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babaleshy · 3 years

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I'm Autistic

Because this will likely be a lengthy, wordy post about my self-diagnosis as Autistic as well as all of my experiences regarding Autistic traits, I'm going to leave a "read more" link so that you're not scrolling for ages just to catch up on your feed.

Ah, I see you've clicked "keep reading" or "read more" or whatever this site has it labeled as, now. You don't get to be mad at how long this is or how much of a waste of time reading this may be to you because you consciously clicked on the link. Therefore, I am exempt from taking responsibilities of eating up any bit of your time, including the time you've wasted reading this disclaimer.

So... Yes. I am. And it's a self-diagnosis right now.

You're probably thinking that I saw a Tik Tok clip, checked out a page on WebMD, and decided that I'm Autistic (this is in reference to a Tik Tok I saw last night that nearly made me spit out my drink because of how painfully accurate the "what people think self-diagnosis is vs reality" clip was). That is, of course, not the case.

A few years ago (likely 2018), I don't recall what it was I read online, but it made me go, "Oh wow, that makes so much sense to me," in regards to a neurodivergent trait. However, this was then I thought I had ADHD. My husband has ADHD, was diagnosed with it as a child, and because his dad forced the doctor (this was like, in the late 90s, early 2000s I think) to put him on Adderall and Ritalin, my husband does not remember 3 years of his life because he was a drooling, zombified mess. Why did his dad do this? Because his grades were bad. Did this help with his grades? No. Did his dad take him off the meds because he didn't get the desired result? Also no. My husband wasn't even informed on what ADHD was. He was simply told he had it and to take these pills. It wasn't until he (my husband) read the label saying that it could increase the risk of heart issues that he cussed his dad out and flushed all the pills down the toilet. Up until very recently, he wasn't sure if he actually had ADHD until he saw a YouTuber who was actually diagnosed with it display the exact traits he had.

But he didn't see this YouTuber when I thought I had ADHD, so my husband couldn't exactly relate, plus I didn't want to trigger anything with him on the subject.

But the more I researched, the more I realized I could be on the spectrum. It wasn't until 2019 that I was printing out articles, trait lists, etc. to highlight and put into a folder (which is thick and nearly bursting with what I've printed out to have a hardcopy of records highlighting the traits that I have, including traits my husband and my mom see in me) that I realized "I could have Asperger's."

Of course, I no longer use that term after finding out it was named after a n*zi, and I began to embrace the term "Autistic" instead.

But the thing that triggered me into going, "Wait, so it's not ADHD that I think I have, it's Asperger's?" was, like my husband, seeing a YouTuber talk about their traits and experiences. I had identical struggles, myself. (Through this same YouTuber, I also found out I'm greysexual, too! There's a name to describe my experience with sexual attraction! Yay!)

There are a lot of VERY SPECIFIC TRAITS Autistic people experience that aren't mentioned by the YouTuber or in anything that I've printed out and highlighted that I have found through various Tik Toks that I have personally experienced that simply further solidifies the fact that I'm definitely on the spectrum. When I showed the Tik Tok I mentioned earlier (I don't remember their name) to my husband last night, he was wide-eyed because the description of how that individual self-diagnosed themselves WAS EXACTLY WHAT I DID WORD FOR WORD HOLY SHIT.

I was already convinced I am Autistic, but each time I read Twitter threads of people's experiences with their Autistic traits, each time I watch Tik Toks or certain YouTubers share their experiences, it further solidifies that yep, I'm Autistic.

What's amazing is that my husband is very supportive. I'm extremely lucky to have married him. I've been a terrible masker but he loves me anyways. He never gave me shit for my meltdowns and tried to help me out, thinking I was just horribly overly stressed. Now that he knows why I've had the few outwardly noticeable meltdowns that I've had throughout our years together, he knows how to help me more, now. And while he's figured out my traits and what issues I have, knowing that I'm on the spectrum helps him make sense of why I'm like this, and he can help me accordingly whether it's to prepare for something in advance, help me calm down, etc.

(I should also add here real quick that there's a high chance I have OCD as well, but less of the compulsive actions and more of the obsessive thoughts, but I'm not entirely sure just yet if this is the case. I'm actually hoping to see someone about this but with the pandemic, I don't know when that will be.)

Now... onto the traits and experiences.

My Traits (that stand out with neon lights)(Will copy word-for-word a trait my mom or husband see in me and it will be typed in a different color.)

Having a folder that has all of my research I've obsessively looked up, printed out, highlighted what I saw in myself with one color (yellow) while highlighting what my mom and my husband see with another color (pink). I'm also using this folder to make this list as a reference because I sometimes forget certain traits I do have are because I'm Autistic. (I'm 32 as I write this, so when so much of what you think, do, and experience that you see is normal for you turns out to be an Autistic trait, it takes a while to get used to it and thus remember that because you haven't had a label for it your whole life.)

Despite being goth/punk, I dress as comfortably as I can. Textures aren't a very big issue for me, but what feels like strangulation of my body tends to be a problem. I cannot handle having the cross seams of pants feeling like I have a chopstick slowly impaling my vulva, or I can't stand how tight some shorts are that they pinch my hip joints.

I've NEVER spent much time grooming my own hair. It's either tiring, I"m impatient and want it done NOW, or both. This is why I have a Tank Girl haircut (all buzzed except for bangs), where I can basically "wash and go." (Husband does my haircuts and dyes and he's kickass at it.)

Eccentric personality; may be reflected in appearance.

Is youthful for age, in looks, dress, behavior, and tastes.

Usually a little more expressive in the face and gesture than male counterparts.

"May not have strong sense of identity and can be very chameleon like before diagnosis." (This resonates with me in the form that I never saw myself in ANY fictional character other than Tank Girl. My husband agrees with this opinion, but he also says he also sees a lot of me in Caulifla from Dragonball Super.)

I enjoy reading and films as a retreat, often sci-fi, fantasy, children's (sometimes), can have favorites which are a refuge.

Uses control as a stress management (like routines, rules, rigid certain habits, etc.)

Usually happiest at home or in other controlled environment.

I've been seen as "sensitive" by some, and mocked for crying a lot by others.

I struggled with social aspects of college and have 2 partial degrees.

Often have trouble holding a job and finds employment very daunting.

Slow at comprehending at times due to sensory and cognitive processing issues.

DOES NOT DO WELL WITH VERBAL INSTRUCTIONS; MUST BE WRITTEN DOWN

Special interests (I'll get into these later).

Emotionally immature and emotionally sensitive.

Anxiety and fear are predominant emotions (some of which might be due to possible OCD).

I do have some sensory issues such as visual processing issues at times, certain sounds, certain smells, food I think, and issues with sunlight and my goddamn retinas.

Moody and prone to bouts of depression. Both of my parents as well as my husband have described my personality as reminding them of a cat.

Mild to severe gastro-intestinal difficulties (some of which could be due to endometriosis, btw).

I stim a little such as leg-bouncing, foot-waggling, some hand-flapping, some bouncing, the "spine-shimmy," joint-cracking, or playing with my ears.

Prone to temper or crying meltdowns, sometimes over seemingly small things due to sensory or emotional overload.

Hates injustice and hates being misunderstood, which incites anger and rage.

Prone to mutism when stressed or upset, especially after a meltdown, likely to stutter and may have a raspy voice.

Words and actions often misunderstood by others.

Perceived to be cold-natured and self-centered; unfriendly.

Very outspoken at times, may get very fired up when talking about passionate/obsessive interests.

Will shutdown in social situations once overloaded but generally better at socializing in small doses. May even give the appearance of skilled, but it is a "performance."

Doesn't go out much; will prefer to go out with partner only (aka my husband).

Will not do "girly" things like shopping.

Takes relationships seriously.

There's a bit on this chart (some of you probably already know by know what chart I'm using here) that says due to sensory issues, one would either really enjoy sex or strongly dislike it. I'm in the former camp complete with a pretty high libido.

Often prefers the company of animals.

So there are the traits that REALLY stick out like a sore thumb. These come from a site regarding female Asperger traits or however it's labeled as. I have plenty more from two other articles I printed out with lots of highlighting, but the chart actually sums a lot of the definitive shit quite nicely. At some point in this list, I could tell I went "fuck it" and copied many things word for word anyways since I'll be talking about experiences later in this post.

But it was this chart that I'd discovered that I started to realize that I really am on the spectrum, and to triple check, I asked my mom and my husband if they saw any of this in me. The traits typed in green are ones I wasn't sure of and had to ask them if they saw it. I'm not always aware of how I am, who I am at times, etc. I also didn't want to lie about it, so I had to get second and third opinions.

Despite all of this, only very few people that know me IRL know about me being Autistic. This is because I was heavily bullied growing up and since I haven't exactly left my hometown, I really don't want whoever stayed in the area as well to either have more fuel and re-enter my life that way, or try really hard to relieve their guilty conscience and demand that I forgive them or some shit. I also don't want "Autism Mommies" to come at my ass either asking that I help their kid (I'm not fond of children so that's not happening, plus ableism is what fucks a lot of Autistic people over regarding of age but they won't take that for an answer) or that because they---a neurotypical person---have a child who's Autistic, then that means they know all about it and because I'm not exactly like their child then I can't possibly be Autistic. It's just a whole mountain of shit I don't wanna get into.

This next bit will be split into 2 parts. One will be my special interests, and the other will be my experiences from my past that are prime examples of being Autistic long before anyone in the common public knew what Autism actually was.

My Special Interests (Both Forever & Temporary)

The following list will have my special interests but with indicators in parentheses as to whether they are forever-interests (as in, I never lost interest in the thing) or temporary (meaning, it was short-lived be it by weeks, months, or a few years). This will be in chronological order, meaning: the order of which these have appeared throughout my life.

Barney (temporary; helped me skip preschool and become honor roll student in kindergarten though)

Halloween (forever)

the color orange (forever)

dinosaurs (forever)

Donkey Kong Country esp. for SNES (forever)

animals (forever)

Godzilla movies (forever)

monster movies (forever)

Pokemon (temporary; I still like Pokemon, but it's not as hyperfocused as it used to be)

Digimon (temporary; same situation as with Pokemon)

Dragonball Z (forever)

Sailor Moon (on-and-off)

Ultimate Muscle (Kinnikuman Nisei) (forever)

Freddy vs Jason movie (still like, but the hyperfocus was temporary)

horror movies (forever)

Transformers (temporary)

Dark Knight movie (temporary)

Harley Quinn (temporary)

Lobo (temporary)

X-Men (forever, but only certain universes, mainly the 90s cartoon, and the character is always Hank McCoy)

neon-colored stuff (temporary; kind of some sort of semi-rave/techno phase)

books (forever; this was when I discovered it's "legal" to enjoy books if you "aren't smart"; I may explain this logic I had later in the post)

sex/sexuality/sexology (forever on the first two, temporary on the last one)

BDSM (on-and-off)

feminism (temporary in regards to doing research and educating myself; I still hold the views I've developed as a result, just not obsessively researching this topic anymore)

anarchism (forever)

ecology (forever)

Pleistocene epoch (forever)

goth and punk stuff (forever after discovering what these things are all about for real compared to when I was in high school and had no idea how to ask, who to ask, or where to look this stuff up at in rural Ohio)

Hellblazer (temporary)

Serbian heritage (on-and-off)

bats (temporary)

arachnids (forever)

teratophilia (forever; finally have a word to describe this damn kink)

gardening (current; unsure)

Russian language (current; unsure)

DIY things (forever)

Towards the end, it may not be in the proper order thanks to slowly losing my damn mind being cooped up mostly in my room on this farm since moving back here in 2014. The two that are "current;unsure" are ones I have a hyperfocus in right now, but I don't know if this will be temporary or not. I certainly hope not, especially considering how useful these things will be. And while I have gardening as one of them, I haven't properly begun yet because I get empty promises from my parents where they claim they'd help me, not to worry about it, then get irritated when I ask where the help is and they suddenly can't give me the help when I told them I needed it.

I should also note that I don't exactly have an encyclopedic knowledge in a whole lot of these interests that are forever-interests because I'm normally exhausted just trying to exist with minimal trouble from people. I'm hoping this will change. The things I know I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge in would be Dragonball Z, animals/ecology, and... a-and that's it. That's really it. That's all I've got because Dragonball Z was so profoundly different compared to other cartoons I've watched in the 90s that it was a wonderful escape, and I grew up around animals, taking care of animals, and watching nature documentaries. The stress I went through growing up has caused my memory of some of that wonderful animal knowledge to be lost and what could be re-gained may be easily forgotten again, hence why I need to narrow my focus for what I'd like to be an ecologist for. While I love paleontology, I want to help the living world's ecosystems and environments, too. I'd love to go back to school for this stuff now that I'm more informed of who I am and what I want in life (as opposed to being forced to pick a college major while still in high school while I'm just trying to survive the concept of existence).

In terms of collecting things pertaining to my interests, a common pattern you'll see me have is a very slowly growing Hank McCoy collection. This is largely because there isn't too much stuff made regarding this character. (There also isn't much stuff I can find that involves Piccolo, Cyndaquil, Donkey Kong, giant ground sloths, etc. that isn't already snatched up by other fans.)

Now, I'm going to get into the list of experiences. Some of which will talk about my special interests, but I also really want to talk about my struggles, too.

Experiences That Screamed "I'm Autistic"

In gradeschool, I was friends with someone who probably wasn't actually a friend and her mom made her hang out with me since I didn't really have any friends. She has told me several times that she didn't want to be my friend anymore with some kind of hostile catty smile, but I just.. I wasn't getting it. Because there was a smile. Why say that with a smile? After all we've been through? Then she's back to being my friend the next week. She really wanted to hang out with the popular girls (yes, there were cliques in 90s American gradeschool) and has done countless things to sabotage our friendship such as telling me Barney is a fake, Donkey Kong was a real gorilla who hung himself, etc. And I believed all this shit, too, in an attempt to still be an acceptable friend. She even told me that I couldn't be a witch because I liked toads so much (toads were the only wildlife I excitedly interacted with in my back yard on a regular basis).

I love Halloween for many reasons, but one of them (aside from my favorite color being involved) was the fact that it was acceptable to wear a mask. I love (and still do) the idea of covering my face because I feel less "naked" to the world. So this pandemic had a small plus for me in the form of mask-wearing outside of Halloween has become somewhat more acceptable.

In 5th grade, another classmate who had more obvious Autistic traits and was diagnosed with Asperger's at the time was an asshole to me. They would constantly give me shit and bully me for whatever reason. When I finally took a stand, the teachers on duty at recess called me to the bottom of the hill, forcing me to look at them WITHOUT allowing me to have my hands up to block the sunlight that hurt my eyes, and were able to manipulate me into "admitting picking on so-and-so for no reason" because I chased them around the playground where a group of girls (the same cliquey assholes the former "friend" wanted to mingle with) had to group-carry me away. They're the ones who snitched and they gave me those same hostile smiles. That's when I learned that not all smiles meant good things. I was 10.

I sometimes "lose the ability" to ask for help long before the "help" I ever got in any circumstance was just me being met with frustration by whoever is trying to "help" me or I'm met with "sorry, can't help you there. (The former being with homework or school work, the latter being with going to authorities about bullies.)

Growing up, I was never girly (or girly enough) and I've tried to, but I failed miserably. My special interests would roar through and because it was too odd or different or annoying, it gave other girls fuel for bullying me with.

Regarding the lack of being girly enough, I was at a pool party with the former "friend" mentioned earlier and she started this "game" where she and the other girls would leap into the pool saying, "I love you, Leonardo!" This was in 4th grade and in reference to the Titanic movie, which at that point, I'd never heard of, because I was too pumped for the latest Land Before Time sequel. So when I leapt into the pool, I said, "I love you, Raphael." All the girls were confused, asked who that was. I then asked, "Aren't we playing Ninja Turtles?" Because the only Leonardo I knew of was a fucking Ninja Turtle, goddamnit. Who let you brats watch that shitty romance film anyways? Boring as fuck.

Aside from the occasional weekend visits or sleepovers at the former "friend's" house, I didn't get to socialize much, so I would spend most of my days (especially in the summer) watching what was on TV or watching from our very large VHS collection. During which I would make mental notes on how certain characters acted or what they said and try to remember that to mimic them in a social setting, which would be out of place because I'd be so focused on mainly the dialogue that once it prompts me to say the thing, they don't respond how I expect them to and then I'm at a loss.

I was very ignorant of music and didn't even know the concept of independent or underground bands existed. Plus, rural Ohio is a cultural wasteland. Otherwise, I would've gotten into metal, goth, and punk way earlier in life. So I thought that bands that existed were because television said so.

Speaking of an odd logic... If it was taboo or bad to talk about, I thought it was illegal. Thus, I thought any knowledge about sex was illegal and that it was supposed to happen "naturally."

I also thought that, because I wasn't considered as smart by my peers, some teachers, and even as such in the form of an insult from my parents from time to time (despite what they claim NOW), that also meant I wasn't allowed to enjoy books, because only smart people are allowed to enjoy reading. So therefore, it would be illegal for me, a not-smart person, to enjoy reading a book. So I had to focus on the pictures because if I enjoyed reading, somehow everyone would know and then I'd get into trouble.

I also thought it was illegal to talk about periods.

I socially struggled BADLY when I got to middle school because my brain was like... 4 years behind? How the fuck do people know all these bigger words? Or complex issues? This was also when I had to start suppressing ALL urges to cry because at that age, I'm not "supposed" to cry over everything. So I still, to this day, suppress it to the point of guaranteeing inducing a headache. Because I've always caught shit for crying.

Middle school was when I met an oppressive "friend" who was obsessed with me because she had a crush on me and was rather controlling of who I could and couldn't talk to and got pissy if I got close to making a new friend. Because I was desperate for a friend that wasn't like the former "friend," I allowed this abuse into my life.

High school was me just trying to survive. By the time I got home, I was too mentally exhausted to enjoy anything short of watching TV or whatever was rented from Blockbuster.

My brain was still feeling like it was years behind, and I struggled to keep up with whatever was supposed to be something I knew about, including the concept of masturbation.

Like I said earlier, anything sex-related might've been illegal to talk about, and because masturbation was still kinda taboo, I feared I'd get in trouble, but my teenage hormones compelled me to do it a LOT. It consumed my free time almost like an escape, a form of stimming, but I was shameful of it to the point of suicidal thoughts.

The former bullet was due to being raised in a christian household. My parents didn't have such views on sex like this, but I was afraid of being in trouble for asking, took to the internet, and caught some misinfo about how immoral it was. I mourned I'd be going to hell.

Speaking of religion, I thought it was illegal to change your religious beliefs, and there was only Judiasm, Muslim, and Buddhism outside of christianity (I'm Pagan, now).

While I was excited to get away from my parents presumably for good after high school, college was a new form of hell. The sudden, dramatic change in environment and lack of ANY preparation for living like an adult on my own caused me to mentally/socially/emotionally malfunction. I had outbursts I desperately tried to suppress, I felt stupid because everybody sounded smarter than me, I didn't actually want to go to art school but wasn't smart enough for anything else and never really bothered to better my artistic skills and thus felt like I shouldn't be there anyways, I struggled to fit in better, I had no idea how to function that certain habits such as neglect of my own dishes on my desk developed because I LITERALLY COULD NOT SEE MY OWN MESSES DUE TO THE STRESS I WAS EXPERIENCING. This was 3 or 4 long YEARS of this.

Attending art classes mostly run by very demanding (and demeaning) teachers while my art skills weren't up to par added to this stress on top of me not actually wanting to be THERE in the first place, just away from my parents.

I nearly ruined a friendship with a roommate because of my struggles. I'm not even sure if she is aware of my Autism because I'm afraid to approach her about it for some reason.

Plenty of times throughout my life where I'm loud and don't even realize it.

I've info-dumped on my parents, but right now they half or completely ignore me.

I've tried making eye contact, but it's like staring in the sun not in the sense of pain, but in the sense of by natural reaction looking away. When I force myself to make eye contact, I'm spending so much focus and effort into doing that to the point where I am unable to pay attention to what the person is saying. Instead, I stare at the mouth so I make sure I hear correctly the words they're telling me.

Each time someone is mad at me and gives me the silent treatment, and I inquire what I did to piss them off, they get madder because I'm somehow supposed to immediately know when I fucking don't. Then, half the time, they continue not telling me and I have to hear it from someone else. This further confuses me as to why they don't just simply fucking tell me.

I've annoyed people to listening to the same one or few songs over and over again. A lot (currently obsessed with the Sunset Overdrive and Tank Girl movie soundtracks).

I can "smell" the heat outside on a summer day.

I can smell other people's unique scents sometimes (especially when in someone's house; also experienced this in other people's dorms).

I can't remember what grade this was, but in high school, we went to some kind of space camp facility thing, and our class was split into two groups: one group was the group who was on Mars and ready to come home, the other was on Earth and can't wait to go to Mars. I was in the former group. My job in this little fun display interactive room thing was to examine the isotopes and report... uh.. I can't remember.. Report something that was off. Everyone else was dicking around with what they're supposed to do, and I was actually doing my job, and then said something, like I was supposed to, if I found something that was off (I don't remember the specifics). When the scientist who worked at the facility praised me on "saving the crew," I caught this look from the entire class a look I can't quite describe other than they didn't seem to like the fact that I did a good thing and was being praised for it instead of any of them (or they were shocked that a "dumb girl" like me could achieve this and get praise for it, I don't know.. hard to tell). This was a science class field trip, but despite this, I didn't have an interest in space, and still didn't feel I was smart. (Come to think of it, I think this was actually an 8th grade field trip, I can't remember.)

Just discovered this today: I'm actually very easily overwhelmed that could trigger a meltdown when I wake up. I don't know for how long until that point passes, either. But this could also be explained with how I've reacted to certain alarm clocks (the ones with the bells just induce pure rage in me). Either I will be on the verge of a meltdown or I'll have a fucking headache all day. Normally, I just wanna drink my coffee and either read or practice a little on Duolingo.

I don't always have enough room for a lot of info in my head for things that I like, so I have to carefully narrow shit down. Right now, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my urge to get my hands on some monster movies while making sure nothing else I've retained info for wanes. Not sure if this is due to stress or what. But apparently I have designated compartments for certain categories in my brain. If I get into monster movies, continue to work on my knwoledge on ecology and paleontology, and gain more knowledge about arachnids, that shouldn't impede on the "language" category, so whatever I learn in Russian will remain safe.

Interest "Webs."

