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vettelsvee · 1 year ago

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GOODBYES ARE BITTERSWEET | Sebastian Vettel ✩₊˚.⋆ PART 1: I'LL SEE YOUR FACE AGAIN [NEXT PART]

goodbyes are bittersweet masterlist f1 masterlist | ao3 | requests or let's talk!

rb sebastian vettel x gf!reader

word count: 4095

summary: seb's gf finds out she's pregnant, and she decides that hiding her pregnancy is the best she could do due to seb's career

warnings: pregnancy, mentions of cheating, curse words, angst, fighting. set on may 2013. for a bit of background: reader and seb have been friends since they were literal babies, but growing up their feelings changed and started dating on 2006.

a/n: this is actually the first chapter of the very first series, Infinity, i posted here! i had to cancel it because i had some problems with wattpad people telling me through indirects i copied their work and i got very, very unmotivated with this story i absolutely love (when actually this was a draft I had of a tom holland fic back in 2017 lol), but i'd love to post the following parts if you like this one! feedback is appreciated, as well as reblogs <3

You pulled the flush and got up, being careful not to get dizzy. You took some paper and wiped the corners of your mouth to remove any possible traces of vomit. You headed to the sink automatically, quickly pulling out the toothbrush you’ve gotten used to carrying since nausea became part of your daily routine. You really tried to get rid of the acidity in your throat and the bad taste in your mouth, but as you expected, and knowing you've been experiencing this more times than you'd like in the past month and a half, it was impossible.

"Y/N, are you still there? Are you okay?" Britta's voice, accompanied by a few knocks on the door, snapped you out of your trance. You startled and forced yourself to answer, even though it was the last thing you feel like doing.

"Yes, I’m coming. Just a sec!"

"Don’t take too long," she replied. "Not that I don’t want you to take your time, but Seb is worried."

Panic-stricken, you suppressed a laugh that almost escaped.

If only he knew what you were about to do…

"Don’t worry, I’ll be right out," you answered.

You stared at yourself in the mirror, contemplating your own reflection longer than you’d like. Minutes passed, and you almost completely lost track of time, aware that you needed to put an end to the intrusive thought that was telling you that what you were about to do was, wrong but inevitably the best thing.

You were going to break away from everything you’ve wanted since you were a child just because things hadn't turned out "right." Seb was at the peak of his professional career, constantly surpassing himself in every race, making history, while you remained stuck in your hometown, working at a bar, dealing with drunks and immature kids pretending to be adults daily, because you didn’t have the luck, or perhaps the financial means, to study what you had dreamed of since you were a child who just wanted to make music.

You leaned on the sink, feeling the cold starting to penetrate your body. A great tremor shook you, and it became increasingly difficult to stay on your feet. Your eyes filled with tears as you confronted the reality of what you were about to do, of the decision you'd made.

Since your boyfriend began not only achieving his dreams but making a name for himself, you thought you didn’t deserve him because you were heading in the opposite direction. Now that you’ve gotten pregnant by him, possibly because the birth control pills you were taking failed for some unknown reason, you felt like this even more.

Despite the love you still felt and possibly always will feel for Sebastian, since you took the pregnancy test with Hanna at one of the most secluded malls in Heppenheim, you knew that letting him know he was going to be a father was never part of your plans.

"Come on, Y/N…" you told yourself, still staring at your reflection. "This is for Seb. You're doing this for him and his career."

You took a deep breath a couple more times, feeling the knot in your throat choking you. You looked at the girl full of insecurities you were one more time. Her eyes reflected doubt and, above all, fear, and you sadly sensed that it will continue to be this way from now on.

Trying to control yourself, you slowly opened the bathroom door, as if wanting to torture yourself. Britta was sitting in one of the chairs, reviewing something in a notebook until you closed the door a bit harder than you meant to.

"Are you really okay?" she asked again, giving you an uncertain look. "I've been hearing you vomit for several weeks now. Don’t you think you should go to the doctor?"

The knot in your throat seemed to tighten even more. See a doctor… Of course you’d been to the doctor! Four weeks and, as of today, four days pregnant was the answer, but no one beyond your parents and your best friend could know.

"Yes, I’m fine," you replied quickly, trying to fake your answer as best as you could. "Don’t worry. It’s probably just a bit of stress," you added, praying she believed you. "I haven't had time to see a doctor, but I assure you, with all my heart, that everything is fine."

And that's why you're leaving the love of your life today.

Britta seemed to hesitate for a moment. Her lips remained slightly open, as if she wanted to say something. Her look gave you the feeling that she didn't quite believe what you were saying.

"Whatever you say, Y/N," she finally said, standing up from her seat. "But seriously, if you need to talk or anything, I’m here for you."

"I know."

"Well, seeing that you're as calm as a lake, we’d better hurry up," she told you. "The last free practice session is about to start, and Seb is probably worried why we haven’t come back yet."

You prepared to leave the room with her. You were more than sure to go with her, but as you were almost out the room, you realize it was now or never.

You stopped before going from the driver’s room to the garage, watching Britta hurry down the stairs, probably aware that you were running late even though there were still about forty-five minutes before the session started.

"Wait, Britta. Just a sec!"

You were convinced your shout from the top of the stairs was heard by more people than you’d like. You wished you could turn invisible as you saw some eyes on you, including Britta’s, which made it hard to speak, and not to mention the variety of emotions you were feeling inside you.

You needed to calm down and act a bit better, or everything you’d been mulling over will end up falling apart.

"I’d like to talk to Seb… alone," you finally said.

"Y/N Y/L/N," she said your name much more seriously now. "You’ve told me that everything is fine, but… are you sure it really is? Are you sure nothing’s wrong?"

No, everything is wrong, and yes, more things are happening than I’d like.

You knew you could trust Britta completely. You were sure that if you told her the news before you did to Seb, she wouldn’t say anything, at least not right away. You wanted to do it; in fact, you’d love to do it because she was like a second mother to you, but you knew you couldn't because, once you left, there’s a really high chance she might end up telling him everything in a moment of weakness.

"Yes, yes, I’m fine. It’s nothing serious, don’t worry," you replied with a sigh, trying to console the PR woman and yourself. "I just need to talk to him about… well, a minor issue."

"Of course. Go get him, I’ll wait here. He’s probably talking to Rocky or Horner about who knows what. He hasn’t gone far, especially considering how eager he was to see you."

"Can you get him for me?" you let it out casually.

You ignored her last comment because now, your nerves were eating you alive. Britta seemed to notice your anxiety, so you were grateful she ignored it and acted as if nothing is wrong.

You sighed in relief when you saw her nod, and you couldn't stop thanking her out loud for what she just did for you.

"Lie down on the physio’s couch and try to rest a bit, you look a bit pale," she insisted. Reluctantly, and after repeating it a couple more times, you finally listened to her. "Seb will be here soon. You know he’ll drop everything when it comes to you."

And it was true. Once she left, you remained lying down, drawing small shapes on your stomach with your index finger. As you whispered things to what would supposedly be your child, a whirlwind of varied thoughts flooded your mind.

A small pressure settled in your chest as you became aware that the idea of breaking up with Sebastian was becoming a reality. You didn't want to face it and largely refused to, but you knew that for both of you, especially him, it was actually the best.

Hiding the truth from the guy you’d loved longer than you’d like to admit is exactly the opposite of what you should do, but because he was the most important person in your life, and you knew him almost as well as yourself, you knew he'd have time to play moms and dads in real life.

This year, the only thing he should focus on was winning his fourth Formula 1 World Championship, not learning how to change diapers or feed a baby.

Your thoughts vanished when the door opened abruptly, startling you. Seb appeared with his suit hanging at his waist, hair completely tousled, and a face revealing worry matching the situation you haven’t told him about yet.

"Sunshine! Britta told me you’re not well. What happened? Do you want to go to the doctor? I don’t care about missing the free practice: you’re the most important thing."

The German quickly took your cheeks in his hands. You hadn’t even sat up, and he was already trying to warm your face with his palms, moving it from side to side and examining you as if he was a doctor with the solution to your problems.

"I’m fine, love, relax," you said, breaking free from his grip.

"I know you better than I’d like, Y/N. You’re pale," he pointed out. "You rarely get pale. The last time I saw you like this was when the police chased us after they caught you doing an illegal concert in the school square."

Your anxiety grew more at his perception. You couldn't hide the lie you concocted with Hanna for much longer.

"Seb, really, I’m fine," you insisted, swallowing hard as you tried to find the right words.

He didn't seem to agree with your answer once again, and he didn't seem willing to let it go easily.

For a moment, you were tempted to tell him the truth, especially when you noticed his eyes fixed on you, not intending to look away until he found out what you really wanted to say… As if he wants to know that he was going to be a father next January if your gynecologist’s calculations and the latest technology were correct.

