#it is a thing that should not be and abnormal

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Every complex ecosystem has parasites

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:

The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.

In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.

Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism.

Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated.

20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogenuous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam.

Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets:

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites."

America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address":

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886

It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name":

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html

So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgeldy piggeldy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent:

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf

But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.

Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children.

Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated.

The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero").

Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf

After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero.

Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it:

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046

Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now):

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/horrified-harvard-scientists-ice-arrest-leaves-cancer-researchers-scrambling/ar-AA1DlUt8

Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual.

But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on.

The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution.

A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and planting monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/#simpler-times

[theshiniestgemstone]

Maybe Y/n and Gideon break into the church after hours to have some fun ;) and almost get caught by security?

oh my goodness yessss. here ya go (thank you for the idea)

warnings: semi-voyeurism, munch!gideon, oral (fem. rec)

It technically started in the parking lot.

The summer air was thick with humidity with an abnormally warm night. The windows were fogged, the kind that used to make you laugh and drag your hand down like Kate Winslet in Titanic, but it eventually turned into just how steamy could you make it.

Gideon's hands were firm around your hips, his belt unbuckled lazily and his mouth chasing yours in desperation. You both should have been ashamed, really. Pawing at one another viciously as if you hadn't done the same thing this morning. And the night before.

Then you pulled back, just a little, breath catching, and asked.

"Do you have a condom?" You shook your hair out. "I don't have my purse."

He froze. Just for a second, but long enough for the spell to crack. His forehead dropped to your shoulder, and he let out a sigh. It was so long and tired that it felt like it had come from years ago.

“…No.” His voice was low, wrecked, full of something that wasn’t just disappointment. Regret, maybe.

You swallowed, staring up at the ceiling of the car like it might offer answers. “Okay,” you said.

You wiped your mouth. "That's okay."

Gideon redid his belt, careful and quiet. You looked away, suddenly aware of the crickets outside.

Neither of you said anything for a beat. Then, casually, like he was mentioning a spare umbrella, he said, “I’ve got some in my desk.”

You turned to him, blinking. “In your desk?”

He shrugged, lips twitching like he didn’t quite want to smile but couldn’t help it. You laughed, low and surprised, your fingers brushing your lips. “Well, what are we waiting for then, Preacher Gideon?”

The two of you climbed out of the car, the night still humid, the church looming against the sky like something sacred and secret. He led you around the side, gravel crunching beneath your shoes, to a discreet steel door nestled behind a hedgerow. He typed in a code that beeped with each press, then a final chirp and a green flash.

He held the door open for you, the gentleman even now.

You passed him with a smirk, and just as you crossed the threshold, his hand landed on your ass, firm and deliberate. You squeaked and whipped around with mock offense, but he was already looking elsewhere, suddenly very interested in the fire exit map on the wall.

You shook your head, smiling anyway. “Unbelievable.”

Gideon unlocked his office door, tapping the lamp to the dim setting. The soft golden glow washed over the room, throwing gentle shadows across the bookshelves, the half-drunk cup of coffee on the edge of his desk, the old photographs pinned to his corkboard.

He crossed the room and opened a drawer, rummaging through a mess of files and mismatched pens. “Still here…” he muttered to himself. He pulled it out, holding it up in the light. "Bingo."

The second he set it on the desk, light, casual, like it was just a pen or a paperclip, things snapped back into place.

You were on the desk before either of you said another word, palms braced behind you on the polished wood, legs parting just enough for him to step in. His hands found your thighs, thumbs pressing into soft skin, and his mouth was on yours again, deeper this time, more assured. Less heat-of-the-moment and more we’re doing this now.

The desk creaked faintly beneath you, expensive and clearly not built for this kind of use, but you didn’t care. Neither did he. His hands slid under your shirt like he’d done it a hundred times, like he knew where to touch. You pulled at his belt as he took a deep breath.

