#letters to Vega

[vegalocity]

It’s honestly a crime that the writing just brushed Syntax’s becoming a Spider under the rug. No, he’s fine with it, don’t worry about it. No we’re not gonna explore this, they’re bad guys and we’re killing them off anyway, don’t worry about it.

There was so much room to explore, especially with how Goliath and Huntsman might’ve felt, but no.

I MEAN RIGHT?

Admittedly it's a running thing with LMK to IMPLY a lot and then look at the audience and say 'no followup questions' with their full chests, (like all of the implications of Red Son's home life being kinda fucked but it barely gets touched upon again after season one despite clear evidence that things aren't all fixed in S3 and we're just supposed to believe everything's aces by S4) And the Spiders i think are probably the most egregious example

the deleted character (rip Spindrax regulated to the shadow relm), one of the characters never gets a dedicated episode to see how he acts as an independent agent and that spider doesn't even have a real NAME (which im sure drives you crazy in particular Twinkle) there are IMPLICATIONS of character arcs and backstories and overall POTENTIAL that just got thrown away to show everyone how cool and dangerous LBD was and gave NO hope of rescue.

Back when s2 was airing i thought LMK was sort of like- Building a rogue's gallery- a sort of batman rogues are we type cabal that could keep the adventures fresh and fun and... nope. I would have KILLED for a sort of 'Harley and Ivy' type episode that was focused entirelhy around the spiders, and possibly run it like essentially an Ed Edd N Eddy episode as the spider boys tried running a heist or smth without SQ there to keep them from feeding off of eachother's vibes too hard and it all turning to complete chaos.

LMK has a lot of stylistic influence to Adveture Time, and you can tell they WANT MK to be a Finn type (I mean his place in the mythological system seems to be essentially Finn's Catalyst Comet arc truncated significantly) but you kinda can't make an adventure time style world without understanding that the world belongs just as much to the semi-reformed wizard kidnapping princesses as it does to the hero that kicks him in the boingloins, you know?

and LMK very much belongs ONLY to the Monkie Kid Krew (I mean ive gone on record to say that Tang's arc would have been MUCH more interesting if he WASN'T actually the Monk in a past life and really was Just Some Guy and fully earned his own magic, but that would mean the world was bigger than just the characters designated as important so that couldn't be) and the villains are just pins to set up and knock over in a season and a special's time (if they even get that, sorry Nine Heads)

But as for Huntsman and Goliath's perspectives on Syntax- man i WISH i knew those... I think the ones i like the best are Goliath being... nice but distant to the new guy in like a 'whatever the queen clearly thinks its fine' type way and Hutnsman being like- INSTANTLY thinking Syntax is gunning for his 'position' (whatever it is) and is HYPER aware of him, Syntax is living RENT free in this spider's head because he's CONVINCED that he's after his position in the 'loyalty to the queen' social ladder or smth and meanwhile Syntax, genre savvy as he is is like "oh we're gonna do that thing where we start out as rivals but grow closer to respect eachother and eventually become very close friends and playfully compete with eachother sometimes to keep the spice in the banter! this is fun! ^.^"

Idk sounds like more fun than a pile of dead bodies that don't even get the dignity of being brought back in flashbacks

[t00thpasteface]

[erial-c]

ohhh warden must be so fucking conflicted rn . vega reading the letter he'd written unknowingly in front of them ... they're literally marceline and ice king

[captainmartin20]

“I miss you and love you endlessly”

[parchmentknight]

HELP okay so i draw in my sketchbook (duh) but i also write whatever thoughts im thinking while i draw... THE MARGIN STUFF IS SO WEIRD IM SORRY IN ADVANCE LOLOLOL

[bluemoon-standingalone]

i've been pondering about this for a while. i'm curious what you guys think

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Wuerker, Politico

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 31, 2024

On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.

He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.

Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.  

Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.

An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”

Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”

This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living

will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one. 

Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. 

It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.” 

Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations. 

As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. 

At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform�� to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” “Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” 

Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.

A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” 

Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.

In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).

Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare. 

Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler. 

