#the silent speaks

[squishyliger]

killing him moodboard

[bet-on-me-13]

Wes ruins everything

Wes had finally done it, he had finally realized why nobody ever belived him about Fenton and Phantom! It made so much sense now, he had been looking for an answer for years, thinking he was going crazy because everybody refused to see the Obvious!

He was Cursed!

He literally had an Ancestoral Curse on his Bloodline that made it so that all those born with the gift of Prophecy would be ignored! A Gift of Prophecy that he apparently had.

It was Cassandra's Curse, the one from Greek Myths. Apparently she was his Great×1000 Grandmother and passed down the Gift (and Curse) of Prophecy to him. And he knew how to break it!

All he needed to do was gather the right resources, chant the correct incantations, make sure not to accidentally summon a Demon in the process, and he could just foist the Curse onto some other poor schmuck. Sure it would suck for them, and he would loose his Gift of Prophecy, but Wes had been ignored for Years at this point, he needed validation!

So he did the Ritual, and he didn't mess it up, and he managed to get rid of the Curse.

Now all he had to do was convince everybody that he was right for the first time in his life! This was going to be great!

...

Cass didn't know what was going on.

A while ago, she had started getting these...gut feelings that she couldn't explain.

She would look over the details of a Case her Family was working on, and see a patern that the others were seemingly ignoring. Like when she realized that The Penguin was about to raid the Docks on the East Side, but the others were convinced it was going to be on the West.

But when she had tried to tell them, they had brushed her off. "We've already concluded that he will begin the Raid on the West side, no need to go to the East."

She had gone anyways, and low and behold she had been right. But nobody even acknowledged that she had been right at all, they had just wondered how they had missed the signs, not even questioning how she had known.

It wasn't limited to Cases either. Even small things, like telling her brother's where the TV remote was were brushed off, and hours later they would still be looking, never even having checked where she told them.

It seemed that no matter what, nobody cared about her point of view anymore. They kept brushing her off, telling her she was wrong, actively ignoring her ideas.

And it was getting worse. They were starting to ignore her more and more, forgetting she was in the room, not calling her down for Dinner, even forgetting to check in on her during Patrol.

She knew that there must be something going on, Magical or otherwise, but when she tried bringing it up with her Dad or JLD, they would also Brush her off.

Her Family was forgetting her. And they didn't even realize it.

...

Danny was not okay at the moment.

When he had gone to school a few weeks ago and noticed everybody staring at him, he didn't give it much thought. Maybe Dash or Paulina had spread another Rumor about him again, not too out of the ordinary.

When his name had been called over the Intercom, he hadn't thought much of that either. His grades were falling even more than usual, so he assumed his Guidance Counselor wanted to have another talk with him.

When he walked into the Principals Office to see both of his Parents and some GIW Agents, that's when he realized something big must have happened.

He didn't have much of a chance to react when the Shields went up, but he did react when the first Ecto-Blast scorched the wall behind him. His Parents began to scream at him as they fired their Blasters, something about replacing somebody? He didn't know, he was pretty preoccupied at the moment.

It took more effort than he cared to admit to escape the Room, but a stray shot to the hidden Shield Projector under the Principals Desk proved to be his saving grace. Unfortunately the moment he escaped the Office, he was met with a veritable Army of GIW Agents, all armed to the Teeth with Weapons he had never even seen before.

He managed to get away for a moment, hiding in the Bathroom as the Agents chasing him passed it by. That's when he met Wes.

He obviously hadn't been expecting him, but the moment he saw him Wes put on a smug look. "Oh hi Fenton, trying to get away from the other students?"

Danny had replied with confusion, "What the hell are you talking about?!"

"I finally managed to convince everybody about you, now everyone knows that you're Phantom! I'll bet you're hiding from all of the other Students hounding you for questions right?"

"...it was you?"

"Yeah, so? I finally get to be right!"

"...You absolute MORON-"

That was the last Danny got to say to Wes before an Ecto-Blast launched him through a Wall, seeing his face morph into a look of Shock just before the dust cloud covered it up.

Since that day, Danny had been on the Run. Nowhere was safe anymore now that the GIW knew both his Human and Ghost's faces, but he had to keep running. He crossed state Lines already, and was on his way to the next Ecto-Rich City he could sense, somewhere in New Jersey.

He cursed his Fenton Luck every day. Why had everybody believed Wes this time?! Nobody had ever belived him before, nobody even seemed to acknowledge his existence after a while! What had changed?

Danny just wanted to rest already.

...

Cass had taken to Patrolling alone recently. She had taken to doing a lot of things alone, actually.

After the first month, it seemed that nobody could remember that she was in the room with them, even if she was within their eyeline, she just faded into the background. By the 2 Month Mark they had stopped talking to her entirely, although occasionally she would get a Text or two from her dad. By the 3 month Mark she was completely invisible, and By the 5th she had been forced to get used to it.