And then he kissed you again, slower this time, like he meant to savor it, like he meant to make this more than just something stolen in the shadows of the night. His fingers danced along your waist, tugging your hips closer until you were flush against him, your breath hitching when he mouthed along your jaw, your throat, the hollow beneath your ear.

The foil crinkled behind you, a promise already within reach.

"Jesus Christ, Gideon, I didn't think you wanted it this bad," you huffed, feeling just how hard he was beneath your palm.

Gideon groaned, low and rough, the sound vibrating in his chest. “I’m not going to last,” he warned, voice fraying as his fingers gripped your hips. Then he was on his knees, like he was praying, like he meant it.

He dragged your pants and underwear down in one smooth motion, baring you to the cold air and the heat of his gaze. You kicked them off carelessly, one foot bracing on the nearby chair for balance, the other hooking over his shoulder like it belonged there.

His mouth found you like he’d been dreaming about it, slow at first, exploratory, but it didn’t stay gentle for long. He groaned again the second he tasted you, like the heat of you knocked something loose in him. His hands gripped your thighs, holding you steady as his tongue moved with increasing purpose, relentless and skilled, like he needed this to live.

You gasped, hips bucking into his mouth before you could stop yourself, your fingers diving into his hair for something to hold onto. The chair creaked beside you, your heel digging into it for leverage, but you barely noticed. Every nerve you had was trained on him, the way he moaned into you, on the sharp drag of his stubble, on the fact that Gideon was on his knees for you in his own house of worship.

You looked down and he was already watching you, eyes dark and blown and almost wild with need.

“Gideon,” you gasped, the name catching in your throat as your stomach tightened. “Fuck, don’t stop-”

He didn’t. He doubled down, one hand pressing to your stomach to keep you grounded, the other slipping between your legs to tease you where you were already trembling. You were so close, already cresting and he knew it.

Then you heard it.

Rustling. Footsteps. The subtle squeak of orthopedic soles on tile.

Your breath caught in your throat, panic wiping everything else clean. “Hide.” You shoved at his head.

Gideon looked up, confused, lips shiny and swollen. “You’re just para-”

“Now.”

You slipped under the desk with all the grace of a panicked raccoon, nearly knocking over a desk lamp. Your heart pounded like a war drum as you pressed your knees to your chest and tried not to breathe.

The door creaked open.

Gideon shot up straight like a kid caught shoplifting, his belt still undone. He slapped a palm flat against the desk to steady himself, accidentally flicking the condom off the edge and onto the floor near his feet.

“Oh, Gideon,” came the familiar, warm voice of Paul, the aging nighttime security officer. “You scared me.”

Gideon wheezed a laugh, too loud. “Yeah-yeah. Just, uh. Writing. Some… stuff. Sermon stuff. For tomorrow.”

Paul stepped inside, nodding, flashlight tucked under his arm like a baton. “Burnin’ the midnight oil. Good for you. Lord loves a hard worker.”

“Yup,” Gideon squeaked. He kicked the condom gently under the desk with the toe of his boot.

“Not a problem, Gideon,” Paul said, already halfway back out the door. But then he paused, turning slowly. “Also… your pants are unzipped.”

Gideon looked down. “Right. Thank you.”

Paul smiled with that tired kind of patience only church employees and kindergarten teachers really mastered. “And I can see your girlfriend under the desk.”

Silence.

“Maybe consider one closer to the ground next time,” Paul added. “More leg room.”

Gideon closed his eyes like he was praying for death. “Will do, Paul.”

Paul gave a cheerful wave, shut the door, and his footsteps faded down the hall.

You crawled out from under the desk like a creature reborn in shame, straightening your clothes as you stood. Gideon just stared at you, pale and wide-eyed, hair completely wrecked. He chuckled. "What now?"

You shrugged. "I'm already down here, so..."

His belt was still undone, zipper halfway down, the condom now sadly resting near the baseboard like it was too embarrassed to be part of this. You reached for him anyway, fingers curling around his waistband with intent.