At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” 

The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone. 

In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally. 

This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.

Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.” 

The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[romeo-the-homeo]

anyone who has the patreon and chose vega’s letter this month please contact me 🙏🏼 i have 8 letters i will share with u in return for a peek at the vega letter when it arrives 🙏🏼😭 i just wanna know what he says so bad please

[w98pops]

homo homini lupus est or something along the lines

[englishknightsky]

ulysses sighing as he's given yet another envelope sealed with a red lipstick mark by a very exhausted courier vs courier six back at the lucky 38 kicking their legs like a schoolgirl and writing him love letters

[jarold-rat]

I am NOT fucking inking this

based on me having the chewy part of a cow foot. i didnt like it despite how similar it is to cow tongue.. my favorite type of cow meat.....

[vegalocity]

Listening intently: i would love to hear your thoughts on syntax

Oh buddy-

where do you want me to start

there he is- the blorbo from my shows

The only people that live rent free in my brain even more are Sailor Moon and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Primarily Raph and Leo)

So here are my thoughts on Syntax and i will TRY to not go into how un-fucking-fairly the spiders were treated by the narrative. Also this is from the perspective of someone that does not ship T0x!c!n$@n!ty (leet speek'd as to not end up in the tag) so don't expect any of that-

So the thing about Syntax- something i had fully EXPECTED to come up again but didn't- is that his story is INHERENTLY sympathetic. He was a captive scientist coerced into working for Spider Queen and mutated and mind controlled by her

I heard some people try and make it 'softer' by saying it was more voluntary than not- like 'oh he took a job' or 'he was already an immoral scientist' or something (even though it seems hes more of a programmer and tinkerer than a capital S Scientist) mostly to try and minimize the level of moral grey that is brought up when you bring the whole thing up- makes it easier for fic purpouses you know? either to justify him hooking up with another villain or to make him an easy 'antagonist' for a different ship or to not have to look at the general moral quandries to the whole thing

And since the writers fridged him bc the spider lego sets didn't do well enough in sales to justify looking into him beyond the surface level of 'nerd spider' and 'please don't think about the fact that he was mind controlled and mutated against his will'

which naturally is WHY i felt so interested in making my main lmk OC's a family he was ripped away from, making that moral quandry front and center, and also my main SHIP with Syntax putting it front and center. Sometimes what i find interesting about a character is completely apart form the things the fanon latches onto and-

I think 'Gamer Syntax' is the thing everyone latched onto, when my read on him was more 'tired millenial also extremely autistic' and sort of just.... latched onto him

I'm projecting my autism onto him probably more than i do to Red Son lmao-

He's my funky lil sci fi loving programmer nerd and He and the rest of the spiders got spat out of LBD's ghost jail and they're not gonna do villain shit for awhile and instead just do their own thing trying to regain power because if they're not LOUD enough to get the Monkey Boy's attention he just fucking won't notice and never find out they were still alive.

[xryptiid]

Closeup of Mrs Flood's suitcase from the Doctor Who Podcast- there's some really cool throwbacks and some new stuff on here!!! WHAT DOES IT ALL MEANNNN???? (photo sauce)

[ultfreakme]

It'd be really fucked up if post-canon Vegas moves with Pete and Macau to the beach side and opens a bar, Porsche hears about this and goes to visit him as they're setting up the place and putting things in order before opening night.

Okay picture this, late at night, Vegas is in a floral pattern dress shirt which is very colorful and light and the buttons are just fully undone the tits are OUT, standing behind the bar table which is open and facing the ocean, warm yellow lights everywhere. Porsche sits on the high chair up front and orders, and Vegas serves him a drink as his first customer and Porsche calls him a fucking bastard because this is his dream. Vegas who's been looking pretty normal and surprisingly chill slips into the early s1 Vegas smarmy af evil expression and says "You stole my dream, it's only fair I take yours".

[laesas]

The hands holding yours are not clean either.

VegasPete + Hands || KinnPorsche (2022)

[hsslilly-blog]

i hope she gets to torment him in every universe ever