#it's one of the top foreign reviews

[buddydacote]

I'm finally getting off my ass and making a website and I was looking for a resource of page dividers. So far my searches have been fruitless, bringing only results for paper page dividers and not webpage dividers. But I'd like to share an Amazon review for a book that may be a lead if any websites it points to are still around (Don't hold your breath it's from '99 and about GeoCities)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Sign of the Day... in Greenwich Village...

(Mary Elaine LeBey)

* * * *

Kamala Harris meets the moment!

September 11, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

Kamala Harris’s debate performance exceeded the unfair and asymmetrical expectations imposed on her by the press and pundits. She was terrific—in command of the facts, unfazed by Trump's bluster, personable, sincere, and likable but strong. That is a difficult mix to maintain in the face of a torrent of lies shouted by a bully who could not be controlled by the moderators. For those who were worried about the possibility that Kamala Harris would somehow stumble and harm her electoral prospects, put those worries aside. The reverse happened. She soared while Trump collapsed into his hollow shell.

Kamala Harris was confident and at ease. Trump sputtered and dodged in a futile effort to avoid answering the moderators’ questions.

I was struck by judgments delivered during the debate by two preeminent historians. I follow both Heather Cox Richardson and Michael Beschloss on Twitter. Near the end of the debate, the historians posted the following comments, which encapsulated the debate for me:

Heather Cox Richardson: “Trump is proving world leaders like him by citing Viktor Orban. Dear heavens. She is walking him like a poodle.” Michael Beschlossos: “From start to end, Kamala Harris has just delivered what is easily one of the most successful Presidential debate performances in all of American history.”

First, I hope HCR writes a book or starts a rock band with the name, “Walking Him Like a Poodle.” HCR’s comment gets to the pith of the debate: Kamala Harris was in charge, leading Trump into traps he knew were traps but could not avoid. In the instance cited by HCR, VP Harris chided Trump, saying that world leaders laugh at him and military leaders believe he is a “disgrace.” Trump responded by citing Viktor Orbán as a leader who respects him. As HCR said, “Dear heavens.” Trump was outmatched and outclassed—bigly.

Michael Beschloss’s comment is significant because it ranks Harris’s performance in the historical context of presidential debates. The precise ranking of her performance matters less than the fact it will be near the top, according to one of the nation’s preeminent historians.

There is too much to cover in tonight’s newsletter, so I will focus on the major newsworthy positions revealed in the debate. I will return later in the week to additional subjects when transcripts and analyses are available. Of note:

Harris presented herself as a candidate offering “generational change.”

Harris advocated for the middle class and small businesses.

Harris promised to sign a bill enacting the protections of Roe v. Wade.

Harris promised to sign the border bill that Trump convinced Republicans to kill.

Harris promised to reinstitute the child tax credit and institute a $6,000 credit for families with newborns

Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election.

Trump refused to express any regret for anything he did or failed to do regarding the January 6 insurrection.

Trump refused to say whether he would veto a national abortion ban.

Trump repeatedly claimed that Democrats advocate for the execution of babies after birth.

Trump refused to say why he urged Republicans to defeat the border bill.

Trump claimed that tariffs are “taxes on foreign nations.”

Trump refused to say whether he hoped Ukraine would defeat Russia war of aggression.

Trump said he didn’t have a plan for healthcare after nine years but has only “concepts for a plan.”

Trump repeated a racist slur that Haitian migrants are stealing and eating pets them in Springfield, Ohio.

No one who watched the debate could believe anything other than the fact that Kamala Harris is smart, capable, and up to the challenge of serving as president and commander-in-chief. Moreover, the debate served as a hyper-charged “media interview”—complete with hostile questions and an obnoxious heckler.

One of the first commentators to publish a review of the debate is David Frum in The Atlantic, How Harris Roped a Dope | She stayed human when Trump went feral. Per Frum,

Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown. She succeeded. Former President Donald Trump had a mission too: control yourself. He failed. Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again. Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backward-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible.

One final note: During the debate, I received outraged emails from readers about the moderators' failure to control Trump or treat Kamala Harris fairly. While true, let’s not make the debate about the moderators. That is what Republicans are doing tonight—to avoid talking about Trump's meltdown. Let’s focus on Kamala Harris’s ability to show Americans that she is up to the job of being president. That’s the story; let’s not bury the lead.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[metamatar]

One of the world’s top arms exporters, Israel exports annually as much as $7 billion worth of military technology, or 2.2 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. An additional 1.35 percent of GDP is dedicated to military research and development, and 6.7 percent is spent on its defense budget— the world’s second largest military budget as a percentage of GDP after Saudi Arabia. All told, 10.25 percent of the Israeli economy is involved directly in arms. Comparatively, for the United States, the world’s top weapons exporter, arms account for around 3.7 percent of its economy. Israel is actually the world’s largest arms supplier per capita, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the World Bank, at ninety-eight dollars; it is followed by a distant Russia at fifty-eight dollars, and Sweden at fifty-three dollars.

These figures do not include the contribution from natural resources exploited under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.50 They do not factor in the service sector’s revenue or general industry and construction taking place in the West Bank. Such figures are difficult to quantify, since many companies operate in the West Bank but have offices in Tel Aviv to obscure where operations take place. Nor does this account for Israeli exports into the Occupied Territories, which are 72 percent of Palestinian imports and 0.16 percent of Israeli GDP. All told, the Israeli economy is deeply involved in a web of expenditure and profit around the ongoing occupation and expansion of settlements.

American military aid supplanting open-ended government grants has had the effect of increasing arms production and diminishing the overall economic reach of the state. No longer is foreign aid and imperialist incentive directly invested in the working class. Israeli workers are now rewarded through the arms economy. This is why, despite the lack of social mobility and the economic degradation of neoliberalism, the working class remains committed as ever to Zionism.

The working class has become dependent on the education, housing, and career opportunities that their participation in the IDF affords them. They have found routes for advancement in the military-fueled high-tech industry, with over 9 percent of workers concentrated in high-tech. And as pensions and real wages are eroded, the cheaper cost of settlement living in the Occupied Territories has become essential.

[rqnvindr]

fountain of tears

pairing: neuvilette x fem!reader

genre: angst, fluff/comfort

word count: 1.8k

synopsis: neuvilette finds you standing by the fountain, alone the rain after an argument. his hidden turmoil can only be solved by hearing your voice again, tender, and unfiltered.

warnings: archon quest spoilers, arguments

a/n: I HAVEN'T POSTED ANY WRITING IN AGES BUT I HAD TO WRITE SOMETHING FOR MY OTTER HUBBY! enjoy!!

--

"this is pointless. i'm out."

your words wound neuvilette, the pain shooting deep into his bones. they ring over and over again in his conscious, louder than any vibration that had ever emanated from his cane to resume order during a trial. he sits in his office trying to work, but his thoughts don't subside, not one bit.

he ponders, staring at the stacks of papers in front of him, documents regarding cases that needed to be reviewed in due time. but not today. the amount of time he had in between today's working hours and the next trial reassured him that he could hyper-fixate on the last thing you said to him before storming out the door.

it's strange that he isn't worried for your safety as much as he is over the feelings rooted in your actions. the chief justice knows that humans are more fragile than those who have lived for eons. those who have experienced centuries of change were capable of adapting to different and unexpected circumstances through changing forms, and bestowing ancient powers of the past that contained the wisdoms and strength needed to guide them. he should be more concerned for where you could've possibly have gone within the last day. but he knows that you are also acquainted with a certain traveler that had recently arrived in fontaine and caused an uproar with the hydro archon in court already, everyone was. there's no way they could've left now, taking you with them on their travels. they still had unanswered questions left for lady furina. it is still a possibility though that you're at least staying with them, since you two were in good graces.

you weren't from fontaine though, and the image of you packing your bags and going home by yourself made him shiver. you did say you were heading "out" after all. he had to consider all of the possibilities.

neuvilette was new to human relationships. how long did it take for humans to draw the line? it varies for everyone, since they are given the freedom to dictate their personal connections to others to a certain degree. but how much was too much for you? when it came to you, he not only wanted to understand humans more, but also just you. he wanted to delve into all of your laughter, all of your worries, all of the sighs that escaped your pretty lips. to grasp it and memorize it all, was his greatest desire.

without you, he would basically lose his purpose for inserting himself into the realm of mortality. you already got him this far, and on top of that, he concluded that you were causing him to feel foreign emotions from removing yourself from his sight. even if it hurt, this was a test included in his journey that he had to endure.

but neuvilette does not want to face the predicament without a resolution. instead of wallowing, he decides to leave his office. he was already working overtime anyway, hoping to just drown in reading the same pages over and over again to keep himself grounded. was he always this sensitive? in his mind, he imagined the beings of the past looking down on him.

it's pouring rain when neuvilette steps outside. ah right. he doesn't need another reminder that his sorrows inconvenience the ordinary citizens of fontaine, who are just trying to make it to work on time, rush their loved ones to the doctor, and just go about their lives without the weather impeding on them. people barely carry umbrellas though, they're all accustomed to this and it's too unpredictable (at least for them it is).

he decides to start backwards, far away from the court of fontaine. he heads to the opera house first, and he finds you on the first try. how could he ever mistake you for someone else? you're the only person he has eyes for. especially when you're standing by the fountain of lucine, and carrying a distinct umbrella in a small crowd of people, most of whom appear to be flocked around the opera house's entrance, probably catching magic shows and other performances.

neuvilette is uneasy when he notices how close you're standing to the fountain. you're inevitably drawn to the grand structure that welcomes audiences from within the borders of the land and beyond to the renowned location. the spectacle that delivers the arts and the law all the same. but beneath its beauty lies danger that erases those who get too close. many fontainians had lost their lives from seeking the wonders of what lay beneath the waters that decorate and surround the hydro region itself. by wanting to delve deeper into it, they subsequently drowned, their lifeforce dissipating into the shackles of the streams. both the knowns and the unknowns of the primordial sea were sufficient reasons to express caution towards the lands waters, even if one was not a native who was subject to becoming one with their origins.

if you were to become the next victim, the rain would proceed to crash down and become one with the fountain in a continuous flow of precipitation. and then fontaine would be known as "the land of storms" rather than "the land of justice".

as he approaches the fountain, neuvilette's desire to pull you away and drag you back to him with no hesitation stirs. yet, it immediately dissipates when you turn your head, and give him what he guesses is a contemplative look. the white-haired man chooses his words carefully. giving you a lecture about the rumored dangers of the fountain's ability to dissolve human beings would only alarm you. he should use the rain as an excuse to find somewhere safer, if you still weren't ready to return to your shared residence.