You mustered the courage to look him in the eyes. His concern overwhelmed you completely. When he made a move to hug you and you fell into his arms, you knew you couldn't keep dodging the truth.

"Seb…" you started to say, slowly pulling away from him, "the truth is that... well, there's something wrong."

He clenched his jaw and got very serious.

"Tell me, Y/N. Whatever it is, you know you can tell me."

"I know, love. I want to tell you everything, but…" you began calmly, your voice breaking. "This is different, and it’s going to be a bit difficult."

"What do you mean by different and difficult? Y/N, what’s going on?"

Your hands fidgeted nervously as you tried to find the best way to cause him the least harm possible. You noticed that the German's nervous and worried tone had dissipated, and now it was anger that seemed to be consuming him.

"I want to tell you, but I don’t know how to do it without hurting you," you admitted in a whisper.

There it was, you had let it slip.

You didn’t know what else to say, so you decided to wait for Sebastian’s response. Anguish had taken hold of him, and you knew he was waiting for your words as much as you were waiting for his.

His behavior wasn’t helping you; on the contrary, the feeling of guilt was consuming you, as you had foreseen, but there was no turning back now.

It was impossible for you to even think coherently enough to say something that made sense.

You watched as your boyfriend’s gaze turned into pure pain, a pleading search for answers that you didn’t dare to give him.

"Seb…" you spoke again, struggling to maintain your composure and reaching for his hand at the same time. "I need you to listen to me, please."

"I just want you to tell me the truth, Y/N," he called you by your full name. That was the indicator that things weren’t going well and wouldn’t be again. "Whatever it is, I’ll be able to deal with it."

"I don’t want us to be together anymore," you declared. "I’m not in love with you anymore. I haven’t been for about a month or so."

The silence that flooded the room after your false confession was too uncomfortable. His eyes filled with tears; yours did too, but for a different reason than his.

He thought you had stopped loving him when, in fact, you loved him more than ever, especially now.

"Why are you telling me this? Why, Y/N?" he wanted to know. "I thought we were great… I really believed we were better than ever."

"I don’t know, Seb," you murmured between sobs, trying to hide your face so he wouldn’t see how truly affected you were. "There are… there are couples that stop loving each other, and that’s what I think has happened with me. With us."

"What can I do to make you fall in love with me again? I can’t lose you. I can’t lose the sunshine of my life, not when we promised each other a life together."

"You can’t do anything, Seb, and I’m really sorry," you falsely admitted with sadness, trying not to succumb to his desperate plea.

"Sometimes things stop being what they were in the beginning, and, well… ours is no longer what it used to be."

"Of course, it’s not what it used to be! Everything was getting better until you decided to drop this on me, Y/N!" Sebastian yelled at you.

"I was even going to ask you if you wanted us to get…"

"And that’s why I feel it’s better if we move on, but each on our own path!" you interrupted with another shout.

It’s not real, Y/N. Everything you’re saying is a lie.

You inhaled and exhaled more times than you would have liked, but it felt necessary. This charade to try to make Seb’s life a little better was not only costing you your relationship but also your mental health in the long run.

"Is there someone else, Y/N?"

Vettel's voice denoted anger. Rage consumed him at the possibility that there was an answer he didn’t want to hear. His fists, clenched tightly and turning his knuckles white, were proof of it.

"No, not exactly."

And once again, the camouflaged truth.

"What are you saying?" he spat at you, getting closer and closer, consumed by anguish.

"I mean not exactly, but… yes. There is someone else, Seb," you admitted.

The shouts, full of reproaches, insults, and slurs, flooded the room.

You tried to turn a deaf ear. You thought this was all part of a performance and tried to convince yourself that in the future, everything would be fine when you knew it would be the opposite.

"How could you do this to me, Y/N?! How could you cheat on me after almost seven fucking years together?!" Sebastian shouted, taking out his anger on a vase on his desk, throwing it to the ground, spilling the water and the flowers he had given you just a day ago.

"We’ve been through so many things together. We’ve grown up together and fulfilled our dreams together, and now you’re leaving me for some guy you must have slept with on a whim?!"

"Do you think this is easy for me, Sebastian?" you replied, your words true for once. "Stop lying, okay? The only person who has fulfilled their dreams here is you," you said, showing your disagreement on that topic that you knew hurt you and that he had mentioned to hurt you. "While you’ve been living your life as a driver and being the center of attention, I’ve kept working in the same disgusting bar full of creepy old men I’ve been working at since I finished high school," you shouted, furious. You knew this kind of stress wasn’t good for the baby, but right now you didn’t care. "I’ve been saving as much as I could to build a prosperous future even though my salary was a pittance, composing songs and singing them with the hope that they’ll reach someone someday and not be forgotten."

"I’ve told you a million times that you don’t need to work in that fucking bar full of drunk old men who fuck you with their eyes to have a good life," he protested, now much calmer. "With what they pay me we can live comfortably. It's more than enough for both of us."

"I know," you responded calmly, though you were on the verge of an anxiety attack, "but I also know that I can achieve things on my own without anyone’s help."

The blonde let out an ironic laugh. Immediately, he crossed his arms, lifted his head, and looked at you.

"You’ve always been too stubborn, Y/N. Now I see what your future expectations are. After all, I understand: if you never got into the Berlin Art Academy on your own, and you’re still working at the same place after so long…"

You stood still, not knowing what to say or do because you knew exactly what he meant with every word that came out of his mouth. It felt like your feet were cemented to the ground; his words continuously hitting you, wanting to hurt you more and more.

"How dare you to say that to me?"

If you were already shaken and almost broken after this whole conversation, now you were completely sunk. Seeing your reaction, tears streaming down your cheeks non-stop, he seemed to regret it.

Quickly, he approached you, opening his arms intending for you to bury yourself in them. You, as stubborn as he said you were, refused not only the hug but any physical and non-physical contact he wanted to have with you.

"Y/N, I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to say that," yes, that was clear, but it had already been said, and the damage was done. "I was wrong. Please forgive me."

No matter how much he kept talking, trying to apologize and make amends, there was nothing else to do.

Without saying anything else, you began to gather all your belongings from the driver’s room of who could now be considered your ex-boyfriend. You didn’t want to do it; you didn’t want to start the zero-contact phase with the boy you had loved since you were ten years old, the one who had loved you like no one ever had before and like no one ever would.

You were saying goodbye to the father of your child to venture into raising her alone so he could pursue his dream in peace and achieve all the successes he so longed for.

“What are you doing, Y/N?”

“Packing. I’m leaving.”

Your eyes were fixed on the floor, your hands fumbling with the few belongings left to pack in the small backpack you usually took to the paddock. Now, you would have to return to your hotel room and quickly pack everything into the suitcase, rush to the airport, and pray you didn’t miss the flight.

“What do you mean, you’re leaving?” the blonde frowned, incredulous. “It’s Friday, Y/N, we have the whole weekend ahead of us.”

“Well, from now on, you’ll have all the weekends to yourself,” you shook your head, unable to bear his comments trying to make you stay. “From now on, you won’t have me here on weekends, nor in your life. I’m leaving your life, and I’m not coming back,” you repeated, emphasizing the finality of your words.

Vettel was speechless at your declaration. He kept shaking his head, approaching you, trying to take your belongings, but you stopped him.

No matter how much you wanted to, you weren’t going to stay.

“What do you mean by ‘leaving my life and not coming back’?”

“It means I’m going back to Heppenheim, Sebastian,” you turned to him, trying to maintain composure. “I’m going back, you’ll also end up going back even though we live… you live in Switzerland,” you immediately corrected yourself, “but I hope we never see each other again.”

The firmness behind your words scared you. Everything was a lie that, as the conversation progressed, had grown until you doubted what was real and what wasn’t.

“I really hope you achieve everything you are working hard for,” you continued, insisting to yourself not to break down right there. “I hope you win the championship this year and get the four consecutive ones you’ve wanted for. You, more than anyone, deserve all of it, and I know you’re capable of that and much more.”

You said nothing more because you had stopped being strong. You left, without looking back, the room where you had spent much more time than imaginable, and one of the many places that made up the story starring Sebastian Vettel and you.

You carefully descended the stairs. You walked with a false sense of security through the RedBull garage, dodging any questions about why you were crying, where you were going, and if you had argued with the team’s golden boy, including the endless questions from Britta Roeske that you were trying to ignore at all costs.

You felt curious eyes following you wherever you went, but you didn’t care in the slightest. It was all done.

Now, it was just you and the little pea, or whatever size the baby was.

“Y/N, wait!”

Sebastian’s desperate shouts echoed behind you, getting closer.

