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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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The Bezzle excerpt (Part IV)

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

This week marks the publication of my latest novel, The Bezzle, and to celebrate, I'm serializing an excerpt from Chapter 14 in six parts:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The Bezzle is a revenge story, a crime novel, and a technothriller. It stars Martin Hench, a hard-fighting forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding high-tech scams. Hench made his debt in last year's Red Team Blues (now in paperback!); The Bezzle is a standalone followup:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865854/redteamblues

The serial tells the tale of Stefon Magner, AKA Steve Soul, a once-famous R&B frontman whose disintegrating career turned to tragedy when his crooked manager forged his signature on a rights assignment contract that let him steal all of Stefon's royalties, which ballooned after modern hiphop artists discovered his grooves and started buying licenses to sample them. The first three installments related the sad circumstances of Stefon's life, and the real-world analogues (like Leonard Cohen and George Clinton, both of whom were pauperized by sticky-fingered managers) as well as one real-world countermeasure, copyright termination, a thing that more artists should know about and use:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Today's installment weaves in a major subplot for the first time in the serial: Los Angeles's notorious, murderous Sheriff's Deputy gangs. These are another unbelievable true tale: for decades, the LASD's deputies have formed themselves into criminal gangs, some of which require that initiates murder someone to be inducted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

They sport gang tattoos, have secret signs, and run vast criminal enterprises. This has been the subject of numerous investigative press reports, and one extensive official report that called the gangs "a cancer":

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/deputy-gangs-cancer-los-angeles-county-sheriffs-department-scathing-re-rcna73367

The sordid tales of the LASD gangs beggar belief. For example, deputies in charge of LA County jails forced inmates to pit-fight and took bets on the outcomes:

https://www.aclu.org/publications/report-cruel-and-usual-punishment-how-savage-gang-deputies-controls-la-county-jails

The taxpayers of LA have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to settle claims against LA's criminals with badges:

https://news.yahoo.com/deputies-accused-being-secret-societies-230851807.html

Periodically, LA judges and officials will insist that they are tackling the problem:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-05-17/dozens-of-lasd-deputies-ordered-to-show-suspected-gang-tattoos-reveal-others-who-have-them

But at every turn, the LA police "unions" manage to crush these investigations:

https://abc7.com/los-angeles-county-lasd-deputy-gangs-cliques/13492081/

And top cops are right there with them, insisting that these aren't "gangs" – they're just "subgroups":

https://lapublicpress.org/2024/01/former-la-sheriff-villanueva-sheriffs-gangs-are-just-subgroups/

It's very weird being an Angeleno and knowing that one of the largest, most militarized, best funded police departments in the world has been openly captured by a hyperviolent crime syndicate. When I was in the Skyboat Media studios last December with Wil Wheaton recording the audiobook for The Bezzle, Wil broke off from reading to say, "You know, someone's going to read this and google it and have their mind blown when they discover that it's real":

https://sowl.co/8nyGh

That's one of my favorite ways to turn literature into something more than entertainment. It's why I filled the Little Brother books with real-world surveillance, cryptography and security tech, giving enough detail to advance the plot and give readers an idea of what search terms would let them understand and use the concepts in the novel. That's something I'm happy to keep up with the Hench novels, unpicking the inner workings of scams and corruption. The more of us who are wise to this, the sooner we'll be able to get rid of it.

Here's part one of the serial:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/17/the-steve-soul-caper/#lead-singer-disease

Part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#copyright-termination

Part three:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#lawyer-up

And now, onto part four!

The last of the boxes had been shelved.

Benedetto rose from his chair. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said to the movers, and dug a roll of twenties out of his pocket and handed each of them two of their own. He turned to me as they filed out. “You wanna get sushi? The place next door is great.”

The empty storefront was in a down-at-heels strip mall in Eagle Rock. On one side, there was a Brazilian jujitsu studio that never seemed to have any students training in it. On the other side was Sushi Jiro, name on a faded sign with half its lightbulbs gone. Beyond that was a vaping store.

“The place next door is good?”

He laughed. “You San Francisco motherfuckers got terrible LA restaurant radar. Put Sushi Jiro in the Mission and it’d have a Michelin star and a six-month waiting list. Here it’s in a strip mall and only the locals know how good it is. Bet you never had a decent meal in this town, am I right?”

“I’ve had a few,” I said, “but I admit my track record isn’t great.”

“Let’s improve it.”

The sushi was amazing.

Inglewood Jams had the kind of books that were performatively bad, designed to foil any attempt at human comprehension.

But whoever cooked them was an amateur, someone who mistook complexity for obfuscation. Like cross-referencing was a species of transcendentally esoteric sorcery. I don’t mind cross-referencing. It’s meditative, like playing solitaire. I had Benedetto send over some colored post-it tabs and a big photocopier with an automatic feeder and I started making piles.

One night, I worked later than I planned. Sushi Jiro was becoming a serious hazard to my waistline and my sleep-debt, because when your dinner break is ten yards and two doors away from your desk, it’s just too damned easy to get back to work after dinner.

That night, I’d fallen into a cross-referencing reverie, and before I knew it, it was 2 a.m., my lower back was groaning, and my eyes were stinging.

I straightened, groaned, and slid my laptop into my bag. I found my keys and unlocked the door. The storefront was covered with brown butcher’s paper, but it didn’t go all the way to the edge. I had just a moment to sleepily note that there was some movement visible through the crack in the paper over the glass door when it came flying back toward me, bouncing off my toe, mostly, and my nose, a little. I put my one hand to my face as I instinctively threw myself into the door to close it again.

I was too late and too tired. A strong shoulder on the other side of the doorframe pushed it open and I stumbled back, and then the guy was on me, the door sighing shut behind him on its gas lift as he bore me to the ground and straddled my chest, a move he undertook with the ease of much practice. He pinned my arms under his knees and then gave me a couple of hard hits, one to the jaw, one to the nose.

My lip and nose were bleeding freely and my head was ringing from the hits and from getting smacked into the carpet tiles over concrete when I went down backward. I struggled—to free my arms, to buck off my attacker, to focus on him.

He was a beefy white guy in his late fifties, with watery dark eyes and a patchy shave that showed gray mixed in with his dark stubble. As he raised his fist for another blow, I saw that he was wearing a big class ring. A minute later, that ring opened my cheek, just under the orbit of my eye.

Apart from some involuntary animal grunts, I hadn’t made a sound. Now I did. “Ow!” I shouted. “Shit!” I shouted. “Stop!” I shouted.

He split my lip again. I bucked hard but I couldn’t budge him. He had a double chin, a gut, and he was strong, and used that bulk to back up his strength. It was like trying to free myself from under a boulder. That kept punching me in the face.

The strip mall would be deserted. Everything was closed, even the vaping store.

Shouting wouldn’t help. I did it anyway. He shut my mouth for me with a left. I gagged on blood.

He took a break from punching me in the face, then. I think he was tired. His chest heaved, and he wiped sweat off his lip with the back of his hand, leaving behind a streaky mustache of my blood.

He contemplated me, weighing me up. I thought maybe he was trying to decide if I had any fight left in me, or perhaps whether I had any valuables he could help himself to.

He cleared his throat and looked at me again. “Goddammit, I messed your face up so bad I can’t tell for sure. I hope to fuck that you’re Martin Hench, though.”

Even with my addled wits, this was an important piece of intelligence: he came here for me. This wasn’t a random act of senseless Los Angeles street violence. This was aimed at me.

I was briefly angry at Benedetto for not warning me that Chuy Flores was such a tough son of a bitch. Then I had the presence of mind to lie.

“I don’t know who the fuck this Mark Hendricks is.” My voice was thick with gargled blood, but I was proud of Mark Hendricks. Pretty fast thinking for a guy with a probable concussion. The guy slapped me open-handed across the face, and as I lay dazed for a moment, he shifted, reached into my back pocket for my wallet, and yanked it—and the seat of my pants—free. Before I could react, his knees were back on my biceps, pinning my arms and shoulders. It was a very neat move, and fast for an old guy like him.

He flipped my wallet open and squinted at it, then held it at arm’s length, then smiled broadly. He had bleach-white teeth, a row of perfectly uniform caps. Los fucking Angeles, where even the thugs have a million-dollar smile.

“Shoulda sprung for botox,” I slurred.

His grin got wider. “Maybe someday I will. Got these in trade from a cosmetic dentist I did some work for.” He dropped my wallet. “Listen, Martin Hench, you stay the fuck away from Thames Estuary and Lawrence Coleman.”

“It’s Lionel Coleman,” I said.

“What the fuck ever,” he said. He labored to his feet. I stayed still. He looked at me from a great height, and I stared up his nostrils. Without warning, he kicked my ribs hard enough that I heard one of them crack.

“You’ve been told,” he said to my writhing body, and let himself out.

ETA: Here's part five!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#poacher-turned-keeper

#pluralistic #the bezzle #martin hench #marty hench #red team blues #fiction #crime fiction #crime thrillers #thrillers #technothrillers #novels #books #royalties #wage theft #creative labor

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welcome-to-green-hills · 7 months

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What’s the difference between an anthropologist and an archaeologist? 😃 And what do archaeologists do when they’re not digging at excavation sites?

Oooh! Okay!❤️🤩❤️

An anthropologist is a scientist who studies human beings. The ask questions like, “what makes us human?” And “How can we define ourselves as human?”

We ask these questions through four (or five if you want to get technical) categories:

Linguistics

Cultural and Social Development

Biology

Archaeology (ME!)

and Applied Anthropology

Linguistics pretty much answers how languages not only changed through time, but how they’ve influenced culture and changes in society. It’s pretty common to have Linguistic Anthropologists work in a language lab where they play with words all day. They also make it a point to connect language with reading. If you ever talk to a linguistic anthropologist, ask them about cranial cap ripples.

Biological anthropologists help with the biological and organic portion of humans and nonhumans. You get primatologists (primates), forensic experts, retired doctors, paleontologists (human evolution), molecular scientists, and those that practice alternative methods of medicine. If you ever meet a biological anthropologist, as them how many ways to Sunday you can study teeth.

Cultural Anthropologists is very open in interpretation. I say that because it’s always advancing in its field with new discoveries every day. Cultural anthropologists study social groups. They immerse themselves in artwork, written/spoken literature, music, humanities, material goods, women’s rights, gender and sexuality. and social engagement. Kinda like how it’s a Tumblr norm to say, “I like your shoelaces. Thanks, I got them from the president.” They learn behaviors and manners, physical and non-physical telling of what makes that society function. If you ever meet a cultural anthropologist, ask them what their favorite cultural greeting.