I have what I'd like to call an "interest web." My special interests in one thing can lead me to having an interest in another. I care about nature, and I also care about paleontology. Paleoecology is something I'd like to dip my toes into. But because this all involves nature, I have an interest in botany (though it's still intimidating so I'm sticking with local native trees) and arachnids (after conquering my fears and learning more about them). So the web stops at arachnids there (no pun intended).

Back to ecology and paleoecology...

I have a major interest in the Pleistocene because it was just before we humans started writing shit down. Hints of that era echoes within our current environment, from the pronghorn being "unnecessarily" fast (due to miracynonyx, the "American cheetah," which is now an extinct cat) to avocados not seeding like they should without human assistance as well as the yucca trees (Joshua trees) going into retreat thanks to the absence of giant ground sloths.

But the planet is warming, and we could use all the help from plants that we get, especially when it comes to making sure that permafrost stays frozen. So there's this "Pleistocene Park" project taking place in Russia, and one day, if I get into the field of paleontology, I may want to chat with those involved in that project, but one can't expect every other country to know English.

There's also FROZEN PLEISTOCENE MEGAFAUNA CARCASSES BEING FOUND IN PERMAFROST, too.

On top of all of this, Russia's northern lands will become habitable for humans if shit hits the fan and the planet's mostly fucked, so it's still nice to know the language.

See how all of these interests intertwine? (It also helps that since I am of Serbian heritage but can't find accessible resources to learn the language and I wanna know a Slavic language that Russian is kind of accessible. It also seems to be the only Slavic language "commonly" found in colleges when it comes to foreign language courses.) This is why I call them "interest webs." Not sure if other Autistic people have them, but it's something that I have.

The second one could simply involve Halloween, punk, goth, monsters, and teratophilia with Halloween being the gateway because my favorite color is orange.

Just thought this would be a fun thing to touch on real quick.

My Sensory Traits

I do experience some sensory traits, but they're not intense like some people would assume (unless I'm simply not noticing how intense they can be).

I can "smell" the summer heat, which was something I thought everybody else experienced but I'm wrong.

My retinas hurt in bright sunlight despite not looking anywhere near the sun, which I also thought everybody else experienced.

Drinks taste different or off in some way if they're not in a particular mug, glass, etc. that the drink is supposed to be in. (I have certain mugs that I enjoy my coffee in, but the other mugs? They taste off. I can't explain why. I have ONLY TWO acceptable little tumbler glasses for orange juice.)

Breakfast food does not taste like breakfast food unless it's on this one specific plate from my childhood.

Dinner can be iffy on certain plates, but the safest go-to is the knock-off blue willow plates.

Lunch is acceptable on anything, but if I'm having simply a sandwich, it must be on a small plate.

I have specific forks I'd prefer to use because of how they feel in my hand, how the food-part feels in my mouth, and how the fork itself tastes.

Gotta have cinnamon in my coffee. I just do. It's not coffee without it.

I cannot fucking handle hair snippets of any size for any reason on my body. This is why there is a rigid procedure to where my husband must buzz my hair over a paper-towel-covered sink (to avoid clogging the drain) while wearing a particular tanktop Harley Quinn night shirt, and then I must shower immediately afterwards. During the haircut, my skin itches like mad like I'm being poked by the hairs directly even in places where hair snippets have never, ever gone.

I'm overly sensitive to the cold to the point of pain, especially in my fingers and toes.

Also cannot brush teeth with cold water because it's so painful (this was LONG before I had dental issues and persists to this day). Even my tongue hurts from it.

I'm picky as fuck with candy. Trick-or-treating was sometimes difficult because all I cared about was either orange-flavored stuff, or chocolate. Only specific chocolates, too (Krackle, Mr. Goodbar, Crunch, Butterfinger, Reese's, that was it.) Skittles were okay, but a lot of the baggies I got had a LOT the red ones and the red ones suck. Can't stand the other candies. (But my tastes have changed since then, and I opt for European chocolate from Aldi's as they are far superior, especially Moser Roth's 70% dark chocolate and Choceur's coffee and cream chocolate.)

Speaking of candy, the Whopper's Robin's Eggs tasted better than regular Whoppers and I will never be able to explain why.

Despite loving orange flavored stuff, I have trust issues when I see an unlabeled orange candy because there's the dangerous chance it could be fucking peach flavored. *gag* (I like real peaches, but the artificial flavored ones suck balls.) Due to my dental situation, I cannot enjoy very much in a way of candy, and the only artificial orange flavoring I CAN enjoy is through Vitamin D gummies... And even then, EVEN THEN I have to worry about the fucking peach flavors if I have to go with a different brand because we can't get our hands on a bottle from Simple Truth.

Artificial cherry flavoring is death.

The ONLY flavored medicine that was acceptable to me was orange (of course) and those dissolving strips that were grape-flavored that they don't fucking make anymore because fuck me that's why. Everything else was peer-pressured to do shots kiddie edition.

The different colored coatings on M&M's taste different from one another and I cannot explain why. It's very subtle, hardly noticeable, BUT I CAN TELL.

Peanutbutter is fucking amazing.

The smell of peanutbutter is fucking not.

There are these frozen meals my husband gets for days he doesn't have energy to cook and one of them (all from the same brand) smells like fucking hell.

My husband's Nissan Cup Noodle ramen overpowers my incense despite what other household members say.

I love incense, especially dragonsblood, "coffee time," pumpkin spice, raven, and rain.

All of the autumn scents or scents associated with autumn are orgasmic to me.

The smell of artificial cherry is death.

I would love to have perfume or body spray of Play-Doh.

I can compare smells of some places to others, such as the library branch I frequent smells like my gradeschool, as do SOME of their books' pages, and when my husband and I walked through this hall-like tunnel-like storefront in downtown Pittsburgh, I said it smelled like my grandma's basement, and he thought the same, so we're in aggreeance that all grandma's basements smell the same. Except for my Baba and Deda's. Their basement smelled like they actually still enjoy life and had their shit together.

Speaking of gradeschool smells, my gradeschool had two directions of classrooms, one led towards the gym, but the hall off to the side was carpeted, had some nice colors, and held 2 kindergarten classes and 2 first grade classes. That section of the building had its distinctive smells. The other direction led to the office, the cafeteria, and the hall with the 2 classes of grades 2 through 5 plus the preschool and the art/music class was. The smell was different in all classes EXCEPT for the music/art class, and I never went to preschool so I wouldn't know what that smells like.

ALL PRINCIPLE OFFICES SMELL THE SAME. HOW.

I could smell when my husband accidentally put in cinnamon when he thought he grabbed paprika in a dish that I liked. He was terrified of telling me. That was a happy accident and it became a permanent ingredient. He was mortified and shocked that I could smell his whoopsie in my dinner he made me.

I can also smell the cinnamon they use in Little Caeser's pizza crust. Yes. They use cinnamon. But I was the only one to notice.

Honey is like peanutbutter: it tastes amazing. But holy shit fuck that smell.

Gas stations smell like death, sadness, and questioning life's choices.

No two people's car interiors smell alike.

I can smell when it will rain soon, especially if it's about to storm.

I'm the one who noticed that hairy white oldfield asters smell like cake batter.

Dominant yellow filling my entire vision can be sometimes painful.

I used to be able to "hear" the color yellow in my head so much I thought yellow actually made a noise. It was a particular shade of yellow, and it made this Playskool toy-like clicking bell ringing noise, but really obnoxiously, almost painfully. I don't know how to describe the shade other than "cloudy pastel lemon?" It looked like the fucking lemon-flavored medicine I had to take as a kid.

My parents tried mixing in this cherry flavored death medicine in with my orange soda thinking I wouldn't know the difference but I did, so I dumped it down the drain and opened a new can because that can of Big K orange was fucking ruined.

Orange is wonderful to my eyes. But it's a hard color for me to find when it comes to getting things in a particular color. My back-up colors are red, green, and purple.

The sunlight hurts my retinas, even when I'm not looking at the sky at all, but the pain intensity increases the further I look up on a sunny summer day. This has been like this since childhood. Prescriptive sunglasses shouldn't be fucking expensive and should be covered by healthcare insurance.

I have to try really FUCKING hard not to stare at someone's muscles in person because ugh... Good thing I rarely see anybody who's well-built. (No really, this isn't even really a sexual thing, I'm so fucking fascinated and once I realize "oh, so that particular muscle looks like that from that angle", I get a glimmer of hope that I MIGHT be able to draw something humanoid since I suck at drawing people.)

Orange trees as so pleasing to the eye, and these are much more socially acceptable to stare at, lest I'm in person and the property owner might think I'm plotting to steal some (luckily I've never been anywhere near a place that grows orange trees).

Neon lights are amazing and I want them to come the fuck back. I swear, stores were so much more enjoyable of an environment when they were common. Such lights improve my mood in a way I cannot describe. I'm no longer in a hurry to get home if I am in the presence of neon lights.

Sunny days during winter are painful because the sunlight reflects off the snow. I'm painfully blinded if I look outside or go anywhere.

I cannot handle the sight of someone having boogers/snot hanging from their nose, not the sight of someone vomiting, nor the sight of an syringe needle piercing flesh.

I cannot handle the sound of alarm clock bells. I have woken up in a rage and been in a bad mood I try so hard to suppress for a good portion of the day. If I hear an alarm clock bell now these days, I wanna take it and chuck it across the room regardless the time of day or if I'm already awake. It's not so bad if I hear it from a video. In person? That's starting a war with me.

Children crying or screaming (especially babies) are almost painful to me and triggers my fight-or-flight response.

The reason why I was the loudest mellophone player in marching band was to drown out hearing the fucking trumpets. And I did; I was louder than the trumpets. (I quit marching band my sophomore year but for different reasons.)

Much of the music from the 80s that gave it that sound that definitely said it's from the 80s is very pleasing to my ears.

I love punk music for its messages, lyrics, and energy, but goth always puts me into a headspace where I feel like I'm at home; I'm at peace and want to cuddle the monster under my bed.

However, some punk songs can hit deep or strong and live rent-free in my head, such as Anti-Flag's "Racist," Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl," and Skarpretter's "Nazi Scum."

One particular artist's voice I cannot get over because his is the first voice of any kind that makes me wanna fan myself is Peter Steele of Type O Negative. My favorite song, however, is "All Hallow's Eve" because his voice, the subject, and the lyrical content.

I'm able to hear something off in the oscillating fan my husband likes to use before he notices it.

I'm the one who can hear coyotes at night (doesn't help my mom wants to blast westerns to drown out the world and I'm back here in my room away from that shit though).

I can hear the branches scraping against the house, gently making creepy noises before I realize what the fuck it is, BUT NOBODY ELSE HEARS IT.

I can recognize the call of a robin because we had so many at the house I grew up in, and nobody else in this family fucking noticed.

I tend to notice the sound of the rain over all the house noise first.

I don't like tight clothing, which is why I prefer bralettes because my tits hurt.

If I could, I'd go without the bra because the band can sometimes suddenly feel tighter than it actually is, but because I have large nipples, I kinda need that bra for a bit of protection.

Shorts can be tight around the crotch, hip joins, and lower belly region, and that's a big no-no for me.

I'd prefer baggy pants, honestly.

Can't have tight footwear. No.

The seam at the top of socks or tights hurt my pinky toes if the whole sock/tights shift that way.

I already covered the hair snippet thing so since this is the sense of touch, another body hair thing is I kinda don't wanna shave my pits anymore because they are extremely itchy when they grow back. HAVE to shave my crotch because if I don't it gets horribly itchy, and my thick, fast-growing hair weaves into underwear, gets caught in pads, etc.

Ah yes. Pads. I hate them, but they're far more acceptable than a tampon or a cup because I have vaginismus.

Certain fabric textures are itchy as hell. There's a black shirt I have whose collar and cuffs are gorgeous but I have to wear something underneath to avoid feeling itchy.

Winter is hell for me here in the midwest, as I am very susceptible to the cold to the point of pain, especially in my fingers and toes. I become very slow, too. I feel like I can't get warm enough most of the time.

Air conditioned places in the summer feel almost similar, so I don't always wear shorts if I'm expected to go into, say, a Walmart with my husband to pick up everything. I'll shiver.

(We're gonna get into TMI territory here.) Can't masturbate by hand unless I've got a nitrile glove on because my brain only focuses on what my fingers are touching more than what my cunt feels.

Can't have any sex with my husband without anything brighter than low-light because things can be visually distracting in the room, or lights can suddenly feel way too bright to me. (Halloween string lights or those LED rope lights with adjustable brightness features and colors are excellent for this situation.)

In Conclusion

This is all that I've figured out so far. None of this hit me at once as a realization when I figured out that I'm Autistic. This took a while to realize it, and the realizations were mostly at random times through examples of other people experiencing it on the internet or through me going, "Huh, is that an Autistic trait?"

There may be even more that I'm currently unaware of or have forgotten to type here.

I apologize for how extremely lengthy this was. This took all day to type because of having to get up and do other things that needed to be done. One of the reasons why I really wanted to type this is because it's much easier to organize this on a computer, and I am absolutely shit at organizing files on my computer.

Unfortunately, while my husband is wonderful in supporting me, my parents aren't exactly all that great at it. Especially my dad, who is either vaguely dismissive or outright "forgets" that I'm Autistic (he honestly just... doesn't care, and tries to make things convenient for him at the expense of others most of the time). My mom... I'm not real sure. There are times where she seems to remember and others where she doesn't. I'm honestly wondering if they don't like knowing that I'm Autistic because that means my brother would have been as his traits were far more obvious than mine.

I hope that whoever is questioning whether or not they're Autistic has found this helpful at least in the sense that it would point you in the right direction on where to go next, but I would highly recommend checking out online Autistic communities, as that's where I've discovered that I'm on the spectrum.

#autism #asperger's #adhd #special interests #sensory traits #autistic traits #sorry for how long this is

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booksandwords · 3 years

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Fence: Striking Distance by Sarah Rees Brennan

Read time: 3 Days Rating: 4/5 (but it’s complicated)

The quote: Hooking up made Aiden think of fencing, sometimes. The sheer physicality of it, the smooth skilled movements flowing and arching to a victorious end. Knowing your opponents moves, weaknesses, what would get to them. Scoring all the points you could. And, in the end, turning away. — Aiden Kane

2nd quote: Arrêt — Aiden Kane Let me explain it means stop, it's used in fencing. It's one word and in that one word my heart broke for Aiden look what can I say he owns me right now.

Because of what Fence: Striking Distance is, the extension of a world created in another medium and with a pre-existing fanbase, rating and reviewing it is quite difficult. I am aware of and really like C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad's Fence series and this does well to extend that. Developing backstories and voices for characters other than Nicholas and building on his. It is worth noting that Johanna the Mad did the cover art and the art on the end pages, C.S. Pacat was heavily consulted in the writing. It could also easily be read as a standalone, knowing the comics is not a pre-requisite it just means you know who is who and a bit about their environment, but all that is contextually explained anyway (like the shower curtain). There is no straight introduction to any character, the closest is a single paragraph by Coach. All that said the primary Fence series focuses its time on Nicholas, he is our eyes, this gives us much more on the others in the fencing team with not only Nicholas but Seiji, Aiden and Harvard all as point of view characters. The plot is simple enough, Coach Williams wants the boys to do team-building work, except Harvard who she wants to enjoy himself away from the team. Chaos ensues. Think the height of fake dating au's for Harvard and Aiden, Seiji trying to defend his roommate despite not having all the information, Nicholas being his clueless self (with daddy issues) and Eugene well Eugene is a pwn in the game but who knew he was such a gossip and a social butterfly. Harvard and Aiden's chemistry is written so well it is off the charts, as is only right.

I'm not entirely sure where this is going to fit in along the main continuity. It was released at about the same time as Volume 4 but is definitely set after, the results of the MLC bouts are noted by Coach early on. It appears to be after the conversation between Aiden and Harvard at the end of Volume 4 where it was made clear to anyone that there is more than friendship there. Aiden's gift is picking a fencers weakness, Aiden and Harvard are each others at the end of the day. What I'm unsure of at this point is where Striking Distance will fit in relation to Volume 5 (which is a long time of release as I write this).

The thing that Sarah Rees Brennan does best in this is the development of the characters outside how Nicholas (and to a degree Bobby) sees them. I do wish we'd seen more of Bobby, I want to know more of his story. Aiden Kane gets all three of my quotes for this review, I think the book is heavily about Aiden and how he is not what he appears. He learnt all his flirtatious, always leave before they do attitudes from his string of stepmothers. His use of names when he forgets someones (willfully or not) says a lot, it's just another way Aiden is shown not to be a simple as he appears. At a time when his dates name is Bruce, he playfully starts calling him the name of every male Avenger character because it annoys someone else. Honestly Aiden most of this book breaking my heart, not something I would have expected from the character we have seen to date in the comics. There is only one person in the world he cannot say no to or hurt in any way, Harvard. Harvard is innately good. His friendship with Aiden is a testament to his loyalty. Family is everything but he is blind to his emotions to a degree. Coach is right he spends all his time taking care of other people and not enough taking care of himself. Seiji is codded oddly for me. Before the endgame, I would have put it down to a minor racial stereotype, but after that, I went back to another reading. His coding is almost minorly autistic rather than simply unsocialised among young people. He can't read emotion and is a pure fact all the time, even showing emotion isn't easy for him. He's an interesting contrast to the others, he's quite intimidating. Nicholas also as no social awareness but it turns out he raised himself more or less. This book and the characterisation decisions made show them as essentially two sides of a coin, as Pacat has been alluding to through Coach in the comics. Nicholas hides a tremendous amount of insecurity under a perfect armour, Jesse is one of the few who can get through it.

Some details that I need to mention.

Harvard Paw, Aiden's bear, is quite possibly the cutest thing I've read in a book in years. The origins behind it and what it means to both Aiden and Harvard almost broke me.

Jesse's tone and arrogance were on point. The phrase "bright as ice" used to describe his tone is fantastic.

That watch... just what kind of monstrosity?

One of Aiden and Harvard's favourite films to watch together is The Princess Bride. Of course, it is. Just yes.

Rosina is possibly one of the books biggest yet most insignificant at the same time surprises. We do love a resilient woman.

Essentially this book isn't just a book for the fans. Anyone with an interest in the blurb could pick it up and read it with enjoy it. Will fans enjoy it more? Quite likely, we know the world, have an attachment to the characters already. And the characters, world and situation have transferred quite nicely. But the plot is not dependant on your knowledge of any of the Fence comics, everything you need to know from the importance of the Coste's to basic fencing terms are included. I would say it's a 3.5 for non-fans, 4.5 for fans. But Sarah Rees Brenann needs to be praised for creating a book that could be read by both. On the back cover of the edition I'm reviewing it's introduced as the first book in a new series, I hope that series comes to fruition there is certainly plenty in that conclusion for it. (while not being a cliff hanger if it is the only book)

#fence: striking distance #fence #sarah rees brennan #c.s. pacat #book review #ktreviews #read 2020

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unproduciblesmackdown · 3 years

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returning the favor: do you have any hcs re: winston, past or present, that you haven't expounded upon before or at length or just feel like talking about again. whatever you like

Thank You.......yeah idk really what hc's i've like "officially" described here that often lol, but then also there's that whole complication where i don't really ever come up with ideas & when asked anything i'm probably going [???] like, classics like "what do you like out of [broad parameter]" & it's like damn....i dunno. what ideas do i have about winsotn who i've thought about every day for > 2 yrs??? that's tough.....& Then the further chaos of like, when i do have hc's or w/e it's less discrete, concrete invented ideas & more towards the end of the spectrum that's like "well i kinda interpret this part of canon vaguely this way" &/or "i have This vague notion that i haven't solidified into a pretend fact or that i'm not at all committed to or take that seriously" where it's like, not only is this not really nailed down but it's basically free floating / i might have other ideas that would contradict each other lol. seems like a more concise list of Stats that are fully/exclusively my ideas is more exciting, but instead i can offer vague "i dunno / what ifs" based on vibes that i verbosely describe lmao, plus i'll forget a bunch of ideas i may have had i'm sure but you know. what else have i ever offered; never really trying to sell this material to otherwise uninterested parties or only make posts that guaranteed more than one person might enjoy, why would i be starting now; and ig if i write a bunch of stuff here & go "oh & i forgot like a half dozen obvious things" i can add on to it if it's a big deal.....plus it's always tricky with billions in particular being vague abt its own characters lmao, we only see [outside of work] personal stuff if it's going to become directly tied to [definitely at work] professional plotlines, or Maybe glimpse some character contextualizing things for the more central characters....side characters have more blanks to fill but also that means. just more that's blank lol & kinda a mystery of Up To Interpretation.....i figured one way to have any structure for this at all is to have a part looking at each winston involving episode's info. well anyways, after this meandering intro that kind of illustrates how i'm sure the rest of things will go here lol, i'm just gonna throw a bunch of stuff down in general. thanks again for the prompt to do so, b/c why not

really the one concrete discrete idea i have which isn't in the canon text is, of course: he is autistic

does he Know? idk. either way, think he's pretty aware of how he operates (& how he Can't operate), but if he doesn't know that's probably more for the "also: he's self loathing, which was basically textually implied" stuff lol. just mentioned it but i do always enjoy the tayston idea that taylor's talking abt in the past having it floated by a therapist/s or whomever that they could be autistic, them considering it but it not applying; winston going "hmm" & doing his own considering & researching & then maybe exclusively sharing the news w/taylor....but of course, maybe he's figured it out himself at some point before. i do think he'd figure it out himself though rather than anyone else directly suggesting it (maybe out here being diagnosed with "just the guy who sucks who we don't like / won't act right or normal" sort of usual experience) & i think, if he knows, he's not about to want ppl at work to know, b/c not as though anyone (but taylor & other quants) particularly seems to be impressed by his quanting proficiency, but he sure gets some validation/affirmation through that route (more re: that of course) and knows that ppl going "oh he's autistic so of course he's better at Doing Math / computer stuff as a like, mechanical efficiency sort of thing" or whatever. and the fact that taylor can interact with him / gives him some leeway to generally do his thing means he's kind of already got space to operate how he operates, see the start of this section....and idk. transitioning into the next section ig

just an Interpretation Of Canon thing here but, re: how these characters generally operate & what their reason is for being around doing stuff in the first place, i guess it's that winston does genuinely like to do & is interested in the math/coding stuff involved here, was also genuinely interested in working for taylor specifically (whatever The Hype specifically was), then you have taylor having the "despite your demeanor, your skills are superior" stance & appreciating what he can do & letting him do it by hiring him for real & all, & here we are, Q is for Quantitative, baby......he must find it rewarding enough to be getting to do this quanting stuff and also, the potential for validation when anyone recognizes he's good at it & by extension finds something about him good & wants him around to any degree

okay just that Episode By Episode stuff for a section here

3x03:

kinda extra room for interpretation b/c this was written as a one off character and reintroducing him in 3x09, written to be recurring, feels like it kinda offers a Soft Reboot for what we got here, where i guess how i take things is that we can suppose in both 3x03 & 3x09 winston's putting on a deliberate Performance to some degree based on what he thinks the potential employer wants to see, but it's also not completely fake / inaccurate either time, & like, maybe the 3x03 vibe wasn't a type of performance he'd only just ever put on for this axe cap interview, & even if it was deliberately bold maybe he was sort of thinking he Could bank on his value as a quant meaning he holds most of the cards (or can get away with acting like it)

building on that & as a More General point of interpretation again: think it's easy to suppose winston could've had an existence w/many elements of frustrations & disappointments & Rejection, but where like, he did figure out these areas of interest & proficiency that seemed to be a more positive force in his life, & leaned into them / focused on them further for it, & i could see him focusing on milestones / graduating from one thing to the next & conceptualizing like, well, if i just get to This point by working on This thing then i'll have it together & be able to move through existence more successfully, like, there's winston going into undergrad & kind of disappointed he's not having that good a time socially / feels like he's missing out / being left out still, but he can be like, well that's fine (: i'm totally fine abt it b/c i'm focusing on the Education & Experience here & when i'm entering the job market as an amazing quant anyone would want to hire then ppl will be seeing me in a positive light & things will fall into place / go great for me / i'll feel like i fit in & am doing things right within some structure. & i think maybe he Did have all those other job offers / opportunities & he was at least partly feeling a bit "objectively" confident, & also maybe just hoping he Could be that confident & that, you know, if he goes ahead & acts like that's the case, it could be confirmed / become true....anyways then obviously disillusionment time

since his outfits are introduced here: more "just how i'm interpreting canon" stuff in that i do just suppose he is mostly focusing on comfort & it'd kinda get in the way of things if he couldn't. flipflops might've been a statement piece but also i figure at least in part about the comfort / lack of much opportunity for restriction or ill fit or chafing texture or anything, same goes re: pants & shirts. interesting he likes to wear the patterned layers but doesn't really wear like, stripes or plaid ever. plus it could well be that Just A Tee is too informal unless you're the formalest of all by virtue of position, i.e. the ceo, but also we sure often enough see him wearing hoodies &/or multiple layers, like, maybe that's just for warmth or weight or what have you, always considering "what if it's about being self conchy as well (different way of saying self conscious)"

