#its a lot of information but it’s important stuff

[whatcouldpossiblyg0wr0ng]

Hey you make your own clothes a lot right? First: that's really cool. Second: I would love to do that & I don't know where I would even start. Do you have any tips?

yeah so ive got a cert 3 for clothes making/pattern making and im part way through a degree on it. Here a few things you need to know

Buy a cheap ass domestic sewing machine. One that can do a little bit of everything. If you dont know what i mean by domestic i mean the ones that arent attached to the tables and cost minimum $1000. Depending on your economy a good price will change but my current one was $150 aus dollards. Look for one specifically that comes with a few different feet and has options for buttonholes, zigzag, and straight stitches. These three are pretty much all you need to make most clothes

fabric scissors. Just get some sharp scissors from whatever store, but make sure they are actually sharp. Once you have them DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES USE THEM ON ANYTHING BUT FABRIC. Trust. Itll dull way to quick and youll need to get more just dont do it. If you dont already have paper scissors just get a cheap pair

go to a fabric store. Get some money saved and go to a store. You need to touch the fabric and see it in person to have any idea what you like. I recommend cotton or polyester for the first project because its friendly most of the time. Buy at least 20cm more than your pattern says you need just to be on the safe side. There might be a stain on the fabric or you might make a mistake. Better to have a little more than less. you should also buy a pattern. I recommend finding something basic but you would wear happily like a pair of pants or skirt with an elastic waistband. non elastic waistbands get complicated quickly so stick to elastic at first. You want to find something that matches the fabric you want to use. If your pattern is specifically for stretch fabrics then dont get none stretch fabric. You are less likely to succeed.

get yourself some pins. people have differing opinions on pins but if youre working with cotton or poly then it will be fine. You want long ones with a pearl end. The flat head ones hurt your fingers after a few hours trust me

Now you have basic equipment! Yay!

now most of the instructions from here will depend on what pattern youre starting with and all the instructions you need should be in the envelope. I will give you just a few tips that cover basically everything

Pick your favourite side of the fabric before cutting it. This is your right side. Pay attention to whether your instructions say to cut right side up (rsu) or pairs. If it says you need pairs of things then fold your fabric with selvages touching and right side together. That way its less likely to be visibly stained.

fabric has this thing called a grainline. Your pattern pieces will have a long line with arrows on it. Line those up parallel to the selvage of the fabric. The selvage is the ugly looking strip on the edges of rolls of fabric. Use a ruler or book or something to make sure everything is parallel

most of the seams you find are closed seams meaning you sew the straight stitch with right sides together and then overlock. Instead of overlocking the edges just sew your machine to zigzag and line it up so the edge gets caught on one side of the zigzag. This will stop it from fraying unless your fabric is evil. But how do you know if the fabric is evil you say? Trust me you will know.

but i dont want to have closed seams you say. Well theres an option called french seams where the raw edge of the fabric is held inside the seam! I wouldnt do it on your first project but you can half the seam allowance (how far from the edge your sew a straight line) and go from there pretty easily. Theres plenty of tutorials for this on youtube if youre interested

Your sewing machine should come with different bits that go on the machine where the needle is. They are called Feet and they are your friend. They let you do cool things like zippers and buttonholes. Theres plenty of youtube tutorials on how to use those too

if your fabric is stretchy then zigzag the seams where you would normally sew straight lines and then zigzag the raw edge too. This lets it stretch without popping stitches.

this should all get you started for your first garment! Its important to check that you understand what youre doing before you do it. Your patterns will say everything you need to know for each garment and the back should tell you what size you should be looking at and what you need.

if youve got more questions then let me know ill be happy to explain!

[carmenpeach]

i wish my phone wasnt on the brink of death so i could show my "grandpa style gamer rig"

[santae-salt]

so the main takeaway from this blog is just "fuck santae never play it and never give them money" right? maybe im just rly stupid but idk how you can say "i love santae but heres every bad thing ever about the site and why the staff sucks"

This is a real "how dare you say we piss on the poor moment"

[spelldealer]

i had an insane dream last night…

[icarus-suraki]

I don't like wading into Ao3 debates, but I want to give my professional opinion on Ao3 with regard to archives vs. libraries.

I am a professional librarian (MSLS) and I have worked in both archives and public libraries and a lot of the confusion and concern I see surrounding Ao3 is a fundamental misunderstanding of How Archives Work.

An archive is a collection related to a subject. That subject is often a person but sometimes a field or concept or project. And the purpose of an archive is to keep everything. And I mean everything. I was going to say "short of biohazards" but since I know there's a sealed R. Crumb Devil Gal chocolate bar in the UNC Chapel Hill archives, we really do mean everything.

When a collection of materials--which are usually unique and original and can be photos, manuscripts, letters, recordings (audio and/or visual), notes and notebooks, objects, published books, whatever--on and/or from the subject arrive at the archive, they are examined, preserved for longevity, accessioned and cataloged (added to the archive's records), and added to the archive. You measure collections in linear feet. As in, once it's all preserved and boxed and secure, you note how many feet of shelf space it takes up. And some of y'all on Ao3 have a lot of linear feet to your name (and I'm proud of you).

This is an archive: it is designed to preserve the original materials related to a subject. That is its purpose. Archives are how we have the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, for example, or the Lomax recordings of American folksongs, or Tijuana Bibles, or James Joyce's loveletters to Nora.

Now you, a member of the public, can access some archives. Some are easier to access than others. The one I worked in was open to the public; good luck getting into the British Archives without a good reason.

So now apply this to Ao3--which is an archive both in name and in purpose. It is intended to preserve fan-created content long term. And this means everything, whether you personally like the materials or not. It is a repository for as much as possible.

And the "whether you personally like the materials or not" is important, hence why I mentioned Jim's loveletters and Tijuana Bibles in particular. (RIP Jim, you would have loved pegging.)

If it's made by fans and it exists, we should keep it to document the history and progression of fandom. That is the point. We have lost enough materials related to the subject of fans of media and we don't need to lose any more.

The fact of the matter is that Ao3 is only one facet of the OTW, which preserves other fan-related materials (convention booklets and zines, for example). Somehow Ao3, an archive on the subject of fanfiction, has been divorced from the rest of the project, mostly by way of "purity culture" and panic over "dangerous" fiction.

The fact that you can go through an archive and find interesting information is the other side of archives. No, they shouldn't be like the banker's box of old letters stuffed in my closet. Yes, they should be organized and as accessible as is appropriate for the state of the materials.

It's really, really cool to find stuff in an archive, I'm not even going to lie. I have done it before and I will do it again. And yet there are other items in an archive that I might not want or need or be interested in at all--but they're still there. That's the cataloging and accessioning: to keep up with what's there, to stay "on topic" with collecting, and to be able to find things in that archive. Bless the tag wranglers who are doing the cataloging at Ao3.

The pearl clutching seems to come from 1. the creation of "dangerous" fanworks and 2. public access to those "dangerous" fanworks. These are issues of "purity culture" and opinions on censorship and should not involve Ao3.

Ao3, under the umbrella of the OTW, is a documentation and preservation project first and foremost.

