#jailbreak/anti

[a-v-j]

If the ship children still look like sans, maybe turn them into papyruses!

-Sap

Curses!

[cyrusdoeshit71]

Piracy Is No Art!

[immaculatasknight]

Unstoppable waters

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“FUGITIVE FROM BURWASH TAKEN ON MANITOULIN,” Sault Star. June 17, 1922. Page 2. ---- Sudbury, June 16. Charged with stealing a boat from Indian Point bridge during the last week in April, and with escaping from Burwash Industrial Farm shortly before that, Louis Shawinabin. an Indian, whose checkered career of the past few years has been of interest to the police, is now in Gore Bay. He is one of the three Indians who escaped from Burwash on April 10th and for whom a reward of $150 was offered. Shawinabin was captured by Constable Dominic Odjig, assisted by a number of other Indians, at Wikwemikong. The other two, Ankonie Wabagezick and Tom Wabagezick, alias Sunshine, remain at large. 

According to the Gore Bay Recorder, Shawinabin has a record. 

Three years ago he was accused of theft and when he found that the officers were after him he got away to French River and managed to evade capture for nearly a year. He was finally captured at Sudbury and brought back to Little Current. He spent part of the night in the lock-up, for in the morning it was found that he had departed. and is making his escape he made havoc of the local lockup. bending iron bars with almost superhuman strength and tearing down the walls. After spending some weeks in the woods he was recaptured by Provincial Constable Shields and Constable McGill on a very wet night in a house where he had taken refuge from the storm. He was then sent to Burwash from which place he had escaped with two other Indians some weeks ago. Since their escape the trio have been seen several times in the vicinity of the Indian reserves on the Manitoulin.

[AL: Another example of the racist trope of Indigenous men having ‘superhuman’ strength when escaping prison. It comes up a lot in Canadian newspaper coverage of these escapes.]

[greenglowinspooks]

Alright, since it’s no longer 2 in the morning and my head’s a bit clearer, I present to you:

Liminal Riddler

So, not everyone in the DC fandom knows about this, and I’d bet that even less people in the Phandom do, but at one point, the Riddler had cancer. Had, past-tense, because he cured it. With the Lazarus pits.

And yeah, not everyone who gets dipped in the pits has to be liminal, but one would assume that the sudden replacement of a large number of malignant cells throughout the body is gonna do something.

The Riddler already acts quite a lot like a DP ghost in some interpretations anyways. He’s got a strict gimmick that he genuinely can’t part ways with, he’s campy and fun, he’s incredibly violent, etc.

Also, the way that he would react to this whole thing would be funny as hell.

Do I think the Riddler would really care if the GiW was after him? No. This is Gotham, the government is constantly going after him anyways.

Do I think he would care if Danny was being hunted down by the same people, and his parents were involved? Somewhat. He probably wouldn’t care about Danny specifically, at least not right away, but a young boy running terrified from his own parents would definitely bring back some bad memories, and he would probably give him a hand (if for no other reason than to get back to plotting crimes instead of dealing with childhood trauma).

Do I think the Riddler, whose entire thing is being smarter than everyone else, would care if the GiW somehow let slip that they thought he didn’t have human intelligence? That they believed him to be nothing but an echo of human life?

It’s not even a question. He would be the most insufferable person in Gotham within the hour. Genuinely nothing could stop him, especially not if Danny was helping jailbreak him from Arkham every time he got caught.

Almost every major road is closed. Every warehouse on the Docks is on fire. Somehow, they managed to color the clouds and smog a bright green.

The natives of Gotham would probably get those anti-ghost laws and acts overturned faster than the Justice League, if only to make the Riddler stop. His traps and games aren’t even lethal at this point (due to Danny’s insistence), but they’re so genuinely annoying that the general population is about to beat the GiW agents to death themselves just to get the Riddler to quit it already.

Also, I think that during this whirl of chaos, the Riddler would become quite fond of Danny.

He’s a bright young boy who’s very fond of wordplay, and inventive enough to keep up with him. Aside from the inevitable crisis of “oh god I’m becoming the bat,” he’d probably be happy to take on Danny as his protégé. Even if the boy won’t let him kill anyone (rude), he’s a terrifying getaway driver and can turn the both of them invisible and intangible, making Arkham escapes a breeze.

Hell, the Riddler would probably be willing to make a false identity for the two of them, just so he could get the boy proper schooling.

(Yes, he thinks that the entire education system is a sham and that he could do much better, but Danny wants to go into aerospace engineering, and the Riddler isn’t one to squander someone’s interest in learning.)

(Also, Echo and Query would find the whole thing hilarious)

[nenoname]

Gravity Falls DVD Commentary Highlights

(just a huge, and I mean huge, dump of random quotes that stuck out to me, which I sorta separated into characters+their relationships and it's probably gonna be obvious that Stan is my fave lmao

I dunno how to make this legible for anyone but whatever, just take all these rando character tidbits. Stan Twin pranks! Sonployee essays! The concept for a post-Weirdmageddon episode that Alex insists is just too miserable but I want it anyway! The Pines family making me cry!)

Stan

"We love the idea of Stan [in Boss Mabel] having a minute to uh, having a context where we want to see him be his worst self and seeing his big brash personality in like a setting that everyone can understand, because the Mystery Shack is a little bit ungrounded because he's in his world of his characters, but seeing him out in the outside world is funny weird."

We really enjoyed the fact that he's as awful as ever and he's rewarded for it. We like those anti-morals where Stan uses his terribleness to succeed incredibly well.

I think it was a little hard for people to understand in the writer's room at the beginning of the series was that, even though Stan is following a lot of these tropes of being a miser, he's not grumpy. Like he actually loves being himself. He really revels in it like even though he's got some kind of sorrow inside, his kind of day-to-day like he's more about just the uncle who loves to hear himself and make dumb jokes than he is somebody who's mean or cruel or cynical per se.

The [NWHS] storyboards managed to make Stan this awesome action hero while still keeping him Stan. Like I like the fact that he steals a wallet in the middle of it. He steals a wallet, he smashes somebody against the wall, he sasses him but he also has this just great Inception moment. And it's because we're building to a big question about “who is Stan?”, I felt a moment of seeing him be kind of awesome further increases your “who is this guy?” He keeps going back and forth between like “oh geez my back” and you're like “all right that's the Stan I know” and then like “whoa, he just did an awesome jailbreak! Is he some kind of super villain? Who is he really?

There's more of Ford in Stan than I think Stan realizes that I think only comes out in certain moments.”

Why did Stan keep a clipping of himself titled “grifter at large”? I think he thought he looked cool in that picture. “You know I kind of have a Clint Eastwood look in this grifter at large photo. I think maybe I'll use this as an About the Author one day. I gotta hold on to this one. You know what, I'm a criminal but I'm a nostalgic criminal! Loving the past is my greatest crime now!”

I know how Stan feels in this [Principal talking to his family] scene, when somebody comes in and says like “You know what? There was a race you didn't know you were running and you're already behind, way behind.” 

And you know even though Stan is a guy who looks like he's having a fun time, I always, in my gut, thought of him as somebody who is a huge well of sadness, a loss of human connection. And that need to please, that trying to get laughs from the crowd and constantly telling dumb jokes and you know putting on a big show in the Mystery Shack, he's trying to get from them the affection that he never got from his family and lost with his brother.

Stan has been waiting for years to have a reunion with his brother. He's always felt like a screw-up. Stan once again had an idea of how he thought things were going to go. He thought that his brother was saying “I need your help” for the first time. He's going to go up there, they're gonna have some drinks, they're gonna catch up and instead he ended up shoving his brother into another dimension and running out of food and money. It's sort of his worst nightmare. But this was Stan's entire character, from the very beginning of the series, was built around this idea that he's living with this tragedy. He's a guy who outwardly seems like he doesn't appreciate family but in fact wants it more than anything in the world and feels like maybe he's not worthy of it and would do anything to prove that he is.

Seeing Stan figure out what he's good at felt important to me. Like he's never been good at anything in his life and he makes a stupid hokey joke and it suddenly turns into a profit. I felt like without [showing how the Mystery Shack was created], I was missing something and understanding why he would do this, how this would be the solution to his problem.

We would like the idea that Stan appears to win through dumb luck, that it's sort of Intelligence versus Guts but Stan wouldn't actually bet everyone's life on a dice roll. He's a cheater! At the end of the day, I believe Stan has been thrown out of Vegas for counting cards and for weighing dies and I believe he could con his way out of any game, particularly for an obnoxious wizard like this. The idea that Stan would gamble everyone on pure chance is like no. No, he's got a plan. This is the guy who escaped prison using gravity leaps, he's got a way out.

The one big thing [The Stanchurian Candidate] does is really highlights Stan's inferiority complex compared to his brother. Part of what he's doing is he's trying to be an important man here and this episode is actually a pretty good setup in many ways for Weirdmageddon Part 3. When we see Ford they're all going on this rescue mission to rescue Ford and this episode shows you just how much Stan wants to be the hero like the reason that he can't shake Ford's hand when they're in that circle.  The cold open of this where he sees everyone loves Ford and now that Ford's back, he's the best. Stan's like “well, how about I run for mayor!” It's just to boost his ego and make him feel better about himself.

Dipper and Mabel

“Straight man protagonists are really hard to write because every other character had a comedic hook. We understand that Soos is kind of this weirdo, his brain is in another place. Mabel has this exuberance and sees the best in every situation and is very creative. Stan is a crooked conman. Dipper is… the normal guy and a character like that can often feel like they don’t have agency, start to feel just reactive.

Waddles is Mabel's only love that lasts the summer. Mabel is very prone to love at first sight and Waddles is able to love back with Mabel's degree of love.

[In Sock Opera] Mabel's in love with Gabe, Dipper's in love with the Author and they're both willing to do something crazy to get get closer to that thing

There kept being layers of adjustment to make it, “okay what would it take to get Dipper to make a deal with Bill?”  1: He would have to not understand the rules of the deal. He's been tricked, he thinks he's just giving a puppet, he didn't know was himself. Classic genie rules, you get what you wish for in a way you didn't expect.  2: There's a little ticking clock that just started, which if he doesn't do it by now, he's gonna lose all this.  3: Bill rightfully points out that Mabel has been kind of not sacrificing for him and he maybe needs another ally right now  4: He was sleep deprived and actually you'll notice that Dipper blinks right before Bill arrives and that's our way of suggesting that that countdown might not have even existed

I think Dipper and Mabel are of equal exact intelligence but Dipper's insecure. He sees his accomplishments as a way to make himself better and thus is motivated to focus on things that are accomplishment type things. And Mabel is very confident and likes having fun and when she's having a good time, she has a little tunnel vision for the people and the things around her. That's one of her biggest flaws. She's actually really, really sweet when she notices and understands your pain but not when she's doing a bit, when she's doing a scene, when she's doing a gag.