You stopped dead, clutching the only strap of the backpack hanging over your shoulder. You slowly turned toward the direction the voices seemed to be coming from and saw the driver running to you, almost choking, as he wiped tears from his cheeks and even those still falling from his eyes.

“I love you, Y/N.”

His voice was choked, and his hands acted on their own. Still, it didn’t stop him from taking your face in his hands and pulling you into a kiss that unleashed a whirlwind of emotions, where you tasted each other’s tears as you had done many times in your relationship. Where you silently said millions of I love yous that only you and he knew perfectly.

“Please, don’t go, sunshine,” the German expressed. “Whatever it is, we can work on it, but please, don’t let us end.”

“I love you too, Seb, but there’s someone else.”

You finally confessed… not in the most ideal way, but in the right one, especially considering what your goal was after all this trail of lies.

“There’s a new person in my life, and I’m afraid to say that no matter how much I love you, I love them more than I love you, and I always will,” you continued, knowing that every word you were saying about your baby was true. “I love you, Sebastian Vettel, and I’ll never stop loving you, but that person is my main priority right now.”

“Have you been unfaithful?”

Sometimes silence is worth more than a thousand words. In this case, it was the exact opposite.

You stood in front of him for a few seconds, debating internally whether to answer or leave as calmly as possible, without attracting more attention than you already had. You decided on the latter because you couldn’t speak, and the tears wouldn’t let you see clearly; not to mention your judgment was so clouded that you couldn’t think clearly about the next step to end this nightmare.

You finally directed one last look at Seb; whispered that you loved him and always would, even though it was over between you.

All it took was for you to lower your head, turn around, and continue walking, fighting not to look back, to realize that you had made the biggest mistake of your life and would never, for anything in the world, be able to forgive yourself.

And you knew perfectly well that Seb wouldn’t either.

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crowleysgirl56 · 1 year ago

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Updated with edits!

Timeline of the last 12 months 15 months of the Good Omens fandom.

July 2023 - Good Omens season 2 drops. Fans watch on the presumption this season is based on the sequel idea Terry and NG spoke of in the 90’s and 2006. Reactions are mixed but mostly positive. We’re happy with fluff. Initial thoughts: “I don’t see how this story could have been fleshed out into an entire novel, but I guess it was only ever just initial ideas, so I suppose that works.”

July 2023 - THE KISS.

Fandom reaction: NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

August 2023 - NG responds to fandom

NG: “Season 2 isn’t actually based on the idea Terry and I spoke about.”

Fandom: “What?”

NG: “Season 2 is just a bridging story to get us to season 3. That will be the story that Terry and I discussed.”

Fandom: “What!?”

NG: “Season 3 hasn’t been greenlit by Prime yet so we might not get it.”

Fandom: “WHAT?!”

NG: “Also I wrote the kiss that way by giving the fandom what you want without actually giving you what you want. So like, stop asking me for things or I won’t write them.”

Fandom: “AAARRRGGGHHHHH!!!”

August to November 2023 - The fandom, now lost and depressed, mope through the halls of Tumblr and Reddit, desperately clinging to any piece of information dropped by NG, sharing fan art, creating headcanons and theories, and writing the angstiest of angst fanfiction ever written. Some weep in a corner mumbling about the South Downs. Most just trudge through their daily lives, listless and despondent.

December 2023 - Prime greenlights Good Omens Season 3.

Fandom: YES! OMG HOORAY! WAHOO! Dancing in the streets. Fanfiction turns to fluff and smut. NG is active and happy, answering many questions without actually answering them. Gives us the hilarious gift of Dottie and Sadie.

January 2024 - speculation of when season 3 filming will begin commences. Realisation that it could be quite a while starts to sink in. Actors and writers strike has caused delay to the scripts being written. David and Michael have taken on theatre work which will delay their filming schedules. Douglas McKinnon announces he’s stepping away as director. Fandom has slight freak out, but NG reassures everyone it’s nothing to worry about, and linked to the recent strikes.

Early to mid 2024 - “The invisible and unbreakable line that joins Crowley and Aziraphale”.

Fandom: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! We inevitably become even more feral. Much fanart is made.

March 2024 - David hosts the BAFTAs and Michael helps him during the opening. David is then nominated for TV BAFTA for Good Omens.

Fandom: OMG YYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAYYYY!!! Much dancing and celebration is had once again. We are so in love.

May 2024 - filming schedule for GO season 3 is announced. It will commence January 2025. The fandom reacts.

Fandom: “That’s still so long away!” “Michael and David will have their hair dyed white and red for the awards season!” “Going by the previous production schedule this means season 3 won’t reach our screen until 2026! No!” “Cannot wait for this to start filming we are going to be so feral!” More fanfiction, more fanart.

June 2024 - David hosts Pub in the Park. Michael joins him.

Fandom: THEY ARE SO CUTE! HOW CAN THEY BE THIS CUTE, WE DON’T DESERVE THEM.

Early July 2024 - horrible allegations are laid against NG and the fandom comes to a terrible crashing halt. Much debate and discussion is had back and forth: “Believe the victims”. “Separate the art from the artist”. “Drop the fandom entirely”. “Step back for a moment”. There is a lot of arguing, but there is also still a lot of love. NG has fled all social media.

Late July 2024 - until it’s January, and the show actually starts filming, Good Omens season 3 has now become Schrödinger’s Series. It both now exists and doesn’t exist. Prime at any moment may pull the production due to the backlash against NG. The fandom now re-examines McKinnon’s departure speculating if he left for other reasons. We once again despondently trudge the halls of tumblr and Reddit feeling the same feeling of this time last year.

This section of the post was made in late July was this was original posted: And that pretty much brings us up to date. Anything could happen in the next six months, which is why I feel we’re all worried. It’s why I’m worried. So instead, keep sharing the art, keep writing the fanfiction, keep speculating with theories and headcanons. Let’s be here for each other. Because we created this fandom for each other. It doesn’t belong to NG anymore. Let’s do this for Terry. Personally, I can’t wait to come back to this timeline and add January 2025 - filming begins.

28 July 2024 - Michael Sheen, the absolute angel that he is posts a picture of his tartan socks clad feet alongside the caption “To our world”. Such a beautiful, beautiful man!

10 September 2024 - Amazon Prime announces production for season 3 is paused. Everyone loses their shit. There is much lamentations.

Unsubstantiated posts start circulating that the show is cancelled. People who have a friend whose cousin’s gardener’s former roommate claim they are involved with the production and therefore they KNOW the show is cancelled. More lamentations.

Amazon stays silent for EIGHT. FUCKING. WEEKS.

The fandom walk around in a god damn haze again akin to what August to December 2023 felt like. Will we be left with the final 15 forever?

Mid October 2024 - for about 3 days straight the fandom receives information that is akin to a rollercoaster of emotion. Head graphics designer Mickey tweets out a now deleted post that everyone is going back to Scotland. Then Peter Anderson Studio tweet out a now deleted post referencing the South Downs cottage. Then random casting company updates their subscription website advertising Good Omens: The Finale a TV movie. Entertainment website releases an article referencing this. The fandom LOSE. THEIR. SHIT. AGAIN. We honestly can’t take much more of this.

25 October 2024 - Amazon finally announces the news we’ve been half expecting half dreading with positive and negative ramifications. Neil Gaiman is gone. GOOD! Season 3 will still happen. GOOD! But now it’s just a 90 minutes finale. WAIT, WHAT, NO! But it could have been worse. It was a hairs breath away from being completely cancelled. GOD BLESS RHIANNA PRATCHETT AND ROB WILKINS.

It’s been a wild ride everyone. I’ve already posted earlier this morning (25 October 2024) my thoughts about the whole situation so go read that there. But for now? Gaiman is gone, and we get our ending.

For now here’s to seeing our boys with their red and white hair again.

#good omens #good omens fandom #Crowley #Aziraphale #david tennant #michael sheen #crowley and aziraphale #crowley x arizaphale #ineffable husbands #good omens season 3

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thissying · 6 months ago

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interview with Richard Pex about Max's go-karting days Formule1 magazine, The Year of Max 2024

"At some point I knew Jos and Sophie from the go-kart track in Genk. I was there, riding with my two eldest sons. But with Stan who was four years old then, too. At some point Sophie came up to me together with Max and said: 'Max wants me to ask you how old Stan is.' I said four and then Max said: 'See. I'm five already and I still have to wait until I'm six.' Jos wanted him to wait until he was six but I asked Max: 'Would you like to drive?' Sophie didn't really want that but we did it anyway."