Archaeology is a field in anthropology that’s commonly classified as a “historical science.” We use the scientific method to answer questions about the past and continuously ask “why?” We’re not Indiana Jones, many of us frown upon the comparison. We’re environmentally conscious of what we do when looking through historical records and digging at different sites. You need an understanding of history, linguistics, biology, and cultural practices for what site you work at. When archaeologists aren’t digging, they’re considered “shovel bums.” They travel around from one agency to the next (if they’re freelance) and dig year-round. We practically live out of a suitcase. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m not a shovel bum. I’ve made my archaeological work through museums and conservation labs.

Applied Anthropology is a newer branch in anthropology. They ask the question, “now what!?” They look for practical solutions. They question a bit more and ask, “now what do we do? How can we make this more efficient for humans?” If you ever meet someone in this field, ask them their stance on Cyber-Anthropology (I.E., video games, AI, robots). You’ll get a mixed bag, but you might come out wiser.

SAPIENS.ORG is an anthropological magazine that’s designed for anthropologists, as well as those who are learning/interested in the field. Free subscription. Scope them out if you’re interested! And know that I’m always up for chatting about it here. I know that I’ve gotten some DMs from y’all wanting to know more about it. Know that my inbox is open.

#I hope this helped you my dear #mystery anon #off topic #I am an anthropologist #I am an archaeologist

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 4 months

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By: Matt Naham

Published: May 21, 2024

20-year-old woman completely made up story that ‘creepy’ man tried to rape her outside of supermarket, leading him to be wrongly jailed for a month: DA

A man spent a month in jail after being accused of attempting to rape and kidnap a woman in a Pennsylvania supermarket parking lot in April, but there’s just one problem, according to the district attorney: the accuser’s story was completely made up, and she admitted as much when cops confronted her.

The startling turn of events in Bucks County was announced Monday, as 20-year-old Anjela Borisova Urumova, identified as a Bristol Township resident, was charged for lying about the attack.

[ Anjela Borisova Urumova in a mug shot (Bucks County DA); the Redner’s supermarket parking lot (WPVI/screengrab) ]

DA Jennifer Schorn’s office said that Urumova falsely accused Daniel Pierson, 41, of pulling her pants down and striking her outside of a Redner’s supermarket in Middleton Township on April 16.

Pierson went on to face felony charges and spent exactly 31 days behind bars before charges were dropped last Friday and he walked free, the DA said, noting that neither surveillance footage nor Urumova’s iPhone corroborated her claims.

“As part of the investigation, Middletown Township Police collected and reviewed available surveillance video from multiple retailers in the area of the reported attack, and a detective with the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office conducted a forensic review of Urumova’s cellphone data,” the DA’s office said. “The review led to the discovery of multiple inconsistencies and contradictory information with Urumova’s account of the attack at the Redner’s parking lot.”

Prosecutors said that police detectives as recently as Friday “confronted” Urumova and got her to admit that she fabricated the allegations.

“This investigation concluded that Urumova falsely reported an attack to police on April 16, and specifically targeted, and later identified, Pierson as her attacker,” the DA’s office added. “Urumova said she gave a description of his truck and identified him because she had seen him and the truck in the past[.]”

Local ABC affiliate WPVI reported that Urumova admitted she falsely accused Pierson because she’d seen him before and believed him to be “creepy.” The defendant further said that her claimed injuries stemmed from an incident with her grandmother, the report said. The complaint obtained by Law&Crime revealed even more about that.

“Her grandmother, who Urumova claimed suffered from dementia, did not recognize her as she entered the house and threw a plastic object at her, striking her in the lip. This incident allegedly caused the laceration to her lip that she later blamed on Pierson,” court documents said.

Authorities said that the defendant specifically described the nonexistent attacker’s truck as having a “Thin Blue Line” sticker on it.

After investigators tracked Pierson down and put him in a photo lineup the following day, Urumova said she was “60% sure” he was the suspect, documents said.

Court records reviewed by Law&Crime show that Urumova was arraigned Monday on charges for making false reports (two counts), causing false alarm to an agency of public safety, tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, and for “unsworn falsification to authorities” (three counts).

[ Anjela Urumova charges ]

Bail was set at $30,000, records also show. It’s unclear if Urumova has an attorney yet. She turned 20 years old on May 9.

Read the criminal complaint obtained by Law&Crime here.

So, a guy's going about his day, minding his own business and this woman just randomly takes a dislike to him and decides he needs to be disappeared from society.

That's all it took.

Now imagine how much more motivated a spiteful ex or a regretful one-night stand would be. Don't tell me false accusations are rare when they're this easy to make.

Here's the ironic part: studies suggest she's far more likely to be sexually assaulted by another woman in prison than by a man in the free world.

[ Source: "The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions", Lara Stemple, JD, and Ilan H. Meyer, PhD ]

#false accusations #false rape accusations #believe women #religion is a mental illness

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angelofsmalldeath-codeine · 8 months

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Hear me out… But please, please, please let’s use our text comprehension and critical thinking skills before dog piling on me. Thanking yous.

Note: this is NOT a pearl clutching post.

Rant below the cut.

TW: kink; kink in public; consent

We don’t kink shame in dis haus. The lawd knows we enjoy kinky stuff.

However, I gotta say that kink requires consent from everyone participating in it, either actively or as a voyeur. There are hard limits to be negotiated, boundaries to be respected, agreed safety systems for when things become uncomfortable/unsafe.

Hence kinky activities taking place in dedicated spaces (their home, pride, clubs, dungeons, whatever is your flavour) and with consenting adults. Now, when you take your kink into the public space, you are forcing everyone around you to take part in it. And children exist in the public space regardless of many people wanting them to never leave the house until they are 18 or something. Children cannot consent to be part of someone else’s kink scene. And no, this is not a “But think of the children” stances that fundamental evangelicals use to tear apart people’s rights.

The demonisation of sexuality and sex declined over time although it still bores influence on society’s thinking on what is ‘the norm’ and ‘acceptable sexual expressions’. This often led to criminalisation of sexuality and sexual practices which deviated from the established norm (heterosexual PIV for procreation purposes). Sodomy or masturbation were labelled sinful, which required an exorcism or other religious interventions (Tosh, 2014; 2017). Heterosexual sodomy was a crime in the UK until 1994 when the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act decriminalised it for adults. Check Buggery Act 1533 and the famous trials it’s brought us if you are curious. The Mental Health Act in the UK uses the same language to describe sadists in a consensual community and in the forensic setting of convicted serial killers. Thus, making it possible that a diagnosis of sexual deviance can be used to commit a person to a mental institution (Tosh, 2017). The DSM-5 conflates both and casts the assumption that everyone with a sadist or sexual deviant label is dangerous or a risk to commit extreme violence.

We cannot get on a high horse and scream that we are heavy on consent and respect when we take our kink to a fucking Ikea! Has anyone in that store consented to watch their Pup Play? Were there children around? My guess would be yes because it was a Saturday and they were in the restaurant. Children cannot consent to sexual activities. Even if it’s “just” light Pup Play with no sexual acts (I’m referring to touching, penetration, and such, don’t get smart on me now) happening in front of them.

We can be our own worst enemies. We cannot advocate to not being stigmatised, prejudiced against, judged for our preferences, yell from the mountain tops that we do consent better and turn around and force everyone around us to take part in our scenes. We can still be imprisoned and have our lives destroyed because of our preferences.

————————————-

I know the Daily Record is a steaming pile of shite of a newspaper. Don’t come for me on that one but this is where the footage came from.

Source:

Another example

#hemmy’s rant

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aromanticasexualandppop · 1 year

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Life in the Future

Accepting aromanticism and asexuality was very easy. It took very little time to accept these as part of my identity, and there were no reluctance or hesitation when I arrived at this point. It was because these words really resonated with me, embodied my unconscious that I did not even notice when I was a child.

But what comes after acceptance? What comes after the euphoria and relief and liberation and satisfaction? What will life become now, when it cannot follow the linear path society suggests - dating, marriage, sex, children, and a lifelong companionship?

I think what led me to accept my aromanticism and asexuality faster was that deep down, I felt that life without marriage and children and other things was what has always felt comfortable.

So when I started to think about what my life will be like in the future now that I know I do not like forming romantic or sexual relationships, I started to look forward to that day. I just planned what I wanted to do.

When I go to college, I'll find a boarding house to live in. I don't like heavy, sweet, and greasy foods in the morning so I'll eat bread with cheese fillings for the most part. I'll buy a good notebook with black designs and a friction pen to write notes in Psychology with. If that's too laborious for me, I'd type on my laptop or write on my tablet with a stylus. Maybe I'd have friends or maybe I won't, but I'll hang out in the library or at a cafe with danmei music blasting in my earphones to do my work, while eating cake or drinking milk tea.

I'll read some good novels and webtoons on my freetime. Finally buy their merch. Finally learn Chinese and Korean to read time (lmao can I??). Make some online friends to geek out about these masterpieces.

Download MMORPG and RPG games again. Create a strong and OP character. Maybe experience the pay2win life. Finally try out Mobile Legends, COD, etc.

At night, I'd like to cook for myself: adobong kangkong, fried tofu with pork and eggplant or any egg dish. Maybe try noodles, and some Korean or Chinese cuisine that I can search up some recipes on TikTok. I'd try baking cake and making pizza.

With the time I have left, I'll learn so many things I have always wanted to learn. Kickboxing, knitting, crochet, violin, harp, dancing, singing. Maybe join an organization to learn about people from different professions: former spies, forensic science, marine biology, astrophysics, artificial intelligence, radiation biology, professional hugging, activists, etc.

I'll volunteer in an orphanage and help the community there. Visit every two weeks. Also join a queer support group. Visit my parent once every month and spoil the heck out of them with gifts.

Maybe I'll get a qpp or a close friend who lives next door that I'll hang out with or maybe I don't. I'll get a cat or a dog if they ever choose me and spoil the heck out of them as well. Cuddle them to naps. Take them for walks or travel around the neighborhood with them on a bike. Record videos of them that will be saved on a cloud.

The house will be full of pet supplies but it will be clean. Dreamcatchers and suncatchers will be put next to the windows. For added effect, the windows will have film on them. The portraits on the wall and next to the writing desks will be merchandise or role models. And then, I'll write to my hearts content.

The food I eat, the clothes I'll wear, the games I'd play, the literature I'll read, the house I'd decorate, the profession I'd have, the things I'd learn, the cause I'd fight for, the things I'll hate and like, and the things that I'll cherish. This is the best life.

