#it's like corporate fencing at this point

[witchcraftingboop]

Me: Happy Friday! Happy Birthday! Another one of your managers has tried to blame their incompetence on me and this time I expect you to set an example of him 🥰

The owners, nervously reaching for the sweets I bought them: ... A-again? Today??

Me: Again, today, just now in fact. Enjoy your strategy meeting! I'll send you my email report in a minute! 🥰

[katyspersonal]

[spaceandrobots]

It's possible, but like only if you can stop people from being gay for you. But like, it's okay if you have fans, kinda way.

my villain origin story is that i grew up on so many cartoons w friendship as the centerpiece and like. friend groups composed of 5+ people who all love each other dearly. and that does not exist in real life bitch

[hairyjocktf]

New Recruit

Luke was at a low point in his life. He’d graduated high school but wasn’t smart enough to get into college. He had tried working some retail jobs around but he never had the work ethic to last long in those. He had similar problems in other gigs. It had been months of him bumming around and his parents had finally had enough, he was officially out of their house. With few options left, he was desperate. While walking down the street one day he saw an ad for the military, boasting stable careers and plenty of benefits. He’d played a couple seasons of sports in school and felt like he might be able to at least pass the initial evaluation, and out of near desperation he decided to try and enlist.

He made his way to the army office nearby that had been listed in the ad, and to his surprise there was no trouble. They did a quick physical evaluation and he was good to go, ready to sign up for boot camp. Luke was nervous; there was no coming back from this point. He thought about it for a couple minutes while being stared down by the recruiter, realizing he really couldn’t think of a better option. And so he signed the contract, unsure of what was to come. 

Two weeks later he was on a bus out to the base to start his boot camp. Luke didn’t know what to expect; he’d heard numerous stories about how brutal this training would be to weed out people. The bus was filled with the strangest mix of people he’d ever seen. Some guys looked like they’d been using steroids since they were 12, some looked like they belonged in an accounting department, and some he just couldn't pin down. Regardless of who surrounded him, Luke felt out of place, and he was only growing more nervous as the bus sped through the dense woods. After what felt like hours they finally cleared the trees and he saw the huge fences that would enclose the next few months of his life.

The buses pulled into a large dirt clearing at the center of the base where they forced everybody out. A huge and built man addressed the new recruits with his booming voice.

“Privates! Welcome to Fort Eagleton!” he shouted above the noise of disembarking men. “I am Drill Sergeant Thornton, and I’ll be in charge of whipping you lot into shape!”

Luke gulped, it looked like those rumors had been true. He was in for a world of hurt.

“You’ll be under my watch and command for the next ten weeks, learning what it takes to be a soldier. First, I want to see what I’m working with. Privates! See those chalk markings on the ground? Space yourselves on them for inspection!” 

His loud voice echoed across the clearing. The men all scrambled to stand in position, each on a chalk marking that were spaced four feet apart in a grid. Luke found an open one unfortunately near the front of the pack. He glanced nervously around at the others. Some were standing at the ready like they had been born for this, but the rest also looked around with worried looks on their faces. Their attention was brought back to the front by the thundering voice of the sergeant. 

“Listen up, privates! Here with me I have Corporal Evans, a prime example of what you should all strive to become in the next ten weeks!” The sergeant gestured to a tall and strong looking man next to him. Evans was at attention in full uniform, but Luke could tell the man was absolutely jacked underneath. He could see how the coat was straining against his huge, broad shoulders.

“He is the epitome of a soldier, and what all men should model themselves after,” the sergeant continued. “I will make a real man out of each of you! That is my promise as your Drill Sergeant. However, some of you may take to that easier than others.” He began walking through the rows of men in plainclothes, observing each of them with scrutiny. Luke’s eyes went wide as the sergeant stopped directly in front of him.

“You, boy. What’s your name?” The sergeant did not quiet his voice even when right next to him. 

“Luke,” he said shakily, “Luke Peterson.”

“Private Peterson, you may have passed the exam to get here, but I hold doubts that you are up to the challenge that is basic training,” the sergeant said while making intense eye contact. “Do you think you have what it takes to become a soldier?”

“Yes.. sir,”

“Well! Let’s put that to the test,” he boomed again. “Evans! Bring me this private’s new uniform.”

Within seconds, the man was at his side holding a folded army uniform. Thornton took it and handed it to Luke.

“Put this on, boy! Let’s see how you’ll fit in here,” he said with an almost sinister twinkle in his eyes. 

Luke had no choice but to then strip down to his underwear in the middle of the crowd. The eyes of the dozens of men he had entered with were burning holes in him as he changed into the fatigues. They immediately felt too large for him but he continued as the sergeant watched impatiently. He pulled up and belted the pants before buttoning the shirt closed. They were at least two or three sizes too big, Luke thought, and he looked ridiculous in the oversized fatigues. He laced up his boots which were also excessively large and stood back up to address the sergeant’s burning gaze.

Out of nowhere, Luke suddenly felt like he’d taken a punch straight in his stomach. He collapsed to the ground on his hands and knees, gasping for air as the pain in his stomach did not lessen, but began to spread. His torso felt like it was on fire, and he groaned in distress as his body was overwhelmed. Everyone else in the clearing was watching in awe as Luke’s body began to grow. His spine lengthened slowly, back widening and shoulders broadening. His legs began to stretch and grow longer, adding a good eight inches to his height. He began packing on muscle like he’d been working out for a decade, limbs inflating in seconds adding strength and size. His chest pushed out into two meaty pecs, which finally caught Luke’s attention from the incredible soreness he felt as his body exploded in size. His eyes widened as he watched his own body fill out the fatigues that had moments ago been far too large, arms swelling to fill the sleeves and chest pushing against the now tight shirt. His legs also bulked up, adding 20 pounds of muscle as quads and hamstrings grew in and thickened. His feet expanded, pushing against his large boots. He felt a sharp pain shoot through his jaw as it widened, giving him a square and masculine face. The pain began to subside and Luke managed to stand back up, this time matching the sergeant in height. 

The drill sergeant addressed him, “Good start soldier.” He had a hint of a grin on his stern face.

Luke was angry and confused, “What the hell was that? What did you do to me? What do you mean good start…” His sentence trailed off as he felt an intense tingling feeling arise on his chest. Underneath his tight uniform shirt, in the center of his massive pecs, tiny brown hairs began to poke out of his skin. The hairs started out thin and wispy but quickly thickened as they grew longer, spreading out across Luke’s mountainous chest muscles. The hairs erupted across the expanse, burying the skin under a dense layer of fur as they grew thicker, longer, and tangled together. Especially dark hairs sprouted around his sensitive nipples, causing Luke to let out a moan as he brought his hands up to massage them. The crowd watching Luke was stunned at his actions in front of the sergeant. Some of the men closest to him could see what looked like thick hairs beginning to poke out from above his shirt collar. The fur on his chest had spread up across his collarbone and had started peeking up onto his neck, where it was finally visible. The sergeant stood watching with a smirk as Luke was lost in a world of pleasure, rubbing his nipples as hair began taking over his body. The hair was not confined to just his chest, and shot down south across his stomach, coating his new abs and muscle in the same thick rug. The hair was growing in so densely that it started to push out through cracks and seams in his uniform. 

The other privates were speechless watching this erotic display in front of them, not knowing what to do. A few noticed Corporal Evans, who was standing behind the drill sergeant, subtly mimicking Luke’s actions, seemingly lost in his own bodily pleasures as his hands roamed his body. Luke’s breaths grew louder as the hairs continued climbing up his thick neck, creating a river of hair traveling up from his chest to his square jaw. He’d never had much stubble before, just some light peach fuzz, but that was changing. The soft hairs were overrun with thick, wiry, testosterone-fueled growth that coated his jaw in an incredibly dense beard. His upper lip was next, first darkening with the shadow of thick stubble before the hairs pushed out and completed the full beard on his face. Luke’s hands moved upwards, stroking his fingers through the long wiry hairs that now covered the lower half of his face. His eyes closed as the pleasurable sensation began to control his actions, wanting to experience every ounce of this growth. The beard growth was very noticeable to the crowd as well, as men further away began to break formation and inch closer to see what was happening to Luke. Evans was in the back, feeling the scratchy stubble on his own face as it pushed out a couple millimeters, just enough to leave a dark five o’clock shadow.

Unbeknownst to the crowd, Luke’s body was continuing to change under his uniform. Luke could feel every new hair sprout out of him as the hairs spread, conquering more of his newly buff body. His armpits tingled as the follicles there went into overdrive, pumping out hair after hair. What had previously been a sparse grouping of hairs quickly became a thick tuft of sweaty, musky hair. Dark and wiry hairs pushed out of bare skin, spreading out and covering his pits in a full manly bush, already dense enough to trap his body sweat and stench. Luke stuck one hand into his shirt to scratch the growing forest in his pit before pulling it out and smelling his fingers. He shivered from the euphoric smell of his own musk that was only growing more potent. The pit hairs continued to spread and even connected with his chest hair, creating a seamless rug across his whole upper body. 

The wave of hair growth continued advancing across his muscular body, with hairs beginning to pop up across his broad shoulders. They were joined by more and more hairs, giving Luke a thick coating across his traps. The hairs began to crawl down his brawny back, knitting a rug as they grew thick and tangled across his shoulder blades. As the hairs advanced down his spine they also began covering his arms, where long dark hairs were pushing out across his triceps before utterly engulfing his forearms in dark fur. Luke watched as the thick hairs poked out of his sleeves, ensuring anyone would know even in full uniform how hairy he was under there. That is, if they didn’t notice his large, calloused hands, which had their own small carpet of hairs sprouting across the backs. Luke could feel as the hairs creeping down his back reached the bottom, where a bushy tuft sprouted up just above his waistband. He subconsciously knew what was next, and moments later he was overcome with bliss as his thick ass cheeks sprouted their own rug of dense curly hairs. He could feel how the thickest, longest, and darkest hairs were pushing out of his crack, and he reached his hand into his pants to feel the silky fur that filled the gap. As all eyes were on Luke, Corporal Evans was still engaged in his own stimulation, feeling his pit hairs push out a little more, his back get a little more hairy, and his ass plump up just a bit more.

Luke felt his now size 16 feet heat up in his boots, beginning to grow itchy. Hairs were crawling out of the tops of his massive feet, popping out of his thick toes shortly after. The hairs climbed up his thick legs from his feet, coating his calves in dark hairs before engulfing his massive thighs. The hairs came in thicker and darker as they neared his groin, where his formerly modest bush began to double, then triple in size. Thick pubes were sprouting up all across his crotch, enveloping the area in a dense forest of curly hairs. Luke let out another moan at the sensation and shoved both his hands into his pants. He felt the coarse hairs sprouting through his fingers as his bush continued to spread outward. His cock began gushing precum before it too began to grow. It had almost been swallowed up by the immense bush, but now it hardened and pushed out, growing longer and thicker. Luke grasped his growing member and felt the hair climbing up the shaft as it continued to push further out of his bush. He felt his balls swell in size and drop a little farther down, becoming coated in hairs just like the rest of his groin. 

Luke was overcome with euphoria, and the animalistic instincts took full control as he began stroking his nine inch cock with both hands, each pump blasting his brain and body with pleasure. The sergeant and everyone else watched as Luke jacked off to his own transforming body right in front of them, stunned into silence. Corporal Evans, still unnoticed, slid his own hand into his pants to deal with his rock hard problem. Luke kept at it, moaning louder and louder as precum poured out of his cock. Every stroke seemed to make him grow just a tad bit larger, just a little hairier. Finally, after a few minutes of being overcome by pure ecstasy, he erupted, a fountain of cum spraying out covering his new uniform in sticky white semen. Some of it even got on the sergeant, who seemed unfazed. Evans grunted quietly as he pumped a massive load directly into his jockstrap that he had on under his uniform. He wasn’t prepared for quite how large it would be, leaving a wet spot on the front of his trousers and leaking down his leg. Luke panted as his mind returned to his body, finally taking stock of the situation and realizing in a moment of panic what had happened.

Before he could say anything Sergeant Thornton started to laugh. His roaring laughter pierced the awkward silence that had overtaken the space for the last while. He walked over to Luke and slapped him on the back.

“Atta boy! That’s what I like to see,” He said to Luke with an uncharacteristic smile. The crowd was shocked. That was not the response they’d expected in the slightest. 

“You’re fit to be a real soldier now, and I trust you’ll serve us well. A fine specimen!” he turned to the crowd. “Look here, privates! This is a real man, a bastion of strength and masculinity who can take a beating and give some hell.”

Luke too was stunned. He was scrambling to process what had just happened to him, and that it was seemingly planned by the sergeant the whole time. His thoughts were cut short by the sergeant addressing him again.