A few innocent laps with great consequences, Richard realises more than twenty years later. "A couple of days later Jos called me. 'Yes, thank you very much', he said. 'Now I have to buy Max a kart.' That's how it started. We agreed then to go karting together more often. Sparring and training. I raced too but I couldn't keep up with Jos. 'Well, you have a better engine', I said to him. 'Okay', Jos said then, 'then I'll fix this engine for you before the Dutch Championship in Amsterdam.' I went like a rocket during practices but at some point I thought: is that Jos over there? He'd been curious about how things were going and had come to Amsterdam for that. 'Can I spend the night in the trailer? Because I'd like to see the race tomorrow', he asked. Typical Jos: pure passion. We clicked and that's how our friendship started."

Verstappen's go-kart team was run by Frans [ed. Max's grandpa]. Because Jos was still active in F1 and couldn't be there for everything. On top of that, Frans and Jos were busy with the boys that drove for the team and sometimes that was at the expense of Max. "In Genk the mini's were allowed on track for fifteen minutes of every hour. Then Max came over and said: 'Daddy, I want to drive too.' At some point Jos was done with it. He said: 'This isn't right. I'm constantly busy with others and then when my son comes and asks me to drive, I don't have time. You know what I'm going to do? I will quit the team. From now on I'm only going to focus on Max. He really wants it, wants to drive so badly. Do you want to do this together with me?'"

Richard didn't need to think about it for long. "My sons were driving as well, so that sounded good to me. 'Okay, then we'll buy a van and we'll do it together', Jos said then. From that moment on we were together almost day and night, at the go-kart track or the business in Maasbracht. There, in that factory hall, we set up a workshop and from there we started working. I think I've been at all Max's go-kart races. It was an incredible time. Very hard work but wonderful. Jos was busy every day, from morning until night. Max went to school, (laughing) sometimes not, but after that he was always there. To tinker or drive. Often they were eighteen hour days because I still had my own company as well. But we had a lot of succes. Jorrit became world champion [ed. in 2006] in Portimão. Jos was his mechanic. Max was there, Stan, our wives. I still get goosebumps now. Especially that look from Max to Jorrit in that moment. You could see the passion in Max's eyes, the will to achieve the same. I can still see Jos caressing his little head, telling him: 'Your time will come.' Unforgettable." That Max had the talent and gift to go far in the racing world became clear very quickly. But everything that happened behind the scenes and what was needed to facilitate young Max optimally is rather underexposed. Richard was there from day one and got sucked in. "The brakes were off with Jos. Everything had to move out of the way for the higher goal. Jos always said: 'Max just has to perform, then everything else will follow.' He made it as difficult as possible for Max; he raised the bar a little every time. Jos felt Max should race with older boys. He had the luck he could often spar with Jorrit, who is five years older. What Max didn't know, was that sometimes Jos added lead to his go-kart and wasn't satisfied until he was as fast as everyone else. Every Wednesday afternoon we went to Genk. I picked up Jorrit and then we took the van to Maaseik to pick up Max from school. He was always the first one to run onto the playground to get in, rain or shine. I think we must have been in Genk 48 Wednesdays out of the 52. Going on holiday was another thing. We always took the van because we'd go on holiday near go-kart tracks. The deal was: one day at the beach and the other day the boys were allowed to kart. That quickly turned into karting every day. Often at unknown tracks and then Jos would say: 'Lap 8 will be pole-position time. Not lap 25 because then you boys will know the track already', That's how it went."

Max was fast right away, showed his famed ruthlessness already at a young age and could match the absolute top of the world in karting. That didn't happen without a fight. The competition watched with disbelief which lead to plenty of speculation that cheating was involved. Jealousy reared its head but not with the person that should have been bothered the most: Jorrit Pex. "Jos and I also often watched in disbelief at how fast Max was. Jos would then compare Max's data to Jorrit's and point out the mistakes he made. Max would often get into a discussion, did not hide away and would then talk to Jorrit. Recently, in an interview, he said: 'I learned a lot from Jorrit.' I liked that." Jealousy wasn't an issue because Jorrit is so different from Max, character-wise. "Jorrit also said: 'give Max the best material. He must become world champion.' That's what he was like. Jorrit didn't have any issues with that. He wanted that for Max. I also noticed Jorrit was more of a homebody. He enjoys going away but mostly he really enjoys being home a lot. Because he'd already said he wanted to run the company with [brother] Yard, the choice was clear. There never was any envy. Not from me either. I was there for everything, been through it all and it was fantastic."

That Max had just that little bit extra, Richard and Jos discovered empirically. "Jorrit and Max were sparring with equal karts. Engines that ran equally fast, same weight, no difference whatsoever. And yet, on the straight Max went just that bit faster every time. If you didn't know better, you'd think: he's got a better engine. Even I started having doubts and Jos too wanted to know now. 'You know what?' Jos said, 'We're going to exchanges the engines.' Nothing changed. Max was a tad faster again. It meant that Max came out of the corner with more speed and therefore was at top-speed more quickly. How he does it, I don't know either. That's pure talent. You can still see it with him now, in Formula1 as well. Max had a good engine but not a better one than the competition. It was purely Max. He had and still has that little bit extra. Tire management, technique of taking corners, attack, defend - Max mastered it down to the last detail. He had good equipment but he did not become European and world champion because he had the best material."

The straightforwardness of the Verstappens is not appreciated all around. In F1, with all its egos, disagreement is never far away. Conflicts lurk in a world where the competition is razor-sharp. Jos was (is) extremely black and white. Max will occasionally accept a shade of grey but only if he's being utterly convinced he's wrong. How did Richard Pex manage to never let those powder kegs explode? The Limburger laughs. "I read or hear stories that make me go: how do they come up with that? Yes, Jos was tough but I've never seen Jos box Max's ear. And I was there for everything. Me and Jos click. We're true friends, through thick and thin. We've been through all the ups and downs and talked about everything. We slept in the van together, were together 24/7 most of the time. Of course I wondered sometimes: how will we manage this? Jos wasn't the easiest person but we always talked things through and turned out okay. And we're both proud of that. We've got, I think, rather the same character: honest, straightforward. We didn't always agree but that was also to up the pressure. I'd say: 'Jos what you're working on now, won't work.' 'Oh yeah?' he say then, and start working like a madman to prove the opposite.

[…]

Max mediated to have Richard and his best friend Stan as a guest in Abu Dhabi in 2021 for the heroic grand finale of the battle between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. "Now I have to be careful otherwise I'll become very emotional. Nothing will ever be more beautiful than that. That I got to be there for that… Pfff. Max said before that: 'You and Stan are coming with us to Abu Dhabi.' Yeah, that's something you'll never forget. Together in the car on the way to the track. Talking about go-karting and the past. On the day of the race Max said: 'Richard, this is the big day. I'm going for it fully. It's going to be difficult but you never know. And then it happens. That last lap, I knew: now he's going to get it. Afterwards tears flow. "I saw everything again. Max on that crate, Jos kneeling before him. The look between those two. I saw those icy cold little hands again, the tears in his eyes when Jos had sent him back on track in the rain and cold in Genk again. Unfortunately we don't see Max a lot any more, but that will change again. I'm certain he still thinks the karting days were the best time of his life and not the present. When the helmet is on, he's the driver but he doesn't give a damn about the whole circus around it in F1."

[…]

Richard Pex has been there for all of it. Nobody that - except for dad Jos of course - knows Max Verstappen better than this Limburger. "Even in karting I already said: it's Max who makes the difference and when he gets to F1 and he's got equal equipment, it will be: start, away and done. That's how it was and still is."

#f1 #richard pex #max lore #max verstappen #max in dutch #jos verstappen

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liliesmultiverse · 23 days ago

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⋆ˊˎ-•̩̩͙- *̩̩̥͙ dating history in my adult fame reality!!