Ford

Originally [the fake Author] looked a little bit more like an oddball wacky inventor and I felt he had to be pretty idiosyncratic. There's certain color things about him you'll notice. He's more or less got the color scheme of the Journal, you know maroons and golds, so that you kind of feel instinctively like maybe that's him. A lot of these motifs though we would end up using in Ford's design, as well the gloves and the coat and all that but much cooler later on but preparing you, it's Ford Lite. 

Now this is there's no logical reason that Ford would break [the warnings about the portal] up into all these books this way but up until this point he's been shown as this sort of all-knowing mysterious Puzzle Master that it felt appropriate, even though it's not logical.

It works for the storytelling so when Ford wrote that, that's when he was super sleep deprived. He realized that Bill had betrayed him, he was starting to have a hard time differentiating between fantasy and reality, he was losing sleep and scribbling all sorts of lunatic serial killer looking stuff about the end of the world.

In Time Traveler’s Pig, we see what should be a young Stanford Pines even though again, the design's a little off but we knew big sideburns, bushy hair. Although that Stanford looked a little bit more swole than this guy and that's one of the what we thought were very subtle clues in season one that helped a lot of fans figure figure everything out way too soon.

[Using the memory gun on the agents scene] needs to show that Ford's really awesome and so we could get rid of the agents and show that Ford can pretty much handle anything that Stan can't and also call back to our memory ray all in one.

There was a lot of fan speculation when we first met Ford. Generally when television shows introduce a new mysterious character late in the game, they turn out to be a villain like 9 out of 10 times. They turn out to be a villain or they're there to get killed off to show the stakes of something and like we could have made Ford evil but I always felt that that would be less interesting. The point that I was trying to get to is that Stan and Ford had this relationship that fell apart and it was both of their faults and I thought that if I'm Stan, I'd be more frustrated if Ford is actually a good guy. It would drive me insane if he's pretty reasonable, pretty rational, better at me than everything.

So we've flirted with this brief moment where it seems like he's a villain and we worked really hard to make it so that like his eyes are being covered by the reflection of the light. His dialogue is ambiguous enough here that for a moment you believe what Dipper believes, which is “maybe he's possessed by Bill.” You just saw him shaking Bill's hand, what is he supposed to believe?

I like that Ford has this photo with him, he had for a really really long time all the way through multiple dimensions. And he's probably told himself- I almost imagined if McGucket found that photo in his coat while they were working on the portal or something, like “What's this here?” and Ford would say “oh yes, that's a photo of a very important moment! That's when I…  that's when I first decided I want to be an inventor!” There would be no reference to the real reason he's keeping it. “This is me and my brother.” It would be like, “oh yes I was thinking about science as a horizon, a frontier to reach towards– you know like a boat, like a ship, like science! It's about science!”

Soos

You choose family. That you create over the course of your life and if that somebody earns being your family, like the Mystery Shack. These kids and Stan, they’re Soos' family and he's happy about that.

I feel like Soos gained something out of [Blendin’s Game]. He gains the knowledge that like “I'm tired of thinking about this man who I'm missing, who doesn't care about me. I'm going to concentrate on the people in front of me, the people that are my true family.”

Soos is a fan of the show even though he's in it. He's a big fan of Gravity Falls and [NWHS] killed him.

I always knew what I wanted Soos’ end to be Soos running the Mystery Shack. I imagine that Soos is actually way better at giving tours than Stan is because he loves all that stuff truly and he believes it. That's part of the difference. Stan’s like “um, all right suckers, this stagnant puddle is the befuddle puddle!” while Soos is like “yeah, one time I looked in there, I think i saw like a cyclops dude. Like, I really think I saw one! Like it might have been a reflection combining my pupils, but like?” and people are like “Whoa, really??”

McGucket

They hired a bunch of people and then they erased their memory. That’s my explanation for why there's like such amazing inventions that would take whole teams of people. McGucket secretly hired a number of contractors and erased their minds. Like I think of McGucket as being like a really sweet nice guy completely in over his head who just like “oh well, once I've erased one guy's mind, I gotta erase ten more guys’ minds to cover it up” and it just sort of builds into like “I guess I'm kind of this kingpin of crime and I'm starting a cult I didn't mean to. Whoopsy daisy!”

When we get to Ford and see their backstory and see their relationship, it just makes all the stuff that happens with the portal and what happens with Ford and all that more poignant that he had someone there who was not only his friend but also a voice of reason and telling him to stop and that he wouldn't listen to him, as opposed to Ford being down there on his own with nobody to bounce off, anybody to say “hey wait a minute, is this a good idea?”

“McGucket was the assistant and he was maybe this assistant who was sort of put upon and Ford kind of brought a college buddy together with him. You know Ford as somebody who lost Stan, and even though he rejected his brother, he kind of needs that other person and he tried to find that in this kind of sweet prodigy and he just pushed him too far.

[The test scene] is meant to show sort of what it was that McGucket needed to erase, what it was that drove him to madness. It was partially seeing the Nightmare Verse and the way it messed with his head and also partly just realizing that this thing has apocalyptic consequences and he doesn't want to be a part of it. And if he can't destroy it or talk Ford out of something, he can forget about it.

Because If Ford's weakness is pride, McGucket's weakness is weakness. He's got a kind heart and he can't stop people, he can't destroy things. I mean he should have basically knocked Ford out with a wrench and take this thing apart piece by piece. He's the one who understood how to build it but I think he's kind of a follower and I think he's the kind of person who could get suckered in by a cult leader. He’s the kind of person looking for instruction and he really respects Stanford and can't bring himself to uh, he's like “I just got out of a bunker! I don't want to go work for another guy down in another bunker! This is my third doomsday cult this year!”

Stan and the kids

Stan and Mabel have such a different life perspective it seemed natural that at some point they would get to a major conflict

Seeing Grunkle Stan and Dipper bond like, I sort of believe that both of them are bad with women and both of them would rather believe there's a giant conspiracy than that they have they just can't get ladies 

Can this idea about Mabel's relationship with Waddles actually reveal a rift between Mabel and Stan where Mabel and Stan actually get along pretty well in the series you know? When they they're both such strong stubborn personalities that when they conflict, they conflict hard like in Boss Mabel. But this idea that Waddles is sort of a metaphor for what Mabel loves and Stan loves Mabel but he doesn't really think that anything she thinks is necessarily smart or right. He loves her like “guys she's my sweet niece but she doesn't know anything you know? She doesn't know anything about a pig” She forgives a lot with Stan but like Waddles sort of represents like the purity of her deepest love and the idea that Stan would threaten that is genuinely a shock

In the previous season it ends with Dipper giving up his journal and there was a lot of argument about “oh is it lame if he just gets his journal back?” Another thing we struggled with, we knew that Stan knows the importance of this journal he wouldn't give the journal back to Dipper so it was a bit of a convolution we'd written ourselves into a corner. We wrote ourselves out, we said “okay he's photocopied it. he's giving it to Dipper because he knows that Dipper's really precocious and he'll never stop asking.”

“We knew that we wanted everything to come to a head when the kids are going to discover Stan's secret and they're going to discover it in such a way that they only get little bits and pieces and they have to decide for themselves based on the limited information. Is Stan's a good guy or if he's a bad guy? Ultimately that decision will be a decision of heart versus mind. And Dipper's mind, Mabel is heart and they're fighting with the scraps of information they have.  Should we trust our heart about how we feel about this guy over the course of the summer and everything we've been through or should we trust the clues? That seemed like a believable way to get Dipper and Mabel to begin a rift between them that is resolved by the end of the series.”

The way Stan acts in [NWHS] is like, to me part of what feels so grounded about it is like I'm a child of divorce and like I know that when parents or parent figures know that hard times are coming for the kids. They kind of lay it on thick they're like who wants ice cream you know what I mean? Like Stan being extra nice to them at the beginning is like it's kind of a realistic thing that that adults do when they know like big changes are coming.

I felt it was really important that we added the scene where they're at maximum bonding. They're up on the roof, they're shooting firecrackers. Stan knows in his heart that when his brother arrives everything is going to change in ways he can't predict and he's really savoring this moment because he knows, even if things goes completely smoothly, which they don't. the kids are still going to be mad at him, especially Dipper for basically lying.  They had this big meeting after the end of Scaryoke where of course Dipper also crossed his finger but Stan crosses his fingers and says “oh I'm telling you everything” and he knows that the kids are not going to be happy about the fact that he's been keeping this all from them because they've done amazing things together already and he should have trusted them before now. 

This act break is them saying, “wait, Stan might be a random grifter who maybe killed our real uncle!” That's pretty heavy for any show let alone a cartoon show.

What that would mean for them if all this stuff is true is so much further than just like, “oh he lied to us about a couple things.” It's just like, “no he's straight up just some random dude that we don't even know uh and the guy that I've been pining for this whole time is dead!”  We really try to stack the deck so it's like Mabel's perspective and Dipper's perspective are both kind of racing to see who gets in front and there'll be a moment where it's like yeah you kind of buy with Mabel she feels good about about Stan and then this scene is the most you’re ever with Dipper where we discover this huge crazy curveball and this feeling that you have looking at this newspaper and looking through these fake IDs this is how Dipper feels all the time.  If you want a window about what it's like to be Dipper, this moment where a giant conspiracy reveals itself out of little pieces and seems to suggest that no one is trustworthy like that's that's where Dipper lives and this to him confirms every bit of suspicion and every bit of paranoia he's ever had and he's willing to run with it. 

I love these characters so much that, for me I was like “I need to see Stan saying goodbye to the kids at that bus. And I don't want him to be some guy who isn't Stan, who doesn't even remember the kids.” That would be really dramatic. It might make you cry more but to me it doesn't actually mean anything. Their relationship which they've built, he was willing to sacrifice his memories to save them. That's how much they meant to him but because he was willing to do that, I think he deserves to get him back.