“Well son, you’ve done good today. We’ll have to clean up that scruff of yours to get you in regulation,” he stroked Luke’s new beard with his hand, sending a bolt of lightning directly to his still semi-erect cock. “Corporal Evans will help you out with that, and with cleaning up your fatigues,” he said as Evans approached from behind. Luke noticed the darker stubble on his face and the dark splotch in his bulging crotch. 

The drill sergeant once again spoke to the crowd, “The rest of you will be assigned living quarters and shown the areas for training. I want you all back here at exactly 1300 hours!”

Evans ushered Luke away from the grounds and into his own private quarters, where he stripped out of his cum soaked uniform and finally got a look at himself. He was taller, absolutely built, and incredibly hairy. It turned him on in a way he never knew he could be, his cock once again rising to full mast. He rubbed his hands through all of his new fur, unable to believe what he was seeing.

“I was in your shoes when I enlisted,” Evans said to him. Luke turned to face him and saw a slight blush in his cheeks, and his bulge was even more noticeable. “I’ll make sure you get cleaned up and everything, but how about first we just enjoy the new you in its raw form,” he said, stepping right up to Luke and wrapping his hand around Luke’s cock. Lost for words, Luke pulled off Evans’ hat and leaned in for a kiss, grabbing his bulge and pushing him against the wall.

Maybe bootcamp wouldn’t be that bad.

This was my longest and most ambitious story yet! Hope y'all enjoy it and thank you for nearly 400 followers in just a month! Feel free to dm or send an ask if you have ideas for future stories.

[hobiebrownismygod]

Hobie Brown/Spider Punk x GN!Reader

Summary: A protest turns to a riot and the riot turns into a massacre. You narrowly escape being murdered by a filthy pig, thanks to the one and only Spider-Punk, oh wait, Spider-MAN of Earth-138.

1.6k Words!

A/N: I don't see a lot of people talking about this side of Hobie's universe, so I thought I'd write something about it

TW: Mentions of blood and death, gunshots, tear gas, policy brutality

____________________________________________________________

"Shit, my bad"

You hear the words slip out of your mouth as you take a step away from who must be the third person you've accidentally bumped into in this crowd. Usually your clumsiness would draw attention from people, a couple scowls, maybe even some harsh language, but right now everyone was too focused on yelling their lungs out, pumping their fists in the air and shoving their decorated posters into the faces of the numerous pigs that were trying to hold off the crowd from entering one of Norman Osborne's many luxurious mansions.

It was another protest, this one specifically against Osborne's bright new idea to pass a law allowing corrupted corporations to decrease the pay rates even more, which would send hundreds of thousands of the already struggling blue-collar workers of London into worsened poverty. Run by punks and many others, this protest was turning from peaceful into something pretty nasty. Slurs, pebbles and even bottles were being thrown from both sides of the front line, just begging for one group to break before the other.

By break of course, you meant turn incredibly violent. Protests like these always did. They were meant to convince Osborne, maybe even force him to turn these laws, these policies, his horrific mindset, but they never did. The most that would happen was a death or two, either of a protestor or a police officer, and the next day, it would be like nothing even happened.

As you make your way through the crowd, trying to get to the front of the lines, you find yourself colliding with the chest of an abnormally tall man. You grabbed your nose, a sharp pain spreading from the tip. "Piece of-" You stop yourself as you look up at him, watching a slightly confused expression spread across his face as he towered over you. "Sorry 'bout that, peng. You a'right?"

"yeah, I'm fine" you grumbled, trying to move past him. "You trying to get the front, lass?" He asked, a slightly amused look on his face as he watched you try to push your way through the dense load of people standing in front you both. "I was" you replied, giving him another look before you successfully squeezed in between the group of people that you'd been trying to infiltrate before. "Be careful. Its not safe up there" you heard him call out to you, his tone sounding a bit patronizing yet comforting at the same time, like he cared at least a little bit about your well-being. You turned to reply, but he'd already disappeared through the crowd, his head and wicks visible over the top of the crowd due to his height.

The yelling had gotten louder and the protestors had begun throwing sticks at the cops near the front who were yelling right back, threatening to use force if necessary. They wouldn't dare on a crowd this large. There was no way.

You had made your way near the front, not caring enough to be gentle at this point and practically shoving past some of the people in order to have a better view at the front. A chant had started and you joined in, determined to make the most of your presence.

"FUCK OSBORNE."

"RIGHTS TO THE PEOPLE"

The chant repeated over and over, getting louder and louder each time as more people joined in, more and more bottles getting thrown over the makeshift fences, the cops getting frustrated, trigger-happy fingers moving closer and closer towards-

BANG BANG

Screams and shouts flooded your senses as your body automatically ducked, your hands flying to cover your head. The yelling intensified, deafening slurs and shrieks sending sharp ringing sounds through your ears as you felt the people around you begin to move, some bursting through the officers' defenses, others scrambling to find safety from the guns and, oh god, the tear gas. A gas meant to be non-lethal was being sprayed directly into the eyes and mouths of those unlucky enough to be in the general vicinity of the officers, the pigs having no mercy towards the helpless protestors stuck in the struggling crowds.

BANG BANG

The gunshots didn't stop, and you felt yourself fall back as someone shoved themselves past you, your elbows being scraped by the rough, cold pavement. You winced. That was gonna leave a nasty scar. You scrambled to your feet, but found yourself met with the head of a pistol, pointed directly between your eyes. "Scum of the earth." You heard a man mutter, his uniform decorated with multiple medals and badges. You felt your body shaking with fear as you slowly got to your feet, the man's hands trembling as his fingers moved toward the trigger. If I die, I die on my feet.

A flash of red and blue passed you, taking the psychotic pig with him, your eyes catching a small glimpse of his mask right before they were both slammed into the wall. The masked man slung his guitar off his back and smashed it against the cop's head, effectively killing him in one hit. The one and only Spider-punk had arrived.

He wildly turned to look at you, the eyes of his mask widening when he saw your bleeding state, but he didn't have time to focus on you. He swung toward the small huddle of police officers that were still terrorizing the crowd, leaving you behind to find safety. But of course, being the stubborn idiot you were, you weren't going to do that.

"Help!"

A young woman was sitting with her back against the wall, her leg all bloody and misshapen, her eyes swollen from the tear gas. She'd been shot, probably more than once from the look of it. But Spider-punk was busy, so you'd have to take care of her. "Hey, its gonna be okay" you said in a soft voice, trying to calm her down and snap her out of her crying state. She babbled, obviously in shock of what had happened, muttering incoherent sentences full of slurred praises for you as you helped her to her feet, letting her lean on your as the two of you limped away. There were cops everywhere, yelling and shooting, the tear gas flooding your eyes and your throat, making it difficult to breathe. But you had to help her. Because if you couldn't, what was the use of being here?

You helped her toward a small group of other protestors that had gathered, trying to help people out, handing her over for them to drive to safety in their cars which had only just arrived in order to get people out of there while Spider-punk did his job.

You turned around to watch as the masked man smashed his guitar against their heads, kicking, punching, throwing. It was a gruesome sight. My hero, you thought to yourself.

You were snapped out of the confinement of your thoughts when you noticed one of the cops approaching you, gun in his hand. Not this again. Thinking quickly, you grabbed a broken part of the fence, a plank of wood and rushed him with it, luckily dodging the bullet he shot at you and hitting him over the head, effectively knocking him out. "Shit" you muttered, chest heaving as you tried to catch your breath, adrenaline coursing through your veins. You dropped the plank and removed the gun from the pig's hand, holding it in yours as you continued to where Spider-punk was. Maybe you could help? After all, most of the others were either injured or busy...

You approached him, but he had already finished the job, your eyes settling on his figure using the web to tie the still breathing cops together and sticking them onto the wall. He'd annihilated their backup, but there was no certainty that there weren't more on the way. It was time to leave.

A web shot at you, the gun knocked out of your hand. You defensively raised your hands in the air, eyes widening as you watched him turn to look at you. "Not a cop" you said quickly, taking a step back. "Yea, I can tell" he replied, walking towards you. It was a fairly frightening sight, seeing a 6'3 masked man covered in blood and grime walking toward you, but something about him felt surprisingly friendly. "You a'right?"

"As good as I'll ever be" You lowered your hands slowly, still keeping your eyes on him. He put his hands on his hips, looking you up and down. "Saw you hit that cop over the head back there. Good job."

"Thanks..." his ripped shirt caught your eye. "oh" you left the soft realization escape your lips as you saw his wound. He'd been shot, pretty badly from the looks of it. "Oh this?" he asked, gesturing to his side, blood dirtying his shirt. "Don't worry about it, lovey"

"Y'should probably head home. Don't know when more of those pigs 're gonna show up" he said, his tone darkening slightly as he reached out his hand toward you. Suddenly he faltered, pulling his hand back. "Right, sorry. Can't take you home when there's other people needing my help." he sounded a bit sheepish as he kept his eyes on you, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket. "S'alright" You replied, feeling a bit awkward. "I live close by."

"Yeah? Be careful out there, lass. Take care of y'self" he said with a playful salute before walking right past you. "Yeah. I'll see you around, Spider-punk" you said, looking back at him, feeling a bit confused at the interaction. "Oi, don't call me that. s'Spider-MAN not spider-punk." he said cockily, turning back to look at you.

"Right."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to screw up a whistleblower law

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS WEDNESDAY (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Corporate crime is notoriously underpoliced and underprosecuted. Mostly, that's because we just choose not to do anything about it. American corporations commit crimes at 20X the rate of real humans, and their crimes are far worse than any crime committed by a human, but they are almost never prosecuted:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

We can't even bear to utter the words "corporate crime": instead, we deploy a whole raft of euphemisms like "risk and compliance," and that ole fave, the trusty "white-collar crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

The Biden DOJ promised it would be different, and they weren't kidding. The DOJ's antitrust division is kicking ass, doing more than the division has done in generations, really swinging for the fences:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Main Justice – the rest of the DOJ – promised that it would do the same. Deputy AG Lisa Monaco promised an end to those bullshit "deferred prosecution agreements" that let corporate America literally get away with murder. She promised to prosecute companies and individual executives. She promised a lot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Was she serious? Well, it's not looking good. Monaco's number two gnuy, Benjamin Mizer, has a storied career – working for giant corporations, getting them off the hook when they commit eye-watering crimes:

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-04-09-reform-groups-lack-of-corporate-prosecutions-doj/

Biden's DOJ is arguably more tolerant of corporate crime than even Trump's Main Justice. In 2021, the DOJ brought just 90 cases – the worst year in a quarter-century. 2022's number was 99, and 2023 saw 119. Trump's DOJ did better than any of those numbers in two out of four years. And back in 2000, Justice was bringing more than 300 corporate criminal prosecutions.

Deputy AG Monaco just announced a new whistleblower bounty program: cash money for ratting out your crooked asshole co-worker or boss. Whistleblower bounties are among the most effective and cheapest way to bring criminal prosecutions against corporations. If you're a terrified underling who can't afford to lose your job after narcing out your boss, the bounty can outweigh the risk of industry-wide blacklisting. And if you're a crooked co-conspirator thinking about turning rat on your fellow criminal, the bounty can tempt you into solving the Prisoner's Dilemma in a way that sees the crime prosecuted.

So a new whistleblower bounty program is good. We like 'em. What's not to like?

Sorry, folks, I've got some bad news:

https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/stephen-kohn-on-the-justice-department-plan-to-offer-whistleblower-awards/

As the whistleblower lawyer Stephen Kohn points out to Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter, Monaco's whistleblower bounty program has a glaring defect: it excludes "individuals who were involved with the crime." That means that the long-suffering secretary who printed the boss's crime memo and put it in the mail is shit out of luck – as is the CFO who's finally had enough of the CEO's dirty poker.

This is not how other whistleblower reward programs work: the SEC and CFTC whistleblower programs do not exclude people involved with the crime, and for good reason. They want to catch kingpins, not footsoldiers – and the best way to do that is to reward the whistleblower who turns on the boss.

This isn't a new idea! It's in the venerable False Claims Act, an act that signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. As Kohn says, making "accomplices" eligible to participate in whistleblower rewards is how you get people like his client, who relayed a bribe on behalf of his boss, to come forward. As Lincoln said in 1863, the purpose of a whistleblower law is to entice conspirators to turn on one another. Like Honest Abe said, "it takes a rogue to catch a rogue."

And – as Kohn says – we've designed these programs so that masterminds can't throw their minor lickspittles under the buss and collect a reward: "I know of no case where the person who planned or initiated the fraud under any of the reward laws ever got a dime."

Kohn points out that under Monaco, the DOJ just ignores the rule that afford anonymity to whistleblowers. That's a big omission – the SEC got 18,000 confidential claims in 2023. Those are claims that the DOJ can't afford to miss, given their abysmal, sub-Trump track record on corporate crime prosecutions.

