#or at least not any like active and populated ones

[secret--history]

the whole 'there are not very many Great Causes worth fighting for these days' from Julian scanned as WAY more out of touch than the moon landing thing for me the first time i read tsh

[c0s-lettuce]

your orbit

steve harrington x reader

synopsis: amidst a night of board games, junk food and extraordinary company, the only thing steve can think about is you.

→ or the deterioration of steve harrington's mind over the course of an evening.

word count: 4.1k

warnings/tags: fem!reader, set around s4 but no upside down, eddie and robin aren't subtle, steve just really loves you, childhood best friends to strangers to friends, one bed but not really ;)

a/n: i love ex bestie steve! i've been wanting to write for him for a while, so hope i did him justice. joe keery favourite white boy frrr. pls forgive any inaccuracies and thanks for reading <3

part two coming soon!

5 PM

Steve decided to take advantage of having the house to himself. His parents are gone for the week, as they so often are. So, he sent out a few invitations to some of his closest friends. A small get-together, he told them, nothing fancy.

Robin accepted, of course. And Nancy and Jonathan, too. Steve only told Dustin about the party, but he already knew that word would spread to all the other kids.

But Steve has a mini panic attack when he finds out you're coming. He isn't too sure where he stands with you these days. Your friendship has all but rekindled, but Steve is still wary around you, terrified of messing up again. You accepted the invitation, though. That's a good thing. Right?

As Steve waits for people to arrive, he takes out his only activities, a deck of cards and a single board game he received as a gift but never opened. He's relying on his friends with siblings and/or a healthier relationship with their parents to bring more things to do.

He sets out the snacks he bought. Chips and candy are laid out over the island counter in the kitchen, and soda is stacked in the fridge. Steve even sets aside a little stash of what he hopes are still your favourites. He also managed to get his hands on some beer, and there's money set aside for pizza later.

Soon enough, people start showing up. Robin arrives first, followed by Dustin, Lucas and Max. Then Nancy and Jonathan arrive with Mike, Will and El. Then you. And finally, Eddie.

The gaggle of children quickly bee-line for the snacks and games. Steve watches with disdain, knowing there'll be a mess to clean up after. But at least his other guests appear happy to see their gracious host, with you among them.

Steve pretty much shortcircuits when you arrive. You're dressed nicely, and your hair is all pretty. You lean in to give him a quick hug, greeting him fondly. He may as well have cancelled the night then because he's sure his heart stopped for a second.

He only snaps out of it when Eddie arrives, slapping him so hard on the back that it could've been an alternative to the Heimlich maneuver. Suddenly, the population of the house has gone from one to a dozen, and noise and energy immediately replace the prior peace.

Steve quickly realises that he's in for a long night.

6 PM

"So, what's the story between the two of you?" Eddie asks.

Steve blinks, caught off guard by the question. He turns to the other boy, who awaits his answer with a half-curious, half-smug expression.

"Nothing, man," Steve mutters, taking a sip of his beer.

"Nothing, huh?" Eddie smirks. "Is that why you're staring at her like she's the love of your life?"

Steve glares at Eddie, wondering who even invited him. Eddie is the newest addition to the larger friend group. Dustin is very fond of him. And from what Steve has heard, so are you. He's in a few of the same classes as you, and there's a rumour among the kids that you used to be in Hellfire for a semester in your sophomore year.

The thought of you being close to Eddie bothers Steve. He chases the feeling away with another sip.

"Come on, big boy," Eddie nudges him. "We're friends now. You can tell me."

He looks back at you. You're sat around the coffee table with the kids in the middle of a round of Uno. And you look so lovely. You always do. Even the way you're holding the cards is pretty. You're the perfect culmination of everything sweet. No wonder the kids are hogging you.

He looks back at Eddie, who's still regarding Steve with inquisitive and mischievous eyes. Steve considers acquiescing, especially since Eddie is willing to listen. At the very least, it'll give Robin a break from dealing with his usual sulking.

"We were really close in middle school," Steve begins. "Best friends, even. But then I started high school, and... well, you can probably guess the rest."

"Ah," Eddie nods, understanding immediately. "I see."

Steve continues. "We only spent a year apart. And she was so excited to join me. But then-"

"Then King Steve emerged, and you left her in the dirt," Eddie remarks.

Steve cringes at the wording but doesn't refute it. It's an accurate recount of what happened. He knew he was horrible, not just to you but to everyone. He regrets nothing more than abandoning you and letting his so-called friends pick on you. Meanwhile, he stood by, telling himself worthless excuses to justify how things turned out.

You and Steve remained strangers after he left his throne behind. And it probably would've stayed that way if he didn't become coworkers with one Robin Buckley, who had become your new best friend in his absence.

He remembers the days you would visit Scoops Ahoy, mostly to distract Robin and make his job harder. You would often give him quick glances and polite smiles, never going out of your way to talk to him. However, he would occasionally catch your eyes lingering on him.

Robin would tell him you were checking him out, insisting she knew how her best friend thinks. But he was convinced you were judging him for his dumb hat and sailor outfit. Nothing ever made him wish he could crawl into a hole and die more than that.

But suddenly, he was back in your orbit again. And he's never left since.

Turning his attention back to you, Steve watches you play your last card, earning a groan from a few of the other players. You stand up victorious, stepping away from the table to grab another drink from the kitchen.

Steve recognises this as the perfect time to approach you and say something other than the "hey" he offered when you arrived. But just as he's about to muster up the courage, the doorbell rings, indicating the arrival of pizza.

With a sigh and another slap on the back from Eddie, he turns away to retrieve the food.

7 PM

You fit in well with the others. Not that it's a bad thing. It's great, actually. It just reminds Steve how much time has passed and how things have changed. It makes him think of what could've been.

You being best friends with Robin makes more sense than hot chocolate on a rainy day. You're like two peas in a pod. You match each other's energy, and both have a sort of charming madness about you.

The kids obviously like you. Not that their criteria are that high. But it helps that you used to work at the arcade and would give them your spare quarters. Plus, the rumour that you used to be in Hellfire makes you seem like a legend in their eyes.

Even Max likes you. He could tell because you were the one she approached earlier, asking if she could have a beer. You laughed and told her no. She just pouted and accepted it. Steve knew if he told her no, he would've been left with an insult.

You aren't particularly close to Nancy or Jonathan. Still, Steve knew they respected you, which means a lot, especially from someone like Nancy. And, of course, Eddie is... Eddie.

Steve comes to the realisation that he's jealous of everyone at the party. They all have a place in your life, in your heart. He wonders if there's even room left for him. There was a time when he occupied all that space. And it's his own fault that changed. Still, he can't help but hope.

The pizza disperses and disappears quickly. As the others chase their dinner with more snacks and set up another game, Steve remains leaning against the wall. He's so deep in thought that he doesn't notice someone approaching him.

"Steve?"

He flinches at the voice. It's you.

"H-hey," he stutters.

"Hey," you reply. "You okay? You seem a bit... distraught."

Steve takes a second to respond but nods. "Yeah, yeah. I'm good, just thinking."

You tilt your head, sensing more to the story but not wanting to pry. "Alright. Just don't hurt yourself."

Steve chuckles nervously, both relieved and terrified that you're making jokes with him.

You point back towards the coffee table. "The others are about to start a game of Monopoly. Did you want to join?"

He looks towards the group, at Dustin micromanaging how Will sets up the board. At Max and El scheming their game plan, having already picked the token they want to use. And at Mike dragging over his reluctant-looking sister, an amused-looking boyfriend following behind.

Steve knew he ought to join in, having just been standing around all night. But the idea of playing a game about capitalism with a group of kids who took board games way too seriously doesn't appeal to him right now.

So, he shakes his head. "No thanks. You go ahead."

You glance at the others before turning back. "Nah, I'm good. I need a break from getting lectured by Dustin."

Steve snorts. "Yeah, that kid's got a mouth on him. You wouldn't believe how often he tries to give me dating advice."

"He gives you dating advice?" you ask, amused.

"Yeah," Steve answers. "Now that he has a girlfriend, he thinks he's unstoppable. A girlfriend he wouldn't even have if it weren't for me, by the way. I taught him everything he knows."

You laugh and shrug. "Well, maybe you could learn something, Steve. You know, the whole 'student becomes the master' thing?"

Steve lets out a huff. "No, no way. Besides, I don't need a girlfriend when I've got-"

You, he almost says. But he clears his throat and corrects himself.

"Uh, all of you," he states, vaguely gesturing to the party. "My friends, you know?"

His words make you grin. "Aww, Steve-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he mumbles. "Just don't tell anyone I said that."

He averts his gaze. His cheeks flush a bit, but he's holding back a smile. He's glad to have gotten that reaction from you.

You're about to tease him some more when Robin's voice interrupts, calling for your help from upstairs.

You sigh, looking back at Steve. "Duty calls. I'll leave you to your thinking."

You give him a cheeky smile before you leave, a smile that makes it seem like you somehow read his mind and found his thoughts amusing. He can only watch as you walk away again.

8 PM

Steve isn't sure how he got here, sitting next to you on the carpet. The Monopoly game was cut short after Lucas and Mike got into a heated argument. And now they've switched to The Game of Life, which hopefully won't cause any fights.

Not only did Steve get roped into playing, he got teamed up with you. You had been calling most of the shots during the game, but when you reached the marriage space, stuck a little pink peg next to the blue one and murmured, "That's us," to Steve... well, it all got a bit confronting for the poor boy.

He felt like a fool, sitting there overthinking two words that likely were said as a joke. Steve had realised a while ago that he loved you. A part of him thinks he always has, ever since the early days of middle school.

But being friends with you again after everything is more than he felt he deserved, so he doesn't expect you to return those feelings just yet. But then you go ahead and say something like that. So casually, too. "That's us." Married. Yeah, right. Either you're cruel, or there's hope for him yet.

Steve manages to calm his emotions a few moments later. But as the game progresses, he continues comparing his life to the little blue peg that was supposedly him.

Steve, in the game, has a college degree, a decently-paying job, a pretty pink peg for a wife (which you've claimed to be you), three peg children and his own house, all while avoiding any mid-life crises.

Steve, in real life, at the ripe age of nineteen, has no idea what he's doing. He's been through at least two quarter-life crises. College is definitely not happening. And he's working a retail job Robin got for him through bribery. At least it came with a better uniform. One which would probably help with picking up girls if the girl he actually wanted wasn't the one currently sitting next to him.

At least now, when you visit Robin at work, you also come to see him. You make eye contact, give him bright smiles, and actually talk to him. And he has to do everything in his god-given power to not lose his mind each time.

But it's not all for nothing. After all, you're a loyal customer of Family Video, and Steve always looks after his patrons (as long as it's you). If he knows you'll be visiting, he'll put on one of your favourite movies on the TV in the store.

He'll also research movies he thinks you'll like, lie and say they're unavailable if someone tries to rent them before he can get them to you. It earns judgment from Robin, but he doesn't care. As long as it makes you happy.

Soon, Steve vows, he'll take you out to see a movie on the big screen. It'll be just the two of you at the back of the theatre with a big bucket of popcorn. He'll pull some cheesy move on you. You'll laugh at him or roll your eyes. Or maybe you'll fall for it. Either way, it'll be perfect.

Steve only checks back into the present when The Game of Life ends. He glances around the table, relieved no one has noticed him daydreaming. Everyone's cars are in the retired space, and Steve catches a glimpse of you and him and your three kids again. But he looks back at the real you as you turn to face him.

Steve is no help as you sort out how much money you ended up with, too busy admiring you instead. You're focused, doing maths in your head and using his lap as a surface to lay out the notes and cards. And somehow, he falls even more in love with you in this moment.

