#thermonuclear take

[tributary]

last post on the subject. 90% of people decide their stance on i/p based on whether they hate jews or arabs more

[squeakadeeks]

lucky for me i have a natural screen time deterrent because everytime someone mentions an insane ED dieting trend on tiktok, which these days has been within less than 5 minutes from opening the app, im compelled to calmly set my phone down, walk outside barefoot until i reach the nearest body of water, stand in it, and then scream until my throat is so hoarse it wins the kentucky derby and eventually has to be shot after breaking its leg

[frances-kafka]

So, if you want to understand the history of ND stuff in any useful kind of way you have to know that we talked about these things differently. Gen Xrs have a different generational experience and Boomers' is different still.

Prior to the 80s, NDs were really not a thing. The optic was almost entirely in terms of learning disability and intellectual impairment in the 70s.

ADHD - not autism - is really the first we see of anything resembling the modern ND consciousness, as "autistic" was a label reserved for children presenting with severe disability or at minimum, delay.

Autism in the 70s and 80s and before was not culturally adjacent to ADHD or giftedness, it was adjacent to conditions of severe intellectual impairment.

It's possible to be an 80s ADHD labeled autistic who gets good interventions *because lots of how ADHD was understood at the time, got absorbed by autism later.*

This is basically my story as a matter of fact, a lot of helpful support I got early was via the ADHD pipeline, and so ADHD *is* my "recognized early enough to get meaningful self understanding and meaningful support* narrative, which is a big reason I was ABLE to shrug off autism as a label for about 15 years, until the changing autism stereotypes caught up with me.

ADHD and early issues with visible LD etc are WHY I didn't end up in the "normal until hospitalized" optic that some autistics I knew ended up in, if they had *only* been seen as gifted. I was very aware of my stuff very early even if it was called something else and even if it will be called something else in the future, and it shaped my social choices, my career choices, etc.

Also there was the optic to Boomers and older that you really could just be a "normal" person or even a high performing "genius" who was just "a little slow as a kid." (There are many historical figures this actually applies to. "A little slow as a kid" may just be within a *normal* range of child development.) This is actually part of where many Boomers are coming from when they think a certain degree of autism is just normal.

Early labels in adults (whom we would now understand as high masking ASD-1) were more personal history than identity.

To Boomers and older, you were "mentally well" until you presented "mentally ill." There really wasn't anything like being ND as we presently understand. Also, the *very same optics* that got boys seen as gifted, invested lots of time and support into, etc, got girls into the clinical pipeline early. The real dx discrepancy between girls and boys in my generation and older is the degree to which cis het white rich boys were just allowed to not be anything at all while girls were immediately tagged as mentally ill or developmentally disabled with the very same presentation, even within the same family. My grandmother who was a victim of this, and heavily and deeply abused from early childhood, is the sister of my physicist uncle who was on the Manhattan Project and was odd but successful, had a wife and family, never labeled anything at all.

Lots of people we now see as autistic were just considered normal gifted people who then had a "nervous breakdown" after high school/entering the adult world.

It was possible to be totally ego-syntonic as an odd person until diagnosis, if you were in the 80s gifted pipeline, because if you were in a social set that was actually ALLOWED to be intelligent let alone gifted in the first place (i.e., an upper middle class person, with more weirdness optic allowed for boys) you likely weren't going to be diagnosed with ANYTHING unless you were Weird with a Capital W.

That I had any kind of optic besides just being Gifted is *because* despite high IQ, I was a poor academic performer, and *couldn't* mask well inside a school setting.

These are people without even that optic.

They literally were just seen as gifted, and it was assumed that - of course - highly gifted people were a little weird. Gifted optic in school meant access to a whole different social and academic pipeline consisting hugely of other people we would now understand as ND, so it's actually possible to come out of that being totally ego-syntonic, and never ever even seek diagnosis until something breaks.

If you're like my ex husband who ended up just going away to sea for years, and then becoming a programmer in a basement at a university, you might never get diagnosed with anything, especially if you never see yourself as the problem in any of your interpersonal interactions, and that was a FAR more common optic with gifted white Gen X and Jones ASD-1 boys than early dx was.