"it-"

"i know. you're going to ask why i'm standing out here as if it isn't pouring rain." neuvilette barely gets a syllable out before you take the words right out of his mouth. you guys always had a habit of finishing each other's sentences, and even in a moment as anxiety-inducing as trying to make amends when you were mad at him, his heart melts. goodness, why did you have to be so lovely?

"if i were to let the rain impede everything, i guess i'd be a shut-in." you shrug. "it's been raining non-stop for the past couple of days. and no one seems to question it, so i just go along with it as if it's completely normal for it to be bright and sunny one day, and then cloudy and rainy the next day."

when you finish your thoughts, neuvilette still waits for you to continue. he was somewhat relieved that you were able to talk to him normally, but knew that there had to be more you had to say. were you going to officially end things between you two? say that you needed more time to think about the state of your relationship? he wasn't going to talk you out of anything, or start a debate. he respected your decision no matter what, even if it were to sting, he had to hear it. and the conversation had to go somewhere if he also wanted to deliver his side as well.

"i have heard some of the locals say though, that whenever it rains in fontaine, it is because the hydro dragon is crying." you say, as you gaze up at the sky. "i don't know if you have ever heard of it, but if such a tale were to be true, then i wonder what he could be going through for it to be pouring rain every other day."

neuvilette hopes he hid how quickly he blinked. normally he was good at hiding his reactions to hearing this "legend". although he never wanted to hide anything from you, the truth behind the mysterious precipitation was something he hadn't had the best opportunity to tell you about.

"yes, this is an old legend indeed. i often hear parents and caretakers telling this to children, whenever it's too wet to play outside." this was as much as the chief justice could water it down. he really did not want to lie before approaching a sensitive topic.

"as much as i would love to continue hearing the knowledge you have extracted from your time here, i have come here with another objective." neuvilette says. "i wanted to apologize for upsetting you. i have also been worried about you for the past few days. you do not have to disclose your whereabouts from the period in which we were apart, but i am happy that you're safe."

"it's alright, really." you reply calmly. "i was also in the wrong for storming out like that and not communicating with you. i was pretty upset, yeah, but i should've just told you that. i'm sorry for being immature and leaving you in the dark."

neuvilette notices tears streaming down your eyes. as your head tilts downward, they drop to the ground and blend in with the rain droplets. instead of offering you his handkerchief, he gently caresses both sides of your face with his gloved hands. you lean into his touch more, until you're wrapping your arms around him in a tight embrace, letting your umbrella drop to the ground. he reciprocates, stiffly at first, but then holds you with no intentions of letting you go.

you're no longer choking back sobs, and then the sky clears up as the rain comes to a stop. you pull away from the hug to observe the sky, staying connected with your hands intertwined this time.

"wow...the hydro dragon must have been distraught watching us as if we were his new favorite play or something." you laugh.

neuvilette chuckles, knowing that you would of course find the occurrence to be a mere coincidence. "it seems that he must be quite fond of you, my dear."

"well, i'm already taken so i guess he will have to stick to me being his favorite character." you shrug obliviously with a smile.

as your lover, neuvilette has adjusted to being more vulnerable with you. you had seen the good and the bad sides of him, the latter especially during the latest argument that the two of you had now cleared up. and even then, you still let him back in. he doesn't have to worry about baring his entire soul to you now, and will slowly navigate you through his past and identity as the hydro dragon, who entered human society as the iudex. the vulnerable figure whose emotions affect the weather, and struggles to connect with others. you're the one worthy of knowing the truth though, and he makes a promise to himself to never hide anything from you from here on out.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[heart2beom]

open the door, mr. choi!

synopsis: going up to yeonjun's dorm, the man you believe to be a complete tool, and asking to use his shower isn't very fun.

genre: one sided enemies to lovers, fluff, angst??

pairing: yeonjun x f!reader

warning: very unrealistic writing of living on campus (i'm manifesting here..), a curse word here and there

author notes: this is so incredibly short but i like writing banter so..lol this really is just banter. reblogging is appreciated!

Transferring to a different college mid semester for better opportunities proved to be that mistake. The mistake you realize is going to be hard to top, the biggest one you've made in your entire life.

In addition to losing daily contact with your friends, you were in a complete foreign city, practically stranded. You had zero relationship with your professors, there were completely different material you had to learn to pass exams, and you had no time to make any friends. even after you decided to go through the on-campus housing route, You were only on friendly speaking terms with your roommate.

You wished you reviewed the dormitories, but you hadn't which then cost you to learn that the girls dormitory had constant complaints about water supply; it was either the sink, the toilet, or the shower — it would just decide to stop working.

Thankfully, the time you've spent living with your roommate, you only experienced one — the sink. There were problems with it practically every other day, ten times more constant than everybody else. Which caused you to naively believe it canceled out all the other occuring problems everyone else had.

So, imagine your surprise when you walk in under the shower head, butt naked, with not one drop coming out on your hair.

"Yunjin!" you yell out, panicking as you adjust the diverter still with no sign of water. "Yunjin is the water out!?"

You sigh when you can't hear a response through the door, and opted to step out the shower, and carefully walk towards the door. You slightly open it, making sure to only poke your head out as your eyes wandered around the dorm.

Great, there's no sign of her.

When you get dressed again, you throw yourself on your bed, staring at the time on your phone. 8:39PM.

Your roommate had helped you out with getting a blind date, in hopes of "putting yourself out there". Though at the time you didn't meet her with much excitement, pretending to despise the idea—Currently, you were practically a few seconds away from pulling out your hair at the thought of missing it.

For god sake, you haven't been on a date since, what, two years? And even worse, when you finally got a chance, you weren't ditching the date on your own accord, but because you couldn't shower!

"I'm gonna fucking sue them!" you shout, directing your pit of rage at your ceiling. Though, right after, you bury your face in your pillow, groaning like a little child, knowing that no matter how many complaints you submit, there would be zero response. So, at the moment, it felt like the best thing to do was give up.

Give up and ...reschedule.

No, you can't—you won't. You have to go on the date—today. An adrenaline-like surge of determination motivates you to shoot up from your bed, and quickly head to your bathroom again. You will go on this date, you owe it to Yunjin—and also, to yourself.

When you look at the counter, you immediately spot the magic wand practically ogling at you, begging you to use it. Your deodorant.

What other option did you have? When you pick up the deodorant stick, you shut your eyes, praying that the combination between deodorant and perfume could manage to make you smell good enough. You exhale, the gross thought making it hard for you to even lift your shirt.

You hear a ping of your phone, quickly opening your eyes, dropping your hand, which in turn also gets your hand off the piece of fabric you were holding.

When you look at the notification, you exhaustedly exhale, your shoulders dropping. It wasn't surprising to see it was him. Yeonjun—the guy you've been working on a project with for the past few months.

And also, the guy you've been trying to avoid ever since you got assigned the project. He was practically a mosquito, buzzing near your ears every waking moment of the day. It was easier for him when he got your number, as per your professor's request. According to her, it would be easier for you two to communicate with each other's contact numbers.

But you begged to differ, especially after these tortuous days of having your phone go off randomly throughout the day. All it did was tear away your focus from more important matters.

You opt to ignore the text, like you always do— and focus on your preparation for your date. That is, until a light bulb lights up above your head, halting your movement, as you furrow your brows in thought.

The boy's dormitory never had an issue with water, it was a usual complaint you'd overhear girls around you say in your morning classes. Their issue was odor. Which you would bet a few cents that that was specifically the consequence of the herd of men living in one space, but you digress.

Sure, you aren't very fond of the idea to go up to the man you find pretty repulsive—in terms of personality, repulsive. He was the walking definition of a douche, but you just got a date, in two years! Who knows the next time you'll get the golden opportunity again? So, you grab your towel and head out the bathroom.

You only hope that your lack of answering back texts wouldn't backfire on you.

Though it took him a few knocks, Yeonjun finally opens his door. His jaw slacks a little and brows raised, clearly taken back by your sudden visit. You wait for him to say something—or rather, you take the time to study his figure for a good second; your eyes instinctually taking in how...good he looks. His dyed hair subtly spiking his eyes, his lips looking a little more pink than usual, and the flowy dress shirt being down two button, exposing his chest—

"Y/N checking out Yeonjun part, what, a hundred?" he stupidly grins, leaning on his door frame with his arms crossed.

"Part zero." you deadpan, he was back to getting on your nerves.

"Right..." he purses his lip, which earns an audible scoff from you, his confidence was astoundingly high. Normally, you'd think it was a praiseworthy trait, confident people are cool, but Yeonjun was something else.

"Okay—look, I have no time to waste. I need your help." you say, cutting to the chase.

"Clearly..." Yeonjun says, his gaze falling to the towel hanging on one arm, and a plastic bag tight in your hand.

"First, sorry for coming here so unexpectedly—"

"Hold on," he raises up a hand to stop you, which is an annoying thing he's been doing to you lately. "Did you just apologize? To me?" he then puts a hand on his heart, pouting like a child.

When you try to open your mouth again, his finger was on your lips in attempt to shut you up — he was getting dangerously confident. You glare at him, which sends the message loud and clear as he drops his hand immediately.

"Look, if you're here for the project, I can't. I actually have a bedtime I have to follow through."

You furrow your eyebrows in disbelief. "A bedtime? What are you? Twelve?"

He clicks his tongue, shaking his head in disapproval. "Damn it Y/N, this was the part where you were supposed to prove to me that you're worthy of me letting you in my dorm."

"I'm not here for the project, Yeonjun." you sigh, your energy drained from all his talking.

"Then what? It's like—" he raises his wrist to take a look at his watch. And to your dismay, his smug smile prepares you for some more teasing. "My, my, my. Coming to my dorm at nine? So I see it you changed your mind about, you know..." he puckers his lips in attempt to make smooching noises, which only earned a judgemental stare from your side.

"We're never going to have sex—ugh, I just came to use your shower, the one at my dorm stopped working." you've learned to stop yourself from engaging with his antics, it only cost you more social battery after all.

"Ah." he says, biting his lip as he appears to think more of your request. "I'm sorry, can't." he concludes.