She didn't know what was going on, was it a Meta Ability? Magic? Alien Tech? She had no idea.

She had begun to cook for herself after the first time Alfred forgot to set her Plate at the Table. The same with Washing her own Clothes, Cleaning her Room, and Paying her Phone Bills. At the very least the Automated Allowance Payments to her Account had kept up, or she wouldn't have been able to go to her favorite Cafe anymore.

It was bittersweet for her. She used to go to that Cafe every week with Alfred, but he didn't even come on his own anymore. Had he only come for her? Did she really mean that much to them? It hurt, she finally had a family that cared for her and suddenly she didn't exist to them.

She sat alone at a Table, ignored by everyone in the Cafe as usual, when a new face walked in. He looked about her age, a little roughed up, walking with a sort of cautious gaint, as if he was scared of something. His Body Language seemed to agree with her assessment, as his body practically screamed "Worry" in its movements.

Cass stopped watching at that point. Just another Gotham Teen, probably worried over something like getting not having enough money or getting mugged on the way home. It was a Common sight in Gotham.

She attention was pricked again for a moment when she heard a voice speak up. "Uh, can I sit here?"

She ignored it, he wasn't talking to her.

"Um, excuse me? Miss? Could I sit here?" He repeated.

She ignored him again, he wasn't talking to her. Nobody talked to her.

"Hello? Do you have Earbuds in?" He said, and he waved his hand in front of her face.

Her face. He waved his hand. In front of Her Face.

He was talking to her.

She looked up at him sharply, seeming to startle him for a moment before he asked, "So, is that a no?"

"You can see me?" She asked.

He looked a bit bewildered, but replied "Uh, yeah? Why would I not? Are you...a Ghost?". That last part sounded a bit suspicious.

"No. Not a Ghost. But nobody sees me. Ever. Nobody remembers me." She replied. She had never spoken this much to anybody outside of her Family, but in the past few weeks she had been starved for interaction.

He seemed slightly interested, and sat down at her table. He looked her in the eyes, and said "Do you...talk about it?"

She smiled. He could see her.

[crimsonbubble]

after spending so much time in silent hill, he's bound to be pent up and frustrated. I bet he'd cry when you ride him. just sitting on his lap and bouncing all pretty on his thick cock while he's trying not to sink too far into your touch but you're so fucking warm around him and your voice is so tantalizingly sweet that he can't help but sink further into you. pulling him away from hiding his face in your neck so you can see his face; all flushed and puppy eyed as you grind your hips on his. he probably whimpers all soft and sweet as you bounce on him. def pleads and begs like you're not actively fucking yourself on his cock.

pls talk to me about this pathetic wet cat coded man 🙏

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

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/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

[whumblr]

Impending punishment

Preferably done in silence while maintaining eye contact. The classics.

- Cracking knuckles

- Rolling up sleeves

- Slipping on brass knuckles

- Putting on latex gloves

- Removing leather gloves (finger by finger)

- Putting bullets in a revolver, one by one

- Letting a bat/cane/rod fall into the palm of their hand

- Piercing a bottle with a syringe (and holding it up, flicking it and squirting some of the dubious liquid)

- Flicking a knife open

- Pulling Caretaker's head back by their hair revealing their throat

[sayxit]

Crows Carols

[a-flaming-idiot]

Miraculous Ladybug AU where, like in the deleted scene from the movie, Marinette only recently moved to Paris from China so she barely speaks any French. And all of Paris thinks Ladybug is this cold, calculating, silent badass cause she never speaks in interviews, leaving Chat Noir to do enough talking for both of them.

Until one day, Chat Noir is all like "My dear, dear, lady. We have been working together for so long, and I've come to believe we are close. But you never talk to me. You never respond to my jokes. You never consider my flirts. You never fill me in on your plans. Did I do something to upset you? Please, if so, let me atone. Let us be friends and partners, M'lady" And Ladybug just looks at him for a while before saying, in very broken French. "My... French... very bad..." and Chat Noir has to reconsider everything he thought he knew about Ladybug. Then they both realize they speak Mandarin Chinese and just start blabbering on and on to each other during fights and patrols.

Which then gives Adrien the idea to approach the weirdly quiet girl in his class to see if she maybe also doesn't know French. Blah blah, Adrien and Mari talk all the time and Marinette gets better at French cause of him.

[azulsejos]

s2 + golbetty centric episode prayer circle 🍎💝

[gojonanami]

thinking about mindreader!nanami getting flustered every time he comes to his favorite bakery because the cute baker, that he has a crush on and who always gets him his favorites, has every explicit thoughts when her mind wanders — and soon, she starts to have some not so innocent thoughts about him—

thoughts that keep him up at night — as he touches himself under the covers, and wonders when he will get the courage to ask you out.