The thing for my generation isnt the degree to which boys were diagnosed over girls... quite the opposite, it's the degree to which smart white rich boys were just *allowed* to be odd and given tons of concessions *without* being labeled ANYTHING, because of the degree to which the culture saw that boy was probably a future curer of cancer or a future astronaut.

A chunk of the "NT [more likely, high masking autist] woman miserably married to ASD man" narrative on those websites like FAAAS is actually referring to men who don't have any diagnostic label whatsoever and don't understand themselves as the problem, if you actually read the stories.

Those guys don't get diagnosed until something actually breaks - like, their wife hauls them into couples counseling, or they have finally exhausted their supply of good will (many social compensations of gifted children stop working past one's 20s and that's actually when my dx happened too).

Interpersonal problems weren't enough for dx unless they actually bothered a person enough to seek help. Something has to break. You don't end up with a diagnosis because you're happy and adjusted, no matter how odd you are.

Please ask Boomers about nervous breakdowns because half the time this is referring to what we now understand as autistic burnout.

[rainbowgod666]

The gEnDE-(is annihilated by the gender)

any fun updates in the bangs saga after like a month?

ooh look at me I have a thing for emotionally devastated catboys AND confirmation that the eyepatch works with the bangs

[gsot]

Hopefully this is the wake up call Europe needs to start taking our own defence seriously

[scalpelsister]

all of u saying nemesis hades 2 is too mean are weak and will not survive the night 👍

[neverreallythoughtaboutthefuture]

Happy New Year!!!

There are now officially only 12 days left to enjoy "Pacific Rim" as a movie portraying "futuristic events"!!!

Important dates to add to your calendar!!!

Between January 1 and January 8, 2025:

Striker Eureka is decommissioned from active combat.

Category IV Kaiju, Mutavore, breaks through Anti-Kaiju Wall and is killed by Striker Eureka, thus proving the Anti-Kaiju Wall ineffective.

Stacker Pentecost recruits Raleigh Becket for breach assault.

Raleigh Becket arrives at the Hong Kong Shatterdome.

Pilot tryouts with Raleigh Becket begin proper.

Raleigh and Mako nearly destroy the Shatterdome during their first attempt at drifting together in Gipsy Danger, prompting Stacker Pentecost to ground her, and inform Raleigh that he would be paired with another co-pilot.

January 8, 2025:

Double Event.

Newton Geiszler drifts with a Kaiju brain.

Category IV Kaijus, Leatherback and Otachi, emerge from the breach and attack Hong Kong.

Crimson Typhoon, Cherno Alpha, and Striker Eureka are deployed.

Crimson Typhoon is destroyed and the Wei Tang brothers are killed by Otachi.

Cherno Alpha is destroyed and the Kaidanovskys are killed by Leatherback.

Striker Eureka is incapacitated by Leatherback's EMP, and Herc Hansen's arm is broken.

Since Gipsy Danger is analog and the only Jaeger able to withstand the EMP (don't ask! I didn't quite get that part!), Stacker finally agrees to let Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori co-pilot her in the field.

Stranded with an unresponsive Jaeger, Herc and Chuck Hansen decide they should do something really, really stupid climb on the top of the head of Striker Eureka and shoot at it with flare guns. For the record that was Herc's dumbass idea!

To absolutely no one's surprise, the flare guns do absolutely no damage to the Kaiju whatsoever, and they only manage to piss Leatherback off but still look badass doing it!

Gipsy Danger is deployed and saves Herc and Chuck Hansen 's sorry asses.

Chuck Hansen is revealed as a secret Gipsy Danger fanboy.

Leatherback and Otachi are killed by Gipsy Danger.

Otachi's baby Kaiju is born and dies via strangulation by umbilical cord during pursuit of Newton Geiszler.

January 12, 2025:

Triple Event.

Category IV Kaiju, Scunner and Raiju emerge from the Breach.

Since Herc Hansen is unable to co-pilot Striker Eureka with his son, Stacker Pentecost decides to take his place in the conn-pod.

Stacker Pentecost launches "Operation Pitfall", an assault involving Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka on the Breach.

Category 5 Kaiju, Slattern, emerges from the Breach.

Raiju is killed by Gipsy Danger.

