#this is a line-by-line translation mostly for my own benefit

[survivetoread]

Natalia Lafourcade - De todas las flores (Marathi Translation)

नाताल्या लाफुरकादे - दे तोदास लास फ्लोरेस (सगळ्या त्या फुनलांमधून)

आपण लावलेल्या सगळ्या त्या फुलांमधून राहिलं फक्त एकच जिवंत रोज सकाळी ते विचारतं कधी येशील त्यांच्यासाठी गायला

आपण पाहिलेल्या सगळ्या त्या चंद्रांच्या राहिल्यात फक्त ��ाहीच आठवणी आपण हसलो तेव्हाच्या आपण एकमेकांकडे होतो तेव्हाच्या नशेत दिशाविना माद्रिदच्या रस्त्यांमध्ये गेलो आपण नाचलो तेव्हाच्या आपण हरवलो तेव्हाच्या आपल्या त्या गाण्यात जे आपल्या जुन्या जगात आपण समजायचो आपल्यात वाटलेल्या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात

आपण लावलेल्या सगळ्या त्या फुलांमधून राहिलं फक्त एकच जिवंत रोज सकाळी ते विचारतं कधी येशील त्यांच्यासाठी गायला

लुप्त होणारे ते चंद्र ज्यांनी आपल्याला पाहिलं पवित्र अश्रू गळणार्‍या सागरांच्या वर तुझ्या कुरवाळण्यासारखेच गोड तसेच कडू सकाळी स्वादिष्ट, पहाटे व्यूह तुझ्या कुरवाळण्यासारखेच गोड तसेच कडू उतरत जात आहे माझ्या छातीत ही सगळी खिन्नता या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात तुझ्या सोबतीशिवाय

आपण पाहिलेल्या सगळ्या त्या चंद्रांच्या राहिल्यात फक्त काहीच आठवणी आपण हसलो तेव्हाच्या आपण एकमेकांकडे होतो तेव्हाच्या नशेत दिशाविना माद्रिदच्या रस्त्यांमध्ये गेलो आपण नाचलो तेव्हाच्या आपण हरवलो तेव्हाच्या आपल्या त्या गाण्यात जे आपल्या जुन्या जगात आपण समजायचो आपल्यात वाटलेल्या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात ज्यात आपण हरवून गेलो त्या गुलाबी बुगनविलांच्या बागात

[covenofthearticulate]

@vamptember's 12 Nights of Christmas | Night 4

It is too easy, these nights, for Louis to pass the entire evening in his library. Armand has so thoroughly spoiled him with every comfort he could ever want; collections of the rarest manuscripts, translations that lend new meaning to his beloved favorites, delightful little surprises of new titles which appear every now and then as unspoken tokens of love, just to let Louis know that Armand is thinking about him.

It was no accident that the library was tucked into the heart of the sprawling complex; away from any windows through which the sunlight might cut his reading short, and sequestered far enough from the street that Louis needn’t worry about the noise and chaos of the outside world. No, he could spend his every evening and every day in this library, just as he finds himself doing on this very evening, tucked quietly in his favorite armchair with only the company of the roaring fire and his beloved Rimbaud on the page, and—

“Jesus CHRIST—” 

A flash of bright white light sears across his line of vision, and there is Daniel, fumbling with his phone in an all-too-mortal fashion as he clicks to turn off the flashlight. 

“Merde alors—Daniel!” Louis yells right back. 

His book hits the ground with a thud as Louis’ hands fly up to cover his eyes from the sudden onslaught. 

“Sorry, sorry!” Daniel apologizes with a huff. “I thought you went out with everyone else.”

Even after Daniel turns the light off, Louis cannot help but squint in his direction, his raisined expression clearly reflective of the resentment now brewing in the wake of his disturbed peace.

“...and you were expecting to come into my library while I was away?” Louis raises a brow in suspicion. 

“Well I didn’t want to go all the way downstairs for a candle. You’ve got spares in here, right?”

Stepping fully into the room, Daniel looks around for a moment. He’s rarely ever in this room; there are other libraries in the house, and it had always been made clear from the instant Louis moved in, that he requires a space of his own.