Stan and Ford

But I think Stan's hope is, that in Stan's mind this is going to play out one way which is that; he's going to free his brother, his brother's gonna come out of that portal after 30 years. Stan's probably imagining that Ford is weak, emaciated, wrapped in a blanket, that he'll stumble forward, through a beard. through blurry eyes, he'll be “my brother, is that you?” He'll embrace Stan, he'll hug him, he'll say, “all these years I thought I was goner but you saved me! I was wrong to mock you, I was wrong to call you the stupid twin! Dad was wrong about you! You're the greatest man and let's be friends again and who are these niece and nephew?” Like that was what Stan was kind of hoping. He knows it's there's a million things that could go wrong, including potentially the destruction of this dimension, but he so desperately needs to believe that he can make up for the problems of the past. He's hoping for this but he knows that things are going to change

When I started the series, I always knew Stan had a twin but all I knew about Ford from the jump was that he's everything Stan Isn't. So Stan is a guy with a huge chip on his shoulder, he's kind of a loser at life. There's somebody who is a winner at life or at least was a winner in all these ways that Stan wasn't.

We realized that in order to bring out the maximum amount of frustration in Stan, [Ford] needed to have a bit of a heart. Like here we see him being kind to the kids, he's not he's not all bad which is what's so infuriating to Stan. The idea that he would quickly get along with the kids when he can't get any respect from them. Ford is designed for what would bring out the most amount of conflict in the family. What would be Dipper's hero, what would be Stan's rival and who's somebody that we could empathize with. I mean, it’s  hard to empathize with a character that comes out and punches one of your characters in the face, basically before he almost says anything.

You see that at this age, that all the stuff [in their room] that would cross over, that would appeal to both of them. It's not just like “there's science stuff here” and then there's “what Stan would be into.” but no, they both like all this.

There was also a version [of ToTS] where early on, they'd rigged the school water fountain. They did sort of like a caper, it was science and a scam together when they were in elementary school but we decided to save the science for the science fair stuff.

We played around with the idea that you would see them working together doing little science games or pulling little pranks. There was actually a scene that some of it was even storyboarded where they're in a treehouse together and Crampelter and his friends have tracked them down and are begging for their lunch money and Stan and Ford have used their jerkiness and geniusness to rig up like a water balloon throwing machine that knocks Crampelter in the head. I remember him saying, “oh no, my old-timey paper crown!” We were really hanging a lampshade on all these sort of Little Rascal cliches.

Ford's not a villain. You know he's getting in Stan's face and saying “I want my life back” but hopefully by the end of the episode even though you don't root for his perspective, you understand his perspective where it's like Stan ruined his science project, Stan shoved him into the portal, Stan took over his house. He’s not completely unreasonable to want it back and he's not completely unreasonable about his request. He says “okay you've got till the end of the summer” and Stan's little look there tells you everything you need to know about how he feels about the situation.

We needed pressure to be at the point where Stan and Ford recognize their lifelong rivalry and Ford does a sincere apology to Stan and almost more importantly, he acknowledges Stan's intelligence. He says “you wouldn't have fallen for Bill's nonsense.” He recognizes that his brother has a kind of intelligence he doesn't.

I always imagined that as kids, Stan and Ford were like this dynamic duo. They were getting into scrapes and like planning pranks and with Stan's creativity and Ford's genius that they were an unstoppable awesome team, before life turned them against each other. I imagine that as kids they were always swapping glasses and tricking their parents so that they could get double presents. And this is a move they did back in New Jersey constantly. We had to figure out who's gonna make a sacrifice and how and even though it's Stan who agrees to be “I'll be the one erase my mind, it's fine, it's worth it”, it's a sacrifice for both. Ford at this point is willing to get his brother back and he has to lose him again. 

Stan and Ford, when they can finally work together, do bring out the best in each other. They just have been missing it for so long.

Post-mind return, Stan and Ford get along and that scene where they both threaten the bus driver gives a hint of what would happen if their powers were combined. We've never seen them working together as adults, they would be a really formidable duo.

Pines Family

[The Blind Eye has] such a great scene between Mabel and Wendy. We don't have a lot of scenes that are just them hanging out and she can kind of be like the cool older sister. Mabel's so obsessed with boys and Wendy's just like "yeah, whatever. They're a dime a dozen."

“in the storyboard, the postcard that Soos is holding up from New Orleans actually said Vegas and at the last minute we got really worried that people were gonna see that and think that that was a clue that Stan was Soos's deadbeat father. And because like our audience, we've trained them to look for clues and to connect dots, they start connecting dots that are not connected. And I called a late retake because, and I see people be like, “wouldn't that be cool if Stan was actually Soos's father” and I hate that headcanon. Whoever's listening and you think “that's a great idea!”-- that's a terrible idea!! Because it means that Stan ran out on his kid and then came back in his life. And weirdly pretends to not be his dad. It flies against the moral of this entire episode which is like, you know this guy who is Soos’ blood relative like cast him out and didn't come back and didn't make time for him and all these people did. These people are Soos’ real family and to say “Stan would be Soos' real father more if he was genetically–”, I'm like “no, no forget that!” Like relationships are about what you do. To me friendship is thicker than water and family is something you can create so I really didn't want anyone to think that we were suggesting that because to me, it actually wasn't just the wrong idea, it was like thematically against what the show's about.” "

"[In NWHS] Every character faces their worst possible choice, which is “Mabel must choose between Dipper and Stan” and “Soos must choose between Stan and the kids,” like “guard that thing with your life. I'm not going to explain to you why.” I believe that Soos would do anything to guard Mr Pines's secrets and these are the only two characters that could possibly make him doubt Stan, these two kids that he loves so much."

"For [DD&MD], you want to set it up as being like [Ford]'s like the coolest toy that's down in the basement that Dipper really wants to play with and he is not allowed to play with him."

"The first three quarters of the series are sort of about Dipper's crush on Wendy and this final quarter is sort of about his crush on the Author. He's such a fan of this guy and he's so used to being denied that which he's a fan of and he's never found anybody who cares about his nerdy stuff. Mabel doesn't care, Stan doesn't care, Soos cares but on a different level. He's so hungry for the approval of somebody like Ford This idea that they would bond over a nerdy board game felt like sort of the way to do this big idea in a sort of grounded way that I like better than like Ford presented Dipper with the Five Trials of the Genius Boy. “I passed these when I was your age! Can you do it too?” and it's like nope he just likes the same dork game that he does."

"The arrival of Ford is creating the two sets of twins starting to pair off between the Brainiacs and the Maniacs"

"Actually I enjoyed that [Ford putting the die in a cheap plastic case] got a little bit of a reckless side because it shows you the Stan part of him. The Stan part of Ford, the little bit that likes a little bit of danger, he likes a little bit of risk. If he would show that side, it would be in when he feels at ease, with a kindred spirit. Around Dipper he’d be like “isn't this pretty cool?” He'd never be that irresponsible around Stan.  I like that Dipper is sort of a little bit of a Achilles heel for Ford as well. Ford has certain blind spots and Dipper exacerbates some of those just because he's willing to encourage, he's willing to “yes and” Ford towards whatever dumb idea he might have."

"Dipper, Mabel, Stan and Ford, they're all characters who need each other. Without Dipper, Mabel's just in a fantasy land. Without Mabel, Dipper is just sort of just spiraling into misery, spiraling into his own neurosis and not being pulled into those social situations, not growing as a person."

"You want [Stan] to be true to our various awful grandfathers, so I feel like for the most part you know that [being shitty to women] a plausible thing for Stan to do, that you only forgive because you know he's not a role model. Nobody wants to be like Stan. The kids never look up to him. The only person who looks up to Stan is Soos and Soos is enough of a comedy character that you understand the joke is “oh this guy thinks the worst way to live is good.” And then at one point you realize why. We made it clear why Soos looks up to Stan is because he gave him his job. He gave him a father basically, he’s essentially Soos’ father. And of course Stan who's had a life of just chaos and disappointment, the only person who would be a surrogate son is [Soos] but also Soos has the biggest heart in the world. So only the biggest heart in the world could forgive all of Stan's many flaws and also if Soos can love Stan, then maybe there's something in there worth loving, then maybe we can too."

"Stan, even when he's sweet, he still has to threaten to murder his niece and nephew."

"I do think the value of [Stanchurian Candidate] is that we're learning just how important it is that [Stan]’s seen. At this point, the kids have become a surrogate family. At the beginning of the show, they were just kind of a little nuisance and then he kind of tried out getting the family from them that he never got from his brother and the idea that he would lose them to his brother is his greatest nightmare and the only way he can really express that is by trying to be impressive to them and trying to be his brother's rival."

"Ford offers Dipper this apprenticeship because Ford sees Dipper as somebody who's special like himself. That Ford's great flaw is arrogance. He believes that there's special people and everyone else and that you can be held back by your siblings. That human attachments are actually weaknesses. The song and dance that he's giving Dipper right now is the exact song of dance that he gave McGucket back when they were younger which is like “sure you could continue working on your job and computers but you and me are different. We're better than everyone else, we have a path that no one else can understand. Only us can do this.” And it’s a very seductive idea for Dipper but he starts to be a little insecure here. He’s kind of “I can't believe it” and he's sort of right to be suspicious because Dipper is a smart kid but Ford's projecting. Ford loves Dipper because he sees someone who tell him yes to everything. He'll never challenge him and if Dipper had taken Ford's apprenticeship,Dipper probably would have gone the way of McGucket, turned into a kind of insane paranoid hermit with no friends, just kind of losing his mind. Like it's a seductive offer but also ultimately Dipper needs to learn not to try to grow up too fast."

"This entire time Dipper's been having this journey of self-discovery and seeing his future as this wonderful thing that he can't wait for. Mabel has been, piece by piece, seeing her idea of the summer fall apart."

"As Ford and Dipper's relationship grow stronger, Stan and Mabel also find much more sort of connection. They both feel like the sibling that's getting kind of sidelined."

"I think [amnesiac!Stan] would be hardest on Soos, second hardest on Ford but Soos would show it. Probably third hardest on Mabel, fourth hardest on Dipper just because where their hearts are. Dipper's not heartless, that's a testament to just how heartbroken those other characters are."

Series goal+ The Finale

"So our idea was; the memory gun can erase a concept as designated by the dial. It stores it. It records you and it keeps that recording and that if you watch that recording things start to come back a little bit, that it hasn't actually completely erased it from your mind. It's more sublimated somewhere where it's really really hard to reach and in the series finale, my concept of Bill is that; if he hadn't gotten in all those forms and fought Stan, Stan is the one that destroyed Bill. Were it just the mind eraser itself that he would be sublimated somewhere but he was weakened in the mindscape and destroyed in the mindscape. But Stan's memories were being sublimated and by looking at the scrapbook in the same way that McGucket's memories come back, they start to come back to the surface."