Striker Eureka self detonates thermonuclear bomb near the Breach, killing Scunner and a bunch of fishes and badly wounding Slattern.

Slattern is killed by Gipsy Danger.

Gipsy Danger uses Slattern's dead body as a "bar code" to grant them access to the Anteverse through the Breach.

Raleigh Becket sends Mako Mori to safety in her escape pod after she loses consciousness upon entering the Anteverse.

Raleigh Becket arms Gipsy's nuclear reactor to self-destruct, destroys the Breach, and narrowly manages to escape the Anteverse through his own escape pod before the Breach collapses.

Herc Hansen stops the War Clock!

[gunsandspaceships]

Tony Stark’s achievements

Childhood:

“Brilliant and unique mind”

At age 4 built his first circuit board

At age 6 built his first engine

Cracked the Pentagon’s firewall in high school on a dare

Went to college at 14

Built cool smart robots (Dum-E and U) when he was a teen

At 17 graduated summa cum laude from MIT

Polyglot

Before Afghanistan:

“Da Vinci of our time”

Became an owner and CEO of Stark Industries at 21

Successfully ran the company for decades

Advanced the world of technology, not only in weaponry and robotics but also:

created advanced AI J.A.R.V.I.S.

created holographic interface technology

created repulsor technology

Participated in charity

In and after Afghanistan:

“I’m sorry, I’m not Tony Stark”

Survived an open-heart surgery in a cave, without general anesthesia

Lived with, in fact, a debilitating wound, shrapnel, and a huge and dangerous technological device in his body for years and was willing and capable of doing not only his usual work but also being a superhero and doing all these next things...

Did not give up under torture and fought with his captors

Invented and built a miniaturized Arc Reactor, in a cave, with a box of scraps

Invented and built Iron Man armor, in the same cave, with the same box of scraps

Escaped from captivity by himself (with help from Yinsen, but without any armed assistance)

Became an expert in piloting and driving

Saved people in Gulmira

Saved a USAF pilot

Probably the best hacker in the world, was able to easily hack networks of the Pentagon, US government, AIM, and SHIELD

Fought with Iron Monger after nearly died. Defeated him and saved many lives. Was ready to die for that

Built many more different Iron Man armors

Fought terrorists between IM and IM2 (IM2 tie-in comics)

Saved a submarine crew (IM2 - newspapers in Vanko’s home)

Saved a woman from a fire (IM2 - newspapers in Vanko’s home)

“Stabilized East-West relations” (IM2 - newspapers in Vanko’s home), so the world was “enjoying its longest period of uninterrupted peace in years”

Organized Stark Expo

Was able to keep Iron Man armor in his safe hands despite the government’s and HYDRA’s attempts to take it for themselves

Defeated Ivan Vanko in Monaco

(Re)Discovered a new element

 Synthesized it, by building a particle accelerator, at home

Revolutionized energy industry and science. Gave clean energy to the world

Defeated Vanko in New York with Rhodey, Natasha, and Pepper and saved many lives again

Saved Peter Parker (IM2)

Made it so that the Abomination would not leave prison and join the Avengers

Built Stark/Avengers Tower powered by Arc Reactor technology

Saved Steve Rogers and many civilians in Germany from Loki

Was able to fight with Thor on equal terms

Biggest brain on Earth, arguably - in the Universe:

best scientist on the team, in SHIELD, on Earth, in the Universe

expert in nuclear, particle, and quantum physics

was able to learn very quickly – became an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics in one night

Successfully tracked Tesseract by its gamma radiation with Bruce

Saved Helicarrier with the Avengers and SHIELD agents on board, almost died

Saved Rogers from a merc right after that

Fought with Chitauri, killed many of them, saved a lot of people

Was able to blow up a Leviathan by himself

Saved New York City by redirecting a nuke to the wormhole

Saved the world by destroying Thanos’ Chitauri army, almost died again

Founded The United States Department of Damage Control to clean up after battles

Rebuilt Stark Tower into Avengers Tower and gave each team member their own quarters