9 PM

The party has diminished, with Nancy and Jonathan having gone home with the kids. Now, just Steve, Robin, Eddie, and you remain. Outside, dark clouds have gathered, showering Hawkins in light rain.

The four of you are finishing the night off with one last card game. You had won, of course. And now Eddie has recruited your help. He has his arm around you, his head pressed against yours, his deck hiding your faces as you conspired his next move.

If Steve didn't know any better, he'd assume you two were a thing. But he does know better. Eddie must be doing this on purpose, trying to make him jealous or something. And it was working. Steve supposed that's what he deserves for trusting Eddie with his deepest, darkest regret.

The card game turns into a one-sided glaring contest, with Robin having to nudge Steve whenever it's his turn. With your help, Eddie finishes second. Robin comes third, and Steve loses the game. But at this point, he isn't even upset about it because it means his suffering is over.

Eddie finally lets go of you, letting out a contented sigh as he stretches his arms above his head.

"Alright," he announces. "I'm calling it a night. You ready to go, Buckley?"

Robin nods. "Yeah, let's head."

The two stand and begin gathering their things.

Eddie looks at you as he puts on his jacket. "You sure you don't want a ride home?"

You shake your head. "I'm good, Eds. You take Robin. My dad should be here soon."

Eddie accepts your answer with a nod, and you catch the slightest hint of a smirk. But you ignore it as you and Steve walk him and Robin to the door. You give them each a hug before they leave.

Robin has an expression you don't fully comprehend as she hugs you back, somewhere between smug and amused. "See you later, nerd. Make good choices, okay?"

You furrow your brow, but she heads out the door before you can ask what she means by that.

As Eddie steps out after her, he looks back at Steve. "Hey, Harrington. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

He sends Steve a wink, who frowns at the implication of his words. You notice Robin is still giving you that look. You send her a raised eyebrow in return. But no more words are exchanged as the two go their merry way.

"God, they're weird," Steve mutters as he closes the door.

His comment elicits a chuckle from you, which elicits a flutter in his chest. He turns to face you, unable to help the smile that graces his features just by looking at you. But a mildly awkward silence follows as Steve racks his brain on how to proceed now that it's just the two of you.

"You, uh- you want another drink?" he asks.

You smile and nod. "Yeah, sure."

His own smile widens. "Alright. You sit back down, and I'll get us some."

Steve heads into the now almost empty kitchen, grabbing two bottles before finding you again in the living room. You're sitting on the couch, packing up the deck of cards. Steve is momentarily distracted by the way your hands move.

But as he approaches and hands you your drink, he decides to be bold and sits close to you, throwing an arm over the back of the couch. He doesn't even have a millisecond to regret it because he feels you lean into his touch.

Steve revels in the satisfaction.

10 PM

Eddie and Robin seem to have left just in time because the storm picks up only a few minutes after they leave. You and Steve sit and chat for a while as you finish your drinks, and you help Steve clear up the empty cans and scattered wrappers despite him ordering you not to.

But even after everything is cleaned, your father still hasn't arrived. Steve watches as you wait, looking at the time again.

"You're welcome to stay over if that's easier for you," he tells you.

You look over at him, considering his offer. "You don't mind?"

Steve shakes his head. "No, of course not."

He doesn't mind. He doesn't mind at all. In fact, he would prefer it. He's used to being alone for days at a time. But it's a bit harrowing going from twelve people to just one, especially in a big empty house during a storm. Yes, he definitely wants you to stay.

"Okay," you say, "I'll just call my parents and ask what's happening."

Steve nods as you walk over to the phone and call home. It rings for a bit before someone picks up.

"Hello?" your mother's voice greets you.

"Hey, mom," you reply. "It's me."

The pitch of her voice changes immediately upon hearing your voice. "Hi, darling! Is everything okay?"

"Yeah, I just wanted to check if dad was still coming to pick me up?" you ask.

There's a pause before your mom groans. "Oh, I'm so sorry. We completely forgot. We had a lot of wine for dinner. I can go get him now."

"It's no big deal, mom," you interject. "The storm's getting pretty bad anyway. Steve said I could stay over."

Again, your mother's cadence changes, but you don't need to question why. You know she's always been a fan of Steve.

"Okay, darling," she responds. "That sounds like a good idea. You two take care, alright?"

You resist rolling your eyes, even though she's not around to see it. "Yeah, you too, mom. Bye."

Your mom bids you farewell, and you hang up the phone.

Steve, who waits patiently nearby, takes this as his cue to speak up. "You staying?"

You look over at him and nod. "I'm staying."

"Okay, great," Steve smiles. "You can take my room. I'll go in the guest bedroom."

"What? Steve, no," you say. "You don't have to do that. I'll take the guest bedroom."

"No, really," he insists. "It's cold and uncomfortable in there. Trust me."

"I'm the guest, Steve. I'll go in the guest bedroom," you respond.

"No, not happening," he states.

You frown. "I'm not letting you give up your room."

Steve crosses his arms. "Well, I'm not letting you stay in the guest bedroom."

There's a pause in the conversation as the two of you stare each other down, hoping the other will fold.

When neither of you do, you make another suggestion. "Alright. How about we just share your bed?"

Steve raises his eyebrows. "Uh, you- really? Are you sure?"

You shrug. "Yeah, I mean... we used to do it all the time as kids, right?"

It's true. You did. There were countless nights when you would pass out in bed together, having stayed up watching movies or spent the entire day in the pool.

"Okay," Steve agrees. "Let's do that then."

"Great," you say.

"Great," he replies.

Yeah... great.

11 PM

Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't freak out.

That's all Steve could repeat in his head. He's lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling while you're beside him. He forgot to factor in how the both of you have grown considerably since middle school, meaning there's less space between you now.

Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Don't fr-

"You know," you break the silence. "I forgot how weird your plaid wallpaper was."

Steve furrows his brow, his distress momentarily forgotten as he turns to look at you.

"It's not weird," he says defensively.

"It's pretty weird," you reply before looking at him. "But it's cool."

As your gaze meets his, he feels his nervousness rushing back. You look so soft and cozy in his bed, wearing his shirt. And you're smiling at him as if you knew the funniest joke in the world and you were about to tell it to him.

He lets a beat of silence pass before clearing his throat. "Did you have fun today?"

"Yeah, I did," you answer genuinely. "You?"

"Yeah," Steve replies. "It's nice having people around."

You nod in response, remembering how his parents would send him over to live with your family whenever they would go away. As much as he loved being able to spend time with you, you knew he hated being left behind.

"How long are your parents gone for this time?" you ask.

"Just until the end of the week," he tells you.

You nod again. "You've been faring up by yourself?"

He shrugs. "I don't mind it. They've been on my back a lot recently. Honestly, I needed the break."

"Right," you reply. "So not much has changed."

Steve lets out a humourless laugh. "Nope. It's been hell since I graduated last year."

You frown at his words. "I guess that's not surprising."

"Yeah, I don't know," he pauses for a second before continuing, his voice quieter. "Sometimes, I think they have a point."

You pause as well, trying to gauge what he's thinking. "You shouldn't let them get to you, Steve."

He sighs. "I know. But what if they're right, you know, about me?"

"They're not. I promise you," you reassure him.

Steve turns to look at you again, almost like he's searching for your sincerity.

You give him a smile. "You'll be alright, Steve. I know it."

Steve can't help but smile back. You sound so earnest that he's inclined to believe you. Besides, you're here with him right now. So, he must be doing something right.

You fall into a comfortable silence. There's barely any noise this late at night to disrupt it. After a few moments, you let out a yawn.

"Ugh, man. I'm so sleepy," you mumble.

"You should get some rest," he responds. "I still remember how grumpy you get in the morning."

You give him a deadpan look. "Gee, thanks."

Steve chuckles. "Just telling the truth."

Your feigned expression breaks as you laugh along, too. Steve cherishes every second of the moment before it fades away.

You yawn again. "Alright then. Goodnight, Steve."

"Goodnight, sweetheart," he replies.

The room falls silent again. Steve lets out a deep breath and closes his eyes. Despite the uncertainty, a smile still lingers on his lips. A million things could change tomorrow. But for now, at least, you're still by his side.

[mimikyusrealform]

globalization

Spencer Reid x Reader. Word Count: 3703. Summary: Three times you leave Spencer speechless, and one time he leaves you speechless. Notes and Warnings: Set during S1 at the beginning, and then at S2. Mention of Somebody's Watching and North Mammon. There's a misogynistic comment, but it's quickly dealt with.

1.

The rivalry started innocuous enough. Three months after Dr. Spencer Reid joined the BAU, you were recruited as well. Fresh out of the academy and without a prebuilt rapport with the rest of the team, you felt out of place. They listened to your suggestions, but after a week and a half, it was like they were still teaching you the ropes, coddling you. Hotch didn’t even let you go out in the field. This piling dissatisfaction reached its culmination without warning.

“C’mon now,” Morgan said one day. You didn’t even remember what led to the following statement, but you remembered the phrase that started the domino effect. “Robberies have been declining since last year.”

“The robbery rate declined last year,” you corrected him as you skimmed through your oddly small workload for the day. They weren’t working on any cases. “It’s been declining since 1986, but it’s possible that the rate will increase this year in comparison to last year’s, which was at an all-time low, at 137.”

“136.7,” Dr. Reid corrected you from his own desk. He had already finished half of his work. “That is given a population of 293,656,842.” He looked at you and Morgan. “Did you know that the U.S Census Bureau estimates the population as of July 1 for each year? Except when it's a decennial census count, like 2000.”

It took Dr. Reid a whole minute to notice your glare. What a genius. He looked as if he was panicking a bit, and his gaze drifted between you and Morgan. He seemed to be begging with his eyes for Morgan to, somehow, reveal to him the secrets of the universe and what he should do to stop your glaring. But Morgan was not a pious entity, and he turned around, suddenly blind. It took Dr. Reid another minute to figure out why you were killing him in your head.

“I—I mean, you round up from 5, so 137 is accurate,” he rectified, staring back at you, like you were the abyss and he, the hero who needed to face it.

You stayed silent for a while. And then, you said, “That's dumb. The rate was 136.7. Sigh. I thought you were a genius, Dr. Reid, how could you even suggest that the rate was 137? Maybe you should check if you need to reinstall the eidetic memory package.”

Morgan made a sound that was between a dog barking out a laugh and a dog choking on its bone. But it was Dr. Reid's perplexed expression what you burned in your memory.

It wasn't your fault, really, that your antagonistic nature decided to pursue a war with the resident genius of the team. If you were to bluff in case of being questioned why you were so adamant in aggravating Dr. Spencer Reid in any way you could, you would say, “complacency is the enemy of natural selection and I'm truly benevolent—so I'm making the Doctor a favor by keeping him on his toes.” The truth was, Dr. Spencer Reid's geeky enthusiasm and nerdy rambles had charmed you. While you weren't on the same level as him when it came to intelligence—your latest IQ test had put you around 137, and that was knowing the common patterns the test tended to use—you had a knack for deconstructing things. When you were 8, you couldn't finish a Rubik cube for the life of you, but when you broke it down to its simpler parts, you found a way to solve it after learning how the core mechanism worked.

Antagonizing was how you dealt with your crushes. All the crushes you ever had, you actively treated them as if they were your mortal enemies. In a sense, they were. Understandably, none of them ever liked you, and you couldn't blame them. But, for some reason, the idea of Dr. Spencer Reid not returning your affections was—troubling, to say the least. And that only made you pricklier.

2.