Either that or I'll just return to the void xx ☠️

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totallyaxl · 2 years

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joseph quinn & he&him/cis male ‷ watch out , axel deal has crash-landed into roswell !! they look thirty years old and celebrate their birthday on the thirty-first of october. they are from lansing, illinois reside in tripp’s trailer park and are currently working as a guitarist/manager at feel good records. one thing you should know about them is he dreams of the day he will be in a spinning glass crate doing a guitar solo. ‷ ( taylor, cst, he/them, 29 )

full name ➵ axel deal

nicknames ➵ axe, asshole

birthday ➵ october 31st

age ➵ thirty

gender identity ➵ cismale

pronouns ➵ he/him/his

sexual orientation ➵ unlabelled

place of birth ➵ london, england (moved to chicago at a young age)

current location ➵ roswell, new mexico

occupation ➵ guitarist/manager at feel good records

education ➵ studied some criminal justice in college but ultimately said fuck it.

languages ➵ english, spanish, french (a little bit), italian, & is learning sign language.

pets ➵ none yet!

PERSONALITY

temperament ➵ extrovert

hogwarts house ➵ he never took the test. someone help him.

mental disorders ➵ anxiety

habits ➵ smoking, drinking, nail tapping, and a tendency to talk too quickly sometimes

positive traits ➵ enthusiastic, kindhearted, carefree,

negative traits ➵ temperamental, reckless, self destructive,

QUICK BIOGRAPHY: (tw: death mention. drug use mention)

childhood➵ he was born in a family that did not have much to their name, even less of a name to society, and he was the middle child of his siblings. before his dad passed, when axel was ten years old. he didn’t die or anything, he simply died to axel. his dad did share his passion for music with his children before never returning from the buisness trip he took. axel was the one who picked it up most the knowledge and almost instantly fell in love with playing the guitar. he also fell in love with the idea of being in a band one day. axel grew up listening to a lot of 80s heavy metal/music and watching a lot of older movies. when his dad vanished, and his mother turned to drugs to numb her sadness, axe; ended up turning a bit more rebellious than anyone could have expected.

home life/school life ➵ the older axel got the less he liked being called axel and preferred “axe” instead. things at home became harder as he became more of a rebel, much to his mothers dismay, he had a run in with the law once or twice. he almost got his mother arrested one day due to her pissing him off a bit too much that day, but ultimately he didn’t. he left home to live with his friends/couch surfing when he was nineteen. things in school were surprisingly good, though, because axe was actually very smart and often came out top of his class. he was easy to get along with and made friends with almost anyone. there were times he got into fights, suspended too, but ultimately he did end up passing in the top of his class.

dreams ➵ axe has always dreamed of two things; becoming a rockstar in a rockin’ band & becoming a forensic scientist and help solve crime cases. because of life neither one of those has been achieved just yet, but he continues to work on it! he now lives in roswell, new mexico while both working actively to seek out anyone wanting to join a band and as one of the managers at feel good records.

CONNECTIONS

childhood friend➵ could be online too! just someone who has known him for a long time and has a close bond with him would be nice <3!

ex(s) ➵ anyone who either ended on good or bad terms! could’ve been a long distance relationship or something local. (0/2)

pen pal ➵ someone he’s kept in touch with over seas and maybe convinced him that roswell, new mexico was a good spot to move to! they would have a close friendship :)!

band mates ➵ he would play the lead guitar but he’s looking for a drummer, a bassist, & lead guitarist.

more ➵ anything else that is plotted! would love more connections <3!

#roswellintro #tw: death mention #tw: drug use mention

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sstvar · 2 years

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da da daa it’s finally here 10 months later my mostly fleshed out batim/batdr AU

Introducing: Crimson Rites

what if i told you most of this came to me in a dream i had this morning as i was going in and out of consciousness.

after this is posted i will slowly start posting the character references for everyone in my AU and i can start answering asks with art of characters then, but regardless please feel free to send asks anyways, just keep it PG 16

depending on the ask i might respond in character, but i won’t be role playing

pspspspspsps hello other batim/batdr fans wanna be mutuals pspspspsppssp i’ll post regularly now i swear PSPSPSPSPSSPS

details are under the cut, they were just kinda long lol. they establish a lot of important things so i do recommend you read them if you’re interested

Synopsis

It’s the year 1920, and Western society has peaked in fashion, music, wealth, technological advancement and, oddly enough, the paranormal.

Since their early college years, Joey Drew and Henry Stein have harboured an insatiable curiosity for all that is supernatural amongst the ordinary world. Due to The Collision, the world has been anything BUT ordinary, yet many layers of it still remain undiscovered, unscathed.

Together, Joey, Henry and their own band of bizarre paranormal ‘experts’ (use that term sparingly) will unearth the many wonders and secrets of all that is eerie.

After biting off a bit more than they can chew, the group drags themselves into the middle of an active murder investigation. In order to get out of it, the team needs to find answers; only problem is that those answers lay waiting in the afterlife. This admittedly amateur team is gonna need all the help they can get in order to make their way out of this mess, and luckily, their boss knows just the guy.

Important Details

Setting

So first off, this AU takes place in Queens, New York on what I can only describe as a whole other planet earth, not really multiverse style, but I’ll explain. This earth is basically the result of several different dimensions merging into one. As a result, many mythical beings live among humanity (ex; angels, ghouls, demons, sirens, werewolves, fauns). The area this AU takes place in is populated mostly by demons, humans, angels and ghouls. The event that caused this is widely regarded as “The Collision.” The main focus isn’t this event itself, but it’s why this world is what it is. These beings have come into contact with humanity on several occasions throughout history through little blips in the lines between dimensions, this just gave them more permanence on earth. Throughout the world, different landscapes/environments from these overlapping dimensions can be found. The Collision also left three moons in its wake.

Characters

Joey and Henry were high school friends and basically made the “let’s be roomies and start a business together” pact. This friendship was maintained throughout their college years, and with Joey’s already intense interest in the paranormal and a degree in parapsychology, the dream of forming a paranormal business was born. With that, they founded Quantam Paradox Inc. (Joey’s name is 1.5x bigger on the front sign).

The team itself consists of Thomas “Tom” Connor, Allison Pendle, Ruth Felten, Wally Franks, Anya Morozov and Shawn Flynn.

Allison Pendle is a well-practiced psychic

Tom specializes in sound engineering and develops a lot of the team’s recording equipment

Ruth mainly works to analyze all of the evidence that makes its way back to base using forensics

Anya’s main responsibility is to perform research on haunting sites pre-investigation and interview eye witnesses/ individuals involved with said investigation

Both Shawn and Wally work to develop experimental technology for the team to use during investigations

On an actual investigation, Allison, Tom, Ruth and Anya are typically the ones who are on site the others got told to wait in the car ☹️

The phrase “make a deal with the devil” takes on a whole new and more absolute meaning here. Many humans and members of other species make contracts and pacts with members of the demon species. It is possible to form these agreements with angels as well, they’re just much more picky in regards to stipulations; contracts with demons are more popular for this reason. Demons still make rules surrounding their contracts, they just tend to be a little more lenient. Many still fear for their souls, so the majority of these deals are more calm/domestic in nature. However, it would be a lie to say that nobody has used or would use one of these deals for malicious purposes. Most of these deals, malevolent or not, are made in what’s called “The Underworld of New York” (commonly just called the Underworld by citizens and is an area of Queens) in a place known as the Bottle Eater. Just pray that your name doesn’t come up there outside of your awareness.

Now there is one demon that is especially popular when it comes to contract-making, the one they call “The Boogeyman.” Really, it’s the Ink Demon, who goes by Bendy in business affairs. He basically runs the Bottle Eater and resides in the hotel it’s attached to along with many of his other companions. As for the reason why he’s so popular, well, when you hear “ink demon,” you’re not expecting something too scary, right? Most people enter a deal with him because of this; they think he’s less intimidating. Well they sure are wrong. One of these misguided souls is Joey Drew, who was seeking a better understanding of the underworld, a kind of ‘insider’ if you will (because really, his little ghost hunting team were amateurs at most and he needed the upper hand). He got just that, but at what cost? Nobody knows, it’s one of the Ink Demon’s consistent rules: the terms of contracts aren’t to be discussed with anyone outside the contract. Regardless, after the contract was made, Quantum Paradox Inc. became a long-term associate of his. Yes, this is the “guy” that Joey enlists the help of.

Alice resides in the Underworld as well with her two sisters, Nyx and Calliope. All were the result of an angel father and demon mother. These coven members siblings are some of the Underworld’s most prominent entertainment figures. They make for a killer trio, quite literally sometimes.

note: there may be very minor changes to this as the story develops further. ALSO, the ink demon isn’t the antagonist or villain in this AU so sorry if i maybe made it sound like that. he’s more of an anti-hero yk? yeah.

i really hope you guys like this as much as i do and again i am holding out a little cup with “asks please” on it

#clashing my two interests together like i’m playing with toy cars #batim au #batim oc #batdr #bendy and the dark revival #bendy and the ink machine #ink demon #joey drew #henry stein #alice angel #allison pendle #thomas connor #wally franks #shawn flynn #batim #crimson rites

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bhaalschosen · 10 months

Note

15, 19, 21 for sloane please!

starting to realize i love this question meme because for this character all the answers are going to read like, wildly unhinged

15. what mundane human job would they have in modern society to pay the bills and do they like it

she's a medical examiner. she went to med school and she has a medical degree, works in forensics.

but also in the background she'd own a weird hole in the wall shop where she sells both crystals and strange taxidermy and other weird curiosities that caters to like four regular clients. this is what her doctor money pays for. she has an etsy shop

19. their top 3 songs on repeat

she doesn't really listen to music except in rare cases and never on repeat. when she wants to put on noise to work to she opens up youtube on her phone browser (not the app) and puts on youtube playlists of like, whale sounds or the nasa recordings of planets in space. this is also what she puts on if you give her the aux cord.

21. do they use duolingo and what's their longest streak

she took languages in school for fun so she's very multilingual (primarily english and french but also a few others) but not because of an app. her phone has no apps on it it's the default background with the default homepage and and you open up her camera roll and it's all photos of roadkill and human bones

#sloane blackthorn

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rhetoricandlogic · 1 year

Text

Tear Tracks

Tear Tracks - Malka Older

Illustrated by Richie Pope

Edited by Carl Engle-Laird

Wed Oct 21, 2015 9:00ams

Flur traveled across the stars to make first contact with the Cyclopes, hoping to forge a peace treaty between humanity and the first sentient aliens they’ve discovered. She’s undergone careful training and study to prepare for this moment. But what if her approach is too human?

Nobody expected them to look human. If anyone still harbored that kind of anthropocentric bias, they kept it bottled up with their other irrational fantasies (or nightmares) of successful contact. The biophysicists had theorized alternative forms that could support higher intelligence: spiraling cephalopods, liquid consciousness, evenly-distributed sentience. The Mission Director, who was known for being broad-minded, even invited some science fiction writers to work with the scientists in imagining what intelligent alien life might look like. The collaboration didn’t generate many usable ideas for the Mission (although it did lead to half a dozen best sellers and a couple of ugly lawsuits). And after all that thought and effort and retraining of assumptions, the first intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms they found were humanoid.