One of the best biologists and biomedical engineers on Earth, even if it’s not his main area of expertise:

helped Maya with Extremis back in 1999, because knew more in her own field, and even didn’t remember that

was head hunted by Aldrich Killian to work on Extremis with/instead of Maya, who was the leading expert in tissue regeneration

improved and stabilized Extremis, so it became safe regenerative technology, and with it…

cured Pepper

healed extensive injuries in his chest

invented and implanted devices for remote control of his suits (into his forearm in IM3, and most probably into his brain for Mark L armor in Infinity War)

invented build-in diagnostic system in his suits

Invented many devices for protection purposes (ex. bomb disposal)

A capable detective. Figured out the cause of explosions in IM3 on his own

Saved Pepper instead of himself by putting Mark 42 on her during the attack on his Malibu mansion

Survived the attack with a barely working prototype suit. Shot down a helicopter with a piano

Was able to fight with enhanced fire-breathing regenerating terrorists without armor and weapons in Rose Hill. In handcuffs

Knowledgeable and skilled in medicine:

saved a kid with his arc reactor in a deleted scene from IM3, selflessly pulling it out of his chest and performing defibrillation under electric shocks

knew how to recognize hyperglycemia when Harley was eating 3rd bawl of candies

closed his wound in Infinity War with nanoparticles

performed first-aid on Bruce after his snap

Built a lot of stuff from random things he bought in a store for the assault on the Mandarin's mansion. In a motel

Successfully stormed the Mandarin's mansion full of armed and huge security guys with dogs. Alone. Without his armor

Successfully escaped captivity in the Mandarin's mansion with just a few pieces of armor on

Saved all the people who fell from the Air Force One

Stormed Roxxon Norco ship with Rhodey, without a suit. With one handgun

Saved the US president

Defeated Killian and his Extremis-enhanced terrorists, saved many lives

Built quinjets

Created Iron Legion

Became the benefactor of the Avengers, provided them with everything, was a combatant, and also the team’s pilot, hacker, engineer, medic, and scientist

As an Avenger saved many lives on missions, including destroying the rest of HYDRA in AoU

With Bruce’s help created Veronica and Hulkbuster suit

Defeated a rogue Iron Legionnaire with a fork

In contrast to other team members was able to function after Wanda played with his mind

Defeated mad Hulk. Saved a lot of lives in Johannesburg

Easily hacked nuclear codes in Nexus and found J.A.R.V.I.S. “in the world’s biggest haystack”

Created advanced AI F.R.I.D.A.Y.

Many advanced AIs

Created Vision

With the Avengers defeated Ultron and his army

Evacuated people who were left in Sokovia

Saved a falling evacuation shuttle with people on it

Together with Thor saved Earth by destroying the falling Sokovia

Rebuilt Stark Compound into Avengers Compound for the team in Upstate New York

Invented several medical devices, including leg braces, blood toxicity detector

Sponsored the development of technology for psychotherapy (B.A.R.F.). Prevented it from being used for harm

Funded all the students’ projects at MIT

Did everything possible to legally, politically, and physically protect the team before, during, and after the Civil War

Was able to disarm Winter Soldier without a suit, with only one armored glove

Figured out Spider-Man’s identity

Created Spider-Man’s suits

Mentored, sponsored, and looked after Peter Parker

Saved Peter Parker (SMH). Twice

Saved the ferry from sinking

Invented nanoparticles

 “Earth’s best defender”

Went to space to save Peter, Strange and bring back Time Stone

Saved Peter Parker (IW)

Saved Strange on the Donut spaceship. Killed Ebony Maw

Cloak of Levitation chose him as his second favorite (deleted scene with Tony wearing Levi and Strange in Mark L)

Was respected by Thanos himself

Withstood when Thanos hit him with a moon

Fought Thanos, made him bleed, kept fighting even without armor

Survived a severe injury thanks to his own invention

Was able to function, tried to fix Benatar, and return home while injured and ill with an infected wound

Built a lab for Bruce and helped him to become one with Hulk (combine the best of both worlds)

Became an amazing dad

Became an expert in time travel physics

Discovered/invented (controlled) Time travel

Built a time machine

Went on Time Heist and stole Tesseract from a guarded military base

Created his own Infinity Gauntlet

Thus brought half of the universe back to existence (Bruce snapped and partially sacrificed his health, but nothing would be possible without Tony)

Saved Bruce’s arm by providing emergency medical care

Fought with Thanos again and…

Saved the whole Universe

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

 — 

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[problemnyatic]

dunmeshi post moment but it drives me up a goddamn WALL how people are so loud and upfront about their fav's flaws and shortcomings and how it makes them interesting, and then drop the notion like a stone the moment it comes to how others treat laios.