"Huh? Why?" you ask then immediately groan at a thought, "God, do you have a girl naked in there?"

"You don't realize it sometimes Y/N, but you are a slut shamer."

You deadpan, letting out a long sigh. "Are you calling yourself a slut?"

"Frankly, for your information, I don't have a girl in there. She actually left a few minutes ago." he says ignoring your question, though he couldn't be happier from the annoyed reaction he got out of you— which he was quick to love and appreciate the more he got it.

You roll your eyes, "So, why can't you?"

"Glad you asked," he says, reaching in his pockets to dig out something. He faces his phone to you, your messages open, only blue texts being on the screen. "You've been ghosting me for like, two weeks."

So your lack of replying back is biting you in the ass.

You didn't have time, dropping the plastic bag full of your date clothes, reaching out to your pocket to get your phone.

You quickly type up an 'okay' without reading the text, and hit send. When you hear the sound of a notification from his phone, you put up a tight lipped smile as you shove your phone in your pockets, picking up your clothes and pushing yourself in his dorm.

Yeonjun broke into a smile you don't catch, as he looks back to you. "Breaking and entering is a felony Y/N!" he yells out.

You ignore him, your attention more focused on how weirdly neat his place was. Was he a fast cleaner? Tidying up the place this fast after sex?

You guessed that was what a long duration of experience gives you — the ability to clean up in minutes. But then you noticed a computer open, with the desk it's on being surrounded with crumbled paper.

Odd.

You hear the door shut, guessing it was Yeonjun, which snaps you out of your thoughts as you immediately head to the bathroom. If you stayed a second later, there was a 50% chance he would've stopped you to ask questions.

When you enter the bathroom, and lock the door behind you, you're pleasantly caught by surprise.

The smell—the smell wasn't foul. You hate to admit, in the back of your mind, you'd always have this image of Yeonjun—a player who was gross.

You don't exactly know why you held onto it for so long since there were multiple, multiple times you got close enough, that your nose could pick up his cologne—it smelled really good, not too strong, just enough.

And when you stand there in his bathroom, weirdly finding yourself inhaling the scent of the air—it smelled pretty fucking good.

A loud knock on the door your back is leaning on startles you, making you jump. "Hey, hurry up! I'm giving you fifteen minutes."

Fifteen minutes? What a psycho.

You shake your head at your own ungratefulness—he was letting you borrow his shower, which you genuinely appreciated, so you undressed quickly in hopes of showering forty minutes max.

You didn't pick up your hair brush with you, so consequently you were spending a great deal of time untangling your hair with your towel—which wasn't very..effecitve.

You already changed, obviously, but your makeup was undone. Just lipgloss was all you had time to do, you thought in your head, disappointed.

Not to forget—Yeonjun has been talking to you through the door the moment you shut the running water—not proving the mosquito reincarnation theories you've been holding onto, to be wrong. He was driving you very close to the edge of insanity.

"You're taking so long." he whines for the hundredth time. "I have to show you something."

You groan, walking towards the door. You were clothed now anyway, if opening the door would finally fix Yeonjun's mouth being a broken record, you would happily do it.

He shuffles away from the door when you push it open, flustered as he clears his throat.

Was he leaning on the door?

"What do you want?"

You think you see his eyes scanning your outfit for a second, a hint of confusion overtaking his expression but he turns away to walk towards the computer—the one that was previously surrounded with balled up paper, so you ignore it. "You look hot but I'll decide to ignore that. I have to show you something."

You exhale, your hair still pretty untamed. "Alright, I don't have that much time though."

He let himself fall on his spinning office chair, as he gestures his hand for you to sit at the edge of his bed.

You clear your throat, waiting for him to stop stalling through his spinning.

And he does.

"Okay." he exhaled, a little shakily. Which was weird. "So, remember the text you sent okay too?"

"Yeonjun...that just happened. Like an hour ago."

"Yep, yeah. Cool, cool, cool." he repeats, opting to spin once more. You raise an eyebrow, is he trolling you?

"I didn't like—you know, read the text. I mean, I can."

"You didn't read it? You should. Actually—nope, no. You shouldn't. You should. Yeah, you should."

You knit your eyebrows together at his odd speaking patterns. Reaching for your phone, you click on the message icon—until a number pops up, calling you.

All of a sudden, you get nervous. Your hand getting all clammy as you swiped right on the call.

"Hi." you breath out, biting your lip in eagerness to hear your date's voice.

Yeonjun only watches you, cocking his head at the sudden mood change. No—he was tilting his head because of all of that. Your dress, the matching bag, your lipgloss.

He furrows his brows, still watching you stutter on the phone, and practically making a fool of yourself with the way you were stupidly, prettily smiling ear to ear.

You never did that with him. Okay, sure, he likes seeing you roll your eyes or scoff at his antics— it brings him pure joy! But god, thinking now, he would appreciate it a hundred times more if your reaction to him was a smile—that smile instead. Or a laugh. Or a hug, maybe a kiss—

Time didn't wait for anyone—connecting the dots unfortunately only happened the moment you hung up the phone.

"Sorry, that was my date. I really have to go. What do you want to show me?"

"Um—uh...gross!"

You scrunch up your face, taken aback. "What?"

"You—you have, like, spinach stuck between your teeth."

Your eyes widen in shock immediately getting off the bed, but then you halt, turning to look at Yeonjun. "But I didn't eat spinach today. Or yesterday." you mumble.

"Well, I'm sorry I'm not a professional chef that can tell what that nasty piece of green leaf is in between your teeth."

"God, is it that bad?" you ask in horror, not waiting for his reply as you burst into the bathroom.

Meanwhile as you check your teeth in the mirror, Yeonjun immediately grabs the phone you left on his bed, which was still open—letting him breath in relief.

He immediately went on to his name on your phone to open the messages between you two—it was ridiculous but a smile still tugged on his lips for a split second when he noticed his contact name was the one he typed in a few months ago, still 'hottest man alive'—he took it a sign you didn't disagree... or it could be that you were too lazy to change it.

But he immediately shook his head out of the thought — doing his job of deleting the message that you sent an okay to.

"What the fuck are you doing?" you say with wide eyes, snatching your phone away from the boys hand.

"Just checking the time." he says with an awkward smile, a little startled of your sudden presence.

"On my phone? You literally have a watch." you say, your tone laced with confusion. Which signaled Yeonjun to shoot up from his bed, pushing you out towards the door—there was no way out of this but to push you out, and hopefully the date being horrible enough for you to forget about confronting him about this tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. Preferably, for the rest of his life on Earth.

"Time for you to leave!" he yells, finally getting you out of his dorm, and now out in the hallway.

Before you could say anything—for example, reminding him that 90% of the stuff you brought was still in the bathroom—he slammed the door right in your face.

When you recollect your shock, you scoff, your annoyance through the roof.

What was he looking at in your phone?

You open it, hoping to find the answer.

But you're only confused as you only see your chat with Yeonjun open.

And even more confused when the text length of the message before your 'okay' was way shorter than what you remember.

Meanwhile, Yeonjun was sitting on his desk chair, biting his lip as he hesitantly hit the delete button on the music project he's been working on.

ending a/n: i think i'm allergic to ending a fic with the two pairings getting together cz tell me why this was deadass just enemies to ????? T_T

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

They are clearly on the warpath with BRF right now. Interview, security articles, followed by yet another fake royal tour announcement. Wonder what they are temper tantruming about. It’s a bigger one than usual.

Well, let's review what happened recently.

For the BRF:

Kate made an appearance after three months' privacy and the world flipped out. Meghan makes an appearance after three months' privacy and no one gives a hoot.

William had a birthday.

William went to the Eras Tour.

William honored his father for Father's Day with a picture of him and his father. Harry (via Sussex Squad mouthpieces) flipped out that he wasn't included.

Kate made an appearance after 2-3 weeks' privacy and the world flipped out.

William got new patronages and new presidencies.

William had appearances with the King of Denmark and the King of Spain for football.

The BRF's financial reports came in. They made a boatload of money.

Charles and Camilla announced the first major foreign royal tour of their monarchy: Australia in October.

Anne was hospitalized and had to scale down her schedule for a bit because there was no one to backfill her.

Anne is representing the BRF and the UK at the Olympics.

Charles and Camilla attended the State Opening of Parliament.

The BRF had Holyrood Week and last year's photos of William and Kate made the rounds again.

William hosted a garden party with Peter, Zara and Mike, Beatrice, and Eugenie.

William played polo at Windsor Castle.

And let's recap the Sussexes:

Harry was accused of hiding and destroying evidence in his phone-hacking lawsuit.

Harry got Charles's top courtiers dragged into his phone-hacking lawsuit.

Meghan's dog biscuits and raspberry jelly were universally panned.

Meghan was trolled by the press for promoting her business while Kate was making her first public appearance in 3 months.

The Sussexes were late on paying administrative fees for their charity and it was global news.

They were not invited to Balmoral this year.

[coochiequeens]

Because large-scale organising is “almost impossible” in China, women are turning to “all kinds of alternative ways to maintain feminism in their daily lives and even develop and transfer feminism to others,” she says. These may take the form of book clubs or exercise meet-ups. Some of her friends in China organise hikes. “They say that we are feminists, we are hiking together, so when we are hiking we talk about feminism.“ - Lü Pin

To find evidence that China’s feminist movement is gaining momentum – despite strict government censorship and repression – check bookshelves, nightstands and digital libraries. There, you might find a copy of one of Chizuko Ueno’s books. The 74-year-old Japanese feminist and author of Feminism from Scratch and Patriarchy and Capitalism has sold more than a million books in China, according to Beijing Open Book, which tracks sales. Of these, 200,000 were sold in January and February alone.

Ueno, a professor of sociology at the University of Tokyo, was little known outside in China outside academia until she delivered a 2019 matriculation speech at the university in which she railed against its sexist admissions policies, sexual “abuse” by male students against their female peers, and the pressure women felt to downplay their academic achievements.

The speech went viral in Japan, then China.

“Feminist thought does not insist that women should behave like men or the weak should become the powerful,” she said. “Rather, feminism asks that the weak be treated with dignity as they are.”

In the past two years, 11 of her books have been translated into simplified Chinese and four more will be published this year. In December, two of her books were among the top 20 foreign nonfiction bestsellers in China. While activism and protests have been stifled by the government, the rapid rise in Ueno’s popularity shows that women are still looking for ways to learn more about feminist thought, albeit at a private, individual level.

