so-lonely/

[realityhelixcreates]

Beta, Theta, and Me Chapter 8: Civil Disobedience

Chapters: 8/?

Fandom: Thor (Movies), Avengers (Movies) Marvel Cinematic Universe

Rating: PG

Warnings: Relationships: Loki x Reader (But not right now),

Characters: Loki(Marvel) Additional Tags:  A/B/O, Sorta, More Of An Exploration Of Life And Self Expression Within An A/B/O Framework, Loki Does What He Wants, But Loki Does Not Actually Do What He Wants, Antagonistic Bosses, Loki Has A Throne Now, But It’s Not What He Wanted

Summary:  In direct defiance of Loki’s orders, you make life easier for him.

“Like he got mad that you were asking questions?” Stark asked over the phone. “If he starts getting like that, you don't have to keep asking.”

“No, not like that at all!” You exclaimed, back to the door, trying to speak over the sound of cursing and thumping from the penthouse outside. “He wanted to tell me! He was trying to, but it was like something clamped his mouth shut, and he couldn't get it out. Looked like it really hurt.”

“Damn. That's way worse than just withholding the information. What the hell is even with this guy? If it's not one weird thing, it's some other weird thing. Okay, well don't put yourself in danger if you don't have to.”

“Yeah. I'm just...hanging out now.” You said nervously. The crashing was still going on. “Gonna be fine though.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah! It's fine! Talk to ya later, boss!” You hung up the phone. You didn't want Stark to hear the disturbance. You definitely didn't want him sending anyone up here to 'calm things down'; that would only end badly for everyone involved, but probably Loki most of all.

He was still injured. And this tantrum couldn't be helping, with all the expended magic, and undue stress on his neck.

And you didn't actually want to leave yet. You knew this wouldn't last forever. Logically, you knew. Loki would heal, and you would move on. It was inevitable. Nothing stayed.

But you didn't want it to be over yet. You didn't want him to be carted off to the hospital or jail just yet. You didn't want to be relocated or let go yet. There were other factors at play now. The territorial desire for a place to call your home. The pride that wouldn't allow you to admit failure, even if you hadn't actually failed anything. The burning curiosity. Now, more than ever, you wanted to know what had happened to him! But obviously you couldn't just come out and ask him about it.

The shouting and crashing had died down outside your door, replaced by coughing. You cracked your door and peeked out.

You could just barely see Loki, red-faced and clutching his armrests tightly. His teeth were bared in a gritted snarl, but the coughing was a rhythmic sound repeating itself as though he was laughing. After a moment you realized that wasn't it. He was sobbing.  

He had told you-ordered you-not to come back today.

But you were out in the hall anyway, grabbing up a box of tissues on your way to him.

“Insubordinate fool.” He gasped. “How dare you defy me?”

“Mhm.” You began carefully blotting up his tears.

“I could kill you. Instantly.”

“Any second.”

“And still you disobey! I should punish you most severely for this.”

“Yeah. You should really bring out your worst.”

You found yourself in his lap somehow; it was really the only position you could be in, in order to reach his face and stroke his hair, offer him the comfort he had obviously been craving for so long.

“You cannot imagine the frustration!” He raged, and you clucked, and cooed, and agreed. You probably didn't really understand. Something had obviously been done to him that was far and away from the trauma you had experienced. So you continued to caress his cheeks and let him get his ranting out.

“I deeply wish you had not seen that.” He admitted, once he had a better grip on himself.

“I'm a servant, right?” You said. “I don't really have any impact on your reputation. Besides, I'm your omni-servant, aren't I? She who does all? Didn't you have, like, councilors on Asgard?”

“Of course. But it was...unseemly...for someone of my station...and then it was too late.”

Sheer force of will kept you from rolling your eyes. Of course there was a stigma against him getting the help he needed. Because he was a prince, or an Alpha, or a man. It was just one more stupid flaw of Alpha-run societies. It was just the same here on Earth.