Like there's all this discussion about how the characters will respond in interesting ways to different situations because they're rich, multifaceted people with different strengths and flaws, but somehow everyone's behavior toward and in response to laios is just taken at face value as "probably reasonable."

No!!! No it fucking isn't!!! He isn't a "menace" and he isn't stupid and he isn't unreasonable, he's autistic, plaintext blatantly autistic and a solid half if not more of the situations he "blunders" into would have been resolved if not prevented if not nonexistent if the people around him had shown any respect for his intelligence and willingness to adapt to new information.

Everyone around him is constantly infantalizing him and acting like there's no reasoning with him, opting to straight up use force over just telling him what the expectations are in a situation he's liable to misnavigate, and it's unnecessary! Yeah he gets a little blinded by excitement about monsters, but it's more common for others to project their own discomfort onto him than for his interest to actually be leading somewhere genuinely bad, and when people actually take the time to explain to him that a situation needs more focus, he listens! Every time!

I'm not going to say he's done nothing wrong, he's as flawed as anyone else in the cast. But I routinely see folks mischaracterizing him as exactly the bumbling idiot the story is screaming that he isn't, and I can't help but see this thermonuclear media literacy moment as a massive fucking tell of folks' ableism.

So in case you needed it in plain english: Autistic men aren't inherently more dangerous or unreasonable than neurotypical folks. In fact, they're far more likely to be victims of violence. Y'all're just ableist as hell.

[tributary]

almost none of you understand nuclear deterrence or how nukes work

[yujeong]

The Score of 4 Minutes - Episode 3

Alright, folks. Before I proceed to lose my mind and write a fucking THESIS about my beautiful baby boy Tonkla and his whole fucking deal this episode, I'll proceed to give you the OST I managed to find, as I did before for episode 1 and episode 2. So, let's go (YouTube links, as per usual): - The Throne Is Mine by Ruiqi Zhao: When Dome wakes up - Flesh and Bone by Jon Björk: When Korn is in the bathroom, checking his phone to see Tonkla's calls + the beginning of the scene with Great, before he calls Korn to ask the time - Walkin' on Dreams by Headlund: When Tyme and Great speak by the basketball court (before the rewind) - Sub Twin by Jay Varton: When Great tells Tyme about seeing 4 minutes into the future - I Found The Answers In You (feat. Mia Niles) by Loving Caliber: When Great tells Tyme to go grab something to eat - The Consequences by Marten Moses: When Tyme and Den are discussing Great's condition - Beneath the Bushes by Raymond Grouse: When Great takes Tyme to the claw machine - Spying on the Neighbours by The Fly Guy Five: When Tyme is teaching Great how to catch the plushies - Are You Having Fun by Alek Bluntz: When Tyme caught the first plushie, then the rest - Rest in His Love by Joyspring: When Tyme and Great almost kissed - By the Lighthouse by Miles Avida: When Nan is getting dressed and steals the key to check the documents - Face On by Wendel Scherer: When she gets caught and chased outside - Where Does It End by Max Anson: When Korn appears and learns about what happened with Nan + when Win gets taken off the case - Roseé du matin by DEX 1200: When Tonkla is breaking stuff in his room and then does drugs - The Four Seasons, Violin Concerto in G Minor, Op. 8 No. 2, RV 315 "Summer": I. Allegro non molto: When Win and Tonkla fuck (before Win goes inside Tonkla) - The Four Seasons - Winter - Allegro Non Molto: When Win and Tonkla fuck (after Win goes inside Tonkla) - Eternum Nocturne by Gavin Luke: When Win and Tonkla talk post-sex - Down the Alleyway by Damon Greene: When Win goes to talk to Mod about her message on social media - I Wanna Fall by King Sis: When Great is smoking on the balcony - Obstruction by Bonnie Grace: When Great is making his (murder)board - Thermonuclear by Craft Case: When Korn and Great talk at the bar - Cluster One by Hampus Naeselius: When Tyme fights Korn and later Great