Talk to young Chinese academics, writers and podcasters about what women are reading and Ueno’s name often comes up. “We like-like her,” says Shiye Fu, the host of popular feminist podcast Stochastic Volatility.

“In China we need some sort of feminist role model to lead us and enable us to see how far women can go,” she says. “She taught us that as a woman, you have to fight every day, and to fight is to survive.”

When asked by the Guardian about her popularity in China, Ueno says her message resonates with this generation of Chinese women because, while they have grown up with adequate resources and been taught to believe they will have more opportunities, “patriarchy and sexism put the burden to be feminine on them as a wife and mother”.

Ueno, who found her voice during the student power movements of the 1960s, has long argued that marriage restricts women’s autonomy, something she learned watching her own parents. She described her father as “a complete sexist”. It’s stance that resonates with women in China, who are rebelling against the expectation that they take a husband.

Ueno’s most popular book, with 65,000 reviews on Douban, is simply titled Misogyny. One review reads: “It still takes a little courage to type this. I have always been shy about discussing gender issues in a Chinese environment, because if I am not careful, I will easily attract the label of … ‘feminist cancer’.”

“Now it’s a hard time,” says Lü Pin, a prominent Chinese feminist who now lives in the US. In 2015 she happened to be in New York when Chinese authorities arrested five of her peers – who were detained for 37 days and became known as the “Feminist Five” – and came to Lü’s apartment in Beijing. She narrowly avoided arrest. “Our movement is increasingly being regarded as illegal, even criminal, in China.”

China’s feminist movement has grown enormously in the past few years, especially among young women online, says Lü, where it was stoked by the #MeToo movements around the world and given oxygen on social media. “But that’s just part of the story,” she says. Feminism is also facing much stricter censorship – the word “feminism” is among those censored online, as is China’s #MeToo hashtag, #WoYeShi.

“When we already have so many people joining our community, the government regards that as a threat to its rule,” Lü says. “So the question is: what is the future of the movement?”

Because large-scale organising is “almost impossible” in China, women are turning to “all kinds of alternative ways to maintain feminism in their daily lives and even develop and transfer feminism to others,” she says. These may take the form of book clubs or exercise meet-ups. Some of her friends in China organise hikes. “They say that we are feminists, we are hiking together, so when we are hiking we talk about feminism.

“Nobody can change the micro level.”

‘The first step’

In 2001, when Lü was a journalist starting out on her journey into feminism, she founded a book club with a group of friends. She was struggling to find books on the subject, so she and her friends pooled their resources. “We were feminists, journalists, scholars, so we decided let’s organise a group and read, talk, discuss monthly,” she says. They met in people’s homes, or the park, or their offices. It lasted eight years and the members are still among her best friends.

Before the book club, “I felt lonely when I was pursuing feminism. So I need friends, I need a community. And that was the first community I had.” “I got friendship, I deepened my understanding of feminism,” Lü says. “It’s interesting, perhaps the first step of feminist movements is always literature in many countries, especially in China.”

Lü first read Ueno’s academic work as a young scholar, when few people in China knew her name. Ueno’s books are for people who are starting out on their pursuit of feminism, Lü says, and the author is good at explaining feminist issues in ways that are easy to understand.

Like many Ting Guo discovered Ueno after the Tokyo University speech. Guo, an assistant professor in the department of cultural and religious studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, still uses it in lectures.

Ueno’s popularity is part of a larger phenomenon, Guo says. “We cannot really directly describe what we want to say, using the word that we want to use, because of the censorship, because of the larger atmosphere. So people need to try to borrow words, mirror that experience in other social situations, in other political situations, in other contexts, in order to precisely describe their own experience, their own feelings and their own thoughts.”

There are so many people who are new to the feminist movement, says Lü, “and they are all looking for resources, but due to censorship, it’s so hard for Chinese scholars, for Chinese feminists, to publish their work.”

Ueno “is a foreigner, that is one of her advantages, and she also comes from [an] east Asian context”, which means that the patriarchal system she describes is similar to China’s. Lü says the reason books by Chinese feminists aren’t on bestseller lists is because of censorship.

Na Zhong, a novelist who translated Sally Rooney’s novels into simplified Chinese, feels that Chinese feminism is, at least when it comes to literature, gaining momentum. The biggest sign of this, both despite and because of censorship, is “the sheer number of women writers that are being translated into Chinese” – among whom Ueno is the “biggest star”.

“Young women are discovering their voices, and I’m really happy for my generation,” she says. “We’re just getting started.”

By Helen R Sullivan

This is the third story in a three-part series on feminism and literature in China.

[aquagirl1978]

Hello, aqua! May I please have chevalier and "cupping his cheeks and calling him cute"? I want to see his reaction :)

Thanks!

Hi anon - thank you for this request. I am always happy to write my favorite

The Exchange

A/N: Part of my Naughty or Nice event Pairing: Chevalier Michel x Reader Prompt: cupping his cheeks and calling him cute Word count: 1071 Tags: fluff

It was just another day in the office of the foreign affairs faction – Chevalier was seated regally at his desk, quill in hand, while Nokto, who was seated nearby, was reviewing trade agreements. Clavis was off somewhere, presumably the garden with Cyran digging traps. Luke was likely napping in the gardens, a menagerie gathering on his sleeping body.

You had just returned after visiting Sariel’s office, arms ladened with papers the king needed to sign. Chevalier looked up, his gaze softening upon seeing you, his smile gentle as you approached his desk. His eyes never left yours as you placed the stack of papers on his desk, waiting for you to take your seat next to him at his desk.

You worked seamlessly as a pair, barely a word needed as you pointed with a fingertip where he needed to sign. He quickly scanned the documents placed before him, pleased with your diligence in reviewing them. He’d then silently pass the documents back to you, his gloved thumb barely grazing the back of your hand.

“King Highness, the Jadean delegation will be here in a few days. Prince Keith will be arriving with them.”

“I’m aware,” Chevalier replied, his gaze fixed on the paperwork before him. Nokto sauntered over, winking at you as he leaned against his brother’s desk. 

“Then you know they will be looking for…”

“Yes, I know,” he said with a sigh, setting down his quill. His eyes flicked up, blue meeting red. “If they want me to entertain their demands…” he added with a wicked smirk.

“How’s three?” Nokto asked with a tilt of his head.

For all his frivolity, Nokto was quite adept not only at his job but handling Chevalier. While the king of Rhodolite was notoriously stubborn, known for not doing a single thing he didn’t want to, it was a poorly kept secret that he could be bribed – with books – to do those things he didn’t particularly want to do.

You watched your love, waiting with bated breath for his reaction.

“Four,” he replied, his gaze averted. “They still owe me one from the last time Prince Keith was here.”

*******

A few days later….

It was already dark when there was a knock at the door to the office. You glanced at Chevalier, the only other person in the room with you, wondering who it could be at this hour.

Rising from your seat, you walked around the desk and opened the heavy door. “Prince Keith, what a pleasant surprise,” you greeted, inviting him to enter.

The tall man bowed his head. “Forgive the intrusion, Your Majesty,” Keith said, “but I just ran into Prince Nokto who reminded me of something.”

“Yes?” Chevalier asked, resting his chin in his hand.

Keith approached his desk, his long legs swiftly taking him there; the moment Chevalier saw the books Keith was carrying, a soft smile spread on his lips as his gaze lingered on the treasure Keith was holding.

Leaning against the wall, you quietly observed Chevalier, your gaze never leaving his.

“On behalf of Jade, I’d like to request an audience with Your Majesty…” Keith stood tall before the king, a slight tremor in his hands as he gently held the books. 

Chevalier waved a hand, his gaze fixed on the leather-bound volumes cradled in Keith’s hands.

“There’s five,” the king said softly.

“My sincerest apologies, Your Majesty. I brought an extra since I was so delinquent in getting you that book you requested on my last visit here. I am so sorry,” Keith replied. “May I?” he asked, seeking permission to place the books on the desk. Chevalier nodded, his gaze still on the books. “This one,” Keith said, proudly pointing to the book on top, “was recommended to me by my friend, Maeve. I hope you like it as much as we did.”

Chevalier steepled his fingers, silent in thought. “The others, they’re all by the same author.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Sonia is my friend, she is quite the popular author in Jade and I thought –.”

“Your friend?” Chevalier interrupted, eyes widening.

“Yes, I feel like I’ve known Sonia forever. She’s always wanted to visit Rhodolite. If she ever does get to travel here, I could arrange for you to meet her.” Keith stopped, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I’m being far too presumptive…”

“I’d like that,” Chevalier said simply. “I’ll meet with you and your delegation tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thank you,” Keith mumbled while bowing his head, somewhat stunned things worked out as easily as Nokto had told him. “Thank you again for your graciousness.” Keith, head still bowed, bumped into a chair behind him. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the chair before escorting himself from the office.

As soon as the door closed, and with a bright smile, you made your way over to Chevalier’s desk. You didn’t wait to be invited; you took it upon yourself to sit on the king’s lap. Cupping his cheeks, you tilted his face towards yours.

“You’re so cute when you get excited. Like when you see books.”

Chevalier scoffed,  his eyes gleaming with mischief. “I get excited with you.”

Your cheeks flushed with warmth. “That’s not the same,” you said softly, slowly stroking his cheek with the pad of your thumb. “ It’s different when you see new books. Your eyes sparkle and your face lights up like a child on Christmas morning.” 

“It’s a rare joy I don’t often see you express,” you continued, tracing his lips with your fingertip, “but one that I carve into my heart every time I bear witness to it.”

“Are you done yet?” he asked with a laugh. The corners of his lips twitched, curling into a smile, while his gaze drifted towards the pile of books lying on his desk. Your hands fell from his face and settled on his shoulders, his quickened pulse easily felt by your fingertips grazing his neck. 

Leaning closer, you tilted your face so you could whisper into his ear. “I know you’re itching to read those books. Let’s retire to your room.”

Your words – or perhaps it was your warm breath on his skin – caught his attention. He wrapped a clumsy hand in your hair, pulling you close for a kiss. 

“After I’ve had my fill of my books,” he whispered between kisses, “I’m devouring you next.”

His ice blue eyes warming as he gazed into your eyes. 