[klavery]

today is the 4 year anniversary of my minecraft bedrock world :)

[arolesbianism]

Every day I shake and cry as I stare longingly at years old posts and threads abt oni lore knowing very well that even if the original poster still gives a shit abt oni lore they probably don't give as much of a shit as I do

[caelanglang]

once i opened twt to this lmao (hey i was properly credited tho… *insert clown emoji and music*)

jokes aside i know that this is a weird anon whose accounts disappear after a whole but wow their dedication is wow i see zero traces of chuuya lol)

there is so much art reposting (and subsequent reposted art sharing) in this fandom. Is that a topic that fell off the face of the earth in the late 2010s and no one took the time to explain to you why and how you shouldn't do it?

First, reposting art means saving or copying the art to create a new post and/or putting it on another platform yourself. On tumblr, reblogging (the two arrows 🔄) is not reposting, as the original poster is still directly linked to it.

Reposting art without asking the artist's permission is rude more often than not. Many artists even have a "do not repost" warning on their page.

Why is this rude? There are a vast range of reasons, and the first one is always because the artist, a person, expressed a wish, and that's on you to respect it.

Other reasons include, for example, fanartists wanting to see the fandom's feedback and be inspired to continue to share (shaking hands with the fanfic writers), artists needing the word-of-mouth advertising as they depend on commissions and/or independent shops income for living, and just generally wanting to keep their own stuff close.

As fellow fans and/or art enjoyers, not having clear credit and link back to the artist is also sad and frustrating. What if we wanted to see more? What if there was a whole collection of similar things and we'll never know?

I know you want to share the cute art you saw elsewhere specifically because you liked it, and it comes from a place of love. I get that. You could share it with your friends behind closed door (ex: private discord server), or post a link to the art and the artist instead of posting the piece on its own.

On a case-by-case basis, you can ask an artist if you can repost their art. Some will allow it under certain conditions! Your responsibility is to respect their wishes. That is a person sharing their creation. Be nice.

"credit to the artist" is not credit.

"I don't know who made this, if anyone knows tell me" is not credit.

"this was from pinterest" is not credit. (<- pinterest is 90% repost, not a source at all)

Posting art that isn't yours is so rude and sharing reposted art just as much.

This is frustrating. Stop reposting art without asking, and especially stop reposting art without credit. And stop sharing reposted art where clear consent wasn't given by the original artist.

[ms-demeanor]

Due to some stuff brought up in recent posts I believe it is time to once again extol the virtues of Ms-Demeanor's Patented Where Did I Put That Fucking Paper Organizational Binder.

Hello! I am a disorganized adult! This is the system by which I manage my important shit like pink slips for my car and medical records and tax information.

You're going to need:

A 3-Ring Binder

Transparent Sheet Protectors

Notebook dividers (optional but VERY useful)

A backpack (optional)

So the way this system works is you put the sheet protectors into the binder. You can either use the dividers to divide the binder into sections or you can label some of the sheet protectors to make different sections but what you are generally going to do is make sections of the binder labeled things like "taxes" or "vet" or "doctor" and put a few sheet protectors in each section.

Then all of your papers with important information get crammed in that folder. You don't organize them, you don't sort them by date, you don't alphabetize. You put things vaguely relating to taxes into the sheet protectors in the taxes section. You put things relating to cars in the cars section. You don't even attempt to make this readable - you're not using sheet protectors so that you can read each page and keep it legible, you're using sheet protectors because it's a cheap plastic bag that will sit nicely in a binder.

You CAN put stuff into the individual sheet protectors when you get it, but let's be realistic you probably WON'T do that, so just tuck individual papers into the front of the binder until you get to a critical mass of paperwork then take an hour to sit down and sort into categories and put it in the binder once every six months to three years (depending on how frequently you get paperwork). Sometimes these sections will outgrow their original allotted space - since my spouse had a transplant surgery the medical section has had to become its own folder - and that's okay. If you end up with multiple folders just keep them together (this is why the backpack is an option, and one I strongly recommend).

Because yeah, if my organization system relies on opening up a drawer and putting something where it belongs as soon as I get the paper, I will simply not be organized. It's not going to happen. But I can handle a messy stack of paper that sits in one place and grows until it is time to shove it into a binder. I can't organize things for thirty seconds a day every day but I can organize things for an hour once every year or so (maybe two hours every five years when I sort out stuff I don't need like copies of warranties for parts on a car I don't own anymore).

When my mom died she had about fifty pounds of paper files in her office that were neatly organized in a system that didn't make any sense to my dad, my sister, and I. I ended up sorting through those files for twenty hours, tossing out copies of paid invoices from ten years ago and student handbooks from my junior high school. I reduced one filing cabinet, two desk file drawers, and a foot-high stack to a six inch binder that I gave to my dad. My mom died five years ago; two months ago my dad asked me about a medical document and I was able to tell him to go look for it in the medical section of the binder. It was there, because ALL IMPORTANT SHIT GOES IN THE BINDER.

Where is my birth certificate? In the binder. Where is my tax return from 2017? In the binder. Where is the record of my dog's last rabies shot? In the binder. Where are the records for my life insurance? In the binder.

A lot of what people consider "being organized" breaks down to whether or not you can find the specific things that you're looking for. Does my binder look nice? Is it aesthetic? Does it have color-coded tabs and papers all laid out neatly? Absolutely fucking not. But if you ask me where to find a paper I know that I can do so within about five minutes of shuffling through the pile of letter-folded sheets that I pulled out of the appropriate section of the binder.

I've discussed the Where Did I Put that Fucking Paper Binder before, but now it is time to expand that concept to the Backpack of Important Shit.

You likely have Important Shit that does not fit in a binder. Some of my Important Shit that does not fit in a binder is stuff like jewelry and the spare key for my car. Other stuff - the reason I decided to bring this up at all - includes my backup hard drive and packaging (including product key codes) for pretty much all of the software that I own. This is also where I store printed out copies of the recovery codes for most of the online accounts that I have.

There's a lot of weird fiddly shit that we have to have that we might not access all that often. This is the kind of stuff that might end up in junk drawers or under sinks or in disused laptop bags or kicking around under a bunch of papers in a desk drawer.

It doesn't matter so much when that weird fiddly shit is a set of hex keys or a utility knife or a protractor or a copy of a student handbook but it DOES matter when it's something that you might need to put your hands on in a hurry. If your computer crashes, you're not going to want to track down the software in the back of a filing cabinet and the backup drive from somewhere in the bowels of your desk. If you lock your keys in your car you are not going to want to figure out if your spare is in a junk drawer or the old purse where you keep semi-important stuff or the tin on your desk that has buttons and pins and headphone covers. Just put it in the Backpack of Important Shit and when you need it you know where to look.

So anyway, if you are a person who is a minor disaster who has trouble finding important things when you need them please don't think that you have to get your life together and have a nice organized filing cabinet or clear plastic bins full of documents or a neatly divided storage closet where everything from board games to backup drives has its own neatly labeled place. Just assign ONE LOCATION for important shit and start putting the important shit there. It doesn't matter if you have a filing cabinet where you keep old copies of homework and printouts of online orders and family history records - you do not need to keep everything that is file-able in one place and depending on what level of catastrophe you are it might be detrimental to you if you try to do that. It doesn't matter if you have a jewelry box where you keep your collection of gauges and wrist cuffs; if you are going to stress out about where grandma's ring is when you're digging through your collection of cheap earrings and silver pendants then *do not keep grandma's ring or any other Important, Vital, Cannot Be Lost jewelry in with your day-to-day wear*.