3x09:

so yeah with winston not having taken another job (at least maybe only like, temporary ones as these self contained gigs / just something to pay the bills) figure it's been a Depressive Period for him here lol & deliberately going on a journey of like self reflection / examination & going "haha yeah hated what i saw" is like, i don't think the self loathing is anything new, the confidence in 3x03 kind of an optimistic bandaid lol like well here's the new me as i understand / hypothesize / hope he could be, totally confident in being backed up by how valuable he is as a quant, then taylor kind of ripped that off and wound's open again but that wound was also not brand new or something he was unaware of / that didn't affect him before now

re: math meetup, i can see that being him presenting more evidence of his talent as a quant but also specifically going "see, i do this collaborative thing" to present this more conciliatory and cooperative approach to taylor, & am also taking it as evidence that he really does Enjoy math / coding stuff beyond it simply being a means to a professional end. i also like to think he has been / continues going to math meetup regularly, at least once a month, maybe every other week, and that it's this semi social event, like the relevant irl group you found back in the day that like, meets up for pizza before and drinks afterwards. i also like to think that, like, while he might come off as A Bit Much during said math meetup / just speak up frequently enough and often enough with some insistence lol, people Are there to meet up about the math and his contributions Are valued despite if his delivery/approach isn't always endearing or whatever. and even if he's not really popular / warmly embraced in the more [socializing event] bookends of the meetup, he's perfectly tolerated, and there's even a person or two or three (also regular attendees) who do vibe with him enough to like, invite / even want him to sit with them / talk with them outside that Math Setting. math meetup pals, maybe he doesn't meet up with these people outside these events but maybe they have each other's contacts and sometimes text. not these intimate personal relationships, but still something real and positive and refreshing. it'd be nice if math meetup could kinda be like what he hoped for from quanting, this way his math lets him "qualify" to access this group / activity, his aptitude "making up for" perceived lack of interpersonal / social charm & charisma & what have you, & having some reliably friendly people around even if of course that's not on its own going to mean he's totally socially fulfilled / not often lonely or anything. hc: he's often lonely & not totally socially fulfilled

he does, of course, want to work for taylor specifically, as long as they want him to, and this is sort of his second chance to find validation through working as a quant lol. think that yeah sure winston likes validation in general, who doesn't but also of course he's maybe a bit Above Average sensitive to / keen on it, but he'll also care about Affirmation if it's coming from people whose opinion he particularly values. think that it's easy to suppose he's also especially sensitive to taylor's assessments here thanks to the fact they really hit a (raw) nerve with him like, sure is the potential to get caught up in feedback loop city & say, have a few months mired in self loathing & an especial lack of certainty & confidence, if someone's kinda gone "i hate your self hatred" lol, but he also Did have this especial interest in / high opinion of taylor before that 3x03 interview, & so that's what continues to be part of it here

but then also interpreting that second 3x09 scene as like, he Does independently Know His Value as a quant and yknow not only has his pride but also can't and isn't going to first and foremost focus on trying to socially perform being peak Accommodating and Appealing here lol. but he still cares about what taylor thinks, wants to work for/with them, and i think it was Mutually Appreciated in the last scene that there was Mutual Effort to cooperate w/the other, giving him a Cue instead of just being mad & obfuscating it unless & until giving up on him completely or w/e is Constructive. interpreting winston as someone who sure can be a bit petty on purpose, especially in the face of some wounded pride (where he seems to take pride in his quant abilities & maybe not much of anything else: see the self loathing otherwise), but isn't really one to be deliberately antagonistic, especially not towards, yknow, the person he specifically wants to appeal to, but he also knows he can come off as grating whether inadvertently or not, so he might be testing the waters a little as well

3x11

he's using headphones even though no one else is in the room, that's a preference / he may also just like to block out other sound in general, as there's no audio of [winston's music faintly playing as / before he takes off his headphones] or indication he paused anything. does he like metal, what with the yngwie malmsteen reference? maybe, but that might just be a Billions Reference thing that isn't meant to indicate much / anything abt the specific character. i don't have any hcs about it anyways besides "okay" if so

first time we see his watch, it's not the calculator watch until s5 but i am a fan of said calc watch....gotta suppose it could represent him being here for the math of it all, what with how fancy/expensive watches are kinda the whole like status / power play thing, and a calculator watch is, afaik, not expensive, these casio calculator watch listings i'm seeing are all priced like, $15 to $25 range. so.

2nd scene is the first time we see sleeves pushed up, a frequent choice, maybe if he's focusing sleeves against forearms / Wrists & Hands can be bothersome. also not the first time he puts his hands in his pockets but i think that's a deliberate choice for winston's sort of Default Pose, equate it to the choice to have jared hang / hold on to his backpack straps.

guess he can also be a bit petty / rude / grating on purpose if ppl are getting in the way of his mathing / coding or otherwise thwarting it, at least probably taylor can relate / sympathize what with them wanting to Get It Right / being bothered if people get it wrong but could've avoided this

noticing all the caffeine and the fact he maybe didn't leave the basement / was powering through that project All At Once....just noting that down as a potential Approach, wanting to not interrupt focus &/or bear down & keep a fairly intense pace until it's finished / stay in the zone or what have you

definitely doing some deliberately cocky Testing / pushing back / amicable power struggle with taylor there, confirming he does have leverage due to that quanting ability after all, Despite His Demeanor / not being "sweet"

by this point definitely consciously kinda wants taylor to rail him.

4x03

i have no concrete hc's of instances inspiring winston to think he's "always seeing the future" but god i wish he did. he's right a lot though, maybe he just notices as much lol

talking mostly to taylor here, then concluding with "i only thought it but didn't say it; doesn't count....damnit." like he wants Their validation thanks, even if recognizing his Win here still wouldn't help them either way....also first time we see him w/coworkers for real, he's really freely Interacting.....time to go ahead and say he'd like to be work friends / at least have friendly interactions at work, might be a bit desperate for such positive social interactions, especially in this environment where he thinks the "objectively" good thing about him is most relevant, but it's cringe & fail (&/or vulnerable to Attack) to outright Want something, like validation / affirmation / a positive response or a simple "yeah you're right" "positive" response

first Space Shirt, followed by ones that are like, also &/Or Sci Fi Shirts. does he like space? i guess so

he's autistic

4x08

here & in 4x11, we don't know how he's gotten this info about taylor re: the arc w/their dad or with axe cap, but he's apparently mused on it on his own like this & isn't just quoting what someone else told him about how taylor must feel about xyz & how that might apply to the situations at hand, even though (unless he cassandra'd it) he wouldn't've had that much cause to suppose it'd definitely be relevant to have ideas about how taylor feels / is navigating a situation & why, maybe he just likes to be prepared like that / stay in the loop but yknow, maybe he's just also interested in them as a person beyond what's most immediately relevant to him doing quant stuff for them

he's already done the sort of kicking himself / wincing / apologizing or agreeing he fucked up an exchange thing before but, the genuine disappointment / momentary discouragement in it always lol....self loathing guy

love how he has these little like, clarifying explanations of things. "total control of the instrument," "always seeing the future," "because i win".....he's out here wanting to communicate to connect & to be understood, not so much as a potential for a power play / status climb and thus a conflict.....can see ppl who are used to / Do see interactions in that light to interpret winston yelling about having won as a like, rubbing it in people's faces show of superiority thing, but pretty sure he's just excited and wants a high five

4x11

having talked about the fact none of the desks in the tmc hq main floor seem to be winston's (& knowing that Could just be wroland not being reliably available to be in the bg of shots lol, analyzing s4 shots for some Consistently Empty desk) but it is fun to also consider that maybe tmc Could've had a secret extension in that that quant haunt in the basement was kept. a little more furnishing and it could be pretty chill, even though the lack of windows might not always be ideal. where's he sit!

also the whole "guy who'd be the first one smothered" moment like, guess i could've mentioned it in 3x03 more but yeah my Headcanon here is that winston maybe has a master's degree, not a phd though (him saying "50 phds" in 3x11 i think was meant to differentiate from him on both points, aka he's 1 guy, without a phd) & this is his first "real" job in any field. b/c i'm guessing like, people are here to get Paid, but as mentioned w/the watch (& just how winston acts in general, he doesn't really seem like he's raring to show off / really take advantage of having money or anything) it doesn't seem like he's, like, the "exceptionally focusing on personally making as much as possible" guy, and lauren's remark seems to emphasize / place the context on winston just not having like, savings from prior salaried years at a job or anything, more of a practical matter, maybe he's out here hoping for some more financial security, also they are all living in nyc, so. on that note, maybe he has an okay apartment but like, not without problems / not absolutely ideal, but it's okay. this would just be Convenient as an hc also lol

don't think the monologue was completely memorized, but it wasn't completely off the cuff either, he'd maybe been brainstorming scripts in his head / had some particular parts solidified word for word, but also hardly think he was guaranteed planning to deliver an admonishlogue at all, seems like it was some important factors that he was just kind of already irritated, nobody was listening / people Were social pressuring him to drop it or not interested in entertaining like "yeah i think you should talk to taylor about it" at all, think it was clear that talking to others was only going to lead to them telling him to drop it / trying to not have anyone say anything to taylor, and then that taylor just jumped in, which i hardly think he was hoping for

always Something that we can expressly see winston moving to sit down in that soon to be empty meeting room as everyone else is clearly filing out lol, like, can see how he might not be able to go "well, back to work" immediately and need some irritation / feeling like shit / guess who just got yeeellllllllllled aaaaaat to burn off, might need some time to absorb "well i guess i just deferred so no bonus as was probably expected," but can also suppose that maybe when winston gets majorly Shut Down he has shutdowns. saying all of four words in the wake of things, otherwise the fact he has this approach of tensing up, not talking at all, kind of just holding onto eye contact as his last way of "properly" participating in the exchange w/o bailing entirely, while also outwardly withering, like clearly these kinds of moments are pretty significantly affecting....feels like he could find it difficult to talk much, or at all, in the wake of some / need some time to recuperate a bit & have some distance & quiet & not just jump back into work like he's having a fine and normal time. sometimes pondering like, not only those notions like taylor insisting winston not be Interrupted when he hasn't technically started talking yet (giving him the buffering / latency time) but also like, fun kinda imagining them sitting across from each other having a texting conversation....or times winston would rather have an exchange via email......or make use of the sticky notes......or just have taylor talking to him and picking up on his nonverbal responses

winston's very Not present in tmc meetups / get togethers this season & again we know that this could be because his actor wasn't very available but it's still the case In Canon that there's only so many tmcers and they're all seeing each other outside work / market hours for varyingly formal or informal purposes & he's never included. & simultaneously hold the hc's that he could be choosing not to go or he could just never be invited in the first place l o l.....in either of these situations the reason for declining to go or being excluded could be up to "b/c other ppl don't like having him around" and idk, best case scenario is he doesn't want to go for some other reason, but he acts pretty okay with the All Hands meetups we do see / when in meetings with the other named employees he's pretty raring to interact with them, so :/

4x12

i do like to think it's fun to imagine What If Taylor Had A Phonecall With Winston Before This Monologue; someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure, i'm sure you remember, i was on the phone with you, sweetheart.....just them both having a more sympathetic approach with each other and a sort of dialed back reconciliation, tbt 3x09, without an audience / roomful of other people

do think that his wearing a tmc logo tee into axe cap hq was a deliberate Statement Piece, like wearing flipflops into axe cap in his true first time being there lol

first time we see the backpack, & the headphones (in this season), like the point you (nothingunrealistic) made about the backpack possibly kind of exerting pressure / compression in a Sensory Way. let's see it again

as good a time as any to bring up how it's such a consistent pattern that it Must be a choice that winston smiles in this direction :/ and grimaces / winces / frowns this way :\ but a choice of the actor of course, was it ever a conscious thing on winston's end, would not put it beyond the realm of possibility he's ever consciously thought of stuff like "even if words fail me(tm) i Gotta hang on to eye contact".....i'm thinking of times he is smiling hard enough that you just gotta do it more symmetrically, like here in 4x12

5x01

he likes bagels

think that this could've been another case of "people who are used to interactions used for conflict / power plays / stepping on other people to status climb (axe cappers in general, maybe team ben having to be extra prone to be on the lookout for these strategies when they're more often on the receiving end of them) misinterpreting winston socializing as means of connection (wanting to talk about the common work thread / interest with coworkers)"

even if for some reason quants were cold shouldering axe cappers like, a sound strategy even if team ben are worthy exceptions. Winston Can Get Petty When People Blame Quants Talking About Being Quants For Axe Cappers Harassing Tmc & also when in the process of doing so everyone's like "also you're smarter than us but no you're not, any math quants could do fundamental analysts could do better" like, winston getting more deliberately antagonistic when ppl are going after his Math Aptitude / value as a quant when that's his "objective" point of pride & confidence & possibly like haha self loathing can't get me here

5x02

winston's decimal points being more precise here i think indicates that the show is not taking the stance of "yeah the quants are just any old analysts with an attitude of superiority" lol

do think he selected that particular seating placement b/c it's like, hey furthest away from axe cap, most aligned with taylor's desk & angled towards it, perfect.....what a letdown

guess this episode suggests he and mafee have chats sometimes, and winston maybe confides At All Sensitive Info w/the guy? bold

always just smh like well thank god we were given this subplot where winston was a plot device really for dollar bill's arc or whatever............what a gift

5x03

just noticing as always how winston is the one person saying they should go for it vs the other two's skepticism / trepidation, and taylor decides to go for it.....they do value his input / trust his judgment

i am also noticing how often winston, as the math guy who doesn't really fit in w/ the whole axe / caply approach & style, has this role in giving taylor these crucial opportunities to pursue their own direction rather than be mired down in the misery of axe cap determining everything....3x11 & his algorithm letting them break completely away from axe cap, 4x11 & his admonishlogue making some Points & then next episode taylor does decide to abandon the revenge jag & says they were wrong & they're sorry....5x03 & this nlp strategy plotline being the first thing taylor could actively pursue for tmc after 2 eps of being dragged painfully through axe cap nonsense, & the fact this, in the next episode, leads to the Impact Fund idea / mase carb

5x04

see that last point

5x05

guess that until confirmed, The Glances being significant is a Headcanon Interpretation lol. anyways i do like taylor giving him these discreet, nonverbal cues as a very deliberate method of communication titrated betwixt them

oh right and an Age Cue here, before that was nailed down i think i already hc'd winston as either the same age as, or a year older than taylor, and that's still true lol, think that's how it goes with the timelines (taylor's being kinda uncertain, and winston's as well, having prior just kinda gone "well if taylor's 22 when they show up as the typical post undergrad age, and each season spans approx a year, and maybe winston spent just a year or two post undergrad getting a master's b/c nothing nails down how long it would take & he could've kinda been ahead of the curve as it were, he could be, say, 23 thru 25 in s3 when he shows up, to taylor's Maybe 23" as the Idea)

just wants to work for taylor as long as they'll have him, but would also like to be openly valued / affirmed on a pretty basic level lol...

one of those matters that's like, i do think that this is what the material is Trying to convey but it's not concrete / explicit, in that i think winston somewhat Likes rian right off lol like. i mean he's also still annoyed on principle, this is maybe his replacement & that stings that it's even a possibility & of course he has reason to want to feel like "oh well this person Clearly sucks" lol, but then there he is trying to scope out the situation & get immediate intel & it's like, here's this fellow 20something you immediately think is pretty (the mental comparison to an A lister as a dunk, lmao) & you see her being perfectly friendly with your nice coworker you're also friendly enough with, that's one degree of separation, now here he comes talking about how cool & epic & smart & capable she is, again makes sense he's still first & foremost bothered by the situation & has cause to just be more jealous about how well everyone immediately thinks of her (see: winston making bad first impressions that may never be undone, the fact other coworkers were probably never going around openly impressed with / praising him after meeting him for 5 sec, or like, ever) but i suppose this immediate underlying sense of attraction / affinity hits in that First Sighting as well

love that we see the feet up on the desk show of confidence again, very funny & glad it's back.....a tool in his arsenal for when he's Very Bothered But (unsuccessfully) Acting Very Unbothered / when he's trying to pitch for his employment lol

when did he have a first gf? perfect time for an hc.....feels like it'd have been like, idk, older high schoolers at the youngest, that kind of emotional commentary....or in college. sometimes pondering the idea like, what if he had a bf first actually.....or not, & Feeling A Way around other guys sometimes like, hmm guess i think this guy is pretty cool &/or i'm kinda like "god i wish that were me" about, then some more noticeable Tension as he's older even if he can't really discern the reason b/c this person's pretty nice & cool actually, hmm. then one day you're doing hw together with a while for code to compile & Oh Hey Lol

meanwhile think clearly rian defuses the Reason For Rivalry (and also clearly immediately likes him / interacting with him & you know, outright sticks up for him & in this significant way) & then when they connect over Math it's all coming together very outright like Oh Hey Lol 😳

also he Gets Right Back To Work easily enough, & like, i think already there's a deliberate performance of "i'm now totally unbothered," but he's just pretty good at shaking things off apparently. & he kind of has to be, to not bail completely or else tamp down his own personality / avoid interactions, but you know. plus that like, he may get irritated when his pride's wounded but around here people can have a whole crisis & arc about it if their egos are bruised in the slightest, so like. pretty blasé

5x06

this isn't really any hc or Interpretation by any stretch but this is the first time we've seen winston pull that particular attitude in that second scene with rian and it's beautiful.....if something's bothering him he's so often like outright indignant but this is like, i'm Bothered but i'm being so dignant about it, for like 4 sec

also the bright green hoodie / bright, high contrast, geometric blockbuster tee is so Vivid but like, always noting how he wears relatively colorful outfits. fun to go "maybe this one's deliberately extra eye catching b/c of this new crush" lol