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° jasmine elaine collins [born feb. 21, 1990] is mrs. good luck, babe!. we started dating on november 13, 2004. she was scared of coming out so we kept our relationship a secret until she broke up with me on april 21, 2005 because her friends started getting suspicious and literally a day later she started dating a guy.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° sabrina lauren hall [born nov. 7, 1989] is mrs. casual. we started ‘dating’ on september 8, 2005. unbeknownst to me, our relationship was entirely casual to her & she was flirting with another girl the entire time. i ended it on june 20, 2006 when the other girl realized that i didn’t know what sabrina was doing.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° thomas grant gustin [born jan. 14, 1990] is mr. fearless. we met completely randomly in august 2006 and started dating on october 5 that same year. we ended up breaking on january 20, 2008 though because it wasn’t working anymore. there wasn’t any bad blood between us though.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° jensen ross ackles [born mar. 1, 1978] is mr. you’re not sorry. we met in 2008 on the set of supernatural because i had a small guest appearance and started dating on july 5. we broke up after only a few months on october 19 because he kept talking down on me because of my age.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° bill istvan gunther skarsgård [born aug. 9, 1990] is mr. better than revenge. we met at a chirstmas party in 2008 and started dating a few days later on new years. he broke up with me on july 14 through a voicemail and a few days later it was announced that he was dating someone else already.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° nikolina kamenova dobreva [born jan. 9, 1989] is mrs. long live. we first met on the set of the vampire diaries and started dating on november 4, 2009. our relationship was absolutely amazing but the internet absolutely ruined it because they hated us together so we mutually broke up on october 13, 2010.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° andrew russell garfield [born aug. 20, 1983] is mr. wildest dreams. we met while i was auditioning for gwen stacy in the amazing spider-man of which i did get the part. we started dating on march 13, 2011 and dated up until august 19, 2014 due to me falling out of love. many of our fans were upset at the announcement as they’d hoped that we’d get married eventually.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° aaron perry johnson [born jun. 13, 1990] is mr. getaway car. we first met when we filmed godzilla and became friends. he filed to divorce sam in april 2014 and it’s officially finalized in october that year and unbeknownst to me, the reason for the divorce was because he’d started getting feelings for me. we started dating on january 13, 2015 which led to a lot of hate towards me with haters calling me a multitude of names, mostly ‘slut’ or ‘homewrecker’. the hate started getting to me mentally and i broke it off on april 27, 2016 which he understood. we lost contact after the break up.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° jonathan edward bernthal [born sept. 20, 1976] is mr. paper rings. we first met while filming season 2 of daredevil but didn’t start getting closer until filming for the punisher season 1 where we started dating on november 19, 2016. our entire relationship was kept completely private from the media & public which was something we decided together. we have two daughters together - willow laura bernthal (b. august 4, 2018) & maya iris bernthal (b. december 11, 2020). we actually got engaged on may 13, 2019 and had plans to get married in late 2023 but life got in the way and we split on good terms on march 23, 2023. i was actually very heartbroken and swore off relationships for awhile.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° katherine victoria litwack [born jun. 13, 1986] is mrs. bed chem. we met through a mutual friend and hit it off pretty easily. we started a casual relationship on april 4, 2024 that didn’t last very long as she wanted more but i was still heartbroken over the split with jon so we broke it off on june 27, 2024.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° aaron perry johnson [born jun. 13, 1990] is mr. so high school. we met again in august 2024 and reconnected easily. we haven’t started anything and have remained friends although rumors did immediately spark when he appeared in the background of some photos at my 35th birthday party. we’ll start dating again though on april 14, 2025.

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shiftingwithjaidyn · 1 year ago

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🎞️ ⋮ writer/fame dr

★┊ BASICS .ᐟ

timeline:

this dr takes place around late august of 2022 due to the fact i intend to be part of one of the films i work on right from its beginning

locations:

los angeles, california (main)

vancouver, canada

new york, new york

san antonio, texas

london, england

notes:

i scripted out a lot of things that occur in this reality (due to the fact i scripted the timeline of everything somewhat similar)

some movies in my filmography are book adaptations that do not exist in this reality however exist in mine and most tv-shows in my filmography are cancelled shows in this reality so i decided to make them continued in my dr (just incase of some confusion hehe)

★┊ ABOUT ME .ᐟ

name: lilian maricel villaécija

nicknames: lily, lia, celia, mary/mari

gender & pronouns: demigirl || she/they

birthday: august 11th, 1980

height: 5’6”/167 cm

zodiac sign: leo

mbti: enfp

nationality & ethnicity: american || filipino-chinese

occupations:

screenwriter

script supervisor

production designer

director of photography

make-up artist

storyboard artist

aesthetic:

★┊ CAREER .ᐟ

movies:

center stage (2000)

in the mood for love (2000)

uptown girls (2003)

eternal sunshine of a spotless mind (2004)

pride & prejudice (2005)

the devil wears prada (2006)

black swan (2010)

if i stay (2014)

la la land (2016)

lady bird (2017)

the glass castle (2017)

to the bone (2017)

the greatest showman (2017)

oceans 8 (2018)

crazy rich asians (2018)

always be my maybe (2019)

little women (2019)

all the bright places (2020)

pieces of a woman (2020)

last night in soho (2021)

everything everywhere all at once (2022)

one last stop (2023) [film adaptation of the book by casey mcquinston]

tv shows:

grey's anatomy (s2-s13) || 2005-2016)

rupaul's drag race (s5-s14 || 2013-2022)

rupaul's drag race: all stars (s2-s5 || 2016-2020)

anne with an e (s1- || 2017-present/ongoing)

the marvelous mrs. maisel (s1-s5 || 2017-2023)

pose (s1-s3 || 2018-2021)

instinct (s1-s3) (2018-2023)

the umbrella academy (s1-s4 || 2019-2024)

the haunting of bly manor (s1 || 2020)

bridgerton (s1- || 2020-present/ongoing)

yellowjackets (s2- || 2023-present/ongoing)

★┊ RELATIONSHIPS .ᐟ

╰┈➤ FRIENDS

(i have a lot of friends due to the fact i've been in the industry for quite a while now, but these are just my closest)

trixie mattel

shea couleé

katya zamolodchikova

kate walsh

emmy raver-lampman

sandra oh

nicola coughlan

gemma chan

simone kessell

a huge special mention as well to @ixzotica a.k.a. aaliyah sinclair in my dr!! the one and only best friend, neighbor, sister, and platonic soulmate of mine in every single universe <3

╰┈➤ PET

name: mari-pusa (Mariposa)

nicknames: mari, choco butternut,

gender & pronouns: female || she/her

birthday: january 15

zodiac sign: capricorn

mbti: istj

breed: tortoiseshell

╰┈➤ S/O

gonna keep him a redacted for now as i am not yet comfortable sharing much about my dr but i just wanted to let u guys know he's an actor, he's a libra, and that he exists HSHJSHDSHKJHL

★┊ EXTRAS .ᐟ

links:

patter banner || gradient divider || star divider || heart divider

note:

feel free to ask me about this dr or any shifting related thing in general!! i'd really appreciate it! : ]

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batboyblog · 1 year ago

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Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #10

March 15-22 2024

The EPA announced new emission standards with the goal of having more than half of new cars and light trucks sold in the US be low/zero emission by 2032. One of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, it'll eliminate 7 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next 30 years. It's part of President Biden's goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 on the road to eliminating them totally by 2050.

President Biden canceled nearly 6 Billion dollars in student loan debt. 78,000 borrowers who work in public sector jobs, teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters etc will have their debt totally forgiven. An additional 380,000 public service workers will be informed that they qualify to have their loans forgiven over the next 2 years. The Biden Administration has now forgiven $143.6 Billion in student loan debt for 4 million Americans since the Supreme Court struck down the original student loan forgiveness plan last year.

Under Pressure from the administration and Democrats in Congress Drugmaker AstraZeneca caps the price of its inhalers at $35. AstraZeneca joins rival Boehringer Ingelheim in capping the price of inhalers at $35, the price the Biden Admin capped the price of insulin for seniors. The move comes as the Federal Trade Commission challenges AstraZeneca’s patents, and Senator Bernie Sanders in his role as Democratic chair of the Senate Health Committee investigates drug pricing.

The Department of Justice sued Apple for being an illegal monopoly in smartphones. The DoJ is joined by 16 state attorneys general. The DoJ accuses Apple of illegally stifling competition with how its apps work and seeking to undermining technologies that compete with its own apps.

The EPA passed a rule banning the final type of asbestos still used in the United States. The banning of chrysotile asbestos (known as white asbestos) marks the first time since 1989 the EPA taken action on asbestos, when it passed a partial ban. 40,000 deaths a year in the US are linked to asbestos

President Biden announced $8.5 billion to help build advanced computer chips in America. Currently America only manufactures 10% of the world's chips and none of the most advanced next generation of chips. The deal with Intel will open 4 factories across 4 states (Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon) and create 30,000 new jobs. The Administration hopes that by 2030 America will make 20% of the world's leading-edge chips.

President Biden signed an Executive Order prioritizing research into women's health. The order will direct $200 million into women's health across the government including comprehensive studies of menopause health by the Department of Defense and new outreach by the Indian Health Service to better meet the needs of American Indian and Alaska Native Women. This comes on top of $100 million secured by First Lady Jill Biden from ARPA-H.

Democratic Senators Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, and Jacky Rosen (all up for re-election) along with Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sheldon Whitehouse, introduced the "Shrinkflation Prevention Act" The Bill seeks to stop the practice of companies charging the same amount for products that have been subtly shrunk so consumers pay more for less.

The Department of Transportation will invest $45 million in projects that improve Bicyclist and Pedestrian Connectivity and Safety

The EPA will spend $77 Million to put 180 electric school buses onto the streets of New York City This is part of New York's goal to transition its whole school bus fleet to electric by 2035.