Tagging: @redheadkittys @alixennial @rhodolitesroseforclavis @chaosangel767 @queengiuliettafirstlady

@queen-dahlia @ikehoe @ikemen-writer @talfollowingstuff @kpop-and-otome

@drachonia @ranhanabi777 @silver-dahlia @keithsandwich @lunaaka

@kisara-16 @altairring @lucyw260 @lordsisterxotome @umi-adxhira

@crypticbibliophile @lancelotscloak @scorchieart @tele86 @nightfoxqueen

@nightghoul381 @maries-gallery @xbalayage @xenokiryu @alydra

@melodiousramblings @wendolrea @aceuuuu @randonauticrap @aria-chikage

@portrait-ninja @sh0jun @ikesenwritings @kalims-pessimist-bestie

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - May 29, 2023

Rwanda’s life expectancy has increased by 20 years in the last 20 years

What did Rwanda change? Three developments stand out: low-cost community-based health insurance plans, national investments in rural health posts, and ramped-up foreign collaborations. In 2020, more than 90 percent of Rwanda’s people had some kind of health insurance. This stands out relative to other low-income countries, where on average 31 percent of people have health insurance.

2. Brandon School Division rejects call to remove library books on sexuality, gender identity

Loud cheers erupted inside a packed high school gymnasium after the Brandon School Division rejected a call to remove books dealing with sexuality and gender identity from libraries. Hundreds of people in Manitoba's second-largest city showed up for the marathon school division meeting, which ran into the early morning hours.

The trustees ultimately voted 6-1 to reject a proposal to create a committee of trustees and parents to review books available in division schools.

3. Lotto winner pledges to fund classrooms in his native Mali

Happiness for one lucky North Carolina resident comes not from newfound wealth from a lottery win, but using those winnings to help schoolchildren -- in this case, from Mali.

Souleymane Sana of North Carolina won $100,000 from a scratch-off ticket. Relocating to the United States from Mali -- a war-torn county in West Africa -- Sana is using his earnings to create a non-profit to help school kids from his hometown.

4. Mountain gorillas rebound thanks to Ugandan veterinarian

In 2018, as their population topped 1,000, they were removed from the critically endangered list and their status upgraded to just endangered. That positive step was due, in no small part, to Ugandan veterinarian Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka. 

Her working home is Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, home to roughly half of the world's mountain gorillas. But early on she also realized that to help the animals and keep them free from disease and poaching, she needed to also help their human neighbours, launching successful initiatives to improve the health and well-being of the people living around the park. 

5. Imports of ivory from hippos, orcas and walruses to be banned in UK

Ivory imports from hippopotamuses, orcas and walruses will be banned under new legislation to protect the endangered species from poaching.

The Ivory Act, passed in 2018, targeted materials from elephants, but a loophole meant that animals other than elephants, including hippos, were being targeted for their ivory.

6. Solar power due to overtake oil production investment for first time in 2023

Investment in clean energy will extend its lead over spending on fossil fuels in 2023, the International Energy Agency said on Thursday, with solar projects expected to outpace outlays on oil production for the first time.

Annual investment in renewable energy is up by nearly a quarter since 2021 compared to a 15% rise for fossil fuels, the Paris-based energy watchdog said in its World Energy Investment report.

7. Paralyzed man walks naturally, thanks to wireless ‘bridge’ between brain and spine

Gert-Jan Oskam lost the ability to walk in 2011 when he injured his spine in a cycling accident in China. Six years later, the Dutch man managed to take a few short steps thanks to a small array of electrodes implanted on top of his spinal cord that delivered nerve-stimulating pulses of electricity.

Today in Nature, an international team of researchers reports giving Oskam a better fix, a way to digitally bridge the communication gap between his brain and lower body. Brain waves signaling Oskam’s desire to walk travel from a device implanted in his skull to the spinal stimulator, rerouting the signal around the damaged tissue and delivering pulses of electricity to the spinal cord to facilitate the movement. Oskam can now walk more fluidly, navigate obstacles, and climb stairs.

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[tac-the-unseen]

Hey, idk if you write for Nubbins, Chop Top or Drayton but if you do could you do the thing with a reader not speaking English very well? I just read the first one you did and I loved it!

Sure thing!

Slasher x Foreigner Reader pt.2

Nubbins:

•Man just blinks at you like a frog

•”Huh?”

•”In English dumbass!.....My bad…”

•He has a hard time remembering not everyone speaks English 

•His speech impediment makes him more sympathetic towards you, and any mess ups you make 

•His schizophrenia also plays a role in that 

•“Sometimes the voices say things I can't understand…is that what it's like hearing us talk?”

•Will defend you to high hell from anyone who makes fun of you, even family 

•Tells you to ask Drayton to make some dish related to your home country 

Chop Top:

•When he finds out you speak a different language he tells you about his Days in Vietnam 

•Hes picked up a bit of Vietnamese but not much

•”Me not knowing Vietnamese is like you not knowing English!” :D “Twinning!”

•He likes to sit on the porch with you while you two play guessing games and listen to music

•He pops a grape in his mouth “what are the wars from your country like?” 

•Man is just interested about your history 

•Will sit patiently while you give him a mental tour

Drayton: 

•”I don't care what you speak, as long as you eat!” 

•Drayton couldn't care less

•”Just think about what you want to say before you attempt to say it!”

•sometimes he gets pissed off when you can't articulate yourself, but most of the time he just lets you figure it out by yourself 

•sometimes he only cares about your opinion on his cooking (only good reviews, He'll get pissed at bad ones) 

•He'll find a cookbook based on your home country and try to cook it for you 

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

There was an attempted terror attack today in Samaria, which was thwarted, the 16 years old terrorist tried to stab people, but he was neutralized before he managed to hurt anyone.

In Haifa, however, another terrorist was more successful. He managed to run over a 20 years old man with his car, seriously injuring him. Then the terrorist got out of the vehicle, wielding an axe, and started chasing down civilians who were at the scene, but thankfully there were was a soldier nearby, who neutralized him before any further damage was caused. A reporter mentioned the exact location inside the city where the attack happened, pointing out that it's a very crowded area, right by a hospital (it happens to be the one where my grandmother was hospitalized a few years ago, when a foreign worker ran her over and fled the scene, and I spent a week there with her, so I knew exactly what the reporter was talking about), so the odds of accidentally shooting a civilian while trying to stop the terrorist was high, yet the soldier managed to react quickly, effectively and accurately, and in this case, with no collateral damage. He's a hero. Here's a pic of the car used in this attack:

I got to hear an interview with Dr. Oren Tamari, an Israeli doctor who looked after an old Gazan woman, who was found tied to her bed. She was asked what happened, and according to her reply, two days prior, terrorists (there's no way of knowing whether they were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad) tied her there, maybe intending for that to be a way of luring soldiers into a trap, when they'd fight with terrorists, and unknowingly kill her as well. Dr. Tamari was asked whether he had come across anything similar in Gaza, and he confirmed that it's not the first such usage of civilians by terrorists that he had encountered.

Germany, Japan, France, Romania and Austria have also announced that they're suspending their financial aid to UNRWA, and the EU said it is reviewing the matter, following the news that there's evidence some of this UN agency's employees have been involved in the Hamas massacre. In the case of one employee, he and a first degree relative were implicated in the kidnapping of an Israeli woman, while several others were killed during the Oct 7 massacre on Israeli soil, leaving no doubt of their complicity.

In reaction to the claim that the employees who participated in Hamas' massacre were "just a few bad apples," on top of the repeatedly proven wide scale complicity of UNRWA in encouraging antisemitism and terrorism, Israel is also pointing out that there is a structural connection between UNRWA and Hamas beyond the 12 employees that the UN had to concede participated in Hamas' atrocities. It was pointed out that about 10% of UNRWA's Gaza staff has ties to terrorists (23% of male staffers have ties specifically to Hamas), and 49% have close relatives who hold official positions in terrorist organizations, especially Hamas. In the past, Hamas has even directed the resignation and of a non-Palestinian director of UNRWA for his "crime" of not disputing that the IDF's strikes in Gaza in May 2021 were 'very precise' (meaning, not indiscriminate bombing). The participation in Hamas' massacre of UNRWA employees is just the inevitable end result of this symbiotic relationship between this UN agency, and Gaza's terrorist dictators.

Ironically, Arab countries which hardly donate to UNRWA felt completely free to attack the western countries that did, and decided to suspend this financial support until they know their money isn't going to terrorists. Shame really is dead.

For that matter, we can talk about the fact that in southern Lebanon, UN employees don't do anything about Hezbollah terrorist activity, even when Hezbollah fires at Israeli civilians from between two UN posts, and despite the UN's stated goal is to make sure this terrorist organization is not so much as present in this area, in accordance with UN resolution 1701. And we can also talk about the UN's complicity in crimes against civilians, like UN involvement in corruption in Russia, UN employees raping local women in Haiti (it's believed most women raped by a UN employee did not report the crime committed against them) and UN employees involved in sexual exploitation and abuse in Congo. The idea that the UN is an impartial, super-human force for good in this world is... just not true. It has been called out on its complicity in crimes before, it NEEDS to be called out for its systematic complicity in crimes against humanity, that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists committed.

In not unrelated news, it only took almost 4 months, but the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten (center in the pic below), has arrived in Israel with a team that will look into Hamas' sexual crimes on Oct 7. They're expected to work here for about a week.

It seems Nancy Pelosi is being attacked for urging the FBI to investigate whether Russia has links to protests in the US pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. What these attacks seem to ignore is that her comments appear to follow the publishing of a US state department report on Soviet antisemitism, which is responsible for cultivating anti-Zionism as an anti-westeren tool, and that antisemitism and protest funding are tools currently employed by the Kremlin.

This is 21 years old Dor Reeder.

