#it’s the work of my own conscience

[starnana7]

okay but the fact that dean and cas are BOTH made for each other and at the same time they willed their love. they made it happen, knowingly, loving each other with every bit of consciousness they had, that they gained with one another. cas was always a rebellious angel, but this is the only universe where he actually rebelled—for dean. that he didn’t do what he was told, where he defied God and fate and the universe. they may not love each other in Every universe, and that may have been their only chance (</3) But Fuck if that isn’t even more poetic. the fact they weren’t linked by some intertwined invisible string but they actually chose to fall in love with each other. every day they made that choice, consciously or not. every day they chose each other. every day they woke up and fought for their love. and like i do think that at some level they were kinda destined for each other, i mean, they Are soulmates, but not in the divine sense yk like chuck did brought castiel over and over because of dean and they are not just two random dudes that fell in love; they were indeed “brought together” but ultimately They—and only they—changed the entire narrative bc that WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. castiel was supposed to obey, to comply; dean was supposed to hate all angels and supernatural beings, and yet they were the only real thing in the entire cosmos. they were the only real thing in chuck’s story, their love, the bond they forged—one that wasn’t even supposed to exist, at least not like that. like they really did that Huh they invented free will right then and there to the point even the writers had to change the original script so castiel would come back (i’m pretty sure he was only supposed to be in a few episodes). love so strong they changed the narrative (both of them). cas love for dean was so strong that even tho he was brainwashed and trained to kill dean over and over and over again, the moment that dean needed cas—dean who doesn’t need any one btw—the connection broke, cas broke free. dean love for cas was so strong that even tho he had the moc, the moment that cas asked for him to stop, he did, he couldn’t kill cas, not with cas touching him and not fighting back (btw i love this parallel with all my heart and also cas-collete parallel hellooo?). dean also loved cas so much that even tho he was by fate bound to amara, the moment she did something to cas he immediately went against her, like even she realized that his love for cas was stronger than their bond—even tho his and amara bond was literally inevitable, like it just would happen. and then again we prove that the choice of dean and cas love for each other was so much more strong than anything that chuck could’ve written, stronger than any fate or ineffable plan or anything. and like cas’ love is so strong that i do think would resonate in every universe, but not because they were supposed to happen. on the contrary, specifically because they weren’t a thing, it were so strong to the point it changed everything that it could also happen in every other universe yk like i firmly believe cas would always find dean but not because of fate but because of his love

[5ftboy]

"Conrad's view has always kind of moved out - to think of bigger things and other people, to think of larger places. And in moving away, sometimes the things that up close are huge and horrifying, get just a little bit smaller, a little bit more right-sized, a little bit easier to manage."

[devildom-moss]

I'm alive (light-heartedly). Thank y'all for being so patient with me. I have been having some trouble writing requests for a bit, and I've been a little worn out.

I'm going to just focus on the poll fic for this weekend and try to get other stuff done next month. It's been hard for me to actually get started, but I'm enjoying the process with this one, so hopefully you all will like the NSFW Beel x Diavolo x MC content I'll have for you, some time on the 31st (I hope).

[cs-oc-blank-random-posts]

Blank! Blank! Blank! Blank! Blank!!!!

I have a question you have answer this honestly, okay, my question is what will you do if someone kills player??????!

:)

[lavellane]

i was so set on replaying veilguard for the davrinmance but oh my god im SO attached to my agent-of-fenharel hardingmancer rn i actually think the choice is out of my hands lol

[darlingknave]

If we get four more years of trump hell because of some stupid fuckin protest vote

god

not again

Please, his last term very nearly killed me

[nobodysdaydreams]

*I guess for this one Garrison would also be working in the lab, but made some sort of deal with Curtain and betrayed everyone. The fact that Curtain calls Milligan a “chemist with a conscience” would imply Milligan was offered a similar deal but refused.

[deviousdiesel]

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[aroldpdl]

christianity literally gives you brainrot

[strigops]

im apparently going to be doing a talk to a room full of middle schoolers abt career paths in paleontology and the way i wanted to tell my boss who signed me up for this "maam respectfully if i knew enough abt that topic i would not be working here also the actual reality of the options is hella depressing"

[randomingoftherandomness]

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[mylowmilo]

My cat Piper has an ulcer! We think so, at least. She’s stopped vomiting as soon as we put her on an anti-ulcer medication and she’s been super duper affectionate, which makes me think she’s feeling better. She may have been in pain for a long time. Like… months. But getting worse over time until it was finally really obvious and required urgent vet care (unable to hold down any food at all? That’s an emergency!) Mixing up the liquid and administering it is just another in the long list of daily tasks for me now, and that’s stressful, but I’m so grateful to finally have an answer as to what’s been giving her tummy trouble.

[sherlock-is-ace]

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[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[rainbowgod666]

Back here in italy mickey canonically works for the police and

[ERROR: ENGLISH TRANSLATION FOR "BRUTO GAMBADILEGNO" NOT FOUND]

Is basically a constant criminal but eh. A few times he was interrogated and the INSTANT he gets to see the evidence hes like "HEY WAIT A MOMENT. Thats not me! I was (at home/doing a different crime altoghether/still behind bars) that night!" and when that happens the rat goes "oh fUCK this is gonna take an extra 30 pages or something" and uuuuuuuhm yeah

[lyricsandpapers]

…..please