5x07

the difficulty in reading that much into things when the lack of sobriety could be making any & everything an outlier, & can't even really read into "apparently down to take stimulants (beyond caffeine) on a dime" b/c well, so is everyone else, so that this situation can unfold, we knew he had a crush on rian (or i guess we didn't, but this is pretty direct about it), we knew he likes validation, taylor Knows him well enough that it's not just like "oh he's acting weird? well that's winston for you" to them, which we also knew but it's fun to confirm further lol

and now for some more free floating / general concepts

family? i have no idea. feel like he either has no siblings or several but yknow, anything's possible. we know what he's like Now, don't think he got that solid self esteem / self confidence as an emergent quality from [everything that happened to him before 3x03] & don't suppose he has this like, rock solid close warm familial relationship of understanding & unconditional love & support w/whoever he grew up with, parents or siblings or whoever he lived with....like, the relationship/s could be Fine but you know, still not all that close

i don't think he was every completely friendless (or if he was, it didn't last Too long) in terms of like, throughout school maybe he had some pals, no amazing close [fingers crossed Like That] ones where someone had like, grown up as his next door bestie and they did everything together & knew everything about each other, nothing all that close, but he had people to sit with at lunch or what have you, even if at times like, the table nobody else really sits at but the people who don't have anywhere else to sit lmao. maybe some slightly closer friendships here & there, but people often kind of got subsumed into other friend groups that he wasn't otherwise a part of / otherwise just kind of gradually distanced again...but also possible he had perfectly amicable occasions of like, maybe only having a class or two with certain people, not striking up intimate friendships but hitting it off well enough.........like, winston's out here Not having been stomped down into suppressing his personality all the time, he's still fairly earnest & forthcoming & eager to connect, just sort of vaguely going for "he maybe have always had this element of discouragement & disappointment re: socializing / connecting / forming relationships / sometimes just being accepted on a basic level, but he also didn't have his spirit totally extinguished either" although there's also the room for stuff like, yknow, him Holding Out Hope like "well nobody likes me now / i'm unhappy but maybe once i'm in college [gets to college & still isn't having a great time] okay well once i Enter The Workforce" lol. you know

but it's also like, hardly think he's Only Just Now experiencing the [winston: ___ everyone: get his ass] type stuff & pushback & punishment & disdain over not really doing anything but people hate his style & vibe, & feel like there's also still room for like, yep wow got burned sometimes / having had some pretty negative experiences......we do have to end up in this place where, you know, 3x03 happens and he doesn't just go "guess finance isn't for me!" & dust himself off & go get some Guarantees from some tech firms, & instead he's Really Glad [Taylor] Called & hasn't taken some other more desired job between 3x03 & that call & is immediately like "good news: i do hate myself" so like, can't see him having just thrived his way to this point....evidently not all dating relationships have been just epic highs & victories, maybe he has those math meetup pals now & maybe idk there's other people he's in sort of in contact with, maybe people from college / grad school or the like, still not that close, figure he's generally been lonely like, overall, despite regularly enough seeking out / striving for connections

oh yeah speaking of, the idea that he has a cat maybe lol, in part simply for company, a little guy that lives in your house / apartment....but also maybe he doesn't

always just some general notions like, also idk maybe he engages in hobbies, talks to people through that just like with math meetup....talked about the Embroidery idea, got that computers/programming connection, was thinking like, idk fuck it amateur photography, develop your own film, maybe he took a class in college or high school or something, same with like, maybe he plays a musical instrument, said "the cello, why not" about that as an early [shrug] idea lol. he does like space, maybe he does Anything with that....rip to any astronomy clubs In Nyc like, guess you're not seeing shit, but. 4x11 au, after deferring his bonus he goes to some cool cinematographic celestial occasion like taylor & the sea glass fish carousel lmao. taylor catches up & they have their [i'm sure you remember, i was on the phone with you, sweetheart] exchange lol.....except also not, b/c you wouldn't really want to have Parallels with m/any moments ft. wendy & taylor :/

recalled like a particularly casual / throwaway idea about like "lol what if he was somewhat thalassophobic" in part b/c once actor william dropped that lore abt himself in an interview, but. could have somewhat some other phobia/s. or not really any! what a world

maybe sometimes he's out here like, single & ready to Fuck like, focusing on just hooking up w/people sometimes rather than really looking to date at the juncture, although it could both be true like, he'd Like to be dating but also doesn't really currently want to do all the Putting Himself Out There & such of seeking it out / trying to consciously navigate it, but sometimes it's more manageable like, just wanting to have sex. looking out for himself when he can & how he can lol

speaking of, some vague sexy hcs

gets pegged

especial fan of Tongue Against Tongue texture, enjoys some Grounding elements to avoid being overwhelmed / narrow things to the more relevant sensory input at hand, like the weight/pressure of a partner leaning / lying against him / holding him tightly, if he's overwhelmed in a good way / kinda got some sensory overflow in a good way he might cry during sex In A Good Way lol, took some time maybe in his Personal Sexual Experience to figure out some general differences in "what he doesn't like at all" or "what's off the table / too unpleasant for him at some times but Not necessarily at all times & might be completely enjoyable sometimes," like, am i willing to perform oral sex, am i willing & Enthusiastically so, is that way too much actually, it can be all of them at varying times....maybe in more everyday general situations he refrains from stims in front of others unless stressed enough, but while having sex with someone especially if at all nervous it's like, there can be this transition between repressing stims & being more unfiltered / uninhibited where they kind of build up & then come through in kicks only to be reined back in, either like, he simply does go for a more reined in approach the whole time or anyone else is willing to ride this out with him / he kind of has the time & space to figure out more of a flow, in which case he might still stim but you know, not as though people aren't used to stims in this situation, i.e. reacting to stimulation with movement & vocalization is at least expected & it could once again be like "well he's a bit weird with it but hey" lol or you know, not that some partners can't be understanding or have had experience w/similar partners. hardly make or break but this can be a vulnerable interaction here / hard to shake the self consciousness & sense of "i Do have to filter myself and act The Right Way" all at once just b/c you'd want to

hey and let him sing karaoke or something lmao, winston is as Dramatic as he is, he would give a performance. work in a way to let everyone who sings sing around lol, could throw in some Affectations so that it's like yeah winston can sing without having to be like "wow winston, when'd you become a trained broadway performer" lmao. imagine. which reminds me of the time will joked about like, oh yeah winston Gets That A Lot re: people recognizing he looks like the guy in deh, aka will roland....the limitations of "this is set in real nyc" including occasional references to recent / popular shows, fuck it maybe will roland does also exist in the billions universe. well anyways it would be fun. the karaoke anyways, and that he'd give a top tier Performance whether or not people are first and foremost enjoying his technical / artistic skill at the art of singing, it'd at least be personality infused and engaging

taking it way back to the ideas about winston's social misadventures in general, i'm sometimes considering for fics i never end up writing if he might have some like, misgivings / anxieties about like, is this person i Like acting like they maybe Like me back as some kind of elaborate joke, & maybe the caution comes from experience like you know, classic over the line "pranks" like asked out As A Joke, kissed As A Dare that he wasn't aware of, think there could be like, would be Friendship / friendly acquaintanceship experiences in there where such "pranks" / "jokes" / "messing with him" (and not in a good way) could happen, or even just you know, more Spontaneously, don't even know this person & he's treated as a joke for other ppl's entertainment, realizing at the time or retrospectively like oh maybe i was more being bullied then having any positive social interaction / getting to feel at least "included" or what have you, like, the idea of getting to hang out with a group as The Funny Guy, but he's had these experiences getting to hang out with a group & realize it's b/c they thought he was funny / Amusing in a laughing At him, not with him way, which is easy also b/c winston isn't really out here trying to be funny that we've seen lol. only realizing he was still being excluded after some time / distance from the situation, or escalating open hostility / just more blatant meanness / over the line shit from some people, maybe some stuff that just immediately feels shitty but he figured was just like, well idk, maybe that's normal & still friendly, maybe it also felt more outright embarrassing / demeaning at the time but it's like haha yeah you got me :'] at the time just to save any face lol.....possible unexpected / spontaneous amicability in his socializing history, but also shittiness, whether it's coming at him all at once or he's kind of holding out hope like, well, i just keep at it / have a Friendly attitude here and surely i'll make friends b/c if people didn't like me At All why are they talking to me / letting me be here at all.....

always kind of pondering Fashion Variation, we haven't seen it but it could be possible, musing on "what would he think Looks Good On Him / how does he feel capable of like, dressing for romantic success or what have you lol" like, was the vivid 5x06 outfit anything, cue the drawing like, a bralette & short shorts is shaking it up and could be a Felt Cute outfit and could also be comfortable enough....not always That much room in men's(tm) fashion before you start having to be aware of [Gender] and dunno that winston out here has had the inspiration / motivation / opportunity to consider / try out / explore but hey. what are we here for

just remembered that post like "uhh i just saw a guy crying in the library & then his phone alarm went off & he stopped crying, opened his laptop & started typing / it's called time management" lmao like winston's not out here having the Most amazing time, he could have such Time Management experiences of like, letting it out some on purpose but then reining it right back in, and/or just like some spontaneous paroxysms of crying for a minute or two more unexpectedly in a "do you ever [experience a tiny inconvenience] & realize the thread by which you're hanging on is quite thin" way or otherwise, you know, oops experienced this frustration & now i'm crying over it, or idk, just feeling a bit more vulnerable for whatever reason & something has unexpectedly plucked some emotional string attached to another string attached to another & the resonance = i'm crying now ig. he can't be Thriving out here & i don't think he's all about having such a stranglehold on emotions that he's like oh tf i Never cry (aside from having sex, in a good way)

although speaking of like, emotional repression, maybe he's out here just "good at" compartmentalizing some experiences lol in that "well anyways, back to work" way & stuff like, sure he knew he was risking it in 4x11 but it also did not seem to affect his dynamic with mafee at all lmao like wow.....

think that him not really having anything on his work desk is a choice / preference but also am not sure that that really applies to anything else lmao. what if he had a little plant. that'd be funny

oh yeah and the idea that winston might literally have like prophetic dreams & they're just kind of a nuisance to him but sometimes they can be plot devices in fics (that don't exist) about him kissing people

well i'm just calling it a night there lol but like, it always feels Lacking writing out hc's like, plenty of ideas but also hardly any, and yet the fact that other individual ideas are so Vague / casual that it wouldn't be like "oh i gotta share this via post or manifesting it some other way" so then it feels like, oh no, if i don't list absolutely Everything on something that's specifically a list of hc's, i can never talk about whatever gets left out......and just that like, i ought to have a bunch of really specific, concrete, unique Factoids about winston here to be of any interest but hey lmao. that hypothetical set of concepts is never gonna happen, & the Ultimate Comprehensive List Of Everything I've Ever Pondered Re: Winston is also going to be difficult lmfao (not as though that's what you've asked in the first place) but you know, we took a swing at things here & covered some ground & the thinking about & talking about winston never ends, & this isn't really a post meant to have broad appeal / if you're not already having fun reading vague musings about the quant then i'm sorry you're reading this after having read all that and gone "wow, i'm disappointed" lmao but hey, weird choices made to bring you to this point......also god knows plenty of hcs are more filed away under specific like [Tayston], [Benston], [Riawin] sort of things (lol, [Mafon]) b/c on the one hand, i find it easier to kind of think in Scenarios and the details particular to the "scenes" therein, but i am also not good at thinking of those scenarios! out here operating on vibes, he's autistic and wants to kiss taylor (also now rian but that's kinda right in canon, not just my head) and that's really the crucial info here

#winston billions #nothingunrealistic #posting these things at 7am lol just had to give this a shot all at once really #there was never going to be a concise & comprehensive post here so just gotta go for it #certainly vs trying to think up that beautiful engaging collection of concrete hc's & thus never writing Anything lol #and anyways it's also like; this is a niche post for an even nicher audience so #quantnoisseur is about having fun and being yourself. for me #thanks again for returning the favor!! do love the opportunity here #again hope i don't like recall three dozen obvious things i should've included once i post this but

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sparkly-angell · 6 years

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Stuckony Fic Rec because why not

*= series

ATTENTION! LOST ARM (If found please contact:) by Fakesheep-luna Teen, 8k Bucky doesn't understand why everyone is so worked up. He just went out for a few drinks, made some new friends and passed out in a dumpster. No big deal! "No big deal??" Steve squeaks, throwing his hands up in the air "You lost your arm! And you don't even remember how!" "Well, at least it wasn't the good one."

Guys!! This fic is comedy approved! its really good, made me laugh a lot, and the plot? amazing. Go read!

Break In by Tenspencerriedplease 7k Scott Lang, at least, understood why Tony hated this stupid job so damn much. He had a Masters degree in engineering but Tony was working on a PhD. Unfortunately for him even with his previous experience and schooling- good schooling- he was stuck working in a knockoff version of McDonald’s meets Subway. At least he works there until he meets Steve and Bucky.

askfjnsfdjsn aaaaaaaa I love gang AU and this one is Great. Highly recomend!

Brooklyn Boys - Bakey Au* by Quicksylver28 Teen/Mature 27k Tony is a bachelor college professor who walks into Steve and Bucky's Bakery/ Cafe. Awkward Flirting ensues.... and fluff, we wont forget the fluff.

ITS SO SWEET! Pun intended. Gosh, I wish I could eat all those baked goods. Sounds delicious. Anyways, the fic is sweet. Peter is a good friend.

Bruises and Drunken Heart Tattoos by Akira_of_the_twilight Teen, 6k An older man in his thirties was standing over Bucky with a bottle of aspirin in one hand, and the fingers of his other hand still gripping the rim of the cup he’d set down on the nightstand. Amber eyes blinked at Bucky in mild surprise. The man’s lips curved into a teasing smirk. “I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

I wanna hug Tony so hard over the course of this fic. It’s cute the way they fall in love. And it’s also funny.

Canvas, Ink & Paint* by Ficlicious Teen, 11k Bucky's got one goal: to rescue a captured SHIELD agent and get out before the guards realize he's not one of them. Unfortunately, apparently he's also got soulmates, and when their messages and sketches start appearing on his skin, his mission becomes a complicated mess of trying not to get caught covered in their ink.

!!!!!! I love soulmate aus and this fic is one of my favorites!! Poor Bucky, tho, he was just trying to do his work. Go read!!

Carrier by Just_another_tinker Explicit, 49k Steve and Bucky gift Tony with their jacket that survived from the 1940's. Turns out that wasn't the only thing that survived.

YALL. SO. MUCH. ANGST. and with a happy ending? someone said Pining? PERFECTION. I love the group dimensions in this fic.

Comic Books and Kings by Ashes0909 Explicit, 10k Tony Stark read Captain America comics and everyone knew it, but it was only ever about Bucky Barnes.

Freacking great! Tony having a crush on Bucky before his crush on Steve? Godsent.

Coffee Love* by Syriala Good, 8k Tony thought his best day was when Steve walked into the coffee shop he was working in. That was until Bucky came in a few days later.

The fluff!! The flirting!! Their kind of pining! *heart eyes*

Cried For Love (Can’t Stand It) by Potrix Explicit, 7k Bucky braces his hands on his hips, and tilts his head to the side, expression caught somewhere between anxious, confused, and nervous. “Well, shit.” “Yeah,” Steve agrees, worrying at his bottom lip, and rubbing at the back of his neck. “That can’t be good.”

Steve and Bucky become spirits and Tony blames himself (which he shouldn’t but thats Tony for you). I love this fic a loooot! (and i wanna hug tony a loooot too)

Difficult Conversations by Yumekiumono Mature, 34k HYDRA had brainwashed their Asset into silence, and then muzzled him to boot. It's not that surprising that Bucky no longer considers talking to be one of his strong suits. So why does he keep having to have difficult conversations? Or, the road to loving Tony Stark is never an easy one.

!!! Man! Tony/Bucky is strong in this fic, but also Steve is there and he is cute. Ive read some WinterIron fics with a similar plot, but the fact that this is Stuckony makes it 100% better.

Don’t Say It by Bibliomaniac Teen, 35k Tony Stark is autistic and nonverbal. Which is fine, obviously, except for it means that Steve and Bucky don't have his words, and it only takes him a few minutes to decide they don't need to know he has theirs. That's also totally and definitely fine, until he goes and falls in love with them.

So. Fuckin. Good! Soulmate au. Its a must read fanfic. For real. The pining and the angst. Gosh, Tony is the best fuckin person. He doesn’t deserve all this pain.

Eagles by Spqr Teen, 6k Natasha presses her hand over her heart, and – Tony has heard rumors, that her skin is blank, or that she killed her other half, but he doesn’t believe them. “They deserve to know, don’t you think?” “They’ve been together for ninety years, Nat,” he says. “They’re practically married. There’s no room for me.”

Gosh!! Another soulmate au. Me addicted in them? yes. This one hurts more. I think i really cried while reading it. But has a happy ending so its worth it!

From Winter’s Cold by 27dragons Explicit, 64 Thanks to one of Thor's crazy stalkers, Tony finds himself stranded in the past. If he significantly changes the course of history, he might never get home again. The choice, when it appears, turns out to be not nearly as difficult as he might have expected.

I simply love this fic. One of my personal favorites! Tony is taken back to 1945 and he finds no one other than.... Bucky. Go read!

Liebestraum No.3 in A Flat by Daecyan_Shikoba Teen, 10k I humbly request to the pianist: Liebestraum No.3 in A flat

Im actually just doing this rec because of this fic. sfdjnsdkjfsn i love it SO much. Pianist Tony has a crush on his neighbours and has anonymous requests to play the piano. Its great. This fic is so relaxing to read.

Long Distance by Notevenclosetostraight Explicit, 44k At the end of a bad day, Tony gets drunk and texts Rhodey all his woes. Except he typed the wrong number, and has been texting someone named Steve– who is blond, 28, teaches art and somehow charmed by Tonys drunk rambles.

Go read!!!!!!!! Its cute, full of sexy times and fluff.

Hands by ezazahaz Teen, 1k He pushed harder, feeling the suit start to crack under his metal hand, the arc reactor giving way. Just a bit more force, and it might push through the grafted skin and false sternum that had replaced the device that had once been a part of the man. This time, instead of saving the man's heart, it would crush it, and he could never hurt Bucky again, never hurt Steve again. Bucky has a nightmare.

I know this one is smoll. But! it’s full of emotion and hurt/comfort. It’s cute. Mostly Bucky/Tony

Hollowness by amobisan Explicit, 63k It feels like a hollowness, when Tony first realizes. First sees. And the first thought, the first thought his useless, traitorous, genius brain can come up with was "At least this time when he leaves, it wasn't your fault."

So. Many. Feels. Tony is so selfless and sad it’s painful. But there’s also so much fluff!!! And a Lot of sexy times.

How Good You’ve Got It by Orphan Account Mature, 2k Tony was only trying to work on deciphering Loki's power signature, which admittedly what Steve would call 'poking an angry brown bear with a pointy stick'. But if he could just- Shit. It wasn't supposed to do that.

Goddamn. One of my favorite fics!! I’ve already reread this like, three times. It’s small, I know, but the plot? Incredible.

Me through Him to You* by sahiya Teen/Explicit, 71k “You’re sick, you need someone to look after you. This mission could take a couple of days, and I want you in one piece when I get home.” Tony sighed. “Why do you care?” Steve’s mouth twisted unhappily. “I hope that’s the fever talking.” He stepped closer. “When I get home,” he said, so quietly that Tony didn’t think even the nosiest of their nosy friends could hear it, “we’re going to talk, all right? Until then, please let Bucky look after you. Consider it me looking after you, through him.”

First fic: sick fic, sick fic, sick fic!! Fluff!!! Love! Second fic: all. the. angst. you never knew you needed, with ahappy ending, tho.

Not Like That At All by Catchclaw Explicit, 8k One last gig. That’s what Steve tells himself this'll be.

Hilarious! I s w e a r it’s so funny. I mean- theres a lot of smut that happens but the end? comical. And sweet. Go read!

One Date Wonder by Arukou Explicit, 20k Every week, the same guy comes into Steve and Bucky's diner and every week, he's got a new date on his arm. Guy just can't seem to catch a break, and after a particularly bad date, Steve and Bucky start taking matters into their own hands to help him out.

Sweet, cute, fluffy! Poor Tony I want to hug him :’( Amazing Diner!Au, a must read.

Pretend You Don’t Know Me! by Aknightofagoodking Teen, 16k Peter forgets that his class is taking a field trip to Stark Tower. Tomorrow. ["So you want us to pretend we don't know you that well?" Mister Stark asks, looking somewhat unhappy. "Yes! Exactly! Pretend I'm actually just an intern. Can you do that for me, please?"]

Ok, so this focus more on Peter. But Stuckony as Peter’s dad? Isn’t that just the best thing in the world?

Scientific Heresy by Antigrav_vector Mature, 34k In the process of running the particle accelerator in his basement and fixing the arc reactor, Tony finds himself flung into the past where he has to take on a fight not his own if he wants to get home to stop Vanko. At least he had a chance to replace the old rector that had been killing him with the new one before everything went sideways... But now he has no choice but to face off with family, friends, and old heroes, and none of that sounds remotely appealing. Well, okay, getting to meet them all during their glory days kinda does.

AAAA Ok, I love time travel stories, so i might be biased a little, but this is the best!! There’s a lot of action scenes which are great and engaging. It’s a must read.

That Damn Flight Suit by Orphan Account Explicit, 2k James and Steve make a very interesting discovery about what really is under the Iron Man suit. Cue awkward boners, oblivious Tony, and slightly possessive super-soldiers who really don't want to share his...assets... with the world.

I mean- It’s smut.

The Sex Shop Around the Corner by sadieb798 Mature, 16k Tony really hates his job. When he tries to figure out what he wants to do next, Tony decides that instead of making weapons for war, he should make things for pleasure. So he decides he's going to open his own sex shop.

cmon, tell me this isn’t the best au out there. skdjfsdkfsn but for real tho, the fic is full of fluff, some pining and kind of a mis communication? perfect.

The Shirt by Sailorchibi Explicit, 3k How an impulsive decision that Tony made at sixteen and an equally impulsive decision that Tony made at forty-three combined to have the best outcome ever.

Smut. Again. But its damn good as well.

The Stories We Write by Notevenclosetostraight Mature, 33k A question at an interview leads to Steve and Bucky discovering fan fiction, and after piles of coffeeshop au's and fake dating tropes (and screaming over ABO fics) they find an author that writes some of the best fics they've ever read-- reader inserts starring a dark haired, dark eyed male reader as their shared love interest.

This fic is so freacking amazing!! Steve and Bucky are such nerds. Tony is mostly unaware until--

Thats it!!! Hope you enjoy reading them all :) If you want more, you know where to find me ;)

#stuckony #stony #stcucky #winteriron #fic recommendation #fic rec #fanfiction #stuckony fic #mine #marvel #mcu #marvel fic #long post #ugh i wanted to tag all the authors tumblrs but some dont have and some tumblr didnt let me tag ugh

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emily-420 · 5 years

Text

try to hold the rising floods that fill my skin

jjba | jotakak | 5.6k | complete

It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of what might happen if he suggested it, but more that he was having a bit of trouble finding a way to word it that couldn’t be misconstrued as an insult.

One could likely suggest that this was Kakyoin’s own fault for phrasing near everything he said in way that covertly concealed an insult about as covertly as a thirteen-year-old shoplifting a candy bar for the first time, but he would no doubt undergo a spontaneous bout of deafness. read on ao3

Kakyoin suggested the idea about ten months after they’d gotten home from Egypt. To begin with, they had been sat with varying degrees of mounting frustration at the dining table at Jotaro’s place studying for their Japanese literature exam, until Jotaro threw down his pen and declared, “I’ve had enough of this.”

“Funny,” Kakyoin said, though his face held no trace of amusement whatsoever, “I could have sworn you’d had enough after the first three minutes.” Jotaro just sort of grunted at him, and though it was just a grunt, Jotaro had enough variations on the grunt in his repertoire to clearly convey that this was an accurate assessment. “Want to go for a walk?” Kakyoin asked, because Jotaro apparently had so much muscle that if he didn’t move around at every half-hour interval he was at risk of some sort of muscle-based internal crisis. Kakyoin didn’t know. He didn’t understand muscles.

They got up to go wander around the neighbourhood and promised to be back in time for dinner. Kakyoin had not been aware that he was staying for dinner, but it beat eating with his own parents, so he was not complaining.

“I hate this literature shit,” Jotaro grumbled as they started out on the street. “I’m fine with Japanese on its own because there’s rules and there’s a right answer. But literature is bullshit.”