He moved to kibbutz Be'eri in order to take care of a kid with special needs there, while his parents live in the neighboring community of kibbutz Sa'ad. His father, Tzvi, is a Red Magen David paramedic, who on Oct 7 had a feeling that the rocket attack they started experiencing that morning was abnormally intense. Tzvi notified the emergency squad of kibbutz Sa'ad that they should be alert. Thankfully, they were and together with one tank, they managed to protect their community. Kibbutz Sa'ad was attacked by terrorists, but suffered no massacre. Tzvi continued in his work, evacuating the wounded under fire. Dorit, his wife, is a nurse, and was a part of opening an emergency field hospital in kibbutz Sa'ad. Some of the injured from the Nova music festival were brought for treatment at this hospital. While Dor lived in kibbutz Be'eri, he also found love there, a 19 years old girl named Tchelet. They were hiding together during the Hamas massacre, but were eventually found. While Tzvi managed to help save his own kibbutz, Dor and Tchelet were murdered by terrorists. It took 9 days of uncertainty for the news to be confirmed. May their memory be a blessing. Tzvi asked for everyone to be strong, raise Israel's flag, and hold our head up high.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[darkwood-sleddog]

AVENUES FOR CONTACTING REGARDING THE NEW CDC DOG IMPORTATION RULING

The CDC recently released their newly revised rules applying to all dogs wishing to enter the United States. This includes stricter paperwork and veterinary record requirements within a certain timeframe, implantation of a specific type of microchip PRIOR to rabies vaccination and a hardline restriction on any dog younger than six months. You can view all the new requirements HERE.

It is my belief that several aspects of the new ruling require additional review and nuance that is not being taken, specifically the 6 month of age rule which in my opinion is over regulatory as dogs can be fully inoculated against rabies at four months of age.

The new ruling makes very little if any distinction of dogs coming from high risk rabies countries and dogs coming from no/low risk rabies countries. The reasoning outlined in the ruling is to "streamline" the process of importation by making the requirements the same across all areas of import. This is unreasonable to countries that have no rabies present as they pose no risk.

Additionally, these rules do not take into account the shared land borders between the United States, Canada and Mexico and treats Canada and Mexico like other foreign bodies which is unreasonable. People living in border areas often cross between the US and Canada/Mexico on a frequent basis. There is no fencing at the Canadian border and wildlife of any health status can cross freely on both the northern and southern border. There are also border towns and enclaves that have an increased frequency of border crossings for daily life that need to be taken into account in regards to the paperwork requirements.

And Finally, I take big issue with the fact the ruling and reasonings behind several of the restrictions addressing the concerns of hobbyist and ethical dog breeders regarding the restriction on age of import will put on genetic diversity of dog breeds. Many breeders would rather place a puppy in an equally good home in a country where the puppy can be home at the critical young age than hold on to a dog for months. This will also prevent sport dog, service dog, and working dog puppies from being properly socialized into their future roles. Not only does the CDC make no exception for service dogs, dogs of military families, or any dog in this instance, but they addressed hobbyist and preservation breeder's concerns by stating that the USDA already has rules limited dog imports to 6 months of age for commercial breeding. Note that commercial breeding and what requires a USDA license is very specifically outlined by the USDA which does make exceptions for hobbyist breeding. The CDC ruling talks about commercial and hobbyist breeding as the same thing, referring specifically to the USDA even though the USDA themselves make specific distinctions. The CDC ruling equates hobby breeding with commercial breeding directly, with no acknowledgment that even if they were the same the puppy can be and is often most often already purchased and legally owned by the client/new owner so breeder requirements would no longer be applicable.

There are many other individual concerns. These are just my top concerns.

What can you do?

HERE is a change.org petition by Jaye Foucher that outlines similar concerns that I share as well as ones more specific to sled dog teams traveling and those that frequently do business in Alaska.

CONTACT the CDC directly and voice any concerns you have.

Contact your REPRESENTATIVES and SENATORS, especially if you live in a border state. Phone OR email would be fine. I personally prefer email as it provides a written record of the communication. While the CDC is not full of elected officials, the Senate and House recently passed an Agriculture bill titled "The Healthy Dog Importation Act" where many of the new restrictions are echoed and reiterated on a legislative level.

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (January 21-27, 2024)

Godzilla Minus One made awards show history in both Japan and the U.S. this week. Its Oscar nomination for best Visual Effects is the first of the series (Godzilla [1998], Godzilla [2014] and Godzilla vs. Kong were previously shortlisted) and the first for any Japanese film. Small wonder Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, and their team went berserk when the nomination was announced. The other nominees are The Creator, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Napoleon, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. According to IndieWire, The Creator has the edge, but Minus One could very well win. And while it naturally made less headlines in the Anglosphere, Minus One also picked up a whopping 12 Japan Academy Film Prize nominations, exceeding Shin Godzilla's 10.

Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color is now in North American theaters. I was intrigued enough to make it my fourth theatrical viewing of this movie, but in the end it did basically strike me as a gimmick. Godzilla Minus One was shot digitally with sets designed for color, so making it actually look like a film from the 40s was always going to be an uphill battle. Even with the regrade, there wasn’t a ton of contrast in most shots, and some of the scenes taking place at night were quite hard to see. Still, apart from the Odo Island massacre, I found the Godzilla scenes as gripping as ever.

Thanks to Minus Color, Minus One made $2.6 million this weekend, crawling back into the box office top 10. Its total in the U.S. and Canada now stands at $55 million, third among all foreign-language films released in the U.S.

Brush of the God, Keizo Murase's directorial debut after a lifetime in movies, is finally complete. It'll play at the Osaka Asian Film Festival in March (link contains more images), and hopefully travel overseas very soon. Murase will also receive an Association Special Award at the Japan Academy Film Prize.

Clover Press shipped out copies of Godzilla & Kong: The Cinematic Storyboard Art of Richard Bennett to Kickstarter backers, myself included. It's an excellent art book, and there are plenty of deleted and altered scenes mixed in with more familiar sequences. Believe it or not, Bennett drew the panel above for Kong: Skull Island—they considered having James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) flash back to an encounter with King Ghidorah in Vietnam. Not sure how that would've worked, as Ghidorah is generally not one to lie low for a few decades, but it's the first I've ever heard of it being considered. I'm hoping to post some more scans soon. Here's the order link.

Minecraft social media accounts teased a crossover with the Monsterverse, in what's likely to be the most high-profile of the Godzilla x Kong video game collaborations. The Mobzilla mod was created over 10 years ago, so this is long overdue.

The big toy news this week was Titanic Creations revealing the digital sculpt for its Yongary figure. This guy's had even less figures than Gorgo - I can only think of one, and very few of them were made - so expect massive demand. New Godzilla toys were also on display at London Toy Fair, both at the Playmates booth and among the plushies made by an unknown company.

[mutual-vigilance]

The Traveller and the Tyrant

This is my honest review and critique of the Witness's characterisation. I would ask you to "enjoy", but, considering its themes and the fact that it is over 3,700 words long, perhaps a better phrase would be: "you have been warned."

When I loaded into Excision last week, I was immediately struck by the opening cutscene’s resemblance to the final, climactic battle of The Lord of the Rings, where the steadfast commander of humanity gave a rousing speech to his allied troops before bravely charging forward into the shambling mass of deformed, mutated enemy foot-soldiers, all under the shadow of a monolithic tower, the abode of the ultimate villain of the story. This was nearly enough to make me tune out, and, alas, what followed was not much better.

I have myriad complaints about the Witness’s portrayal in Destiny, and this cinematic is as good a place as any to begin. I do not think the introduction to Excision was fitting for the end of the Light and Darkness saga. Throughout the series, we have fought off a number of escalating threats, beginning with opportunistic Eliksni scavengers, and ending with a being that can end the universe itself. I do not think that a horde of Scorn ought to be the best this being can come up with for its final stand. I would have preferred to see it bend reality, drag us into the arm-tunnel shown in the trailer, shatter an allied warship on the spot, do anything, anything other than tread the worn war-paths of Sauron and his hundreds of imitators in various works of fantasy. First, because this is science fantasy after all, and second, because many of those themes are deeply rooted in xenophobia, unfitting for our current day and age.

The visual designs of the Witness itself and its precursors draw heavily from the historical and present cultures of southwest Asia and north Africa. Their monumental structures of stone evoke the architecture of the region. Their tetrahedral ships remind one of the Egyptian pyramids, and their murals, of the intricate paintings in buried tombs. They are said to hail from the sandy desert. The precursor aliens covered their heads and sometimes entire bodies in cloth; the concept art clearly contains sketches based on humans who dress this way, in burqas; and even the Witness is clad in a long, black robe that hides its lower face, showing only its dark, single brow and dark eyes. I could go on, but I believe I have said enough to back up my next statement: It was not a wise decision to base this particular sci-fi faction on the peoples of the Levant.

The Witness’s army of Scorn is portrayed as a savage horde, in stark contrast to humanity and our allies. The Scorn don’t even have guns. They have crossbows and torches, yet they are a deadly threat to our shining ships. We are told that our enemy is magnitudes more powerful than us, but we are shown that its troops hail from the Bronze Age. Why is the Witness not allowed to demonstrate its technological or paracausal superiority? We are told that it is made of many people, but it is single-minded, ruthless, and its cruelty is unmatched. In fact, its constituent minds are not even slaves; they literally do not have individuality until they dissent, and any dissent is, of course, summarily suppressed. These characteristics – the savagery or “backwardness”, the collectivism and despotism – are common Orientalist stereotypes. And to top it all off, the Witness is driven purely by religious fanaticism. Its robed, veiled selves are ontologically evil and irredeemable, except in death, naturally. I note that Savathûn gets a pass, decked out as she and her throne world are in Gothic imagery and ball gowns, and roll my eyes. And in the game, our characters speak of the Witness as a poison, a disease. A corrupter of all that is good. A foreign snake in our Traveller’s garden. There is concept art of that. Appalling. 

I have always known that Destiny is a game made by and for Americans, or the West in general. I was even recently reminded of this by the way that Bungie hiked up the price of The Final Shape expansion for many non-USD currencies, but I still held hope for a satisfactory conclusion. I was too optimistic. It appears that even in this modern tale, the tired tropes that have plagued genre fiction since genre fiction existed are inescapable. I saw the Witness’s multi-armed form (reminding me immediately of Guanyin and perhaps others of Shiva) coming from a long way off, and I still laughed when I first finished Iconoclasm. It was like finding myself situated in that old drawing depicting the Christian nations of Europe as a group of humans, arming themselves against the distant, threatening silhouette of... the Buddha. An image published in 1895. Maybe a being with a thousand arms is threatening, who knows, but I’ve seen too many sticks of incense burnt before her altar to be afraid or awed. Buddhist villains are rare in fiction, and there was some potential in contrasting the Witness’s concept of the world as made of suffering with similar ideas in Buddhism, but the resemblance, in the end, was used for superficial, visual shock value. Sigh.