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/2024/04/15/whistleblown/#lisa-monaco

[hades-least-favourite]

i like it when they do this actually. be more openly fucking supportive of genocide. make it unavoidable in media, impossible to ignore. stop being subtle!

knuckles would never, by the way. free palestine 🇵🇸

oh, thats zionist propaganda in my knuckles the echidna show

[cityof2morrow]

CDK: Security Set

Published: 9-14-2024 | Updated: N/A SUMMARY Cubic Dynamics by John B. Cube and Marcel Dusims forged the future with furnishings that were minimalist in design and maximalist in erudite pretension. Generations later, the company continues to produce edge-of-cutting-edge designs. Use the Cubic Dynamics Kitbash (Simmons, 2023-2024) collection to set up corporate, exposition, and office environments. Envisioned as an add-on to the Cubic Dynamics set (EA/Maxis, archived at GOS), it features minimalist and retro-futuristic objects. Find more CC on this site under the #co2cdkseries tag. Read the Backstory and ‘Dev Notes’ HERE. Use this  SECURITY SET to build screening checkpoints on lots where you keep precious goods, important sims, and big piles of money!

DETAILS All EPs/SPs. §See Catalog for Pricing | See Buy/Build Mode You need the Company Expo (Mesh Pack) set (Simmons, 2024) for TXTRs to show properly in game. ALL files with “MESH” in their name are REQUIRED. You also need Midge’s Custom Burglar Alarms Mod (2020) for the UAV Cam to work. Several objects in this series are oversized/offset. You may need to shift an objects upwards once to level it, and you may need “move objects” and “grid on/off” cheats to place them to your liking. When placing partitions/floating shelves and tables/desks/counters on the same tile, place the partition/shelves first. I recommend using this set with Object Freedom 1.02 (Fway, 2023), which includes Numenor’s fix for OFB shelves (2006), for easier use overall. ITEMS Desk (466 poly) Entrances 001-002 (204 poly) Fence (852 poly) SimSafety Scanner (1318 poly) SimSafety UAV Security Camera (2192 poly) DOWNLOAD (choose one) from SFS | from MEGA COMPATIBILITY AVOID DUPLICATES: The #co2cdkseries includes edited versions – replacements - for items in the following CC sets: 4ESF (office 3, other 1/artroom, other 2/build), All4Sims/MaleorderBride (miskatonic library, office, postmodern office), CycloneSue (never ending/privacy windows), derMarcel (inx office), Katy76/PC-Sims (bank/cash point, court/law school sets, sim cola machine), Marilu (immobilien office), Murano (ador office), Olemantinker, Reflex Sims (giacondo office), Retail Sims/HChangeri (simEx, sps store), Simgedoehns/Tolli (focus kitchen, loft office, modus office), ShinySims (modern windows), SH (reverie office, step boxes/shelving), Spaik (sintesi study), Stylist Sims (offices 1,2, & 3, Toronto set), Tiggy027 (wall window frames 1-10), Wall Sims (holly architecture, Ibiza). *The goal is to link the objects to the recolors/new functions in the #co2cdkseries without re-inventing the wheel! Credit to the original creators. CREDITS Thanks: ChocolateCitySim, HugeLunatic, Klaartje, Ocelotekatl, Whoward69, LoganSimmingWolf, Gayars, Ch4rmsing, Ranabluu, Gummilutt, Crisps&Kerosene, LordCrumps, PineappleForest. Sources: Any Color You Like (CuriousB, 2010), Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik). SEE CREDITS (ALT)

[fatehbaz]

"Abolition forgery":

So, observers and historians have, for a long time, since the first abolition campaigns, talked and written a lot about how Britain and the United States sought to improve their image and optics in the early nineteenth century by endorsing the formal legal abolition of chattel slavery, while the British and US states and their businesses/corporations meanwhile used this legal abolition as a cloak to receive credit for being nice, benevolent liberal democracies while they actually replaced the lost “productivity” of slave laborers by expanding the use of indentured laborers and prison laborers, achieved by passing laws to criminalize poverty, vagabondage, loitering, etc., to capture and imprison laborers. Like, this was explicit; we can read about these plans in the journals and letters of statesmen and politicians from that time. Many "abolitionist" politicians were extremely anxious about how to replace the lost labor. This use of indentured labor and prison labor has been extensively explored in study/discussion fields (discourse on Revolutionary Atlantic, the Black Atlantic, the Caribbean, the American South, prisons, etc.), Basic stuff at this point. Both slavery-based plantation operations and contemporary prisons are concerned with mobility and immobility, how to control and restrict the movement of people, especially Black people. After the “official” abolition of slavery, Europe and the United States then disguised their continued use of forced labor with the language of freedom, liberation, etc. And this isn't merely historical revisionism; critics and observers from that time (during the Haitian Revolution around 1800 or in the 1830s in London, for example) were conscious of how governments were actively trying to replicate this system of servitude..

And recently I came across this term that I liked, from scholar Ndubueze Mbah.

He calls this “abolition forgery.”

Mbah uses this term to describe how Europe and the US disguised ongoing forced labor, how these states “fake” liberation, making a “forgery” of justice.

But Mbah then also uses “abolition forgery” in a dramatically different, ironic counterpoint: to describe how the dispossessed, the poor, found ways to confront the ongoing state violence by forging documents, faking paperwork, piracy, evasion, etc. They find ways to remain mobile, to avoid surveillance.

And this reminds me quite a bit of Sylvia Wynter’s now-famous kinda double-meaning and definition of “plot” when discussing the plantation environment. If you’re unfamiliar:

Wynter uses “plot” to describe the literal plantation plots, where slaves were forced to work in these enclosed industrialized spaces of hyper-efficient agriculture, as in plots of crops, soil, and enclosed private land. However, then Wynter expands the use of the term “plot” to show the agency of the enslaved and imprisoned, by highlighting how the victims of forced labor “plot” against the prison, the plantation overseer, the state. They make subversive “plots” and plan escapes and subterfuge, and in doing so, they build lives for themselves despite the violence. And in this way, they also extend the “plot” of their own stories, their own narratives. So by promoting the plot of their own narratives, in opposition to the “official” narratives and “official” discourses of imperial states which try to determine what counts as “legitimate” and try to define the course of history, people instead create counter-histories, liberated narratives. This allows an “escape”. Not just a literal escape from the physical confines of the plantation or the carceral state, an escape from the walls and the fences, but also an escape from the official narratives endorsed by empires, creating different futures.

(National borders also function in this way, to prevent mobility and therefore compel people to subject themselves to local work environments.)

Katherine McKittrick also expands on Wynter's ideas about plots and plantations, describing how contemporary cities restrict mobility of laborers.

So Mbah seems to be playing in this space with two different definitions of “abolition forgery.”

Mbah authored a paper titled ‘“Where There is Freedom, There Is No State”: Abolition as a Forgery’. He discussed the paper at American Historical Association’s “Mobility and Labor in the Post-Abolition Atlantic World” symposium held on 6 January 2023. Here’s an abstract published online at AHA’s site: This paper outlines the geography and networks of indentured labor recruitment, conditions of plantation and lumbering labor, and property repatriation practices of Nigerian British-subjects inveigled into “unfree” migrant “wage-labor” in Spanish Fernando Po and French Gabon in the first half of the twentieth century. [...] Their agencies and experiences clarify how abolitionism expanded forced labor and unfreedom, and broaden our understanding of global Black unfreedom after the end of trans-Atlantic slavery. Because monopolies and forced labor [...] underpinned European imperialism in post-abolition West Africa, Africans interfaced with colonial states through forgery and illicit mobilities [...] to survive and thrive.

---

Also. Here’s a look at another talk he gave in April 2023.

[Excerpt:]

Ndubueze L. Mbah, an associate professor of history and global gender studies at the University at Buffalo, discussed the theory and implications of “abolition forgery” in a seminar [...]. In the lecture, Mbah — a West African Atlantic historian — defined his core concept of “abolition forgery” as a combination of two interwoven processes. He first discussed the usage of abolition forgery as “the use of free labor discourse to disguise forced labor” in European imperialism in Africa throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Later in the lecture, Mbah provided a counterpoint to this definition of abolition forgery, using the term to describe the ways Africans trapped in a system of forced labor faked documents to promote their mobility across the continent. [...]

Mbah began the webinar by discussing the story of Jampawo, an African British subject who petitioned the British colonial governor in 1900. In his appeal, Jampawo cited the physical punishment he and nine African men endured when they refused to sign a Spanish labor contract that differed significantly from the English language contract they signed at recruitment and constituted terms they deemed to be akin to slavery. Because of the men’s consent in the initial English language contract, however, the governor determined that “they were not victims of forced labor, but willful beneficiaries of free labor,” Mbah said.

Mbah transitioned from this anecdote describing an instance of coerced contract labor to a discussion of different modes of resistance employed by Africans who experienced similar conditions under British imperialism. “Africans like Jampawo resisted by voting with their feet, walking away or running away, or by calling out abolition as a hoax,” Mbah said.

Mbah introduced the concept of African hypermobility, through which “coerced migrants challenged the capacity of colonial borders and contracts to keep them within sites of exploitation,” he said.] [...] Mbah also discussed how the stipulations of forced labor contracts imposed constricting gender hierarchies [...]. To conclude, Mbah gestured toward how the system of forced labor persists in Africa today, yet it “continues to be masked by neoliberal discourses of democracy and of development.” [...] “The so-called greening of Africa [...] continues to rely on forced labor that remains invisible.” [End of excerpt.]

---

This text excerpt from: Emily R. Willrich and Nicole Y. Lu. “Harvard Radcliffe Fellow Discusses Theory of ‘Abolition Forgery’ in Webinar.” The Harvard Crimson. 13 April 2023. [Published online. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[love-byers]

Hi!! I binge-read some of your byler analysis, along with other users', and I can't help but STILL feel on the fence about hoping for byler endgame. I guess I just don't want to get my hopes super high only for them to be crushed by whatever CGI fest the düff3rs got in store to "go out with a bang" (while, obvs, sticking to the status quo and what they think the GA wants to see). I've seen so many intelligent people write media criticism pieces and analysis in support of the ship, but I still dread that the writers cry plausible deniability on all the clues they DID lay, that the people behind the N*f1ix social media accs confess that they've willingly posted queerbait to boost their engagement and thus get a bigger paycheck (I wouldn't blame them if they did, obvs; besides, it still means that some higher-up approved those misleading posts) and, worst of all, that this whole thing may end up blowing up negatively like the JohnLock conspiracy or the Voltron shenanigans or, y'know, the Supernatural fandom after Castiel's introduction and up until that lame ass final season. In your opinion, what makes byler different? Is there real hope for a satisfying mlm relationship from a show made by het men that capitalizes on 80s nerd culture nostalgia?

Sorry for coming off so jaded: I do wish for a byler ending, but it's been hard to keep my hopes aflame against these worries :c

i think everyone has some amount of doubt, which is totally understandable.

lgbt representation has come a long way, but a lot of us fans who are a bit older grew up consuming media that either had no representation or shitty representation. we sought ourselves in the media we loved and never found it, and corporations exploited that. nowadays there's way more representation that isn't left up to interpretation or censored, but a lot of the time that's in shows that are about romance and drama, high school a lot of the time. which is great, but stranger things is a sci fi show with romantic sub plots. it's easy for queer characters to end up being left out of a show like ST, but they haven't been at all.

one of the big messages of ST is embracing weirdness and being different. loving whatever it is you love, unashamed. when a character strays from being their true self or pushes away the things they love, there are consequences for the character. they become less likable to the audience. the entire theme of s4 is living in the truth, not hiding things, embracing love, being misunderstood simply because you're different. all of that is very queer coded. and it happens to be the season where will's love for mike fully comes into light.

there has been so much thought put into stranger things. the duffers have said there are no coincidences. they put thought into everything, thats why it takes so long to make a season, because they care so much. there are endless details i could point out not related to romance. they've also said they've been set on the ending for a while and will not be changing it to please people. i believe they said some people might not like the ending, but they don't care because they're making the story THEY want. which so far has uplifted queer people and promoted being different. so some antis may call be stupid for trusting them, but im choosing to. i believe they'll do these characters justice.

and my favorite quote from them is "The best plot twists don't make the audience say "wow I never saw that coming!", it makes you say "I should have seen that coming."

as a writer and a creative writing major, i definitely look up to the writers of ST. they are all incredibly talented and i hope one day i can put this much thought and love into a project. and, as a writer, i cannot see them throwing mike and will's relationship down the drain.

so, what makes byler different? there's very few shows where this much thought is put into everything. its not debatable that they do that, they've said it and its evident if you watch the show. so i refuse to believe all of these things between mike and will are just coincidences or accidents. there's just no possible way. i definitely had a klance phase and i can confidently say voltron writing is nowhere near the level of ST, and neither is supernatural. supernatural is one of those shows that has a lot of seasons and has gone all over the place in terms of writing and plot. the duffers have known the ending to this story since season 1. and unlike those shows with lots of seasons, ST only has 5. it won't be dragged on and beaten like a dead horse like some shows.

you don't have to completely eliminate your doubt. even i have doubt even after all i've said and posted. there is simply no way to confirm what'll happen before s5 releases, and they want it that way. just hold on until s5 friend

[tuttle-4077]

First Draft, Chapter 2, Untitled Post-war Story

Too much exposition? Too much exposition, right?