"I think part of what makes [NWHS] work also is that it has the strongest ticking clock. Yeah, I mean. it has a literal ticking clock. Also the sun is going down it's also, the town is starting to drift apart as the characters are starting to drift apart. There's just such a sense of Doomsday and even though we have like a three-part apocalypse, to me nothing feels as apocalyptic as this episode now."

"The entire purpose of [ToTS] is that Stan and his brother have had this huge rivalry that remains to this day and threatens to tear apart Dipper and Mabel and briefly does, and then Dipper and Mabel are able to find their way together, which is meant to repair Stan and his brother's past."

"Here we're teeing up the rest of the conclusion of the series which is just “whoa this is different. The status quo is shifted and is it going to shift us?” and that was the mission of this entire story was shift. Shift things such that it pits Dipper and Mabel against each other so that they can ultimately make things right and fix their uncles’ trauma in the process."

"“Let's try to set things into motion such that all of these characters who we love, who love each other are placed at maximum odds”. So Ford's entire existence in the series is basically a wrench in the relationships between Stan, Dipper and Mabel, that Stan has had a sibling who he didn't get along with and they've grown up having this horrible rift. Dipper and Mabel are these two twins who love each other but are very very different and are at this sort of volatile growing up moment where if something goes wrong could they turn out like Stan and Ford."

"[The convincing Gideon] scene works for me because it sort of represents the full completion of Dipper's Wendy Arc. Even though he's talking about Gideon and Mabel, he's really talking about himself. That idea that you can't force someone to love you but you can strive to be someone worthy of loving. It really does come down to like be the best you, you can be and the right person will see and feel that."

"It was gonna be W1, W2, W3 and then some kind of goodbye story. I remember it being something vaguely about some sort of other time travel. Bringing Blendin back because he just kind of vamoosed in the middle of this big story. There was that discussed like time traveling back to the first day when the kids arrived. The challenge was thinking of a valuable arc. So like each episode needs to have like a new problem and a new resolution and I was trying to brainstorm what's something that could feel valuable for like a final episode after the apocalypse, after Stan's mind has been erased and he's in the process of getting it back. "

"The thing I remember I wrote one out it was it's the last day of summer. Dipper and Mabel are packing uh they're planning to go home, they're feeling like nostalgic, they kind of don't want to leave. Blendin shows up and he explains that there's all these time bubbles left over, these weird anomalies because of all the time business and what Bill has done and just to watch out and be careful. Then Dipper and Mabel actually accidentally trip into one of these bubbles that are sent back to the very first episode or actually beyond the first episode, their first day in Gravity Falls um and somehow this was meant their character arc was to go from being like a little sad that they're going to leave Gravity Falls to seeing what it was like on the first day. When they were scared to be in Gravity Falls. The idea is like their first day they're like “oh Grunkle Stan, he's this weird old man and we hate living in this house and like we missed our place of comfort back home! And this is a kind of scary new adventure that we don't like.”  The kids see their own growth and realize like “the way we felt about going to Gravity Falls like we don't think we can handle it, is how we feel about leaving.” That feeling of going into a new experience means that something new and exciting is going to happen you're going to grow. There was some thought that maybe over the course of that episode, Stan would get his memory back and something that the kids had done in the past would help him in the present, get his memory back.

"What's supposed to be happening here isn't that Stan's entire memory reappears in an instant. It's supposed to be a couple days of work and we see the beginning of that process when he looks at the scrapbook and then we're kind of jumping ahead a few days. maybe a week of just intensive memory therapy with Stan before he gets there."

"When we were trying to crack the half hour episode after Weirdmageddon, it felt like we were just kind of wallowing and Stan not having his memories. It was a very depressing thing. And we didn’t get to have Stan for the last episode, which was like “it's a great it's great i think you get the emotion like in this episode. It tears you apart when you see it. You could last a little bit longer on it. But going much longer, then you just feels like well what are we doing? Why are we just kind of wallowing in our own sorrows for no good reason.”

"When we had discussed the idea of an episode beyond this episode, a fourth episode, it was basically 20 minutes of [amnesiac!Stan]. This is so intense, you might think you want it but good lord, this is enough."

"Bill singing “We’ll meet again” was something that just felt like the perfect reference because this is kind of an ending about endings in a lot of ways and we know we know Bill's going to be defeated. We know that people like Vill and have grown attached to him and for him to sing “We’ll meet again” is sort of the perfect mysterious way to say like “I might be going, I might not be going.” It’s a reference to Dr Strangelove, a movie that famously ends with nuclear apocalypse and the song “We’ll meet again” so it's for those pop culture savvy. It's already tinged with a kind of a fear and an irony and the apocalypse built in, so it's perfect on a number of levels."

"The concept of the Zodiac as existing in our current canon is this idea that the prophecy was that friends and enemies would need to come together, seemingly impossible alliances would need to be made to stand up to Bill for this prophetic moment. You know that characters like Gideon who was who used to be an enemy, characters like Pacifica, like Robbie, that we've reached the point where thanks to the kids’ kindness and growth, they are now friends with Pacifica, they've resolved Robbie's jerkiness, they've helped McGucket with his memory. They've even overcome this issue with Gideon in W1 and so it seems like friends and enemies have all been restored, leaving only one thing which is Stan and Ford have to shake hands. And their pride once again is what dooms the entire world but they get so close."

"It's clear Stan, even though he's being stubborn here and holds things up, he's ready to do it.  He clasps Ford's hand and then Ford can't help but correct his ignorant brother with something that doesn't matter at all after professing how important all this is and how important it is to put pettiness aside, he's the one who ends up being petty in the end."

"I like that Stan [during the deal] is just thinking “all right, think white, think white, think white.” He's like “think about nothing but sitting on your lazy boy.” "

"Stan and Bill had never interacted in the series up until this moment  because he had just been taken over when he was asleep. We'd seen a lot of Ford and Bill, but Stan and Bill has never happened. And Bill sort of represents all the mystery and weirdness, and Stan is the guy who just wants to have a good life and protect his family. He's the one who never invited Bill in but he's willing to take Bill out."

"If Mabel's going home with a pig, Dipper's going home with this symbol of his friendship with Wendy. And even Stan he's wearing that Mabel sweater. That's a visual symbol of; he's softened up, he's embraced family, he doesn't need to be the tough guy all the time."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

How could this happen? Owners of Chamberlain MyQ automatic garage door openers just woke up to discover that the company had confiscated valuable features overnight, and that there was nothing they could do about it.

Oh, we know what happened, technically speaking. Chamberlain shut off the API for its garage-door openers, which breaks their integration with home automation systems like Home Assistant. The company even announced that it was doing this, calling the integration an "unauthorized usage" of its products, though the "unauthorized" parties in this case are the people who own Chamberlain products:

https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decision-to-prevent-unauthorized-usage-of-myq

We even know why Chamberlain did this. As Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo points out, shutting off the API is a way for Chamberlain to force its customers to use its ad-beshitted, worst-of-breed app, so that it can make a few pennies by nonconsensually monetizing its customers' eyeballs:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/chamberlain-blocks-smart-garage-door-opener-from-working-with-smart-homes/

But how did this happen? How did a giant company like Chamberlain come to this enshittening juncture, in which it felt empowered to sabotage the products it had already sold to its customers? How can this be legal? How can it be good for business? How can the people who made this decision even look themselves in the mirror?

To answer these questions, we must first consider the forces that discipline companies, acting against the impulse to enshittify their products and services. There are four constraints on corporate conduct:

I. Competition. The fear of losing your business to a rival can stay even the most sociopathic corporate executive's hand.

II. Regulation. The fear of being fined, criminally sanctioned, or banned from doing business can check the greediest of leaders.

III. Capability. Corporate executives can dream up all kinds of awful ways to shift value from your side of the ledger to their own, but they can only do the things that are technically feasible.

IV. Self-help. The possibility of customers modifying, reconfiguring or altering their products to restore lost functionality or neutralize antifeatures carries an implied threat to vendors. If a printer company's anti-generic-ink measures drives a customer to jailbreak their printers, the original manufacturer's connection to that customer is permanently severed, as the customer creates a durable digital connection to a rival.

When companies act in obnoxious, dishonest, shitty ways, they aren't merely yielding to temptation ��� they are evading these disciplining forces. Thus, the Great Enshittening we are living through doesn't reflect an increase in the wickedness of corporate leadership. Rather, it represents a moment in which each of these disciplining factors have been gutted by specific policies.

This is good news, actually. We used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then we stopped putting down rat poison and rats are eating us alive. That's not a nice feeling, but at least we know at least one way of addressing it – we can start putting down poison again. That is, we can start enforcing the rules that we stopped enforcing, in living memory. Having a terrible problem is no fun, but the best kind of terrible problem to have is one that you know a solution to.

As it happens, Chamberlain is a neat microcosm for all the bad policy choices that created the Era of Enshittification. Let's go through them:

Competition: Chamberlain doesn't have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that "rolled up" all of Chamberlain's major competitors into a single, giant firm. Most garage-door opener brands are actually Chamberlain, including "LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco":

https://www.lakewoodgaragedoor.biz/blog/the-history-of-garage-door-openers

This is a pretty typical PE rollup, and it exploits a bug in US competition law called "Antitrust's Twilight Zone":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

When companies buy each other, they are subject to "merger scrutiny," a set of guidelines that the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division use to determine whether the outcome is likely to be bad for competition. These rules have been pretty lax since the Reagan administration, but they've currently being revised to make them substantially more strict:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-ftc-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

One of the blind spots in these merger guidelines is an exemption for mergers valued at less than $101m. Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, these fly under the radar, evading merger scrutiny. That means that canny PE companies can roll up dozens and dozens of standalone businesses, like funeral homes, hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers:

http://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Serial-Acquisitions-Working-Paper-R4-2.pdf

By titrating the purchase prices, PE companies – like Blackstone, owners of Chamberlain and all the other garage-door makers – can acquire a monopoly without ever raising a regulatory red flag.

But antitrust enforcers aren't helpless. Under (the long dormant) Section 7 of the Clayton Act, competition regulators can block mergers that lead to "incipient monopolization." The incipiency standard prevented monopolies from forming from 1914, when the Clayton Act passed, until the Reagan administration. We used to put down rat poison, and we didn't have rats. We stopped, and rats are gnawing our faces off. We still know where the rat poison is – maybe we should start putting it down again.