Lila Archer was not an enemy but a victim with very poor timing. You draped a towel around her febrile shoulders, and patted her back in an ode to comfort. Then, you went out of the house to deal with your real foe. Dr. Spencer Reid was still trying to dry himself with a pathetically small cloth. In another occasion, it would have made you laugh. But you were, at loss of a better word, jealous. How shameful was that? You hadn’t been jealous since Nathaniel Sterling, your crush in tenth grade, started dating Rose Harding, the cloistered girl who ruined your straight-A-record in Math because you were paired with her during one assignment.

You had the bad habit of swallowing the acid that dripped from your own soul and regurgitating it when you were alone. For now, you compartmentalized. Weirdly enough, you found yourself feeling tired, instead of murderous. You understood, then, how having a crush on someone didn’t compare to being in love.

A crush was a candle in the wind; being in love was a fire in a forest.

The color of the night sky, that reflected on the blue water, covered the world of depth and beyond all bounds. Even the air was blue; it bit your skin. Or maybe it was your own feelings that prickled down your spine. If porcupines did mate for life, they would be the most tender lovers in the world, you thought. The prickliest beings loved carefully and purposefully.

Only after Elle left his side, did you approach. Though the look she gave you was too perceptive for your liking. “I didn’t know kissing with the girl you’re supposed to be protecting from her stalker was part of the protocol. Please, forward me the exact article that describes the effectiveness of French kisses as a method of protection against erotomaniacs.”

He tried to ignore your wording, but his ears were red, and so were his cheeks, despite the fact the air had cooled the water clinging to his clothes. “I, uh, I fell in,” was all he could muster given the fact you had a gun, a motive and a cold heart.

“I see,” you nodded. “That’s what tends to happen when you pool your women.”

“I don’t pool my women! I-I don’t even—I don’t even have women.”

“Relax, Doctor, you won’t drown. If you know how to two-stroke, two-timing should come naturally to you.”

Dr. Reid made a pitiful sound when he realized there was no winning against you.

“She kissed me first,” he said.

“Maybe you deserved it.”

“Don’t make it sound like a punishment.”

“I’m not.” You were sincere.

3.

You were pretty good at remaining unmovable, and you were proud of that. But—this guy. This guy.

“All I did was show them who they really are,” he was saying with that stupid self-satisfied smile. “What they were truly capable of. People pretending to be decent. When it came down to it, they… They reacted just the way I knew they would.”

“Is that so,” you couldn’t help but interrupt his little monologue. Gideon looked at you from the corner of his eye, but he didn’t try to stop you. “Congratulations. Be proud of discovering the sky is blue for the rest of your life, I commiserate you; it must have been so hard for you. Do you really think you’re a mastermind for this?” His smile slowly disappeared, replaced by a glare directed towards you. “If you starve a dog, are you a genius for knowing the dog will end up becoming aggressive? But then, that’s a Nobel-worthy dissertation for someone so simpleminded like you.”

He started to say something, voice shaking from barely contained rage, but you were already leaving the basement. He yelled after you. You couldn’t hear him over the buzzing in your ears.

In the plane, you were shutting down the world around you by pretending to read a Russian Copy of The Brothers Karamazov. You didn’t speak Russian. That was—until Reid sat in front of you. He didn’t speak for a moment, just observed you. You flipped five pages before he finally said,

“Are you okay?”

“What an unpleasant question,” you replied. He kept looking at you, which annoyed you because it made your stomach twist. “I suppose. That guy got on my nerves.”

“I thought you didn’t have nerves,” he said. “I mean… you always act as if you’re untouched by the world.”

“I try my utmost not to be perceived. The world is a scary place, after all.”

“It is scary,” he agreed. “But, scary—how? How does someone like you find the world to be scary?”

You put your book down on your lap. “Full of people.” You twirled a strand of hair around your index finger. “And what I hate most are the people who lie to themselves. That guy—lied to himself that he was right. He decided to believe other people were his enemies instead of realizing… realizing he was his own worst enemy.”

It wasn’t without tact—though it startled you all the same—when he said, “Sounds a bit like you.”

“Oh, right.” You supposed it was a fair assessment; you never gave him any indication that you actually didn’t see him as enemy. You acted like you did, after all. Maybe he really believed you hated him. So, “I don’t hate you. If I was smart, I would go as far as to say that I like you.”

You watched him freeze for a split of a second before his face turned red, like a M-class star. It gave you terrible ideas and horrible impulses. You couldn’t help but reach for his glasses, and—gently push them up the bridge of his nose. Your index finger brushed against his skin. His face went a class up in the Morgan-Keenan classification.

“But you are smart,” he managed to choke out. “Very smart.”

“What are you implying?”

He couldn’t answer, and you returned to your book, a bit disappointed, maybe. You had thought he was ready to give in. You still couldn’t read a single word. Reid must have noticed because he ended up prying the book from your hands, and began reading out loud, just for you, just for your enjoyment. It was enough.

+1.

“Kid,” Morgan called as he slid in the seat next to him. “Seriously, when are you gonna ask her out? Save the rest of us from her pining.”

Spencer frowned. “Ask who out?”

He was only half listening, but when Morgan said your name, he spluttered. “What?!” He lowered his tone after that voice break. “Morgan, are you crazy? She hates my guts.”

Morgan looked incredibly amused. “No, she doesn't. She's just pulling your hair. And, if she actually hated you, well, I don't think I need to remind you what happened to Officer Harrison. I really wish I had been there to see it.”

Spencer almost smiled at the memory. A few months back, a case had brought them to Texas when the local police discovered two independent pairs of hands scattered across their state line. The second in command, Officer Harrison, had been a flagrant misogynistic and a stereotypical macho-man.

“But what does cutting the hands-off mean?” Officer Harrison had asked.

JJ, you and him were the only ones from the team still in the bullpen.

Hotch did trust you with fieldwork, but he found that you and Spencer were an especially good match, so he mostly paired the two of you together. You bounced off each other’s ideas with an uncanny synergy.

Before he could ramble off, you beat him to it, “The ancient Greek sometimes mutilated the body of their victim. There's a theory that says that the mutilation of the body corresponded to the mutilation of the soul, so that the shade, without limbs, couldn't enact vengeance over the killer. Maybe the Unsub’s superstitious and believes that by cutting off their hands he’s saving himself from their ghosts.”

Officer Harrison had looked at you, before dragging his gaze up and down your body. He had mainly interacted with Morgan and Hotch, sometimes himself; and almost none with you, JJ and Emily. Then, he whistled sarcastically. “That's very impressive, darlin'. I didn't take you for the smart type. No offense, but you don't look like it.”

Rage was born in the pit of the stomach, Spencer found out that day. It rendered him immobile for a moment, and before he could tell the officer off, you beat him to it, again. Intelligence wasn’t quantifiable, he knew this. But you always managed to prove it to him. Some tests might say he was several points smarter than you, but you were two steps ahead of him, every single time.

From the corner of his eye, he could see JJ’s appalled expression. He wondered how his own face looked.

“Oh,” you had said. “Looks can be deceiving. It's alright. No offense taken. I myself was deceived by your looks—I thought you were a conventionally ugly man, maybe even a rare ugliness, but you're actually a piece of shit in human form. Tell me, did the doctor perform a colonoscopy on your mother to find out if she was pregnant, as opposed to an ultrasound?”

JJ's lips were pulled inwards in a tight, flat grimace, as if she was trying and failing to stifle her laughter, and Spencer found himself playing side-eye ping-pong between you and Officer Harrison.

“Why, you bit—” Officer Harrison stammered, face growing a tint of red and fists comically clenched.

“Jonathan,” Sheriff Mendoza had interjected then, sternly. “Why don't you take a walk? Go on, get some air.”

Officer Harrison looked as if he was going to self-combust from how ruddy his face was and how sweat accrued on his temple. His shoulders were trembling when he attempted to storm out. He seemed ready to shoulder-check you, but you put a hand on his chest and held him in place.

“Officer Harrison. Harrison. Jonathan? Johnny? Johnny, by all means, please underestimate me again,” you told him lowly. “It'll make the look on your face when I ruin your life funnier.”

With that, you finally let him go, and he bulldozed his way out of the bullpen. You could practically hear his teeth grinding.

“... I'm sorry for him,” Sheriff Mendoza had offered awkwardly, a deep sigh pulled out of his chest.

You had shrugged. “Natural selection will do its work.”

Spencer thought you had never looked lovelier than in that moment.

He shook his head to clear the memory away. “Maybe she doesn't hate my guts,” he admitted reluctantly. “But I'm still his least favorite person here.”

“Wow,” Morgan said exaggeratedly. “For a genius, you can be stupid sometimes. She clearly likes you, man. Look, tell you what, the next time she picks up a fight with you, tell her this: ‘you are hot when you're talking about statistics’.” He was laughing by the end of it while Spencer choked with his own saliva. “She'll love it, I promise.”

“How can you be so sure?” he replied. “She's so emotionally repressed and so unapologetically herself, I don't think anything I do will ever get a real reaction out of her.”

“Trust me on this one, kid,” was all Morgan said with a pat to his back.

Spencer spent the rest of the day thinking about his words. When he first met you, you had offered him a handshake like most other people. He rambled his well-practiced explanation, “A study shows that the number of organisms, both pathogenic and non-pathogenic, that are passed during handshakes is staggering. Kissing is actually more sanitary than handshakes.” But instead of looking at him like he was a weirdo, you had stared at him, unshakeable, and replied,

“I can say ‘a study shows that shooting yourself in the head is an efficient way to de-stress’, but if I don't say what study it is, then does the study really exist?”

That was the first time his heart lurched in your presence. When he spoke again, his voice was a bit breathless, “Uh, it's a study published in The Public Health Journal, by H. W. Hill and Helen M. Matthews. Volume 17, number 7, July, 1927, I-I mean, 1926. It's titled Transfer of Infection by Handshakes. Pages 347 to 352. I-I can get you a copy of it.”

You blinked at him, but he didn't feel as if you thought he was a freak. He felt like you were amazed by him. It brought his heart to his throat.

“Is that so,” you had said. “Then, I expect it to be delivered at my doorstep at 5 o'clock sharp, tomorrow. Military time.”

He had been stunned into silence for a few seconds. “That's... unreasonable. I don't even know where you live.”

You said, “It's quite standard.”

“Then you have unreasonable standards.”

“I've been told.”

Spencer had thought you and him would become something like best friends. For the first week and a half, you had been quite friendly with him, and often listened to his rambles. But then, then he had made the terrible mistake of correcting an innocuous error you made regarding a statistic, and the look you had shot at him could have curled water. From that point on, you seemed to have made it your life mission to fight him at any chance.

And yet—he never got the feeling you did it out of malice. He thought you did hate him on some level, but when you argued against his points during a case, there was a glint in your eye. Like you were still amazed by him. Sometimes, you even finished his rambles when he couldn't land them. Sometimes, you were the only one who listened to him when he sidetracked. To him, you defined the wonder of globalization. When you were there, it was like talking to the stars, and having the stars answering him back in perplexing, secret ways. He kind of figured this out when you smiled at his existentialist joke. You told him it wasn't funny, but your eyes were bright.

Maybe trying Morgan's advice wouldn't go so bad.

If only you weren’t so prickly. And clever and quick, he added in his head, just in case you were hearing his thoughts. He wouldn’t put it past your abilities. For three weeks, Spencer hadn’t managed yet to seize a situation in which Morgan’s advice worked at his favor. It wasn’t until the team, you and him included, obviously, went out for drinks that he finally got his chance.

“You aren’t drinking?” he asked you. You were cradling a Virgin Margarita in your hands, and for a moment he wished your fingers were curled around his own instead of the glass.

“No,” you said. “You’re clearly the best in the profiling game. Take pride on this display of your observational skills for the rest of your life.”