I live someplace that has fires. My binder got upgraded to my Backpack of Important Shit when the fires were getting uncomfortably close to the house I was living in and I wanted to have one bag to grab if we had to get out fast. Once I did that, I never took the binder out of the backpack and the backpack has now made three moves with me and has meant that I've had my birth certificate handy when I needed it in the middle of a move between two states, I was able to provide a history of my cholesterol panel going back six years to a visiting nurse, and I was able to give the exact names and contact info of my spouse's previous surgeon to the hospital when I had unexpectedly moved to a new state with three bags and my work computer at the beginning of the pandemic.

Get yourself a backpack of important shit and a folder of where the fuck did i put that paper. It is so much easier to search a backpack for important shit than to go through an entire house and it is so much easier to flip through a binder than it is to dig through a filing cabinet.

Anyway good luck and happy adulting.

[lurkingshan]

Japanese BL Starter Pack

It’s been awhile since I dropped a rec list, so I am here today to share one that is very near and dear to my heart—a Japanese bl primer for those who are new to the jbl game. I created this for @neuroticbookworm to help her on her journey when she decided she wanted to start getting into Japanese works. The fandom (on Tumblr and generally) tends to focus primarily on Thai shows because they are the easiest to access for international fans, since Thailand is working its way toward world domination via ql media and wants us all to be able to watch. But there is a lot of great stuff to watch beyond the easy access Thai channels, and Japan is the country where this genre originated, so its shows are important for anyone who considers themselves a bl fan. Japan doesn’t cater nearly as much to the international audience so tracking down the shows sometimes takes some ingenuity and can-do spirit, but that’s part of the fun!

And so, the list! Bookworm is about halfway through it and having a ball, so I figured it was time to stop hoarding it and share it with anyone else who would like to dip their toes into jbl and isn’t quite sure where to start. A few notes: 

I am not here to teach you about the deep roots of the jbl genre or give you a primer on yaoi manga. I am by no means an expert and there are other places to find that information. Start here with this great post by @nieves-de-sugui and then maybe wander over to @absolutebl to read up more on the evolution of the genre.

This list is by no means an exhaustive accounting of every important Japanese bl ever made; it is simply a nice sampler platter of the cream of the crop among various styles you will find in jbl. Watching through this whole list will not only expose you to some fantastic shows, but also give you a sense of what makes jbl unique and how the country’s style differs from others, and point you toward the types of jbl you’ll like most (they tend to put shows in pretty specific style and tone lanes and once you find the ones you like there are lots more where that came from). 

If you’re coming to this post as a jbl lover and you don’t see your favorite here, I promise it’s not because I don’t love it very much; I simply had to make some choices to get this down to a reasonable shortlist. Feel free to leave extra recs for others to find! 

I’m putting these in a loose suggested watch order that will take you through the various jbl lanes in a kind of popcorn style, because I always think it’s good to change it up so you don’t get too stuck in one mode, and it works its way up to most of the extremely Japanese stuff (you will know what that means by the time you finish). But do what’s in your heart and change up the order if you want, friends, I am not the boss of you! 

Cherry Magic (Crunchyroll or grey)

gif by @liyazaki

I believe everyone on Tumblr is pretty familiar with this one, which is not a coincidence—this is one of the most accessible jbls. Not in terms of actual access to watch it, mind you (we’ve all jumped through shady internet hoops to watch it) but in terms of its content and style. Cherry Magic is a classic workplace romcom with a magical twist, and it is charming af. It’s a great exemplar of Japan’s light and zippy comedy lane for bl—a lane in which, importantly, the romances stay chaste even when the actual plot is about sex, or lack thereof. My friend @waitmyturtles would kill me if I didn’t make sure you know that Cherry Magic also has a lovely follow up film. And bonus: there is now a Thai remake airing so if you watch the original you can get in on the discussion about the different adaptations between countries. This is pretty easy to find these days in all the usual places, but I strongly recommend watching it here.

Old Fashion Cupcake (Viki)

gif by @liyazaki

Moving on to a slightly more mature workplace romcom. Old Fashion Cupcake, another Tumblr favorite, is an age gap boss-subordinate romance, and it’s both very adult and somehow wholesome af at the same time. Sure, there is a lot of carnal desire going on here, but there is also a lot of wooing via fluffy pancakes. It’s a tight five episodes and a fantastic example of what Japan, with its extreme technical precision in writing, directing, editing, pacing, and acting firing on all cylinders, can do in two hours. There’s not an ounce of flab on this thing and you’ll want to watch it over and over again.

Utsukushii Kare (Viki)

gif by @wanderlust-in-my-soul

Time to get a little weird! Weird is a key feature of Japanese media, and lots of jbls explore unusual relationship dynamics rooted in complex psychology. This is the first show on the list that will likely feel very Japanese if you’re new around here—my advice is to lean into it and finish the show, even if you get uncomfortable along the way. In Japanese media, discomfort always serves a purpose. This is a high school story with a twisted relationship at its center, and I’m not saying any more than that. Don’t spoil yourself and go watch it! This one also comes with two sequels—one short second season and one movie—that continue from the original story. They are less essential but still excellent.

I Cannot Reach You (Netflix)

gif by @my-rose-tinted-glasses

Next up, another high school tale, but with a totally different vibe. This show is kind of a revelation in its willingness to tell a story about overwhelming desire—including sexual desire—with young protagonists. It’s rooted in a classic but often misunderstood trope, friends to lovers, and takes the angst of it seriously, giving us a low stakes story that feels extremely high stakes to our leads. It’s also gorgeous and uses a classic Japanese visual style (bokeh) that you’ll be dying to learn more about. 

His (Viki)

gif by @gabrielokun

Time for a break from high school, and we’ll sprinkle in a movie for some added flavor. His is a jbl film featuring a second chance romance between a stoic, introverted man who moves to a remote town to start over, and his ex-boyfriend who follows him there unexpectedly, adorable child in tow. Importantly, this movie does not take place in what we often refer to as the “bl bubble” where homophobia doesn’t exist; the leads’ experiences of being gay men in a homophobic society are hugely important to the plot and themes of the story. It’s a beautiful film and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched it. @bengiyo would surely also like me to tell you that this film follows a brief prequel show called His: I Didn’t Mean to Fall in Love about the characters originally meeting in high school; I do not think it’s really necessary to watch it but completists can start there.

The Pornographer series (Gaga)

By now you should be ready to get into some classic Japanese fucked up psychosexual material, right? Right! The Pornographer series is told in five installments in this order:

The Novelist, a six episode miniseries

Mood Indigo, a six episode prequel series

Spring Life, a 15 minute short

Pornographer: Playback, a two hour film

Spring Life Continued, a 15 minute short

Confused by that distribution model? So say we all; sometimes Japan likes to make us work for it to make sure we really appreciate its many gifts to us. The story across these installments is about a very difficult to love protagonist, what makes him the way he is, and the also-unhinged-but-in-a-different-way man who finally gets through to him. It’s an extremely satisfying love story and one of the best character arcs I have ever seen, full stop. For this one, you’ll want to just pull the word problematic out of your pocket and store it in a drawer; nearly everything that happens in this story is problematic and that’s the point. Lean in! All of these installments except for the film are on Gaga, if you get that far hmu and I will supply you with the final puzzle piece.