[sapphicwhump]

Thinking about the popularity of Laios transfem headcanons in a whump context

Marcille's affinity for flesh-melting ancient magic opens the possibility for some kind of horrific blood ritual that feminizes the recipient

"The entire process will take about thirty seconds. I have to liquefy most of your body fat and muscle mass while I restructure your skeleton. Once I start the spell, I won't be able to stop until you're reconstituted, or you'll die as a puddle. This is going to hurt, a lot. You are going to scream. You are going to regret this decision and wish you were dead. But it'll all be worth it when it's over, I promise." "...How do you know?" "Because I developed this spell myself. It's the reason I chose to specialize in healing. And, a long time ago, I had my mother cast it on me."

Laios' agonized screaming gradually gets more and more feminine as Marcille reshapes her vocal cords

Marcille specifically requests the fattiest cuts of meat from whatever monster they killed yesterday to use for the spell so she can give Laios bigger boobs. Her build ends up suspiciously close to Falin's, because Falin is the only reference point that Marcille has for what fem!Laios would look like naked

The next time Laios goes on a rant about some incredibly obscure monster lore, Marcille is shocked to realize her yapping has gone from annoying to indescribably attractive, and that she's been applying a double standard to her and Falin's behavior this whole time. She's enchanted by her autistic tgirl swagger and ends up causing thermonuclear levels of drama within the party, much to Chilchuck's dismay

Basically concord-and-cliches' art but with fem!Laios

[lennadanvers]

Tsar Bomba*

Johnny Soap MacTavish x Reader

A/N: This is just angst. I wrote it quite some time ago, but I guess it's time I post it. I'm not sure if I really like it, but at least it has a cool name lol. It may or may not have a part 2. The ending I have in mind is not happy, either way. Other than that, I guess the only TWs are mention of past trauma, mentions of a narcissistic father, past narcissistic abuse, and just Johnny fucking up. If I missed anything, please let me know and I'll add it.

*Tsar Bomba: Soviet thermonuclear bomb that was detonated in a test over Novaya Zemlya island in the Arctic Ocean on October 30, 1961. The largest nuclear weapon ever set off, it produced the most powerful human-made explosion ever recorded. (Amy Tikkanen, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024)

Soap is an asshole. A complete and utter idiot, with zero regards for other people and their feelings. A stupid pile of scottish-

“Aren’t you gonna go after’er?”

When Ghost is giving you relationship advice, you know it’s bad. Not like Johnny didn’t know that before Simon asked one of the most useless questions he’s heard. Which is to say something, because even he's asking himself that same question.

Am I not gonna run after her?

Of course, the question doesn’t come alone. It implies many others, each of them a punch to the guts.

Should I? Does she want me to? Would it change anything? Do I deserve to drag this any longer? Why would she want me to be with her? Is she even capable of forgiving me? Am I? How could I do it? Why am I so stubborn? Why couldn’t I just do as she said just this once?

Truth be told, most of the questions are accusations. Guilt. Johnny doesn’t fight them. On the contrary, he sides with the feeling in an absurd display of a split personality. One part of him punches, kicks and bites (sadly, in his head he doesn’t carry any guns… Which is, now that he thinks about it, okay, because he deserves a very long suffering); and the other bares the weakest parts of him: neck, belly, the way he’s always known he doesn’t deserve the love he needs… Both versions of him have red cheeks and wet eyelashes.

For the first time since he’s met you- but not the first in his life- Soap thinks he should die. The same way he knows any object he lets go of will fall to the ground, he should die. It’s the next logical step: he let go of you- more like threw your heart to the floor, the thought makes him flinch-, so now it comes the end. You ran out the door, and now…

Now you’re coming right back.

You’re stomping in his direction. You’re blushing, dark red cheeks and nose that he usually finds beautiful, but that right now look awful. Because it’s rage red, hurt red, indignation red;and it’s all directed to him. All provoked by him. Stupid, idiotic him. Asshole him.