The Senate confirmed President Biden's nomination of Nicole Berner to the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Berner has served as the general counsel for America's largest union, SEIU, since 2017 and worked in their legal department since 2006. On behalf of SEIU she's worked on cases supporting the Affordable Care Act, DACA, and against the Defense of Marriage act and was part of the Fight for 15. Before working at SEIU she was a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Berner's name was listed by the liberal group Demand Justice as someone they'd like to see on the Supreme Court. Berner becomes one of just 5 LGBT federal appeals court judges, 3 appointed by Biden. The Senate also confirmed Edward Kiel and Eumi Lee to be district judges in New Jersey and Northern California respectively, bring the number of federal judges appointed by Biden to 188.

#Thanks Biden #Joe Biden #Democrats #politics #US politics #climate change #climate crisis #student loans #debt forgiveness #shrinkflation #women's health #drug prices

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dessarchive · 4 months ago

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JO CAMERON, HOLLYWOODS UPCOMING IT GIRL 𓈒

JO CAMERON… JUST WHO IS SHE?

Jo entered the acting industry at just five years old with her debut in the season 13 premiere of Law & Order. When she saw herself on tv, she knew bringing characters to life was what she wanted to do for the rest of hers. The cast and crew along with viewers were all shocked at how amazing Jo’s acting skills were as she previously had no experience.

Let’s go back to the beginning to get a better sense of who Jo really is. Jo Cameron, born Jolena Merliah Lorelai Odessa Cameron, was born in Woodstock, New York, on March 1, 2006 alongside her twin sister, Julianna. She was named after Josephine March from the story Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and Lois Joanne Lane from the Superman DC comics. Jo grew up in Woodstock, New York on her family’s farm that her mother and father built after they graduated high school. At just five years old, Jo told her parents that she wanted to be an actress which wasn’t shocking to either of them as Jo grew up hosting plays in their living room with her seven siblings almost nightly.

Jo’s acting debut was so excellent that shortly after the premiere she caught the attention of many producers and casting directors. Jo got many offers but none caught her eye until she read the plot for The Florida Project. She took the role of Moonee almost immediately and fell in love with acting even more than she ever thought she could. The Florida Project was released in 2014 and ever since she’s gone on to play numerous roles stretching across many genres and winning many awards along the way.

🎬 JO’S ACTING TIMELINE

Law & Order (2011) The Florida Project (2014)

Girl Meets World (2015) Stuck In The Middle (2016)

Stranger Things (2016-2025) Young Sheldon (2017-2020)

The Baby-Sitters Club (2020) The Black Phone (2022)

Hocus Pocus 2 (2022) Avatar: The Way Of Water (2022)

Scream 5 (2023) Barbie (2023)

Princess Diaries (2023)

Percy Jackson and The Olympians (2023) Mean Girls (2024)

The Princess and The Popstar (2024)

The Edge of Seventeen (2024)

Smallville (2025) Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Barbie In A Mermaid Tale Live Action (2026)

Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2026)

Corpse Bride Live Action (2027)

Little Women on Broadway (2029) Avatar 4 (2029)

Avatar 5 (2031)

From the time Jo was fourteen she was already featured in “Celebrities Under 20 That You Should Watch Out For” and time has proven that her success isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Jo will earn many titles throughout her career, the most notable being “Hollywood’s Sweetheart” and “Hollywood’s Biggest Name.” Besides acting, Jo has mentioned multiple times she wants to experience many more things in her career such as becoming a singer-songwriter, a model, producer, director, and creating her own broadway play. At just twenty-four, Jo will become the highest paid actress under twenty-five and also become the youngest EGOT winner.

As of March 2025, Jo quietly resides in both Oceanside, California and Woodstock, New York to keep her grounded and connected to both her family and friends. Fans suspect Jo’s second album is in the works as Jo has just released her newest single, Shower.

Want to read more? Click below!

THOMAS AND JO, ARE THEY ONLY FRIENDS?

INSIDE JO CAMERON’S CLOSET!

JO’S DISCOGRAPHY, A DEEP DIVE!

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

youtube

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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alexbkrieger13 · 14 days ago

Note

https://www.ruv.is/frettir/ithrottir/2025-06-26-konan-sem-vinnur-alltaf-hun-er-natturulega-sturlud-443253

Lovely words from Glodis :)

The woman who always works: "She's naturally crazy"

Danish captain Pernille Harder has achieved something that few can match. Harder has won league titles ten years in a row in three countries. Glódís Perla Viggósdóttir is her teammate and says Harder is an incredible player.

Pernille Harder achieved this this year by becoming the league champion for the 10th season in a row. This skilled striker is 32 years old and therefore just starting out. She is the captain of the Danish national team, while Glódís Perla Viggósdóttir is her captain at Bayern Munich.

What characterizes Pernille? And how does one win a league championship 10 years in a row, with four teams in three divisions?

Harder, better, faster, stronger

Such a collection of titles is hardly known, whether in men's or women's football. The only one comparable to this is Kingsley Coman, who won the league for 11 consecutive years until something finally went wrong in 2024. Coman won the league with PSG in France, Juventus in Italy and Bayern in Germany from 2013 to 2024.

Coman, however, only played once for PSG and Juventus in the first two titles. Pernille has been a key figure in all ten league titles to date.

It is not at all certain that Bayern will continue to win the league, as the team has won it for the last three years. So Pernille could still add trophies to her collection.

Which ones and who else?

Other examples of players who have won league championships many times in a row, but with one team:

Manuel Neuer and Thomas Müller : 11 consecutive years from 2013 to 2024 with Bayern Munich.

Wendie Renard: Renard won 14 consecutive league titles with Lyon from 2006 to 2020. PSG won the title in 2021, but Lyon has won the following seasons. However, Harder's achievement is greater as more teams and countries are involved. Perhaps Harder will eventually top those 14 titles.

Eugénie Le Sommer won the French league 10 times in a row with Lyon from 2009 to 2020.

Barcelona are on a roll and have won the Spanish league six times in a row. Aitana Bonmatí, Alexia Putellas, Caroline Graham Hansen and Asisat Oshoala have played for the team all those seasons. But they need to start moving across the Catalan border if they want to top Pernille.

Her wife approaching?

Pernille and her wife Magdalena Eriksson have been playing together for the last few years. They met at Chelsea and went to Bayern together. Eriksson has now won five league titles in a row. She plays in defence, often alongside Glódís Perla.

They attracted a lot of attention when they met as captains with their countries in an international match recently. There, Eriksson took a very hard hit on Harder, who lay on the grass several times. Among other things, they covered each other in set pieces where they fought very hard. Sweden eventually won 2-1.

Will meet at the European Championship

Sweden and Denmark are in Group C at the European Championship in Switzerland, so all eyes will be on the two captains on July 4th at 4:00 PM.

Poland and Germany are the other two teams in the group, so it is clear that a strong team will be left with a sore forehead in this difficult group.

Harder is the all-time leading scorer in the national team's history with 78 goals in 162 games. She is quickly closing in on Katrine Pedersen's record of 210 games.

What does Glodís say?

Glódís and Pernille are key players for Bayern. The Dane played the most minutes for Bayern in the league this year, while Glódís was in fifth place when she was injured towards the end of the season.

Glódís says that Pernille is one of the best players she has ever played with, but it is undeniably fun to annoy her during practice.

"I think I would rank her as one of the best players I've ever played with. She's a total professional. If we start off the field, she's a total perfectionist, does everything right and takes extremely good care of herself."

Her teammates often laugh at her.

Pernille can sometimes be too conscientious.

"We often laugh at her because we always show up for free time in the morning and there are exercises that we have to do. You're supposed to do two or three rounds of the exercises. Most people just go at their own leisurely pace and do some of the exercises. They do some other movement and usually never do three sets. But she always does all the exercises, always three sets and preferably more."

Sometimes gets into a rage during training

No one gets this good without a little bit of competition. Glódís often faces her in training and enjoys getting the better of Pernille.

"But she does all the work you want from your number ten and then she scores all those goals too. She's an amazing player with a huge competitive spirit, absolutely disgustingly competitive. She's taken the piss a few times in training, when she's not working. So it's really fun sometimes not being with her on the team and annoying her."

#love ot #pernille harder #woso #fc bayern frauen #fcb frauen

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bruciemilf · 19 days ago

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Halloooo

I keep seeing stuff about the batfam on my dashboard…it’s all really fluffy and funny and the art (yours)…but I’m not IN THE BATMAN FANDOM. I don’t know anyone’s names or context or anything.

Are there any, like….easy ways to open your mouth and suck in the entirety of the fandom and have knowledge of Everything so I can enjoy (your) stuff even more

That's weird :0 if you want, you can try filtering tags on batfam/dc to only see stuff you're interested in (or just mine, if that works better!)