Our Dining Table (Gaga)

You could probably use a break after those last two, so it’s time to shift over to a heart-tugging twofer: family trauma mixed with the cutest shit you’ve ever seen. ODT is an example of another classic type of Japanese show: the food drama (you will see the GOAT in this category at the end of this list). In Japanese culture, food is love, and the act of preparing food for your loved ones is a common path to romance. You’ll love this story about an isolated office worker who meets a pair of brothers, learns to cook as a way of connecting with them, and begins to heal from his own trauma as a result. The image above is a scan from the manga, which @troubled-mind curates to make extremely cool comparison sets like this one. Many jbls are faithful adaptations of yaoi manga source material, so it’s good to have a bit of familiarity with them.

Minato’s Laundromat (Gaga)

gif by @liyazaki

Japanese media loves to explore taboo, and often manages to do it in a way that is surprisingly light and chaste. This is an age gap romance between a teenager and his adult neighbor that explores internalized homophobia, emotional repression, and falling in love across seemingly impossible social chasms. It’s also a great example of old school yaoi seme-uke dynamics that still show up across the bl genre. Also, take my advice: end your journey with this one with the first season and just pretend season 2 doesn’t exist.

Eternal Yesterday (Viki)

gif by @wanderlust-in-my-soul

Remember what I said about weird? Time to do that again, but with a heaping dose of grief and pain on top. It’s not a spoiler to tell you this show involves a major character death; a major character death is, in fact, the root of the entire story. This is a magic realist tale of first love turned tragic, and it will hurt and heal you. It is one of my favorite dramas of all time.

Restart After Come Back Home (Gaga)

And now for a break for your poor exhausted brain. This film is basically the jbl version of a Hallmark original movie, about a city boy who goes back home to the country and falls in love with a total sweetheart while working together on a farm. Enjoy it, bestie, you’ve earned it! 

Tokyo in April Is… (Gaga)

gif by @wanderlust-in-my-soul

You’ve probably noticed by now that emotional repression and failed communication are big themes in Japanese works. This second chance romance has plenty of both, and it’s a great example of a kind of muted emotional style that Japan does so well, where the surface of the story seems almost placid and calm even as deep emotion roils underneath. This one (and Eternal Yesterday above) are part of a special line up of jbls on Japanese channel MBS called Tonku (Drama) Shower. The shows air one after another in the same time slot on Fridays (in Japan, perhaps Thursdays for you depending on where you live) and you truly never know what you’re gonna get, but they’re all interesting. Warnings on this one for sexual assault and trauma. 

The End of the World With You (Viki)

Time for sexy and weird again, but even more so! This has to be one of the most unique bls ever made; it goes to some truly divine and strange places, and it feels incredibly queer while doing it. Made by the same screenwriter/director of the Pornographer series with a lot of the same sensibilities, but in a more heightened apocalyptic setting. This one has existential angst, a road trip, a redemption tale, and a variety of interesting side characters in the mix.

What Did You Eat Yesterday? (Gaga)

gif by @my-rose-tinted-glasses

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of the list and your reward is watching one of the best bls of all time, and a perfect slice of life food drama to boot. WDYEY now has two seasons (along with a couple specials and a movie that fall in between) because the universe clearly loves us. You can now get it on Gaga for easy access but I’m partial to the versions over at @kinounaniresource for better subs. Wherever you watch, settle in to get cozy with Shiro and Kenji and make sure to always eat before you hit play.

[moonlit-imagines]

Headcanons for being the Justice League’s computer intelligence

Justice League x reader

warnings:

a/n: THANKS BABE. this is such an old request i am so freaking sorry

prompt: anonymous: “Hello! I would like to request a Justice League (DC Extended Universe) + Reader who is sort of their 'Person in the Chair' - helping behind the scenes to keep their weapons/powers/skillset in tact, but is not afraid to fight back if necessary? I would like these to be a set of headcanons, please? Thank you and Happy Writing! P.S. You're writing is incredible!”

you and alfred got along well

“glad i’m not the only one doing the grunt work anymore” -alfred

“and i was under the impression you loved this job” -you, sarcastically

you could frequently be found switching between important sites that actually helped during missions and reddit

“alfred hang on i want your opinion on this: ‘am i the asshole for trying on my bosses suit? i (25m) work with some pretty famous people and my boss (45m) has a really cool suit. it’s a little stiff but i think i like it. anyways, there’s a matching hat (if you will) and it smells AWFUL, so i sprayed it with febreeze but it only made it worse—’” -you

“hang on. this cant be…” -alfred

“HOW DID YOU FIND MY REDDIT ACCOUNT?!” -barry, over comms

“your name is scarletspeedster, and we’ve been trying to wash that febreeze smell from the cowl for weeks.” -you

“my god, barry. next time, just use an old suit” -alfred

“really?!” -barry

“no” -you and alfred

you do a lot of gadget/weapon design with JL members

“it’s acceptable” -bruce

“wow, thanks” -you

“it’s…it’s good work. i mean it” -bruce

diana sits with you and tells you stories, sometimes theyre very informational

“so if you ever do end up fighting, you’re going to want to craft a very nice sword for yourself. i know you’re good at that, you’ll do just fine” -diana

barry nerds out with you sometimes

he gets real excited when he sees you designing stuff on the computer

and tries to be helpful

“wind resistance might be a problem with this design, you should go sleeker” -barry

“hey, barry? if you don’t let me do my job im gonna design a tool specifically to shut you up” -you

“harsh!” -barry

“sorry, maybe a little too far. but let me work” -you

arthur wanted cooler clothes

“can i get you some material from atlantis so you can make me a nicer suit?” -arthur

“only if you bring me extra so i can have fun with it” -you

“not a problem for the king, its a deal” -arthur

clark didn’t really need/want much

but he was a great help when testing new weapons and suits

“can you just…laser vision that target right ahead. new suit material” -you

“yeah, stand back” -clark

it held for a good 20 seconds

“better than i thought” -you

you were their eyes in the sky on missions

directions, lookout, enemies, obstacles, detours, you name it

and yeah, maybe victor could also do a great deal of this stuff, but you got to do it behind the scenes and you actually got paid pretty well for it

but occasionally you did ask him for tech support

“victor, the batcomputer froze” -you

“i know, i did that on purpose” -vic

“can you unfreeze it so i can see what’s going on?” -you

“what’s the password?” -vic

*sigh* “ilovevicstone123” -you

diana let you spar with her sometimes

which honestly scared you every time bc you know she could kill you if she wanted to (but you knew she would never)

(but she could)

you’d never be apart of the justice league, which was very okay with you because you loved being behind the scenes and not being shot at

and so long and you had tea with alfred while the rest of them were kicking ass, you’d manage

taglist: @locke-writes // @captainshazamerica // @summersimmerus // @deanzboyfriend // @zoeyserpentluck // @mr-mxyzptlk-1940 //

[masochistkatsuki]

Team Player : How to Fuck your Friend Group 101

Pt One → Masterlist

When you're tasked with having sex with every person in your friend group, the friend who put you up to it isn't excluded either. With Mina Ashido, you either go big or go home. It's a life or death (dealing with your friends stupid flirting) situation, and only you can stop it !

Luckily for you, she's your best friend, which means you can have some fun and figure out your next moves on everyone else.