Not completely human, not like actors in silver face paint, but bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal, with most of the sensory organs concentrated in a central upper appendage that it was difficult not to call the head.

“We need a new word, a whole new vocabulary,” Tsongwa said, as he and Flur reviewed hours and hours of long-distance surveillance video. “A term to remind us that they’re not human, but still give them equal importance and intelligence.”

Because not only were they humanoid (the word did not satisfy Tsongwa, but it caught on and stuck), they were clearly intelligent, with societies and civilizations. They lived not in the caves or intelligent-organic complexes or mind-alterable environments hypothesized by the scientists, but in identifiable buildings, in cities. (The Mission Director promptly brought in architects, urbanists, psychologists, forensic archeologists, urban psychologists, forensic architects). They were “advanced” (Tsongwa insisted on putting the word in quotes) enough that first contact with them could be via radio, and then video. Many of the linguistic problems, not to mention the initial shock of alien existence, could be worked out long before Flur and Tsongwa got anywhere near the planet.

The Mission Director insisted on the importance of a protocol for contact, flexible enough to use in as many different contexts as they could imagine (an optimist, he was still hoping to discover intelligent spiraling cephalopods), yet structured enough to allow for some degree of standardization. Two ambassadors, one male, one female (the Mission Director did not point out that they were also of different “races,” another word Tsongwa used only in quotes). They would go armed, but imperceptibly so. They would go with scientific objectives—as much observation and recording as possible—but also with diplomatic goals that were more important: they were to bring back, if not a treaty, at least an agreement. “A framework,” the Mission Director explained, “for future relations.” He made a template for them, but encouraged them to modify it as necessary. The next day he came back with a few more templates, to give them a sense of the range of options.

Flur, the brilliant young star of what they call the Very Foreign Service, smiles and nods, but he’s overselling it. She’s pretty sure she can figure out the acceptable options, maybe even some the Mission Director hasn’t come up with, just as she’s pretty sure she can charm these aliens by respecting and listening to them, by empathizing, by improvising. Maybe more than Tsongwa. She likes Tsongwa, but he’s so serious, and places too much importance on semantics. She knows he’s supposed to be the experienced balance to her youth and genius, but nobody’s experienced anything like this before. And he’s not actually that much older; it’s just the deep lines on his face and the slow pace of his consideration that make him seem so.

Flur is aware of another probable advantage: as far as they have been able to tell, most of the alien leadership is female. Or the equivalent of female, what looks like female to the humans, which means human females will look like leaders to the aliens. Even Flur’s skin color is closer to the rosy purple of alien flesh. Though no one has mentioned either of these cultural elements, Flur prepares herself for the possibility that she will need to act as the head of the expedition, even if she remains technically subordinate to Tsongwa.

Her confidence, or overconfidence, does not pass unnoticed. But it doesn’t worry the Mission Director or Tsongwa much. Flur is never disrespectful, and she works hard, studying the video and audio recordings, diagramming and re-diagramming what they understand about political structures, writing short treatises about cultural practices.

The time and place of the landing are set, and there is a flashy ceremony for the departure from the base station, full of flags and symbols and fine music, scripted and simulcast. Flur has an odd longing to wave to her mother, but manages to quell it. Fortunately, the Mission Director has managed to fend off requests to simulcast the mission itself (largely by reminding politicians and media executives about the unlikely but real possibility of a grisly end to the adventure). The closing air lock leaves Flur and Tsongwa alone, except for the eighty-two mission staff looped into their communications and recording network. They beam down, a slang phrase for what is in practice a long, bumpy, and dangerous trip into the planet’s atmosphere on a shuttle known as the Beamer. This is Tsongwa’s expertise, and Flur is appropriately grateful for it as she copilots. He ably navigates them to the designated landing site, an extensive field outside of the alien city.

Flur takes a deep breath once they are settled. Through the small window she can make out tall, curving shapes: the aliens, the natives of this planet, have gathered as planned. From the screen on the dash the Mission Director looks back at her, almost bathetic in the way emotion and overwhelming awareness of the significance of this moment play openly on his face. Flur checks her comms and stands up. For a moment she and Tsongwa are face-to-face in the narrow aisle between the seats, and though his chin is level with her forehead Flur feels for the first time that they are looking straight at each other. This moment, though it is being recorded and transmitted in a dozen different sensory and technological combinations, is still theirs alone. There is a mutual nod—Flur doesn’t know which of them initiates it—and then Tsongwa leads the way to the hatch.

Stepping out of the Beamer, Flur finds that the aliens look less human at this close range. Their extended bodies curve gracefully into hooks and curlicues, partially obscured by flowing robes that give the impression of square-sailed ships luffing to the wind. When two of them step forward with extended hands, Flur can see that their three fingers are flexible as snakes. They cover the lower part of their faces with more cloth, but above that their noses have only a single nostril, flat on the face, opening and closing like a whale’s. Unsettlingly, it is the eyes that are most human: none of the giant pupils or extended slits of old science fiction movies, but (what appear to be) irises and robin’s-egg sclera within the familiar pointed oval shape, although they each have only one. In the popular press they are already known as the Cyclopes, but Flur finds each eye startlingly (perhaps deceptively?) expressive.

The two aliens have paused, hovering at a safe distance. Maybe that’s their idea of personal space? Flur glances at Tsongwa, a sideways slant of the eyes obscured by her goggles, but he is already stepping forward, arms up and out, mimicking the circular alien gesture that they have identified as significant and positive. Through her speakers, Flur can just make out the sound of him clearing his throat.

“Greetings,” he says, in an accented Cyclopan that they hope is comprehensible . He pauses. In what is surely the best moment of either of their lives, the aliens say the same word back to him.

The two designated humanoids approach, and curve more so that their singular eyes are nearly on a level with their visitors’. The skin of their faces looks parchment-like, worn and creased, like oak leaves pasted together, with striking lines trailing down from both corners of their eyes. They pronounce elaborate welcomes which Flur only partially understands. Their names are Slanks and Irnv, and they are happy to welcome their most esteemed visitors from another planet and take them in this honorable procession to the capital city of their island, where they will meet their leader. Flur almost lets out a reflexive giggle at the irony of it all, but she squelches it, and accepts instead the folds of material that Irnv hands her. “A costume more suited to our climate,” Slanks says, as he hands the same to Tsongwa.

Flur, cozily padded in a latest-model spacesuit, had not noticed any issues with the climate, but at least the local dress resolves one concern. There had been some worry at Mission Control that, having transmitted visuals of humans in their native habitat to the aliens, they would find the sight of them in their tubed breathing apparatuses disconcerting, but the alien clothes include fabric to cover the lower face, so that should help.

It is a moderately long walk to the city, and Flur keeps an eye on the visit clock ascending without pause in the corner of her view, and the bars representing her life support resources shrinking ceaselessly. A milky fog obscures much of the landscape, but Flur stares at the fragments of organic material at her feet, twigs and leaves in strange shapes, or maybe shells or corals, or something they have no word for yet. She longs to scoop up a sample, but is embarrassed to do so in front of their attentive entourage.

At the edge of the city they are guided to a canal or river where they board an almost flat barge, its slightly curved sides dressed with the same fabric that the Cyclopes wear. As they detach and float slowly along, Flur begins to feel disoriented, although she can’t figure out what is dizzying her. Finally, looking down at the canal, she decides it is the water, or the liquid, which is sluggish and thick. Grateful for the flowing native costume, she detaches a specimen vial from her space suit and within the compass of the billowing sleeves manages to scoop up some of the canal liquid, seal, and pocket it. She doesn’t think anyone has noticed, not even Tsongwa, who is deep in limited conversation with Slanks.

The gray-blue buildings are sinuous and low. Flur wonders if they continue underground. They cross a few other canals, but there are also pedestrian paths where tall humanoid shapes in expansive robes move, pause, interact. As they stream inexorably by, Flur catches a glimpse of two flowing dresses, one bold purple, one carnelian red, pressed against each other, fluttering suggestively. She looks away quickly, then looks back, but they have drifted out of sight before she can be sure what she saw.

The canal empties into a wide circular plaza, like a collection basin, or possibly the source of the waters. Avenues dotted with pedestrians surround the central circle of mixing waters, which has been waterscaped into a flat sculpture, tilted slightly upward, with streams of blue and lavender liquid running down it in carefully designed flows. Flur can make no sense of it, but she’s sure it’s important.

“It’s beautiful,” she says to Irnv, and although the alien replies “Thank you,” Flur has the feeling that the crinkles around her eye express politeness rather than real pleasure. Beautiful was not the right word.

They disembark and enter the palace through a gateway draped with more cloth, the bright colors this time woven through with a black thread that gives the whole a muted sheen. The corridors are high and narrow, and slope (downward, so she must have been right about going underground) more steeply than a human architect would allow. Despite her oxygen regulator, Flur is out of breath by the time they come to a stop in a cavernous chamber, and she thinks uneasily about their tanks. As a precaution, during the visit planning they halved their life-support time frame and gave only that conservative number to the aliens. Still, Flur can’t help being aware that everything was an estimate, that if for any reason they can’t use the barge it will take them longer to get back, that they are therefore dependent on the aliens. She calms her breathing, catches Tsongwa’s eye on her and nods to tell him she’s okay. Then she looks around. Mission Control sees what she sees.

The room, like the corridors, has no right angles; its shape suggests the word “organic” to Flur, although she guesses Tsongwa would be able to find some semantic problem with that. The impression is intensified by a shallow pool of slightly lilac-tinted liquid in the middle of the room, roughly where the conference table would have been on Earth. The Cyclopes are reclining in flexible harnesses, suspended from a frame that hangs from the rounded ceiling and ending in constructions almost like hammocks. It takes quite a bit of adjusting for these to be feasible for Flur and Tsongwa (more wasted time, Flur can’t help thinking), but once she’s cradled in one she finds it surprisingly comfortable, her weight evenly distributed, her feet just resting on the ground.

While they are finishing with Tsongwa’s harness she examines the row of decorations along the curving wall, gradually realizing that they are not abstract moldings, but sculpted likenesses. There are no gilded frames, no contrasting background to firm, smiling faces, but once she sees it Flur can’t believe she missed it. There are so many analogs in her own world: the row of ancient principals on the moldy wall of her high school; the faces of presidents in her history book and hanging in pomp in the Palais National; the old, unsuccessful directors hanging outside the Mission Director’s office. Conscious of the video feed, she looks at each face in turn for a few seconds, trying to learn what she can.