“How is your neck?” You asked. “Do you need any painkillers or anything?”

“Uncomfortable, and no.” He answered, letting you stand once again. “Your drugs are useless to me. And we do not profane our bodies with such anyway. It's an insult to our physical purity.”

“Oh my god, Loki. Are you an anti-vaxxer?”

“A what? No, it's just that Asgardians are impervious to viruses, and so am I. And there is no pain so great that I cannot endure it. Think me weak, simply because of this?” He gestured to his neck brace. “My pain is pure. I do not need to do anything about it, save endure.”

“Not weak, just that there's nothing wrong with-”

“I do not require that kind of sympathy.” He interrupted. “Your comfort was a gift, but you need not press it further.”

“All right, all right!” You said. Was this some kind of Asgardian thing? “No painkillers, I get it. How is it though? Is it still broken, or is that even what happened in the first place?”

He stared at you with the wariness of a wild animal. “It was...” He paused. Nothing happened. “It was broken.”

“How?” Who could do that to a god?

He hissed in pain.

“I mean, how did you survive?” You amended swiftly. Whatever had done it must be tied to whatever was enforcing his silence.

“I...I...was in space. In a sort of torpor. It has happened before. So too, was my brother. A ship came, ostensibly in response to our distress call, but more realistically to salvage any valuables from the wreck. They found Thor, and something possessed them to bring him aboard. He woke there, and for once-for once-he refused to leave me behind.

Their captain came out to find me. He is human, and a sentimental fool, like all your kind. When he saw that my neck was wrong...I do not know what it is about your people that drives them to do such things without even thinking about it...like some kind of strange instinct...he straightened my head. Damn fool has phenomenal luck. He got it just right. I woke up right out there in space with him, mostly unable to move. He went back immediately to get me an old style of space helmet; it was so thick and bulky that it acted as a makeshift brace just long enough for them to put together a real one.

The whole crew of that ship is irrevocably insane, lunatics, all of them. But I owe my life to human sentimentality.”

“So we aren't all bad, huh?” That was a heck of a story, if you'd ever heard one. He was right though; that was incredibly lucky. How easily he could have died.

“You are exhausting. Well. You specifically are not. But that crew was. Whoever heard of an Omega captaining such a ship? He was such an odd one. Already claimed, of course, not that he was my type.”

“How long do you think it will take to heal? Did a doctor look at you when you got here?”

“Yes, a human doctor saw to me. Tried to pierce my skin with a needle. Tried to give me a dose of something called 'morphine'! I informed him of his impertinence when the needle broke. Idiot. His tools could do nothing. To injure me took the power of an inf-fi-fff-AHG!”

He broke off, gagging.

“Loki! Loki, Loki, shhh, shhhh, I get it, he couldn't help you. Okay.”

A few moments passed while Loki caught his breath.

“The nature...of my injury...slows its healing. As does my use of magic, as does my distance from Asgard, as does the constant strain of just living my life.” He wheezed.

The nightmares. The curse, or whatever it was that hurt him when he tried to talk about it. All of those stresses must be constantly re-injuring him, keeping him from healing properly.

“What can I do?” You asked. In the back of your head, you were yelling at yourself not to get any further involved, not to offer any more of yourself, but you didn't take it back.

“You? You can do nothing, what do you think you could possibly do?” Loki scoffed. “You already take some pressure off. I do not have to use as much magic with you around.”

“Is there anything else I can do? So you can use less magic? Is there anything left of Asgard that can be brought here? Do you think, I dunno, lullabies or warm milk before bed would help with the nightmares? I can learn to sing better!”

He stared at you, expression severe and hard to read. Maybe you had overstepped again.

“I'll think about it.” He said. “For now, I am tired...warm milk? Really? Am I an infant?”

“No milk? Not even with cinnamon?”

Loki's lip curled. “Disgusting.”

“Man, you really are a picky eater.”

He had you leave him by the fireplace with is books, and prepare dinner. You went with pot roast this time, dumping all the ingredients into a slow cooker, and washing the prep dishes, while thinking to yourself.