Maybe it’ll help you, to yell exactly that at Soap. Even better, you’ll do it in front of Simon. His closest friend, his coworker, his superior… He deserves the humiliation. You deserve to inflict it. You deserve everything.

You stop where it’ll be clear you’re yelling at him, but not close enough for him to touch you- he wouldn’t dare, either way. Except you don’t yell. You just take a deep breath and clench your fists.

“I fucking told you, Soap.”, your voice is shaking, and so are you. And him, now that you didn’t call him Johnny, “I told you to not do that. I told you why I… Why he… I told you!”

You had told him. Twice. He even had asked about it the second time. “I don’t have a relationship with him. I haven’t spoken to him since I was in high school. I moved away as soon as I could, and I’m happy I did. He’s not in my life anymore”. You were so proud when you said that, that there wasn’t a place in your life for your father.

You give Simon a quick glance, and the man stares back at you. He’s not going to pretend he hasn’t been present for the whole interaction. He’s not going to pretend he isn’t listening to you. It clearly makes you uncomfortable, but Johnny is willing to let you know that Ghost will probably kick his ass after this- maybe it’ll help a little with the awkwardness.

Your voice sounds more like a growl when you keep talking.

“I said I never want to see him again! Why would you do that?! Why did you…! He knows where I live! He went to my fucking job, MacTavish!”

Your lips trembles. You’re breaking a little, and he doesn’t know what it is. Pain? Fury? Frustration? Betrayal? Fear? Whatever it is, you make it disappear with another deep breath.

Johnny is terrified. One deep breath and your whole face relaxed. Your eyes don’t look like they’re about to flood your cheeks anymore. It’s a mask that says nothing. You’ve closed off.

It’s a stab to his spine. He knows you used to do this. You used to cry in the bathroom, quietly, and come out like nothing happened. You used to not be able to let him know how you felt. It took you years to cry in front of him for the first time. To trust him. To learn that he was safe.

And he violated your trust.

“This is over. We are over. I warned you! You knew not to do this, the only thing I… I don’t… If you wanted to do it you should have said so, that way I wouldn’t have wasted… You had no fucking right, Soap! I fucking told you I hate him. He went to my apartment! He was there! Why would you…? You had no right!”

He opens his mouth. Doesn’t know what to say, though. Or, actually, he doesn’t know what he can say. Sorry? Not nearly enough. Not even a fraction of what he feels, and even less than a portion of what you deserve. Soap knows the only thing that would fix this, he can’t do: not having done it in the first place. Not tracking your father down. Not asking him to meet up. Not thinking he wasn’t that bad. Not telling him how good you’re doing, despite how proud Johnny was of you. He should have never asked him for his blessing to marry you.

But you don’t want to hear his silence any longer.

“Don’t! I don’t want to see you ever again. I hope you’re happy. You know him now, congratulations! Now you know everything. I bet he was so fucking nice with you. I bet he said he was so proud of me, even if I never treated him right, didn’t he?”

No, Soap is every opposite of happy. Yes, he said that. Yes, at the time he thought your father was nice. He wants to stab himself in the heart for thinking that. He knows that man was an awful parent to you- hell, he wasn’t even a parent.

But that was his mistake, wasn’t it? For Johnny MacTavish, family is the most important thing. Without family, nothing else is worth it. And seeing you celebrate birthdays and holidays only with friends, knowing your family was out there, far from you… He didn’t want that to happen in your wedding, too.

Key words: he and wedding. First mistake: it wasn’t about him. Fucking selfish asshole. Second mistake (this one was more of an idiotic fantasy that he didn’t deserve): wedding. Yes, maybe his father had asked his mother’s dad for her hand before proposing. And? Those were Johnny’s parents. Why in hell would you want him to ask someone else if it was okay for you to marry him?

“He does that! I’m not crazy... He’s- he's nice to other people! He’s manipulating you. And I’m not going to have that narcissistic bastard in my life. You and him can stay the fuck away from me! Even if you didn’t love me, there was no need to do it.”

Don’t love you? Soap wants to cry- his body is just frozen in place. He is a miserable person. All he does is love you. How did he manage to make you think otherwise? To make you feel otherwise? How did he dare do the only thing- the worst thing…?