See, now, there are some 'odd' aspects of your friend group. You often found yourself stuck on whether the dynamics in-between members were normal. You'd seen a lot of people who were completely comfortable, content with being physically intimate while having a full understanding of the platonic relationship.

On the other hand, so many people criticized or didn't understand it all. A lot of people could never imagine doing that with their friends. Its not exactly fitting under that definition, is it ? As soon as you crossed that line, you were in-between being friends and something romantic.

So, you never really knew what to think of those moments where you stood on the line of okay and not okay. Everyone in the group had kissed all the others at least once-- stuff like that was just.. regular. The insult gay or skank lost all meaning by your third year. You all were close in a way that was extreme for most highschool friend groups, but even so, the only actual romantic development was between Mina and Kirishima. Right ?

A part of you felt like there was something there, but it was unreachable in your mind. It was stuck to the tip of your tongue, like the perfect word for a situation, but one you just couldn't remember.

It was a mystery you were determined to solve in your Third Year. You weren't one of the top students for nothing.

You'd been scouted by the Public Safety Commission in your last year of junior high, something only Mina knew. Ironically, this led to your first "encounter" with her. If fucking your friends was a course, you learnt Minas lesson first.

It was your second year, and Class 1-A got their hands on alcohol for the first time. By the end of the night, just about everyone was wasted. Of course the class reps stayed sober, and a few people stayed responsible. But the culprits of planning the party, Bakugous friend group, were all fucked up. Especially the classes notorious party girls : Mina, you, and Jirou (who was more dragged into this by extension but still)

You and Mina set her to bed after wiping down her makeup and leaving water and a few ibuprofen pills on her bedside table. From there, you two figured youd ride down the intoxication with a movie in your room.

This turned to you two sharing secrets, past stories, and overall character traits. Highschool drunk bonding really is like no other bond. It was a big part of you two becoming the closest friend duo in the class. You two had calmed down enough to remember what was going on, but the ongoing buzz made the air around you two hotter than it probably would've been.

Still tipsy, you told her your biggest secrets. One, you were in special commission training in order to secure a spot in public safety after graduation.. totally not an insane accomplishment and huge breach of contract to say.. But more important..!

"I think I like girls too.."

The pink hair and skinned girl looked up at you, instead of surprised, or shocked, she only seemed confused. "Girl.. are you just now..?" How did you just drop that insane bomb then act timid about a glass closet ?

"Hey !! What's that supposed to mean ?" You pulled away from where you were resting on top of her before, growing embarrassed.

"Nonono, dont worry !" She pulled you back onto her, "im sorry, I didnt mean to make you uncomfortable." She rubbed softly at your waist. Gentle and soft, something you always loved about her. Its probably why she so easily could coax this information from you.

"Its okay" You brushed the messy pastel fluffs from her eyes, looking straight into them. You had an idea, you just needed to ease the tension in. You knew you were both already feeling it. "You wanted to know more about the Public Safety Commission processes and procedures.. why don't we combine the two ?"

Sharp teeth biting into your neck pulled you out of your thought process. "Minaaa" You sang, finally willing to commit to her challenge.

She looked down at you, "Ohh, you have something in mind, don't you ?" She smiled, she often had to be in charge of people, especially the idiots. You were one of the few people who let others relax as you took a calm control over things. It was something not just she, but everyone liked about you.

You and Mina were two sides of the same coin, similar in a concerning amount of ways, but contrasting like complimentary colors. You two understood the other's wants and desires more than anyone else. If anyone was going to pleasure either of the girls, they knew it'd be their best friend.

It's times like these, when you're practically practicing for your future job, but also stripping Minas leopard tank top from her chest, panting a hot breath over her skin, you wonder if your love for girls and everything about them began with her.

Goosebumps rise across the expansive area, her nipples beginning to harden just slightly. You sigh, "You're so pretty, Mina." You bite softly at her underboob, trailing your tongue towards her sternum.

"I know" She giggled, light and airy. Pulling your hand towards her bright pink dolphin shorts. Throughout the fabric, you felt her wetted lips cling to the cloth, creating a perfect mold of it against your fingers, when you havent even taken anything down there off. "I think I'm ready.."

You smiled, proud you could get such a pretty girl going so fast. Perfect. "Mina Ashido" You spoke softly, but sternly.

She looked up at you giggling, "This is my favorite part !" You held back a smile, as much as she loved these stupid roleplays, she never took them too seriously either. It helped, honestly. Youd probably get embarrassed acting all serious for too long.

You grinned wider, "You have one chance to provide the information needed." adding pressure to the inner area, rubbing softly through the fabric to start a slow, teasing pace. Her head fell back slightly, and while she had bitten her lip to avoid being too loud too quick, a content sigh gave away that you were on the right track. "Or the Public Safety Commission will have to deal with you personally."

She bucked her hips into your palm, grinding steadily against it. The moist fabric and further secreting liquid soaked into your skin. How cute. "Please, just get to it already !!" She whined, but still mischievously flashed her teeth at you.

"Ah, ah" You scolded, though in a joking tone. You pressed your hand against her, giving her the pleasure she began to beg for, but holding her in place. "What was this about flattering comments ?"

"Oooh, so you're actually going to do it ?" She looked pleased, but also kinda shocked. "Youre so amazing~" She teased, though you knew she genuinely meant it, "Im so happy we have someone who'd do anything to protect the public's safety !" Okay now she was trying to rile you up.

You slid your fingers through the shorts and under her panties, resting your middle and pointer fingertips against the hood of her clit. Not enough to do anything serious, but the light touches were going to break her down eventually.

"Lets start." You looked at her, asking if she wanted to continue, not just the physical intimacy but overall conversation. She smiled at you, aegyo sal growing plump under her eyes.

"Sounds good, (Hero Name)." You smirked. You couldnt lie, it was pleasing how into this Mina would get.

"So who from the list is the easiest to start with ?" Your fingers started to slowly circle around where she wanted it, occasionally brushing over it when you were pushing your fingers up left.

Me, obviously, she thought, but her words got caught in her throat. "Mm.. its.." Her legs trembled a bit, spreading out.

'Jesus Mina. You really need to fuck.' You slowed your movements, and placed your spare hand on her thigh, bringing her back to where she was. "Eijirou..", She moaned, voice a little too sensual while saying his name.

You were still quite shocked that she wanted you to actually fuck him as well. In you, her, and Jirous personal group chat, the topic of Mina keeping him in her basement was one of the most recurring conversations. "And how's that ? Be specific, Ashido."

Itd been such a long time since anyone used her last name, in the right context, it could feel like it was someone calling out her given name for the first time. "O..oh.." Her head tilted back. Between her tension with Kirishima, and intense work studies, you doubted shes had the time to herself. You could tell she was more sensitive than usual. "Hes.. real inexperienced.." She sighed, hips bucking slightly as you began to steadily quicken the pace again.

You thought back. There wasn't really a lot to be said about Kirishima. He was a sweet boy, got really hard easily.. unsurprisingly. You tried to come up with anything that could help. He was relentlessly respectful, and of course chivalrous. It's easy to forget hes just a man too.

"Sooo," you began, genuinely curious on how shed answer this next question. "If hes the easiest, why haven't you done anything ?" You began to make the circles smaller, enclosing directly to where she was the most sensitive.

"I..im.." Her legs were beginning to close and open sporadically, she was getting close. "Only you know how to do this stuff to me.. I need you to teach him..!" Without warning, her legs finally snapped shut, and you locked your fingers in a tight spiral against her clit, letting her ride out her first orgasm.

