#late transition

[babayaganoush]

[burnt-to-cynders]

Fun fact about me: when I was a kid, like 5 or 6 years old, my older sister made me dress up in a frilly pink dress and put makeup on me, and you know how I reacted?

I fucking hated it!

She teased me about it, and the frills were itchy and the makeup felt weird on my face and I demanded she take it off immediately. I felt embarrassed and wrong and weird. Was it gender euphoria I couldn’t process? Dysphoria? Social pressure from the fact I felt like I was being judged? Who knows? The point is that I had a reaction to wearing “girl clothes” that would probably have very much indicated back then that I was NOT trans. And yet I am now.

How could that possibly work? Easy. Gender identity is malleable and shifts as you grow and change. I didn’t react like a young trans girl who didn’t know she was trans yet because…I wasn’t a young trans girl. I was, for all intents and purposes, a cis boy.

And that doesn’t make me any less of a woman now

[macksting]

I’ve really been getting into Sailor Moon lately. Lemme tell ya, that’s a wild and funny thing to be doing after bouncing off it for over twenty years, each time finding “this just isn’t for me.” My lovie has been an earnest fan of it longer than I’ve known her, and now binge-watching the 1990s Sailor Moon has become a frequent date for us in the evenings, and she gets to see me call out attacks and get maudlin over character stuff like a teenage girl, because let’s face if I’m over the hill and simultaneously not long into a second puberty, so I am in fact getting a do-over of sorts and I’m a bit of a mess. Granted my gender expression has always been odd, and I’ve always been something of a cry baby, so that’s no change. Heck, my mother once punched one of her gaming buddies in the face in her living room for telling me “boys don’t cry.” (We all thought I was a boy then.) This says more about my awesome mom than it does about me, of course. I digress. So by reasonable standards I have now seen two Sailor Scouts express gender dysphoria. Makoto talking about making up for appearing unfeminine by being tall and boyish and fighty by becoming an excellent cook in the Pure Hearts storyline, and a brutally rebuffed and emotionally wounded Usagi wandering into a cosmetics store following its promises of making her desirable and acceptable when Mamoru is pushing her away out of fear for what will happen to her in the Black Moon arc. (Trans folks, I would hope we’d be the first to say, have no monopoly on gender dysphoria; we merely have an unusually poignant set of sources of it.) Last night I saw a Sailor Moon episode about the false promises of beauty products. I mean, other things too, but basically preying on young women's fears to sell them stuff, as a means to destroy goodwill to advance a literally fascist goal of Preserving The Human Spirit Through War. That's some old Italian Futurist shit, and one sees it in other places too. (Actually, it reminds me of a scene in Legend Of The Galactic Heroes, come to think of it.) It’s possible I’m reading too much into it, but honestly it ultimately doesn’t matter to what extent a theme is deliberate or not, if the result is meaningful. I’m at least as happy to see a thing that should be addressed, addressed accidentally, as I am to see it deliberately done. Stumbling upon themes by accident often gives unique perspectives that are valuable and have nuances that might be missed if engaging with a thing purposefully. (e.g. Tedd’s worries about losing her friends due to hyperfocus and a differing experience of friendship degradation over time compared to them in El Goonish Shive, being accidentally an example of the author’s undiagnosed ADHD and related neurodivergences) Also if you used those cosmetics for long, it was explicitly the goal of the Evil Baddies to make it so that you were dependent on beauty products by them stripping away natural oils, etc., so that you had to use them thereafter. In fact, and holy shit this is kinda transition goals in a way*, the android who was selling them had her whole eyes painted on, and had to redraw them. FUCK that’s cool. I won’t say it’s perfect in any dimension, but I’m really really appreciating the incredibly frequent wholesome and supportive takes in old 1990s Sailor Moon. Sure it has some dubious stuff too, and of course its characters are sometimes ridiculously flawed for funsies and drama, but even those flaws are often used to gently make some really valid point or another, by writers who really cared for their characters and how they interact and see the world. It’s not as if my love for my wife needed any particular rekindling, but this has thrown a lot of fuel on the ever-raging fire of my love for and appreciation of her, and I think also hers for me. And I know I at least am getting some much-needed gender euphoria out of expressing my passion for this show. * look I am dysphoric about having eyes and always have been and I have no reasonable explanation for that, it’s weird, I just want that dress of proximity detector mesh from “Is There In Truth No Beauty” (star trek TOS), it’s complicated and prolly has to do with eye contact and my light sensitivity