On to regulation. How is it possible for Chamberlain to sell you a garage-door opener that has an API and works with your chosen home automation system, and then unilaterally confiscate that valuable feature? Shouldn't regulation protect you from this kind of ripoff?

It should, but it doesn't. Instead, we have a bunch of regulations that protect Chamberlain from you. Think of binding arbitration, which allows Chamberlain to force you to click through an "agreement" that takes away your right to sue them or join a class-action suit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

But regulation could protect you from Chamberlain. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the FTC to ban any "unfair and deceptive" conduct. This law has been on the books since 1914, but Section 5 has been dormant, forgotten and unused, for decades. The FTC's new dynamo chair, Lina Khan, has revived it, and is use it like a can-opener to free Americans who've been trapped by abusive conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Khan's used Section 5 powers to challenge privacy invasions, noncompete clauses, and other corporate abuses – the bait-and-switch tactics of Chamberlain are ripe for a Section 5 case. If you buy a gadget because it has five features and then the vendor takes two of them away, they are clearly engaged in "unfair and deceptive" conduct.

On to capability. Since time immemorial, corporate leaders have fetishized "flexibility" in their business arrangements – like the ability to do "dynamic pricing" that changes how much you pay for something based on their guess about how much you are willing to pay. But this impulse to play shell games runs up against the hard limits of physical reality: grocers just can't send an army of rollerskated teenagers around the store to reprice everything as soon as a wealthy or desperate-looking customer comes through the door. They're stuck with crude tactics like doubling the price of a flight that doesn't include a Saturday stay as a way of gouging business travelers on an expense account.

With any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Corporate crooks armed with computers aren't smarter or more wicked than their analog forebears, but they are faster. Digital tools allow companies to alter the "business logic" of their services from instant to instant, in highly automated ways:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The monopoly coalition has successfully argued that this endless "twiddling" should not be constrained by privacy, labor or consumer protection law. Without these constraints, corporate twiddlers can engage in all kinds of ripoffs, like wage theft and algorithmic wage discrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Twiddling is key to the Darth Vader MBA ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further"), in which features are confiscated from moment to moment, without warning or recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

There's no reason to accept the premise that violating your privacy, labor rights or consumer rights with a computer is so different from analog ripoffs that existing laws don't apply. The unconstrained twiddling of digital ripoff artists is a plague on billions of peoples' lives, and any enforcer who sticks up for our rights will have an army of supporters behind them.

Finally, there's the fear of self-help measures. All the digital flexibility that tech companies use to take value away can be used to take it back, too. The whole modern history of digital computers is the history of "adversarial interoperability," in which the sleazy antifeatures of established companies are banished through reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other forms of technological guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Adversarial interoperability represents a serious threat to established business. If you're a printer company gouging on toner, your customers might defect to a rival that jailbreaks your security measures. That's what happened to Lexmark, who lost a case against the toner-refilling company Static Controls, which went on to buy Lexmark:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy

Sure, your customers are busy and inattentive and you can degrade the quality of your product a lot before they start looking for ways out. But once they cross that threshold, you can lose them forever. That's what happened to Microsoft: the company made the tactical decision to produce a substandard version of Office for the Mac in a drive to get Mac users to switch to Windows. Instead, Apple made Iwork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), which could read and write every Office file, and Mac users threw away Office, the only Microsoft product they owned, permanently severing their relationship to the company:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Today, companies can operate without worrying about this kind of self-help measure. There' a whole slew of IP rights that Chamberlain can enforce against you if you try to fix your garage-door opener yourself, or look to a competitor to sell you a product that restores the feature they took away:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Jailbreaking your Chamberlain gadget in order to make it answer to a rival's app involves bypassing a digital lock. Trafficking in a tool to break a digital lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

In other words, it's not just that tech isn't regulated, allowing for endless twiddling against your privacy, consumer rights and labor rights. It's that tech is badly regulated, to permit unlimited twiddling by tech companies to take away your rightsand to prohibit any twiddling by you to take them back. The US government thumbs the scales against you, creating a regime that Jay Freeman aptly dubbed "felony contempt of business model":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

All kinds of companies have availed themselves of this government-backed superpower. There's DRM – digital locks, covered by DMCA 1201 – in powered wheelchairs:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

In dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

In treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

In tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

It should come as no surprise to learn that Chamberlain has used DMCA 1201 to block interoperable garage door opener components:

https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=iplr

That's how we arrived at this juncture, where a company like Chamberlain can break functionality its customers value highly, solely to eke out a minuscule new line of revenue by selling ads on their own app.

Chamberlain bought all its competitors.

Chamberlain operates in a regulatory environment that is extremely tolerant of unfair and deceptive practices. Worse: they can unilaterally take away your right to sue them, which means that if regulators don't bestir themselves to police Chamberlain, you are shit out of luck.

Chamberlain has endless flexibility to unilaterally alter its products' functionality, in fine-grained ways, even after you've purchased them.

Chamberlain can sue you if you try to exercise some of that same flexibility to protect yourself from their bad practices.

Combine all four of those factors, and of course Chamberlain is going to enshittify its products. Every company has had that one weaselly asshole at the product-planning table who suggests a petty grift like breaking every one of the company's customers' property to sell a few ads. But historically, the weasel lost the argument to others, who argued that making every existing customer furious would affect the company's bottom line, costing it sales and/or fines, and prompting customers to permanently sever their relationship with the company by seeking out and installing alternative software. Take away all the constraints on a corporation's worst impulses, and this kind of conduct is inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

This isn't limited to Chamberlain. Without the discipline of competition, regulation, self-help measures or technological limitations, every industry in undergoing wholesale enshittification. It's not a coincidence that Chamberlain's grift involves a push to move users into its app. Because apps can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking DMCA 1201 prosecution, forcing a user into an app is a tidy and reliable way to take away that user's rights.

Think about ad-blocking. One in four web users has installed an ad-blockers ("the biggest boycott in world history" -Doc Searls). Zero app users have installed app-blockers, because they don't exist, because making one is a felony. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

The temptation to enshitiffy isn't new, but the ability to do so without consequence is a modern phenomenon, the intersection of weak policy enforcement and powerful technology. Your car is autoenshittified, a rolling rent-seeking platform that spies on you and price-gouges you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Cars are in an uncontrolled skid over Enshittification Cliff. Honda, Toyota, VW and GM all sell cars with infotainment systems that harvest your connected phone's text-messages and send them to the corporation for data-mining. What's more, a judge in Washington state just ruled that this is legal:

https://therecord.media/class-action-lawsuit-cars-text-messages-privacy

While there's no excuse for this kind of sleazy conduct, we can reasonably anticipate that if our courts would punish companies for engaging in it, they might be able to resist the temptation. No wonder Mozilla's latest Privacy Not Included research report called cars "the worst product category we have ever reviewed":

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/

I mean, Nissan tries to infer facts about your sex life and sells those inferences to marketing companies:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/nissan/

But the OG digital companies are the masters of enshittification. Microsoft has been at this game for longer than anyone, and every day brings a fresh way that Microsoft has worsened its products without fear of consequence. The latest? You can't delete your OneDrive account until you provide an acceptable explanation for your disloyalty:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23952878/microsoft-onedrive-windows-close-app-notification

It's tempting to think that the cruelty is the point, but it isn't. It's almost never the point. The point is power and money. Unscrupulous businesses have found ways to make money by making their products worse since the industrial revolution. Here's Jules Dupuis, writing about 19th century French railroads:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriages or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches. What the company is trying to do is to prevent the passengers who can pay the second class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich. And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class passengers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/731357317521719296/having-refused-the-poor-what-is-necessary-they

But as bad as all this is, let me remind you about the good part: we know how to stop companies from enshittifying their products. We know what disciplines their conduct: competition, regulation, capability and self-help measures. Yes, rats are gnawing our eyeballs, but we know which rat-poison to use, and where to put it to control those rats.

Competition, regulation, constraint and self-help measures all backstop one another, and while one or a few can make a difference, they are most powerful when they're all mobilized in concert. Think of the failure of the EU's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. While the GDPR proved very effective against bottom-feeding smaller ad-tech companies, the worse offenders, Meta and Google, have thumbed their noses at it.

This was enabled in part by the companies' flying an Irish flag of convenience, maintaining the pretense that they have to be regulated in a notorious corporate crime-haven:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

That let them get away with all kinds of shenanigans, like ignoring the GDPR's requirement that you should be able to easily opt out of data-collection without having to go through cumbersome "cookie consent" dialogs or losing access to the service as punishment for declining to be tracked.

As the noose has tightened around these surveillance giants, they're continuing to play games. Meta now says that the only way to opt out of data-collection in the EU is to pay for the service:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

This is facially illegal under the GDPR. Not only are they prohibited from punishing you for opting out of collection, but the whole scheme ignores the nature of private data collection. If Facebook collects the fact that you and I are friends, but I never opted into data-collection, they have violated the GDPR, even if you were coerced into granting consent:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/the-pay-or-consent-challenge-for-platform-regulators.html

The GDPR has been around since 2016 and Google and Meta are still invading 500 million Europeans' privacy. This latest delaying tactic could add years to their crime-spree before they are brought to justice.

But most of this surveillance is only possible because so much of how you interact with Google and Meta is via an app, and an app is just a web-page that's a felony to make an ad-blocker for. If the EU were to legalize breaking DRM – repealing Article 6 of the 2001 Copyright Directive – then we wouldn't have to wait for the European Commission to finally wrestle these two giant companies to the ground. Instead, EU companies could make alternative clients for all of Google and Meta's services that don't spy on you, without suffering the fate of OG App, which tried this last winter and was shut down by "felony contempt of business model":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

Enshittification is demoralizing. To quote @wilwheaton, every update to the services we use inspires "dread of 'How will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity in a world that demands I have this thing to operate?'"

https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/698603648058556416/cory-doctorow-if-you-see-this-and-have-thoughts

But there are huge natural constituencies for the four disciplining forces that keep enshittification at bay.

Remember, Antitrust's Twilight Zone doesn't just allow rollups of garage-door opener companies – it's also poison for funeral homes, hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers.

The Binding Arbitration scam that stops Chamberlain customers from suing the company also stops Uber drivers from suing over stolen wages, Turbotax customers from suing over fraud, and many other victims of corporate crime from getting a day in court.

The failure to constrain twiddling to protect privacy, labor rights and consumer rights enables a host of abuses, from stalking, doxing and SWATting to wage theft and price gouging:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

And Felony Contempt of Business Model is used to screw you over every time you refill your printer, run your dishwasher, or get your Iphone's screen replaced.