Wow, is she that scared hes gonna suck ?

"Thats hot." You gasped, itd been a while since you got to see Mina like this. She truly was breathtaking. "So.. I think I understand Kirishima.. but I still think you should teach him yourself.." You had an idea of what you were going to do, but hoped Mina would just grow a pair.

"Its even hotter when they magically know." She sighed, a dreamy look on her face. Is this what happens when you read too much Tumblr smut ?

"Thats not.." You still can't believe this is happening. "Its another girl who taught him-"

"Don't worry I can pretend." Oh my god okay shes seriously not gonna fuck him until you do.

You sighed, a little proud of Mina for how fucking insane she could be. Your eyes trailed down her sweaty neck, towards her collar bones and bare chest. Hmm.

"Well," You continued, readjusting your hand so your middle and ring were prodding against her entrance. Your body leaned over hers, and in a familiar move from tonight, the vibrations from your voice rumbled softly on her shoulder. "Keep going, whos next ?"

"Denki-" You slid your fingers in, down to the second knuckle. Of course it was him. You began softly massaging around, relaxing her to the movement.

"Im holding off on him for as long as possible.." You grimaced. Kaminari was one of your best friends, dont yet anyone wrong, but.. well.. its HIM.

"Makes sense.." She sighed. He was definitely going to need the least convincing, but a lot of self motivation and convincing was needed.

It was an unspoken rule that more graphic sexual conversations happened between the guys specifically, and the girls specifically. It wasnt often that theyd seriously talk about it to each other, given the awkward teen hormones going on. The most that was shared was small incriminating details the other group would tease the person for, or things willingly shared during a truth or dare type thing.

But Denki fucking Kaminari. Public group chat, "just learned I have a mommy kink" "hear me out on lactation tho" It wasn't too surprising given he was also friends with Mineta, but goddamnit did he make it everyones problem. Also everyone in that group chat has seen that one specific picture of his dick. Unrelated probably.

"There's some things you should probably know.." Mina continued, whimpering a little as you began you fuck her softly with your fingers. "Hes real fucking stupid, obviously.." She gasped, your fingers getting closer and closer to her gspot. "But he knows a lot .. he probably has files on everyone's sexual preferences and feelings."

you groaned, sinking your teeth into her lower neck, sucking a purple bruise out of her pink skin. "Hes a fuckin psycho.." you lifted yourself up, and brought one of her thighs up to her chest as you deepened your thrusts. "Well.. whos next on our list, Mina ?" You pressed a kiss against the edge of her mouth, her voice finally breaking as breathy moans slipped from her lips.

"Fuck..fuck.. um.." Her eyes struggled to stay open, her legs felt numb from the overstimulation but her lower stomach felt so fucking good. Heat rose through her body as she whined louder and louder. "S-Sero.. Jirou is close after th-though.." Her face was an even brighter pink, a telltale sign of blush for the acid girl.

You slowed your thrusts, opting to grind your fingers against the opening muscles. "Wait.. wait fuck.. no dont stop.." she pleaded. She was definitely close, and the roleplay was beginning to get thrown out her mind.

"Its okay.." you hummed, picking your pace back up. "Just tell me real quick and ill let you cum Mina, okay ?" You smiled, and held her chin in place to make eye contact with you. "Is that okay ?" Your place was back on par with how she liked it.

"Yes yes yes.. oh fuck.. okay .. Sero is.." Her head tilted back, her legs spreading. "Hes the second closest to you, casual sex is easier than you think with him."

Your fingers began beating softly against the edge of her gummy pad. right where she would fall apart. Honestly, you knew she was right. You and Sero constantly would build up sexual tension from conversation or body language alone, it probably would've happened at some point anyway. "Okayy.. and.." You began rubbing circular around the spot, fully preparing to feel her coming around you any second. "What about Jirou ?"

Mina was panting, and struggling to get her words together even more. "J..j.. its.. haaahhh.." She was totally beginning to lose it. You quickened your pace, more interested in seeing her let go again than what she was going to say. Being in the girls group, you already knew most of Jirous sexual preferences anyway.

"Its okay, Mina." You finally fucked your fingers into her gspot dirrectly, using your other arm to lift both of her legs up to her chest, gaining a deep and quick angle. "You did good."

"Fuckfuckfuck oh my.. oh my g..god.." Her hips stuttered against your hold, her warm walls tightening and releasing rapidly against your fingers. "Yes.. fuck.." She had a fucked out smile, eyes fluttering closed contently.

You let her rest, and took your hand away to take care of her. While gathering the warm cloth and a bottle of water (with a lemon slice, she likes citrus after intense.. situations), you briefly reviewed what you knew about Jirou.

She's a lesbian, so you had an easy chance. The issue is she gets flustered easily, you wanted to make sure you didn't scare her away. There was also the Momo situation..

While cleaning up Mina, towling town her sweat and using the warm damp cloth to soak up the mess between her legs, you thought about everything you knew now.

Kirishima is probably similar to Mina, in need of releasing all the tension they've been teasing each other with. You have a good idea of how to relieve him, but also set him up with Ashido once and for all.

Denki is a whore. You'll probably have to out slut him in order to get him to talk. Its going to be a long night for him, taking some time to study the bdsm test wont hurt.

Sero's pretty laid back, if you're upfront about what's going on and why you're doing what you're doing, you know he'll be cool with it. Besides, this is one you're looking forward too.

Jirou might be a bit tricky. You'll let her know your intentions, and set up a personal hang out to just relax and ease into anything at her pace. You can also try and see whats going on with Yaoyorozu !

Oh.. and Katsuki.. Well. There's not really a point in thinking about him. You know nothing. Despite being the first two at the table, he kept everyone locked out of his romantic or sexual life completely, as far as you knew. As it concerned you, he didn't have anything going on. You didnt need to ask Mina about him, you knew he would be the hardest.

As you finished up, you looked back over to the clock. "We're thirty minutes late by the way." You held back a giggle, stuff like this always ended up happening.

"Fuck !" Now this one sounded way less pleased than before.

A/N : Not a lot of Bakugou development, sorry, i like girls more. next chapter should have more though !! speaking of

i think its pretty obvious the order that the characters will go in, but who do you think will be the next chapter focus ?

tag list (ask to be added) : @adv3rs1ty @icarusthefoolish @hyunjinshairband7 @waterfal-ling

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

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

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

[yasmindifference]

Cheer up prompt #27

An anon and @this-was-a-terrible-idea also requested #27! A popular number apparently lol. I hope you all enjoy! ♡

"--and then Mr. Browsten said that with all the, um, the hullabaloo that it wasn't fair to make us take a test, so he cancelled it."

Tim pauses for breath and Mom hums an encouraging noise. When Dad makes that sound, it means he's not really listening, but he knows Mom's paying attention, even though she hasn't stopped curling her hair. From where he's lying on her bed, he can see her reflection in the vanity mirror, and she's frowning just like he knew she would.

Mom doesn't approve of canceling tests, which means she doesn't approve of Mr. Browsten, because he cancels them all the time.

(Mom says tests are important to know where improvement is necessary. Mr. Browsten doesn't seem to agree.)