“A candle?”

“Yeah…for the outage.”

Louis blinks, cocks his head to the side for just a moment, but before he can even voice his question—

“For the outage, Louis. The power’s out!” Daniel raises his arms, motions up and out as if to say look around, you idiot! 

“There’s a massive snowstorm. It’s been coming down hard for hours. Christ, you really didn’t know, did you?”

“I’ve been reading,” Louis replies with the stunning simplicity which never fails to get a breathy laugh of disbelief out of Daniel.

“I swear to god, between your library and Armand’s movie room, you two could wait out the whole end of the world in this place.”

“But the world hasn’t ended, Daniel.” Bending down with a sigh, Louis retrieves his book from the floor and flips through the now-bent pages in an attempt to find his place once more. “It’s only a few hours of darkness. We’ve both survived worse.”

Daniel gives a small scoff at that last remark which, admittedly, was slightly less kind than Louis would be on any other ordinary night, had his reading not been so rudely interrupted by a blinding light. 

“You really don’t use any electricity? Like, at all?” Daniel fixes him with a skeptical, narrow-eyed look. In the shadows, the pinch of his brow looks ghastly.

“Why would I need it? I could read in complete darkness if I so wished; the fire is mostly for warmth and, I suppose, a bit of ambiance.”

With a roll of his eyes, Louis catches a glimpse of all the things Daniel wishes to point out: it’s not just the lights— it’s the alarm system, the wifi, the refrigerator, hell, the heated tiles in your bathroom that you keep pretending to hate! Stop acting as if you’re above it all when you benefit from it just as much as I do! 

“Great, well…I’ll let you get back to your reading, then,” is what Daniel finally does say.

He grabs a candlestick from the mantle, sticks it into the open mouth of the fireplace to let the flames catch the wick, and…and then he holds it for a moment, once a small flame is caught, and realizes he doesn’t know exactly what to do with it. Maybe he’ll be fine holding it with his bare hands, it’s not like the wax will burn him, and he only needs it long enough to find the stupid flashlight from the cupboard and—

“Here,” Louis says with a tsk as he crosses over to his grand desk, grabs a beautiful brass candlestick holder from the corner. “Allow me.”

With his usual gentlemanly grace, Louis snatches the candle from Daniel’s hand, tips the flaming end toward the top of the holder and waits patiently for the first few drops of wax to land. 

“It isn’t that I refuse to use electricity,” Louis finds himself explaining. “It’s simply that…well, it’s similar to the way you prefer listening to your music on vinyl instead of…what was it that you yelled at Benji for the other day? Spot?”

“Spotify?”

“Spotify. Overhead lighting is my spotify, Daniel. It’s helpful, but it doesn’t put me at ease, and it doesn’t feel natural.”

Turning the candlestick rightside up once more, he presses the bottom into the shallow pool of melted wax until the seal has cooled and the candle is cemented in place. 

When he hands it back to Daniel, there is a familiar look of realization on his face. It never fails to amuse Louis, this expression of Daniel’s. It’s the same gentle crease between his brows and soft curl of his lips that appeared that very first night, the instant he began to realize that he was, in fact, speaking to a vampire. It returns to Daniel every now and again, whenever Louis says something in particular that strikes at that sentimental cord and reminds him that Louis is still the same creature he always was, with the very same tragic wisdom about him. 

“...is it really snowing outside?” Louis asks, to break him from his thoughts, if nothing else.

“More than snowing,” Daniel scoffs. “It’s a blizzard.”

“Hmm. I’d like to see it,” Louis decides. 

“Yeah?”

“Oh yes. If the world is ending, what use is it to stay holed up in my library?”

Louis stands, takes a step towards the doorway but pauses before heading all the way out. Turning back, he stares at Daniel, then back to the door, a silent yet glaringly obvious gesture to please get out so that Louis may follow behind. 

The halls of Trinity Gate look different in the near darkness. Only now does Louis realize how truly rare it is, to walk the halls without pollution from the billboards and neighbors, without the odd glow of yellow light leaking from under the doorway leading to Sybelle’s room or one of the various guest suites, without the blitzkreig of colors from the televisions, or even the strange blinking lights from the smoke detectors and alarms. 