[taliabhattwrites]

Transition care is being outlawed and institutionally gatekept the world over.

Trans existence is the reactionary scapegoat du jour, a convenient symbol for regressive ideologues to rally against because we constitute a convenient effigy to burn, an existential threat to the patriarchal ideology of 'immutable', 'biological' sex upon which their 'natural order' (of male-supremacy and misogynistic exploitation) is founded.

During a cultural moment where the right's intentions to directly attack bodily autonomy and non-heterosexual, non-reproductive modes of existence are being plainly stated, where the nativist and natalist violence upon which states and their colonial orders are founded is being made most explicit, the response to this overt declaration of war on our ability to do what we will with our bodies is ... non-existent.

Feminism is being thoroughly repudiated by the left, by advocates of collectivization and queer activists alike. The "male loneliness crisis" is spoken of as our most pressing cultural issue, eliding the reactionary turn among men who are responding to deepening capitalist contradictions by demanding their patriarchal entitlement over women's labor and bodies. Trans people's existence is considered a luxury belief, established and proven healthcare is called 'experimental', and we are perceived as affluent eccentrics seeking novel forms of costuming rather than a thoroughly brutalized, impoverished, and stigmatized demographic sinking further and further into the margins.

Conservatives who rail against abortion and no-fault divorce now claim the label of "women's rights" because they also call for the eradication of transsexuality. The connections between the opposition to trans existence and the threats to women's political and economic independence are obvious, but no one is making them.

We are not organizing a robust, materialist, ideological opposition to this reactionary backlash on the basis of bodily autonomy, the emancipation of marginalized genders, or the right to exist independently from patriarchal structures such as the nuclear family.

We are arguing with each other about validity, about whether it's "biologically essentialist" to observe that society enables men to exploit women, and about whether anyone who speaks plainly about misogyny is a "TERF".

I stand here seeing things get worse for my sisters and my siblings, cis and trans and non-binary and intersex and queer and even heterosexual and more, watching us devour each other while working class men settle for dominion over their wives and families in exchange for being compliant for their bosses, and I wonder if we'll realize what must be done before it's too late.

I don't know. I don't have an answer for you.

At least, not a good one.

[royalarchivist]

Quackity: Yo yo yo, what's up? There’s also a button to toggle, so in case you’re talking to people in English, you can toggle it.

Slimecicle: I’m never gonna speak to anyone in English again!

Quackity: [Cracks up]

Slimecicle: Dude, this is fckin' sick– I'm just saying sht! I feel like a baby that has learned how to speak! Bababa, bababah– 👶

[Starts chanting "baba" over and over with Fit and Maximus]

Slimecicle: I like that we’ve gotten a thing to translate all languages, and now we speak none.

[He hears Maximus chanting "seṃen" in the background]

Slimecicle: Hang on, I gotta– I have to contribute to this conversation. I have to contribute! [Starts chanting "cuṃ" over and over] Dude, we're freak– we're multilingual! The first multilingual– THIS IS LIKE WHEN PROMETHEUS DISCOVERED FIRE!!! 🔥🔥🔥 [Starts chanting "cuṃ" again]

Day 1 of the Qlobal Translator being implemented on the QSMP! 🌐

[lazylittledragon]

what do you mean youre technically a detransitioner cause of terf bullshit?