They do appear to be mostly female, although Flur counts three faces of the thirty-eight that scan to her as male. There are no confident smiles; a few are actually looking away, their faces turned almost to profile, and most of the eyes are angled downward. They look almost sorrowful; then, as she keeps staring, they look too sorrowful, the way the politicians at home look too distinguished. The vertical lines on the cheeks, trailing down from the corners of each august eye, begin to look stylized. In fact, much as the sequences at home evolve from paintings to photographs to three-dimensional photographs to hyperphotos, the moldings also show the passage of time. The first few are exact and detailed, like living aliens frozen into the wall, and as she follows the series back they become vague and imperfect. The face that Flur places as the oldest is painted in a combination of blues and lavenders, as though faded from the more usual dark purples, and the two-tone palette is unique. Staring at it, Flur starts to feel that it looks familiar. She remembers the fountain in the huge plaza, and suddenly that flowing pattern of water makes sense. It was a face—this face.

She leans toward Irnv to ask her, but at that moment everyone starts swinging back and forth in their hammocks, and more aliens start filing into the room. The last face to enter is also familiar: it is the most recent in the sequence of portraits. “It’s the president,” Irnv whispers. “She lost her three children and husband to sudden illness over the period of a year!”

Flur has no idea how to respond to that, and her half-hearted “I’m so sorry” is lost in the flurry of introductions, swinging of hammock-seats, and a brief interlude of atonal song. After that it is the president who, arranging herself with some ceremony in her hammock-chair, begins to speak. Flur gets most of it. Irnv, who has also apparently been studying, whispers the occasional English word in her ear, but these are so out of pace with Flur’s internal translation that they are more disruptive than helpful. She is grateful that she will have the recording to listen to. She will translate it word by word, slowly, in her office at Mission Control (a thought that fills her with momentary, inconvenient homesickness) but the general point is clear enough. Honored to receive this first interplanetary delegation; already the communications between them have set the foundations for a strong and close friendship, the type of friendship (if Flur understands correctly) which can withstand any tragedy; this personal visit, however, will truly interlace (or something like that) their peoples in mutual regard. Blah, blah, blah, basically.

Then it is Flur’s turn. She had expected to stand up to give her presentation, and it feels odd to speak from the balanced suspension of the hammock, without much preamble except the turning of expectant, one-eyed faces towards her. She takes out the small projector they brought, and aims a three-dimensional frame of the rotating Earth into the middle of the room, slightly closer to the president’s seat. Her presentation is brief and colorful: a short introduction to the history and cultures of Earth, glossing over war, poverty, and environmental degradation and focusing on the beauty and hope integral to human and other biodiversity, with subtle nods to technological and, even more subtly, military power. The aliens seem impressed by the projection, although there is too much light in the room for it to come through at its full sparkling vividness. Flur wonders if they hear her spiel at all.

She nods at Tsongwa, and he takes over, describing their proposed agreement, or framework. Leaning back in her hammock as he steps through the template, explaining why each section is important and the degrees of flexibility on each point, Flur has to admit he’s quite good: understated, yes, but that seems to fit the mood better than she had expected. Before they left she had, privately, suggested to the Mission Director that they switch roles, so that she could take on the key task of persuasion, but although he seemed to consider it, he had not made the change. Flur knows she would have been good, and her Cyclopean is slightly better than Tsongwa’s, but he has learned his piece down to the last inflection. He even seems to have taken on the president’s mannerisms, looking down and to the side and only occasionally, at key points, making eye contact.

There is a pause after he finishes, then the president sways, signaling her intention to speak. “For such a momentous occasion,” she croons, “we will need to discuss with the high council.”

During the pause while the council is called, Flur cannot help fretting about their deadline. Why wasn’t the council there from the beginning, if they are needed? Will she and Tsongwa need to make their presentations again? At least her political diagrams have been partially validated, although she is still not clear on the relationship between the president and the high council, or either of them and what Mission Control has been calling the Senate. Apparently the president does not have as much direct decision-making power as they thought.

There is further singing to cover, or emphasize, the entrance of the high council, and under it Irnv points out some of the more important council members. She seems to have a tragic tale about each of them. There is a woman who lost most of her family in a storm, another whose parents abandoned her as a child. The leader of the council, surprisingly, is male; his wife drowned two days after their wedding. Unable to continue murmuring about how sorry she is, Flur is reduced to nodding along and trying not to wince. She wonders if Tsongwa, a few feet away, is getting the same liner notes from Slanks. Looking at them she guesses he is, but between the oxygen mask and the face covering, it is impossible to read his expression.

Extensive discussion follows. Flur loses concentration in the middle of hour two, and can no longer follow the foreign syllables except for occasional words: “haste,” “formality,” “foreign,” “caution.” Dazed and unable to recapture the thread, Flur shifts her attention to body language instead, trying to figure out who is on their side. The president doesn’t seem engaged, putting a few words in now and then but otherwise looking at the pool in the floor or at the walls. Then again, no one else is showing fire or passion either. The discussion takes place in a muted, gentle tone, councillors lounging in their hammocks, occasionally dismounting to dip their lower extremities in the shallow lavender pool. She wonders if they are showing respect for the president’s tragedy. It is when she catches the president actually wiping a tear away from the corner of her large eye that she leans over to Irnv.

“Maybe the president is, um, a little distracted?” she asks.

Irnv looks back at her but says nothing, and Flur hesitates to interpret her facial expression.

“She seems quite . . .” Flur notices another tear slip down the furrows in the president’s faded-leaf face. Thinking of her lost family, she is wrung by an unexpected vibration of sympathy. “Maybe she could use a break?” What Flur could use now is a moment to talk to Tsongwa in private, to strategize some way of moving this along.

She wasn’t expecting her comment to have any immediate effect, but Irnv leans forward and says something to someone, who says something to someone else, and a moment later everyone is getting up from their swings. Flur cringes, but maybe it’s for the best; they certainly weren’t getting anywhere as it was.

“We will take a short refreshment break,” Irnv tells her. “Come, I will show you the place.”

They file into a corridor beside Tsongwa and Slanks. Flur tries to exchange glances with Tsongwa, hoping that however the refreshment is served, it will allow them some tiny degree of privacy to talk, even if only in their limited sign language. Food would be nice too, but since the breathing apparatuses they are wearing make eating impractical, their suits are fitted with intravenous nutrition systems. They won’t get hungry until they’re long dead of oxygen deprivation. Flur is wondering how to explain this to Irnv in some way that will make their refusal of refreshments less impolite when Tsongwa and Slanks turn off the corridor through a small opening draped in purple. Flur starts to follow but Irnv catches her arm with her three serpentine fingers.

“Not in there,” she whispers. “That’s the men’s side.”

They take a few more steps forward and then slide through an opening with crimson curtains on the opposite side of the corridor. The space is smaller than Flur expected, and there is no one else there, but in the far wall is a row of curtained, circular passages, like portholes. Irnv gestures Flur toward one, then wriggles into the cubbyhole beside it. After a moment of hesitation, Flur pokes her head into the hole. Inside is a low space, a small nest with cloth and cushions everywhere and a shelf with several small jars holding different items: violet straw, green powder, ivory slivers the size of a thumbnail. Flur pulls her head out, but the drape has already fallen in front of the Irnv’s opening. Flur crawls into her own nook, lets the curtain down behind her, and leans her head back against the unsettlingly soft wall.

It is so obvious she doesn’t even want to whisper it into her comms (although Tsongwa is probably doing just that at this same moment, on the men’s side), because surely they’ve figured it out by now: Eating is a social taboo. That’s why they cover their mouths all the time. Of course they hadn’t mentioned this during the previous discussions, any more than earthlings would have said, “By the way, we don’t discuss defecation.” Fortunately, because of the intravenous nutrition and the assumption that they wouldn’t be able to eat alien food, no one at Mission Control brought the matter up during protocol discussions for the trip. Flur wonders what the reaction would have been. Embarrassed silence? A quick, mature resolution of the question and no more said about it? Giggles?

Even though she’s not going to eat (she does take samples from each of the jars for her specimen cases), Flur finds the isolation soothing. She would like to sit in this cozy womb, silently, for at least ten or twenty minutes, breathing slowly and remembering why she’s here. Instead she talks to Mission Control.

“How long would it take for us to get back without that canal?” Flur asks the air in front of her nose.

“We calculate walking would add another hour to the journey,” answers Winin, the desk officer assigned to her earpiece. “That’s with no obstacles or disruptions of the sort that might come from visitors from outer space walking through a major city.”

“So about two and a half hours total,” Flur muses.

“You’ve still got some time,” Winin assures her.

“Yeah, but we’re coming up on the limit we gave them.” Flur lowers her voice, wondering how sound travels among these cubicles.

“Well, you can find an excuse to extend that, if you have to. How does it look?” Winin asks, as though she hadn’t seen and heard everything that happened herself.

“Can you patch me in to Tsongwa?” A moment later she hears his voice.

“. . . very interesting, how many things we did not foresee.”

“It is, it’s fascinating. I think we can consider that alone a success, a complete validation of the need for this expensive face-to-face visit in addition to all the other communication.”

Flur is a little surprised to hear the Mission Director. So Tsongwa went straight to the top during his break. She clears her throat. “Hey Tsongwa, how’s the food on your side?”

He lets loose his surprisingly relaxed chuckle. “We’ll have to ask the lab techs later,” he says.

The Mission Director is not interested in small talk at this juncture. “Now that I’ve got you two together, what do you think? Can we get the agreement signed today?”

There is a moment of silence, and Flur realizes that, through the layers of alien building material and empty alien atmosphere that separate them, she and Tsongwa are feeling exactly the same thing.

“It seems unlikely,” she offers, at the same time as he says, “I doubt it.”

The Mission Director lets out a whoosh of breath. “Well. That’s a shame.”

“It’s not a no,” Tsongwa clarifies. “They need more time.”

“Maybe if we could talk to someone else,” Flur says, looking for some hope. “The president doesn’t seem up for it right now, with all she’s been through.”

She’s hoping that Tsongwa did not get the full tragic history and will have to ask what she means. Instead he says, “Actually . . .” He pauses to order his thoughts and in that pause Flur hears a rustling and then her name called, very softly, from the other side of the curtain.

“Gotta go,” she whispers, and then slides out of the cubbyhole.

Irnv is reclining in a hammock-harness outside the cushioned wall of nests, still within the women’s area. Her face covering is loosened and hanging down below her chin, and although Flur is careful not to stare at the dark purple, circular mouth, she finds she is already acclimatized enough to be shocked. The orifice seems to be veiled on the inside by a membrane of some kind, and doesn’t fully close. Struck by the curiosity of the forbidden, Flur wishes she could see how they eat.

“Do we have to get back now?” she asks, wondering too late if she should thank her host for the food she couldn’t ingest.

“We have some time still,” Irnv says. “I don’t know how you do it, but here we usually relax and socialize after eating.”

“It is . . . like that for us too,” Flur says, wondering if she is right about the translation for ‘socialize.’ Following Irnv’s graceful nod, she climbs into the hammock next to her and tries to put a relaxed expression on her face. Where is everyone else? They must have designated special eating rooms for the aliens and their handlers.