[ofmdaily]

you know me better than anyone has ever known me, and i dare say the same is true for me about you.

[bitemedotmp3]

There's antivirus apps for phones, so the first thing Uzi does once she gets her hands on Aurelius' is download one. It should be enough to make sure whatever infected his computer isn't sticking around on mobile, too.

No, that's a lie. The first thing Uzi does is try very hard not to ask who the dark-haired guy is and why he's all over the place. He's on the wallpaper, he's on the app icons, he's- is that his face on the weather app? Even Uzi doesn't do things like that with her boyfriend's face. Though maybe she should...

"Oh, uh. Yeah, no, those should be fine. Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with your phone," she says, flicking through a few screens. Nothing about abnormal data or battery usage, so Uzi has to assume the spam texts were just a springboard to get the virus to his PC. Whether it was on purpose or not is a different matter, but she makes a literal mental note about the scripture-a-day texting service's number. Something to look into later.

...She should take more photos of people. There's a single selfie of herself and V from when V took her phone, and that's about it. But only because it's not really her thing, that's like, preppy stuff, and she's definitely not prep. But it might be nice to have some pics. Something to think about.

Uzi hands the phone back, chewing over a few wandering thoughts. Regardless of her own mental state, the job should be done now.

"Phone and PC look like they're ok now. Anything else you want me to check out while I'm here?" she says, looking up at Aurelius. "Otherwise, I can head out, let you catch up on whatever you missed."

「✦」 It's quite nice to meet a young person so cognizant of their company. Uzi's still of a mind to say whatever she wants, whenever she wants, but he appreciates her effort to censor for his sake, and to explain things to him when he's asking questions.

Five stars.

"Thank you," he says and means it, before unlocking his phone and handing it her way.

It might as well belong to someone else. Not only is the wallpaper just Klaus, there are widgets with his photo in the background and the chat icon's been replaced with his face too. Obviously, someone taught him to customize his phone.

"Whatever you do, please keep the photos safe," he adds seriously.

"I spent a good amount of time collecting them all."

Candid shots, selfies, videos, shorts...his collection of Klaus was quite obsessive impressive.

[dancingindreamlight]

We need need need to tell Ukrainian stories. Show stories from individual Ukrainians, show documentaries, show movies about the war. Because it is stories that will get to the hearts of people, if their hearts aren't made of stone.

Not just war but people's lives, the people who are lost-- show not only death but their lives-- feel the full force of what it is when a human being is killed. And show what suffering russia causes, what we can't allow to spread, not only the killing but the brutality of the occupation, the kidnappings, the torture.

Show human stories, help others feel what they feel, which will hopefully translate into support, help others truly understand this war and what's at stake by seeing from the Ukrainian perspective.

[kelocitta]

Freak ass skeletons Extra Lore:

Whereas Rat King represents an anger at being confined to positions where you are taken advantage of- Scavenger Queen represents the desire to be the oppressor. The opportunists, the manipulators, the kings who sent the soldiers and the vultures who pluck at the bodies. Much like Red Riding Mercenary and the Wolf, they have a violent and negative relationship- but it is far more unbalanced and ultimately the Rat Kings own instinct for violence is exactly what the other feeds off of. It is easy to mistake the resulting reactions they have towards each other as a true expression of emotion- "hatred" and "enthusiasm" respectively, but it must be noted that they are creatures of instinct sensing their conflicting natures and responding in kind.

[pastadoughie]

putting everyone over 5'10 in a fuckin combine harvester i am so sick of all of you

[player-42]

"I agree," Illux says, sounding all too-happy to be apart of this new, growing, grandiose scheme. "I think I should stop this egotistical man," she meets his gaze, and the glowing in the robotic eye feels almost like looking into a mirror - she can faintly see her own reflection in it, the way her smile curves.

For a moment, she sees it - a memory of her hands covered in blood, hollowed eyes, an empty smile in the wake of carnage, covered in it, drowning in it, red so deep that her eyes outshine it in the dark, pupils abnormal, inhuman, not quite a person.