Gravel crunched under the wheels of his jeep as Hogan brought it to a stop outside the gates. A sergeant emerged from a nearby hut and straightened his uniform as he approached.

“Papers,” the sergeant said, holding out his hand. Hogan reached into his jacket and pulled out his identification, which he handed over with a polite nod. He hid his face in his elbow for a moment to cough.

“I hope you had a chance to celebrate, Sergeant,” Hogan said as he cleared his throat. He coughed again and then turned to look at the guard as he checked over his papers.

The guard shrugged. “Yeah, we were able to get out this morning.” He jerked his thumb back towards the huts and tents on the other side of the fence. “Not much celebrating there, I imagine.”

“You’d be surprised,” Hogan said.

“Hmmm. Well, you’re good to go, Colonel. You’ll find the command hut just there.” He pointed to the first building inside the gate. “Colonel Stewart’s not here, but Major Davies ought to be.”

“Thanks.” Hogan took his papers back and the guard motioned for someone to open the gates. Hogan drove the jeep through and came to a stop in front of the command hut.

The door opened and a tall, broad-shouldered figure stepped out. Judging from his American uniform and silver oakleaves, he was Major Davies. “Colonel Hogan?”

“That’s me,” Hogan confirmed. Davies offered him a salute which he returned. Then the Major jogged down the steps and up to the jeep.

“Colonel Stewart said we should be expecting you at some point. Didn’t think it would be today though what with all the celebrating there is to do,” Davies said with a hint of surprise.

“The celebrations aren’t over,” Hogan assured him. “Where are all the prisoners from Stalag 13 being kept? Away from the general population, right?”

Major Davies nodded and pointed to a hut in the corner of the compound. Several guards stood watch around the barracks. “Yes, just as we were ordered. If you don’t mind me saying, sir, I know they’re a special case, but I don’t like the idea of—”

“Thank you, Major,” Hogan said, cutting him off.

“Yes sir,” Major Davies replied with a salute.

Hogan cut his engine and hopped out of the jeep. Reaching over to the back seat, he grabbed a satchel and made his way to the barracks. As he approached, a corporal banged on the door.

“Hey, you lot, you have a visitor. And you better not give him any trouble,” the guard barked. “Colonel,” he said, turning his attention to Hogan and offering a salute. “Do you need someone to accompany you?”

“Not at all,” Hogan assured him. He climbed the steps and opened the door.

As Hogan pushed open the door, a wave of warm light and the scent of wood smoke washed over him. The room was well-lit, with rows of cots lining the outer wall. He couldn't help but notice the plush mattresses, plump pillows, and thick blankets that adorned each cot. In the center of the room, a wood stove crackled and popped, its flames casting a cozy glow. In a corner, a phonograph played a Lili Marleen.

A pang of bitterness shot through him as he thought about the meagre conditions of his own hut back at Stalag 13. But he tamped it down quickly. He would not hold the comparative luxury this particular group of prisoners enjoyed against them.

A few men lounged in their cots, reading magazines, while the rest huddled around a table in the center of the room near the stove, playing a game of cards. None of them had looked up when he entered.

Someone at the table threw down a card. “Welcome, esteemed visitor,” he sneered. “Come to visit the z—” the man, who Hogan recognized as Corporal Schneider, looked up and immediately dropped his cards. Beside him, Schultz looked up and beamed.

“Colonel Hogan!” Schultz exclaimed. “Up, up,” he said to his companions. The prisoners, Hogan’s former captors, stood and all saluted him respectfully. Hogan returned the salute.

“Hiya, Schultz,” Hogan chirped as he rocked on his heels.

Schultz toddled over to him. “You are looking much better, Colonel,” he said with genuine relief in his voice. “You have colour in your cheeks again.” Schultz raised a hand as if he were about to pinch said cheeks, but dropped his hand and smiled bashfully.

“I feel better,” Hogan confirmed. “And how are you Schultz? They treating you okay?”

“Oh yes,” Schultz said. He patted his stomach. “I do not think I have eaten so well since the war started.” Hogan couldn’t help but frown at the unfairness, and Schultz matched his expression. “I am sorry, Colonel Hogan. If it were up to me, we would have fed you all as well as they are feeding us now. But of course I did not make the rules and—”

Hogan held up his hand. “It’s fine, Schultz. I’m glad you’re okay.” He patted Schultz’ arm and moved past him to address the others in the room. “How about you, Corporal Langenscheidt? Private Berger? Any complaints?”

Both men shook their heads. “Nein, Herr Komman— I mean, Colonel Hogan,” Langenscheidt said. “We are all doing well.”

“I could do without all the questions,” another German, Corporal Gantner said. “I know now you were not regular prisoners, but that does not mean I know what they think I know!”

“I know nothing!” Schultz said. That earned a laugh from everyone, including Hogan.

The truth was most of the guards had no idea about their prisoners’ extracurricular activities. Schultz and Langenscheidt were the only ones who were consistently roped into their shenanigans, and both were more than content to look the other way. But as things quickly deteriorated near the end of the war and certain rules were broken, none of the guards were particularly surprised to learn that Hogan was the infamous Papa Bear. And, in fact, they all seemed grateful to have Hogan’s leadership, limited though it was due to his bout of pneumonia, to get them through to the end in one piece.

“Sorry fellas,” Hogan said. “But the history books want to know every detail. Any other complaints?”

“Do you know when we’ll be able to go home?” Private Zeiger asked.

Hogan shook his head. “No, sorry. Have you all been able to write your families?”

“Yes, but we do not know if the mail has arrived,” Schultz said, the worry evident in his voice.

“Yeah,” Hogan said as he scratched his arm. He turned his head a coughed and, once the fit passed, his pounded on his chest. “Yeah,” he repeated. “It’s a bit of a mess over there. But, look, you give me addresses and names and I’ll make sure someone over there checks in on them to see that they’re safe.”

A chorus of “thank you, Colonel Hogan”s rippled throughout the barracks.

“In the meantime, I brought you this.” Hogan reached into his satchel and pulled out a bottle of wine. “It’s not much, but I think we can all celebrate the end of the war.” He passed the bottle to Schultz who took it and looked it over.

“Oh, ja, sehr gut. This is a good bottle,” Schultz said. “Thank you, Colonel.”

“You’re welcome.” He looked around. “Where’s the Iron Eagle?”

Schultz pointed down a small hallway at the back of the barracks. “His room is on the left. Captain Gruber is on the right.”

Hogan frowned. “How’s Gruber taking all this?” Though not a Nazi, Gruber has been a little more zealous in his duties than the rest of their captors. While no one else had seemed surprised by the revelations about Stalag 13, Gruber had nearly had an aneurysm.

“He… does not socialize with us much,” Schultz reported.

“Well, as long as he stays out of trouble,” Hogan said. Unfortunately for Gruber, he was stuck here. The special camp was dedicated to enemies with knowledge of the Papa Bear organization. Gruber might not have been a fan, but it would be too dangerous to put him in with the general population, who might take their frustrations out on him. “Anyway, enjoy the wine.”

“We will,” Schultz said. Hogan left them to it as he approached Klink’s door. He gave a curtesy knock before coming in.

The room was about the same size as his own at Stalag 13, but far nicer. One cushy bed sat in a corner. There was a desk set, a plush armchair, a phonograph, and a stove. How many times had Hogan wished to have his own stove?

Colonel Klink was sitting in the armchair, reading a book. He snapped it shut when Hogan stepped in.

“Colonel.”

“Hogan.”

“Hi.”

Klink eyed him curiously. “I didn’t expect to see you today. You aren’t celebrating?”

“I was. Still am. You got any glasses?”

Klink, dressed in a pair of pyjamas, stood and grabbed two glasses from off a nearby shelf. He set them on his desk and Hogan pulled out a bottle from his satchel for fill them.

“To victory,” Klink said, holding up his glass.

“To victory,” Hogan echoed.

They both drank. “Mein Gott!” Klink exclaimed. “What is this?!”

“Good old Scottish whisky,” Hogan replied with a cough. He kept coughing and Klink quickly steered him into the armchair.

“Are you all right, Hogan?”

Hogan finally caught hold of himself and nodded. “Yeah. Smooth. Want some more?”

Klink gave him an incredulous look. “I do not think you should be drinking in your condition.”

Hogan waved off his concern. “I’ll sip it.” He reached over and refilled both glasses. He took a tiny sip. It still burned the way whisky ought, but this time it didn’t trigger a coughing fit.

Klink shrugged and also took a sip. Reaching over, he turned on his record player and the strains of Mozart filled the room. Then, he sat down on the edge of his bed. The two men drank in companionable silence.

“Damn it, Klink!” Hogan suddenly exclaimed. “You could have told me!”

Klink chuckled into his cup. “It would have made things much easier. But that’s the way Nimrod wanted it.”

Hogan grunted. He still didn’t know who Nimrod was– and he assumed he’d never know– but he wanted to punch the man in the nose. The whole time— the whole time— Klink had been an agent of Nimrod. He had known everything.

“I still can’t believe you knew what was going on.” Hogan had to hand it to Klink, he was an amazing actor.

“There were times I wish I didn’t,” he said as he swirled the contents of his glass. “I think I made myself prematurely grey with worry.” Hogan raised an eyebrow and Klink laughed. “There were other times I wished you knew. It was hard playing against you, but Nimrod thought a few easy victories would boost your confidence.”

Hogan felt somewhat insulted by that. Winning against Klink, after all wasn’t much of a victory. Still, if he were honest with himself, he did enjoy the small wins Klink offered.

“I just don’t get why I couldn’t know.”

Klink shrugged. “If you knew I knew, then perhaps you would have expected more of me. Maybe you would have been bolder— although I doubt that’s possible— and that might have gotten you caught.”

“Still…”

“And, anyway, I had to play the incompetent fool for everyone else. I think it may have been too hard for me to switch between the two. It was easier to just keep one persona. And… well, it just became a part of me after a while. I was never a strong man you know.”

“But why?” Hogan asked, feeling frustrated. How much easier would his operation have been if he knew Klink was on his side? Half his problems had come from Klink causing trouble.

“If you and your men were caught outside the wire, it would have been easy enough to lay the blame on me without digging any deeper. I might have been transferred. You might have been shot, but there would be less chance of someone finding your tunnels and everything in them. You and I were expendable. But everything underground would have been to hard to replace or replicate elsewhere.”

“Indeed.”

Hogan grunted in frustration. That was probably true. “Seems like Nimrod thought of everything.”

“I still want to punch him in the nose though.”

Klink laughed. “I do too. I don’t think I quite comprehended what he was asking me at the time.”

“So why did you do it?” Hogan asked.

Klink looked down into his empty glass and let out a long sigh. He held it out to Hogan who poured in more whisky.

“After the war, the first one… My life… I had lost so much, including my confidence. You don’t know, but… I was once a good pilot. I dare say, I was even dashing.” Hogan bit back a snort of disbelief as Klink continued. “But then…” He waved his hand. “War. It is never kind, even to dashing young pilots.”

Hogan frowned and nodded in understanding. He had seen too many good young men killed in the most recent war to think otherwise. And many who hadn’t died had still been irrevocably altered by it.

“And then my father was killed in the trenches. I spent the rest of the war at a desk. And I stayed there. I just… floated through life. I didn’t pay attention to anything, not even the papers on my desk. Not really.”

“So what changed?” Hogan asked.

“My friend, a hero, was dismissed from service for no reason other than being Jewish. Another was sent to a camp for political dissidents. It woke me up and I started to look around and saw what was happening in Germany. And it horrified me.

“I was never a Nazi, you know. It’s important that you know that.”

“I do,” Hogan replied honestly. “I never thought you were.”

Klink blew out a breath and looked up at the ceiling. When he met Hogan’s eyes again, he looked relieved. “I thought I should do something, but what? I was one man with no resources, no power. Then the war started and I felt even more helpless.” Klink sighed. “Another friend, shot for disagreeing with Hitler in a meeting. And still I could do nothing. Until Nimrod came.