“Flur,” Irnv says, and Flur snaps out of it. “What does your name mean?”

Rather than try to define a general noun, Flur takes out her palm screen and presses a combination she had pre-loaded. “Like this,” she says, holding it out to Irnv as the screen runs through hyperphotos of flowers, all different kinds.

“Ahhh,” Irnv strokes the screen appreciatively, stopping the montage on a close-up of a wisteria cluster.

“And you?” Flur asks, trying to keep up her end of the socializing.

Irnv looks up, her head tilted at an angle that is so clearly questioning that Flur begins to trust her body language interpretation again. “Your name,” she says. “What does it mean?”

“Star,” Irnv replies, with a curious sort of bow.

“Oh, I thought star was ‘trenu,’” Flur says.

“Yes, trenu, star. Irnv is one trenu. A certain trenu.”

Flur finds herself tilting her head exactly the way that Irnv did a few minutes ago, and Irnv obligingly explains.

“Irnv is the name of your star. Your . . . planet? We tried to pronounce it like you, but this is our version.”

Terre. Earth. Irnv. But “pronounce it like you?” They have only been in contact for a few years. How old is Irnv?

“And your family?” Irnv asks, while Flur is still turning that over. “Where are you from?”

“An island,” Flur says, one of the first words she learned in Cyclopan. She takes her palm screen back and brings up globes, maps, Ayiti. She hadn’t prepared anything about her family, though. “Many brothers and sisters,” she says. She thinks of the video that was made for the launch party, presenting a highly sanitized version of her backstory, and wonders why nobody thought to load that into her drive. Maybe it wouldn’t translate well; their research has not pinned down the alien version of the heartwarming, life-affirming family unit. “We used to raise chickens,” she says, unexpectedly, and quickly pulls up a picture of a chicken on the screen, and in her mind, the memory of chasing one with her brothers.

Irnv blinks her single eye. “They are all well? Your brothers and sisters?”

“Well?” It’s a hard concept to define. The pause feels like it’s stretching out too long. “They’re fine. We’re just fine.”

A beat. “And how were you chosen for this?”

“Oh,” Flur says. These are all questions they should have prepared for. She can’t imagine, now, why they thought the conversation would be all business all the time. “Well, I went to school, and there were . . . competitions.” She can’t remember the word for tests. “And then more school.”

Irnv is nodding, but Flur reads it as more polite than comprehending, and she’s trying to remember the words, find the right phrase to explain it, how it’s not just written tests, but also character, leadership qualities, sacrifices, observations by instructors and mentors, toughness, drills . . .

“. . . happy to have you here,” the alien is saying, with seeming earnestness.

Flur rouses herself back to her job. “We are very happy to be here too,” she manages. “But we will have to go home soon, and we would really like to complete this agreement. For the future.”

Irnv leans back in her hammock. “We hope so. But it is a very short time.”

“It is,” Flur agrees, with as regretful a tone as she can summon. “The president . . .” she trails off, delicately.

“The president is a great woman,” Irnv says, in a tone that sounds to Flur very close to reverence.

“She is,” Flur agrees, disingenuously. Pause, effort at patience. “Perhaps it’s not the best time, though, with all she’s been through recently.”

Irnv looks confused, then understands. “You mean the loss of her family? But that wasn’t recent, that was many years ago.”

Years ago?

It takes Flur a moment to recover from that, and when she does Irnv is looking at her curiously. She puts out her hand, and the supple, red-purple fingers curl around Flur’s arm. Flur is shocked to feel their warmth, faintly, through the protective space suit.

“I think she will agree,” Irnv says. “It will take time. We can’t rush.”

“Of course,” Flur answers, still feeling the pulse of warmth on her arm, though by then Irnv has removed her hand. “We go,” the Cyclops says, sliding the scarf back over the bottom of her face as she stands.

They are not the first ones back into the meeting room, but it is still half-empty. Tsongwa and Slanks aren’t there yet, and Flur wonders what they might be talking about in the men’s room. She decides to put her time to good use.

“Irnv,” she says gently, getting her attention from a conversation with another alien. “That—that face there?” Flur nods at the first one in the series, the two-tone blue and lavender portrait. “Is that like the fountain in the middle of the city?”

Now that Flur has seen Irnv’s mouth she finds she can better interpret the movement of the muscles around it, even with the mask covering it. She is pretty sure Irnv is smiling. “Yes, yes,” she says, “you are right, that is another example. She is the founder of our city. After starting this city she was visited by very great tragedy. In her sorrow she wept, and her tears, different colors from each side of her eye, became the canals that we use to navigate and defend our city.”

Flur is trying to figure out how to phrase her follow-up questions—does she probe whether Irnv understands it as a myth and exaggeration, or take it politely at face value?—when she notices Tsongwa has come back in with Slanks, and nods to them.

“It is in her honor,” Irnv continues, “that we now make the tear tracks on our faces, to represent her learning, sacrifice, and wisdom.” She runs her fingers along the deep grooves in her face.

“You . . . do that? How?” Flur asks, trying to sound interested and non-judgmental.

“There is a plant we use,” Irnv says. “But when one has really suffered, you can see the difference. As with her,” she adds in reverential tones as the president enters the room, and Flur can see that it is true, the wrinkles in her cheeks are softer and have a subtle shine to them.

“That’s . . . impressive,” she says, feeling that admiration is the correct thing to express, but then the president begins to speak.

“Very regretfully,” she begins, her eye not nearly as moist as Flur had expected, “the time our visitors have with us is limited by their technology, and unfortunately we will not be able to settle this question on this visit.”

Flur’s hammock shudders with her urgency to speak, even as she catches Tsongwa’s warning look.

“However, we look upon it favorably,” the president goes on. “We will take the time to discuss it here among ourselves, and converse again with our good friends soon.”

Flur is about to say something, to ask at least for a definition of ‘soon,’ a deadline for the next communication, some token of goodwill. It is the Mission Director’s voice in her ear that stops her. “Stand down. Stand down, team, let this one go. We were working with a tight time frame, we knew that. And it’s not over. Great job, you two.”

The positive reinforcement makes Flur feel ill. Irnv’s face, as she turns to her, seems to hold some wrinkles of sympathy around the mouth-covering mask and her cosmetic tear tracks, but all she says is, “We should get you back to your ship as soon as possible.”

The return trip, indeed, seems to pass much more quickly than the journey into the city. Less constrained by the idea of making a good impression, Flur takes as many hyperphotos as she can, possibly crossing the borders of discretion. Noticing that they are taking a different canal back (unless they change color over time?) she scoops up another sample. She even pretends to trip in the forest to grab some twigs, or twig analogs. Irnv says little during the walk, although Tsongwa and Slanks appear to be deep in discussion. Probably solving the whole diplomatic problem by themselves, Flur thinks miserably. When they find their ship—it is a relief to see it again, just as they left it, under guard by a pair of Cyclopes—Flur half-expects Irnv to touch her arm again in farewell, but all she does is make the double-hand gesture of welcome, apparently also used in parting.

“Irnv,” Flur asks quickly. “How old are you?”

“Eighty-five cycles,” Irnv says, then looks up, calculating. “About thirty-two of your years,” she adds, and Flur catches the corners of a smile again. Meanwhile, Tsongwa and Slanks are exchanging some sort of ritualized embrace, both arms touching.

The return beam is less difficult than the landing, and once they are out of the planet’s atmosphere and waiting for the Mission Crawler to pick them up, Tsongwa takes off his breathing apparatus and helmet, removing the comms link to Mission Control.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” Flur says, trying for a why-wouldn’t-I-be tone. “You?”

Tsongwa nods without saying anything.

“I just wish we could have gotten the stupid thing signed,” Flur says finally.

Tsongwa raises both palms. “It’ll happen. I think.”

“The president seemed so . . .” Flur shakes her head. “It’s a shame that we caught a weak leader.”

“You think she’s weak?”

“Well, grief-stricken, maybe. But it comes to the same thing. For us, anyway.”

Tsongwa leaves a beat of silence. “What did you talk about in the eating room?”

“Personal stuff, mostly . . . names, families. Oh, that’s something,” Flur sits up in her chair. So different from those hammocks. “Irnv told me she’s named after our planet, but after our word for it. Earth, I mean.”

Tsongwa is stunned for a moment, then laughs. “Well, that’s very hospitable of them.”

“Tsongwa, she’s thirty-two. Thirty-two in our years!”

Another pause. “Maybe her name was changed in honor of the visit?”

“Or maybe . . .” Neither of them says it: Maybe the Cyclopes have been listening to us longer than we have been listening to the Cyclopes.

“What did you talk about?” Flur asks finally.

“Family, to start with.” Tsongwa says. “Personal history. It’s very important to them.”

“What do you mean?”

He arranges his thoughts. It occurs to Flur, looking at the lines in his face shadowed by the reflected light from the control panel, that she has no idea what he might have told them about his family, because she doesn’t know anything about him outside of his work.

“They wanted to know if I’d suffered.”

“Suffered?” Flur repeats, in the tone she might use to say, Crucified?

Tsongwa sighs; the English word is wrong, so dramatic. “They wanted to know if I’d . . . eaten bitter, if I’d . . . gone through hard times. If I’d experienced grief. You know.” An alert goes off; he starts to prepare for docking as he speaks. “They think it’s important for decision makers, for leaders. It stems from the myth of the founder—you heard about that? They believe that people who have suffered greatly have earned wisdom.” He twitches a control. “Now that we know this, we can adjust the way we approach the whole relationship. It’s a huge breakthrough.”

“But . . . but . . .” Flur wonders, with a pang, whether this means she won’t be included in the next mission. Can she somehow reveal all the hardship and self-doubt she has so painstakingly camouflaged with professionalism, dedication, and feigned poise? “But come on! The president has suffered, okay, but she didn’t seem any the wiser for it!”

Tsongwa shrugs. “They believe it, I said. That doesn’t mean it’s true. They aren’t perfect, any more than we are.”

And Flur thinks of the Mission Director, his careful multidisciplinarity and his pep talks, or the president of her country, a tall, distinguished-looking, well-spoken man who has failed by almost every measure yet retains a healthy margin of popularity. By that time they are docked, and scanned for contaminants, and the airlock doors open, and then they are swarmed by the ops team, shouting and congratulating them, slapping their shoulders and practically carrying them into the main ship where the Mission Director, his emotion apparent but held in perfect check, shakes hands with each of them and whispers a word or two of praise in their ears. Flur tries to smile and nod at everyone until finally, though it can’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, she’s alone, or almost, stripped to a sterile shift and lying in a clinic bed for the post-visit checkup.

“What’s the matter?” The medical officer says, coming in with a clipboard and a couple of different scanners. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Fine,” Flur manages through her sobs.