I got into DC after watching Batman 2022— but I've been a casual fan for some time. Honestly, DC is extremely rich in resources, both fandom and meta-wise.

I'm not the best person to recommend comics, but, here’s what I have so far:

Batman, The Long Halloween

Under The Red Hood

Harleen (2021)

Wayne Family Adventures Webtoon (still reading, keep in mind this IS very good if you want a soft introduction and get a surface level reading of the Batfam’s energy, but I recommend checking out canon first, and determine if it's a good fit for your interpretation. I love it a lot still, and I recommend it!)

Batgirl (2000-2006)

Wonder Girl, Wonder Girl Homecoming

Blue Beetle (2006)

We Are Robin

Batman #160 (still reading)

I wanna read Batman: Man Who Falls soooo badly

Other than that! You also have a bunch of cinema to choose from, including:

The Justice League animated series

Batman Beyond

Batman: the Animated Series

Batman (2022)

The Dark Knight (2008)

My Adventures With Superman

Harley Quinn (2019)

The Penguin (2024)

Other than that!! Just interact with the fandom! Almost if not all people have been super friendly so far.

Follow blogs for specific characters, read meta, follow people with a good grip on the established content you have. (PandaRedd is a fan favorite, and he's really funny), Watch video commentaries, read fanfiction, the works!

Most of all. Just have fun with it!!

#asks

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yonderghostshistories · 6 days ago

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>be “Spitting Image”

>have a successful 18-series run from 1984-1996 on ITV

>get cancelled in 1996 due to low ratings

>despite that, it has a massive cultural impact/influence on not only British Comedy but also British Culture and also worldwide (including many International spin-offs), and launching the careers of many people who worked on the show

>initial plans for a proposed reboot get scrapped cuz ITV used the Ant & Dec puppets against the creators’ wishes for the “Best Ever Spitting Image” special in 2006

>spawn a few shows inspired by the show SI in terms of format and style/aesthetic (including “2DTV”, “Headcases” and “Newzoids”)

>come back in official reboot form in 2020 with a new cast and crew

>gets paywalled on BritBox

>reboot is kinda mid

>gets cancelled (again) in 2022 (also cuz the Queen died)

>stays silent for a while

>come back in musical form via the musical “Idiots Assemble : Spitting Image The Musical” in 2023

>stays silent (again) from late 2023/2024-onwards

>randomly come back (again) with a new special on YouTube for a new new series called “Spitting Image : The Rest is Bullshit”

>release said special on 4th July (aka Independence Day)

#lolitics #spitting image #spitting image: the rest is bullshit #uk politics #british comedy

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april-is · 3 months ago

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April 25, 2025: a remix for remembrance, Kristiana Rae Colón

a remix for remembrance Kristiana Rae Colón

For my students

This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement, who press creases into jeans, who carve their names in pavement, the girls whose names are ancient, ancestry is sacred, the Aztec and the Mayan gods abuela used to pray with

This is for the dangerous words hiding in the pages of composition notes, holy books, and Sanskrit This is for the patients who wait for medication, for the mothers microwaving beans and rice at day’s end

This is for the marching bands and girls at quinceañeras, the skaters and the writers whose moms are eloteras, laughing “Cops don’t scare us, we sag so elders fear us We will rewrite our textbooks in our own language if you dare us”

This is for the Sarahs, the Angelicas, and Shawns, the Beatrices, Paolas, Danielas, and the dawns we scribble sunlight in the margins of horizons with our songs, for all the voices tangled with the silence on our tongues

Rivals in the parks, fireworks at dark, tired shirts that sweat your scent on hangers in the closet For the boys who fix the faucet while their sister fixes coffee ’cause mommy had to leave for work at 6 AM and laundry isn’t folded yet: you don’t have to hold your breath

You don’t have to behave: stage your own rebellion, paint canvases with rage and religion and prayers for pilgrims sleeping in the train cars at the border and their children Filibust the Senate and bust markers on the Pink Line, stain the prosecution’s case and force the judge to resign, force the crowd the rewind the lyrics you invented

Speak away the limits to heights of your existence Be a witness, be a record, be a testament, a triumph Set your poems flying in the glitter of the planets Feed open mouths with truth, the truth is we are famished The Universe is starving for the symphonies you play Clarinets and thunder and the syllables you say are the instruments: you are infinite. Stretch your hands to heaven Let your throat throttle the rhythms of all your fallen brethren Your legacy is present, your history is now You are the tenth degree of sound You are the nephews of the sky You are the bass line and the hi-hat and the snare drum and the cry of red Septembers. You’re the architects of winter You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t remember You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t remember You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t remember

Cast poems in the river and tell them you remember Skate City Hall to splinters and tell them you remember Send diamonds to your islands and tell them you remember Find your God inside your mirror and tell Her you remember

I think rhyming poetry can often feel old fashioned -- yet this is anything but. I love how even when the rhymes disappear from the ends of each line, you can still find rhymes and almost-rhymes (slant rhymes!) buried throughout the stanza: parks/dark, closet/faucet. And it helps keep up the relentless, self-assured rhythm of the whole poem, rushing ahead and building.

More Latinx poets here.

Today in: 2024: from Moon for Aisha, Aracelis Girmay 2023: Still Life with Nursing Bra, Keetje Kuipers 2022: A Small-Sized Mystery, Jane Hirshfield 2021: Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew, Ross Gay 2020: Vigil, Phillis Levin 2019: Nights in the Neighborhood, Linda Gregg 2018: I Dreamed Again, Anne Michaels 2017: wishes for sons, Lucille Clifton 2016: Told You So, Keetje Kuipers 2015: Accident, Mass. Ave., Jill McDonough 2014: This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Young Lee 2013: To Myself, Franz Wright 2012: Manet’s Olympia, Margaret Atwood 2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku 2010: Ode to Hangover, Dean Young 2009: We become new, Marge Piercy 2008: The Only Animal, Franz Wright 2007: Dream Song 385, John Berryman 2006: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel 2005: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

#poetry #poem #national poetry month #kristiana rae colón

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shirubae · 1 year ago

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WHY was Blaze in Sonic 06?

In my analysis of Sonic 06 I promised not to touch lore or canon. But this single question has plagued me for years, and I can't run from it any longer: why was Blaze in the future with Silver in Sonic 06? It literally keeps me up at night. It is a core moment in her identity, yet it remains one of the biggest unaddressed mysteries in the series.

To answer this question, we must also answer: who is Blaze? She's a princess from another world. Easy, right?

Buckle up. Forget everything you know. This is a long one.

Blaze's Debut

Let's step back in time. The year is 2005.

Blaze debuted in Sonic Rush, which released on November 15, 2005. She was created by the game's writer and director, Akinori Nishiyama, as a contrasting character to Sonic. It introduced Blaze as a cat from another world who is the guardian of the Sol Emeralds.

Fun fact: Blaze being a princess was originally a twist! Nothing in Sonic Rush ever indicates that Blaze is a princess - no dialogue, no supplementary material - until the very end of Extra Story where she mentions her duties as a princess while she heads home.

How crazy is that? When you hear about Blaze nowadays, you're like "oh duh the princess" but she was not always known as such! More importantly, this is the first example of Blaze's identity being a mystery.

Blaze Returns

Blaze's next appearance was in Sonic 06, which released on November 14, 2006, exactly one year later. This game depicted Blaze as the curt companion of Silver, fighting Iblis in a destroyed future of Sonic's world. Huh? Yes. The game never mentions her alternate dimension nor the Sol Emeralds. Blaze is Silver's well-dressed friend now. You think that's confusing today? Try being a kid who just got to know her in Sonic Rush a year prior.

Because of how the game treats Blaze, some fans assumed that Sonic 06 was a reboot of the series, or that it was at least retconning Blaze's backstory into her being a denizen of the future alongside Silver. There are zero official sources to support this rumor, but it gained traction anyway, and people started citing it as gospel. It's wrong.

Blaze's official Sonic 06 backstory can be found in other sources, like the official websites and the Japanese manual. They are pretty consistent with Rush: she's from another dimension and guards the Sol Emeralds (despite their total absence in this game). None of them say she was born in the future.

The English website calls her a "queen". Close enough, it indicates that Blaze is still royalty in this game.

However, there's also some odd details, like her wearing a cape, so it may come from an early draft of Sonic 06's plot and not be entirely accurate. Maybe they were planning on her royalty being more important than it ended up (I theorize that it's why she could absorb Iblis where Silver failed).

Let's wrap up the princess thing. The first game to obviously establish Blaze as a princess was Sonic Rush Adventure, which released another year later on September 14, 2007. Blaze being a princess is brought up a lot because it is a pivotal fact in her character arc in this game.