Your head snaps violently in Simon’s direction, and Soap can almost see him bracing himself for what’s about to come. Which is an unnaturally calm and controlled voice.

“I’m sorry you had to see this, Simon. And I’m so sorry you have a friend who doesn’t understand boundaries or respect, at the very fucking least. I’ll put his stuff in a bag, and I’ll leave it with the doorman, in case you want to go get it for him. I’m sorry you got involved in this, I… I’m so sorry.”

There you are, apologizing again. Johnny was working on that with you. He had been for the past couple of years. But you’re doing it again, even though it is not your fault. It never is, and you’re always sorry, and he wishes he was dirt so at least you could step on him without feeling guilty. And he wants to rip his own heart out and hand it to you. He wants to use his stupid nails to scratch his stupid chest open, his stupid hands to break his fucking ribs and any other bone he can find in the way. He wants to crack his head open against the wall. He wants… It doesn’t matter what he wants.

Because you’re leaving.

You’re leaving, and you’re not crying. You’re so hurt that all the effort you did to open up, all these years working on learning how to be vulnerable, just disappeared. You’re back to the place you were when he met you. Except it’s worse now.

He made a mess. Johnny fucked you up.

For the millionth time today, he wants to die.

[gsot]

I hate playing ICBM with disarmamentcels. what do you mean this man phoned my actual real life phone to suggest a mutual agreement to limit numbers of SSBNs. Motherfucker go send out an ASW patrol before you start having these ideas, I have 30 SSBNs parked off your Arctic coast as we speak. Who do you think I am? Robert L. Holmes? I’m going for maximum credible deterrence here, outta my way.

[val-creative]

Fictober Day 7: "follow me if you want to live"

Lena/Kara (Supercorp)

For @fictober-event Day 7 prompt!

Type: Fanfiction | Fandom: Supergirl (TV) | Ship: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor | Warning & Triggers: Implied Threats of Outsider Violence

---

Okay, okay, okay...

Kara closes off the distraction of emergency sirens, and of people screaming to flee, and of Lena. Lena taking charge. Lena barking orders into a phone for receptionists and staff workers to evacuate from L-Corp. Lena doing her absolute best to keep everyone safe.

She has no choice... she ditches Lena, hurrying up a stairwell and kicking off her heels. Kara's neutral-hose covered feet flying.

According to the thermonuclear readings, the bomb planted by Lena's competitor should be in this ninth story wall-panel... and a blast of her heat-vision should terminate the detonation sequence...

Kara squats, examining it with X-ray vision first. One of these cords attached she has to burn. Which one? The red cord or the blue cord?

Before her communicator cut out... Winn said something about the Matrix movie from 1999... ugh, Rao help her.... Kara only saw it once.

Behind her, Lena's footsteps. Lena's heartbeat pounds in Kara's ears.

"Follow me if you want to live! NOW!" Lena hollers to a ground of women huddled in another office-room. "Kara! Kara, you too--"

When Lena's hand grasps onto Kara's shoulder, Kara turns her head and stammers, "wh--wait, wait--!" and resists against being pulled.

"This building is about to go, Kara! Do not make me drag you!"

"It's just--uh--"

Kara fumbles for a reason for her to stay, and for Lena to go, looking away for the emptied stairwell entrance before she's noticed a blank-faced Lena goes to a knee in front of her. Their eyes meet intensely.

Both of Lena's hands gently grasp this time, against Kara's cheeks, and she presses in. Lena's mouth presses, too. On Kara's... lips. Huh.

Kara blinks, dreamy-eyed and confused, when Lena backs up.

"Very romantic," Lena says with a hint of a grin, "and I want to return your feelings, but it's the WORST time possible right now--I swear to you, Kara, I'll hear what you gotta say when we're out of the danger."

Huh...

Oh, oh! Red pill! The red cord!

Before Lena manages to get Kara on her feet, Kara secretly lowers her glasses and pinpoint heat-blasts the bomb. It whirs off unnoticed.

They take hands, and Kara feels her own heart pounding like Lena's.

Okay, okay, OKAY... Kara's best friend thinks Kara is IN LOVE with her and... wants to be with in love with her... BACK?

Kara swallow down an absurdly high laugh.

Sounds nice.