“All of it?” Kakyoin asked sarcastically. “The entirety of all literature that has ever been written ever?”

“Shut up,” Jotaro muttered, because he didn’t know how to communicate. “You know what I mean. The fact that you can be tested on interpreting a subjective medium. And that there’s a ‘right answer’. That’s stupid.”

“Well, I know where you’re coming from. To me it’s less the interpretation of literature than interpreting what answers they want you to write during the test. I mean, the only critical framework we’ve been given is ‘what will get you marks on the exam’, so it’s not as if we’re really scrutinising anything.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jotaro mumbled. “I forget you like that shit. You know. Thinking about stuff.”

“Yes, I do indeed love to think about stuff. I do it all the time. You could say, in fact, that I am always thinking about stuff, constantly,” Kakyoin said, because, while he may have had a better grip on communication than Jotaro, he had less of a grip on how to have friends.

“I am going to kill you one day,” Jotaro said, kicking a rock, and Kakyoin didn’t believe him for even a second, which was how he had yet to cease being such a ginormous bastard.

Jotaro kept kicking the rock. Kakyoin took a couple turns when it ended up closer to him. It was late afternoon, not quite sunset, and the neighbourhood was comparatively quiet, muffled sounds of life in the air as if a solid barrier surrounded the two of them on the carless street. The two weirdos.

Life had gone back to normal alarmingly quickly after they’d recovered enough from their injuries to leave Egypt. Polnareff and Abdul stayed in Cairo, and Iggy went with the Speedwagon Foundation to get a prosthetic foot so he could go back to stealing people’s hotdogs in New York to his fullest capacity. Probably he would have been fine without a prosthetic - many dogs were - but he had been putting on such a show of suffering that Joseph got annoyed enough to give in and foot (ha) the bill. Apparently, Joseph and Suzie had stayed at the Kujo’s for a whole month to make sure their daughter was okay, being ‘really fucking suffocating’ (Jotaro’s words) in their displays of affection. Kakyoin wouldn’t know because he’d spent that month trying not to move too much so as not to agitate the massive bruising that still remained on what little abdominal muscle he was in possession of.

Probably he ought to be grateful that Dio had been arrogant enough to assume that a solid punch to the stomach with his (hi)jacked muscles and a good water tower to the back would be enough to do him in, but mostly he had just been sort of hibernating and playing video games and trying not to think about the pain. At least he still had all of his appendages, anyway. And with all his bountiful parts, Kakyoin went right back to school as soon as he was up and about, and it wasn’t even entirely because his parents didn’t quite understand that an evil immortal vampire had done a real number on his insides and wanted him to get over it and back to studying for exams. No, he was still on his Conquering His Many Psychological Issues kick, and was trying to prove that he was like… tough, or something. It made sense at the time, in any case.

He hadn’t quite forgotten that he went to the same school as Jotaro, but it was a close thing, given that they’d had all of one day of school together before leaving the country, and also that Kakyoin was brainwashed for all of it. As it happened, in that one day of school, in the brief window between arriving at the institution and trying to do some murders in the nurse’s office, Kakyoin had chosen the desk beside Jotaro’s at the back of the room. At least, he can only assume he did given his things were there, and it would have only been so he could stare at Jotaro and think about all the murder he was going to do on him for the good Lord Dio while their teacher talked about calculus, or something equally non-murder related.

Anyway, as they happened to be in the same class, and happened to sit next to each other, and happened to have gone on the same journey across the planet where they had to try very hard not to die all the time constantly, he and Jotaro were… friends, he supposed. He supposed because Kakyoin had never had a friend before, but he had seen what they were like -- boisterous, considerate. Sociable, definitely. He couldn’t say that they were friends the way other people were friends, but then, it wasn’t as if they weren’t, either.

They ate lunch together. A few days a week, they’d either study at Jotaro’s place or play games at Kakyoin’s. One time, out the front of a convenience store, Kakyoin tried one of Jotaro’s cigarettes and decided immediately, amidst a lot of coughing, that he did not like it at all thank you, and Jotaro shrugged, said ‘you get used to it,’ and shoved the cigarette Kakyoin definitely would not finish in his mouth beside the one he was already smoking. He’d looked stupid, and Kakyoin told him as much more than once, but all he had to say for himself was ‘I’m not gonna waste it.’

So, in a lot of ways, their friendship could be seen as fairly normal, if you only looked at about half of it. For Kakyoin, at that point, after travelling with him, it just felt normal to be around Jotaro, but not in quite the same way as the others. With Abdul and Joseph, there was a barrier of respect and formality that had a tendency to inhibit real closeness. Iggy was, in addition to being a vicious little bastard, a dog, so you’ll have to forgive Kakyoin for not being overly close to him. And then there was Polnareff. Polnareff was in general incredibly bright, accepting, and fun to be around no matter who you were, but this tendency of his was especially meaningful to the two teens. Kakyoin couldn’t speak entirely for Jotaro, but he knew that for himself, the way Polnareff had delighted in his quirks and was entertained by his info-dumping was touching, in stark contrast to the way people usually slinked away from him at the first sign that he was Not Normal.

So, Polnareff had been sort of a goofy older brother to him, yes. But it was different to the sheer amount of sameness between him and Jotaro. Sure, they had different interests and personalities, but they were the same age, both autistic, both stand users. There was a similar kind of disinterest in everyone else in the world who couldn’t begin to understand them that made it remarkably easy for them to get along, to exist quietly next to each other, satisfied to have found someone who gets them so well.

This can sound very deep and emotional, but the surface-level result of it all, when thrust back into an everyday environment, was that they often spent long periods saying nothing at all to each other. This could, and in fact had, given the amount of concern for his imminent safety some of Kakyoin’s classmates had hilariously been showing, make it seem as if they didn’t like each other at all. Oftentimes Jotaro was content to say nothing and stare out the window, and Kakyoin, in addition to usually having his Gameboy somewhere on his person, was oftentimes content to make sarcastic little remarks to himself, or whoever might care to listen.

It was upon reflecting on this comfortable nature of their relationship that Kakyoin had spawned The Idea, and he had been mulling it over for a good few weeks. He felt like it was a good Idea, but there was every chance that Jotaro would think he’d lost the plot entirely, which would be truly a shame given that he was really Kakyoin’s only friend who lived in the country, unless you counted his Gameboy, which he did. That said, it wasn’t so much that he was afraid of what might happen if he suggested it - he was Jotaro’s only friend too, after all - but more that he was having a bit of trouble finding a way to word it that couldn’t be misconstrued as an insult.

To return to what we’ll tenuously refer to as the present, they had reached a waterway at the edge of the neighbourhood. The sun was setting by then, the light low and slanted over the creek, and the shadows were deepening. They stopped by the water, a few meters along from a footbridge that was also heavily used by cyclists and students. Jotaro went to school that way; he had once gone to stop a younger kid from being bullied for their cash only for the dude in question to take one glance over his shoulder, take in Jotaro’s physical mass, and immediately take off in the other direction. ‘It was like Hol Horse all over again,’ Jotaro had told him, clearly highly amused by the whole escapade.

“Sorry my mum assumed you’d stay for dinner again,” Jotaro said into the quiet.

“Not at all. I like her cooking. Anyway, it’s Saturday, so it’s not like my parents will be waiting for me,” Kakyoin said. His parents were both office workers, and while it was true that they both usually got dinner and drinks with their coworkers on the last workday of the week, it was also true that they weren’t exactly home early for the rest of the week, either. Between them not being home and Kakyoin frequenting the Kujo’s place, they had dinner together as a family about once a week, if that.

Jotaro knew this - he’d mentioned it previously - but didn’t comment on it. “Besides,” Kakyoin continued, “it’s nice to eat with people who I can actually talk to.”

He saw Jotaro tug on the brim of his hat out of the corner of his eye. “...For what it’s worth,” he started, and then paused for a few seconds. Kakyoin glanced at him - he had a discomforted twist to his mouth. “...I think she’s just. Happy. That I have a friend.”

“Ah.” Kakyoin gave Jotaro a single light pat to the back of his shoulder. “Me too.”

Jotaro gave him a very unimpressed look. “Yeah, thanks, shithead.”

“I meant that I was happy that I had a friend,” Kakyoin scoffed. And added, after consideration, “Shithead.”

“Whatever,” Jotaro said, but he was smiling as much as he ever smiled, which was to say, barely, and mostly emotionally. He was smiling in his heart, and he knew that, and Kakyoin knew that, and that was all that mattered.

“Did you shake out all your stupid muscles enough yet?” Kakyoin asked, gone directly back to being sarcastic.

“Stretch out, you mean.”

Kakyoin flipped a dismissive hand. “Whatever you do with them.”

“Yeah, I feel better.” Jotaro turned away from the water to head back the way they came; Kakyoin followed alongside him. “It’s nice to get out.”

“If you say so,” Kakyoin said, because he was a gamer, and his stand didn’t like enclosed spaces for no reason.

“Speaking of shitheads,” Jotaro said, “I talked to Polnareff last night.”

“He called you?”

“Yeah. I forgot to mention it ‘cause after that we had to see my dad off at the airport. But anyway, he says his Arabic is getting really good.”

“He says.”

Jotaro smirked. “Yeah. Probably he learned how to say ‘you’re welcome’.” Polnareff, in all his posturing about French being the most superior and beautiful language of them all, had never had the strongest English out of them. He was more natural than Kakyoin, who had a very textbook-based understanding and found it hard to follow along at first, but it was clear enough to him once he got used to the speed of conversational English that this was more due to the closeness of the two languages than any study on Polnareff’s part. If he knew any more of the language than Jotaro, who was probably more fluent given his test scores than the handful of words he uttered at any one time let on, Kakyoin would be surprised.

“He also said he moved in with Abdul. Like, officially.” Polnareff had been staying with Abdul while he tried to figure out what exactly his skillset was and what kind of work he could do. He didn’t have the chance to really figure it out before, having his early adulthood stolen by his sister’s murder and involvement with Dio, but he had said to them, when they were saying their goodbyes and while studiously not looking at his boyfriend, ‘All I know right now is that I love him. That’s all I have left.’

“He’s doing investigative work now. Apparently he didn’t want to make it permanent until they were equals.”

For a second Kakyoin thought that was incredibly stupid, but then he considered his own pride, and thought maybe it wasn’t that unfathomable at all, really. “I guess that makes sense. I do feel bad for Abdul-san, though. May God rest his soul.”

There was a shared moment there, as they walked down a residential street that looked like any other, where they silently contemplated the precise pitch of Polnareff’s snoring, and also the smell of his feet after being in the desert all day.

“...It’s nice, though,” Jotaro said after a minute, hands in his pockets. “That they’re happy. And they have something.”

Exactly, Kakyoin thought loudly, and then, well, I guess I have to ask sometime. “Speaking of,” he said lightly, “I had been kind of thinking, lately.” Jotaro grunted to show he was listening. “Well, you know. I’ve never been close to anyone the way I am with everyone we fought with, and especially you.” He took a moment to consider his words, what he really wanted to say, and also how not to accidentally take a sledgehammer to Jotaro’s pride, however unsuccessful such a thing may be.

“Essentially… I thought I would never have any fulfilling relationships if no one could see my Stand, and I still don’t think I could be satisfied, even as friends, if someone didn’t understand that about me. And given that, and me being the way I am,” --this was a polite way of referencing his autism, but it was also mostly about the way he read a lot of encyclopedias as a kid and had a habit of spouting facts at random, and also his long and storied history of doing unspeakable things to cherries with his mouth-- “...I just think the odds of me meeting someone who sees all that, and understands it, and still wants to be around me, it’s…”

“It’s not impossible,” Jotaro said, frowning, but then he was usually frowning, so this may not have been indicative of anything.

“No,” Kakyoin said, looking quite seriously at him, “it’s not, because it’s already happened.”

Jotaro blinked twice at him, and without breaking his stride pointed questioningly at himself.

“Yeah,” Kakyoin said. “I was just thinking. We spend a lot of time together. I like being around you. I don’t mind meeting new people, but it always feels like there’s a huge gap between us so I never feel really connected to anyone, and I feel like you’re the same. And we’re both Stand users so we don’t have to worry about putting each other in danger.”

“What are you saying?” Jotaro was still frowning, but somehow this seemed like more of curious frown than it had previously. Kakyoin briefly considered the possibilities of Jotaro having a discreet second Stand which surreptitiously rearranged his eyebrow hairs when no one was looking. Born from Jotaro’s inability to show emotion with his own facial muscles, no doubt.

“Wouldn’t it be easy if we dated each other?” Kakyoin asked directly. “Instead of struggling to find someone else to understand us?”

Jotaro blinked at him some more. “Wait. Are you confessing to me?”

“Oh, goodness, no,” Kakyoin said with a laugh.

“Gee, thanks,” Jotaro grumbled. “...I mean. It’s not like you have to date someone.”

“No, I know. I just think that I would like to share my life with someone.” He made a thoughtful sort of face, said, “And the intimacy would be nice, too.” Jotaro shot him a look of unbridled terror and Kakyoin waved his hands immediately, saying, “Not like that, I just meant, you know, everyday stuff--”

“Oh thank god. I don’t--”

“Yeah.”

“You remember,” Jotaro said, this time with a contemplative twist to his frown, “how I said I thought I might be gay?”

“Of course.” Kakyoin had been out as gay to Jotaro, and the others, from practically the very beginning, because his mouth was figuratively as well as physically big, and his openness about the subject seemed to have made Jotaro feel a little more comfortable talking about it, too.

“That was probably wrong.” Before Kakyoin could feel any kind of reaction to this in the wake of what he had just proposed, Jotaro continued, maintaining all the while a pointed frown at the bitumen in front of him as they walked. “I think it’s more like, I just don’t like people very often. Girls or guys. Our classmates for example. They aren’t my friends so why would I feel anything for them. If that makes sense.”

“I think it does. It just means you don’t trouble yourself with trivial crushes based solely on appearances. I’m a lot like that, too. Well, unless you count that guy in middle school, but to be fair, I was in middle school, so I wouldn’t.”

“...I like you, though,” Jotaro said thoughtfully, looking over at him. They were only about two minutes from the Kujo house, and a cool autumn breeze played with the curls under his hat as he walked. “It’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

“Yeah?”

“I guess, sure. Let’s try it. See what happens.”

“Cool,” Kakyoin agreed. He made no move to take Jotaro’s hand, link their arms, or be closer to him in any way, but he did say, flipping a hand and not altering his tone to go along with the more theatrical turn he took, “So, oh dear boyfriend of mine, because I am so sweet and thoughtful, I have brought with me on my person my Tetris cartridge, purely for your entertainment.”

“Hell yes,” Jotaro said expressionlessly. “Did you beat my high score yet?”

“Does it matter?” Kakyoin asked, steadfastly not looking at him, because of course he hadn’t. Tetris, as it happened, was tragically the one game that Jotaro liked, and he also happened to be superhumanly good at it. His high score was nearly double Kakyoin’s. Kakyoin was never going to live that down, probably, but he was also never going to let Jotaro forget that he had bet his mortal soul on a game he had never played once in his life, on two separate occasions, so probably they were even. “I’ve been mostly playing Super Mario Land, anyway.”

Jotaro grunted, said, “That game’s annoying.”

“You’re annoying, you heathen. You uncultured swine. I do you the charitable favour of letting you play my games and this is what you say to me. I cannot believe you’ve said this,” Kakyoin bitched, entirely straight-faced. They had had this conversation any number of times now and he was having fun making his reactions to the claim progressively more outlandish and ridiculously phrased. Jotaro just snickered, and they carried on in this vein until they got back.

They somewhat reluctantly studied for about another hour when they returned, and then Holly happily announced that dinner was ready, so they cleared their books, worksheets, and other assorted paraphernalia away and ate. It felt a little weird to talk to Holly when her son had just agreed to date him, even if it was only as a kind of odd experiment, but only a little, given that they hadn’t, like, done anything to solidify their kind-of-relationship yet.

Holly said that they’d surely ace their exam with all the studying they had done, and Jotaro just sort of lowered his head to eat closer to his food, as if he was praying. Kakyoin knocked his socked foot against Jotaro’s bare ankle under the table; he glanced up at him, and when Kakyoin just gave him a deadpan look at two thumbs up, Jotaro gave him an unimpressed glare and the finger. Or, more accurately, Star Platinum gave him the finger, because he was a teenager and hated being scolded.

This didn’t really work out in his favour though, given that Holly roused, “Kujo Jotaro, I saw that!!” and spent a decent five minutes chasing him about the house with a tea towel and vines wiggling threateningly in his direction. Kakyoin ate quietly by himself, wondering why, if Jotaro’s legs were about twice as long as everyone else on the planet’s, and also he could stop time, he would choose to put the couch in between him and his mother instead. Not that getting whacked with a tea towel was really something worth running away from in the first place. He wondered if it was an American thing -- which it could well have been, given that everything Kakyoin knew about Americans was based entirely on Joseph Joestar’s personality -- and then had a great time by himself entertaining the notion that this was all a play they were putting on for his benefit. Dinner and a show.

It was nice, though. Family that liked and was comfortable enough with each other to goof around like that was something he never had. Though he sometimes felt like something of an intruder on the household, being folded into the mix of it, even just as an observer… it was nice. It made him feel very warm in the general chest area, and he didn’t know what to do with that, with knowing that these people felt more like his family than the people who brought him into the world.

Later, after dinner, he and Jotaro were hanging out in Jotaro’s room, splayed mostly across Jotaro’s futon. Kakyoin would probably end up spending the night; it happened fairly often, enough that his parents had stopped worrying if he didn’t come home. Plenty of people would undoubtedly give anything for that kind of freedom, but as it was, he was so used to them not really understanding or paying enough attention to him that all he could feel was a kind of cold, stale resentment that was as firmly lodged in his heart as his own self-loathing.

He could forget about that for the time being though. Jotaro was laying on his back playing Tetris on Kakyoin’s Gameboy, one knee in the air, and Kakyoin was cross-legged beside him reading a horror novel he’d taken out from the library. They were largely still in their uniforms, though Kakyoin had taken off his jacket and was only wearing the uniform short-sleeved white button-down shirt that Jotaro had mysteriously never acquired. It was quiet in the room for a good while, just the sounds of the night, Jotaro pressing at the plastic buttons, and Kakyoin turning the thin pages of his book.

One might wonder what, exactly, the point was of ‘hanging out’ with someone if you were only going to do something you could well do without them, but the answer was easy and simple. It was the presence of another person in the room, another sound of life, a solid reassurance. It was, really, just like having a cat, but we can keep that between ourselves for now.

After a time, Jotaro dropped his hand and the Gameboy in it down on the futon and let out a sigh. Kakyoin made a noise of agreement, even though he hadn’t said anything, because that was the kind of thing they did, and also treating any slight trace of expression that came from Jotaro equally was the most efficient way to go about actually communicating with him.

“Hey,” Jotaro said after a minute.

“Yeah,” Kakyoin said, not looking up from his book. Jotaro kept silent in a way that meant he was waiting for Kakyoin to look at him, so he said, “Wait a moment,” and finished the paragraph he was reading before setting his book down and turning his attention to his friend. Or, well, boyfriend. He wasn’t used to it yet.

“Was just kinda thinking,” Jotaro said shortly, looking at his ceiling. “Are you even, like… attracted to me?”

Kakyoin batted his eyelashes at him insincerely. “You want me to tell you you’re pretty?”

There was a second where Jotaro just looked up at him, and then, though Kakyoin was fairly sure he hadn’t stopped time, he had no warning before Jotaro was on top of him and attempting to smother him with his pillow. He wasn’t serious about it, obviously, or Kakyoin wouldn’t have been able to pry him away with Hierophant Green, cackling and pressing a foot into Jotaro’s stomach.

“Learn to take a joke, god,” Kakyoin said, still on his back, half off the futon. Jotaro just grunted and settled beside him, one leg folded in front of him, the other propping up his elbow. Kakyoin looked up at him consideringly, said, “I mean. You’re attractive, yeah, but that’s like, more of a statement of fact than my opinion or anything. I see you as my friend first.”

“Hm.” If Kakyoin didn’t know better, he’d said Jotaro looked unmoved, but as it was, he did, and he could tell that he was a little embarrassed by that.

Kakyoin propped himself up on his elbows. “Honestly, I was more attracted to you when we first met. You’re just kinda this big good-looking dork I know, now.” He shrugged, as best he could.

Jotaro wouldn’t look at him. “What do you mean,” he said, in that toneless way of his that could make him sound more demanding but really just meant he was having trouble processing things.

“Are you kidding me? I didn’t really notice when I was fighting you, because of the whole being brainwashed situation, but when I woke up here, you were leaning over me, you had my face in your hands, all focussed on me--”

Jotaro had his head in his hands at this point. “Stop,” he said desperately, which was probably a mistake, given that Kakyoin was an absolute shithead.

He grinned and poked Jotaro in the thigh. “I was like, jesus, who is this guy? Who’d I kill to deserve this? If you could only imagine the state of my little gay heart--” Jotaro made a noise like he could not physically bear to hear any more of this, and Kakyoin took pity on him. “Alright, sorry, but you did ask,” he said, flopping back down. “Anyway, then I saw you have a panic attack over having to kill a shark and you told me about different types of coral for an hour and I was like, oh no okay he’s just kind of a nerd.”

Peeking out at him from behind his fingers, Jotaro said, “Mm. And now you wanna go out with me.”

“I know for a fact I didn’t put it like that.”

Jotaro snorted, sat back against his hands. “I guess we should go on a date?”

Kakyoin made a face at the ceiling, which was definitely not fair considering this whole thing was his idea in the first place. “Yeah. Doesn’t feel real, huh?”

“I mean. It’s been two hours.”

Kakyoin just snorted, and Jotaro got up somewhat laboriously - it must have been such a curse, having so many muscles to carry with you all over the place, Kakyoin felt bad for him - and said, “I’m going out for a smoke.”

He had an ashtray on the desk in his room, and he took it out with him, other hand rifling in his pocket for his cigarettes. Holly knew he smoked, it wasn’t exactly easy to hide, but she also seemed to think there was nothing she could do to stop him, so instead she had a very firm Not In The House rule that Jotaro respected. The house being traditional, most rooms had shoji doors leading on to the engawa, and Jotaro’s room was no different. He slid them open now, and still laying on the floor, Kakyoin asked, “Mind if I come out?”

Jotaro barely paused, pulling a cigarette out of the pack with his lips, mumbling, “Do what you want,” which was about as much of an invitation as he ever gave.