He sighed. You were impossible. Still, he couldn’t keep the fondness out of his voice when he said, “You don’t have to be so defensive with me.”

“You’re right,” you nodded, and he arched an eyebrow. “I have to be especially defensive with you.”

“That’s not… that’s not what I meant,” he murmured, rubbing the back of his neck. “Okay. Why do you have to, uh, be ‘especially’ defensive with me?”

You didn’t answer him. But he knew you couldn’t go without having the last word, so he patiently waited for you to gather a satisfactorily poignant response. In the meantime, he took the time to examine your face; there was a quality to it he would never find a perfect word to describe it. Maybe it was your supraorbital ridge, or your posterior zygomatic arch, or even the vertical length of your forehead. He just knew you were lovely. He had never been comfortable with not knowing something, but with you, he didn’t need to know. He would rather discover you, if you would let him. If you were full of secrets, he would work them out; if he only found hatred for him, he would press his mouth to it and relish in it.

“Because you have a BA in Psychology,” you ended up saying, stoic as ever, “and I’m a soft girl with mental health issues.”

He laughed. It took him a lot of time to figure out that—the more matter-of-factly you said something, the less serious you were. Your lips quirked up in a little smile, and you sipped your drink. The rest of the team—besides Hotch—hadn’t yet realized your tell-tale sign.

The words escaped him before he could think them over, “You’re cute when you pretend to be emotionless.”

Your facial expression didn’t change, and that was alright, because when you turned your head to the side—he could clearly see the faint blush on your cheekbones. “Fool.”

Ah, he realized. I won. You were at a loss of words. Because of him.

“You know, the word ‘fool’ comes from Old French fol, which means ‘madman, insane person’ and ‘idiot, jester’, and fol is from Medieval Latin follus, adjective for ‘foolish’. The evolution of its meaning can probably be attributed to the use of follis in a sense of ‘empty-headed person’. The word was also used in Middle English for ‘sinner, rascal, impious person’. It actually must have been passed to the English language via its borrowing in the Scandinavian language of the Vikings. And did you know that the association between April 1 and foolishness in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales could have been a copying error and...”

You didn’t look at him as he continued going on his tangent, but he knew that you were listening intently. Because your body was angled towards him, even if you kept your face away from his gaze, and when he took a pause to breathe, you hummed in acknowledgment only for his ears.

Globalization was saying hello and someone answering hola from miles away.

But you didn’t need to answer him for Spencer to understand you were in love with him and he was in love with you.

[phoenixyfriend]

MOTHERFUCKERS

Hi, if you're new here, I'm Nixy. I've spent the past five months trying to bully Colourpop, a cosmetics company known for their collaborations, into doing the right thing.

Today, I received the email on the left. I checked instagram to be sure, and lo and behold, they're advertising it there, too. Presumably, they are also doing so on tiktok, but I don't have that app.

Do me a favor, and go to one of the linked socials, or their online email contact form, and let them know you're even more angry and disappointed about this than about the HP thing. This isn't about which franchise has done more harm, but about the stage of the collaborations themselves. The HP Collab is a dying project that's been constantly on sale for half a year and, most likely, was just being advertised in a last-ditch attempt to dump backstock before it expires; it was in bad taste, but not too likely to have a direct impact on the minority group we know it harms. I'm especially sure of this because they only advertised that sale by email, not on the socials.

The Twilight collaboration is alive and well, being restocked, being advertised, and actively banking on the marketing of an indigenous population without any kind of benefit to the tribe. The least that Colourpop could do, since I imagine they can't back out of the contract, is donate a portion of their profits to the fundraiser. That would probably do a lot more to help the tribe than just cancelling the collaboration entirely anyway!

Mention that people have been asking them to make a statement on this issue for a good year and a half now.

Mention that between this and the HP collab and other questionable projects, they are losing goodwill by the day among people who previously trusted that they were trying to act with ethics and transparency.

Mention that the Quileute Move to Higher Ground project has been struggling for years to put together the funds to move their entire community away from the danger of rising sea levels. They've managed to move the school, but they still need to build new housing... especially because companies have been buying up their houses to establish as AirBNBs since it's a tourist area. They've also bought up all the properties in Forks, WA, for the same reason, which means fewer people actually hiring Quileute workers.

Because of Twilight.

These people are being forced to leave their homes in part because of the franchise that Colourpop is collaborating with. They have not seen any money directly from the way SMeyer used their tribe, and any possible benefits of tourism have been far outweighed by the aforementioned airbnb issue.

Colourpop is a big company, but it's not a giant. It's got enough going for it that you can safely assume you're not going to ruin a person's life and livelihood by hassling the contact forms, but it's not so big that it's impossible to budge them.

Let's try to make at least something happen. It might not be much, but please just send an email or leave a comment on their socials. Reblog this post so other people know what's going on.

[stardust-n-glitterglue]

glitterglueau refs

So excited to have these completed so I can talk about my silly little au a bit 🌟

glitterglueau takes place at a different pizzaplex than the one in Security Breach. There’s no virus or anything too crazy going on…probably more than a few OSHA violations, but aside from that pretty benevolent overall!

Star (my sona) is a chronically ill fella who’s been working at the plex for a while now. He’s a “diversity hire” and knows it, but is determined to make the best out of it! Due to health issues barring him from safe transportation, part of his payment is a small flat located in a hidden area of the plex itself…mostly since it’d cost the company less long term than paying for bus tickets. He works as a designer, tweaking things with the animatronic and staff costumes, among other things. He tends to spend a lot of time in the DayCare area since Eclipse shadows him when there’s not an active security emergency and Eclipse likes being there. He’s anxious and a bit fearful around other humans, but gets along much better with the plex’s robotic population.

Sun and Moon are separate entities with their own bodies, typically functioning better in the light and darkness respectively, and work in tandem to wrangle the kids during DayCare hours.

On the surface, Sun is very much the humanoid robotic equivalent of a “golden retriever”, plus a healthy sprinkling of sass and anxiety. He’s generally energetic, very silly, and the least confrontational of the “celestial” bots. He’s distrustful of adult humans due to past interactions with the parents during drop offs/pick ups, and is a master at making cutting remarks that aren’t quite obviously threats.

Moon is calmer, calculating, and the type to pull harmless pranks that become less harmless if the person being inflicted with them has done something he deems deserving of wrath. He’s usually quieter, when he’s not singing, and enjoys spending time with the shyer/lower energy kids at the DayCare a lot. He tends to let people think he’s “a stupid machine” while recording their behavior to send to security.

Eclipse is the plex’s main security bot. He’s in charge of all of the security bots and cameras, and is usually running through their information in the background of his processors. He can be intimidating as the largest bot in the plex (barring DJ), especially with his typically aloof personality. He cares a lot for the kids in the DayCare and enjoys playing with them between other work, choosing to stay there most of the time in case there’s an issue with drop offs/pickups (typically the most prevalent problem area of the plex).

Glitch was originally an AI trapped in the Balloon World arcade cabinet, however Star managed to move it to a Fazco virtual pet and keeps it close. It’s the closest to Star and is very protective and possessive of him, often delivering nasty static shocks to any human who gets too close…which leaves Star equal parts thankful and concerned it’ll hurt someone by accident. It tends to chatter with Star and gives him its undivided attention, but doesn’t mind him interacting with the bots too much.

[chondrichthyes-x-mantodea]

Imma say it, and I'm definitely going to be dragged out on the street by my hair: I can't stand how many libfem/TRAs are into alternative subcultures. The amount of "you can't be punk/goth/emo if you're transphobic 🥰" posts I see with fucking hello kitty all over the place is so odd to me. Yall say you go against the grain, but as someone who was heavily involved with goths, yall promote the most unhealthy view of sex and gender. This pro-kink, sex work is work shit is so prevalent in that community. I can't tell you how many shows I saw with people in fetish gear. For a subculture that says it's all about unconventional, left leaning beliefs, you'd think you'd be aware of how sex culture is an enemy to half the population. Taking weaponized sex and making it an exhibit is not changing anything for anyone, especially not the people hurt by that culture. It's just unveiling an unhealthy relationship with a natural process and broadcasting your version of patriarchy 2.0 lmfao. And back to TRA shit... do you really think saying "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is some radically left leaning statement? You think that's PUNK? Be fucking fr. Seeing subcultures that were made for people to be outliers in beliefs come full circle and become so watered down is so weird. Seeing the corporate pride ass version of what it says subcultures are has to be one of my top ten most jarring things. I remember being in a show, and I could just sense the superficial activism around me. I hate it sm. Idk if any of that made sense, but as I've become gender critical and hateful towards sex work, I've felt super unwelcome and yknow what that's ok. I'm glad I'm not around a bunch of people who perform activism to seem tough while reinforcing patriarchy. There's no deeper thought in their brains. Regurgitating what the person next to you said about makeup being empowering while dressed in a black corset while saying your subculture is about challenging norms (and liking the music yes I know) is the cheesiest, most ironic thing I can think of. Sincerely, a gender critical radfem who is tired of alternative people who perform their moral superiority

Edit: Not to mention the goths who babygirlify male softboy singers who have cheated on their wives and have rape accusations.... you know who you are. How the FUCK are you gonna say you're left leaning and behave like that? Every time I went to a show from 2020-2023, it felt like I was listening to a hello kitty says acab Thomas Jefferson miku binder says kill terfs post being read outloud while someone shoved the mic up their asshole in the middle of the Target pride collection

There is such a clear apathy towards feminism within groups that "prioritizes" activism, and that became so apparent to me. Males within the subculture were just normal, but women always dressed super feminine and sexualized. Makes me wonder why feminism is the least serious of all activist groups. Are women the most profitable group to hate?

[cryinggirlnamedhelen]

—CHEESECAKE, APPLE PIE — K. KENMA

synopsis ; what was “supposed” to be a simple collaboration and streamer friendship ended up being an investigation for lore, but more importantly—romance.

cw ; afab!reader

note ; in case you're confused or don't know, in the manga, it's confirmed in the chapter 29 (volume 4) extra/omake page that kenma's favorite food is apple pie.

a/n ; im back. this is an older work that i wasn’t originally going to publish, but atp wtv.

“throwing my plushie based on how much i like the dessert”

you almost wanted to cackle at the comments. what should've been a simple tiktok by a popular tiktoker and streamer that was just doing a cute trend with a popular audio ended up becoming the subject to many people's theories and engrossments in a ship. at least, that was how it was to a neutral bystander who wasn't actively involved in the lore between you and kenma.

11.8 million likes.

at this point, the neutral bystanders that you just spoke of took up less than 1 percent of the online population. after all, it’s rare these days to meet someone who uses any sort of online platform to not be invested in or have at least heard of the lore between you and kenma. you had gone to elementary, middle, high school and college together, and you were both always having collabs with each other.

“cooking stream with kodzuken in 30 mins (watch him burn down the entire kitchen)” was one such example. you ended up being the one who almost burned the kitchen, but no one really cared about that one. they were more interested in the contents of the video and the title.

you both had brushed hands far too many times for it to be pure coincidence, and no one has ever seen kodzuken so happy before. he smiled a decent amount of time, but never this much. his eyes were softer around you as well. “the look of love” edits and clips of you both on that single stream began to go viral, with many claiming that you should both just date already.

and the title. it seems simple at first, but why add the comment in the parentheses? whenever you did a collaboration with anyone else, you would never add a comment like that, not even with the people you were closest with. so why add such a snarky and playful comment? sure, you've known each other for decades now, but it was still sketchy. and the fact that the antisocial and nearly friendless kodzuken allowed it? that only added fuel to the fire.

even more so, a famous fellow alumni from nekoma posted a photo of you and kenma from when you were both in high school, giving each other a high five when the team made it to nationals. you had been the manager after all. of course, it was lev who had posted it. after that, deciding it wasn't enough, kuroo decided to post childhood pictures of you and kenma playing video games together.