it's a v long story but i detransitioned for a couple of years when i was 16/17, for multiple reasons but mostly because i fell into the blaire white/kalvin garrah chamber of "you have to be This way to be trans otherwise you're not real".

i was already Deeply insecure about myself and my 'passing' and i was led to believe that i couldn't want to wear makeup or skirts, and i couldn't choose not to have bottom surgery, and i couldn't do anything but bind for 12+ hours a day to the point that my ribcage is still misshapen. basically i thought that if i wasn't suffering enough doing 'feminine' things, i couldn't really be trans, so i should just go back to being a girl and suck it up.

the terf bullshit is because i'd seen a lot of terfs/detransitioners talking about the 'dangers' of testosterone and how it would turn me into a horrible ugly evil monster and how there was nothing worse than wanting to be a man. which combined with 'you need to fully medically transition to be valid at all' creates some very dangerous and upsetting feelings to cope with.

it also came from trying really hard to put myself in a little box before i realised that my sexuality/gender are very fluid and it's FINE for me not to have a label and just do whatever i want. when i was 19 or so i went back to using they/them (and eventually he/him) and changed my name again because even though i like doing 'feminine' things, i don't want to be seen as a woman.

tldr: i was conditioned by transphobic/terf rhetorics to think that i was being trans the 'wrong' way so i couldn't be trans at all, so i believed i must actually be a girl if i still wanted to do 'feminine' things. nowadays i am a transmasc who does feminine things because i don't give two shits about what any transmed prick thinks of me anymore.

[ronelyn]

Gal in my support group came out at 70. She had the sweetest, kindest, happiest smile. :) I transitioned in my 30s. I can't imagine how different it must be to transition as an actual kid.

Honestly, my life would be so different I wouldn't even recognize myself. And...I have a *happy* life. Whoever that "Fran" would have been, she'd hopefully have a happy life, too, but it wouldn't be *mine.*

Your life is YOURS. You can't make your past live "have been" better. You CAN make your present and future happier. Do that. You may be amazed how good it ends up being. I know I was. :)

The conversation of when is too late to medically transition is coming round again, which it does periodically, but I have never really resonated with the phrase "it's only too late when you're dead" before. But now I realise it is so incredibly true. It fucking sucks to wait, seeing everyone around you start medically transitioning sooner and faster than you is so disheartening. I came out at 11 and tried to start hormones, I've been on the NHS waiting list for years and I desperately tried to convince my transphobic parents, I tried to get a job to pay for it etc. So it wasn't for lack of trying that things happened as they happened and I didn't start hormones until I was 18.

For 7 years I watched everyone around me transition and it felt like I was running out of time. Whenever the conversation came around about when was too late to transition I always thought to myself "its too late for me". Still these days I feel like I'm running out of time for top surgery. I have been binding ever day for 7/8 years and I'm kinda coming to the end of my rope with it, every day it's just a little harder to bind, which is devastating. I don't know what I'll do when I can't bind anymore but for me at the moment surgery is prohibitively expensive and I'm not in a safe environment to get it. I'm looking into alternatives like trans tape (but I do have a larger chest).

ANYWAY I do understand when ur in the moment of waiting that it feels like you are running out of time, my life didn't even feel like it started until I was on testosterone. A few months in after seeing some changes and finally being convinced it was real and not just hand sanitiser I finally took my first breath tbh and I have not looked back since. But before starting it was just a waiting game and I thought I'd be too old for there to be any differences which is silly really because people start in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.

Its only too late to transition when you're dead also applies to coming out. Not everyone "always knew" not everyone had the language or ability to express themselves at 3 years old, not everyone understood or thought about gender aged 3. People come out as kids and teens and young adults but people also come out at every stage of life.

I don't admire Caitlyn Jenner by any means but she was 65 when she came out

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/16/we-really-are-trailblazers-coming-out-as-trans-in-later-life

Article about people transitioning later in life ^

It really is only too late when you're dead

[marzipanandminutiae]

I have a question, where would gnc/trans people get their clotges in the days before the selling of premade clothes? I assume some was stealing from relatives, and that soem of them did know how to make clothes, but that doesn't seem at all likely to be the most common method

That is an amazing question!