Kakyoin didn’t get up immediately, his outrageously long limbs having made good friends with the floor. Honestly, he hadn’t really expected Jotaro to agree, and was at a bit of a loss as to what one did with their boyfriend. He supposed that their relationship had never really been normal, though, so he might as well do the whole dating thing however he saw fit. Sitting up, he grabbed his Gameboy and stepped quietly out to where Jotaro sat smoking at the edge of the engawa.

Sitting next to him, legs over the edge, Kakyoin asked, “Why’d you agree, anyway?” Looking at him out of the corner of his eye and crooking an eyebrow in amusement, Jotaro opened his mouth, but before he could make the terrible joke he was definitely about to make, Kakyoin said quickly, “Don’t you dare tell me you’re not sure.”

Jotaro snorted. “Spoilsport.” He sat quietly for a moment, looking thoughtfully out at the neat garden that was barely only scantly visible in the dark. “I guess, I thought about it and it seemed like dating you would be easy and comfortable. Seemed nice.”

That had been Kakyoin’s point, too, so he nodded. And then he pressed his shoulder against Jotaro’s and said, quite obnoxiously, “Aw, you mean it wasn’t just because you were captivated by my stunning good looks?”

“I,” Jotaro said, and then stopped, visibly struggling with something for a moment. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled deeply. He turned a little to look at Kakyoin more properly. “You know,” he said, “sometimes you’re too hard on yourself.”

Kakyoin blinked at him, feeling sort of vacant all of a sudden. “I literally just said I had stunning good looks.”

“You were joking, though,” Jotaro said evenly, and looked away from him again. “You know, you…” He made a face – or, well, more of a micro-expression, really – that suggested that whatever he was going to say next was going to be torn from the depths of his mind almost against his will, even though he was, unless Kakyoin was mistaken, very much in control of his own mouth. “You’re kind of charming in your own way.”

Kakyoin’s heart was beating in his chest. It usually was, and he knew this, but at that moment, he was particularly aware of it, for some reason. He looked out at the garden. “That just means I’m funny looking,” he muttered.

“S’not what I said,” Jotaro grumbled crankily. “I said it in a nice way because I meant it in a nice way.”

“Right,” Kakyoin said uselessly. He bumped their shoulders together again, and stayed there this time. “Thanks.”

Jotaro snorted, looked at him thoughtfully, and then, very slowly and awkwardly as if there was some sort of trap embedded on Kakyoin’s body that he wanted to avoid springing, maneuvered his arm over Kakyoin’s shoulders. Settling against him, Kakyoin shuffled a bit closer along the engawa.

“What’s that for?” It wasn’t as if they had never touched each other, but it wasn’t like Jotaro to be particularly touchy-feely.

He shrugged, putting his cigarette back in his mouth. “Thought I’d try it.”

“Right.” Kakyoin looked down at his hands. “Okay,” he said at a more normal volume than before, “I am definitely going to beat your high score.”

“Good fucking luck,” Jotaro said, and Kakyoin stuck a bony elbow into his ribs, and it was nice. Easy, and comfortable.

#jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #stardust crusaders #jotakak

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ganymedesclock · 6 years

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How do you think Zant and Ghirahim would interact? Likewise, how do you think Ganon would treat the two in a setting where we could explore such a relationship?

My particular read on Zant is he’s not wild about social interaction unless he’s already decided the person is okay; I interpret him as the specific flavor of autistic where he’s only really comfortable in a social situation by shadowing a particular person for comfort’s sake. In which case I think he’d have a lot of sideways interactions with other people, but, not a lot of super direct engagement.

Ghirahim superficially is much more polite, but, given his particular complex relationship with his master and his childhood (a friend of mine, @golvio draws a lot of comparisons between how they imagine Ghirahim’s treatment under Demise and the Pearls in Steven Universe) it’s just that- superficial. He wants to be well-mannered because he feels keeping up aristocratic airs is an imperative he has to justify avoiding, but unless something really catches his intellectual curiosity, he, scientifically speaking, tends to not give a shit.

So I feel like you could have Ghirahim and Zant cohabiting in the same area and just sort of operating with a mutual regard to not say anything to each other unless the other’s hair is on fire and someone else isn’t already intervening. They could absolutely take more interest in each other, but, they’d need to at least get shoved into some kind of buddy cop adventure story to shake the topic loose. Just leaving them around each other, they’d never get anywhere. They would politely ignore each other. You would ask Ghirahim what he thought of Zant and after asking you to clarify who you’re talking about, he would make an idle note of “So that’s what his name is.”

With regards to Ganon and Zant, I sort of like the vein that Hyrule Warriors took with it in the sense that Ganon seems to regard Zant as a protege and student- not something as warm as “like a son” but that’s because Ganon’s not exactly the type to hand out familial affection very easily if at all. I imagine him taking a sort of scholarly, educational angle; Zant is his apprentice. Even if the guy lives for centuries, he’s significantly younger than Ganon himself, so there would be a certain degree to which Ganon looks towards Zant as someone in need of guidance, rather than a peer and equal.

That’s not to say Zant doesn’t impress him, or ever surprise him; Ganon might have a certain compassion for the downtrodden but he doesn’t seem the type to have patience for slackers or the talentless in his inner circle. But there’s definitely a distance between them, that would be altogether reinforced by the overly-reverent pedestal Zant puts Ganon on, though I think as time goes by and they had more time to interact with each other, or even just Zant operating on his own for a time because Ganon hasn’t been resurrected yet, he’d become a little less starstruck by Ganon, for the better- creating an environment where they can actually talk to each other and Zant isn’t fountaining the glories of his god, because Ganon might be cocky but I think the last thing he’d want to be is someone’s deity.

That would also affect Ghirahim; not the mentorship, because Ghirahim is one person who can not only match Ganon in age but actually surpass him- though I think this would average to them seeing each other as peers because the gaps in Ghirahim’s resurrections are much larger and they’re both at a certain level of time abyss where what’s a century give or take, actually- but the thing where Ganon has no particular desire to be regarded as a god. Distant reverence is fine on paper- it certainly flatters his ego- but in practice it just means people project a lot of expectations and perceptions onto him and that would make him shift a little uneasily in his skin considering the whole situation he had as king of the Gerudo.

It also doesn’t help that the person Ghirahim would be reminded of looking at Ganon is Demise- there’s no way to ignore that Ghirahim would be comparing Ganon to Demise. And the thing about Demise is, they are, in brief, an abusive tyrant; Ghirahim is someone deeply marked by the fact that he was raised from the cradle to disregard his personhood and feelings for Demise’s benefit.

This is completely counter to how Ganon operates, and would be a wall he would inevitably run into hard, dealing with Ghirahim- Ganon’s nice and cozy with Zant as a protege because Zant has all of his hopes and desires right there on the surface. All Ganon has to do is play the genie in the bottle, feed those hopes, encourage them, and, when Zant becomes more of a favored student than a useful tool, he can still use them to prop Zant up. Zant wants to feel powerful, Zant wants to feel valued, heard, supported- Ganon knows exactly what words to cook up to feed a flagging spirit.

Ganon operates selfishly on a certain level, and, he also works best with others who are also operating selfishly- not necessarily maliciously, but, what do they want? They want something for themselves.

Ghirahim is a standout among many Zelda antagonists in that he really doesn’t want anything. His resurrection of Demise is because he sees it as his responsibility. If he attaches emotions to it, it’s that he’s pleased to feel like he belongs, like the world makes sense, like he’s filling his role, and then, slowly, that he’s actually a bit curious about this person who’s so good at thwarting him.

But that’s one selfish desire, and it’s clear Ghirahim writes it off as a petty and ridiculous thing. Him, wanting things for himself, even if it’s something as simple as having the pleasure of figuring out who the hell this twerp in his way is.

And I think Ghirahim’s sense of self-denial would logically be a lot harsher any context in which he’s interacting with Ganon- because Ghirahim would have to deal with the keen awareness that Demise threw him away. He is not alive now because of Demise’s grace, but as an oversight, in a world Demise may well be incapable of returning to, and the sense is that this is just fine to them; they don’t need him or want him back.

I can see Ghirahim falling into step behind Ganon if he’s at a particularly low point and just needs to feel like someone actually wants him to be here, whoever that is, but I also feel like Ganon would galvanize Ghirahim in interesting directions- because coming from someone who is inevitably going to superficially remind Ghirahim of Demise, Ganon’s entire stance is going to be “but you’re a person, you’re made of metal and you’re a sword, that’s great, I’m largely made of meat slime that grows eyes, physiological construction is completely irrelevant here, the point is, you think, you have opinions, and no matter how hard you’re trying to pretend you don’t, you want something.”

Ganon focuses on the idea that people want things. He himself is so driven by this you could argue that his less-corporeal forms are basically one big grudge spirit. While textually, Ganon’s dying words in Ocarina of Time and Demise’s curse intend to mirror each other, it’s worth noting how Ganon’s words are basically pure spite- while Demise’s curse is methodically, systematically worded, functionally aloof; it’s the patient explanation of an adult to someone they perceive as a none-to-bright child that no, actually, you haven’t won anything of meaning. You’ve inconvenienced them. And they will not forget that you did that.

So Ghirahim would inevitably initially see Ganon as an entity similar to Demise, and that perception would inevitably come utterly torn down around the edges because Ganon and Demise are such fundamentally different people.

Frankly, my perception of Ganon and Demise is their relationship is comparable to that between Hylia and Zelda- the first Zelda was bodily born out of Hylia, making her a sort of mortal-incarnated demigod, but, the more Zelda became aware of Hylia, the less she was able to stand Hylia and was repulsed by Hylia’s thought process and the way she viewed Link. That’s continued through all of her descendants; Breath of the Wild Zelda suffers a huge amount of misery trying to connect with Hylia only to be given a repeated cold shoulder, and even awakening her powers, it’s only to be a pawn in the face of Hylia’s scheme.

Hylia is, in short, Zelda’s sort-of removed divine mother, and, she’s also an incredibly cold, neglectful parent.

I think the same goes for Demise and Ganon- they in a sort of abstracted manner had a hand in Ganon’s origin, but, this isn’t a family that could so much as sit through a very uncomfortable holiday dinner. And this is relevant to Ghirahim, because Demise’s treatment of Ghirahim obviously aligns with a lot of Demise’s attitude as a creator and towards the world in general- an attitude they actually share with their sworn enemy, Hylia. (both Fi and Ghirahim are ultimately discarded once they’ve “served their purpose” in the eyes of their respective creators)

Ganon, conversely, is heavily drawn towards the suffering outcast, and, as I talked about in my long post about what Ganon’s healing power means about him, that draw isn’t “I can exploit this” nearly as much as it appears to be genuine compassion. A lot of his narratives and behavior suggest that he feels that way himself- that as someone who has spent much of his life marked as a pariah, he has a certain visceral empathy for the discarded.

More than Ganon would not want to treat Ghirahim the way that Demise did, he would be loath to tolerate someone who treats fully loyal servants like Demise does. If Ganon stabs someone in the back, it’s because he’s either sure they would do the same in a heartbeat or because from his perspective they’ve already put a dagger in him. He’s not the kind of person who gets rid of someone he knows would never betray him, or has no reason to believe they’d do so.

If anything, this makes me wonder if Ghirahim would initially find Zant revoltingly whiny and needy- he can’t imagine why Zant would utterly humiliate himself and Ganon both by drawing Ganon’s attention to his needs and wants, or even just openly expressing distress in front of Ganon.

And then after a while Ghirahim starts to feel a little weird watching them interact because the fact that Ganon actually responds to Zant and encourages him, or even just, irritably orders someone to see Zant to his bed after the latter’s magically overworked himself, would just sort of start to contextualize for Ghirahim the gaping void of affection or even basic care that he received in his own development.

#Legend of Zelda #Ghirahim #Zant #Ganon #readmore #sepublic

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nico-no-talk · 4 years

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Psychological Analysis #1.1

Hey (great start)

So, y’all must be wondering what the hell is this. Well, this is something that suddenly got into my head just today and it just turned midnight just now so it’s next day, so I shall rephrase that this idea came to me since yesterday and it’s something I’ve been wanting to do cause I kinda enjoy analyzing especially if it involves something I’m familiar with.

Just as a warning, I’m in no way a psychology major nor therapist or any kind of human being with a degree. I’m just a guy who enjoys the psychological genre thanks to a certain game that has pink blood. And these topics I’m going to be discussing here are topics I’m a bit familiar with cause I had to research these topics myself and two of which I’m very familiar with but only one of them I am officially diagnosed (according to my mom). This is also a spoiler zone! If you wanna read the manga yourself, go ahead and come back here with a funny story in your head! Without further ado, let’s get into this and start with what I am analyzing.

The characters I’m going to be analyzing are the 3 main characters of a manga that almost no one heard of: Dadadadan or Dame Dasa Daru Dansi. The story is about 3 boys who live in the same dorm room together and all have some form of issue with women: One is shy around girls, one straight up hates them and will start insulting them when his eyes lay on one, and the last one couldn’t care less about them unless they are 2-D. So we have a shy boy, a gynophobe, and a hardcore otaku. So, why on earth am I analyzing a slice-of-life manga about 3 guys with issues with women? Well, due to the fact that this manga (to me at least) is somewhat rich in the psychology of these boys. I’m going to break them down to who each of these boys are, what I might think their diagnosis is, their backgrounds/speculating backgrounds (one of which left somewhat vague the most), explain their relationship with each other, then conclude. I’ll also attempt to provide evidence as I go. Let’s start!

Mina Ayashiro

I’ll be starting with the easiest one then work my way down. Mina is an otaku who’s only interested in 2-D girls

and a computer wiz plus a hacker.

He likes snacks such as pocky and enjoys collecting figurines,

especially anything relating to his wife, Nagul, a made-up character for this universe. At the start, it seems to be that’s he’s just an otaku guy who gets really into roleplaying when it’s involved and then it’s revealed early on that he’s a son of a CEO of a big company and just changed his name, which explains how he is able to afford all of the figurines, posters, cosplay, and anime he has.

Diagnosis

Right at the start, it’s obvious that this guy has no issue with women whatso-ever. Just a guy who likes 2-D only,

but he gets really hyperfiated about it and forgets that other people exist and is able to talk to people just fine, only that he has no interest in interacting with other people except for the world of 2-D

Right off the bat, I’m going ahead and diagnosing him with autism. I am on the spectrum myself and while I was reading this manga series, all I could think was that I relate to him so much that I might as well kin him. His lack of need to socialize with others and his special interest only 2-D, with a special skill in computers/hacking

sort of makes him a somewhat textbook definition of someone who is autistic but high functioning. He does miss some social cues,

and never misses the chance of making each situation twisted to his liking: trying his best to involve a lot of roleplaying as possible.

Canon Background

Mina was raised with a life of luxury from his very doting father,

being the one who introduced Mina to the world of 2-D. While on the other hand, his mother wants him to take over the company one day,

so only wanting the best. Due to his upbringing from his father’s influence, the parents constantly fight over him

and what’s best for him: the father wanting Mina to live happily and letting him do what he wants; the mother wanting Mina to think about his future, to take things more seriously, and him to grow out of his love of 2-D. I’ll go ahead and give my opinion on which I support: the father. As I mentioned in the first few paragraphs, out of the 3 character’s backgrounds, Mina’s is the most vague cause his main issue is about his future and nothing from the past is hurting him, unlike the other two, so I’m going to start to give my theory on how he grew up.

Speculated Childhood

When Mina was born, his father was on cloud nine while the mother was already trying to secure her newborn son’s future. Both parents must’ve noticed as Mina was growing, his lack of interest in his surroundings. The father, being the more emotional one, must’ve been worried since he did agree with his wife that little Mina will be the next CEO, but a child who rarely speaks and shows no interest is concerning. So, he took Mina in to see a doctor and the professional speculated that Mina must be on the autism spectrum, but it is up to the parents whether or not they want to get him tested. The mother, against it since it’ll give them bad public eye, and the father agreeing with his darling wife, only wanting the best for his son and with heavy worry that his son would have possibly been bullied if he was diagnosed. So, the father researches the topic and concluded himself, all the while agreeing in the end, that his son must be on the spectrum and promises that he will not reveal it to anyone for his son’s safety. So, he starts to expose Mina to different hobbies, shows, practiced skills, anything that his son can latch on to for him to have some motivation in his life. One day, his father showed him an anime, involving Mina’s all time favorite female character, Nagul. Mina instantly fell in love with her and demanded anything involving the show, especially Nagul. His father, delighted to see his son so happy for the first time, got anything Mina wanted. His mother, on the other hand, is fully against this behavior that she knows will affect him greatly in the future (which she’s not wrong). As the years go on, the Ugagami couple divorced: the mother gained custody of him and will allow his father keep visiting, and then Mina’s name changed to Mina Ayashiro.

His father continues to dot and give him spending money for anything he wanted, as a way to keep himself under his mother’s radar. This concludes my speculation of his possible background.

Mina’s Relationships

Mina’s relationship with his roommates impacted his life greatly. At the end of the Mina Rescue Arc, his mother is looking over a flash drive that he gave her, full of pictures with him and Nagul, but as she scrolls more, she discovers pictures with him and his friends,

showing that he did in fact change and has opened the gate to his world a little and welcomed two people, the most important people in the world to him, going as far to hack security cameras to find evidence that Mikami did not in fact steal the answer sheets. To him and Mikami, both are very protective of Shiro who is the weakest out of the 3, so during the later chapters, listening on a conversation that Shiro is involved and getting insulted, the two teamed up to ruin the guy but plan failed when Mina decided to incorporate that Shiro is God’s child.

Mikami and Shiro changed Mina’s life by just being there and supporting him every step of the way, indulging him in his fantasies and interests of common anime tropes.

Part 2

Part 3

#dadadadan #dame dasa daru dansi #mina ayashiro #shiro kisaragi #mikami ryouta #psycology #psychology analysis #i dont know what i'm talking about

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estelaparas4580-blog · 6 years

Text

The New Soccer Train

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You Are the Product

John Lanchester

At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is. Bear in mind that thefacebook – its original name – was launched exclusively for Harvard students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as television or cinema or radio.

Also amazing: as Facebook has grown, its users’ reliance on it has also grown. The increase in numbers is not, as one might expect, accompanied by a lower level of engagement. More does not mean worse – or worse, at least, from Facebook’s point of view. On the contrary. In the far distant days of October 2012, when Facebook hit one billion users, 55 per cent of them were using it every day. At two billion, 66 per cent are. Its user base is growing at 18 per cent a year – which you’d have thought impossible for a business already so enormous. Facebook’s biggest rival for logged-in users is YouTube, owned by its deadly rival Alphabet (the company formerly known as Google), in second place with 1.5 billion monthly users. Three of the next four biggest apps, or services, or whatever one wants to call them, are WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, with 1.2 billion, 1.2 billion, and 700 million users respectively (the Chinese app WeChat is the other one, with 889 million). Those three entities have something in common: they are all owned by Facebook. No wonder the company is the fifth most valuable in the world, with a market capitalisation of $445 billion.

Zuckerberg’s news about Facebook’s size came with an announcement which may or may not prove to be significant. He said that the company was changing its ‘mission statement’, its version of the canting pieties beloved of corporate America. Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world more open and connected’. A non-Facebooker reading that is likely to ask: why? Connection is presented as an end in itself, an inherently and automatically good thing. Is it, though? Flaubert was sceptical about trains because he thought (in Julian Barnes’s paraphrase) that ‘the railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid.’ You don’t have to be as misanthropic as Flaubert to wonder if something similar isn’t true about connecting people on Facebook. For instance, Facebook is generally agreed to have played a big, perhaps even a crucial, role in the election of Donald Trump. The benefit to humanity is not clear. This thought, or something like it, seems to have occurred to Zuckerberg, because the new mission statement spells out a reason for all this connectedness. It says that the new mission is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’.

Hmm. Alphabet’s mission statement, ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, came accompanied by the maxim ‘Don’t be evil,’ which has been the source of a lot of ridicule: Steve Jobs called it ‘bullshit’.1 Which it is, but it isn’t only bullshit. Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth; that’s fair enough, since if they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be viable as businesses. What isn’t fair is the panoply of cynical techniques that many insurers use to avoid, as far as possible, paying out when the insured-against event happens. Just ask anyone who has had a property suffer a major mishap. It’s worth saying ‘Don’t be evil,’ because lots of businesses are. This is especially an issue in the world of the internet. Internet companies are working in a field that is poorly understood (if understood at all) by customers and regulators. The stuff they’re doing, if they’re any good at all, is by definition new. In that overlapping area of novelty and ignorance and unregulation, it’s well worth reminding employees not to be evil, because if the company succeeds and grows, plenty of chances to be evil are going to come along.

Google and Facebook have both been walking this line from the beginning. Their styles of doing so are different. An internet entrepreneur I know has had dealings with both companies. ‘YouTube knows they have lots of dirty things going on and are keen to try and do some good to alleviate it,’ he told me. I asked what he meant by ‘dirty’. ‘Terrorist and extremist content, stolen content, copyright violations. That kind of thing. But Google in my experience knows that there are ambiguities, moral doubts, around some of what they do, and at least they try to think about it. Facebook just doesn’t care. When you’re in a room with them you can tell. They’re’ – he took a moment to find the right word – ‘scuzzy’.

That might sound harsh. There have, however, been ethical problems and ambiguities about Facebook since the moment of its creation, a fact we know because its creator was live-blogging at the time. The scene is as it was recounted in Aaron Sorkin’s movie about the birth of Facebook, The Social Network. While in his first year at Harvard, Zuckerberg suffered a romantic rebuff. Who wouldn’t respond to this by creating a website where undergraduates’ pictures are placed side by side so that users of the site can vote for the one they find more attractive? (The film makes it look as if it was only female undergraduates: in real life it was both.) The site was called Facemash. In the great man’s own words, at the time:

I’m a little intoxicated, I’m not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is the more attractive … Let the hacking begin.

As Tim Wu explains in his energetic and original new book The Attention Merchants, a ‘facebook’ in the sense Zuckerberg uses it here ‘traditionally referred to a physical booklet produced at American universities to promote socialisation in the way that “Hi, My Name Is” stickers do at events; the pages consisted of rows upon rows of head shots with the corresponding name’. Harvard was already working on an electronic version of its various dormitory facebooks. The leading social network, Friendster, already had three million users. The idea of putting these two things together was not entirely novel, but as Zuckerberg said at the time, ‘I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.’