@ilovekodzuken123: chat this might not be casual

@kodzukenapplepie: are they willing to adopt me?

@kodzukenno1fan: i wanna be in a poly with them

finally, this is when people began to truly get invested. they searched through every single live stream, every single social media post, every single qna video. some even gave lev and kuroo dms for the two of them to send more pictures of you and kenma.

@skibidi2019: she called a guy with gyed hair in a video game cute. yk who else has dyed hair? KENMA

@unemployed55: they want each other so bad

and finally, the video that confirmed it all was finally posted. the one that truly had the online world in shambles.

“cheesecake,” you throw your plushie up a good amount. it barely goes over your head from when you had thrown it from your lap. “apple pie,” immediately, you throw your plush right up as much as you could, enough for it to hit the ceiling with a soft THUD. however, this was the point where many had stopped watching the video, because the description had said enough already by itself.

“guess who this is abt lmao. anyways hi bbg🫶”

instantly, your comments and dms exploded, along with kenma’s. laughing, you sent kenma a text.

did u see their reactions and comments? they’re funny asf

im just ken(ma): yeah i did

your fans were right. you both were indeed dating, but considering how these are their current reactions to your slight implication of romantic feelings, then it might still be too early to reveal that you’re dating.

[bethelctpride]

How to find the local queer people when there don't appear to be any queer events nearby

are you sure there are no events?

Because they're a lot more common than you think, but you have to look in the right place! The social media algorithm sadly will not feed them to you. You will generally have to go through at least one layer of introduction before you meet folks directly.

Yes, this is a bit of a secret social club. Because many of these people lived through being too public might get you raided by cops or get you dead. They're rightfully cautious. They want to make sure people showing up aren't there to do harm. And the more rural the area, the tougher it will be to find people, but they're definitely THERE and likely having the same thoughts that nobody else is there.

Queer social activities are overwhelmingly run by middle aged folks (who have time, money, skills, and energy to do so) and they tend to use different social media because that's where they originally built communities!

The advice here for hunting down groups assumes you are an adult who can figure out logistics and safety of contacting other adults and getting yourself somewhere safely.

For social media, check Facebook and Meetup. These are most likely to have large local-ish groups putting on events. Join some groups. Many may be private and require approval before you see content. Even if there's not one immediately nearby, join the closest one, whatever "close" is. Even if it's not a perfect fit, they generally know the other even smaller groups nearby and may give you an invite to closer group or even direct contact info for The Local Guy where you text him.

Next up, Instagram. You'll pick up some folks a little younger and more business and pop up events this way. Sometimes you may not see an event until after it happened! Message the person and ask when next one is. Good odds there's a repeat.

Still no luck? Check out specific types of businesses/orgs in your area that tend to have an overlap. Maybe the local bar or coffee shop has a gay night once a month. Check their posts for last month, or if you can filter by date, look specifically in June. If they had one, message and ask about if they have an upcoming one. Even if they don't, they may put you in contact with organizer from past one.

For organizations, check for groups serving HIV+ populations and the neurospicy. Even if you fall into neither category, because of the overlap, there's good odds they offer specific services FOR queer folk. Contact them and they'll know who in the area is putting on events.

Check furry groups. Generally they do most organization via Telegram, which will require an invite. Find the nearest furry convention, check to see if they have a message board. Search for telegram. there's likely one attached to the convention and asking there of "hey, is there a furry telegram group that covers X area?" there will be one. I hope you like bowling, because this is by far the most common non-convention furry event.

(and if your reaction is EW Furries, you need to kill the little Puritan living in your head that hates people having fun doing stuff in a way you think is Cringe. Bowling is not that uncool.)

Still no luck? Now you're going to have to go search for individual queers in the wild! Your best luck is going to be with three other types of groups: 1. SOME Church activities 2. activities that attract the neurospicy (train groups, collecting groups, etc)

3. Tiny specialty groups where everyone is old and its in danger of dying out

If you're really rural sometimes the ONLY group doing any activities is the local church. If they're listed as "open and affirming" that's what you want. Unitarians and Congregationalists are most likely to fit that definition. But you should be able to run web search for that exact phase of "open and affirming church" + "your town" and it'll show you SOMETHING nearby. You may still come up with nothing, but the ones that are doing that tend to be really dedicated, so they will have info about what local groups are friendly to queers, if not open about that. They will also have non-religious activities like knitting or potluck even if you don't want to go to a service.

Neurospicy activities- check your surrounding libraries for activities as well. Even if you're not that brand of spicy, the overlap is high. Find an activity you are reasonably interested in and go meet locals. You'll find out which ones are queer after a few meetings. Often it will turn out everyone is and nobody said anything until one person does. (like our local hackerspace. secret trans hangout)

Endangered skills- do you really want to learn some weird, specialty skill that's dying out? Ask around. call the senior center and have them post a note. Post at the library. stick a thing on a bulletin board at the grocery store. Pick something you are GENUINELY interested in learning like flint knapping, or how to cook a regional dish, local history, how to spin llama wool. Weirder and more endangered the better. Post several! Give them a way to contact you by phone. Unless they are horrendously bigoted up front, you are about to learn a skill and once you disclose "hey I'm gay", you are about to be introduced to every solitary queer in the area that is a friend of a friends' granddaughter's classmate. Often your mentor won't quite GET it, but you're their favorite person now so they're trying. And as you get introduced, suddenly the local flint knapping group is also the queer flint knapping group! and you should post on social media about your cool new activity and SURPRISE, you found them all! Also they now all have cool knives. win-win!

[brynvivix]

"don't vote for Harris or you're supporting genocide" "voting blue is still voting for fascists" Then what else do you expect us to do?

Here are some options y'all seem to insist on and why they're fucking stupid:

Vote Third Party :: Until we have ranked-choice voting (and probably even if we did have ranked-choice voting), it is practically impossible to make a 3rd-party candidate viable. There's not enough of the population that's far enough from moderate to give up their "safe" blue vote for some "revolutionary."

Don't Vote At All :: I'd prefer to pick my enemy. If I'm going to be working in spite of the government, or even against it in some ways, I'd rather the people I'm working against not already be targeting me for being queer, for example. If my options are "bad" or "much, much worse" I'm gonna pick "bad" and try to improve things from there.

Violent Revolution :: It's a cosplay power fantasy in the same vein as the Right-wingers looking for a reason to shoot protesters. Assuming you even have enough people organized and enough firepower to pull that off in the first place…have you prepared a plan to keep the innocents alive and safe? Are you sure you can keep supply chains for food and medicines intact? Are you sure there will be resources available for the disabled, the scared, the young and old, those who won't be able to fight and still need to be taken care of? Turns out revolution is ugly and causes a lot of undue collateral damage. Are the lives "saved" really going to outweigh those whose lives will be upended and destroyed? It's not like a newly-toppled, unorganized country will be able to do anything about Israel/Gaza, so you're just hurting and killing far more people than you're saving.

As for the power you do have to better things (and make Leftism more viable as a political stance in the US)?

Work at the level of your local government. If you're in a small enough town or neighborhood and think you have what it takes, run for local office. Be a local face of the left wing; you're far more likely to sway a small town to your views than the whole country, and each small town with a socialist-leaning government is a dot on the map for larger-scale viability, and you can help keep your community safe while trying to build up in scale.

Build community so we can keep each other safe if worse does come to worst. Push mutual aid initiatives, help at food banks, grow produce to donate to those in need, apply to work at your local free clinic, empower local businesses whenever possible so that if there is a socioeconomic collapse, you and those you love aren't left completely without resources.

Protest, and make it disruptive. You can be disruptive without being violent: graffiti, blocking roads, encampments, sit-ins, to name a few examples. Create inconveniences so it gets people's attention whether they like it or not.

Above all, FUCKING VOTE BLUE. You're choosing your enemy. You get to help decide if the government we're working in spite of is run by milquetoast neoliberal war hawks who do, on some rare occasions, actually make things marginally better…or full-tilt Christo-fascists who want to kill some of us for kissing people with the same genitals as us. There aren't any other options that are going to be picked. It sucks, but at the bare minimum we can pick the option that isn't going to actively murder us while we try to build up viability for a candidate who won't sell out brown people to an ethnostate.

If you aren't doing at least one of the things above, then don't lecture me about how I keep myself and my community safe. I'd love to see a United States (or some future iteration of it) that acknowledges the sovereign rights of indigenous peoples, that doesn't fund genocide, that provides healthcare as a basic human right, that doesn't meddle in every other country's business. But if we are to see that, let alone help that happen, we need to survive this next presidential administration.

Edit: y'all have lost reblog privileges. If you wanna screenshot this and have stupid unnuanced opinions OFF of my post, be my guest. Just leave me tf alone.

[arolesbianism]

Thinking abt the second dream story featuring a third dream story I can't remember if I ever talked abt. I <3 body horror bonus points if its slow and agonizing

[purplemoonfox]

On and in defense of Commander Fox and the Corries, and why I think they were set up to fail

Summary at the bottom because I like to go on.

Things we know for sure about clones and Fox and the Corries in the strictest canon sense (which ain't a lot):

1. They are stationed on Coruscant.

That is definitional, now remember what Coruscant is.

2. They have no Jedi in charge of the Guard, they report directly to Palpatine.

Although I adore the fanon that Quinlan Vos is their Jedi, it’s not canon.

3. Clones love their brothers dearly.

That is almost without exception, even the clones we see acting against the Republic (hi Slick) at least believe they were acting in their brother’s interests.

4. They seem to accrue extra responsibilities as the war goes on, up to the point of being the ones we see Palpatine with in ROTS.

Even if they don’t, the idea of a law enforcement/military unit answerable only to Palpatine is a shit idea. There’s reasons people worry about accountability in real life, and sneaky little shits who act all nice and innocent at first but eventually show their true colors once they have power in the bag is one of them.

These are all very obvious.

In very short terms, it's very likely Palpatine uses the Coruscant Guard to sow public dissatisfaction.

And all those that hate Fox fall for it by proxy, because I think you're essentially seeing of him (and the Guard, and by extension the clones) what Palpatine wants the public to see and think of clones.

The Coruscant Guard are probably the most consistently accessible and visible of the clones in the galaxy to its biggest cultural and political hub. Most of the time the 501st or 212th or any other seems to drop in, fights a battle, and apparently fucks off afterwards? Obviously, planets like Ryloth have a stronger personal connection--some GAR contingent seem to have been there practically the whole damn war and Howzer was obviously very familiar with the Syndullas, and they with him (and look how personable Howzer is, and how quickly and somehow easily he extricates himself from the rationale clones held about their orders; maybe it makes sense to think of it like how leaving your little hometown where everybody thinks the same affects a person)--but otherwise I feel like the clones, to the rest of the galaxy, are (expensive) theoretical constructs.

The vast majority of the public aren't likely to have any personal experience with a clone, let alone a develop personal rapport with one, unless they happen to go to specific places like 79s where they can be found, and that still doesn't necessarily lend itself to extended relationships since most of the clone patrons would only be on Coruscant temporarily. Some fics portray clones as being refused entrance to establishments (especially later in the war when people were protesting clones themselves) or restricted in where they can go (like grocery stores, etc.). I think that's plausible, even realistic--but it doesn't seem to be a focus of canon aside from showing some protests so I'll let it alone.