Unfortunately for a lot of people, we don't really know- many trans folks flew under the radar and as such details of their lives are unclear. Legendary stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst, for example, left no sort of record as to where he got his clothes (especially since he lived in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for many years of his life). And figures like Mary Jones, a Black trans sex worker from the early 19th century, flit into and out of the pages of history so quickly that there's barely enough info to get their vital statistics, let alone shopping habits.

However, my guesses would be as follows:

Secondhand shops. These have existed for a very long time, and if you already have at least one outfit that makes you read as the correct gender, nobody would question you going through that section of the store/market/whatever.

Sympathetic conventional tailors or dressmakers. This is almost certainly where middle- and upper-class GNC or trans people got their clothing- one can hardly imagine legendary writer George Sand buying her suits secondhand, after all. And since humans have always been human, and Let People Dress How They Please; They Aren't Hurting Anyone is a sentiment I've seen at least as far back as the 19th century, I suspect there were far more of these than many people might think.

Clothing workshops catering to the demimonde- that is, to theatrical companies for costumes, or to sex workers. Certainly this is where drag performers got their stage gear, and one imagines people for whom gender variance crossed the line from performance to identity- like Fanny Park and Stella Boulton -might have turned to their costumers for everyday attire, too. And catering to sex workers probably got all sorts of requests that were seen as outre for the time (in a roleplay capacity- most sex workers dressed conventionally while not actively Doing Sex), but their money was as good as anyone else's.

Friends and relatives. Some families knowingly supported their crossdressing or trans loved ones. Even partners who married the person in question as the binary opposite gender could fall into this category- Lili Elbe (though she lived after premade dresses began to rise in popularity) first experimented with feminine attire in dresses and jewelry loaned by her enthusiastically supportive wife Gerta Gottlieb. In fact, Gottlieb was bisexual, and their marriage was only annulled because Lili was a woman now and same-gender marriage was illegal in Denmark at the time.

Also yes stealing from your relatives was also an option, of course. if they were less than sympathetic

The king of France???? this is the wildcard, and my absolute favorite: the Chevaliere d'Eon, when she transitioned in the 1770s, got the king to not only formally state that she had been assigned female at birth (there had been speculation about her physical sex for years at this point) but to pay for her new wardrobe of gowns. Absolute Queen.

"but didn't her mantua-makers notice Some Physical Things?" she's believed to have had some form of gynecomastia, based on her autopsy, and they'd never have cause to see her in less than her calf-length chemise. if they did see anything, they kept their mouths shut, and rightly so.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

No, Uber's (still) not profitable

Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

Bezzle (n): 1. "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it" (JK Gabraith) 2. Uber.

Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle. There are just intrinsic limitations to the profits available to operating a taxi fleet, even if you can misclassify your employees as contractors and steal their wages, even as you force them to bear the cost of buying and maintaining your taxis.

The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn't magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.

Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors' cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.

Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.

This venture predation let investors – like Prince Bone Saw – cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business. They spent $2.5b on self-driving cars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the more plausible of Uber's plans. They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's Proposition 22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then they did it again in Massachusetts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/simple-as-abc/#a-big-ask

Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with flying cars? Flying cars! Maybe they were just trying to soften us up for their IPO, where they advised investors that the only way they'd ever be profitable is if they could replace every train, bus and tram ride in the world:

https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/

Honestly, the only way that seems remotely plausible is when it's put next to flying cars for comparison. I guess we can be grateful that they never promised us jetpacks, or, you know, teleportation. Just imagine the market opportunity they could have ascribed to astral projection!

Narrative capitalism has its limits. Once Uber went public, it had to produce financial disclosures that showed the line going up, lest the bezzle come to an end. These balance-sheet tricks were as varied as they were transparent, but the financial press kept falling for them, serving as dutiful stenographers for a string of triumphant press-releases announcing Uber's long-delayed entry into the league of companies that don't lose more money every single day.