So then I went ahead anyway, defending the City upon the Hill (ringed with spears) against Satan, via feats of marksmanship and acrobatics through five exciting encounters, riffling through a diary that I picked up in the Monolith to try and learn more about my enemy. If I knew my enemy, and knew myself, then I could potentially complete Salvation’s Edge in a reasonable time-frame! Or not. The raid took my team and me a month and a half. Probably because the lore left me more confused about my enemy than I was at the start.

We are told that the Witness comprised a multitude when it first entered the Traveller, since people were still actively being cut out of it shortly thereafter. And then, by the end of Excision, the game implies that the multitude is gone, and only a single consciousness remains, which we kill with little fanfare (when we could’ve used a 2-minute cutscene. In my completely unbiased opinion). 

Where did the many go? Did they all become dissenters? How? Why?

It is possible that, like the lower-case gardener described in page 2 of the raid's lorebook, all of the constituent minds grew frustrated with being unable to achieve perfection even with the Traveller’s Light, abandoned their original goal of imposing the Final Shape upon the universe, and were sealed off into statues one by one until only the last remained. But this would imply that we, the player, had little to do with the Witness’s downfall, that it imploded from its own loss of faith. Hardly a triumphant victory for us to brag about when we go home, and it comes with the “bonus” moral that mortals should not aspire to godhood because such attempts are doomed to failure. This explanation is too dull for me to accept.

The alternative, then, is that we did do something to cause the constituent minds to defect en masse. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what. Remember, we killed the dissenters to weaken the Witness. Why would committing murder make other people dissent, people that are one hundred percent committed to the Witness’s goal? I imagine myself as a sailor on a warship in the heat of battle, or a member of a raid-race team that has been awake for 47 hours straight. I see the enemy ship fire at me. I see the 48-hour deadline drawing closer and closer. What could possibly make me turn against my own crew, sabotage my own team? Yes, it could be because my captain has been yelling at me and I am completely fed up with them and I would rather die than suffer them for another minute, but that is also either a preexisting weakness that we merely exploit, or a stress fracture within the Witness that is caused by destroying everything and everyone it throws in our way, not by convincing these constituent minds that our philosophy and goals are better than theirs. Yes, this is the genre of game where shooting and slashing solves all problems, but come on. It could’ve been different.

On page 4 of The Rubicon, the raid’s lorebook, we learn of a previous occasion upon which the Witness was nearly defeated. Its adversary offered it peace, but the Witness struck it down. The dissenter narrating this story was not shocked into individuality by the betrayal, but by the fact that the thing they created to be literally single-minded in its pursuit of the Final Shape... is single-minded in its pursuit of the Final Shape? And then, more pertinently, the dissenter dismisses any notion that the Witness could be changed, and begs us little lights to not hesitate when we are the ones holding the knife to its throat.

This dissenter, while earnest, is wrong. The death of the adversary did change the Witness. It dislodged one mind from the collective, did it not?

So imagine, if you will. 

We encounter the dissenters. We listen to their story. They beg us to destroy them to weaken the Witness. They desired to be exonerated in death, to be redeemed, to be saved by us and the paracausal entity behind us. 

And we refuse.

We are given a blade, but we strike the statues with the hilt instead, cracking the stone. We pull their living flesh – made of what, we do not know, but it is living – from the rubble and we spirit them away to the camps we’ve made. We sit them by the fire and we protect them from retribution and, though these nocturnal beings do not see very well in the Light, the Witness sees, and it knows. It may seethe at how we escape its clutches time after time, it may sneer that we are making everything harder for ourselves, that we forget the ultimate goal is survival, but, through our selflessness and our seemingly endless capacity to forgive, we stir up hope within the multitude that what awaits them could be better than death, than even finality. They begin to remember the ancient enemies that once offered them mercy, and they are confronted by a new enemy who, for the first time, uniting Light and Darkness, has the power to defend such a truce. Slowly, they realise that they do not want to be our enemy. They are cast off. We save every person we can. And in the end, together with all our allies, we confront those vicious minds that remain.

But page number 4 shut that down, and all I’m left with is my fireteam member’s gripe that wow, this is just like how the United States deals with uppity foreign countries. It doesn’t really attempt to show that it is better, but prefers to fund dissident groups within the enemy state until it collapses, and everyone there is worse off. Which is harsh, but I can understand my friend’s position, since I have related gripes of my own. You see, the campaign forced me to protect the Traveller, the very model of a foreign interventionist, and I cannot overstate how much I resent that.

I started to become interested in Destiny’s lore after seeing some amazing fanart. Through copious amounts of research, I came to the conclusion that the Traveller is a downright bastard. If you haven’t read Shattered Suns, Rhulk’s backstory, you should. But below is a summary of what Rhulk said about his society as he sat on the Witness’s therapy couch, looking directly into the camera:

“Long ago, my planet, Lubrae, was inhabited by clans of hunter-gatherers. One day, the Traveller came and provided us with resources that helped us survive the dangerous flora and fauna of the forest where we lived. (It may have also genetically modified his people, if his ‘we evolved’ phrasing is to be taken at face value.) People were of two minds about how to continue after that. Some wanted to take advantage of these resources and settle down in a well-protected City. Others preferred to stay in the forest, and live like how they did before. As a result, they fought, and they were still fighting by the time I was born. I grew up watching the better-fed, better-armed City people murder members of my forest-dwelling clan on sight.”

His clan, Rhulk explained, was egalitarian, and relied on one another for safety. The Traveller’s uplifting of his species changed all of that. Lubraeans were able to manufacture Glaives and other tools to better protect themselves against the wildlife. The newly-introduced technology shifted their very conception of safety from the clan to the Glaive, from their fellow Lubraeans to objects that could be gathered into one City, be cordoned off, monopolised, hoarded, controlled. In that City, they invented oligarchy, soldiering as a profession, and the death penalty. They started to march troops into the forest, trying to rid it of its original inhabitants.

I have read books and reports on modern hunter-gatherer societies, and all of them conclude that first contact, if unavoidable, should be made with extreme caution. To quote the 2013 IWGIA report on indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact:

“[When we make initial contact,] what we are actually doing is forming the spearhead of a complex, cold and determined society that does not excuse adversaries with inferior technology. We are invading the lands they live on without being invited, without their agreement. We are introducing needs they have never had. We are destroying extremely rich social organisations. We are taking their peace and tranquillity away from them. We are launching them into a different, cruel and hard world. Often, we are leading them to their death.”

I do not like how the narrative of Destiny persistently exonerates the Traveller. At times, a character will rail vaguely against the “chaos” it causes, and the most frequent complaint we hear about it is that it left their species too soon. Rhulk was, to my knowledge, the only one to see the Traveller come to his world, distribute its technology among his people, dump a pile of societal problems into their laps as a result, saunter off without so much as a word, and subsequently come to the conclusion that Lubrae never needed the Traveller in the first place. And he was correct; it never did. I hope it is abundantly clear that if humans were to ever encounter an alien planet inhabited by hunter-gatherers who are themselves hunted by predators, our first course of action should not be to hand out shotguns left and right.

But what if we granted them different technology, such as high-yield crops? If human history is anything to go by, they would go on to invent chattel slavery. Agriculture increased the efficiency of food production, but humans, instead of distributing the labour evenly, have universally chosen to create an artificial underclass, and then force them to perform the majority of the labour. This was true in 2000 BC, and it remains true today. The fact of the matter is, societal issues can be much, much more difficult to solve than technological ones. The Traveller tripled human lifespan? So what? Humanity has already doubled it on our own, but we’re still struggling with concepts like “women deserve rights.”

Some might say that it does not matter, because those aliens would have invented all these things sooner or later, both the good and the bad; that the Traveller merely eased their transition into a prosperous future. To which I would respond: it does matter. They must be allowed to choose their fate. At the very least, they deserve an answer for why their prayers for safety and sustenance were answered in this ham-fisted manner. We are told that the Traveller wants to grant us freedom, but all it does is run roughshod over peoples’ right to self-determination. Look at what it did to the Witness’s homeworld. It terraformed an environment that sapient beings were already living in. Were the precursors not already adapted to the dry environment, physically and culturally? What is the purpose of making a forest sprout from the sand? Is it for the benefit of the nomads of the desert, or is it to reinforce the audience’s preconception of how utopia should look? Why does the game’s narrative re-iterate that the precursors ceaselessly sought answers from the Traveller, framing them as greedy, entitled, and unsatisfied with the “blessings” bestowed upon them? If I were a precursor, I would have questions too: what was wrong with the way I lived before? Why do you get to decide how I ought to live? Is walking away even an option at this point? Paradise is a prison when you cannot leave. Lubrae’s Wanderers tried, but they could not escape the new material conditions that the Light had imposed upon them.

Humans have had our share of prophets, many associated with millennia of internecine warfare. Now imagine if God, literal God, showed up in the desert one day, and stuck around until we achieved interstellar flight. The Traveller destroyed the precursors. We’re the unfortunate ones who have to deal with the consequences of its actions, if not its words. Destiny’s narrative insists that because the Traveller was silent, it is not responsible for what befell the precursors. That is untrue. Silent or not, the damage was done. The Traveller touched world after world, sending their peoples into crisis after crisis, and all the lore says on the subject is how much the Traveller cares about all of them. Truly. It can care all it likes, as long as it stops wielding the weapon of mass destruction strapped to its belly. Come here. Hand over the beam.

My opinion may sound extraordinary, but I assure you it is not. The following are some translated user comments, taken from the most-viewed version of the Witness origin cutscene from the Season of the Deep uploaded on Bilibili (video ID BV1Jm4y1t7cn):

“I feel that Traveller was messing around with the entire universe. In order to stop it, the Witness's people discovered the Veil and the Darkness, and tried to stop the Traveller from flooding everyone with its ‘kindness’. This caused the Traveller to embark on a foolish journey, drawing even more species into a cosmic war, just so it can continue to spread its so-called grace.”

“In summary: the Traveller tosses technology everywhere to all species, and then every species wants to expand their territory. It’s just setting fires everywhere.”