What we know of that IS canon is that clones aren't allowed to even think about having families or doing anything with their lives besides being soldiers (even though all of them have thought about it, even just secretly; I'd wager that all of them have secret dreams they don't share); it's against regulations as we see with Cut Lawquane in season one of TCW. So to effect this, clones are probably actively or passively discouraged from forming close friendly relationships with anyone who isn't a clone and who they have no reason to be speaking with—aka most people besides Jedi (and if the fanon can be believed, if decommissioning/euthanization is a concern, they would have the motivation to avoid even the perception of such a relationship). Obviously there are going to be exceptions, but you can scrutinize a stable population a lot better than an itinerant one.

The point is, if your only tangible frame of reference is a rigid hall monitor that doesn't demonstrate much of a personality (even though clones have real, complex personal lives beneath that surface) and is behind a faceless mask--and we see so little of the Guard that what exists of their personalities is, let's be real, nearly all fanon--then you never really have a chance to acquire a sense of their humanity, and a strict enforcement of regulations tends to breed resentment in a population for whom strict adherence to regulations isn’t normalized. There will be cultural differences in play.

This is not the clones' fault, they neither asked to be created nor put into this position, they’re only doing what they’ve been asked to do, but it plays directly into Palpatine's goals.

Moving on.

Sure, the Guard answers to Palpatine in the chain of command, and we see them actively serving him in ROTS, but Palpatine definitely isn't doing shit for fuck for the Guard's administration in a daily sense, so Fox basically runs that whole bitch by himself in every practical sense--a clone, with no rights of his own, considered property, in a situation increasingly hostile to him and his.

Now let's think about the clones we see: as far as we can tell, clones' social lives are largely insular. They mostly see and talk to each other, and that's not necessarily by nefarious design (as discussed above), that's just what happens (military people tend to hang out with other military people, that’s just how it is; you’ll spend most of your day around other military people, most likely stationed in a place you’re not so familiar with that it’s easy to do anything else). Remember: we as viewers get access and insight that people in-universe don't.

And, significantly:

The Corries do not have a Jedi. The Jedi see value in their lives beyond their merely being expendable, faceless, and unthinkingly obedient droids wearing flesh, this point was made multiple times--and the Jedi are able to walk the line between orders and the bigger picture, which rubs off on the men they lead. Go watch Nala Se’s (bitch can catch these hands) comments about the Jedi’s influence on the clones when she’s speaking to Dooku.

I can see leaving the Corries without a Jedi being another saccharine, oh-so-magnanimous moment from Palpatine (he has so many of these) in the vein of expressing confidence in the clones' capability and in being very undemanding of the Jedi, in order to “free up” Jedi (whom he so totally trusts) to fight the war…but in effect leaving the Guard without anyone familiar with Coruscant and equipped to play referee with the environment and peoples they're bound to serve, and with no one batting in their corner or showing them any other way to exist and think.

On a side note:

Fox is an interesting clone commander anyway, not least because he doesn't have a Jedi to bounce off of. In a sense, whether or not Fox had his chip activated, we’re probably seeing how a clone commander was originally going to behave on their own initiative: see problem, address problem, think no more deeply than that. The Kaminoans did not want creative thinking in the clones. The clones were trained to fight the enemy they’re pointed at with singleminded intent, it stands to reason that that straightforward directness would transfer to other instances which might have been more kindly served by a different mindset. Their mindset isn’t even like a real life military where you’re still obligated to think about the nature of what you’re ordered to do—just following orders hasn’t been a valid defense since 1945.

TBH I've got a lot to say about fandom, the fetishization of actual violence through the lionization of fictional violence (although I don't think that fictional violence breeds actual violence; rather, I think people who were already interested in it go looking for things they think reflect their beliefs), and why we even have war crimes as a concept (and the absolute ignorance perpetrated by an increasingly illiterate populace), but...

I digress.

You cannot claim to have sympathy for clones without acknowledging their humanity and that includes for the ones who didn’t have the chance to grow beyond the limitations built around them. It was awful that Fox killed Fives, but it’s a tragedy like so much else in this franchise, not proof that Fox is awful. Part of the horror of what we see everyone go through in clone wars is how many times Palpatine’s plans almost derail but it never happens.

If your complaint is that Fox didn’t think any more deeply than what was right in front of him in the moment, remember that that’s exactly what’s been expected of Fox and all other clones: obey orders, and it’s not their role to determine what those orders are. Abstractions are for those who are not expendable, made to die. Orders are orders, and good soldiers do what again? He quite literally all but says “my opinion doesn’t matter” when he tells Ahsoka that he doesn’t blame her for (apparently) killing Letta, but she’s under arrest anyway.

Fox is put in a position of having to wield authority in a very different way than any other clone commander, has no direct support from or evident collaboration with the one group of people who generally see clones as living beings worthy of compassion, and deals with the public while having been trained to lead a war campaign. His is a war of attrition, not dropping in on a planet and fighting a battle, and he’s responsible specifically to Palpatine, who is literally the big bad. Fanon tends to think that Palpatine either activated his chip early or tortured him; honestly either one tracks, it's Palpatine after all--and in two major instances, we don't see what Palpatine says, to Fives or to Fox--but the fucker is a masterful manipulator so anything and everything is still on the table.

But in the midst of all this, because clones aren’t unthinking or unfeeling, and the dissonance is tragic but not absent:

Clones do give a shit about their brothers. Fox is no exception; he's audibly upset when he asserts that Ahsoka killed three troopers. And the immediate order to shoot to kill is pragmatic--he only issues it after he believes she was willing to kill clones to escape. That’s a fair order; if she’s willing to kill clones as he believes she did, then his men should at least be able to defend themselves as well as they can. See issue, address issue.

I mean. Shit, he doesn’t stick around after he shot Fives; we see his face once and that is not a triumphant posture. If he wanted to gloat or be an asshole about it he had the chance. Rex probably would've gone for the throat, but he had the chance.

The way he dies also suggests this. He could have thrown somebody else under the bus--called the men who fired on Vader defective, shifted blame somewhere else, somehow. He did not. There was one thing Fox ever had control over in his life, and that was how much he let anyone else take the fall. Hell, his answer wasn't even that bad, but Anakin (who is on my permanent shit list for not putting two and two together from the Sifo-Dyas reveal and what Fives told him earlier) probably did have it out for him, because Vader is an asshole. He's a Sith, it comes with the territory.

So, to summarize:

Clones are trained from decanting to do as they're told regardless of their personal feelings, and Fox in nearly so many words states that he acts regardless of his personal feelings. He is not likely to be in a position where he's shown a different way to behave, or interact with anyone that does anything but reinforce that expectation.

(Side note, I feel like Palpatine would have a great time tormenting Fox by sending him off to do shit he personally disagrees with but is technically correct according to the letter of the law..................)

Fox essentially is on his own in an environment unlike what most clone commanders deal with that he probably wasn't trained to understand much of (cultural understanding is important); it's rather likely the Guard hews very close to their training because of that. They'll stick to what's familiar and what's expected of them as they understand it. That is a very normal human response.

Leaving the Corries without a Jedi means that, as well as lacking anyone who sees them as individuals worth more the money it cost to make them and who treats them as such, they lack a go-between and likely familiarity with the population they're policing but are subordinate to, legally speaking, as clones are seen as government property, not people. This is going to breed resentment; somebody is going to bitch that no clone has the right to do bla bla bla.

The vast majority of the galaxy is going to take cues from Coruscant whether they like admitting it or not. If Coruscant has a bad impression of clones, then the vast majority of the galaxy—for whom the clones are (expensive) theoretical constructs—will have a bad impression of clones. Clones may not be in a position to pursue close relationships with someone not in their near orbit, and may be likely to actually avoid them because of regulations.

The vast majority of the galaxy would likely see them as unthinking, rigid hall monitors (whereas non-clone troopers, stormtroopers, think for ourselves and we wouldn’t act that way..........).

Which all gives Palpatine an excuse to give in soooo magnanimously to the public's demands to stop using clones as troops.

[cydork]

Alien Questionnaire - A Biological Perspective

A while ago, somebody linked me a very comprehensive worldbuilding questionnaire. For most aspects of a fictional society, it was great, but I noticed it assumed that anyone using it was making up a fictional human society, or at least a society of beings very similar to humans. As such, there was almost nothing in the biology department, which to me is one of the best parts! Thus, this questionnaire was born.

These questions are designed to help people worldbuild from a biological foundation. As such, the questionnaire only touches lightly on other aspects of a fictional society, and is more of a jumping off point. I wrote it with the aim of using it to develop aliens, but it should be suitable for any project with non-humanoid species, such as sapient terrestrial animals.

Have fun! I'd love to see your answers :)

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General Anatomy How many limbs do they have? Do they have limbs at all?

What are their primary manipulators? Where are they located? How does this affect their tool use, building ability, etc?

What kind of body covering do they have, e.g. hair, scales, feathers? How do they clean it? Do they shed this covering constantly, or all at once at certain times? 

Can they maintain a constant body temperature? If not, how do they deal with changing environmental temperatures? 

What kind of habitat do they live in? Both specific habitat, and broader such as on land vs in water.

What adaptations do they have for living in this habitat?

What kind of creature did they evolve from?

What are the similarities and differences to their closest living relatives? 

What resource(s) is the most necessary and urgent for them? E.g. for many animals, but not all, it’s water.

What are some common mutations? E.g. eye colours, ability to digest lactose in humans.

What injuries or illnesses are considered disabling? 

How is their healing ability? Can they regenerate? If they can, is that limited to certain body parts or a certain number of times?

Senses What senses do they have? E.g. sight, smell, electroreception, etc.

How good are those senses?

Which of their sense/s do they use the most in everyday life?

How might this choice of sense impact the way they interact with the world? 

Can they detect things that Earth creatures cannot? If yes, how and why?

Movement  How do they move? Do they walk, crawl, fly, etc? 

If they have multiple modes of movement, which is preferred, and why?

Which part/s of their body do they use to move?

What is their speed and endurance like? 

How agile are they? 

Do they rely mainly on their own bodies for travel, or do they use pack animals and machines? 

How often do they move around? Are they mainly sedentary, do they move a lot within a set area, do they migrate, etc?

Do they have different levels of mobility depending on age, sex, or other biological group? E.g. young barnacles are able to swim, while adults are anchored permanently to a surface. 

Reproduction and Lifecycle  How many sexes are there? 

Are there differences between the sexes (ignoring the reproductive system)? 

Are there different castes, such as in honeybees or naked mole rats? If so, what is the function of each caste? 

Are differences in sex or caste used to justify discrimination or hierarchy? How might these ideas differ in different populations? 

Do they have a concept of gender? If so, is gender affected by sex, caste, or some other factor?

How do they attract a mate? Do they release a chemical into the air, do an elaborate display, etc?

Does one individual try to actively woo another, or is courtship more mutual?

What do they find attractive in members of the same species?

What is the usual reproductive partnership? E.g. two individuals, one main reproducing individual with a harem, no set partner, etc. 

How long do they live?

How are young brought into the world? Live birth, eggs, spores, etc?

Is producing young a painful, dangerous process, or is it easy?

How much parental investment is there? Are there many young with little investment, or few young with a lot of investment (r vs K strategy)? Or is it somewhere in the middle? 

How many offspring are produced at a time? Think about how attitudes towards children may differ between a species that produces one or two, and a species that produces dozens or even hundreds at a time.

How do they grow? Are they born looking like miniature adults, gradually growing bigger? Do they have specific phases of high growth, like puberty? Do they have a larval phase, metamorphosis? 

How self-sufficient are they as young? Can they move around and feed themselves as soon as they are born? Do they require parental care? 

What is the usual structure of childcare? Single or multiple parents/related individuals? Communally raised? 

Is sex purely for reproduction, or does it serve other purposes?

What kind of sexuality is considered the norm? This doesn’t just refer to same/other sex pairings, but the culture around sex in general.