One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who's had Uber's number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial "disclosures," methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.

In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more

In mid, 2022, Horan showed how the "profit" Uber trumpeted came from selling off failed companies it had acquired to other dying rideshare companies, which paid in their own grossly inflated stock:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

At the end of 2022, Horan showed how Uber invented a made-up, nonstandard metric, called "EBITDA profitability," which allowed them to lose billions and still declare themselves to be profitable, a lie that would have been obvious if they'd reported their earnings using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Like clockwork, Uber has just announced – once again – that it is profitable, and once again, the press has credulously repeated the claim. So once again, Horan has published one of his magisterial debunkings on Naked Capitalism:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-three-uber-isnt-really-profitable-yet-but-is-getting-closer-the-antitrust-case-against-uber.html

Uber's $394m gains this quarter come from paper gains to untradable shares in its loss-making rivals – Didi, Grab, Aurora – who swapped stock with Uber in exchange for Uber's own loss-making overseas divisions. Yes, it's that stupid: Uber holds shares in dying companies that no one wants to buy. It declared those shares to have gained value, and on that basis, reported a profit.

Truly, any big number multiplied by an imaginary number can be turned into an even bigger number.

Now, Uber also reported "margin improvements" – that is, it says that it loses less on every journey. But it didn't explain how it made those improvements. But we know how the company did it: they made rides more expensive and cut the pay to their drivers. A 2.9m ride in Manhattan is now $50 – if you get a bargain! The base price is more like $70:

https://www.wired.com/story/uber-ceo-will-always-say-his-company-sucks/

The number of Uber drivers on the road has a direct relationship to the pay Uber offers those drivers. But that pay has been steeply declining, and with it, the availability of Ubers. A couple weeks ago, I found myself at the Burbank train station unable to get an Uber at all, with the app timing out repeatedly and announcing "no drivers available."

Normally, you can get a yellow taxi at the station, but years of Uber's predatory pricing has caused a drawdown of the local taxi-fleet, so there were no taxis available at the cab-rank or by dispatch. It took me an hour to get a cab home. Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.

Uber won't say why its margins are improving, but it can't be coming from scale. Before the pandemic, Uber had far more rides, and worse margins. Uber has diseconomies of scale: when you lose money on every ride, adding more rides increases your losses, not your profits.

Meanwhile, Lyft – Uber's also-ran competitor – saw its margins worsen over the same period. Lyft has always been worse at lying about it finances than Uber, but it is in essentially the exact same business (right down to the drivers and cars – many drivers have both apps on their phones). So Lyft's financials offer a good peek at Uber's true earnings picture.

Lyft is actually slightly better off than Uber overall. It spent less money on expensive props for its long con – flying cars, robotaxis, scooters, overseas clones – and abandoned them before Uber did. Lyft also fired 24% of its staff at the end of 2022, which should have improved its margins by cutting its costs.

Uber pays its drivers less. Like Lyft, Uber practices algorithmic wage discrimination, Veena Dubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:

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

All told, wage theft and wage cuts by Uber transferred $1b/quarter from labor to Uber's shareholders. Historically, Uber linked fares to driver pay – think of surge pricing, where Uber charged riders more for peak times and passed some of that premium onto drivers. But now Uber trumpets a custom pricing algorithm that is the inverse of its driver payment system, calculating riders' willingness to pay and repricing every ride based on how desperate they think you are.

This pricing is a per se antitrust violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, America's original antitrust law. That's important because Sherman 2 is one of the few antitrust laws that we never stopped enforcing, unlike the laws banning predator pricing:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/sites/ilr.law.uiowa.edu/files/2023-02/Woodcock.pdf

Uber claims an 11% margin improvement. 6-7% of that comes from algorithmic price discrimination and service cutbacks, letting it take 29% of every dollar the driver earns (up from 22%). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi himself says that this is as high as the take can get – over 30%, and drivers will delete the app.