The actions needed to halt and reverse this enshittification are well understood, and the partisans for taking those actions are too numerous to count. It's taken a long time for all those individuals suffering under corporate abuses to crystallize into a movement, but at long last, it's happening.

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/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

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

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

[mydarllinglover]

Alone || Daryl Dixon

MasterList

Strangers

Pardoned

Shit happens

Secrets revealed

brothers reunited

walkers in the field

false negotiations

six months later

sickness

old enemies

moonshine

picture to burn

claimed

train tracks

crumbling down

split up

rescue mission

from a friend

welcome to alexandria

allocated jobs

double date

the man in the red poncho

the quarry

sitting ducks

home invasion

guts couture

holy, jesus

the hilltop colony

midnight rain

tiaras and arrows

karma catches up

anti-cupid

get free

jailbreak

in a kingdom not so far away

cabins and cobbler

garbage trucks and trash people

the start of something

better than revenge

forever goodbyes

bullets full of blood

something to live for

the new world

the bridge

all for nothing

make up, don’t break up

hike in the woods

home sweet home

early months

making friends

baby steps

between a rock and a hard place

out of the woods

whispered rumours

sharing stories

trading lives

babys first fair

till death do us part

as it was

nothing new

Guilty As Charged

Bed-Time Tales

Fearless

Mine

Burning Down

Haunted

Greene, Was The Colour

A Friend To All

The Underground

Just The Three Of Us

Friend To None

Blank Space

Better Man

…

[livwritesstuff]

Eddie Munson had never been a fan of Christmas.

The cards had been kind of stacked against him, he thinks, with how his mom had died just before Christmas when he was still in elementary school, and then there has been the years of barely scraping by with Wayne. By the time he was old enough to have his own opinions, he was firmly and outright anti-holiday festivities — enough so that he had multiple well-rehearsed and overly aggressive rants at the ready.

He’d mellowed out quite a bit since high school, but he still never got the appeal of Christmastime.

Then he married Steve Harrington and started raising their three daughters together and it’s entirely true what everyone says about children changing your entire world because, now, he fucking loves Christmas.

To be clear – Halloween is still the greatest holiday of all time. That’s never gonna change, but Christmas might have firmly established itself as second.

That whole stretch of December, actually, always ends up being a blast, with the tree and the decorating and the gingerbread houses and all that other festive shit.

Christmas morning is the best part, he thinks. Eddie and Steve go through the wringer trying to get the girls into bed the night before, and their excitement wakes them up even earlier than usual.

Steve drags himself out of bed when they first hear chatter from the girls to snag their stockings from downstairs before any jailbreaks occur. The girls convene in Moe’s room to dig into their stockings under direct orders to not wake up their dads until 6:30 (not that either of them are sleeping, necessarily, but sometimes they manage to doze off for an entire half hour).

At 6:30 on the nose, the girls are practically breaking down the bedroom door in their haste to show off what Santa had put in their stockings, and Steve and Eddie put on a whole groggy show acting surprised about the little stuffed animals and boxes of crayons and heaps of candy that they’d clearly already taken a dive into.

The rest of the morning goes by in a haze. Steve and Eddie get corralled out of bed pretty quickly, and Steve is in charge of keeping the masses away from the presents under the Christmas tree long enough for Eddie to make a pot of coffee (which Steve doesn’t usually drink, but he does that morning), and when Eddie joins him on the couch with their novelty mugs of coffee, Steve slings an arm over his shoulders and presses a kiss to the side of his head. They always prop up their ancient camcorder on a side table, angled just right to capture the girls’ gleeful smiles as they unwrap all their gifts.

It might be Eddie’s favorite day of the year, believe it or not.

It’s all a fuckload of extra work in an already busy time of year, obviously, and he loses out on some of that sleep that he’s needing more and more the older he gets, but goddamn is it worth it every year because their girls are so happy. Happier than both he and Steve had ever gotten to experience.

That’s what fatherhood means to him though — giving his children things, opportunities, experiences, that he’d been denied in his own childhood, and seeing it pay off in their big grins on Christmas morning.

He’s not sure if it’s the most wonderful time of the year or any of that sappy crap, but he can still safely say that it’s pretty damn great.

[radio-free-beth-sarim]

We talk about how we're currently living in a cyberpunk dystopia and yeah, we probably are. It's difficult to tell from the inside I guess. But that often seems to come with a sense of nihilistic futility. That capitalism has progressed to the point where the best you can do is give up and try to survive.

Fuck that! That isn't cyberpunk! Cyberpunk is about subverting technology for personal and anti-corporate means! It means using technology in the margins of life! Using human ingenuity and creativity to tell the corporations to go fuck themselves!

We live in a cyberpunk dystopia? Then be a fucking cyberpunk! Jailbreak your phone! Hack your Playstation 5! Learn to code! Use open source software! Build a pwnagotchi! Pirate the media that the corporations won't provide you because they used it as a tax write off! Set up a plex server and share it! Take back your tech or the corpos fucking win!

Ice T had a line in the movie adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic:

SNATCH BACK YOUR BRAIN, ZOMBIE! SNATCH IT BACK AND HOLD IT!

[catofadifferentcolor]

Terrible Fic Idea #95: DA: TV, but make it different first meeting

Sometimes I have terrible fic ideas. Other times terrible fic ideas have me, leaping out of my subconscious when I'm trying to fall asleep and shaking me until I get out bed and try to do something with it. Like this one.

Or: In which the passing thought I'd have liked to have had playable origins for DA:TV turned into What if Rook had been imprisoned in the Ossuary with Lucanis pre-DA:TV?

Just imagine it:

Rook is born Lucretia Mercar - or, rather, she’s found only hours after birth on a battlefield in the north of Tevinter, without a sign of who her birth parents were or where every might have gone. She’s taken in by the solider who finds her - an older NCO by the name of Valentinian, who raises her in as much comfort as one can expect in a military camp and names her Lucretia after his beloved older sister, who died the previous year in Seheron.

Valentinian Mercar comes from an old military family - one with just enough linage to have weight, but long enough without magic to have minimal influence. He is, however, a good man. Gruff and sometimes uncertain what to do with a young daughter, but kind. Caring. Generous. Good to the men under his command and the slaves who serve the camp. Hates abuses of power. Loathes corruption. He is as good a man to ever come out of Tevinter - with the exception that he believes whole-heartedly in human superiority and the restoration of the Empire.

When Lucretia shows signs of magic, Valentinian is thrilled and sends her off to Minrathous to the best apprenticeship he can manage for her. She spends most of her teenage years away from home, studying - and becoming increasingly radicalized after hearing anti-slavery speeches by Magister Dorian Pavus and his ilk. This leads to many arguments with her father on the rare occasions they see each other.

Lucretia comes home for the winter holidays in the last year of her apprenticeship. She expects disagreements over her position on slavery over dinner; she does not expect for her father to have summoned his Venatori friends to help her see the error of her ways.

The Venatori attempt to reeducate Lucretia. When their initial intimidation attempts fail, she’s taken to one of their facilities - and when those attempts only steel her resolve, she’s taken to the Ossuary where she can be of use.

As it turns out, while you can force a demon into a non-mage with some effort, a mage has to allow themselves to be possessed. They can be tricked or tortured into it, but you can’t just stuff one inside them against their will. So when their new method of creating abominations fails, the Venatori go back to basics.

After about four months of this, Lucretia is tired. Her strength is failing. As much as she doesn't want to give the Venatori the satisfaction, she doesn't think she can hold out for much longer.

This is when she's visited by a Spirit of Purpose - or what seems to be a Spirit of Purpose anyway. It offers her freedom in exchange for possession, which is a deal Lucretia is no longer strong enough to refuse...

...but their jailbreak goes poorly until they stumble upon the cell of an Antivan Crow whose mind hasn't been subsumed by his demon. With Lucanis' help, they're able kill all the Venatori in the Ossuary along with their surviving experiments.

This is where I imagine the real thrust of fic beginning.

Though free of their cells, Lucretia and Lucanis are trapped in the Ossuary until the next supply ship arrives in three weeks time, as the prison can only be opened from the outside. They spend those three weeks exploring the prison, attempting to heal, and falling in to that sort of codependency that only comes from being offered a kind touch for the first time in nearly a year. To say nothing of the fact that they are each other's only support system - Lucretia keeps Lucanis and Spite level, and when she breaks down he does the same for her and Purpose. There's nothing romantic about things at this stage, but there is something verging on the dangerously obsessive, and if they'd been left to their own devices for much longer things might've become terribly unhealthy for the both of them.

Three weeks of eating real food and sleeping in real beds (well, one bed, partly for warmth and protection, partly because of nightmares and touch starvation) does wonders. Overpowering the Venatori supply ship goes much more smoothly than the rest of the jailbreak.

They manage to scuttle the supply ship near Afsaana on the Rialto Bay and catch a proper ride back to Treviso.

Caterina is thrilled enough to have her grandson returned that she doesn't question his relationship with Lucretia - at first. After a few weeks it becomes clear that Lucanis' experiences in the Ossuary have changed him and that Lucretia's presence is - in her mind - keeping him from healing. She encourages Lucanis to send Lucretia away, which Lucanis naturally refuses.

The situation between Lucanis and his grandmother is approaching untenable when Varric and Harding show up, asking for the Crows' help taking down a powerful ancient elven god going by the name of Solas before he can tear down he Veil. Caterina refuses to help them, thinking them mad and their terms not worth playing along, but Lucanis agrees to help them, walking away from his position as heir to the First Talon to do so.

And so Lucanis and Lucretia join what will eventually become the Veilguard c. 9:50, two years before the events of the game.

Lucretia at first is considered something of a tag along - she had, after all, been just shy of completing her apprenticeship when captured, has no useful contacts, and retains just enough of her Venatori-adjacent upbringing to be leery of the idea of ancient elven gods having been more powerful predecessors of Tevinter magisters, if they existed at all. But she quickly makes herself an integral part of the team, having a strategic mind and charismatic personality that helps her become Varric's second in command as she matures.

The next two years are a series of cat-and-mouse adventures, Varric and his team hot on the heals of Solas across the length of breadth of Thedas as he tries to gather what he needs to tear down the Veil. Dealer's choice on details, but at least one of these instances should involve Lucanis getting in what should be a fatal strike, but whether because ancient elves are hardier or because gods can only be killed with lyrium daggers, Solas survives.