You were so done with suffering. It had been all around you for so long, inescapable, the greater portion of your lived experience. There had to be something else. You'd caught tantalizing glimpses of another way of life, like peeking through the slats of a fence. But every time you thought you had found a way to slip through, somebody boarded it up. Even now, when the sun was out, and things were looking up, you couldn't help but look at this man, and see the rich, velvety layers of misery he was swaddled in.

Perhaps it was just another symptom of the human sentimentality he so scorned. To see someone in pain, and instinctively want to alleviate it. It was so integral to the core of humanity that your people had to be bombarded with a constant blitz of propaganda designed specifically to erode your compassion and empathy, just so you would stop. But it didn't stop you, not all of you. There were still protests, and strikes, and mutual aid, and community action. The urge was still there; it could not be stripped from all of you.

You returned to his side while waiting for dinner to cook. It would be a few hours yet, in which you didn't have much to do, so you sank down on the cushion he had taken to leaving near the fireside for you. Loki was staring into the sparks, as if trying to glean meaning from their dance.

“Would it offend your sensibilities overmuch to help me dress?” He asked. “It would reduce my magic use by a small amount.”

“Yeah, I could probably do that.” You said. That wouldn't be so bad, especially since he was mostly wearing robes during his convalescence. The underthings would be a challenge, simply because of the basic embarrassment that nudity always brought on. But if you could get past the awkwardness, it shouldn't be difficult.

“Are you certain? You will be exposed to certain things that could dishonor you.” He said.

“Dishonor?” You snorted. “What's there to dishonor? You already said you weren't gonna do anything to me.”

“Ah, but I do not wish to make you suffer the temptation.”

“Not gonna be a problem, trust me.” You said. Embarrassment, maybe. Temptation? Never. It was an advantage, you told yourself. Over and over again, you told yourself. At the back of every man who walked out your door, you told yourself. It was an advantage. The pheromones didn't effect you. It made you free.

But Loki frowned slightly. “Very well.” He said, slightly miffed. “You can bathe me as well, if it means so little to you.”

And there it was again. The pride always bruised like an overripe pear.

“I probably can, yeah.” You said, holding on to feigned nonchalance. That was somewhat more difficult, because it meant you would have to be physically touching more of him than you would by just dressing him. But cleaning himself probably took a lot more magic that getting dressed did. And the touch would just be kind of inconvenient, and then there was the brace...

“What do I do about the brace?” How would you wash his hair and face without getting it wet? How would you wash his neck?

“Unfortunately, I will have to use a little bit of magic to keep it dry.” Loki admitted. “Still, it will be less than before. Are you truly sure about this?”

“Never know if I don't try.” You said.

“Strange little thing. To be so cavalier. Well, we shall see how brave you are when the time comes.”

                                                                          ******

The time had come, and now you knew why Loki's tub was so damn big. It was built to accommodate his incredibly long legs, as well as any helpers he might require.

And probably a bit of debauchery as well. You couldn't discount that possibility, unlikely as it was that he would have partners over any time soon.

You stood in hot water just up to your thighs, wielding a soapy scrubbing pad, while Loki lounged submerged nearly to his shoulders. Things were going well so far.

Stripping him down hadn't actually been so bad; the man was built like a Geefs sculpture, like a statue of the Devil so beautiful it had to be removed from the church. He had done almost nothing to hide his privates from your view, almost challenging you, but it didn't matter. That wasn't what drew your eyes.

No, your gaze was held by the roadmap of scars that meandered across his torso, around his back, over his shoulders. A hundred human lifetimes of cuts and stabs, of burns and gashes. A cicatrix as long as your hand just to the side of his sternum caught and trapped your attention. What could do that? What could do that to him? It had a brother, a twin less than an inch from his spine. It must have been a blade. It must have severed ribs.

“It was an abomination, since you are wondering.” Loki had said, catching your horrified stare. “Like legends of old, we became each other's demise.”