Blessed darkness. True darkness. 

The faint flicker of the candle’s flame dances across the crown moulding, the beloved paintings adorning the hallway, the statues that seem now to breathe and loosen their stiff limbs. Little details too small for the human eye, delivered only by the virtue of the Dark Gift. 

This is a liminal space, he realizes, as the shadows warp the halls around them only to give way to the beautiful, insidious wonderland of silver moonlight reflecting from the snow and spilling in transcendent ripples across the hardwood floors.

Louis can hear the wind long before they arrive at the little window seat in the east wing sitting room. It’s low and fierce like a rumbling tide, and yet there’s something comforting in the patter of fresh white snow against the window pane.  

They sit in silence, one on each end, ankles knocking together as they settle against the cushioned alcove. 

“I’ve never seen this city so dark,” Louis breathes in amazement. 

“Yeah…thank god the moon is out tonight.”

Louis has nothing to say, but he offers a soft hum in reply as he allows himself to become transfixed with the rush of snow coming down, the way each icy flake catches the silver moonlight, the way the wind makes them dance across the window pane as it howls and rages against the glass.

“This is the perfect weather for a ghost story,” Daniel says eventually in a voice so unsure, so soft, it nearly blends with the groan of the wind outside. “Know any good ones?”

He stops breathing for a moment, as the request hangs in the air. Louis notices the way his chest stops moving, just as he notices the rattle of the wrought iron gate around the perimeter of the building, and the whole world seems too quiet and too loud all at once. 

It’s less of a question and more of a bait. They both know that. 

Louis hasn’t spoken of it, of her, to anyone. Not even David, with all his well-meaning endeavors to chronicle the whole thing and somehow make sense of it for himself. 

But Daniel is different. There is a softness there, an earnestness. And Louis has always been able to speak to Daniel, hasn't he? Suddenly Louis finds himself staring at him, drenched in silver-blue moonlight and the gentle lick of yellow from the candle flame, and behind the violet eyes and porcelain glow of his skin, he finds that very same reporter boy looking back at him with the very same hunger and curiosity.

“What would you like to know?” Louis asks, with a gentle tilt of his head.

“No, sorry,” Daniel immediately backtracks. “Nevermind.”

“It’s alright.” Louis says, and for perhaps the first time, actually means it. “Really, it’s alright.”

But Daniel continues to look out the window despite Louis’ eyes on him, and there’s a flurry of thoughts racing through his mind, just as quick and harsh and chaotic as the whipping wind outside.

I miss you. I love you. I want to hear you talk again, I want to listen to your stories, really listen. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you—

“Daniel—” 

The instant his voice is imbued with that soft knowing, he can feel Daniel close off his mind, turn off the spout with a hurried sort of embarrassment that lets Louis know any sort of leakage just now was not intentional. He makes a sound in the back of his throat, something whining and self-chastising, and for a moment he seems so utterly, charmingly human. It makes Louis’ heart ache, and for some reason he can’t seem to help himself as he reaches out and lays one hand on Daniel’s knee. 

A simple gesture, and yet they both seem to feel something; something overwhelming and indescribable and familiar and strange all at once. Daniel stares at the hand, then stares right at Louis, and it looks as if he has something to say but his mind is closed now, and Louis cannot seem to see anything past the restless thud of his pulse.

Leaning forward, Daniel places the candlestick on the narrow window ledge, presses his hand over Louis', and for just one flicker of a second, the wind dies outside, and the world is still and quiet and full of possibility.

“There’s a backup generator,” Louis admits, before either one of them does something they cannot take back. “In the boiler room, next to the breaker box.”

“Maybe we can leave it off for now. The darkness isn’t so bad, I guess.” Daniel shrugs.

“Very well,” Louis nods, and allows his eyes to soften just a bit. “Perhaps I can think of a story or two, after all.”