Come 9:52, Solas has everything he needs to tear down the Veil...

The events of DA:TV follow canon, with some exceptions.

The Spirit of Purpose in Lucretia - who has been called Rook for being almost but not quite a crow since Varric took her and Lucanis on - keeps Solas from tricking her with blood magic, but still allows for a connection to be formed between them. Instead of trying to turn Rook into someone who can replace him in Fade Jail, he tries to radicalize the Purpose within her to do whatever is necessary to stop the gods - include release Solas of her own accord.

Canon proceeds apace - albeit it with major changes to the Crow storyline, with Lucanis being redeemed in his grandmother's eyes for ending the Antaam occupation and revealing Ivenci's betrayal of the city. (Dealer's choice how much this redemption is wanted - and how much of a part Caterina played in allowing Illario to have him kidnapped to ensure Lucanis was molded into the proper heir.)

After losing two companions defeating Ghilan'nain, Rook reluctantly releases Solas from his prison to help them defeat Elgar'nan. Which he does, failing to inform the rest that this will allow for the destruction of the Veil...

...but Rook has been expecting betrayal from Solas - and is willing to do (almost) anything necessary to achieve her purpose, including convince him to tie his life-force to the Veil when all she really wants to do is put her knife through his throat.

Thus ends the Sixth Blight... but no part of Thedas is untouched. There is much rebuilding to be done. Rook and Lucanis focus much of their efforts on Kirkwall in Varric's memory, as neither has any strong desire to return to their homelands. Aveline, eager to return to her position in the guard, eventually pushes the role of Viscount on them both, claiming Varric named them his heirs.... but that is another story.

Bonuses include:

Dealing with the realities of torture, imprisonment, betrayal, and possession. Neither Rook nor Lucanis should be in a good place when they escape the Ossuary. It should take a lot of effort - physical, mental, and emotional - to get them to a place where their relationship could be called healthy, and there should be a lot of false starts and backsliding. They're the only ones that understand what they went through... but sometimes that very closeness makes it impossible for them to help each other. But what began through circumstance eventually turns into solid relationship built on seeing each other at their worst and watching them choose not to be the worst version of themselves every day thereafter.

Navigating a relationship made up of a mage, a demon, a spirit, and an assassin with two bodies and one unwilling procession between them. Especially when not all parties are able to talk to each other at the same time. (This should be made somewhat more interesting by Spite and Purpose being the Fade equivalent of close kin, as Spite is corrupted Determination, which is the "first cousin" of Purpose.)

Some kind of closure for Rook and her adoptive father. Maybe Valentinian gets a redemption arc, realizing just how bad the Venatori are after their "reeducation" presumably leads the to the death of his beloved daughter. Maybe he doubles down on the Kool-aid and thinks to kill his daughter himself out of shame for her betrayal of Tevinter. Dealer's choice.

Nobody is perfect. Rook, for all her anti-slavery tendencies, still needs to work her way through some of her Venatori-adjacent upbringing. The Crows may have (theoretically) moved beyond purchasing slaves and beating recruits occasionally to death, but their training methods are still firmly in the spare the rod, spoil the child camp. The Danish and city elves view each other with suspicion, but both are leery of Tevinter mages. Varric still feels betrayed by Anders and Justice's choice to blow up the Kirkwall Chantry and sometimes this bubbles over onto Rook, Lucanis, and their spirits; &c.

And at least one completely meaningless side quest along the lines of DA:I's shards. Rook especially should become obsessive about collecting every single one of whatever it is, even after it becomes clear that whatever it is won't help them with Solas. Just because you have a purpose doesn't mean it's good or useful, after all...

And that's it. A little front-heavy on the background, but what can you do? As always, feel free to adopt this bun. Just link back if you chose to do anything with it.

More DA Ideas |More Terrible Fic Ideas

[a-v-j]

*Anti all things considered how do you think it’d take for me to give you a ass kicking WITHOUT help?

[cadmusfly]

so for the RP blog shenanigans I was looking up a guy who @josefavomjaaga told me actually used to be Ney's ADC before tranferring to Soult's team, who has a really long name but let's call him Bory de Saint-Vincent because that's his last name

and this dude is fuckin wild, look at this description of him

Bory de Saint-Vincent's almost too colorful life story has sometimes overshadowed his reputation as one of the most thoughtful and productive naturalists of the early nineteenth century. A free spending extrovert who also dabbled in literary ventures, his career was complicated by involvement in a near-mutiny at sea, various political intrigues, and financial debts to the extent that he spent years at a time avoiding the authorities, or actually being incarcerated. Throughout it all, however, he managed to keep up a career as a natural history collector.

he's more known for being a naturalist than a military guy, but he's also just straight up nuts

even just looking at his wikipedia page

I dunno about you, but I feel like "precocious naturalist" should mean "discovered twenty new kinds of plants as a kid", not helping save a guy from prison (I initially read it as jailbreaking but it could have been more legal, not sure, but also apparently the ship the entomologist was meant to be on also sank so lil kid Bory saved this guy's life technically???)

Dude hopped on a expedition to Australia, got sick of the captain and decided to just go at it alone for a few years in the middle of the ocean

now my crack theory is that ney got sick of hearing about plants all the time and shoved him towards soult

and he had so many scientist friends, when he was exiled after waterloo, he was invited to stay in prussia by the king thanks to a scientist friend, got kicked out after 18 months, "offered a commission as General in Bolívar's new Republic of Colombia" by another scientist friend, declined that, and escaped to holland to meet the Sieyes guy who kinda was supposed to be a consul alongside this other dude called Bonaparte many years ago

dude got placed in debtor's prison for too many debts and these two fuckin notes attached to that

His scientist friends tried to cheer him up by parading a giraffe next to the debtor's prison so that he can climb onto the rooftop to look at it with a telescope

but he didnt want to leave prison because he could have his friends visit and had good food and good sleep, but his son in law against his wishes paid his debts so that he could actually go to the damn wedding

dude did have some weird racist ideas about human ethnicity but he was also anti-slavery and denounced the heritage peerage system while in a political position and ended up getting kicked out because of that so that's cool

this guy is like a french Stephen Maturin sort of, except he's real

and he is also contributing to the fact that none of soult's ADCs are normal people

i wish i'd learned about him earlier so i could submit him to the napoleonic sexyman tournament

[witchcraftandburialdirt]

12 and 22 for Robin

✧ ━━ "𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐒𝐎 𝐍𝐈���𝐄" 𝐎𝐂 𝐀𝐒𝐊𝐒 𝚁𝙾𝙱𝙸𝙽 𝙰. 𝙱𝙰𝚄𝙳𝙴𝙻𝙰𝙸𝚁𝙴 ; 𝙻𝙴𝙰𝙶𝚄𝙴 𝚅𝙴𝚁𝚂𝙴

12. Have they ever done something illegal? What was it? ━ Despite his rather amiable, charming nature; Robin's past is a mess of illegal activities as he climbed the ladder in the underground world of crime in Zaun. In his time there, he slowly adapted and Abel taught him almost everything he knows now ( No! Abel did not manipulate Robin to do any of this, he just helped him achieve his goals, whatever those goals were ). He soon learned to possess a monstrous charisma and learned an inhuman prowess for manipulation, and as seen in threads he is a very eloquent speaker and is incredibly persuasive/charismatic when he wants to be. A terrific planner, coming up with both long and short-term solutions to subdue enemies using a Machiavellian style in execution of those plans. He is happy to not be the center of attention and is satisfied with the role of puppeteer, unobtrusively pulling the strings to control or minimize other people’s influence. Robin can be extremely brutal if the situation calls for it, methodical in approach, yet he has never killed anyone himself, but … If you want me to list a few of the things he's done: - Aiding And Abetting - Assault And Battery - Blackmail - Breaking And Entering - Coercion - Conspiracy - Conspiracy To Murder - Counterfeiting - Destruction Of Property - Extortion - Fraud - Gross Negligence - Harboring A Fugitive - Illegal Possession And Use Of Firearms - Incrimination - Jailbreak - Kidnapping - Mafia Affiliation - Obstruction Of Justice - Racketeering - Sabotage - Smuggling - Stalking - Torture - Trespassing

22. Do they have any mental illnesses? ━ I think it's almost impossible for Robin to not; but I've always been wary diagnosing him with anything because I do not have the qualifications to do that. Rather I'll detail the traits of different illnesses he has, and I'll let you all draw your opinions from it. I went into his traits regarding NPD Here ; but he has a lot of ties to the Dark Triad (sans psychopathy). During his teen years he definitely went through an entire depressive episode that culminated in him making a pact with a demon so his suicidal ideation/survivor's guilt wouldn't eat him whole. These negative emotions continued up until and even after his death; but thankfully he seems to have found a sort of peace nowadays. Admittedly Robin did have what I imagine to be an anxiety disorder ( this I feel comfortable saying he had due to my own diagnosis with it haha ) in his teens too, being up in Piltover was a very stressful experience - however with Abel's assistance and teachings Robin was able to overcome this as well. I would say the most enduring part of his personality is his Machieavellian way of dealing with the world, but that is a personality construct and has never been classified as an illness; but is closley tied with anti-social personality disorder due to these interpersonal characteristics being common in individuals with APD. Again, I cannnot confirm or deny if he falls under any of these unmbrellas. He thinks unemotionally and logically when it comes to problem solving, and he has a very in depth understanding of how neurotypical people will react to certain situations/stimuli.

[camels-pen]

ghost of your past

Summary:

Walker was up to his last straw when Danny broke a precious mug gifted to him by his daughter on his last Father's day as a living man.

He didn't expect to lose more than his patience chasing the punk, but then, out of nowhere, he reunited with the mug's creator.

based on @mystyrust's prompt "Walker attacks amity park and maddie recognizes her father/ grandfather/ancestor" and @ectoplasmicsoda's prompt "Walker and the terrible, horrible, no good day."

Ao3 Link

Oh, that little punk. Walker was gonna toss him in the slammer and throw away the key, mark his words. The little half-human abomination was going to pay.

Walker had left his guards to scour the town. Told them to leave no rock unturned until they found the brat, but it seemed he hadn’t needed to bother.

“Walker! Look, uh, buddy, this isn’t a good time—”

“I. Dont. Care.” He moved closer, grabbing the ghost boy by the throat. “You’ve gone too far this time. Putting aside starting a second riot in my prison followed by the subsequent jailbreak of the entirety of the ghost criminal underworld,”—he leaned in close, his voice dropping to a low whisper—“that was a one of a kind mug my kid gave me for my last Father’s day. That was my last physical memory of her and you are gonna pay dearly for breaking it.”