Uber's food delivery service – a baling wire-and-spit Frankenstein's monster of several food apps it bought and glued together – is a loser even by the standards of the sector, which is unprofitable as a whole and experiencing an unbroken slide of declining demand.

Put it all together and you get a picture of the kind of taxi company Uber really is: one that charges more than traditional cabs, pays drivers less, and has fewer cars on the road at times of peak demand, especially in the neighborhoods that traditional taxis had always underserved. In other words, Uber has broken every one of its promises.

We replaced the "evil taxi cartel" with an "evil taxi monopolist." And it's still losing money.

Even if Lyft goes under – as seems inevitable – Uber can't attain real profitability by scooping up its passengers and drivers. When you're losing money on every ride, you just can't make it up in volume.

Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg

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

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg

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

[hongluboobs]

Twitter really liked this one so u guys get it too (with additional context from Twitter in the frame

[wigglebox]

Destiel Pride - Day 14; Transition

[babayaganoush]

Not a girl or a woman but a

LADY

[majorxmaggiexboy]

okay but 100% Dream can do that Gandalf “do not take me for some conjuror of cheap tricks” thing like at some point it’s Hob who’s late for one of their meetings and it’s getting dark and Dream’s starting to feel like his chest is a pit of snakes, which is not something he’s prepared to think about or address, so he’s stepped outside for a bit to debate the appropriate wait time (flee immediately and potentially miss next meeting bc he’s convinced this is Hob’s way of calling the whole thing off, or stay there for a minimum thirty some odd years just in case this is some form of payback) so he’s waiting outside this pub just fully skulking in the dark and some generic creeps start heckling a little, at first he just sneeringly ignores them but as we know 85% of his emotions manifest as severe annoyance, disdain, and righteous indignation so he starts getting snippy and they do not take the hint

so they approach and are getting pretty adamantly flirty until Dream (who has decided the best strategy may be to pop in on alternating years just to see if Hob shows up or perhaps send out some investigatory ravens and he doesn’t think Hob is likely to be imprisoned in a sphere but not all prisons are in fact fishtanks so it couldn’t hurt to check) escalates to proper ticked off and the shadows start converging from the surrounding area to puff up around and behind him like an especially stormy eldritch peacock and he’s actually turned into a shadow himself apart from the pinpoint star eyes and holy shit was he that tall before and where tf are these shadow tendrils coming from and his voice is coming from like forty different directions in full YOU DARE

meanwhile Hob (whose train was late, who’s been on a series of mild misadventures today and knew all too well the potential ramifications of being late (“oh absolutely he’ll be distraught furious. No doubt.”) has just come skidding round the corner (he was not in a full sprint at this point or anything, not at all) just in time to see what looks like two blokes about to get eviscerated by this seven foot swirling void of starstuff and fury

Hob experiences a full and thriving range of emotions when witnessing this, including at least two levels of Concern but also, well

it takes a bit to get Dream’s attention and a bit longer for Dream to return all the shadows whence they came (some have to just be stuffed back into his coat like an unwieldy litter of kittens, it’s fine) but all in all things proceed as normal

(Hob refrains from Asking about the whole cosmic horror and shapeshifting possibilities thing just yet because his friend is nothing if not an easily startled stray possum and he’d rather not stir up any hissing, best save it for a meeting not preceded by a break in routine)

(Dream brings it up himself about forty minutes in, all, “You’ll have. Questions.” Which Hob denies, carefully casual, until before Dream has even finished asking “You’re certain?” Hob is in fact gleefully rattling off a list of Questions)

[anglerflsh]

I need to talk more about Sophie my good friend Sophie God's most tormented autism warrior Sophie. wa

[sungniki]

Ain’t no doubt you’re my answer

No worries, I’m alright

[not-another-robin]

Do you think the world is ready for my transfem alfred and bruce au