"And it would be lovely if you helped me out," she continues. "I can help you out in return. An equal exchange in base on mutual interest," she extends her hand, shitty black nail polish that's almost completely come off waiting. Callused hands due to the amount of swings her axe has taken, how many times she's gripped it in her hands to slay yet another enemy, waits.

"Your redstone is interesting, by the way, Doc," she adds. "And your accomplishments are impressive. You are definitely a man worth his salt who knows what he's doing. Hey, even if we don't end up taking him down, by some miracle," she grins so hard that fangs show, and she wants to dig them into the bottom of her lips, draw blood. "At least we'll have fun, won't we?"

Illux loves having fun. It's one of the only things that makes her feel alive. Keeps her blood pumping. Emotions set her alight, negative, positive, although she prefers joy to sadness, but whatever it is, if it's stimulating, she wants it. If it's interesting, she wants it.

If it's chaos, she needs it.

[ there's a note left on a counter. the writing is a little smudged, having been done in a haste. ]

hello, the goat! i have a little game for you.

i've scattered a plethora of candles through your house. not just for fun, though. if you find them all, i'll give you a shiny, shiny gift! perhaps some ore... if you catch my drift. good luck, have fun!

[ a terrible smiley face stares at you from the bottom of the paper. ]

Seeing as he had no plans of leaving his house unattended for any reason, an activity such as this seemed perfect.

A nice, relaxing little break from whatever the fuck was going on with Martyn.

Right off the bat, he found a pink candle in the empty decorated pot he was intending to adorn with a flower. Easy find.

CANDLES COLLECTED: 1

There were a few more candles hidden in his line of sight in the main living area. One under his desk, one behind the monitor that wasn’t hooked up to anything yet, one on top of his dresser drawer, one hidden inside that false tree he was making to conceal the transition between the two building sections, and there was even one under the rug that he only noticed because it felt uneven walking on it. Who hides a candle under a rug?

CANDLES COLLECTED: 6

There was a candle in the area he marked out where he planned on putting his oven. Bit of an odd place to put a candle. Another easy find was… on the door handles? Whoever did this had replaced his door handles with door candles. Okay. Sure. Why not. There was a candle lodged impossibly within a glass bottle in his brewing stand. He had to break the bottle to get it out, and once he did, he noticed an orange candle right where he was meant to put the blaze powder.

A candle in the cupboards. There was a candle inside the leaves of a potted plant. A candle on the ceiling, somehow?

…did they replace some of my bricks with candles?!

CANDLES COLLECTED: 20

Curse him for putting so many storage compartments in his house. They were everywhere. He wasn’t even looking for candles, he was looking to finish his house, and there were more fucking candles. How many candles—?!

One peculiar placement was in his redstone chest. There was a red candle lodged into a redstone repeater, where a torch was meant to go. For what purpose?! What was this meant to achieve?!

CANDLES COLLECTED: 38

His tomato garden was not spared from this treatment. His pots? There were candles. His cherry tomatoes? There were candles. His fucking water streams?! Somehow, there were candles. And even then, he kept finding them in the most ridiculous places. Candles on windowsills. Candles in foliage. Candles on top of his miniature porcelain goat statues. Candles on the roof. Candles beneath rocks. In chests. Inside of door hinges. There was one in his Ender Chest, how the fuck was there a candle in his Ender Chest, who was hiding these?!

The final straw was when he felt an irritating sensation in his robotic arm. He opened a panel, and lo and behold…

A candle. A candle inside his arm. This was beyond explanation.

HOW MANY CANDLES—?!

CANDLES COLLECTED: 77

[strunmah-mah]

I keep seeing all the Leander theories, about what he is, and I understand the appeal of them, but I cannot overstate how much I hope all of you are wrong.

I desperately want Leander to be the human he appears to be. He is just some guy, a regular dude, there should be nothing inherently horrifying about his nature.