[mamasparky]

hiii what if I said, I want to hear YOUR sallowgraham headcanons ☝️😽🤲

Oh shit- I’ve been Reverse Uno card

Ok, a good chunk of our hcs line up so I won’t repeat those but I’ll def tell the rest under the cut

Backgrounds:

I have a lot more about joshua than Edward he’s my fucked up guy

I’m a big transmasc joshua believer - I think his experiences of growing up in new Canaan really influenced a lot of his experiences with relationships in general

Takes a form of wasteland testosterone that is mostly just a low dosage of buffout

His family and the town loved him but they were never quite sure what to do with him and so was inadvertently isolated by them

He has several siblings but was never particularly close to any of them. He’s a true forgotten middle child

Looks a lot like his father

Was never really that close with anyone his age and struggled to find meaningful friendships

Probably travelled alone on his mission trip because they weren’t sure who to send him with

Was taught a lot of survival skills growing up and hunting game is second nature to him - when traveling with Bill and Edward he was the one to make sure they had protein in their diets

Edward grew up pretty easily with his mom but they argue a lot due to both of them being stubborn as hell

He was also every followers teacher worst nightmare and was kicked out the classroom multiple times

Grew up with Bill as his “best friend” and bill never really developed a proper backbone to tell him off and kind of just stuck around because they were mostly friendly

Edward really demeaned him and a lot of the others and was really not popular at all amongst the followers

Did a lot of boxing and loves to fist fight people even as he got older

Edward really got into trying to aggravate and embarrass him the whole time they travelled together and into forming the legion

Joshua hated it yet took the bait every time because Edward is so good at getting under peoples skin

Legion

They got “married” (probably just joshua saying it after they had sex for the first time) pretty young and within a year of the legion being formed

Now you’ll have to excuse me but I’m a huge truther of Vulpes being their bio kid. It makes no sense within actual canon but it is my hill that I will stand on because I think it’s funny

Edward doesn’t know this because Joshua fucked off for a few months under the excuse of “conquests” when he found out he was with child and because he was young and scared of what it meant. He couldn’t face becoming a parent when he was like 21-22 and abandoned vulpes with a tribe in Utah

Joshua never really accepted Vulpes as his own and found excuses to either ignore or mistreat him due to guilt

Edward and him fought constantly with one another and they never really forgave each other for certain fights when one dug into the other and hurt him

Joshua is the really blood thirsty of them two (and has been since a kid) and encouraged Edward to go further and further with his extremes

Edward (obviously) has issues with control and would use their bonded status as a way to control Joshua in a lot of ways.

Joshua was really encouraged through his religion to respect his spouse and be kind of subservient and that translate easily for their relationship. Joshua has a really hard time telling him no and Edward used that for his benefit when ordering him around and convincing him to do stuff

Edward once thought he could take Joshua down in a fist fight and was quickly proven wrong

Edward prefers physical touch as his way of showing love while joshua prefers acts of service

Both are extremely jealous lovers. If either cheated which Edward prolly did a few times- they always blame the affair partner and not each other

A lot of your post Hoover dam hcs overlap with my ideas so I don’t have too much to say there but I do have a bunch of post actual game things. This is all just based around very personal belief that I think they’re a extremely toxic relationship and terrible for one another. There is no canon bases for these but I like them 🤷‍♂️

Joshua wants so badly to come back to the legion despite the acceptance he has gotten from both his family when he came back to new Canaan and the Dead Horses

If given the opportunity he could and would rejoin the legion as Caesar’s legatus and would pretend as if little had happened the past like 6 years

Caesar would only agree to it within very specific circumstances but who is he to deny his very dangerous ex-husband?

Joshua is also a ghoul in very deep denial of it

Edward now has two extremely dangerous Legatus depending on if they won the battle of Hoover dam or not which he can use for twice the expansion

They both become the even worse versions of themselves

If this is a version where arcade is sold to the legion then joshua wants to strangle him for “tempting” his husband

There’s totally a lot more but this is the most I’ve been able to compile in like 30 minutes so you’ll just have to take my scrambled thoughts

[ixesese]

Do you like song recommendations? :0 :D (if not, just ignore me ;P)

Anyway, anyway, get ready for me to ramble!!!