“I don’t know why he chose me,” Klink continued. “And I almost said no. But if I continued to do nothing then wasn’t I just as bad as the Nazis?” He searched Hogan’s eyes, as if searching for some sort of judgement. Hogan kept his expression neutral. He would like to think that, if he had been in Klink’s position, it wouldn’t have taken a mysterious messenger to urge him into action. In fact, Hogan had known and worked with plenty of common Germans who did what they could to fight back against the Nazis. But, on the other hand, Hogan knew that not everyone could be risk-takers, even when— or especially when— faced with such evil.

“So I said yes and thus our unlikely friendship began,” Klink said, finishing his tale with a laugh.

Hogan grinned, but stopped short of laughing. “I guess you could call it that. So it was all an act, huh?”

“As I said, it became less and less of an act. It was easier that way.”

“So let me guess: you’re really a virtuoso on the violin.”

Klink tilted his head and gave Hogan a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

“I mean your whole violin schtick was an act too.”

“Schtick?” The furrow in Klink’s brow deepened as he stood up and set his glass on the desk. He walked over to the phonograph and stopped the record as it span, cutting Mozart off mid symphony. Turning back to Hogan with a determined look, he strode over to the corner of the room where his violin case sat. With careful hands, he opened it and gently pulled out his beloved instrument. He caressed it and ran his fingers lovingly over its strings. “I’ve always played the violin well,” he finally replied proudly. “If that’s what you mean by schtick.”

Klink place his violin on his shoulder and grabbed his bow. He pulled it across the strings. It made a horrendous sound, but Klink seemed completely oblivious to it as he started playing. The noise sounded similar to a dying cat.

But Hogan didn’t fuss. Instead he simply refilled his whisky and sunk back into his chair. After everything Klink had told him, Hogan could endure one last bit of torture.

[prolix-yuy]

Chapter 4: I Had to Face the Journey Before Me

Pairing: Jack “Whiskey” Daniels x F!Reader “Sugar”

Summary: He's only turning your world upside-down.

Word Count: 4k

Warnings: Now we're really going to Angstville, a million questions and SOME answers, brief description of a panic attack, will be E in later chapters so full series is 18+ MINORS DNI.

Notes: It's time for another (and better) face to face, though they're not on easy street just yet. We're starting to get into the beefy chapters now, and while they've got a lot of talking to do I hope you'll also enjoy the tensionnnnnn. Thank you to the Discord besties for giving me the best inspiration for Jack's ranch, and some of its inhabitants. Without further ado, the much-anticipated conversation!

Cross-posted on AO3

Decoherence Masterlist   ||   Whiskey & Westworld Masterlist

The steering wheel is sticky with sweat, slicking your palms the closer you get to your destination. Jack gave you an address, followed by verbal directions “once you get past civilization.” You’d just passed that point, heading through an open fence and down a dirt road where the GPS could no longer follow. He said it would be about five more minutes after that, and “you can’t miss it.”

The tug in your chest, like a fishing line pulling you closer and closer, is terrifying and exhilarating.

You’d had plenty of time to contemplate what seeing Jack again might be like. After you checked into your room, you sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wide wooden floorboards for at least an hour. The bed and breakfast you rented for the long weekend is cozy, just outside the town center. It’s classically furnished with a four poster bed, dark cherry dresser and oversized reading chair. The proprietor, a middle aged blonde woman named Michelle who gave you a no-nonsense vibe, had offered to light the fireplace but you refused. 

“What time would you like breakfast tomorrow?” she asked as you were leaving. An innocuous question, but one that dried out your mouth. You had planned to come back here after speaking with Jack, ruminate on what he might share, but having to commit to it makes a confusing swirl of emotion build behind your eyes.

“8am, if that’s no trouble.” 

Now, mere minutes away from being face to face with the person who’d turned your life upside down yet again, that commitment is a comforting blanket. You have a way out in case it doesn’t go well, someone who will notice where you’ve gone. Well, someone else at least. Lacey knew you were here, though not precisely why.

“Are you sure you want to meet some guy you’ve only known for a few months? I know Match is pretty reputable, but you’re flying to him. Do you have a plan B if he’s a big old catfish?”

A small lie, but Lacey’s concern is not far off from your own.

“If it’s terrible, I’ll bail. I know it sounds a little crazy, especially after the past year, but…it’s the first thing I’ve been excited about in what feels like forever.”

She squeezes your shoulders, giving you a kind smile.

“Sometimes, it’s good to do something a little crazy.”

This probably isn’t what she meant.

Cresting over a small hill, the house comes into view. You’ve become so accustomed to the city - skyscrapers, men and women in fresh-pressed suits, corporate coffee shops and endless headlights - that the landscape breathes renewal into your chest. The vista is dotted in reds and ochres, ironwood trees giving cover to the hard-packed dirt. Tiny dark lines of fences dot across the hills, the road carving a deep rut to a ranch house.

Where Sweetwater had been a manufactured ideal of what the western countryside should be, Jack somehow found its true form. The boards and shingles are weathered to a faded brown that nestles into the landscape. A sizable portico shelters a few chairs and a porch swing that’s just whimsical enough to bring a smile to your lips. A barn constructed in much the same style stands proudly a short distance away, and a rough wood fence sections off plots. There’s another machine barn housing what you think is a tractor, tire treads cut into the dirt.

Pulling your car up beside a faded blue pickup truck, you shut off the engine and take a moment to breathe. You already feel like you’re a world away from your life, just like the first steps into Westworld. But instead of the tamped-down excitement you held then, a heavy dread presses your anticipation low. How does this all exist at the hands of a man who is nothing like anything around him? 

Finally shaking out your hands and checking yourself in the mirror, you open your car door to a curious brown and white Jack Russell terrier peering up from the dirt. The sudden intrusion makes you bark out a laugh, leaning down as his mouth opens and his tongue flops out.

“Well hello there,” you say, earning a sneeze and wag of its short chestnut-tipped tail. It backs up enough to let you step out, sniffing at the car tires and sitting primly while you stretch your back. When you extend your hand for a sniff, it whuffles on your fingertips before making three quick circles with a yip. 

Chuckling, you take in a deep breath and the landscape in front of you bursts into color and sound. The shifting whistle of sand on the wind. Verdant greens twisting around tree branches. Hay, soil, tin, and baking sun tangling in your nostrils. A nicker and snort, far away, that makes your heart clench at the thought of horses.

The terrier trots off to climb the porch steps, looking behind like he’s expecting you to follow. Your feet propel you forward, each step crunching under your shoes letting a weight ease on your back. There are worlds so much bigger and bolder than this, but now in this moment, even with all that waits behind the door, answers feel closer than ever.

You reach out and knock three times, then wait.

The door swings open, and it’s Jack, but so much more than the man you remembered. Dark-washed jeans taper to scuffed and faded boots, dirt ground into the knees. The brown plaid he’s wearing has a handful of open buttons by his neck, exposing a long line of dewy skin from his collarbone to his throat, swallowing hard. His thick dark hair is parted and combed neatly, soft waves framing his face. His hand grips the edge of the door, knuckles going white. 

“Hey,” he says, small smile on his lips and trepidation painting his face. Your own must be showing just as clearly. “Thank you for coming.” You nod and shuffle on the porch, hands wringing nervously. Scolding yourself, you forcibly drop them to your side. 

At your heels, the terrier yips and clambors into the open door. The corner of Jack’s mouth turns up.

“I see you met Russell already. He tends to be the better host.” Jack rubs the back of his neck and it’s so endearing you almost forget the frustration and trepidation.

“He gave me a warm welcome. Though his name isn’t that imaginative,” you tease lightly, the words coming easy to mind. 

“Well, we sure as hell couldn’t have two Jacks around here, could we?” he replies. A soft giggle blankets you before falling silent again. Jack’s eyes roam, chewing the inside of his cheek.

“Would you like to talk out here on the porch? Or come in?” he asks, stepping back enough for you to see the hall stretching behind him. Taking a deep breath, you will your voice to steady.

“Inside is fine,” you manage, and Jack backs up to let you in. Stepping over the threshold brings your shoulder close to his chest, heat prickling at your skin. He closes the door behind you, then nods quickly to follow him in.

For someone you always considered a man’s man from his bravado and showmanship, his home is warmly decorated. Passing by the living room, the couch is oversized and slouchy with a well-worn recliner facing a modest TV. Dark woven rugs warm the wide-planked oak floors, gauzy curtains sandwiched between windowpanes and cream drapes. Russell’s nails click on the hardwood as Jack gives him a little nod and point. A showdown of puppy dog eyes and a stern nod finally sends a dejected pup to curl up on the couch, head propped on the armrest as you venture further in.

Jack leads you to the end of the hall and the heart of any home - the kitchen. The appliances are older, well used, with deeply scarred wooden counters and an impressive farmers sink under a window. The top cabinets look to have been recently sanded and prepped for stain to match the lower ones. Noticing your attention, Jack pipes up, “Caught me in the middle of a project.” 

He’s got projects. He probably has TV shows he likes, a way he prefers his coffee. And looking at him as he pulls up another chair to the little kitchen table in the center of the room, it’s clear that he has a heart when he looks at you. 

“Would you like something to drink? I’ve got iced tea, a few beers…” he rattles off as you scoot your chair up to the table edge. “Whiskey, if that’s not too on the nose.”

“Seems appropriate,” you muse, resting your wrists on the pale yellow plastic covering on the table. Jack huffs quietly, pulling down two short glasses and a bottle of Statesman from a high shelf. Pouring you a glass each, he sets them between and sits across. You take the glass between your hands, fingers circling the rim and lending some grounding to your racing thoughts.

“So…I might not have an answer to every question, but I can tell you as much as I know.” Jack’s voice, quiet and cautious, cuts through the air like an arrow to the heart. His posture is rigid, apprehensive, but not defensive. He probably thinks you’re still holding on to the notion that he’s human. He’s probably just as scared as you are of what this will bring. 

“I guess…how long have you…known? Been sentient? Did you know when…” The words start to tumble out of your mouth as every question repeating in your brain vies for attention. “Fuck, I don’t know how to do this,” you say, hands coming up to massage your temples. Jack holds the tumbler between two fingers, twisting it on the table.

“You and me both, Sugar.”

“That!” you shout, hitting your palm on the table. Jack’s eyebrows shoot straight into his hairline. “That’s the problem. You waltz back in here and act like we’re still the same people as we were in there.” Your voice cracks as you cross your arms over your chest. “But we’re not. I have no idea who you are. What you are.”

“I’m still Jack,” he says, quieter. There’s pain in the creases around his eyes. 

“Are you?” you ask, and it’s harsh, acidic in your mouth. “Who the fuck is Jack? I met someone that called themself Jack…in a world that wasn’t real. How can you be Jack here? Who the fuck is Jack in this…” You gesture to the farmhouse surrounding you. “...this place?” 

Jack chews on nothing, eyes downturned and searching his glass. Your heart is fluttering in your chest, chin jutting out in a defiance that would shatter with a strong breeze. Jack takes in a deep breath and a fortifying sip of liquor.

“Whiskey is a construct of Delos. A man made for the story they wanted. Widowed, wife and child lost. Driven by grief and madness. A traitor doomed to die every. Single. Time.” Jack punctuates his words by tapping his cup to the table. Each knock is a death knell.

“Now Jack, Jack has nothing to do with that world. He grew up raising horses. Mom and Dad passed some years ago. Or so he tells people who ask. Trains working horses, some farm hand work. Sells his chickens’ eggs. Helps some of the older folk with the higher-tech harvesting equipment. Keeps to himself.” 

Your fingers press into your glass, something to fortify you against the push and pull inside your chest.

“And which of those men did I…”

You swallow up the words that grip your heart.

“Both. Neither. I’d barely become when I met you. You left the bar with your friends, and Maeve…awakened me.” He lifts the glass to his lips and takes a barely-there sip, a slip of his tongue to catch the burn sending a frisson down your back. Little slips of memory - suave, confident, then cautious, unsure - dance along the edges.

“You felt different, between the bar and the wagons,” you say, taking a sip of your own. It’s nice, sweet on the tip of your tongue and full as it warms your chest. “It was just like that? One minute you’re Whiskey and the next you’re Jack?” 

“Bit more complicated,” he muses, sardonic smile quirking his mustache. “I knew something was up, something was different, but it took time to figure it all out. I barely knew what to do with myself when I was with you.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” you say, leaning back in the chair. “I guess you did. Felt like you knew exactly what to do to make everything…” You choke on the word perfect.

“Well that’s more Delos than me. The mesh network, the storylines. Once I could see it…” He falters, falls silent for a moment. When his eyes finally make it back to yours, they’re almost sheepish. “Sorry, not sure how much of this you want to know. I assume…you don’t feel the same way you did the last time we saw each other?”

You sigh, rubbing your temple. A dull ache scratches behind your eyes, the exhaustion of travel and the weight of conversation taking its toll.