Wu argues that capturing and reselling attention has been the basic model for a large number of modern businesses, from posters in late 19th-century Paris, through the invention of mass-market newspapers that made their money not through circulation but through ad sales, to the modern industries of advertising and ad-funded TV. Facebook is in a long line of such enterprises, though it might be the purest ever example of a company whose business is the capture and sale of attention. Very little new thinking was involved in its creation. As Wu observes, Facebook is ‘a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success’. What Zuckerberg had instead of originality was the ability to get things done and to see the big issues clearly. The crucial thing with internet start-ups is the ability to execute plans and to adapt to changing circumstances. It’s Zuck’s skill at doing that – at hiring talented engineers, and at navigating the big-picture trends in his industry – that has taken his company to where it is today. Those two huge sister companies under Facebook’s giant wing, Instagram and WhatsApp, were bought for $1 billion and $19 billion respectively, at a point when they had no revenue. No banker or analyst or sage could have told Zuckerberg what those acquisitions were worth; nobody knew better than he did. He could see where things were going and help make them go there. That talent turned out to be worth several hundred billion dollars.

Jesse Eisenberg’s brilliant portrait of Zuckerberg in The Social Network is misleading, as Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, argues in Chaos Monkeys, his entertainingly caustic book about his time at the company. The movie Zuckerberg is a highly credible character, a computer genius located somewhere on the autistic spectrum with minimal to non-existent social skills. But that’s not what the man is really like. In real life, Zuckerberg was studying for a degree with a double concentration in computer science and – this is the part people tend to forget – psychology. People on the spectrum have a limited sense of how other people’s minds work; autists, it has been said, lack a ‘theory of mind’. Zuckerberg, not so much. He is very well aware of how people’s minds work and in particular of the social dynamics of popularity and status. The initial launch of Facebook was limited to people with a Harvard email address; the intention was to make access to the site seem exclusive and aspirational. (And also to control site traffic so that the servers never went down. Psychology and computer science, hand in hand.) Then it was extended to other elite campuses in the US. When it launched in the UK, it was limited to Oxbridge and the LSE. The idea was that people wanted to look at what other people like them were doing, to see their social networks, to compare, to boast and show off, to give full rein to every moment of longing and envy, to keep their noses pressed against the sweet-shop window of others’ lives.

This focus attracted the attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his studies at Stanford – he majored in philosophy – Thiel became interested in the ideas of the US-based French philosopher René Girard, as advocated in his most influential book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Girard’s big idea was something he called ‘mimetic desire’. Human beings are born with a need for food and shelter. Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them. In Thiel’s summary, the idea is ‘that imitation is at the root of all behaviour’.

Girard was a Christian, and his view of human nature is that it is fallen. We don’t know what we want or who we are; we don’t really have values and beliefs of our own; what we have instead is an instinct to copy and compare. We are homo mimeticus. ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’ Look around, ye petty, and compare. The reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy. ‘Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic,’ Thiel said. ‘Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.’ We are keen to be seen as we want to be seen, and Facebook is the most popular tool humanity has ever had with which to do that.

The view of human nature implied by these ideas is pretty dark. If all people want to do is go and look at other people so that they can compare themselves to them and copy what they want – if that is the final, deepest truth about humanity and its motivations – then Facebook doesn’t really have to take too much trouble over humanity’s welfare, since all the bad things that happen to us are things we are doing to ourselves. For all the corporate uplift of its mission statement, Facebook is a company whose essential premise is misanthropic. It is perhaps for that reason that Facebook, more than any other company of its size, has a thread of malignity running through its story. The high-profile, tabloid version of this has come in the form of incidents such as the live-streaming of rapes, suicides, murders and cop-killings. But this is one of the areas where Facebook seems to me relatively blameless. People live-stream these terrible things over the site because it has the biggest audience; if Snapchat or Periscope were bigger, they’d be doing it there instead.

In many other areas, however, the site is far from blameless. The highest-profile recent criticisms of the company stem from its role in Trump’s election. There are two components to this, one of them implicit in the nature of the site, which has an inherent tendency to fragment and atomise its users into like-minded groups. The mission to ‘connect’ turns out to mean, in practice, connect with people who agree with you. We can’t prove just how dangerous these ‘filter bubbles’ are to our societies, but it seems clear that they are having a severe impact on our increasingly fragmented polity. Our conception of ‘we’ is becoming narrower.

This fragmentation created the conditions for the second strand of Facebook’s culpability in the Anglo-American political disasters of the last year. The portmanteau terms for these developments are ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, and they were made possible by the retreat from a general agora of public debate into separate ideological bunkers. In the open air, fake news can be debated and exposed; on Facebook, if you aren’t a member of the community being served the lies, you’re quite likely never to know that they are in circulation. It’s crucial to this that Facebook has no financial interest in telling the truth. No company better exemplifies the internet-age dictum that if the product is free, you are the product. Facebook’s customers aren’t the people who are on the site: its customers are the advertisers who use its network and who relish its ability to direct ads to receptive audiences. Why would Facebook care if the news streaming over the site is fake? Its interest is in the targeting, not in the content. This is probably one reason for the change in the company’s mission statement. If your only interest is in connecting people, why would you care about falsehoods? They might even be better than the truth, since they are quicker to identify the like-minded. The newfound ambition to ‘build communities’ makes it seem as if the company is taking more of an interest in the consequence of the connections it fosters.

Fake news is not, as Facebook has acknowledged, the only way it was used to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. On 6 January 2017 the director of national intelligence published a report saying that the Russians had waged an internet disinformation campaign to damage Hillary Clinton and help Trump. ‘Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations – such as cyber-activity – with overt efforts by Russian government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls”,’ the report said. At the end of April, Facebook got around to admitting this (by then) fairly obvious truth, in an interesting paper published by its internal security division. ‘Fake news’, they argue, is an unhelpful, catch-all term because misinformation is in fact spread in a variety of ways:

Information (or Influence) Operations – Actions taken by governments or organised non-state actors to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment.

False News – News articles that purport to be factual, but which contain intentional misstatements of fact with the intention to arouse passions, attract viewership, or deceive.

False Amplifiers – Co-ordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with the intent of manipulating political discussion (e.g. by discouraging specific parties from participating in discussion, or amplifying sensationalistic voices over others).

Disinformation – Inaccurate or manipulated information/content that is spread intentionally. This can include false news, or it can involve more subtle methods, such as false flag operations, feeding inaccurate quotes or stories to innocent intermediaries, or knowingly amplifying biased or misleading information.

The company is promising to treat this problem or set of problems as seriously as it treats such other problems as malware, account hacking and spam. We’ll see. One man’s fake news is another’s truth-telling, and Facebook works hard at avoiding responsibility for the content on its site – except for sexual content, about which it is super-stringent. Nary a nipple on show. It’s a bizarre set of priorities, which only makes sense in an American context, where any whiff of explicit sexuality would immediately give the site a reputation for unwholesomeness. Photos of breastfeeding women are banned and rapidly get taken down. Lies and propaganda are fine.

The key to understanding this is to think about what advertisers want: they don’t want to appear next to pictures of breasts because it might damage their brands, but they don’t mind appearing alongside lies because the lies might be helping them find the consumers they’re trying to target. In Move Fast and Break Things, his polemic against the ‘digital-age robber barons’, Jonathan Taplin points to an analysis on Buzzfeed: ‘In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others.’ This doesn’t sound like a problem Facebook will be in any hurry to fix.

The fact is that fraudulent content, and stolen content, are rife on Facebook, and the company doesn’t really mind, because it isn’t in its interest to mind. Much of the video content on the site is stolen from the people who created it. An illuminating YouTube video from Kurzgesagt, a German outfit that makes high-quality short explanatory films, notes that in 2015, 725 of Facebook’s top one thousand most viewed videos were stolen. This is another area where Facebook’s interests contradict society’s. We may collectively have an interest in sustaining creative and imaginative work in many different forms and on many platforms. Facebook doesn’t. It has two priorities, as Martínez explains in Chaos Monkeys: growth and monetisation. It simply doesn’t care where the content comes from. It is only now starting to care about the perception that much of the content is fraudulent, because if that perception were to become general, it might affect the amount of trust and therefore the amount of time people give to the site.

Zuckerberg himself has spoken up on this issue, in a Facebook post addressing the question of ‘Facebook and the election’. After a certain amount of boilerplate bullshit (‘Our goal is to give every person a voice. We believe deeply in people’), he gets to the nub of it. ‘Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.’ More than one Facebook user pointed out that in their own news feed, Zuckerberg’s post about authenticity ran next to fake news. In one case, the fake story pretended to be from the TV sports channel ESPN. When it was clicked on, it took users to an ad selling a diet supplement. As the writer Doc Searls pointed out, it’s a double fraud, ‘outright lies from a forged source’, which is quite something to have right slap next to the head of Facebook boasting about the absence of fraud. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and founder of the long-read specialist Medium, found the same post by Zuckerberg next to a different fake ESPN story and another piece of fake news purporting to be from CNN, announcing that Congress had disqualified Trump from office. When clicked-through, that turned out to be from a company offering a 12-week programme to strengthen toes. (That’s right: strengthen toes.) Still, we now know that Zuck believes in people. That’s the main thing.

A neutral observer might wonder if Facebook’s attitude to content creators is sustainable. Facebook needs content, obviously, because that’s what the site consists of: content that other people have created. It’s just that it isn’t too keen on anyone apart from Facebook making any money from that content. Over time, that attitude is profoundly destructive to the creative and media industries. Access to an audience – that unprecedented two billion people – is a wonderful thing, but Facebook isn’t in any hurry to help you make money from it. If the content providers all eventually go broke, well, that might not be too much of a problem. There are, for now, lots of willing providers: anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company. In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757 collective years on the site, every single day. Jonathan Taplin points out that this is ‘almost fifteen million years of free labour per year’. That was back when it had a mere 1.23 billion users.

Taplin has worked in academia and in the film industry. The reason he feels so strongly about these questions is that he started out in the music business, as manager of The Band, and was on hand to watch the business being destroyed by the internet. What had been a $20 billion industry in 1999 was a $7 billion industry 15 years later. He saw musicians who had made a good living become destitute. That didn’t happen because people had stopped listening to their music – more people than ever were listening to it – but because music had become something people expected to be free. YouTube is the biggest source of music in the world, playing billions of tracks annually, but in 2015 musicians earned less from it and from its ad-supported rivals than they earned from sales of vinyl. Not CDs and recordings in general: vinyl.

Something similar has happened in the world of journalism. Facebook is in essence an advertising company which is indifferent to the content on its site except insofar as it helps to target and sell advertisements. A version of Gresham’s law is at work, in which fake news, which gets more clicks and is free to produce, drives out real news, which often tells people things they don’t want to hear, and is expensive to produce. In addition, Facebook uses an extensive set of tricks to increase its traffic and the revenue it makes from targeting ads, at the expense of the news-making institutions whose content it hosts. Its news feed directs traffic at you based not on your interests, but on how to make the maximum amount of advertising revenue from you. In September 2016, Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, told a Financial Timesconference that Facebook had ‘sucked up $27 million’ of the newspaper’s projected ad revenue that year. ‘They are taking all the money because they have algorithms we don’t understand, which are a filter between what we do and how people receive it.’

This goes to the heart of the question of what Facebook is and what it does. For all the talk about connecting people, building community, and believing in people, Facebook is an advertising company. Martínez gives the clearest account both of how it ended up like that, and how Facebook advertising works. In the early years of Facebook, Zuckerberg was much more interested in the growth side of the company than in the monetisation. That changed when Facebook went in search of its big payday at the initial public offering, the shining day when shares in a business first go on sale to the general public. This is a huge turning-point for any start-up: in the case of many tech industry workers, the hope and expectation associated with ‘going public’ is what attracted them to their firm in the first place, and/or what has kept them glued to their workstations. It’s the point where the notional money of an early-days business turns into the real cash of a public company.

Martínez was there at the very moment when Zuck got everyone together to tell them they were going public, the moment when all Facebook employees knew that they were about to become rich:

I had chosen a seat behind a detached pair, who on further inspection turned out to be Chris Cox, head of FB product, and Naomi Gleit, a Harvard grad who joined as employee number 29, and was now reputed to be the current longest-serving employee other than Mark.

Naomi, between chats with Cox, was clicking away on her laptop, paying little attention to the Zuckian harangue. I peered over her shoulder at her screen. She was scrolling down an email with a number of links, and progressively clicking each one into existence as another tab on her browser. Clickathon finished, she began lingering on each with an appraiser’s eye. They were real estate listings, each for a different San Francisco property.

Martínez took note of one of the properties and looked it up later. Price: $2.4 million. He is fascinating, and fascinatingly bitter, on the subject of class and status differences in Silicon Valley, in particular the never publicly discussed issue of the huge gulf between early employees in a company, who have often been made unfathomably rich, and the wage slaves who join the firm later in its story. ‘The protocol is not to talk about it at all publicly.’ But, as Bonnie Brown, a masseuse at Google in the early days, wrote in her memoir, ‘a sharp contrast developed between Googlers working side by side. While one was looking at local movie times on their monitor, the other was booking a flight to Belize for the weekend. How was the conversation on Monday morning going to sound now?’

When the time came for the IPO, Facebook needed to turn from a company with amazing growth to one that was making amazing money. It was already making some, thanks to its sheer size – as Martínez observes, ‘a billion times any number is still a big fucking number’ – but not enough to guarantee a truly spectacular valuation on launch. It was at this stage that the question of how to monetise Facebook got Zuckerberg’s full attention. It’s interesting, and to his credit, that he hadn’t put too much focus on it before – perhaps because he isn’t particularly interested in money per se. But he does like to win.

The solution was to take the huge amount of information Facebook has about its ‘community’ and use it to let advertisers target ads with a specificity never known before, in any medium. Martínez: ‘It can be demographic in nature (e.g. 30-to-40-year-old females), geographic (people within five miles of Sarasota, Florida), or even based on Facebook profile data (do you have children; i.e. are you in the mommy segment?).’ Taplin makes the same point:

If I want to reach women between the ages of 25 and 30 in zip code 37206 who like country music and drink bourbon, Facebook can do that. Moreover, Facebook can often get friends of these women to post a ‘sponsored story’ on a targeted consumer’s news feed, so it doesn’t feel like an ad. As Zuckerberg said when he introduced Facebook Ads, ‘Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.’

That was the first part of the monetisation process for Facebook, when it turned its gigantic scale into a machine for making money. The company offered advertisers an unprecedentedly precise tool for targeting their ads at particular consumers. (Particular segments of voters too can be targeted with complete precision. One instance from 2016 was an anti-Clinton ad repeating a notorious speech she made in 1996 on the subject of ‘super-predators’. The ad was sent to African-American voters in areas where the Republicans were trying, successfully as it turned out, to suppress the Democrat vote. Nobody else saw the ads.)

The second big shift around monetisation came in 2012 when internet traffic began to switch away from desktop computers towards mobile devices. If you do most of your online reading on a desktop, you are in a minority. The switch was a potential disaster for all businesses which relied on internet advertising, because people don’t much like mobile ads, and were far less likely to click on them than on desktop ads. In other words, although general internet traffic was increasing rapidly, because the growth was coming from mobile, the traffic was becoming proportionately less valuable. If the trend were to continue, every internet business that depended on people clicking links – i.e. pretty much all of them, but especially the giants like Google and Facebook – would be worth much less money.

Facebook solved the problem by means of a technique called ‘onboarding’. As Martínez explains it, the best way to think about this is to consider our various kinds of name and address.

For example, if Bed, Bath and Beyond wants to get my attention with one of its wonderful 20 per cent off coupons, it calls out:

Antonio García Martínez 1 Clarence Place #13 San Francisco, CA 94107

If it wants to reach me on my mobile device, my name there is:

38400000-8cfo-11bd-b23e-10b96e40000d

That’s my quasi-immutable device ID, broadcast hundreds of times a day on mobile ad exchanges.

On my laptop, my name is this:

07J6yJPMB9juTowar.AWXGQnGPA1MCmThgb9wN4vLoUpg.BUUtWg.rg.FTN.0.AWUxZtUf

This is the content of the Facebook re-targeting cookie, which is used to target ads-are-you based on your mobile browsing.

Though it may not be obvious, each of these keys is associated with a wealth of our personal behaviour data: every website we’ve been to, many things we’ve bought in physical stores, and every app we’ve used and what we did there … The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, is how to tie these different sets of names together, and who controls the links. That’s it.

Facebook already had a huge amount of information about people and their social networks and their professed likes and dislikes.2 After waking up to the importance of monetisation, they added to their own data a huge new store of data about offline, real-world behaviour, acquired through partnerships with big companies such as Experian, which have been monitoring consumer purchases for decades via their relationships with direct marketing firms, credit card companies, and retailers. There doesn’t seem to be a one-word description of these firms: ‘consumer credit agencies’ or something similar about sums it up. Their reach is much broader than that makes it sound, though.3 Experian says its data is based on more than 850 million records and claims to have information on 49.7 million UK adults living in 25.2 million households in 1.73 million postcodes. These firms know all there is to know about your name and address, your income and level of education, your relationship status, plus everywhere you’ve ever paid for anything with a card. Facebook could now put your identity together with the unique device identifier on your phone.

That was crucial to Facebook’s new profitability. On mobiles, people tend to prefer the internet to apps, which corral the information they gather and don’t share it with other companies. A game app on your phone is unlikely to know anything about you except the level you’ve got to on that particular game. But because everyone in the world is on Facebook, the company knows everyone’s phone identifier. It was now able to set up an ad server delivering far better targeted mobile ads than anyone else could manage, and it did so in a more elegant and well-integrated form than anyone else had managed.

So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made – the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Now, thanks to its partnerships with the old-school credit firms, Facebook knew who everybody was, where they lived, and everything they’d ever bought with plastic in a real-world offline shop.4 All this information is used for a purpose which is, in the final analysis, profoundly bathetic. It is to sell you things via online ads.

The ads work on two models. In one of them, advertisers ask Facebook to target consumers from a particular demographic – our thirty-something bourbon-drinking country music fan, or our African American in Philadelphia who was lukewarm about Hillary. But Facebook also delivers ads via a process of online auctions, which happen in real time whenever you click on a website. Because every website you’ve ever visited (more or less) has planted a cookie on your web browser, when you go to a new site, there is a real-time auction, in millionths of a second, to decide what your eyeballs are worth and what ads should be served to them, based on what your interests, and income level and whatnot, are known to be. This is the reason ads have that disconcerting tendency to follow you around, so that you look at a new telly or a pair of shoes or a holiday destination, and they’re still turning up on every site you visit weeks later. This was how, by chucking talent and resources at the problem, Facebook was able to turn mobile from a potential revenue disaster to a great hot steamy geyser of profit.

What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does – ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ – and the commercial reality. Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them. Since there is so much content posted on the site, the algorithms used to filter and direct that content are the thing that determines what you see: people think their news feed is largely to do with their friends and interests, and it sort of is, with the crucial proviso that it is their friends and interests as mediated by the commercial interests of Facebook. Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.

I’m left wondering what will happen when and if this $450 billion penny drops. Wu’s history of attention merchants shows that there is a suggestive pattern here: that a boom is more often than not followed by a backlash, that a period of explosive growth triggers a public and sometimes legislative reaction. Wu’s first example is the draconian anti-poster laws introduced in early 20th-century Paris (and still in force – one reason the city is by contemporary standards undisfigured by ads). As Wu says, ‘when the commodity in question is access to people’s minds, the perpetual quest for growth ensures that forms of backlash, both major and minor, are all but inevitable.’ Wu calls a minor form of this phenomenon the ‘disenchantment effect’.

Facebook seems vulnerable to these disenchantment effects. One place they are likely to begin is in the core area of its business model – ad-selling. The advertising it sells is ‘programmatic’, i.e. determined by computer algorithms that match the customer to the advertiser and deliver ads accordingly, via targeting and/or online auctions. The problem with this from the customer’s point of view – remember, the customer here is the advertiser, not the Facebook user – is that a lot of the clicks on these ads are fake. There is a mismatch of interests here. Facebook wants clicks, because that’s how it gets paid: when ads are clicked on. But what if the clicks aren’t real but are instead automated clicks from fake accounts run by computer bots? This is a well-known problem, which particularly affects Google, because it’s easy to set up a site, allow it to host programmatic ads, then set up a bot to click on those ads, and collect the money that comes rolling in. On Facebook the fraudulent clicks are more likely to be from competitors trying to drive each others’ costs up.

The industry publication Ad Week estimates the annual cost of click fraud at $7 billion, about a sixth of the entire market. One single fraud site, Methbot, whose existence was exposed at the end of last year, uses a network of hacked computers to generate between three and five million dollars’ worth of fraudulent clicks every day. Estimates of fraudulent traffic’s market share are variable, with some guesses coming in at around 50 per cent; some website owners say their own data indicates a fraudulent-click rate of 90 per cent. This is by no means entirely Facebook’s problem, but it isn’t hard to imagine how it could lead to a big revolt against ‘ad tech’, as this technology is generally known, on the part of the companies who are paying for it. I’ve heard academics in the field say that there is a form of corporate groupthink in the world of the big buyers of advertising, who are currently responsible for directing large parts of their budgets towards Facebook. That mindset could change. Also, many of Facebook’s metrics are tilted to catch the light at the angle which makes them look shiniest. A video is counted as ‘viewed’ on Facebook if it runs for three seconds, even if the user is scrolling past it in her news feed and even if the sound is off. Many Facebook videos with hundreds of thousands of ‘views’, if counted by the techniques that are used to count television audiences, would have no viewers at all.

A customers’ revolt could overlap with a backlash from regulators and governments. Google and Facebook have what amounts to a monopoly on digital advertising. That monopoly power is becoming more and more important as advertising spend migrates online. Between them, they have already destroyed large sections of the newspaper industry. Facebook has done a huge amount to lower the quality of public debate and to ensure that it is easier than ever before to tell what Hitler approvingly called ‘big lies’ and broadcast them to a big audience. The company has no business need to care about that, but it is the kind of issue that could attract the attention of regulators.

That isn’t the only external threat to the Google/Facebook duopoly. The US attitude to anti-trust law was shaped by Robert Bork, the judge whom Reagan nominated for the Supreme Court but the Senate failed to confirm. Bork’s most influential legal stance came in the area of competition law. He promulgated the doctrine that the only form of anti-competitive action which matters concerns the prices paid by consumers. His idea was that if the price is falling that means the market is working, and no questions of monopoly need be addressed. This philosophy still shapes regulatory attitudes in the US and it’s the reason Amazon, for instance, has been left alone by regulators despite the manifestly monopolistic position it holds in the world of online retail, books especially.