“You did great,” he says, as he runs the scanners over her quickly, almost unnoticeably. “The geeks are already raving about those samples you brought back. There, there,” he says, when she doesn’t stop crying. He pats her arm awkwardly. “It’s just the tension and excitement. You’ll be fine.”

But it isn’t the tension or the excitement. Flur is thinking about the things she could have said to Irnv: about her four brothers, dead, drunk, imprisoned, and poor; her three sisters, poor, unhappy, and desperate. About her own childhood, hungry and hardscrabble. If she had unburied these old sufferings, would Irnv have trusted her more? Would she have been able to get the agreement signed?

But mostly, and it is this that makes her want to cry until she makes her own, shimmering tear tracks, she is thinking about her mother. Twice abandoned (three times if you count Flur’s reluctance to visit). Beaten occasionally, exploited often, underpaid always. An infant lost, a dear sister lost, an adult child lost. Flur has always avoided imagining that grief. When her brother was killed, she clung to her own complicated pain and did not look her mother in the eye so she would not probe those depths. Now she weighs all her mother has suffered.

In another world, it would be enough to make her president.

#Malka Older #Tear Tracks #short story #long post

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caspia-writes · 2 years

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As pseudo-promised, I've written something based off @sleepyowlwrites's vaguely spooky headlines.

@sleepy-night-child, I'm going to assume you want tagged!

(Transcript under cut, for those who aren't interested in decrypting the font.)

TRANSCRIPT: New Law Proposed to Protect Wildlife from Wilder Life Animal cruelty to be punishable by hard labor

Following popular outcry regarding to the consumption of still-living animals (a common Arktischer practice depicted in the recent novel and film of critical acclaim Jagd der Mitternachtssonne), Großsächsisch officials temporarily exiled from the Ostarktis territories have proposed a new law making the practice punishable by up to six months of hard labor. Staatspolizei forensic anthropologists specializing in the Arktischer people report a general sense of optimism surrounding these new measures.

“The Arktischer are an inherently wild and violent folk,” explained Altenstadter Staatspolizei forensic anthropologist Oberleutnant Schwanthalter. “It should not surprise these officials that reasonable measures have failed with them. These are a people who understand only the basest laws of nature, and thus require the basest means of correction to learn more civilized habits.”

If our Leiter accepts this new measure against rampant Arctic barbarity, it is expected to be put into place immediately following the Reichswehr’s victory over the Northern Rebellion. This measure is also expected to be implemented retroactively, to the extent to which incriminating records can be found, to aid the process of civilizing the wilder components of Arktischer society. More information on the proceedings will be published as proves possible.

#writing #verräter #news article #tw racism #cw racism #tw animal cruelty #cw animal cruelty

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Raising money for Locus Magazine

Update: The naming rights/Tuckerization from this fundraiser sold almost immediately after this post went live, so we’ve added another one.

Update 2: This one sold, too.

Since 1968, Locus magazine has been the paper of record for science fiction, fantasy and horror literature; it’s been through several iterations, but the current one — a crowd-supported nonprofit — is the best yet. They’re raising $75k on Indiegogo to fund the next year’s operations:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-magazine-science-fiction-fantasy-horror#/

I started writing a bimonthly column for

Locus

in 2006; I’ve written six columns per year for them ever since, without missing a single one, and every one of them is open access on the same day it comes out in print:

https://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html

After Locus founder Charles N Brown died in 2009 — in his sleep, on a plane, coming back from an sf con he’d covered for the magazine — his staff took over the magazine and its vast archive of science fiction ephemera and restructured it as a nonprofit. Brown’s collection went to Duke University:

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2019/01/11/locus-archives-documents-the-history-of-sci-fi/

The magazine pressed on, continuing as the best source of industry news, thoughtful reviews (including short fiction reviews, a rarity these days) and opinion, as well as its essential annual recommended reading list and its Locus Awards. I devour each issue.

Earlier this year, the editorial team wrote to me and asked me what I could donate to the fundraiser. My contribution is a “Tuckerization” — naming rights for a character — for an upcoming Marty Hench novel, one of the sequels to my forthcoming Red Team Blues (Tor Books, 2023).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Red Team Blues is my first noir novel, a detective story whose hero is Marty Hench, a Silicon Valley forensic accountant who’s spent 40 years unwinding every finance scam tech, and who, on the eve of his retirement, is roped into a bloody, deadly cryptocurrency heist.

This is one of my lockdown books (I have seven books forthcoming as of this writing), and it was a wild ride to write. I love noir fiction, but it has an odious side: the prototypical noir hero is a veteran (in early noir, he’ll be a WWI vet in the interwar years; in later noir, he’s a WWII vet in the 50s or 60s), who has come home to a changed and fallen world.

Everywhere these heroes look, the wrong people are participating in society as his equal: queers, women, people of color. The foundational vibe of noir — a simmering rage at the state of the world — is grounded in incredible, reactionary bigotry.

Marty Hench is also bitter about what his world has become, but the invaders he rails against are the crooked finance bros who parasite off of the genuine excitement and creativity of early techies who want to help everyone “seize the means of computation.” He is furious at them, and he expresses his fury by unwinding their baroque scams and busting them, but the supply of finance bros is limitless, and for every one he slays, five more pop up.

I finished Red Team Blues in about eight weeks and handed it to my usual first readers, from whom I got unusual responses. The day I finished it, I woke up at 2AM to find my wife sitting up with the bedside lamp on. I asked her what she was doing, and she looked up from the book and said “I had to find out how it ended.”

Then I emailed it to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The next day, he emailed me this:

That.

Was.

A! Fucking! Ride!

Whoa!

Then he bought it, and two more books in the series.

Now, attentive readers will have noted that Red Team Blues is Marty Hench’s last adventure. That means that the rest of the series will be an indeterminate number of prequels, explaining how the Marty Hench of RTB came into being. The next book in the series is The Bezzle, set in the mid-2000s, which sees Marty go up against a corrupt prison IT baron who waxes unimaginably wealthy by eliminating prison mail and visits and replacing them with high-priced, per-minute “visits” and emails on a “free” tablet; I finished the first draft of this one last week.

The book after that, Picks and Shovels, is Marty’s first adventure, telling the story of how his obsession with early computers led to him flunking out of MIT, then discovering the miracle of spreadsheets at a community college accounting program. Everyone else in his class wants to use spreadsheets to hide money, but Marty wants to use them to find it.

Marty follows his roommate out to Silicon Valley, where he lands his first job: helping track down an insider threat for an early PC company called The Three Wise Men, a predatory affinity scam run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. The action gets going when Marty figures out that the “insider threat” he’s been sent after are on the side of the angels: a rival tech company founded by three women who’ve left Three Wise Men to compete with it.

They’ve also left their faith: a queer orthodox woman who renounces due to her rabbi’s homophobia, a Mormon woman who leaves the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who throws in with radical Liberation Theology over the dirty wars in Central America. This one is about halfway done and will be finished by spring.

Each of these books is a period piece, steeped in a highly specific time and place: Silicon Valley in the grips of the crypto bubble; central California prison towns during the Trump years; San Francisco in the heroic era of the first PC bubble.

The Locus Tuckerization will let you name one of the characters in one of these sequels. It’s a chance some (minor) immortality, but more importantly, it’s a chance to sustain a magazine that has promoted and aided the careers of every working sf/f/h writer in the field, including and especially me.

It’s not just the Tuckerization, of course! There are lots of other wonderful premiums in the crowdfunder:

exclusive access to a deleted scene from Mary Robinette Kowal’s Spare Man, a signed manuscript for an as-yet unpublished novel, and/or a 30-minute Zoom with Mary Robinette;

many signed books from authors’ own collections;

a signed, handwritten apology from Kelly Robson because she’s “soooo sorry they totally wrecked you with their story”;

a private Zoom chat with legendary editor Ellen Datlow, or sf writers Stephanie Burgis or Justina Ireland;

a story critique from award-winning writers Kate Heartfield or Sam J. Miller;

a Tuckerization from Wole Talabi.

More awards are going up daily, and the campaign closes in 10 days. As of this writing, they’ve raised $54,539 of their $75,000 goal.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-magazine-science-fiction-fantasy-horror/

[Image ID: A reworked classic red-border Locus Magazine cover; the cover illustration has been replaced with the cover for Red Team Blues, a minimalist image of a man escaping through a keyhole by Will Stahle. The man's face has been replaced with a dotted-line bordered grey oval with a question mark in its center. The Locus issue number has been replaced with Locus's 'Indiegogo 2022' wordmark.]

#pluralistic

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simplyforensic · 2 days

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Forensic Science Timeline: The Ancient & Classical Era

Discover how the Ancient & Classical Era of Forensic Science Timeline contributed to the development of forensic science. Forensic science has deep roots in ancient civilizations. The earliest applications of forensic methods were found in prehistoric times. They were also found in ancient societies like Babylon, Greece, and Rome. This era marks the first recorded use of fingerprints for…

#Ancient & Classical Era #Forensic Science Timeline

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crystalherbalism · 9 days

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The Right Data Recovery Houston Company for Your Needs

The right data recovery in Houston company is crucial for restoring lost or corrupted data effectively. Look for a provider with a proven track record, certified technicians, and a transparent process. Ensure they offer a free diagnostic and have a strong reputation for customer service. Selecting the right company can make all the difference in recovering your valuable data swiftly and securely.

Understanding Your Data Recovery Houston Needs

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Customer reviews and success stories can provide valuable insights into the reliability of a data recovery Houston company. Look for testimonials from clients who have had similar data recovery needs. Positive feedback and case studies showcasing successful recoveries can help you gauge the company’s effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

Comparing Pricing Models for Data Recovery Houston Services

Pricing is an important consideration when choosing a data recovery Houston company. Different companies may have varying pricing models, such as flat rates or charges based on the complexity of the recovery. Obtain quotes from multiple providers and compare them to ensure you’re getting a fair price. Be cautious of extremely low prices, as they may indicate subpar service or hidden costs.

Evaluating Customer Support and Service Quality

Customer support is an often overlooked aspect of data recovery services. A good data recovery Houston company should offer excellent customer support throughout the recovery process. This includes clear communication, regular updates, and a willingness to answer your questions. Reliable customer support can make the data recovery experience smoother and less stressful.

Conclusion

Choosing the right data recovery Houston company is a critical decision for successfully retrieving your lost or damaged data. By understanding your needs, evaluating expertise, assessing technology, considering turnaround times, reviewing testimonials, comparing pricing, and evaluating customer support, you can make an informed choice. Prioritize these factors to ensure you select a data recovery Houston provider that best meets your requirements and delivers high-quality service.