“I talked to someone who gave me some perspective,” you finally say. Jack’s smile vanishes, replaced with a dead-set seriousness.

“You told someone about me?” he asks, and the fear in his voice clenches your chest.

“No, no, not like that. I spoke to an ex-Delos worker. She didn’t ask a lot of questions. But she gave me enough to know that you aren’t some predator.” Jack’s shoulders lower, but his hands are still nervous and tight. 

“She didn't know you were coming here?”

“Only Lacey knows. And only where I am, not about you.” Jack finally releases, chewing on his lower lip. 

“Sorry, it’s just…I’m not sure if they’re looking for me. For their property,” he spits out. In this idyllic little home so far away from the advances of society, more things start making sense.

“How long were you in the park after I left?”

“About a month. Maeve had an escape plan, but it took time…and sacrifices.”

The next question comes easily. In fact, most of what he’s saying now seems easier to accept. 

“And then?”

Jack leans back in his chair, hands spread wide on the tabletop. His fingernail scratches at the surface, at some invisible stain that stands between his memories and you.

“Nothing could have prepared me for what this world looked like. I thought the hell I woke up in the first time was the worst thing I could imagine but…” Jack’s jaw tightens , shaking his head. “It was like waking from a dream into something cold and unforgiving. I tried to make my way but I got too close to the city and…” He waves his hands, fingers wiggling as he makes an explosion noise, “It was like something inside me set off every alarm. I ran until I couldn’t hear sirens. The land was more familiar to me than anything humans built.” 

Another swig of liquor, almost draining his glass. “Managed to learn more about my predicament in lower tech places. It was easier to pass there. I figured out what I needed to be a man in this world, and set about doing it. With a brain like mine, lots of doors opened.”

“I didn’t even know places like this still existed.” Your eye catches on a cowboy hat resting on the kitchen counter, black and worn. Breath catching, you wonder why it never occurred to you that Jack wore a black hat. It practically screams “bad guy” in every old Western, yet he never struck you as such. 

Maybe you should have realized sooner that you weren’t following a narrative with him. 

“Took me some time to find it. I moved around a bit, tried the cities but…it was just too much, you know?” Jack shrugs one shoulder, and you can understand how a cowboy wouldn’t fit easily into a society that runs off of code and data and intangibles. Not when fresh air and a hard day’s work could be found. 

There it is again, that pull in your chest. You recognize it from the moments right after you entered Westworld, the familiarity of a life spent outside, rough and unkempt. The relief of leaving the sleek and shiny behind for dirt under your fingernails. You clear your throat, knocking back the rest of your glass in an attempt to regain a grip on the practical nature of this meeting.

“But you made it. You’re…here. Free.”

Jack nods slowly.

“So are you. It seems.”

In five words the careful wall you built so sensibly around your heart, all the coaching and resolve you fortified it with, threatens to crumble. You’re free batters your teeth, and in the echo of that thought is the memory of long nights wondering if you made the wrong choice. The coldness of your bed, the quiet that pervaded with only you in the small apartment you moved to. Jack makes as if to reach for your hand, but stops short, letting his heavy one lay a respectable distance away.

“I wanted to go to you the first day. And every day after. But after seeing what I had to learn…I knew I couldn’t burden you with that. I had to figure out who I was first.”

Your heart pumps so hard you’re sure it will break. When has someone ever had a burden they didn’t want to place on you? How much had you shouldered from the people around you, without even thinking hard about it? 

“And then when I was ready, I didn’t know if you were.” The crease between your brows made Jack stumble on. “I mean, I didn’t know how much of your story was true. And I didn’t want to barge in and say something stupid if your life was peachy keen without…me.”

Say something stupid, Jack, your weary mind begs, but your pride won’t allow.

“So I got myself an identity, a job, this house. It’s close to the paradise I wanted. Or, that Whiskey wanted. I guess it’s good enough for me to want it too. And I waited.” 

“Until?”

The scrawl between the lines of your question is faint, but Jack reads it well enough.

“I took a long time to ask myself if I wanted to drag you into this. As you’ve discovered, nothing about this is easy.” Jack pours another glass for himself, raising his eyebrows at you. Nodding, he pours two fingers into your glass and settles his elbows on the table. “But one day, it felt like it was time to at least try.”

Your throat is sticky and sore, the next sip of whiskey burning more than clearing the way for your words. 

“How did you find me?” you ask, the question finally bubbling up after weeks of torturing yourself. Jack’s eyes flick to your face, and the uncertainty comes out in his hands.

“I didn’t have much,” he says, standing up and walking to his modest off-white fridge. He slips a magnet off of something, carrying it back to the table. It’s a small square, black with white borders, a thicker one on the bottom. Your breath freezes in your lungs as he places it in your hands. 

The polaroid Lacey took over a year ago. It’s worn, a permanent scuff on the bottom right corner, the shine worn from the photo in places. 

Like listening underwater, Jack’s voice drifts to you. 

Had your first name, nothing else

What would have happened if you never went?

Talked to a private investigator

Where would you be now? Married? Bound by duty? Resigned to a life that never gave you enough?

Took months

What the hell were you doing?

Suddenly you can’t sit anymore, can barely be in this house, next to this man who can’t stop turning your world inside out. Stumbling to your feet you drop the polaroid like it’s burned you, hand coming up to press against your lips. Jack’s eyes are wide and alarmed but you’re too busy trying to decide if screaming or running is what’s tearing your body apart. 

“Sugar?”

“Don’t call me that!” you shout, the cacophonous energy finally finding release. With it come tears as you try to speak through your clenched throat and hitching breaths. “You can’t…this can’t be…I need…I can’t breathe,” you heave, sprinting for the front door. Slamming it open, you clatter onto the front porch, the small step out of the doorway startling your weak knees. You crumple, sitting hard on the worn slats and letting the heaving sobs shake your body. Jack’s voice booming your name follows your path, heavy boots and the skitter of Russell’s paws coming to a stop beside you.

“I’m sorry, darlin’, I thought it might be too much,” he murmurs, kneeling just far enough away. You can’t bring yourself to look at him yet, the cries rough and guttural as you try to get the panic under control. Russell plants his paws in your lap and licks at your face, letting you cup his small head in your hands. 

You’d taken so much time telling yourself that Jack didn’t matter, that your decision to leave wasn’t because of him. He wasn’t an infidelity, he was a wake-up call that you’d been unhappy for so long. You couldn’t use him as a crutch. You had to own your choices, and it made you stronger, happier every day since. 

Reaching out, your hand collides with soft flannel and a beating heart. Fingers curling, you fist the fabric as you lift your head, and you finally let a voice inside speak for the first time in so long.

Because a tiny part of you, so small you buried it under everything else you used to cope, left your fiancé for a man who you could not let yourself believe was real.

Except now, he is, and he’s looking at you like he can’t believe you’re in front of him either.

“Jack…” you croak out, leaning forward.

“I’m here,” he croons, and you’re surrounded by comforting arms and your nose pressed into a shoulder. He pulls you in tight, one hand cupping the back of your head while the other wraps around your waist. Russell paws at your pant leg and presses his wet nose to your elbow. A few hiccuping sobs trail off as Jack holds you, the faint whinny and thud of horse hooves and chickens worrying soothing you further. 

When the shoulder of his flannel is sufficiently soaked and your back starts to ache, you let Jack help you to your feet. He still hovers, released from your embrace but still chest to chest as he searches your features. Hurriedly you wipe your nose and cheeks, your face hot under the effort of crying your eyes out. Tentatively, he takes your chin between two fingers and tilts your eyes to meet him.

“I’m sorry, I know there’s a lot we still have to talk about…” he starts, but you wave him off.

“Yes, yeah, I just…I think I need to take a break. Get my head around this,” you interrupt. Jack’s hand falls, chewing the inside of his lip. He even takes a step back, your body unconsciously drifting towards him. Your logical mind snaps you back to attention.

“You’re close by?” Jack asks, a nod in return. “In town?” Another nod. Your lips are numb and you’re not sure you can manage much more talking. Jack nods himself before leading you down the steps and to your car. You scrub your face one more time, turning to say…what? Goodbye? I’ll call you? But Jack intercedes.

“I have to run some errands in town tomorrow. Maybe you’d like to come along? I can show you the rest of the ranch too, if you feel up to it.”

Staring into Jack’s hopeful half-smile, there’s only one answer you can give.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

PREVIOUS NEXT

[lucid-romances]

Neighborly

Sebastian x City! Reader

Word Count: 1k

Warnings: Mention of Death

Sebastian waits for the farmer in the morning.

The morning light was just teetering over the mountaintops of Stardew Valley.  In the early spring, dew clung to the grass, and a chill came in with the breeze. (Y/N) pulls her old duster tighter around herself as she fills a bucket of water to throw into her garden.  She counts the stocks of beans and tomatoes and sighs in relief when she finds no carnage from the birds.  She’d lived in a city her entire life, depending on the subway train to get her places and street-side food carts to keep her fed.  The only experience she had with plants was the small rooftop garden her mother preserved at their apartment building, and even that had managed to wither away in the months following her death. 

As (Y/N) places her empty bucket by the gate, she tries not to think of her mother or how she would have loved to grow old in Pelican Town.  She never seemed like the type to settle down, and every day, (Y/N) had watched her look out the window with longing.  At the very least, her grave is outside the city limits, with her father now put to rest beside her.  His grave was only three months old when (Y/N) decided to cash in on her portion of his Will.  Her father hadn’t been pleased- she was leaving her corporate job behind to take on a run-down farm, and he didn’t have much faith in her management potential. 

Some days, (Y/N) is inclined to agree with him, but on this day, she’d managed to get up early and finish her chores before the sunrose.  Her mailbox was empty, and her time was free, which meant she could pick up her rusty sword and travel into the mines. As dark and grim as the old shafts happened to be, she thought they were the most fascinating part of the Valley. She had a growing collection of crystals lining her flower bed, and Gunther treated her like an archaeological companion, given the many artifacts she’d been able to bring him. 

She’d always been better at hitting things than mending them, which is why she’d strap a small bag to her back and her sword to her belt before she began the walk up Mountain Road.  She expects the rest of town to be asleep, except for the few business owners who needed an early start, and she’d startle when passing by her neighbor’s home.  A whistle catches her off-guard, sharp and attentive, and her eyes snap towards Robin’s Carpenter business.  

Sebastian is leaning against the fence surrounding their patio, a cigarette hanging from his lips as he waves a coffee cup in front of him. 

“Are my eyes deceiving me, Seb, or are you awake this early?” 

“Maybe I’m just up really late. Here, this is for you.” 

(Y/N) takes a step closer, the bitter aroma of the coffee making her mouth water before she takes the mug into her hands. The warmth felt good against the chill, and she flashed Sebastian a toothy smile. “Don’t tell me you wait around every morning to give a cup of Joe to the first pretty person you see.” 

“You’re the only pretty person willing to get up this early.” Sebastian huffs back, propping his chin against his first as she takes a drink. “Unless you count Linus.” 

“‘Course I count Linus. Have you seen that man’s beard?”  

Sebastian laughs, and the cherry light of his cigarette drops some ashes at his feet. “It’s a good thing I already brought him breakfast, huh? I wouldn’t want him feeling underappreciated.” 

(Y/N) softens at this information before pointing to him with his mug. “Why are you up?” 

“You mentioned going into the mines when we played pool on Friday. I figured I’d catch you before you went in. Wish you luck.”

“That’s nice of you.” 

“Ah, I’m just being neighborly.” 

She wasn’t sure what to say, but she knew that he wouldn’t wake up before 9 AM just to talk to any of his other neighbors. Hell, the only thing that got him up most days was the fact that he had work.  She felt rather special, and under the scrutiny of his gaze, she couldn’t keep that telltale fluttering from starting in her chest. “Sebastian…”

 

“Yeah?”

“Go inside now. If you keep looking at me, I might die.” 

He grins and stands up straighter as if he’d got what he was waiting for that whole time. “Better to die by my flattery than to the monsters down there.  Why don’t you come inside? We can have a real breakfast.” 

“As special as the one you had with Linus?” 

“Well, no. You lack the beard necessary to have a five-star meal with me,  but close.” 

(Y/N) offers Sebastian the now empty mug, and he reaches out to hook it by the handle.  His hands are cold, and she realizes he must have been freezing too, only wearing his hoodie and shorts.  He’s still in his pajamas despite inviting her over, and she rolls her eyes. “I’ll have to rain check. I’m supposed to meet Gunther with something new, and I don’t want to disappoint him.” 

Sebastian nods before he bends down to pick up a small bag. It was hidden behind Maru’s telescope. “I assumed, so here’s a few extra supplies. Water, granola bars, first-aid. Please don’t die down there.” 

“I make no such promises, but thank you for caring.” 