“I think the narrative may end up depicting the Traveller as a neutral power, or even close to a villain. After all, its existence has disrupted the fates of many species in the universe. No matter its original intentions, its unilateral interference is not a good thing. I don’t know how the plot will resolve; whether Light and Darkness will no longer continue to interfere in the universe, or whether the Darkness (Veil) will show its true face after the Witness is defeated…”

I am not cherry-picking. These are all highly-rated comments. You can go see for yourself. It’s fascinating that reactions like these are almost completely absent from the Anglophone fandom. I only reached my own opinion on the Traveller after extensive research, yet these fans on Bilibili took one look at that cutscene, and instinctively decided that our war is the Traveller’s fault. A vast Pacific lies between the writers of Destiny, and the messaging these players saw in its story. The game insists that the Traveller is innocent, that it always had good intentions; these fans say that intentions don’t matter when its actions have been the ruin of so many. Self-determination is more precious than any paradise a foreign saviour can grant.

On page 5 of The Rubicon, we see that the precursors learned well from their god. They began to journey among the stars, and render aid unto the other species they encountered. They did one better than the Traveller, in fact, as it appears that they actually bothered to ask those species beforehand why they may or may not desire aid, rather than park their ships in their skies and skip straight to the terraforming. Unfortunately, after too many refusals, the precursors decided to go to an even further extreme than their god. They would interfere in the life of every being in existence, all at once, forcing them to exist in an eternal, perfect moment. And unlike the Traveller, they would tell everyone exactly what was coming. The Final Shape.

Early on in the eponymous expansion, we discovered that the afterlife exists. Cayde-6 was perfectly aware and conscious after his death, suspended in a bright and comforting forever alongside his Ghost, Sundance. He enjoyed the experience, and disliked being resurrected yet again. This raises an incredible number of questions, but the thing that stood out to me the most was how familiar it sounded. How much it resembled what the Witness promised. For Zavala to be reunited with Hakim. For Crow to be reunited with Amanda. For Ikora to find peace in victory. And for us to…

I do not think the Witness was lying when it offered all of those things. It was not lying when it gave each of its disciples a different vision of its ultimate goal. Whether it was capable of carrying through is one thing, but whether it was honest is another, and I believe it was honest. Its Final Shape is a natural extension of what Guardians receive in death. Whereas Guardians are granted a peaceful eternity with their Ghost, the Witness would try to simultaneously grant every sapient creature an end in kind, tailored to their individual desires. That is not to say, I agree with its end. The Witness was a tyrant as much as the Traveller is a bastard, especially since it threatened to punish people for eternity, too, out of nothing but the pettiness in its bitter heart. Yes, I concur, I am a pawn of the light, but I will not suffer to be your pawn, either.

What I wanted to say after that, rebuking its offer to make me into a disciple, is: “I will join you, if you let me save you.”

[mariacallous]

Even as a growing number of foreign governments commit to protecting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) people, others are actively marshaling their resources against them. From the Hungarian government’s legal and political attacks on LGBTQI+ people to Iraqi legislation that punishes those who “promote homosexuality” and increases criminal penalties and fines for same-sex relations, the negative trends are significant and concerning.

In many places, politicians blame LGBTQI+ people for a wide array of societal ills to boost their popularity at home and their geopolitical interests abroad, distracting from the real economic, social, and political challenges their countries face. In Georgia, for example, the ruling party may have used anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric to manipulate the political landscape ahead of elections. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, a country long considered relatively welcoming for LGBTQI+ people in the Middle East, one activist described a political leader’s rhetoric as “the manufacturing of a moral panic in order to justify a crackdown, and to deviate public attention away from their unpopular policies.”

Although human rights are seen by some as a lower-priority foreign-policy issue for the United States than so-called hard security threats, the failure to protect them abroad can have significant negative consequences for U.S. interests. Now more than ever, the United States needs to push back against foreign-government repression of LGBTQI+ rights while also doing this work at home. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it recently, this matters “not just because we have a moral imperative to do so,” but because doing so “helps strengthen democracy, bolster national security, and promote global health and economic development.”

Across a range of issues, it’s clear that anti-LGBTQI+ policies and rhetoric can cause significant damage to many of the United States’ top foreign-policy priorities.

To start, efforts to repress LGBTQI+ rights are often a canary in the coal mine for more severe persecution to come. A 2022 report found, for example: “From Nazi Germany to genocide in Darfur to the breakup of former Yugoslavia, the imposition of ‘moral’ codes that directly assault sexual and gender identities and freedoms came before widespread state-led physical violence and atrocity crimes.”

The targeting of LGBTQI+ people can also be a precursor to, or occur alongside, abuses against other vulnerable populations. The Taliban-promoted sexual assault of and life-threatening attacks on LGBTQI+ people, for example, have occurred concurrently with brutal restrictions on women’s and girls’ participation in education, work, and other aspects of public life. Likewise, vicious torture of gay men in the Russian Republic of Chechnya has taken place against a wider backdrop of long-term human rights abuses by Chechen authorities.

Erosion of LGBTQI+ human rights can also signal and exacerbate the breakdown of democratic norms and institutions, including restrictions on independent media and judicial review, serving as a bellwether for the state of civil society more generally. Russia’s recent detention and prosecution of LGBTQI+ people have paralleled its crackdown on independent journalists, human rights defenders, and civil society.

Countries in which the human rights of LGBTQI+ people are less respected also frequently have greater levels of corruption, partly because discriminatory legal regimes create barriers to reporting wrongdoing by corrupt officials, making LGBTQI+ people an easy target for extortion. Corruption, in turn, compounds other pressing problems: It degrades the business environment, drives migration, and impedes responses to public health crises and climate change. States with endemic corruption are also more vulnerable to terrorist networks, transnational organized crime, gang-related criminal actors, and human traffickers. This is, in part, because threats to transparent and accountable governance are among the root causes of radicalization, and restrictions on LGBTQI+ and other civil society organizations reduce the capacity of those groups to mitigate the conditions conducive to violent extremism, terrorism and other criminal activity.

Not only are anti-LGBTQI+ policies a drag on economic growth, but they are also detrimental to public health. Punitive laws fan the flames of stigma and discrimination, in turn making vulnerable communities reluctant to seek life-saving and public health-protecting services. Across 10 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, HIV prevalence in countries that criminalize homosexuality is five times higher among men who have sex with men than in countries without those laws.

Taken together, the failure to protect LGBTQI+ people’s human rights can create disastrous effects for U.S. interests. State-sponsored discrimination and violence undercut the United States’ tremendous investments in international anti-corruption efforts, counter-terrorism programs, economic development, and public health. And, as the COVID-19 pandemic made clear, a disease threat anywhere can quickly become a disease threat everywhere. The same can be said for terrorism, corruption, and economic instability. When governments target LGBTQI+ people, they also increase the chances that the symptoms and consequences of this repression will spread in their communities and across borders.

Given the stakes, it is crucial that the United States uses the tools and powers it has to promote accountability for human rights abuses and mitigate their harms to U.S. citizens and businesses.

In this respect, the recent heightened repression by the Ugandan government is illustrative. In May 2023, Uganda signed into law the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA), which mandated the death penalty for certain “serial” offenses and a 20-year prison sentence for the mere “promotion” of homosexuality. Although the legislation was decried by human rights advocates, it was lauded by some of Uganda’s geopolitical partners as evidence of shared interests. Shortly after the legislation was passed, the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Uganda and made the unfortunately common—and demonstrably inaccurate—claim that homosexuality is a Western import. He also identified opposition to Western support for LGBTQI+ people as “another area of cooperation for Iran and Uganda.” In similar fashion, an editorial on the pro-Kremlin Tsargrad website summarized the law as “a geopolitical victory [for Russia], which they see as the direct result of years of their hard, methodical work [on a] global anti-LGBTQ hate campaign.”

The AHA was the final, egregious straw amid an ongoing decline in respect for human rights, including of LGBTQI+ people, and democratic backsliding in Uganda, and the United States’ response was swift and comprehensive. Underscoring the link between the violation of the human rights of LGBTQI+ people and broader harms to American interests, U.S. President Joe Biden described the law as part of an “alarming trend of human rights abuses and corruption.” The United States issued a business advisory; updated the U.S. Travel Advisory and Country Information Page for Uganda; expanded existing visa restrictions to include those repressing vulnerable populations, such as human rights advocates, LGBTQI+ people, and environmental defenders; supported the World Bank’s decision to pause Uganda’s access to new funds; and imposed sanctions on the Commissioner General of the Uganda Prisons Service for widespread violations of human rights, including credible reports of physical abuse of political opposition and LGBTQI+ people. President Biden also determined that Uganda did not meet the eligibility requirements of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), “on the basis of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Although the law remains in place, these actions and international attention have had effect: Uganda’s government has not conducted widespread roundups of or ordered death sentences against LGBTQI+ people. But violence, abuse, and evictions have increased in the country, and arrests of LGBTQI+ people have persisted and likely risen under an earlier, colonial-era law that criminalizes same-sex conduct.

As the situation in Uganda demonstrates, the United States has options to respond to foreign governments that fail to uphold their human rights obligations. These measures can be unilateral, as is the case for issuing travel advisories or removing trade preferences, or multilateral, which could involve working with the United Nations, the World Bank, or other multilateral institutions. They can also be affirmative, as opposed to punitive—for instance, expanding humanitarian and development assistance for human rights defenders and mobilizing private sector capital to support businesses that operate consistent with international non-discrimination standards.

As with all diplomatic efforts to address wrongdoing, the choice among these options will vary depending on circumstances, such as whether a government is launching a new campaign against LGBTQI+ people or has an older but little-enforced criminal law on its books. Inevitably, the importance of raising human rights concerns will be weighed against other U.S. priorities, and human rights will not always prevail. However, increasingly, LGBTQI+ issues are being integrated into bilateral relationships, even when doing so is not easy and when quiet diplomacy is the only option. In all circumstances, consultation with LGBTQI+ civil society must be prioritized in weighing the benefits and risks of action to ensure that efforts do not contribute to backlash or negative repercussions for LGBTQI+ people on the frontlines of global human rights movements.

In a recent State Department convening on LGBTQI+ rights in U.S. foreign policy, Secretary Blinken made our commitment clear, telling civil society leaders: “Our promise is this: We will be with you every step of the way. We’ll persevere with you. We’ll listen to you. We’ll learn from you. We’ll help resource and support your fight. And we’ll bring our strength together with yours so that finally together we can build a world where all people are genuinely free—free to be who they are, free to love who they love.”

Although this work may have been in the spotlight during Pride month, it requires our focus year-round. Indeed, our national security depends on it.