Diet and Foodchain What is their diet? Are they carnivores, omnivores, frugivores, insectivores, etc?

Do they feed off an unusual source, for example rocks, metals, or (in appropriate settings) something like magic or souls?

What physical adaptations do they have for this diet? 

Is their diet very restricted, or can they have a wide range of foods?

How often do they eat? What is the culture around mealtimes, if any?

Are they prey for other organisms? For each other?

If they are, how do they deal with it? Do they fight back, have barriers, or do they accept it as a part of life?

If they are hunters themselves, what is their attitude to killing other organisms? Are they respectful? Prideful of their kill? Is it completely trivial? 

If they are hunters, how do they hunt? Are they solitary or packhunters? Are certain members of the group designated to hunt? 

Are the results of foraging or hunting shared, or is it everyone for themself?

Are they parasitic, parasitised, or in a symbiotic relationship with any other organisms? 

Body Rhythms How often do they sleep?

What time of the day are they most active? Are they nocturnal, diurnal, crepuscular? 

Do they generally sleep for one long period a day, multiple shorter periods throughout, or something in between? 

Do they sleep to cope with extreme temperatures or bad conditions, i.e. hibernate or aestivate?

Do they have any biological processes that disrupt their life e.g. moulting, reproductive cycles, etc?

If yes, how does their society accommodate for these processes? Does it accommodate them at all? 

Communication What is their main method of communication? Sound, visuals, scent, etc? Think about their main sense and how this would affect communication.

What is their body language like? What small moving parts might aid their body language?

If they have multiple methods of communication, are they all given equal weight, or is one considered higher than others? 

Society How sociable are they? 

If social, what is the usual social structure? 

Are there hierarchies? How strict or relaxed are the roles?

How are disputes usually settled? Is it more common to be violent or appease the other party? 

If not social, what is the reaction to being with other individuals? Do they become aggressive or stressed? Do they tolerate each other? 

What is the usual size of a community? Do they have communities at all? 

Do they have an in-group vs out-group mentality? If so, how strong is it? This generally relates to how scarce or plentiful resources were during their evolution, and how territorial their ancestors were.

What kind of bonds do they form? 

On the spectrum of individualistic to community-oriented, where do they fall?

Do they have a strong sense of personal identity? Think about how this might tie in with the previous question. 

What are the main things they derive identity from? Occupation, gender, family ties, etc?

Do they have names? If yes, how are these names formed? Are they given by another party or chosen by the individual?

Have they domesticated any creatures? If so, what do they use these creatures for?

Do they have any unusual relationships with other creatures on their planet (beyond predation, parasitism or mutualism)?

Do they produce art? What are their main forms of artistic expression? Think about how this will be linked to their main sense(s), communication method, and/or primary manipulators.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GLOSSARY Primary manipulator: Main body part used to manipulate objects, e.g. hands in humans, trunks in elephants, feet in parrots.

Sedentary: Inactive, staying in the same place.

Caste (reproductive): A group within a species with differences in body type and reproductive ability.

Symbiosis/Mutualism: Interactions where both parties benefit, e.g. cleaner fish getting a meal in exchange for picking irritating parasites off larger fish.

Aestivate: To become inactive during hot or dry periods, usually involving being sealed in mucus or soil e.g. lungfish, snails. 

Reproductive cycle: Regular hormone fluctuations that affect an animal’s fertility or attitude towards breeding. The cycles can range from months to years and can include things such as antler growth in male deer, heat cycles, and menstruation in humans.

[thevoidstaredback]

How To Balance Your Daytime and Nighttime Activities So That You Don't Burn Yourself Out More Than You Already Have

In Danny's defense, dying scared the hell out of him. Living in a house of ghost hunters was a bad idea, so he left. It didn't matter that they were family. He was a ghost living in a house of Ghost Hunters whose life's work was the very thing that killed him in the first place. He died turning on the portal his parents had spend nearly thirty years working on with two witnesses to his demise. The natural response was to destroy the portal and leave without telling anyone.

He didn't get to that point, though. The first few months after The Accident had been constant ghost attacks, one after another. Danny had tried t understand what was happening, but between his friends on some level denying his death, the ghosts attacking on sight, and the powers he was developing not getting themselves under control, he was reaching his breaking point.

On top of all of it, the portal destabilized.

No one had been in the lab, thank god, but the ghost portal collapsed in on itself. The running theory his parents had was that the ghost boy had been the one to break it. Danny's running theory was that the constant back and forth and overloaded the system. No new actually knew what had been the thing to turn it on in the first place, so no one could actually prove anything either way. At least, that's what Danny hoped.

Danny knew, in the deep recesses of his mind, what to do to get it working again. He knew what to do to keep it open if he so chose.

It had never been his choice in the first place.

Danny had known it wasn't entirely safe for him when the house started to turn on him, but that had only been solidified when the portal had gone down, Jack and Maddie Fenton doubled down on hunting down the Ghost Boy. He was the only ghost left in Amity Park, so he was the only one the trackers would lock onto.

Six weeks before he turned fifteen, Danny left his home. He didn't tell Jazz or Tucker or Sam, and he most certainly didn't tell his parents. Quietly, he packed his things - only those of which that would be easy to carry - and left. He didn't bring his phone or laptop with him. He thought about leaving his wallet, but figured that'd be useful to him.

The last thing he did before leaving Amity Park was go to the police station and tell them he was leaving willingly. He refused to elaborate as to why. They didn't need to know that. He didn't tell them where he was going, either, just that he was leaving.

It was an accident that he ended up in Bludhaven. Four weeks of traveling had tired him out. His powers only making it worse. He was low on money and food, he'd been sleeping on benches and in alleyways, his clothes were all filthy, he hadn't showered in days- He was ready to collapse.

Bludhaven, from what he understood, had a much smaller homeless population that her mother city Gotham, but it was still a lot of people. Particularly homeless youth. Danny was just another kid in an alley when he'd finally collapsed.

It took three days of sleeping behind a dumpster before anyone noticed him. In that time, he'd only woken up once. Not having eaten in a while, he had no waste to expel, so his body had focused on keeping he rested before allowing him to wake up. That was when he'd realized the actual danger he was in.

He had no idea if human weapons could still work on him or not, and he was not trying to figure that out any time soon. So, before the group of armed guys who'd just come into the alleyway noticed him, Danny let the invisibility wash over him before he flew up and away.

On the rooftops is where he found the city's vigilante. He was dressed in a black suit with blue accents and a black domino mask. His weapon looked like a broken bo staff and was strapped to his back.

Danny was not inclined to meet this man, but he'd never seen another hero in action before! Sure, he knew they existed, but he'd never actually gone looking for any. No one in Amity had, actually. It was a peaceful place. Well, until he opened the portal on himself, but that was hardly his fault.

Sure, he wasn't going to meet him, but maybe following him around wouldn't hurt? As long as he didn't get caught, he should be fine. It was only for the night, anyway. He'd probably never see this man again after this.

At least, that was the plan until he accidentally followed the man home at three in the morning. In his defence, though, he didn't know that it was that early or that Nightwing - as he'd heard a few guys call him - was going home! Regardless, he was going to take this to the grave. He was going to leave Bludhaven come dawn and he was never going to tell anyone the he knows where Nightwing lives.

Again, that was his plan. Danny ended up falling asleep on the rooftop opposite the building Nightwing lived in. He slept through the day, only waking up when rush hour foot and road traffic got too loud to ignore. Just as he was getting ready to leave the rooftop, he spotted movement in Nightwing's apartment.

Now, he couldn't even begin to say what had made him stay, but he did. He sat back down and watched as Nightwing moved around his apartment.

It was messy, messier than he'd have expected, but he wasn't one to judge. What really caught his attention, though, was the uniform Nightwing was wearing. Now that begged the question as to why the hero - vigilante was probably the better term here - fought crime at all hours of the day. Why approach the problem both legally and less legally? Why align yourself both ways?

Danny was always a curious boy when something sparked his interest.

He was swift in his movements as he pulled out the binder of paper and scholork he'd taken with him. Opening up to the first blank page, Danny started to write.

He was a hero, whether people thought of him as such or not. He only ever wanted to help. Maybe he could help this guy. Maybe he'd feel some kind of accomplishment if he managed to help Nightwing.

Step one is to observe.

Part 2 Part 4

Tag List: @flame-343

I need to point out that I have gone off of the original prompt, if that wasn't already obvious. In the og prompt, Danny is an adult. In this one, as I continue my take on it, Danny is a child. I didn't mean for it to happen, but the words don't listen to me, I listen to them.

[beneathsilverstars]

Was explaining my thoughts about Vaugardian attitudes towards mental health and therapy as part of a different topic, but it got really long so dfjkghdf here it is as a whole post! Starting with some more general worldbuilsing but hold on, we’ll get there.

Since Houses canonically contain libraries and infirmaries and provide things like education and transition care, I see them as a center of not just community but specifically community resources. If you have a problem or a question, you go to the local House, and if they can't solve it themself they'll point you in the direction of whoever can! Thus Housemaidens generally fill a role similar to social workers, and specific Housemaidens will have specialties like being a doctor, cook, teacher of a particular subject, etc. In larger cities, a lot of the more specific or labor-intensive resources would probably be outsourced to other charities/companies/organizations, or perhaps split into specialties by House, to better serve a dense population instead of trying to cram every resource into every neighborhood's House. But you would still go to any House first to find these other resources, so every House would maintain a focus on educating and advising. Combine this with the fact that religious leaders are often one of the first people that followers go to for personal guidance, and it makes sense that Housemaidens would provide all sorts of counseling, filling the role of everything from job coach to therapist.

If Housemaidens are the people providing all or at least most of the therapy in the country, then even if they're not trying to push religious doctrine, the Change belief is still going to be the source of the values and philosophies that their therapeutic models are based in. They can try to be nonpartisan and avoid mentioning Change in so many words, but it'll still be baked into the default assumptions of the local modalities in a self-perpetuating manner. If you want an entirely different approach, you're probably going to have find someone who specifically studied alternate modalities from other countries, any of which would have a much smaller market share than Change-based therapies.

So! Vaugardian therapy will focus on questions like "What Changes have been happening in your life lately, and how do you feel about them?" "What would you like to Change in your life?" "What can you Change about your thought processes and habits to address the things that trouble you?" and "Who do you want to be?" Which sound like just a particular way to word fairly common topics, but! These questions would be asked in pursuit of Change-y goals, as well.

The goal of irl mental healthcare as an industry is to make sure people can be productive. A common diagnostic question is "does this symptom interfere with your ability to work and otherwise get things done?" But Vaugardians are friendly and helpful to the point of approaching utopia, so I could see them being less concerned with this, because they're more willing to accept that some people can't work and some people need more support. In fact, in keeping with their distaste for carcinization, they might actively oppose the idea that there is any particular goal that people should be working towards. If there's one type of existence that is best for all people at all times, reaching it would mean there's no reason to ever Change again! So instead of any particular milestones, the goal is simply to set and strive towards goals that feel right to you.

I also think they'd be less likely to work off of a diagnostic model at all; you can't just say that someone inherently has depression. They may be depressed right now, but that can Change! The Change might require constant upkeep, but some Changes are like that, and it doesn't mean the Change is any less real. Instead, they'd probably be more focused on individual symptoms (and traits!), which might tend to come in certain clusters, but those clusters would be seen as trends rather than criteria. The Change modality would be less concerned with whether a state of being is disordered vs normal/healthy (and they'd be less likely to conflate "normal" and "healthy"), focusing instead on whether you're happy with where you're at, but also willing and able to Change as suits you.