Okay okay, so! Have you heard Kendrick Lemar’s song: United in Grief? (The intro was sampled from a song called Paradise by NOT THE TWOS, which fits also…but I think Kendrick’s sample sounds better :0 just a preference tho) It’s specifically the intro (…not so much the rest of the song :|)! Aaand I think it fits because :D I translated that Morse code message from a while back (a little lost on the binary :/ I don’t think it throws my theories into oblivion tho)! So idk spoilers for anyone who didn’t translate it, but from what I’m understanding!!! Starlo told Ceroba about Kanako (I’m assuming, might be wrong, probably wrong), and that might have something to do with Star’s burns(graspin at straws here!! I wanna know soo bad!!). But Star seems torn up about it (not the burns…maybe the burns… but mostly abt the fact that he doesn’t know what to do)! He’s trying to fix everything! Be the best! Make everyone proud!

But he can’t :( He’s trying so hard and it’s not enough!!! /-\

He told the truth and yet he is not at peace. He has abandoned his happiness and given up on finding his paradise in pursuit for fixing ‘his’ mistakes(Hehe tied it back to the song)

And! And uuughh fav character stressed out got me thinkin overtime!! (I got more thoughts but back on topic!)

There’s also Wildflower by Billie Eilish! (I feel kinda basic suggesting it but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and I know it’s kind of a love song, but I’m gonna twist and turn and pick it apart until it fits >:/!! …it mostly stems from when I thought shadow Kanako was a manifestation of Starlo’s guilt, haunting him, buuut I’m p sure that’s not the case :/ (gonna be real, it’s just a liiittle bit hard to read ur handwriting, but don’t feel bad cuz I have trouble reading just about any handwriting that isn’t printed, even my own!! …I manage tho, obviously) anyway specific lyrics I’d like to point out are!!

“Did I cross the line?” Which can apply to just about everyone (I think :0) for Chujin and Starlo abt their experiments/involvement/knowledge and for Ceroba (and Orion?) for hurting Starlo in a way that he (maybe? probably?) can’t/won’t forgive. Dalv got rid of something too 👀(still putting the pieces together on that) Not sure abt Lily and Kanako tho (maybe a certain line is crossed when trying to help…when trying to be…?)

“But I see her in the back of my mind - All the time” I imagine that Kanako/the thought of Kanako haunts more people than just Starlo :) and other things as well, Dalv is hung up on something (integrity human maybe? forgive me, I am unaware /-\) and I’m getting vibes that Orion miiight regret what he’s done, that he jumped to conclusions (what did Star do tho???).

“Like a fever, like I’m burning alive” :) I meeean, Star’s got physical burns, certain someones gave him those burns… I know anger is often associated with fire (think burning rage, maybe described as a raging inferno :0) buuut :) grief stings. It can burn. Betrayal (even just perceived) too. It can light emotions in the void it creates. It can make you feel like dying, like you are dying…especially when done by someone you love and/or trust…and…yea…

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, so I kept it to myself” (based on my interpretation ;) ) Starlo. He’s hurting. Very much so, and… maybe he thinks he deserves it, for what he’s done (what exactly has he done? Idk, can’t wait to see!!)? Maybe he sees the actions he’s taken (no matter how good his intentions were), as bad simply because those they were meant to benefit, got hurt or misunderstood. But they don’t know or won’t believe the truth, but they still lash out and…and Starlo just keeps it to himself. If they knew…they wouldn’t have hurt him…they didn’t mean it…not really…it’s not their fault… (which is a very unhealthy way of thinking!!! [guilty, I also think like this!] >:/) (sad boi hour, listened to Wildflower on repeat and this was the result)

Anyway! That’s all I’ve got for now! I’ve only recently found your page(new obsession btw), so I haven’t been able to do a deep dive yet (exams >:/). BUT!! I will!! I’m gonna know everything!! I am!! Just give me some time!! (Patiently waiting on that master doc :D still gonna do a deep dive tho)

listened to the songs and this ask gave me a happy meltdown holy moly. Okay so, i do like the song recommendations and I encourage you and everyone else to ask me more and give me matching songs for uty mistakes!!

in another point. You are close with your theories.