“Danny? Sweetie, where’d you go? I know getting anti ghost possession shots can be a bit scary, but—” A loud inhale. Walker rolled his eyes, turning back to look into the stunned face of a woman who looked starkly like his wife. When he was still alive to have one. “...Pa?”

Walker raised a brow. He looked the woman up and down, the blue and black hazmat suit looking about as stupid as the brat’s, pausing briefly on her dark, red-brown hair. Probably one of those ghost hunters who loved to mess things up, then. “Do I know you, ma’am?”

From one second to the next, her open shock changed to a very familiar scrunched up nose. “What the hell, Pa? You don’t recognize me and you’re going around strangling children now?!”

Recognition struck him. “Madeline!” he shouted, a smile growing on his face. He dropped the ghost brat and rushed over to sweep her into his arms. “Oh, hun, I’ve missed you so—”

Maddie dodged him and moved around to coo at the brat, turning his head at different angles to look at the beginnings of bruises Walker left.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Do you know who he is?” 

The brat abruptly froze as Maddie growled, “I don’t joke about things like this.”

Walker clenched his fists, stalking forward. “That little abomination was the one who—!”

“Do not call him an abomination!” She stood quickly, standing in front of the brat as he massaged his throat with a pitiful look. The moment Maddie’s back was turned, the boy stuck his tongue out at him. “He’s my baby boy and your grandson!” 

“He’s your what?!” Is this a joke? This had to be a joke. Please, dear Ancients let it be a joke.

Maddie put her hands on her hips. “Pa, please, I know you don’t usually like my partners, but don’t be a pest about this.”

“Don’t be a—” He stomped right up to Maddie. “Don’t throw my past words back at me, Cookie!”

“Well, can you blame me?” She threw her hands in the air. “I waited years to be able to do it and then you kick the bucket!”

He shook his head. “Whatever. I don’t care about your taste in idiot partners right now! I care about this little punk, breaking the mug you got me for my last Father’s day!” She stared at him, unimpressed. “He broke your mug!” he repeated, indignant. “It was my favourite one!”

Maddie scoffed. “That mug was a piece of shit and we both know it. You’ve never drank out of it in your life.” Didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate fine art. And he’d seen the hours she put into learning how to use the pottery wheel. Or rather, he’d heard her frustrated screams through the walls. “And I heard what you said to Danny; your last physical memory of me? Really? I don’t suppose you only have one physical memory of Alicia?” Walker’s code of avoiding lies as much as possible was really working against him here. Maddie scoffed. “Of course. Of course!”

“Kiddo, I didn’t—” 

“Don’t call me ‘Kiddo’.” She glared at him. “I am in my early 40’s. And I have not seen you in over three decades.” Was she really that old already? He was surprised she wasn’t bragging about having lived longer than him. “I will not allow you to diminish my opinion and call me a child.”

Walker hedged, “But you’re still my little lemon cookie—”

Maddie threw her arms up. “I’m married now! I have kids! Two of them! One of them is going off to college soon!”

“I don’t know what that brat’s told you, but there’s no way he’s related—” Walker blinked. “Did you say ‘two kids’?”

“Yes! Jazz—Jasmine. Our oldest child and a wonderful daughter.” Maddie smiled, pulling out her wallet. “She’s got her whole life planned out ahead of her. We’re still a little worried—you know what happens to Walker girls when they try to plan out their lives.” She chuckled a little as she handed over a long sectioned plastic with small photos, folding it up in a way to show off a picture of a girl with Maddie’s red hair and speaking at a podium, her face bright and smiling. 

Walker took the photo in hand, staring at the little girl he knew nothing about, given by his own little girl that he was supposed to know everything about. 

“Or,”—Maddie sighed—“I guess you wouldn’t know.”

“Know what?” he asked softly, tracing the picture over with his eyes. Jasmine had Delilah’s nose.

“Well, you know how I was doing a biology and chemistry double major and going to go to medical school? And Alicia was going to marry her high school sweetheart?” He nodded faintly. “I switched into an experimental ecto-biology program and Ally’s divorced now, living on her own in Arkansas.” She chuckled weakly.

Walker’s head snapped up. “What?!” He blinked a bit, turning back to stare at the unfamiliar picture. “What?” he repeated, softer.

“It’s—I mean, I finished my degree eventually and Ally finished trade school—” She huffed through her nose. “But we can catch up and talk all about it later, okay? Preferably with Ally. Maybe we can all meet up and have a picnic by mom’s grave.”

“Mom’s grave?” He parrotted, a terrible ache running through him. Dear Ancients, he hadn’t even considered that Delilah was anything other than alive. 

“I promise I’ll tell you later, but more importantly—

“What happened to you, Pa? Where did you go?” Maddie asked. “We thought you’d died. Mom and me and Ally, we all buried you—mourned you. What—What happened?”

Walker furrowed his temporary brows. “What do you mean? I did die.”

“But how are you here? Was it temporary? Did—” She gasped, putting a hand over her mouth. “Did we bury you alive?”

“No! Isn’t it obvious I’m—” He gestured down at himself, pausing as he noticed the illusory skin and clothing. Huh, seemed like he’d forgotten to take off his disguise to fool the ghost hunters roaming around shooting at his boys. Now it made sense why Maddie recognized him so quickly.

He should… probably take off the illusory charm. It wouldn’t do to get used to a fake human disguise, especially one as accurate as this.

Out of the corner of his eye, the punk was slowly crawling out the other end of the alley. “And where do you think you’re going?” Walker tried to storm past Maddie, but she held firm.

Maddie snatched the photos from Walker’s hand. “Pa, I’m glad you’re alive, but I don’t take threats to my children lightly.” 

He scowled and when he looked back, he noticed a distinct lack of annoying ghost boy. “Darn it, you let the punk escape.”

Maddie glanced behind her and sighed. “Oh, would you quit with the overdramatics?” She shook her head. “It’s always the same with you: ‘This town is full of criminals! You can’t just go out on your own in broad daylight!’ without any further thought and entertaining no other opinions or research other than your own.”

“Our town was full of criminals! I was nearly ‘bout to prove it too, before I was murdered!”

She raised an eyebrow. “You mean when you barged into Ms. Garrison’s house when she was a few minutes late to the county fair? When you knocked down every door, tore her house apart, and then fell through the part of her second story that was under construction to brain yourself on the floor?”

“How do you—” He coughed. “There was surely someone holding her hostage and I was going to be the hero—” he coughed again. “I needed to rescue her. Clearly the perpetrator spread false rumours so they could get away scot-free. And Ms. Garrison already had a faulty memory!

“Cookie, I never meant to leave y’all, you have to know that. I was trying to do good.” Maddie searched his eyes a moment and he kept himself still, a brief hope flickering in his chest. 

“Y’know, Pa,”—her face softened, the bags under her eyes looking heavier, more pronounced, and looking at him like Delilah had in those last years he was alive: resigned, tired, pitying—“I almost believed you.”

She turned around, making to leave. He reached out, suddenly desperate to make her stay. “Cookie—Maddie, please.”

“I need to find my son and take care of him.” She tore her wrist from his grip. “Have a good life, Hardy.”

Walker stood there, stunned. Unable to tear his gaze away as his daughter—alive and whole and independent in an entirely new way—strode out of the alley, leaving one ghost for another.

[nucleargnocchi]

In defense of Despicable Me 3

It has taken me FOREVER to get to this and I can no longer find the ask but! @squidsandthings, to answer your question of what's up with Despicable Me 3, the plain truth of it is that it is simply the pinnacle of film. Most people think it's a classic case of a company wringing every drop of profit they can from a movie that saw commercial success, dragging it out further and further with each sequel until the plot is so attenuated you can barely see it, the concept is so inane you lose brain cells watching it, and the characters are so two-dimensional they are undoubtably relatives of Stanley. But I say it's cinema at its finest. I will try to make this short, but brevity is nigh impossible when extolling the virtues of Despicable Me 3.

To start, Gru is the morally gray anti-hero this generation needs: an ingenius villain with something to prove (he has mommy issues), yet a tender family man at heart. He yearns for his past life, for the thrill of heists and gadgets and gizmos, but recognizes that he now has joys and responsibilities (the gorls) and must struggle to tame his nostalgia.

Dru, Gru's long-lost twin brother with the most luscious blond hair you've ever seen, is the hot to Gru's cold, the high to his low, the piliferously well-endowed to his follically challenged. Dru has all the charisma and charm that Gru lacks, but he is bumbling and incompetent when it comes to heisting. Yet, despite it all, he desperately wants to follow in his (and Gru's) recently deceased father's legacy of villainy, to make him posthumously proud.

The gorls are growing up: Margo receives a proposal from a boy with limp cheese and a pig, Edith remains surly yet reveals her caring nature as she accompanies Agnes to find a unicorn, and Agnes herself remains a paragon of hope and childlike wonder despite learning that unicorns aren't real, choosing to embrace a one-horned goat in what is possibly a biblical allusion to finding the beauty in imperfection. All the while, the gorls are figuring out what a relationship with their step-mom Lucy looks like, and Lucy in turn is learning what it means to be a mother.

The minions, upset with the dangerous labor conditions (Dr. Nefario was accidentally frozen in carbonite) and unfulfilling work (not evil), decide to unionize in a powerful example of proletariat uprising. Unfortunately, they later get imprisoned for stealing pizza after enthralling fictional and real-life audience members alike by performing a spectacular impromptu rendition of the Major-general's Song on a live singing competition. They then stage a jailbreak like the radical prison abolitionists they are and find their way back to continue a life of crime with Dru.

With such a star-studded cast of characters, you'd think there would be no way to steal the spotlight, but the antagonist, Balthazar Bratt, manages to outshine them all. Bratt is nuanced and realistic with a tragic, compelling backstory (teenage acne) who clings to a delusion of fame after his TV show as a child actor was canceled. He is stylish and funky, bringing all the best parts of the '80s back to life with his superior sense of fashion (I mean, who else can pull off spiky purple shoulderpads and not look monstrous?), immense bravery (he sports a spiky, gleaming mullet despite his large bald patch), and multipurpose choice of weaponry (keytar that emits waves of sonic energy strong enough to blow not just your socks, but all of your clothes off to the tune of Van Halen's "Jump").

In all, Despicable Me 3 is undoubtably a cinematic masterpiece through and through.

Also, it's an inside joke with my cousin that I've taken waaaay too far.