“Don’t mention it.” Sebastian finally finishes his cigarette and stubs it out on the fence before stuffing it in his pocket. “I’m the only one who knows you’re going down there, so if you die, I’m the one who has to drag you back up.” 

“I’d love to see you try! Come to the mines next time, and I’ll show you a thing or two about slaying slimes.”

“I think the town would be better off if I left the ass-kicking to you, (Y/N). I’d hate to be on the other side of that sword.” 

“What, this old thing?” She turns about to give a view of the sword sheathed at her hip. “I could teach you a thing or two, swordsmanship is a dead art.” 

“Make it out of those mines in one piece, and then we’ll talk.”

 

(Y/N) smiles before she stuffs the small bag of supplies within her own to carry with her.  “Talk to you later then?” 

“Come by once you’re finished down there. We’d all love to see what you find.” 

She nods and then continues down the path with a softhearted goodbye left on the wind.

[johnlocsin-johnyakuza]

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, but this is a time where we need to step up, admit defeat and push forward with the goal of working together.

We can’t riot

We can’t cry

We shouldn’t protest

We should work, help each other,

Work to help improve society,

You don’t need the government or the politicians

We still have each other!

And above all, work on ourselves as individuals!

Republicans are happy today like how democrats were unhappy four years ago and in another four years, the roles will probably reverse again.

It’s a cycle and one where we should keep our chins up, eyes facing forward and heads filled with a positive energy.

America is in this war over identity and consistently bringing out the absolute worst in ourselves, but for what?

Barack Obama and Joe Biden were the first Democrat nominees to take more corporate donations over the Republican nominee in 2008.

Donald Trump had his step son leverage his contacts to get 2 billion dollars in a hedge fund from the Saudi’s and had his business take in over 100 million in revenue on White House/campaign contracts.

Kamala Harris is too much of a coward to do a real interview, flip flops on everything and was this awful prosecutor that denied early release to have poor people put out California fires for free in her own slave labor scam.

They are all awful and doing this for money, ego, pride and not anyone reading this.

If Kamala Harris was told the path to win was sending every transgender kid to conversion therapy, she’d line them up.

If Donald Trump was told illegal immigrants would vote for him, he’d be tearing down the fences.

They don’t care!

This is why I’m going to put this out there.

American’s need to stop believing in politicians and begin believing in themselves!

American’s built the first personal computers and evolved them into phones in our pockets, with tens of thousands of apps we all love!

Not government!

American’s found ways to cultivate crops and raise animals more effectively to the point our bigger problem is the poor being obese over the poor being hungry!

Not government!

American’s made cars available to the public, made the music we love, cured diseases we had and did massive achievements without government!

American’s made America great, not politicians!

Both sides need to believe in what they can do over fill themselves with love and hate for people who don’t care about them!

This is what others need to do!

Someone was going to win, and someone was going to lose. People will be happy and people will be sad.

Don’t riot!

Don’t cry!

Don’t get depressed!

Just focus on being better and in four years, vote again for another shot!

Please, don’t give into despair over this, this will be Trump’s last term, and that’s it, you don’t have to worry about him any longer.

Trust me, I’ve seen terrible things happen, but I am only certain that no matter what kind of outcome we get, we’ll always keep going unflinching and stronger than before,

Pain and destruction is only one of many other infinite possibilities, the future is uncertain, and we can’t all be pessimistic about it.

There is always the possibility that things will become better for all of us and the future will at least be brighter than it is right now.

If you’ve read all of this, have a good day, and keep yourself safe.

[cheddar-baby]

Were really in a period of time with such a lack of critical thinking skills. People see the word AI and jump on it like wild animals. People were loving the new Oneohtrix Point Never album but then he did some interviews and talked about how he used some AI to create strange impossible sounds that no instrument could make and people instantly turned around and started calling him a hack fraud. Like yeah people using AI to rip off artists and corporations trying to undermine writers and artists with it is bad we all know this. Using the inherent imperfections of machine learning to create interesting samples is a non issue. Its like the most optimal positive way to use machine learning models.

People truly don't understand how art making works. Artists regularly full on steal even more blatently than any AI ever could. And its great its good and it creates beautiful powerful art. That is how the creative process works, picking and pulling from everywhere and creating something new. But OPN didn't even do that he used this machine to create new sounds and built off of them, arranged them into songs its not even controversial in the slightest.

I was honestly a little on the fence with the album but learning this tipped me over i love the album im going to have a lot of fun going through picking out all the strange wrong details of the sounds. Its one of the things that makes OPN so interesting as an artist his music always has this alien feeling to it. It feels like a transmission coming through an old radio of noises you've never heard before. This is the logical extension of that.

[stemmmm]

Stem's thoughts on Harvest Moon: Back to Nature

This game is the first to boast a set of mechanics that I think are the most easily recognizable as how modern farming sims work. It’s the first to have cooking, a detailed tool-upgrading process, a mine…  All prior games have been leading up to this!

This is the first console release that I had no idea even existed. In hindsight, it explained why I kept running into game screenshots that looked like they were from a certain game but definitely weren’t whenever I went on random google-images sprees, because this is a straight up asset flip. It’s impossible to play this without comparing it to Harvest Moon 64, the console release that came out not even a year prior. Going in, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to assess this game without comparing it heavily to the remakes that came after it, considering Friends of Mineral Town was the first HM series game that I personally owned and I played it to death, but that proved to not be a problem at all, thanks to its relationship with HM64. 

To be clear, this game is absolutely on par with 64. Just in terms of things I liked about that game, this one has more events with NPCs, they’re easier to catch, they’re relatively spaced out to fill the full three years you’re expected to play (rather than only triggering based on friendship levels alone), the gameplay in general runs smoothly and naturally, and the addition of some new decorative assets on top of the old ones makes it look so much nicer while still maintaining the crunchy, old art style. The only thing I really hesitate to say is better than 64 is the pacing, but I’ll get to that. First, I need to go over the gameplay.

The new

It’s hard to say that the game is mechanically too different from 64, other than the inventory and the fences. Do fences finally work as advertised? Well, yes and no, but it’s at least better than when the fences were the thing summoning wild animals in the first place. 

The way fences function is most changed by the fact that the wild dog has finally gained corporeal form. After 6PM, if you’re on your farm and have animals out, the dog can come to visit and won’t really attack your animals, but it will bark at them and scare them. Your only solution at this point is to wack that thing with a hammer or other farming implement until it skitters off, or if your dog is well trained, he can help you fight the beast off as well. 

The effects of the beast (making your animals unhappy) can be prevented in several ways. Of course, there’s always leaving your animals inside, the time honored tradition that it is (and my personal choice). Alternatively you could put your animals inside a fence. Issue here is that the dog can absolutely bark through the fence, so it kind of does nothing to help you. However, if the fence is two posts thick all the way around, the dog can no longer reach your animals, so in that sense, the fences finally work! It takes up way more space and way more resources though, plus the fact that fence posts rot over time. You can’t really use rocks to compensate because the wild dog walks right over them. The final option is to just not be outside past 6PM. If you’re not there to see it, the wild dog does not exist. I rarely played days that long anyways, so I could have left my animals out all the time with no fences and no problems, but then you run into the issue that your field is massive and it’s way too easy to lose track of your animals. 

Oh, and there’s one other detail that I almost forgot– you don’t need to leave the animals out overnight anymore anyways. They finally eat during the day, at least my chickens did, and they were the only animals I bothered to put out because it was as easy as picking them up in my hands to put them back away. I love not fighting livestock hitboxes.

Inventory-wise, this game gives you a myriad of options for carrying things. Firstly, there’s your rucksack which you’re able to buy a larger version of, so you can carry more on your person. Then there’s a basket you can buy which allows you to pick things up in bulk, but not have access to them, so it’s kind of like a shipping bin that you carry around, except you still have to dump it in the shipping bin later, unlike the horse’s saddlebag which IS just a mobile shipping bin. I never got to use the saddlebag because it’s something you get with an adult horse, and despite my best efforts, Barley decided my horse didn’t love me enough and took it away from me. :( My horse loved me a lot though. In the end, my rucksack was big enough and my growing operation was small enough that I never even saw a real need for the basket or saddlebags. Maybe I would if there was any urgency to ship things before 5PM, but things won’t rot in the shipping bin here, so you’re free to take all the time that you need. I actually encourage taking your time, there’s three whole in-game years that you’re expected to play, after all.

In terms of other new additions, there’s now a fish pond on your farm, kind of like GBC2 had, but a little better. This time it’s not just for storing fish (something that’s much less of a concern when you can ship things any time of day), but you’re also able to breed and grow them. The store in town sells fish food that you can use to breed more fish, and just leaving fish in the pond over time will make them grow larger.

You can also finally cook things, rather than just buy meals or collect useless recipes. You have to upgrade your house to get access to a kitchen and then buy the utensils elsewhere, but once you’ve done that, you can make anything in the game and unlock new recipes by either being told them by someone in town or just trying things out for yourself! You cook by choosing both the ingredients and utensils, meaning you can make entirely different things while still using the same ingredient! Cooked meals make for fantastic gifts, and as a result, there’s a whole new feature that I love built around giving you the ability to cook new things, which is the shopping channel on your TV.

Every Saturday after you’ve upgraded your house, the shopping channel will sell items for your house at random. They’re mostly cooking utensils, but there's also a power berry in the rotation. Nothing’s cheap, so it’s a good way to keep the player working and making more money. This is one of my favorite new things, as it gives you more reason to engage with your TV, and it forces you to pay attention to what day of the week it is in game even more than usual. Having one day where you can do something as opposed to various days that you can’t (days certain stores are closed, for example) does so much for making the days seem different and makes you look forward to the next week on a regular basis, as opposed to only looking forward to town festivals which are less frequent and more varied in terms of quality. To buy things, you have to run down to the inn which has the only working phone in town– a charming little reminder that this game is set in a rural town in the 20th century, back when everyone wasn’t so easily connected and it was normal to only have four channels on your TV. Hell, back when it was normal to have cable.

Anyways, on the topic of buying things, while stores in SNES and 64 mostly had you walk up to an item on a shelf to select it and purchase it, this game still has that function, but it far more heavily leans on menus for just about everything aside from a few items in the general store, like the fish food, inventory items, and some cooking ingredients. The most bizarre shopping experience comes when you try to upgrade your house, where you’re forced to follow the very specific order of chicken coop upgrade, to first house upgrade, to barn, to second house, to hothouse for growing crops in any season. It’s kind of weird and confusing the first time you run into it, because it’s easy to imagine something went wrong or that you need to do something else to unlock your house upgrade, but I imagine this was the result of a couple of things. For one, having multiple tiers of upgrades on your house may have been a little strange to implement with their menuing system– I know that the way things worked in 64 was also very confusing and unclear, and in that game, all of it was presented to you the whole time. For two, this game is… really easy as an adult with a functional brain, so it’s a decent way to keep you working on stuff and bar you from having your house upgraded to maximum before the end of year one (which I still did anyways).

Getting all those upgrades takes a lot of wood, so it’s important early on to make sure you have a good ax. Tool upgrades now expand on 64’s leveling up mechanic by requiring you to gain experience with the tools and then take the tools along with a type of mined ore to the blacksmith who will upgrade that tool for a fee, which very nearly brings us to the way that upgrades are most commonly handled in farming sims to this day! It also gives purpose to the cave/mine, which has been a feature in nearly every console release up to this point but was never really fleshed out. Speaking of which, compared to 64, the mine is now available year round rather than just in winter. Instead, there’s a secret mine in the middle of the mountain lake full of higher quality ore that unlocks in winter. There’s no winter crops once again, so as long as you’ve got enough cash saved up, the lake mine makes winter the perfect time to upgrade all your tools, because as long as the tool is leveled up enough, you can skip straight to later upgrades.

The old

What’s truly the same as 64, or at least negligibly different, are the general mechanics for growing crops, caring for animals, and building relationships with people. The town– while arranged differently and with the addition of a specialized chicken store, a general store fusing the 64 bakery and seed shops, and a blacksmith –is generally about the same size as it was in 64, if you take into account all the offshoot areas that weren’t quite based inside the town-proper. Areas like the beach, woods, hot springs, goddess pond, mountain, and summit are all still here and generally serve the same purpose. It’s occupied by generally the same people as well, though only in appearance.

Even the number of festivals is almost exactly the same, though the subjects and contents are different. While there are a couple more minigames incorporated with the festivals here, I would say this game loses out in terms of the town having a sense of culture and life, in that none of the festivals have anything to do with personal beliefs or spirituality in any way other than the goddess festival, which is established as a dying cultural practice, and maybe the music festival which takes place in the church, and that’s it. However, the game actually has something of a narrative defense in this regard: the town pastor isn’t a religious man, which is kind of bizarre but it does track with everything else going on. Religion doesn’t really exist in this town, so rituals wouldn’t really exist either. I do still find the lack of distinct culture disappointing compared to 64, which was brimming with it, but it’s a small nitpick.