So, "I feel apathetic all the time, I don't want to put effort into anything and I don't care about anything, I don't know who I am or who I want to be" would be an experience of depression symptoms that a Vaugardian therapist would prioritize helping you Change. But "I don't care about any of the things I used to care about, I think I want to quit my job and cut off all my friends so I can spend more time sleeping" would be... an idea a good therapist may recommend you spend some time exploring, to make sure that's what you really want and you're ready for the ramifications... but they wouldn't say, "No, that's a bad thing to want, we need to treat your depression so that you no longer want to do that." If you really do hate your job and your friends right now, stagnating in that because you feel like you ought to would be the worst case scenario! If pursuing this Change ends up making you feel unfulfilled and lonely and sick of sleeping all day, then, well, you can just Change again at that point, once you've decided that's what you want to do.

In an opposite example, a common criticism of irl therapy is that it provides bandaid solutions for structural issues. "I'm anxious about losing my job" might be addressed by mindfulness methods to lessen anxiety, which is better than nothing, but if you're genuinely in danger of losing your job and thus access to shelter and food, that's not something you can mindfulness away. Versus, in Change-based therapies, they would focus on discussing what you get out of that job and what about it makes you anxious. You might decide that you want to change careers to something that fits you better right now — which would be a lot easier to accomplish in Vaugarde than it would be irl, because of the resources provided by the Houses and general community. Or, you might decide that there's something about yourself that you want to change in order to better fit the job. So instead of working on the feeling of anxiety, you might work on building new skills, or building better relationships with your coworkers.

... I wrote this post thinking that Vaugardian therapy might use similar techniques to CBT (therapy), since CBT focuses on understanding the patterns of thought, behavior, and belief that lead to psychological issues, so that you can replace negative patterns with habits that serve you better. Sounds like making mental changes in order to change your feelings and actions! It would just be in favor of different goals than irl CBT under capitalism.

However. I did some more research, and it looks like Humanistic therapy is very similar to what I made up just now? According to this text, humanistic therapy "emphasizes growth and self-actualization rather than curing diseases or alleviating disorders." Psychological issues are "viewed as the result of inhibited ability to make authentic, meaningful, and self-directed choices about how to live," so it focuses on "helping people free themselves from disabling assumptions and attitudes so they can live fuller lives."

It's less of a set of techniques and more of a philosophy. According to this website, the key is empathy and "unconditional positive regard," which means the therapist "shows warmth, is receptive, and is nonjudgmental." They cultivate a casual, friendly atmosphere, instead of positioning themself as an authority figure. Client-centered therapy is a subtype that sounds like the most cliché sort of talk therapy; the therapist "listens, acknowledges, and paraphrases your concerns," giving you a space where you can be honest and accepted as yourself. Another subtype is gestalt therapy, which "focuses on the skills and techniques that allow you to be aware of your feelings and emotions," and encourages a focus on the present and self-responsibility.

So! That sounds about right! Vaugardian therapists aim to help you recognize your emotions and figure out who you are and who you want to be, through casual conversation and empathetic active listening, without judgement. They help you look at your skills, emotions, desires, and struggles, and guide you to consider the full breadth of options available to you, so you can decide what Changes will lead you to happiness and fulfillment. They especially try to avoid diagnosing, prescribing, or otherwise telling you who you must be or what you must need. They may provide suggestions — help you put something into words, or bring up options that professionals are more familiar with such as medication, or challenge you to re-examine your assumptions — but it's a collaborative brainstorming, and they want you to freely choose the option you think is best for you.

[artbyblastweave]

after reading Peter Clines Ex-Heroes pentalogy I can confidentiality say that Danielle Harris is one of the coolest heroes ever, what do you think of her?

^This lady So what I like about Danielle Morris/Cerberus is that she's a take on the Iron Man archetype in the context of an otherwise deliberately incredibly low-budget superhero universe, a setting where, with the exception of one millionaire, the superhero population consists almost entirely of working-class people in kludged-together wetsuits and motorcycle leathers who only get away with their low-rent costumes by virtue of the fact that they do, in fact, have incredibly potent superpowers. This is a hard circle to square, aesthetically, if you also want to introduce a hero who uses power armor, because that shit's expensive.

The solution? Cerberus doesn't debut after the other half of the book's elevator pitch, the zombie apocalypse, is already well under way. The fact that there's only one set of the armor despite the extensive documentation that must exist is due to the fact that the armor is a prototype, slated for eventual mass production but hastily deployed as a show of force by a rapidly disintegrating military that's at the point of just throwing whatever they've got at the wall to see what sticks. The typically-inadvisable trope of the suit's chief engineer also being the field pilot is initially justified by the fact that she's the only person left who knows how to operate it; and then by her reluctance to train a second person on how to operate it because she comes to be psychologically dependent on the physical protection it provides her. Protection that's at least somewhat illusory, to boot, because if you take a shot for every time the suit very realistically suffers a power failure or mechanical failure at a crucial juncture, you're going to lose your liver. The collapse of the logistics network impedes the armor's ability to work at full capacity almost from the start; those bracers on her arms in the above illustrations are for .50 Caliber machine guns that ran quickly out of ammo after her first skirmish and had to be mothballed. The series is very clear that Cerberus wouldn't be viable in the long run if she weren't on a team with several other superhumans, including an electrokinetic and a technopath, who can help cover the suit's weak points. Ironic, given the implication that the original point of Cerberus was so the army would have an answer to those same people. Overall, the armor is paradoxically portrayed as both viable and nonviable.

One of the really interesting things about Ex-Heroes's worldbuilding is that superheroes numbered in the dozens before the apocalypse, but supervillains only start to emerge in any real numbers after the apocalypse, when the prospect of being able to start a fiefdom or a cult of personality without someone noticing and coming to kick your shit are significantly greater; before that, criminals with powers mostly kept what they were capable of on the down low because there was no sane reason to adopt the kind of comic-book classic presentation that would call a superhero down on their heads. Thus the quiet thesis of the series is that quite a bit of classic superheroic nonsense would be actively facilitated by the end of the world and the collapse of society; the incentives and the restrictions would change, but heroism would remain pointedly necessary. Cerberus is also part of this quiet thesis. The perpetual tension of Tony Stark is that we know him to exist in a world full of cultural, legal and logistical restrictions, against which the specific fantasy of being Iron Man would inevitably run aground. Cerberus, as a superheroic identity, never existed alongside any of that. It's way easier to be a knight errant or a lone ranger if that's the only version of those things left that anyone can be.

[inspired-lesson-plans]

This is a very long post. If you do not have the time, then please at least do the quick activity up top. The lesson plan that took me 4 days to write will follow the ⁜ symbol.

HW Due Mon:

Open https://mysolartime.com/ in a new tab and allow the website to track your location.

Open https://www.utctime.net/ in a new tab.

Reblog this post the current UTC time and your local time, using the following format:

21:00 UTC, 4:00 local

4. Vote in the following poll.

⁜

Social Studies, Grade 5, Geography 6.1.5.GeoSV.3: Demonstrate how to use digital geographic tools, maps and globes to measure distances and determine time zones, and locations using latitude and longitude.

Do Now:

Provide students with a paper copy of a population density world map and 2 minutes to fulfill the following instruction:

Draw lines on the map in order to separate the world into 24 time zones. Try not to separate dense population centers into different time zones.

⁎

Class Discussion:

Use the projector to share and discuss the maps of any students who are willing to share. Have fun with this, there are bound to be some good ideas and bad ideas because 5th grade is like that.

Then, project the official world time zone map, and discuss the good ideas and bad ideas present here.

Exemplary discussion points:

The 0-point of the timezone map is the Prime Meridian, which cuts right through England. Why do you think it's in England?

How come some countries like the US and Brazil are cut into multiple time zones, but China isn't?

Why do you think the lines are pretty straight in Europe, Africa, and North and South America, but so confused in Asia and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans?

⁑

Direct Instruction:

Long ago, nobody really cared about the exact time. All you really needed was sunrise, sunset, and noon, and you could figure those out with your eyes. If you wanted to be fancy, you could put a stick in the ground and trace its shadow over the course of the day to measure out hours.

Perhaps the first recorded complaint of time-keeping technology comes from Rome in 250BCE.

The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours! Confound him too Who in this place set up a sundial To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions! When I was a boy, My belly was my sundial: one more sure, Truer, and more exact than any of them. This dial told me when it was time To go to dinner, when I had anything to eat; But nowadays, why even when I have, I can't fall-to unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials, The greatest part of its inhabitants, Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets. [x]

In other words, "Kids these days are always looking at their sundials. Back in my day, there were only three times, Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. All we needed to tell the time was our stomach!"

Please note this was a satire, so if it sounds funny, you are correct.

But for 18th century British sailors, accurate timekeeping was no laughing matter. These sailors used fancy math (called trigonometry) to calculate their latitude. So long as they knew the angle between the sun and the horizon, and the time when that angle was measured.

Ship's captains would keep logbooks of these measurements. That way, another ship's captain would be able to reference the logbook in order to replicate the journey, much like replicating a science experiment.

Now... think about this... how can you do that unless the next captain is using the same time as you. We take this for granted today, but how can you be sure that two clocks are synchronized?

Scientists in the town of Greenwich, England (pronounced gren`-ich) recorded the solar noon every day of the year and calculated the Greenwich Mean Time. By keeping an accurate and exact time in one exact place, GMT eventually the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for everyone in the world. That's why in the time zone map, the 0 runs through one specific part of England.

This is important. For the first time in human history, the clocks in different places were synchronized. Solar noon happens at a different time in London than it does in Greenwich, but if they both use GMT (otherwise known as UTC), then they can coordinate their schedules. This was very important for railroads, where exact, coordinated schedules are very important.

Soon, the entire country of England existed within a single time zone.

When the United States built railroads that spanned vast lateral (East-West) distances, they needed to create different time zones for cities that were far apart from each other, such as New York and Chicago. Thus, the US became the first country with multiple time zones.

As the rest of the world industrialized, they needed to pick their time zones. You can see this on the map. Each time zone is, at least in theory, as wide as 1/24 the circumference of the Earth. It's like the space between the numbers on a clock! Most countries are smaller than this, so they can comfortably fit within a single timezone. Others, like Brazil and Australia, divided their landmasses into two or three time zones.

China did not have widespread industrialization until post-WWII dictatorial communist rule. This was a very uncaring and inconsiderate government, to put it mildly. Suffice it to say that for Chinese farmers in the far west, having to get up 2-3 hours earlier every day would have been the least of their worries.

⁂

Modeled Activity:

Show students how to use this Day and Night world map as a way to visualize the day and night cycle across the world.

Additionally, show them how to use https://mysolartime.com/ to find their current time where they live.

Give students a moment to calculate the difference between their Local Time and the official time in their time zone, and what that means.

(I am currently in Philadelphia, which is 11 minutes East of New York City)

Finally, show students how to use https://www.utctime.net/ to find their exact, current UTC.

Have students calculate the difference in minutes and hours between Local Time and Official Time.

00:41 - 19:30 = -5:11 (Philadelphia is 5 hours and 11 minutes East of Greenwich, England)

Explain that every internet connected device in the world uses a service like this one, then adds or subtracts hours to fit the time zone of your current location.

Higher Order Learning:

Students work in small groups to look up the local time in different major cities around the world, recording their data on a worksheet. As they do, they should discuss the following questions:

Are time zones still relevant in our always-online society?

If you can know your Local Time and the UTC any time you look at your phone, then what purpose do time zones still serve?

How would it feel for schools and businesses to use UTC instead?

How would you feel if your school day went from 4:20-10:50 UTC?

Finally, each student must individually write at least 3 sentences responding to the following question:

Would you advocate for or against your school district dropping references to the time in your time zone and instead referring to UTC and Local Time? Why or why not?