[rheakira]

I've come to temporarily break my hiatus to bring up something deeply important. Because after a recent event, if I have to go another day without talking about it, I don't know what I'll do.

Fandoms have an enormous issue when it comes to bigotry and people feeling comfortable enough to be openly bigoted.

And I want to make it clear: everyone is capable of it. In fact, most people do it more often than they don't. But because this strange myth has been built up that if you aren't "blatantly saying slurs" or "killing others" it can't possibly be bigotry, we have done nothing but become dangerous behind closed doors.

If your friend has odd beef with a person of color in the fandom and holds them to standards they don't hold their white friends to, that is bigotry. If your friend feels some sort of way about the trans person in your friend group and tries to come up with reasons for why they specifically can't stay, that is also bigotry. If your group insists that a person with a personality disorder is making it up just for attention and uses that as a reason for why they can't be around them, that is bigotry as well.

I've never been upfront about it because... why do I, as a human being, need to be upfront about my identity when people randomly decide what I am? But I am in fact a person of color who is queer and disabled. Whenever I join a fandom group that is mostly white people, I am liked until this is discovered. And then I watch as people get brutal about things I do or say. Things that they don't do to other people in the group, and I also watch as they take my words and either twist them for convenience or ruin my reputation for it.

As a marginalized person, both in fandom and out, you are held to a unique standard that does not apply to other human beings around you. It makes doing what you love very difficult, because unfortunately as a marginalized person, people will always subconsciously side with the person trying to oppress or attack you. This has happened to me my entire life, from school to work spaces to even internet spaces claiming to be safe places.

People will say that they care about you and like you and even form a friendly bond with you, but the moment a person of privilege decides they do not like you very much, they can and will side with the other person even without proof of their issues with you. It's exhausting and ruins lives in places that should be fun and safe.

I am on my umpteenth experience with this exact cycle and I would be lying if I said it didn't make me feel like I couldn't live or breath in places I should be allowed to be involved in. It's a very real problem that refuses to end because no one has the courage to challenge it. I am speaking not only on my own experiences, but for the many other people of color or queers or disabled people who simply cannot join these so called "safe spaces" because of our identities conflicting with people who have been taught that we are lesser and not worth love or care.

If this is a problem you face, please know that I see you and I love you. It's hard to keep surviving in a world that wants to hurt you and leaves you abandoned and alone. I want you to know that the world is scary, but we all exist. You should be allowed to experience joy and fun without feeling like you're being suffocated and wanting to die.

You matter. The people around you that make you feel like you don't are nothing by comparison. You matter and I truly hope that we'll one day find each other and become the safe space that we deserve.

The marginalized people in your fandom are more important than your fictional characters and plotlines that you put above us. We're here and we're not leaving. Learn to live with us and protect us.

If we're truly your friends, you would care when your privileged "friends" want to remove us.

Additionally, please do not take this rant and make it only about white people who are part of these marginalized categories. This is a post about EVERYONE. Including the people of color around you. Do not remove us from this conversation. Care about ALL OF US if you support this at all. Thank you.

[squishyliger]

[alucardsinep]

seasons greasons. discuss

[ltlemon]

ur blog has infected my camera roll with the weird talking dollar bill

im so glad im spreading my infection. here's another one

[crimsonbubble]

James Sunderland... I KNOW hes a sad wet puppy but like.. I need that blonde man to gently dom me and praise me and encourage me hhhhhhh

don't do this to me rn 😩😩 the softest soft dom to ever soft dom

i just know he says things like "there we go." "so good for me." "just like that, sweetheart." "feeling good, baby?" but even when you try to brat him at the hopes of getting him to be a little rougher, the only thing he does is quirk a brow with a soft tilt of his head and it has you crumbling back down to him. he def laughs and kisses your cheek when you pout and deflate into his arms because he brought you back to him again. just like he always does <3

when he overstims you and you start whining that it's too much and you cant come again, he goes "yes, you can, baby." "please baby, do it for me" and he says it all whiny and begging as he continues to make you feel good. KISSES. SO MANY KISSES. he cant and wont stop kissing you and your pretty body while he makes you come over and over again.

taking all of his cock inside you for the first time and he's holding your hips so gently as he coos at you with stuff like "easy, honey, let me do it." "taking all of me so well, baby." and his voice is so fucking nice to listen to; all reassuring, loving, and trusting. when you ride him for the first time, his hands stay on your thighs as he lets you take him at your pace. mainly because he loves watching how your face scrunches in pleasure as his cock hits your sweet spots and fills your pretty hole. "gonna take all of me? yeah?"

im gonna stop here before i turn this into a 12 page essay

[mittland]

clarence clemons and bruce springsteen on stage by michael putland, 1979

[cowardlylittlebranchman]

Losing it