Around the same time, fans noticed that Blaze doesn't seem to recognize Sonic at all in Sonic 06. In their only scene together in Kingdom Valley, she doesn't say a word. If this is the same Blaze from Rush, why doesn't she know him? (Mind you, Sonic doesn't acknowledge her either). This discrepancy only fuels the "future Blaze" rumor, and it's still never been properly explained. Despite being discussed again and again, we haven't had a clear answer. So, let's at least go over the answers that we have received.

Takashi Iizuka at Sonic Boom

Takashi Iizuka is the current (2024) head of Sonic Team. He's worked on many games in the series, though notably not Sonic 06 nor Rush. Still, during the Q&A panel at the live event Sonic Boom 2012, one of the many fan-submitted questions requested he clarify some lore regarding Silver and Blaze.

youtube

Here's a transcript, since the crowd in the video is pretty loud:

Speaker: "Iizuka-san, can you please clear up the story of Silver, Blaze, and Eggman Nega? Are they from an alternate dimension, or the future? Not to mention, in Sonic Rush, Sonic Rivals, and Sonic 2006, they all know each other, but in Sonic Colors, they've never met?"

Takashi Iizuka (via translator): "So, everyone probably already knows this... but Silver and Eggman Nega are from the future, and Blaze is from an alternate dimension. That's the official story. But in 2006, basically what happened was everyone kind of had like, amnesia. That's how that kind of played out."

The guy was put on the spot to answer a big question regarding two characters from games that he didn't even work on, plus the translation barrier! He handled it well, all things considered. This at least debunked the "future Blaze" rumor, but it didn't answer why she was in the future in the first place. Let's check another source...

Shiro Maekawa on Twitter

Shiro Maekawa is a former Sonic game writer who worked on the Shadow and Silver Episodes for Sonic 06 (but not Rush). This means he wrote for Blaze; naturally, some curious fans have reached out to him with questions. His responses may give us some insights into what was intended with her in 06.

First of all, Maekawa confirmed that he intended to connect Rush to 06. He's said this in multiple tweets. What exactly he means isn't totally clear.

A fan once made a neat tumblr post delving into this connection; I don't totally agree with everything said, especially the "future Blaze" stuff, but it's definitely a valuable perspective (unfortunately the author has deleted their blog after harassment... good job guys).

He also says that he intended for the place that Blaze gets sent to in Silver Episode to be her alternate dimension. That makes sense; just sending her home! But he admits that his ideas are not official, so it's up to Sonic Team to decide.

Furthermore, Maekawa supports the theory that Iblis remains sealed within Blaze's soul to this day. Fans have taken it a step further by theorizing that the reason Blaze can become Burning Blaze is because of her connection to Iblis - this makes sense, given the fiery aura and the fact that Blaze briefly goes Burning in the cutscene when she absorbs it. If that theory is true, and she goes Burning in Rush, then it would force 06 to be a prequel to Rush.

Since it's confirmed Blaze isn't from the future in 06, she must have gotten sent there somehow - maybe by the Sol Emeralds? They do teleport her on their own in Rush. That would mean Blaze hasn't met Sonic yet, so she has nothing to say to him. Then in the ending, she forgets everything and goes home, later meeting Sonic for real in Rush. Boom, easy! For a long time, this placement in the timeline seemed fair.

There was a tiny hole: an unused audio file of Blaze dialogue in 06.

youtube

Blaze says: "Sonic...?", expressing familiarity with the blue blur. So maybe she did know who he was...? It's not clear. And it's unused, so it technically shouldn't count, but it does raise some alarms. On the other hand, this game also has the "Book of Darkness" and "head to Wave Ocean" bloopers, so maybe its audio files aren't to be trusted. Problem solved?

No. Not until a certain someone speaks...

Ian Flynn on Bumblekast

Ian Flynn went from writing the Archie Sonic comics, to the IDW comics, and now the games. He's been working on Sonic properties for a very long time, and is even consulted as part of the mythical "Sonic lore team" at Sega-Sammy. Those folks work on piecing together the canon, including the chaos of 06's timeline placement (imagine being paid to write stuff like this lmao).

This means he receives lore knowledge from on high, from the top dogs at Sonic Team. At the moment it's fairly secretive, but on Ian's Q&A podcast, the Bumblekast, he often lets fans in on tidbits.

What Ian has shared so far supports a lot of theories discussed with Maekawa. He has entirely confirmed that Blaze went Burning Blaze as she absorbed Iblis and went home, and has dubiously confirmed that she still has Iblis in her soul (he doubts it will ever be brought up again).

But the prophet has spoken: Sonic 06 is officially set after Rush in the timeline. Say what you will about Ian's writing or understanding of the characters; like it or not, he's received this info from Sonic Team. So, our timeline theory is debunked.

Ian even acknowledges that there are plot holes with this timeline placement, like why Blaze and Sonic ignored each other in Kingdom Valley, and why she didn't think to find her old friends for help. But he has no say over it. He'll just have to find a way to write around it, I guess.

He also acknowledges that Blaze's presence in the future and partnership with Silver are still completely unexplained, and he hopes to eventually touch on it... But he also states that there is an official reason why Blaze was in Silver's future. I'll write his quote here for reference:

Ian Flynn: "Here's the thing: working on something else, I actually did get a straight answer, and it was frustratingly simple. And it's like, 'that works, okay.' No, I can't get into it, that's all private work stuff but maybe it'll come to light, eventually. But there is an answer, and it works, and I kinda feel dumb for not thinking of it."

So it's currently classified. Where does that leave us? "That greedy Ian is selfishly sitting upon a hoard of gold, hiding his secrets from us!" "Ian is a filthy American, he has no idea what he's talking about!"

Well, we can guess to our heart's content. There are a few theories:

Maybe the will of the Sol Emeralds sent Blaze to help Silver. The strings of fate pulled her so she could help guide him and eventually absorb Iblis. This one is the most sentimental, so I like it...

Maybe Blaze got caught time-traveling during a fight with Eggman Nega, and was flung into the future. This would explain why Ian found it "frustratingly simple" (he hates Eggman Nega lol).

Maybe at the end of Rush, Blaze couldn't get back home from the Exception zone; instead, she ended up lost in Silver's future due to space-time shenanigans. Nothing in her ending truly confirms that she ever made it back home. Pretty simple.

These still don't explain why she and Sonic didn't recognize each other, but we have to just let Ian deal with that one lol.

Conclusion

Our best course of action is to wait. In many of the clips I've linked, Ian regularly expresses interest in addressing Blaze's mysteries in an issue of IDW comics or a TailsTube episode. We also know that Evan Stanley, a fellow comic artist-turned-writer, is a big fan of Blaze and Silver (check out her "Ghosts of the Future" fan-comic). Our cries for the truth do not fall on deaf ears.

Ultimately, Sega-Sammy will choose whatever is most profitable. They are a business operating in capitalism. If revisiting Silver and Blaze's backstory is somehow a good business decision, they will allow it. If it's not... they won't.

The "Fearless: Year of Shadow" campaign has given me hope. Its success is hopefully proving to Sega-Sammy that fans do care about characters besides the main Team Sonic, and that mysteries and lore of the past can be addressed in games like Sonic X Shadow Generations. Whether it results in more leniency with using the extended cast in future games, such as Blaze and Silver, remains to be seen. Maybe the two need to be teased in a movie before they can get more attention lol. But I have hope that one day, my patience will have paid off, and I can update this article with the official truth of the matter.

Patience and direction: that's what Blaze offered Silver in Sonic 06. She supported him through his recklessness, stabilized him, and reminded him of what he was fighting for. But she also loved his passion, his drive for peace, and value of the truth. She loved how "naive" he was in the face of his seemingly impossible mission.

We fans are all a little naive. So for now, let's just wait and see.

UPDATE: Just checking in, it's been a while. The truth still has yet to be revealed. First of all, the Sonic Channel timeline came out and confirmed more than ever that Rush happens before 06. However, I've come across an interesting idea from the IDW comics.

At this point, Sonic was just thrust across dimensions by the climax of the Metal Virus arc, and has ended up in Blaze's dimension with no memory. This plot point always seemed a little odd to me - obviously it's meant to echo the Mr. Tinker plot, but it gets resolved in two issues. Kind of a strange blip.

However, it does propose a hypothesis for why Blaze acted the way she did in 06: maybe she lost her memories! This story establishes that crossing dimensions can result in temporary memory loss, although it doesn't explore the idea very much. Maybe it only happens if one is sent across dimensions by force? We'll still have to wait and see how Blaze got to Silver's future before we can conclude anything, but it's something to consider for now.

#blaze the cat #sonic 06 #sonic the hedgehog 2006 #sonic rush #sonic rush adventure #silver the hedgehog #ian flynn #akinori nishiyama #takashi iizuka #evan stanley #analysis #thinkpiece #theory

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