"So we watched a documentary instead and it was pretty interesting, it was about puffer fish! Sarah asked what puffer fish have to do with grammar and Mr. Browsten said that learning is its own reward, but I think he just didn't have anything else ready so he took something from Ms. Cappola instead. She's the fifth grade science teacher and I heard her classes watch movies at least twice a week."

Mom tuts, which Tim was expecting, and sets down her curling iron.

"Ridiculous," she mutters. "I don't know why we're paying that school so much in tuition when they can't be bothered to teach you anything. It's a miracle you ever learned to read."

"It's because I'm smart," Tim informs her helpfully, and Mom smiles her special just-for-Tim smile.

"You are," she agrees. "And thank goodness for that. Now, would my smart boy do me a favor?"

Because Tim's smart, he already knows what she's going to ask. He rolls off the bed to his feet. "Curling iron?"

"Yes, please." Mom rolls her chair away from the vanity so he can crawl under it to unplug the curling iron. She plugged it in herself, but that was before she was all dressed up in her expensive dress. "Thank you, Timmy."

"You're welcome," he chirps, crawling back out.

Mom rolls back in front of the vanity, but Tim stays where he is, kneeling next to it so he can watch her put her makeup on. There are a lot of different bottles and brushes and powders involved, but Mom never hesitates. Tim doesn't know how she keeps it all straight.

He likes watching Mom get ready to go out. Sometimes--like tonight--she lets him pick out the jewelry she's gonna wear, and then she chooses her dress and hair and makeup all based on what he picked. Even when the colors don't match, it all fits together like a puzzle...a puzzle she pieces together in seconds after Tim's impulsive choice.

It's really cool.

Tonight, Tim picked pretty, dangly earrings with some kind of red stone (ruby, Mom said when he asked), so Mom picked a black dress. She said it would make the earrings pop, which he didn't get until he saw her wearing it.

Now, he watches her choose lipstick as red as the earrings and asks, "Does the lipstick make the earrings pop, too?"

Mom finishes smoothing it on before she smiles at him. "You tell me."

Tim studies her. The lipstick matches the earrings, but it doesn't draw attention to them the way the plain dress does. He already watched her do her eye stuff, and her eyes look bigger somehow, but they're not colorful like they were when they all went to the opera last week.

"No," he decides. "You went new...neutral?" He waits for her slight nod of confirmation, then continues, encouraged, "You went neutral with your eye stuff and red with your lipstick to make your lips pop."

"Very good," Mom says, smiling. She cups his cheek briefly before turning back to the vanity. "Clever boy."

Tim beams and watches in fascinated silence as she uses some kind of powder. Even though he's staring right at her, he can't tell what the powder actually does. All he knows is that when she's done, her face looks...different. Still pretty, but kinda sharper somehow.

Makeup is like magic, he decides. No matter how many times he watches her get ready, he can never figure it out.

"Can I try?" he asks impulsively.

"Try what?" Mom asks, a little distracted. The cap on one of her bottles is stuck and she's struggling to open it.

"Your makeup!" Tim takes the bottle from her and opens it by using the hem of his shirt to grip it better. Mom can't do that, her dress is all shiny and slippery. "You look pretty, I wanna try."

Mom pauses and then smiles.

"I don't have long before I have to leave," she warns him, "but I don't see why not. Do you want to pick out some lipstick?"

Tim absolutely does. He levers to his feet as, across the room, Dad finally stirs. He's been reading some stuff his assistant from Drake Industries brought by earlier, ignoring them both, but now he says, "Janet" in a weird tone.

"Jack?" Mom asks, even as she directs Tim's attention to the little circles on the bottom of her lipstick tubes that show what color they are. She has a lot of options.

"Janie, really," Dad says. He sounds unhappy, and Tim looks up from comparing two different shades of pink to find him frowning. "You can't mean to let our son--"

He stops mid-sentence and Tim bites back a wince. Dad's in trouble; Tim hasn't seen that look on Mom's face since he told her about his last nanny giving him whiskey to help him sleep when he woke up from bad dreams.

"My son," Mom says very deliberately, "is welcome to express himself however he likes."

Is trying makeup expressing himself? Tim just wants to see if it makes him as pretty as it does Mom.

Either way, that's not a good tone. Tim looks down and concentrates really hard on picking out a lipstick.

"Janet," Dad tries again, weakly. He obviously knows he's in Big Trouble, but for some reason he hasn't apologized yet. Tim tries to psychically tell him to cut his losses and back down, but his telepathy apparently still hasn't kicked in, because Dad says, "It's just that--"

"Do you know what you want to try, sweetheart?" Mom asks, completely ignoring Dad.

Tim looks between his parents, decides to let Dad dig his own grave, and hands Mom the red he settled on.

(If it's the red that most closely resembles the red in Robin's uniform...well, it's not like Mom has any way of knowing that.)

"Excellent choice!" Mom says. She stands up from the vanity and pats her chair. "Take a seat."

Tim does, excited. He's not usually allowed to sit at Mom's vanity.

Lipstick, he learns quickly, feels really weird. He has to sit super still while Mom puts it on him, and it makes his lips feel weirdly heavy, like there's something on them.

Which there is, actually, so...he doesn't know what he was expecting.

Mom hands him a tissue so he can "blot" his lips, just like he's seen her do a million times, and then steps aside so he can see his reflection in the mirror.

"Whoa," Tim says, leaning closer. He makes a few faces, pushing his lips together and out, transfixed by how bright and noticeable they are. It doesn't make him pretty like Mom, but he likes how it looks anyway. "Cool."

Behind him, Dad throws up his hands and leaves the room. He's angry, Tim can tell, but Mom is smiling down at him, so Tim's not worried.

"Do you want to pick eyeshadow next?" she asks.

"Yes, please!"

Prompt #27 was experimentation! Well selected! ♡♡

[thewertsearch]

JASPERSPRITE: Whats a timeline? :3 […] AC: :33 < ok imagine a long tempting strand of yarn […] AC: :33 < now imagine instead of being made of wiggly enticing stuff, its made of what lets you exist AC: :33 < and you are right at the twitching tip of it, dont you s33? […]

I like Nepeta's perspective here, that a timeline is made of 'what lets you exist'. She's saying, I think, that timelines are made out of reality - out of the firmament that distinguishes the multiverse from the Furthest Ring.

Her imagery suggests that she understands at least the basics of her world's deeper mechanics, despite not actually using this knowledge during her time on-panel. I would have liked to learn more about her perspective, but we're almost out of time. From where we're sitting, Nepeta's already dead.

AC: :33 < […] look at the sky! JASPERSPRITE: Meow yes i see the sky and can tell that indeed something is going on. JASPERSPRITE: But aside from that i dont really understand what you said being a cat and all.

Even though he’s a Sprite, the poor guy just doesn’t have the brainpower to use this information he's getting - and that's if Sprites are even told about Scratching.

The world’s being ripped to pieces, and he’s just going to watch the pretty colors until there is no more Jaspersprite. Someone please get this cat a ticket to the Yellow Yard.

AC: :33 < im a bit nervous for you, especially since you remind me so much of someone i already lost AC: :33 < but maybe youll be ok? i dont know

It’s difficult to say. The troll sprites were implied to have died when their session ended, but this session isn’t really ending; it’s being rebooted. Sprites might be doomed in a normal game, but we’re pretty far outside of normal parameters, so there may still be hope.

...right, Sburb? I'm right, aren't I?