The big internet enterprises seem invulnerable on these narrow grounds. Or they do until you consider the question of individualised pricing. The huge data trail we all leave behind as we move around the internet is increasingly used to target us with prices which aren’t like the tags attached to goods in a shop. On the contrary, they are dynamic, moving with our perceived ability to pay.5 Four researchers based in Spain studied the phenomenon by creating automated personas to behave as if, in one case, ‘budget conscious’ and in another ‘affluent’, and then checking to see if their different behaviour led to different prices. It did: a search for headphones returned a set of results which were on average four times more expensive for the affluent persona. An airline-ticket discount site charged higher fares to the affluent consumer. In general, the location of the searcher caused prices to vary by as much as 166 per cent. So in short, yes, personalised prices are a thing, and the ability to create them depends on tracking us across the internet. That seems to me a prima facie violation of the American post-Bork monopoly laws, focused as they are entirely on price. It’s sort of funny, and also sort of grotesque, that an unprecedentedly huge apparatus of consumer surveillance is fine, apparently, but an unprecedentedly huge apparatus of consumer surveillance which results in some people paying higher prices may well be illegal.

Perhaps the biggest potential threat to Facebook is that its users might go off it. Two billion monthly active users is a lot of people, and the ‘network effects’ – the scale of the connectivity – are, obviously, extraordinary. But there are other internet companies which connect people on the same scale – Snapchat has 166 million daily users, Twitter 328 million monthly users – and as we’ve seen in the disappearance of Myspace, the onetime leader in social media, when people change their minds about a service, they can go off it hard and fast.

For that reason, were it to be generally understood that Facebook’s business model is based on surveillance, the company would be in danger. The one time Facebook did poll its users about the surveillance model was in 2011, when it proposed a change to its terms and conditions – the change that underpins the current template for its use of data. The result of the poll was clear: 90 per cent of the vote was against the changes. Facebook went ahead and made them anyway, on the grounds that so few people had voted. No surprise there, neither in the users’ distaste for surveillance nor in the company’s indifference to that distaste. But this is something which could change.

The other thing that could happen at the level of individual users is that people stop using Facebook because it makes them unhappy. This isn’t the same issue as the scandal in 2014 when it turned out that social scientists at the company had deliberately manipulated some people’s news feeds to see what effect, if any, it had on their emotions. The resulting paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was a study of ‘social contagion’, or the transfer of emotion among groups of people, as a result of a change in the nature of the stories seen by 689,003 users of Facebook. ‘When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.’ The scientists seem not to have considered how this information would be received, and the story played quite big for a while.

Perhaps the fact that people already knew this story accidentally deflected attention from what should have been a bigger scandal, exposed earlier this year in a paper from the American Journal of Epidemiology. The paper was titled ‘Association of Facebook Use with Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study’. The researchers found quite simply that the more people use Facebook, the more unhappy they are. A 1 per cent increase in ‘likes’ and clicks and status updates was correlated with a 5 to 8 per cent decrease in mental health. In addition, they found that the positive effect of real-world interactions, which enhance well-being, was accurately paralleled by the ‘negative associations of Facebook use’. In effect people were swapping real relationships which made them feel good for time on Facebook which made them feel bad. That’s my gloss rather than that of the scientists, who take the trouble to make it clear that this is a correlation rather than a definite causal relationship, but they did go so far – unusually far – as to say that the data ‘suggests a possible trade-off between offline and online relationships’. This isn’t the first time something like this effect has been found. To sum up: there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit. So maybe, one day, people will stop using it.6

What, though, if none of the above happens? What if advertisers don’t rebel, governments don’t act, users don’t quit, and the good ship Zuckerberg and all who sail in her continues blithely on? We should look again at that figure of two billion monthly active users. The total number of people who have any access to the internet – as broadly defined as possible, to include the slowest dial-up speeds and creakiest developing-world mobile service, as well as people who have access but don’t use it – is three and a half billion. Of those, about 750 million are in China and Iran, which block Facebook. Russians, about a hundred million of whom are on the net, tend not to use Facebook because they prefer their native copycat site VKontakte. So put the potential audience for the site at 2.6 billion. In developed countries where Facebook has been present for years, use of the site peaks at about 75 per cent of the population (that’s in the US). That would imply a total potential audience for Facebook of 1.95 billion. At two billion monthly active users, Facebook has already gone past that number, and is running out of connected humans. Martínez compares Zuckerberg to Alexander the Great, weeping because he has no more worlds to conquer. Perhaps this is one reason for the early signals Zuck has sent about running for president – the fifty-state pretending-to-give-a-shit tour, the thoughtful-listening pose he’s photographed in while sharing milkshakes in (Presidential Ambitions klaxon!) an Iowa diner.

Whatever comes next will take us back to those two pillars of the company, growth and monetisation. Growth can only come from connecting new areas of the planet. An early experiment came in the form of Free Basics, a program offering internet connectivity to remote villages in India, with the proviso that the range of sites on offer should be controlled by Facebook. ‘Who could possibly be against this?’ Zuckerberg wrote in the Times of India. The answer: lots and lots of angry Indians. The government ruled that Facebook shouldn’t be able to ‘shape users’ internet experience’ by restricting access to the broader internet. A Facebook board member tweeted that ‘anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?’ As Taplin points out, that remark ‘unwittingly revealed a previously unspoken truth: Facebook and Google are the new colonial powers.’

So the growth side of the equation is not without its challenges, technological as well as political. Google (which has a similar running-out-of-humans problem) is working on ‘Project Loon’, ‘a network of balloons travelling on the edge of space, designed to extend internet connectivity to people in rural and remote areas worldwide’. Facebook is working on a project involving a solar-powered drone called the Aquila, which has the wingspan of a commercial airliner, weighs less than a car, and when cruising uses less energy than a microwave oven. The idea is that it will circle remote, currently unconnected areas of the planet, for flights that last as long as three months at a time. It connects users via laser and was developed in Bridgwater, Somerset. (Amazon’s drone programme is based in the UK too, near Cambridge. Our legal regime is pro-drone.) Even the most hardened Facebook sceptic has to be a little bit impressed by the ambition and energy. But the fact remains that the next two billion users are going to be hard to find.

That’s growth, which will mainly happen in the developing world. Here in the rich world, the focus is more on monetisation, and it’s in this area that I have to admit something which is probably already apparent. I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me. It goes back to that moment of its creation, Zuckerberg at his keyboard after a few drinks creating a website to compare people’s appearance, not for any real reason other than that he was able to do it. That’s the crucial thing about Facebook, the main thing which isn’t understood about its motivation: it does things because it can. Zuckerberg knows how to do something, and other people don’t, so he does it. Motivation of that type doesn’t work in the Hollywood version of life, so Aaron Sorkin had to give Zuck a motive to do with social aspiration and rejection. But that’s wrong, completely wrong. He isn’t motivated by that kind of garden-variety psychology. He does this because he can, and justifications about ‘connection’ and ‘community’ are ex post facto rationalisations. The drive is simpler and more basic. That’s why the impulse to growth has been so fundamental to the company, which is in many respects more like a virus than it is like a business. Grow and multiply and monetise. Why? There is no why. Because.

Automation and artificial intelligence are going to have a big impact in all kinds of worlds. These technologies are new and real and they are coming soon. Facebook is deeply interested in these trends. We don’t know where this is going, we don’t know what the social costs and consequences will be, we don’t know what will be the next area of life to be hollowed out, the next business model to be destroyed, the next company to go the way of Polaroid or the next business to go the way of journalism or the next set of tools and techniques to become available to the people who used Facebook to manipulate the elections of 2016. We just don’t know what’s next, but we know it’s likely to be consequential, and that a big part will be played by the world’s biggest social network. On the evidence of Facebook’s actions so far, it’s impossible to face this prospect without unease.

#facebook

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viper-no-viping · 7 years

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Wweelp. I guess it's Rambling Time.

Not even sure how far I'll get in any particular topic, but, we're still kind of rusty with blathering shit for school assignments, so.. Here I am, exercising my shit-blathering pathways, or whatever.

I guess an initial General Weather Report would be suitable, given that seems to be how our collectively chronophobic ass keeps track of things that we will Almost Definitely forget in the nearish future.. But that would require thinking in detail about Various Things and that's kind of Not My Bag rly, heh, so. I dunno, I guess we'll see what happens.

Suppose starting with the current thought process will suffice. There's this trans chick on YouTube we follow, who posted recently that she's getting bottom surgery, now that she's recovered from her facial feminization surgery. From there I ended up at.. One or two other videos, pretty sure it was two, about her transition timeline.

And now "transition timeline testosterone" is sitting there in the YouTube search bar staring back at me and I'm just like :\ lol dunno, or someshit.. sigh.

This video made some Feely Feels rear their dysphoric heads, because of some Hashtag Relatable shit about the way he described stuff.. And I'm sure the seething jealousy that he got top surgery means something, heh, meanwhile we're over here crossing our fingers that the body isn't too fucked up for even a breast reduction, which, even for that, the co-pay alone.. ugh.

I mean, not like I actually know how much it would be yet, hopefully Tahni will remember to ask about that when we see the primary again for the results of the next ultrasound to make sure that ovarian cyst isn't fucking cancer, fucking goddamn cancer, never would have thought we'd be stressing over that as a possibility but here we fucking are..

Well. I personally don't have much history, hehe, what with the Iiii don't, exist, Iiii don't, exist.. et cetera.. yeeup, not sure where that was going, but anyway. Yeah. If not from the fucking ovaries, possibly from the goddamn thyroid, which is Fun. Apparently there are no actual known causes for the thyroid cancers, shit just fucking happens, more commonly in "women." Yay.

But I mean, even if it is some kind of fucking thyroid cancer, at this point just take the shit out and put us on thyroid meds for the rest of our life, just make this shit stop.. ugh, but it's probably not even one thing, is it, this whole fucking body is going to shit, and how many months will it be until we've done enough tests and shit to figure out what's even going on..

It's so funny, two years ago they Really Thought it would just be an endoscopy and colonoscopy to find the cause, just a couple tests.. xD Ahh, funny in a kind of lol kill me way.. But at least shit is actually showing UP on tests now. Just having the vague undiagnosable bullshit is a different kind of agony, like before the LPR was diagnosed, it is Fucked Up trying to get any kind of answer on shit when your main symptom is just a constant hellish nausea, not anything that comes back from a lab test with Actual Results that doctors will Actually Respect.. To say nothing of how family and friends start slowly but surely deciding to themselves that it's just you making a fuss out of "nothing."

So, yeah. Different kind of hell, but godfuckingdamn I would take almost any other ailment aside from this fucking Everlasting Period bullshit. Talk about fucking dysphoria, haha. You really hate acknowledging the existence of this entire section of the meatsuit you're stuck in? Here, have some as-yet-undiagnosed ~menstrual issues~ that make the most unpleasant thing that section of the meatsuit does last TWICE AS LONG AS IT USED TO!! THAT SURELY WON'T MAKE YOU WANT TO STAB YOURSELF AT ALL!!!!

Yep. Look how well I'm coping. XDD STFU self, damn.

Or, well, I guess don't STFU, still need to exercise the word-vomit muscles, god knows how the fuck I'm gonna get by the rest of that godforsaken pass/fail How To Actually Do Shit With Your Psychology Degree Part I class.. Due tomorrow is an assignment in place of a midterm, to make a resume and goal list of shit to do that'll make said resume better.

Except there are no accredited fully-online law schools yet, so what in the ungodly fuck are we gonna even do with the degree? It's not like having it is gonna make the body less of a complete medical fucking wreck, it's not like it'll erase the fact that we can never know when we're going to be suddenly fucking incapacitated with dizziness/ridiculous cramps/intense don't-fucking-move-or-you'll-gag nausea for days on end so we can't actually keep a consistent schedule of doing anything outside of the house, what the fuck good is it gonna do me to make a fucking resume reminding me of exactly how worthless of a job candidate we are at this point?

Whoops, that Got Deep real quick, haha. But like, seriously, what the shit do I even put on a resume aside from the fact that we accidentally started the Psychology Club at our high school? If we use the non-chronological resume format it'll make the employment gap stand out less, but it's supposed to emphasize skills and experience instead, and what fucking skills or whatever can we even put on a resume? What fucking skill set will make you a viable job candidate when you can't even stand for the length of a shower without your legs getting shaky, but you don't have a fancy enough degree or the social stamina to handle a job that doesn't require some form of physical labor? Not to mention I think there's also supposed to be a made-up cover letter, something like "Hi I'm XYZ and I'm applying for ABC job with this resume", what the fucking shit can I even put for that when I know how Ridiculously Limited we are at this point?

A bunch of blathered nonsense to fill a page with lots of words and hopefully conceal the fact that we're completely making shit up. That's what. Because I can't just say "I'm Pretty Much Fucked in terms of traditional employment because chronically ill autistic multiple, and am trying to plan out a career in online comics, or if online law school becomes a thing I'll gladly use my psych degree for that." That's how you fail an assignment, even if it's the truth. I can't exactly write a cover letter to the internet announcing our intent to try that shit. So. Yeah. All aboard the Blathering Train, instead.

But yeah, anyway, that's enough financial/career angst for right now. Back to dysphoria angst!, lolol.

Yeah, so, here I am staring at this shit in the search bar and just.. Like, I don't even know if it would be medically safe to try HRT at this point, but aside from that, I don't even think that's what we want, ideally? Not interested in dealing with facial hair, armpit and "downstairs" hair already pisses some of us off enough..

Not sure if we're interested in being perceived as male, I guess, but not really wanting to be perceived as female either? I'm pretty sure at this point most of us are either specifically agender, or don't subscribe to the concept of gendering traits at all and just call themselves non-binary..

Like, the vast majority of us have fucking hated the body's boobs since they first showed up in middle school. We gave Not A Fuck for gendered shit, in general, but on an autistic sensory level we Fucking Despise pressure on the body's chest and these bitches are heavy. Even moreso than usual, recently, what with the hormones being fucked up. Fucking hate it.

But like, how do you explain to a doctor that you want the boobs off completely? The best we can probably realistically hope for is a reduction because back pain, but I dunno if it would Raise Questions if we asked what the smallest possible size they could do was. Could we settle for As? Would it be weird to ask to go from DDs to As? Weird enough that someone would take the time to be like "now hang on a second" and start trying to make us go through the red tape bullshit to be on record as Officially A Trans TM?

If we could get away with not wearing a bra without looking like we're wearing weird droopy melons under our shirt, I feel like that much would be enough for several of us, even if the body did still technically have some small boobage. As long as it didn't impede us or anything we wanted to do, if it didn't get in the way or weigh down on our chest, if it didn't make our shirts fit weird, I feel like we could deal with that..

But then I see this trans bro on YouTube here and hhnnghh why can't we just not have themmmm..

I mean, ideally, why can't the fuckers be detachable so those who don't hate them can put them on when they feel like it and the rest of us can go on our merry way without them, but, heh, science isn't quite there yet.. Next best thing seems like it would be getting top surgery and letting whomever felt like having boobs just stuff a bra when they wanted to. But of course, insurance won't pay for it if it's just because We Really Want It, we'd have to either be Officially Trans TM and jump through all those hoops and hope top surgery is covered, or we'd have to just settle for a breast reduction covered under back pain.

I guess it also Says Something, that so many of us in the system are asexual-and/or-gay dudes, or simply never thought about it and are female "by default" aka because the body was categorized as that and we didn't care enough about gender to think there was any other option, we just accepted the narrative presented to us, that we were just "not like other girls." None of us have ever felt super masculine or super feminine, that I can recall, because What The Fuck Even Is Gender, and why the fuck is it necessary to divide up traits into human-created categories anyway..

But it makes it hard to figure out exactly where we are in terms of transness.. We've known Basically Forever that we "aren't like other girls," but gender means so little to us that we never particularly wanted to be a boy either, so calling ourselves a trans guy or even just non-binary transmasculine still seems odd, even though it seems like the latter should fit..

But then, how much of that is just cisheteronormativity in action? Because I know we've had several dreams wherein we had a wang and it felt pretty natural, not foreign and out of place like the body's current genitalia setup. But like, what the fuck does wang-creating surgery even look like, that sounds like a whole mess of complicated shit to figure out, and we're already medically compromised..

With the arrival of our newest non-straight dude, one of several in the system, some of us have had to seriously reexamine where we stand on gender shit. I guess at this point it's generally accepted that we would have been much better suited to existence as "semi-effeminate AMAB homoflexible non-binary ace," rather than "pan-quoiro AFAB possibly transmasculine non-binary ace"..

I guess it feels like masculine should have been the starting point that we feminized to our liking, instead of starting off with feminine and not knowing if we want to be "masculine enough" to be categorized as "transmasculine".. Is it "masculine enough" if we want the boobs off but can't do HRT because half the shit this other video mentions sounds just as bad as having the boobs? We can't stand body hair and acne and all that, and god knows how HRT would even work with all the hormonal issues the body's already having..

The more I think about what we ultimately would ideally want, the more it seems like we would really just prefer having no AFAB reproductive parts/periods and no boobs, maybe a wang and a lower voice, and that's it. I guess maybe we could try out the aesthetic of some minimal beardage, but body hair in general already irritates several of us.. So like, for various reasons I don't see HRT happening.

We already know most of us would have the boobs off tomorrow if we could, but I guess what's tripping some of us up now is the fact that Vern is way less genitalia-repulsed than most of us, and in fact seems to generally handle the notion of Having A Body better than most of us.. And he definitely identifies as a guy, a non-binary semi-effeminate robot guy but still definitely masc-leaning, so.. What does it say about us if so many of us have already been questioning this for so long, and now the one who's most secure in his gender identity out of all of us is one of our masc-leaning non-binary guys?

I don't even know how we would.. React to it, I guess, if we did try to.. I dunno, embrace being transmasculine or something.. It doesn't feel like we'd prefer to do anything drastically different, behavior-wise, and we don't care enough about pronouns to try to figure out something gender-neutral that isn't "they" because gender-neutral "they" within a plural "they" system is confusing as fuck.. So like, I don't think most of us on the fence about being transmasculine would change our names or whatever, or use he/him pronouns, it would just.. Feel better to not have certain anatomical bits be perceived as part of who we are?

But then that just kind of makes us wonder if we're being a Bad Trans TM or something, like if that counts as reducing gender to body parts or something.. This is all so goddamn complicated.

Hot damn, finally got around to looking up some YouTubeage about how the fuck a phalloplasty actually works.. Taking skin, fat, a nerve, and an artery from the donor site to make it, that sounds so fucking unnerving to even think about, taking body stuff from one area and like.. Making a wang? Ughh, there are so many stages.. Yeah, no, even getting the AFAB reproductive bits out seems like possibly too much intense surgery for us, I don't see how we could ever manage this kind of bottom surgery, shit sounds fucking terrifying, I guess the notion of taking so much shit from another area on the body just kind of gets us in a body horror kind of way..

So yeah, I don't see us being able to do that.. And I mean, we're not really sexually-focused to begin with, so like, aside from just the base-level comfort of Having It, it's not like we'd desperately Need a wang or anything to have a fulfilling life? Just NOT having the AFAB reproductive shit/periods, that would be the main thing, not having that shit and not having the boobs. If we had a lower voice we could pass as a guy if we wanted to, and we'd probably like that, but weighing that one thing against the whole list of other shit that comes with HRT, it's probably not worth it.

But how do you ask for, much less get covered for, removing the boobs and reproductive stuff with no Official Medical Reason, just "because I don't want it"? Non-binary dysphoria doesn't seem like it would be considered a Valid Enough reason for it to be covered, but we don't want to go into a Full Transition either, so.. yeah, I dunno how we'll end up being more comfortable just existing in the body, with so many roadblocks.

I dunno, objectively it's probably internalized transphobia/nb-phobia or whatever the name for that is, not feeling "trans enough" and whatnot.. But I guess part of it is also, why can't we just be a fucking gender mystery and be allowed to exist that way? It's our fucking meatsuit, why do we have to pigeonhole ourselves into either Male or Female just for our insurance to believe that certain bodyparts cause us extreme dysphoria and we'd be better off without them? Why can't we just be a person with no boobs and maybe a wang and a voice that can't be readily identified as male or female?

I dunno why I'm even rambling about this, I know why, cisheteronormativity and various historical fuckeries, et cetera. I guess it's just frustrating trying to figure out where we are on the gender spectrum when we're blocked from making the modifications that would make the body feel less alien to us. Maybe if we could actually get top surgery, we would have a better idea of whether we consider ourselves transmasculine or just some kind of masc-leaning genderfluid non-binary, which is where several of us seem to be right now..

Hnngh. This guy seems like a good example of where we might end up one day if we do end up trying out HRT, but the idea of the body being more of a pain than it already is in terms of body hair/acne/et cetera just seems so shitty..

Haha, is it weird that I'm kind of hoping that ovarian cyst will end up being cancer and they'll give us an option to remove the whole reproductive setup in there? Because we would do that shit in a heartbeat. What's that called, a hysterectomy? A total laparoscopic hysterectomy with bilateral ovary-something-something.. How do you convince insurance that you Need that to improve your quality of life, without establishing yourself as Fully Transitioning?

Wow, this guy's scars are so small, huh, would have thought it'd be worse.. Goddamn, we'd love to have all that shit taken out. Not like we're fucking using any of it, it's just been causing us more and more agony since puberty, can't be doing this fucking 11-day period bullshit anymore, the dysphoria was bad enough on its own..

ugh, why the fuck am I even looking at all this, not like we can do any major surgeries for a while yet, if at all..

I don't know, I guess trying to work out what we would collectively be least-dysphoric with is useful, it's just extra depressing thinking about how hard it'll be to get the boobs off, or even reduced, much less the whole reproductive removal biz.. feh. Time to ramble about something else.

hmph, actually, should probably do the other quiz for that pass/fail class.. -.- That way we can just deal with the resume/goal list bullshit tomorrow, mmmmboy.. meh, that would require more focus than I probably have though, guess it'll be tomorrow.

I dunno. The 10th-to-12th anniversary is fast approaching, probably best to just disappear into distractions a bit longer, at least until it's passed. Still not sure if it'd be best to avoid tumblr or what, on the 12th, but I guess we'll see.. meh.

#this is mostly collective-wide shit but i Cannot Be Fucked to properly tag all this so #i'll just leave this here for now

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