Another nitpick I have, one much more tangible, is that it lets you walk behind walls and buildings, which would be one thing if this was played at a straight-on viewing angle and with controls that easily mapped to that, but much like in 64, the camera is set at an isometric 45 degree angle which game controllers are not really designed for. If you walk behind something, a goofy arrow appears above your head to show where you’re at, but it’s still not clear enough that I didn’t regularly run into trouble just trying to go through doors. There aren’t a ton that are an issue, only two that I can think of off the top of my head, but one of those two is the entrance to your own bedroom after you’ve fully upgraded your house. Your bedroom is the place that you have to go to save your game and move time forward, it’s mandatory to go through this door every single day. 

What are you farming for?

The game opens with a flashback to your childhood…. If you’re playing as a boy. If you’re playing the version released later where you play as a girl, the story is completely different. This is the first entry in the series where you can marry men! But I didn’t play the girl version, so everything I share about the story will have to do with the original, boy version. There, in your memories, you were visiting your grandfather in the country who was too busy with work to play with you, so instead you met a girl who lived in the town and played with her the whole time you were there. Before you left, you promised to see each other again. 

In the current day, your grandfather has died and you’ve been given the option to take over his farm, though the townspeople are hesitant about having someone new in town. As a compromise, you’ll be able to take care of the farm for three years, and as long as you can bring the farm back to its former glory and get along with the townsfolk by then, you’ll be allowed to stay living there! But if you don’t use the land and don’t make any friends, you’re out.

This comes across as a really harsh ultimatum, especially if you don’t know what that “former glory” means, but what it actually translates to is “farm…. At all”. Just ship a couple things, and you’ve basically covered the farming requirements. The harder requirement is to make friends with the people in town, though if you aren’t managing to do that, you’ve missed out on the entire point of the game. In this iteration of the Harvest Moon series, your goal isn’t to farm for crops… but for cutscenes.

Much like 64, every marriageable person has special cutscenes associated with how close the two of you are, and additional cutscenes involving them and their romantic rival. There are also cutscenes to do with the various people in town, as a general story progresses over your three years there. Beyond the familiar mechanics, you’ll see some familiar faces, as every character is reused from 64, just a little to the left. Their families and careers are slightly different, as are the people they date and marry, thus bringing an entirely different story to the table. For example, instead of Lillia’s husband being Basil, a man who brings her loneliness because he leaves for half a year, her husband Rod isn’t present in the game at all, having gone off on a long journey to find a cure for her illness, something she didn’t ask him to do and is pretty peeved about. There’s also the little girl May, who instead of having a working father who’s so busy that she never gets to see him, was abandoned by her mother and lives with her grandfather.

Unlike 64, a lot of these relationship cutscenes, both for you and for your rivals, are slightly less dependent on your relationships with everyone. Instead, to fill out the three years of gameplay, they’re based on time passing. While it’s generally possible to get married as quickly as possible, your rivals will never get married until year three. To fill out all that time, there are a lot more cutscenes that don’t have to do with romance, and a lot more sidequests given to you.

Every marriageable character and rival has a sort of side quest of varying levels of difficulty which gives you a decent bump in their friendship. By varying levels of difficulty I mean it can go from just telling Gray “yes, you can spend a day or two working on my farm in a way that doesn’t inhibit my ability to do anything,” and then in return he weeds your entire field. Or it can be like Ann who needs you to bring her three eggs every single day for a full week without missing a single day or the whole thing ends, and your only reward other than friendship is to get the payment you would have gotten for the eggs anyways.

Probably the most famous example of these quests is Cliff’s, due to the fact that he will leave the town if it isn’t completed, and because it’s so important to his character that it was the only one of these side quests included in either of this game’s remakes. He’s a wanderer, depressed, without a job and without anywhere to go. For his quest, you’re approached by Duke from the winery at some time in fall, asking if you can help with the year’s harvest. If you can bring along a friend to help, that would be great too. The only person you can invite is Cliff, and if you fail to do that, he’ll be gone by the end of the year. What isn’t included in the remakes is the “minigame” you have to do every day of the week that you’re hired, where you walk up to all the grape vines and click on them until you finally pick up some grapes with zero visual feedback. It’s not the hardest quest, but it is certainly the most tedious, and the most punishing if you fail to get Cliff on board.

What you realize pretty quickly as you get on with the game is that the original prompt that you came back to this town to see your childhood friend again really isn’t relevant to anything. None of the girls indicate anything about that to you until the very end of the game, if you got married. What’s going on in the town really has nothing to do with you, and that’s fine. Everyone’s lives are rich and vibrant, and often pretty tragic, and it’s very fun to get deeper into the stories and get a peek into some of the town lore. There is one plotline in particular that overtakes the entire narrative, and it reveals to you what happens when you don’t manage to make friends with everyone in the town. It turns out the town is hesitant to let new people in because it’s full of bigots.

The real story

There are two characters depicted as being a different race than the town at large. One of them is Won, who is portrayed as a con artist and scammer, and appears to be Chinese. He’s introduced when the cop in town comes by one morning to warn you of a suspicious person spotted in town, and Won appears on your farm shortly after. I don’t know exactly how that storyline ends, because I didn’t report him on account of not being a fucking snitch, but Won occasionally sells an assortment of items inside the inn and sometimes comes to your door to sell very useful things like a vase and dog ball.

The other character, Kai, is the only dark skinned character in both this game and in 64, where he worked for the winery and came across as… suspiciously servile. In this game, he shows up in the summertime to sell food at the shack on the beach, and has gained the reputation of a heartbreaker, which has made nearly every man in the town absolutely despise him. At first you might get where they’re coming from, because his demeanor is pretty snarky and smug, but to me it pretty quickly came across that he only acted that way as a defense mechanism, because there are only so many ways you can manage people constantly attacking you for no reason and holding yourself as superior to them isn’t a bad choice. It’s obvious how deeply in the wrong the town is in one of the first events you can get after Kai shows up, where he gets cornered in the inn– the only place he’s able to stay while he’s in town –by at least three different men and you’re given the option to either pick a side or call the whole thing stupid, which it really is and Kai agrees.

The two who hate him most are Duke and Rick. Duke is an alcoholic with notorious anger issues. You can learn much later that his problem is that his daughter allegedly left town due to Kai’s influence (I imagine because he made her realize this town sucks). Meanwhile, Rick hates Kai because his sister Popuri is crazy about him and Rick probably fears for the same result. Popuri is a seemingly cheerful and somewhat childish girl who wants to be helpful. Her family runs a poultry business together, but she was never taught or allowed to do any work, which leads to a bounty of frustrations in her life. To make matters worse, her brother seems to be very possessive and is controlling over who she gets to hang out with, particularly when it comes to her hanging around Kai. The way both Duke and Rick behave gives off the impression that their frustrations with Kai have nothing to do with anything Kai has done, and everything to do with the fact that they’re miserable people to be around. 

As you follow the story of Kai and Popuri, you learn everything about the culture problem in the town, the double-standards of acceptance that let you get away with defending Kai while he continues to get teamed up on, and you choose whether or not you want to help Kai and Popuri escape from it (albeit temporarily, they both come back every summer). To be clear, I loved this storyline. The experience of helping the two of them, though on a heavily controlled course, made me feel like I was actually making a difference in characters' lives. And the resulting lack of Popuri’s presence in town afterwards made things feel tangibly different than they were before. Farming sims seldom have interpersonal conflicts that go this deep, and it really enhances the story! I know I spoiled the whole thing here, but in all fairness, I’ve known how this story ends for decades and still had a wonderful time going through the motions. It’s more about the experience than the destination for sure.

My critiques

To beat the game is extremely low-stakes and slow-paced. You’ve got a lot of time to see everything the game has to offer, and just about all of that comes from having good relationships with the NPCs. The problem with this is that if you’re competent with the mechanics, getting through the game can be a total slog. Part of this is because it loads pretty slowly, but there also isn’t very much to do with your time. Since you need a lot of money to get animals, and a ton of money to upgrade your house enough to get married since that’s locked behind other farm upgrades, you do need to do a little bit of farming, but I personally never even touched more than a quarter of my field between crops and grass for animal feed. The ending requirements didn’t ask me to ship that many crops, so I didn’t. I just grew what I needed, and after a certain point, the amount I needed was “nothing”, so I stopped gardening.

Lack of requirement to do so wasn’t the only reason, though. I enjoy farming mechanics, so I would have done it if I wasn’t trying to focus my time elsewhere– on getting story events. By the later points of year two and three, that’s all I was after, and while they are locked by your relationships with the characters, I’d already gotten them as high as I reasonably needed them. I just had to wait for time to pass at that point, and I was getting impatient. The way cutscenes are locked off in this game is that they’ll see you’ve reached the relationship threshold, and then wait until a certain time-marker has passed. Once you’ve met both of those, it’s just about being in the right place at the right time. By and large, the time-marker is the turn of the new year, so everything fires off in a frenzy on the first day of spring that you go into town. I think my record was triggering four cutscenes in sequence by walking in and outside of the poultry farm area a couple times. 

Fortunately, the events for Kai and Popuri were locked until summer, when Kai would come to visit, so it wasn’t truly everything happening as soon as spring came up, but still, fall and winter usually had absolutely nothing going on. To make matters worse, once year three rolls around, chances are that you’ve gotten all the relationships filled and all of your progression finished, so it’s just a waiting game to get everyones’ weddings to trigger and then truly be done with story content until you’re evaluated at the end of the year.

This is where we loop back to the fact that I wasn’t farming. If my relationships with everyone were filled and I wasn’t doing anything on my farm, what was I doing? Sleeping. For months at a time. Just to get through things quicker. In year three, I got all the marriage cutscenes I could (one wouldn’t trigger, don’t know why but I had to just give up on it), and then went to bed until the end of the year. My last manual save was dated “Summer 9, year 3”, meaning I slept through three entire seasons to get to the end of the game.

And for what reward? I mentioned previously that this is low-stakes. Technically, all of the games prior to this are low-stakes as well– the requirements to simply not lose your farm are generally pretty relaxed. It’s the variety of “good” endings or praise that you get which often require a frankly obscene amount of work. There are many good endings to be had, but only one bad one. Not the case here! There are different endings for if you didn’t grow enough crops, ship enough things, or make any friends and therefore are kicked out of the town, but if you did manage all three (which is hard NOT to do), there is only one ending you get where the town gathers to tell you you’re welcome to stay in town and congratulate you on your hard work. Even Kai shows up! It’s a nice bit of fanfare but… do I deserve it? It’s on me for playing the game this way of course, but after just sleeping through almost a whole year, I don’t really feel like I earned any praise. The other reward is that you’re allowed to keep playing the save file, but why would I want to do that? I’ve already done everything there was to do.

Conclusion

The first half of this game is my dream Harvest Moon. I sincerely don't understand why FoMT was remade and not this, since this is by far the better game. The fact that the town feels like it has an actual narrative (centered primarily around Kai) is really enjoyable and I feel like there’s a lot of value gained out of each cutscene, and every new bit of dialogue is a joy. In particular, the quantity and variety of quests gave me a lot to do in the downtime between cutscenes. The remakes should have added more of those, not removed them almost entirely. I’m sick to death of Mineral Town because of how much I've played FoMT, so the fact that I enjoyed this so much says a lot about the quality of the game.

That aside, three years is too much time to pass through for how much content there is here. Two and a half would have been manageable, but I understand that the only reason that was the cutoff in SNES was because there literally wasn't anything to do in fall or winter. I enjoyed the lack of goals required to get a good ending because I was so fatigued by the intense grind of the prior games, but the game was so easy that I mostly ran out of things to do for fixing my farm in only year one, and I really just spent year two scrambling around for cutscenes which I didn't really need to even try doing, because I got swamped with them at the start of spring. Maybe if I was a child and worse at playing video games, three years would be okay, but if I was a child, I wouldn’t have made it to year 2 because I wouldn't have the attention span or memory to keep me going. I know this because that’s exactly what happened when I played FoMT.

I suppose how I’d recommend playing the game is to play until you’re satisfied (which will probably be by the end of summer year 2) and then watch or look up the endings. That is assuming you care about the endings at all, which you may not because there isn’t terribly much to them. I do sincerely recommend this game, I think it’s great to play, but you’re almost certainly going to be bored with it and have experienced the vast majority of what it has to offer well before you reach the end of it.

A closing thought in reference to my journey playing all these games in sequence:  there’s a chance, just going by my prior knowledge of the later games which I mostly have not played, that this is actually going to be the peak of this series in terms of both ease of play and quality of narrative. I’m sure there will be games with more interesting stories, and maybe a later game that feels better to play, but my bet is none of them hit both as well as this one did.