...Sburb?

AC: :33 < did you ever have someone nice back on earth who you loved? […] AC: :33 < […] i bet lots of girl cats would have loved to be with you, if only there had b33n some around to hear your lovely meows :33 JASPERSPRITE: Youre really nice to say so nepeta what about you though? […] AC: :33 < […] yes i have liked somebody for quite some time, but alas he doesnt know it

Nepeta’s tale is one of missed opportunities. She never got to wax poetic about her love of shipping, never got to confess her feelings to to Karkat, and - let's be entirely honest with ourselves - never really got to be a character at all.

Now, if you’re an optimist, you could take this as evidence that Nepeta’s story isn’t over – that we’ll be expanding on her character in the Dream Bubbles, perhaps.

I'm... let's say I'm a realist.

I think Nepeta is simply a victim of Homestuck's enormous character roster. Ever since Hivebent started, it's become increasingly obvious that there are some 'important' trolls, and some less important ones. This isn't a bad thing - it's just how fiction works, and it would be borderline impossible to juggle rich, satisfying, 8000-page arcs for sixteen primary characters, no matter how quickly you're putting up panels.

Nepeta simply isn't a protagonist. She's a total sweetheart, but in the end, she didn't make the cut.

JASPERSPRITE: Maybe you can win his affection by rubbing your cheek against him thats what i would do. AC: :33 < ohhh no no no, im too shy even for that! […] AC: :33 < its hard to explain, maybe cats think diffurntly, but trolls tend to be pretty cautious about expressing their f33lings when it comes to the flushed quadrant JASPERSPRITE: Whats a quadrant? […] AC: :33 < a quadrant is a thing in a group of things that consists of four similar things JASPERSPRITE: Like paws? AC: :33 < EXACTLY like paws!!! :DD

But damn, if she isn’t a sweetheart.

[n3tworksucks]

Hey babe! Could you do like a NSFW alphabet headcanon thing for Carl Gallagher?

Ily🤍🤍

HIII BBY OFCC ILYT🤍🤍 (UPDATED!!)

word count;1430

warnings; nsfw n stuff sooo..... do what you want with that💀(an- i updated it because it wasn't too accurate and it was finally starting to bother me so i hope i made it a little more accurate😘)

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

he'd probably already have like a towel and water or something so when yall are done he could just quickly clean up then probably cuddle, or smoke and talk or both.

B = Body part (Their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

I'd say he likes his upper body(like idk how to explain lmao) so his torso and arms and stuff because like he could do a lot with his arms and stuff ;)

and for you, probably your boobs or thighs because he likes leaving hickeys on them and he love going down on you, so I could definitely see him growing some extra love for your thighs, and it doesn't even have to be sexual too, he just loves every part of you.

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically)

loves cumming inside, like if you're on the pill or hes using a condom, but if not, I feel like his pull out game if pretty strong, so hed like to cum on your lower stomach or back. and for you, he'd love it if you came anywhere lol, like him just knowing he made you cum just makes it better.

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

I feel like he'd wanna talk to his friends about his sex life not necessarily to brag. but also doesn't because he doesn't wanna risk any information getting out and you getting upset or something. but he'd probably tell a little to Ian if the subject came up somehow, but no details.

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

oh god do I even have to answer💀? yes he is. I think we all know lol.. but mostly from like research from when he was younger, because he's not a virgin, but he definitely knows how and what to do in general, but the more you go at it, the more he learns your body and what it takes to pleasure you.

F = Favorite Position (This goes without saying.)

hes got a few for different places, but his mains are missionary but maybe with one ankle on his shoulder, or dogy, and if you have a favorite he'd most likely try it.

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

I mean, not all the time. I'd say 50/50. like there's times where its not a need to be serious but thats mostly the vibe, like it was an important date night or something. then other times like if you're both high or a little out of it then I'm sure there's a few giggles and jokes.

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

doesn't focus too much down there, but he'd probably trim when he feels like it or wants to look nice lmao.

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…) 

yess, he loves the feeling of being close to you and to him it feels like it just builds the bond more, like even if its angry sex, he'd still kiss you lovingly and stuff like that.

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

sometimes yeah, like you're not able to see each other for a while, he'd probably jack off a few times, but doesn’t wanna do it often because he wants to wait for when you get to be with each other again ;)

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

he'd probably be into tying or holding your hands together, maybe a blind fold here and there if you're feeling frisky, and he'd probably be into smoking a joint or something too, like shotgunning.

L = Location (Favorite places to do the do)

mostly the bedroom, but, if you both were horny enough, probably a public bathroom, either in a stall or he'd lock the bathroom door and fuck on the counter. or anywhere, he doesn't care.

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

it doesn't take much, but he's better at controlling now, but what would get him going now is when you'd just physically love on him, like rub his thigh a little, kiss his neck, tell him you love him. if you do all those, he'd probably drag you away from everybody and go somewhere private. and idk why… but I can see this turning him on too, like when you're sweaty and stuff, I think if he thinks of another reason for you to be sweaty, that would probably get him going.

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

definitely a no to anything that could hurt you and make you uncomfortable. no knifes, no major rough kinks and stuff, he'd hate to see you get hurt even a little with stuff like that, like wouldn't be too into harsh degradation, and doesn't wanna make you try unless its tears of pleasure.

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

loooves going down on you all the time, like, he gets pleasure out of it too, he gets pussy drunk a lot of the time, but also loves a good blow. but he mainly gives first, knowing you give back eventually.

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

if its just normal casual sex, probably at a slight faster speed just because. not rough, but if its special or you both have some time on your hands, he'd go slow and sensual

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

not his favorite, but sometimes you both just need a moment, or just need to be quick with it. he's definitely good at quickies though if you need to be fast.

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

he doesn't mind experimenting with things youd wanna try, or something he saw on the internet or something. and he doesn't care about where, like a public bathroom or in a car. in a way he likes the feeling, but doesn’t necessarily wanna get caught.

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

oh god, after military school he could probably go forever lmao, but obviouslyat some point there's rest. but I think he could go at least 3+. whether thats in the same time or same day, but i think after rounds, there'd be a break then he'd be back at it.

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

now… I think at some point, you both would talk about it, like maybe he ask about it after he passed that one aisle at a cvs💀 but if you did end up using toys at some point, they'd mainly be for you, like a vibrator or something, but wouldn't wanna use them all the time, because he wants to be the only one that can make you feel good yknow?

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

he'd tease a little, mainly with his words, but even if he was unfair, he'd let you get back at him sometime to even it out.

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

if he's on top, he groans more, maybe let's one or two moans out, but its mainly heavy breathing. but if you were on top, he'd moan more, and act more subby. especially if he's he's pussy drunk, he'd moan while eating you out.

W = Wild Card ( a random headcanon)

so kinda back to like how to get him going, I feel like he's sensitive to certain touches and words/tones with you. like only if you're trying to get him going, and he can tell the difference between you being horny and you being affectionate, so if you touche him like that, you know he's sighing, closing his eyes, and leaning his head back

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on under the belt)

I'd say.. about 6.5-7 inches. I'm not gonna go further💀

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

pretty high, but can control his thoughts a little more, and by that I mean from 70,000 times a day to probably more times a day lmao

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

he'd wait for you to fall asleep, and even when you're asleep, he'd still probably be awake not doing anything but laying with the love of his life.