But his choices. He should be making choice, after choice, after choice. And that should be the reasons monsters look at him and say, "that is not a good man."

[tennessoui]

Fix-a-Sith AU, my beloved. Does Obi-Wan attend Council meetings with his Sith glaring suspiciously at everyone over his shoulder?

honestly i feel like it's a watershed moment for sith anakin when he attends a council meeting with obi-wan (glowering over obi-wan's shoulder the entire time with Massive Bad Vibes shooting out from all corners of his force signature) and the council is like 'whoa obi-wan, sith in the middle of rehabilitation do NOT attend council meetings??' and obi-wan just shrugs and is like 'oh who is he going to tell? he's temple bound and his comm link is baby sith-proofed.'

and that bugs the hell out of vaderkin for most of the meeting but he can't put his finger on why.....at the end of the meeting, when they're back in their quarters, he's like 'you know i could still contact sidious and tell him everything i just learned. it wouldn't be easy but it wouldn't be extremely difficult. i AM good with technology, you know.'

and obi-wan is like 'oh yes dear, so you've said. i know you're very clever. but you see, what i couldn't say to the council at the time is that i trust you completely to not betray me the way you so easily could.'

and vaderkin bluescreens because trust??? obi-wan trusts him?? his husband?? trusts?? TRUSTS??? he trusts him?? him???

and obi-wan sighs and gives him a very fond only slightly sad smile and he's like 'i know you've been hounding me to fall in love with you, but which one do you think is more damning, darling - to love a sith or to trust one?'

[arsenicflame]

Izzy Hands can have a little "thinking hes incapable of feeling love" as a treat (for me. the treat is for me)

[honeydots]

base inigo in feh 🥺 flower picker!!!

[namira]

I have so much animosity towards whoever made 'gut health' trendy, so much you can scarcely comprehend. Like as a proud IBS warrior I am just like always going to be prone to stomach issues and thus always going to have people giving unsolicited advice about it but like literally every "gut health" tip makes it infinitely worse and when you are like 'actual medical professionals have advised me to limit my fiber intake' they will not accept it.

[syn4k]

actually yeah, fae tr, especially during s2. think about it.

operate on strange rules and dynamics that are incomprehensible to all but themselves

adjacent to the arcane and unnatural from the very start. they approach a natural terror and fucking play around in it

incredibly aggressive for no apparent reason. violence for violence may be the law of beasts but they have shark tooth grins and laugh at things that terrify others so who's to say that any of them are human?

very tightly knit group. they have their banter and their little dogfights and they spill blood and pull the rug from under each others' feet but one almost gets the sense while watching that this is just how they show affection

attempts to enter that group are never really fully successful. sure, they have friends and allies, but even those are kind of on the outskirts of. whatever dynamic they have going on.

unless you're Andor, that is.

some in Dagrun whisper that the fact they accepted him so readily as one of their own is a blessing. most of the town see it as a curse.

lastly, and most importantly, they are inextricably bound to each other. every last one of them. if you fuck with one of them, all of them hit back in vengeance, and the vengeance of the sky people is not something that you want to provoke. because after all,

they say the zombie singlehandedly killed a god he used to be championed by and absorbed all of its power

they say the mercenary has eyes that are a little bit too sharp behind his glasses, a tongue that's a little too rough for a champion of mianite. his actions never quite line up with his words

they say the thaumaturge runs towards things that would destroy her instead of away like she should, embraces them fully, and emerges stronger and more fucked up for it every time

they say the wizard holds enough power in his little finger to turn entire cities inside out without so much as lifting it

and they say when the captain goes quiet, you should run.

[cosmicredcadet]

I kinda hate the need to specify something as non-romantic. Like idk i feel like it should be the other way around or something. why is it automatically assumed romantic? why must we specify non-romantic intent? shouldn't we be assuming things as non-romantic first and then having to specify romantic intent?

[miku-worldwide]

do not shame yourself out of your anime power-up