“But...”

“Does it disgust you? Am I so ugly to you now that you have seen all of me?”

“No! You're just...” Like an exaltation of form that had inspired artists for millennia. An expression of beauty that could be appreciated so much farther than just the carnal. Even the marks that scrawled across his body like a cuneiform tablet only added to the story of him. The tantalizing story of a being ages old and aeons away.

He'd sunk slowly into the water with an appreciative moan, shameless, ruling the moment like the prince he was.

He'd given you a different uniform for this activity. It was basically a one-piece bathing suit, but it retained the aesthetic of your Asgardian uniform. How did he just have these things? It wasn't an immodest garment by any means, but you felt almost as revealed as he was while wearing it.

The soap was definitely something special; luxurious and sudsy, it was actually moisturizing, and smelled like a forest in Autumn. You kept your little exfoliating pad frothy with it, and used it to limit the amount of physical contact with him. He wasn't making it easy; he kept stretching out and posing, leaning into your touch, moaning at your gentle ministrations. You were being gentle, even though you just wanted to scrub him off and get this over with, but he was clearly in a roguish mood.

He flicked water at you in playful little splashes.

“Why are you trying so hard to stay dry, you prim little thing? There is plenty of room. You can relax too, just as long as you do your job.”

You shied away from the water droplets. “It's bad luck to mix work and play. Always comes back to bite me.”

“I don't bite that hard, do I?” He asked.

“Don't want to find out. You already threatened to drink my blood once, remember?”

He gave a fake frown. “That was before I realized how sour you were. No respectable bloodsucker would be able to stand two drops of you.”

“Then I'll keep my precious blood to myself. Now show me your back.”

“With pleasure.” He stood up to turn around, deliberately giving you a view of his marble ass. You were tempted to give it a hard pinch. After all, if he was going to act like an exasperating child, you might as well treat him like one. However, you also felt it was more likely that you would break your fingers squeezing before he even felt the slightest sting.

He paused a moment before sitting back down, just making sure you got a good eye full. What a brat. Was he like this as a kid? You couldn't imagine what kind of royal terror he must have been, with his tempers and his tricks. He didn't seem terribly hard to please though.

You set about scrubbing his back, taking note of the many scars there. Many of them seemed similar to each other, as if they had all been inflicted by the same awful weapon. Long, thin, and criss-crossed. You didn't know what could have caused them, but he flinched the first time you touched them, quickly regaining control.

“Does that hurt?” You asked. They didn't look fresh, but that didn't mean anything. “What made these?”

“Lash.” He said, but cut you off with a sharp hand gesture when you started to ask more questions.

Was it related to the things he couldn't say, or just another bad memory? A whip? There were so many of those marks.

You carefully washed his hair, probably the least stressful part of the whole affair, though you did watch his face carefully for any signs of discomfort regarding his neck.

You were just about to declare him clean and step out of the tub, when his hand shot out and caught you by the wrist.

“Aren't you forgetting something?” He asked. You noticed the suppressed mirth in his voice and didn't know if you liked it.

“Don't think I am, no.” You said. He gestured to the water. Specifically, he gestured to the water that was currently covering his crotch.

Oh, it was going to be like that? A challenge? Bratty to the last.

“How could I have possibly forgotten?” You drawled sarcastically. You reached down into the water and grabbed him without any ceremony or gentleness. He went instantly hard in your hand.

Perhaps this had been a bad idea.

But as you held up the rough scrubbing pad and saw the merriment drain from his expression at the realization of what was coming, vengeful satisfaction settled in your soul. He barely had time to protest before you plunged the pad underwater and gave the whole area the cleaning he'd demanded.

When you were done, and his muffled yelps had subsided, you tossed the pad aside, and climbed out of the water.

“All done!” You announced with fake cheer.

Loki glared at you, his lips pressed so tight, they almost disappeared. There wasn't any anger in his gaze, but you slipped out of the bathing room quickly, lest the heat of it bore into your back.