#data recovery Houston

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ramrodd · 18 days

Video

youtube

Mark: An Eyewitness Account

COMMENTARY:

YOU and Robyn Wals and John MacDonald are so close to the same epiphany as Molly Worthens but you are blinded by the ideological blinkers of the criticql historical method of the Post Modern Historic Deconstruction, History is a zero-sum subset of literature. A minor genre, thoughmetaphycially necessary for a healthy society. Forensics occurs in the here/now of the mythos and , like F. Scott, carried backwars against the current. As you read this, your eyes are moving along with the wave of the futue that William F. Bukcley proposed to accomplish with Project 2025. Project 2025 started out as the Young Americans for Freedom, the leading edge of the Conservative insrugency committed to dismantling the administrative state of the neo=liberalism of Eisenhower's 1956 Presidetnil Platform and replacing it with a rip-off of the harmonization of Mars's Das Kapital and Hitler's Meim Kampf with a dab of Atlas Shrugged and a midgen of the Turner Diaries thrown in for the white supremacist thugs How project 2025 got started is pretty much the same way the Jesus Conspiracy got started as a consequence of the Talking Cross and the public slaughter of Sejanus a year and a half before. By the astronomy, Good Friday occurred in 33 CE. A collegue of Peter J. Williams tacked it down using the astronomy charts of the Magi. That's the point:. The Palestine Bible, as a proxy for the genre, is a literary project of the Magi, beginning with the Book of Job. In terms of Christian literatue, the primacy rests on Cornelius. He is the common denominator in the Gospels and Acts. He is the linke between Luke and Theophilus. HE was in the room with Pilate during the interrogation of Jesus of Nazareth, He probably prepared the paper work for the transmittal of Pilate's euangelion to Tibeius and arranged for the pony express to expedite the delivery. Pilate's lost euangelion is the first written record of JEsus. It was composed of the harminizaton of Mark 15:1 - 16:8 and the Gospel of Peter. I don't know if the Magi had the Talking Cross in mind when they launched the Book of Job literary project, but the object of the exercise was to create the metaphysics necessary to produce Apollo 11. I think they expected to put man on the moon by 3240 CE, but the Talking Cross accelerated that process by 1200 years. And that convenant between the Jewish god and the centurions of the Italian Regiment represented by Cornelius was the tidings of Joy Pilate reported to Tiberius and all the rest that was reported in Book V of Tertullian's Apology, Cornelius had Pilate's euangelion when the Holy Spirit arranged for Peter to come in out of the cold and provide testimony from inside the Jeesus Insurgency, summurized in Acts 10,:34 - 43, This becomes the narrative arc of the Gospel of Marrk that connects a series of dots from the intelligence archives of the 10th Legion generally understood to be Quelle. And Peter's Confession in harminization with the contents of Pilate's euangelion become the euangelion of Mark 1.!, Acts 15:7 and the 19 citations in Paul's Epistles. I don't hold a bried for the "lost Gospel of Mark" and all the controversy, but the nature of the literature around it suggests to be the working of an editorial board which includes Cornelius and St/Mark in Alexandria and Theophilus as to the composition of the Gospel of John, which is the memoirs of St Makr from when he was a 12 year old John Mark who encounters Jesus during the Passover of his Bar Mitzvah year and gloms unto Him as his rebbe, until he is 15 at the foot of the cross and is totally grossed out when the sokdier splits Jesus wide open to make sure He is dead. The Gospel of Mark is a psychological flat line, bu the Gospel fo John comes straight from the Shadow of John Mark/St. Mark like hearing a favortie song from your childhood if you are into Jungian Psychology. Hegel's Post Modern Litary Deconstrucion reveals all this without all the drama over what Jesus said to whom, or didn't say, accroding to the Jesus Seminar v Pr0-Life solo scriptura. N.t. Wright believes he rejects Hegel, but he's the essence of the harmonization of Paulice Theology with the Cruid Christiology of the Chruch of England, You all have wonderful scholarship and if you re-organize it around Richard Bauckham's eye witness thesis but with Cornelius as the source of the midn map and not Peter you will be delighted with the New Insights to the Gospels yuo can bring to Bart "GIggles" Ehrman's seminar.

#youtube

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blogchaindeveloper · 2 months

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Top 10 Ways Blockchain Is Transforming Startups With Secure And Decentralized Solutions

With its disruptive potential, blockchain technology has become a massive startup opportunity startups. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that securely, openly, and decentrally records transactions. Using cryptographic techniques, central authorities or intermediaries are not required, and data integrity is guaranteed. This ground-breaking technology is revolutionizing how startup startups function by equipping them with creative ways to meet the demands of the contemporary business environment.

Blockchain enables businesses to use its revolutionary powers in several ways, from boosting cybersecurity to encouraging stakeholder trust and transparency. In addition to examining how blockchain affects the startup ecosystem, we will also look at how it facilitates the development of new business models, access to international markets, and improved consumer experiences.

1. Strengthening Security: Preventing Cyber Attacks

Cyberattacks are a persistent threat to startups, especially those handling sensitive data or financial activities. Because of their centralized nature, traditional systems are more susceptible to fraud, data breaches, and hacking. But thanks to the distributed ledger of blockchain technology and cryptographic methods, every transaction is protected by a distinct digital signature, which makes data manipulation and alteration nearly impossible. Blockchain technology assists firms in establishing trust with stakeholders and customers while drastically lowering the risks of cyberattacks.

2. Blockchain Security Entrepreneurs Set the Standard

Leading businesses are offering state-of-the-art blockchain security solutions. Leaders in the field, including Elliptic, CipherTrace, Blockstream, Hosho, and Provable Things, are among them. These companies are experts in services, including threat intelligence, forensic investigations, transaction monitoring software, and audits of smart contracts. Their knowledge guarantees blockchain-based systems' security and integrity, providing startups a solid defense against attacks.

3. Maintaining Openness: Establishing Confidence Among Partners

Entrepreneurs must gain investors' and customers' trust. However, scarce resources and intricate supply chains frequently hampered their ability to offer transparent systems. In this regard, blockchain technology's decentralized and unchangeable ledger appears revolutionary. Blockchain gives stakeholders confidence by providing real-time tracking and verification of transactions, which boosts credibility and trust in startup operations.

4. Blockchain Entrepreneurs Bringing Sustainability to the Environment and Social Impact

Blockchain has revolutionary potential for business, social impact, and environmental sustainability. Blockchain is being used by premier companies like Plastic Bank, Veridium Labs, LO3 Energy, Sun Exchange, and Everledger to address significant difficulties. With initiatives like rewarding the collecting of plastic waste, tokenizing carbon credits, facilitating peer-to-peer energy trading, encouraging the use of solar energy, and tracing the origin of valuable assets, these firms are genuinely improving society and preserving the environment.

5. Strengthening Decentralization: Decreased Dependency on Middlemen

Blockchain technology is based on decentralization, and startup startups are enthusiastically embracing this feature. StartupsStartups have historically relied on third-party platforms, intermediaries, or centralized authority for validation and transaction processing. However, the decentralized consensus methods and blockchain-to-peer transactions give entrepreneurs more efficiency and control over their data and processes, lowering their dependency on intermediaries and creating new opportunities.

6. Decentralized Entrepreneurs Setting the Standard

Leveraging decentralization is being spearheaded by a new generation of startup startups. In this field, pioneers include businesses like OpenSea, Uniswap, Compound, Chainlink, and Filecoin. They established decentralized lending platforms, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) for trading tokens, decentralized marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized networks of oracles, and decentralized storage networks. These developments demonstrate the potential of decentralized systems in a range of sectors.

7. Generating Novel Business Models: Broadening Perspectives

Startups: Thanks to blockchain technology, startups now have the previously impossible opportunity to develop revolutionary business models. Using smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), firms can streamline workflows, curtail expenses, and investigate inventive income opportunities. Because of its adaptability, blockchain technology opens up new avenues for creative entrepreneurship and enables realizing unrealized potential.

8. Reaching New Markets Worldwide

Blockchain's worldwide reach enables firms to penetrate international markets without encountering conventional obstacles. Without intermediaries, startup startups can easily connect with partners and clients anywhere. Due to their greater accessibility, they have more room to grow and may now take advantage of unexplored global opportunities.

9. Enhancing the Client Experience: Convenience and Trust

Blockchain technology's increased security and transparency directly impact the general user experience. Clients feel more at ease knowing that transactions are transparent, their data is safe, and they have more choices when engaging with startups. This promotes enduring client loyalty and excellent word-of-mouth, which is advantageous for the expansion of startup startups.

10. An Innovative and Socially Conscious Mindset

Blockchain embodies an innovative, collaborative, and socially impactful mindset that extends beyond its technical features. Startups that use blockchain embrace a concept that promotes positive change in the world and society, not just technology. Startups build a more sustainable and equitable global economy by integrating social good, decentralization, and transparency into their goals.

Online Courses for Blockchain Certification: Realizing the Complete Potential

For startups to fully capitalize on blockchain's disruptive potential, they need individuals with experience in blockchain development, deployment, and implementation. Online courses for blockchain certification, such as those covering enterprise blockchain solutions, offer a means of gaining a theoretical and practical understanding of blockchain technology and related platforms like Hyperledger, Ethereum, and Bitcoin.

Training programs for blockchain developers provide students with the knowledge they need to develop blockchain applications in the real world. Whether you are a developer, entrepreneur, consultant, or enthusiast, these extensive courses support a range of goals and enable students to take advantage of blockchain's potential across multiple sectors.

Let me introduce you to Blockchain Council: Leaders in Blockchain Learning.

The Blockchain Council is a shining example of excellence for ambitious blockchain professionals who want to reach their full potential. Composed of enthusiasts and subject matter experts, the Blockchain Council sets the standard for studying, creating, and sharing blockchain information.

Learners who enroll in the Blockchain Council's Blockchain Certification Online Courses, which include the specialist enterprise blockchain solutions courses, will gain a thorough understanding of blockchain technology, its practical applications, and industry implications. The certification validates the holders' knowledge and dedication to their professional development, lending credence to their competence.

In conclusion, Blockchain Technology Can Help StartupsStartups

Blockchain technology can completely transform startups in a variety of sectors. Improved security, openness, and decentralization can help entrepreneurs overcome obstacles and prosper in the competitive environment. Among the many advantages blockchain provides to companies include lower expenses, increased productivity, and a creativity boost.

People can take a transformative journey through Blockchain Course to unlock this potential and become blockchain experts. By taking these classes at Blockchain Council, students become well-versed in blockchain technology and obtain an NFT certification that makes them stand out.

Because of its dedication to information sharing and education, the Blockchain Council is a top choice for professionals and blockchain enthusiasts. With the Blockchain Council, you can venture into blockchain technology with assurance and become a part of a group of forward-thinking pioneers and innovators. With the Blockchain Council's Online Blockchain Certification Courses, you can start your path to success right now and take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities for businesses and other industries.

#Blockchain certification #Blockchain Developer #Blockchain technology

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