Starlo and the incident with Kanako are related, but he isnt really at fault and didnt tell anything to Ceroba. The sratch on his arm is related with this event. He is torn up about it (an example about what he feels is seen in the song AUDIT- a fanmade walten files song)

2.he didnt give up on ficxing his mistakes actually, quite the opposite: but it'll turn out in the uty events.

3.At first, S!KANAKO was a manifestation on his guilt! but i changed it to it being the only source of communication of kanako, since she has been mashed with a mind powered monster. But he does see her that way.

4. Yes, that line applies to everyone in their own way. but to be fair, its not in the way you might maybe think.But there is one thing. you did get right lily's.

5. yES, KANAKO DOES HUNT CEROBA IN A WAY. Dalv too, but in a more wondering if shes okay way. But, for Dalv in being haunted by someone, we all know its intergrity cmon./silly And correct, orion does regret hurting starlo (i wont tell you what he did, but, i will share something.

last point you said is correct

[doberbutts]

Anyway I know it's not intended to be read like this but having been a dog trainer for tears I can honestly say that Firekeeper demonstrates the exact reason it's important to A: let your dog have some autonomy and B: not try to fight your dog.

Yes, the wolf pack politics are based off the incorrect alpha/beta/omega dynamic IN FAIRNESS it was written in the early 2000s.

But Firekeeper is much like a primitive breed dog here. She values her freedom and her autonomy. She is never not going to act at least sort of wild. She follows [incorrect] wolf rules- unwanted touch is warned and then punished if warning doesn't work. You can't force her to do things without breaking her. And her will is so strong that attempting to break her may end up with HER breaking YOU. If she really doesn't want to do it, she simply won't. Thieves are punished swiftly and immediately. Restricting her freedom just results in more creative ways to escape. She doesn't mince words, she cuts straight to the point. She gets frustrated and gives up easily if she feels overwhelmed or like there's not enough benefit in whatever task is bothering her. She watches the silly humans do silly human things and thinks it's all pretty ridiculous but is willing to play ball occasionally if she feels she'll get at least amusement out of it.

I swear she's my high school friend's pyr in human form.

And then re: don't fight your dog. At times Firekeeper is challenged. Someone has decided they WILL bring her to heel. She lashes out and hurts them enough for them to back off but not enough to kill or maim.

When I describe primitive breeds as being very boundary animals, this is what I'm talking about. Tater, my littlest chihuahua, is a very boundary dog. Now she's also a domesticated little thing intended mostly to sit on the laps of Mexican grandmas. BUT when she draws a hard boundary, hoo boy, come hell or high water she will make sure the line in the sand stays as-is. She has no problem dishing out appropriate punishment and does not suffer fools. And even the significantly larger dogs in the house respect that about her, and go out of their way to avoid a repeat once she's stated her opinion on their behavior.

And she gets that from her ancestry of being a feral little dog running around ruins in the Mexican countryside.

She's not an unpleasant dog to live with. Honestly she mostly just does her own thing and the other dogs enjoy her presence. Most of her time is spent curled up in one of the cave beds or sprawled in my lap. But when she offers an opinion about something, it's certainly a strong one.

Too many people try to fight their dog over something. They feel like they have something to prove. They say something about needing to be dominant, the alpha, the boss, or whatever. They talk about firm hands. Tater is a perfectly pleasant dog who is friendly and nonaggressive and honestly she would bite you if you tried this with her. She is not one to be trifled with when it comes to her autonomy or boundaries.

Anyway I'm reading this and I'm reading Firekeeper's behavior and I'm over here going "ok so the author is trying to translate the world's most annoying siberian mix into a 15 year old human girl"

[icarus-suraki]

Book asks: 8, 15, 42, 46, and/or 48

8) What is your favorite opening line? "A screaming comes across the sky" is iconic. The typesetting for "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..." is iconic (in my edition of Ulysses especially because the S takes up the entire page, as it should). "See the child" is magnificent. But I really think the opening line of 100 Years of Solitude is my favorite:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Yeah, I'll play the 100 Years of Solitude drinking game (take a shot every time someone is named Aureliano) but I really love that novel and I really love that opening line.

15) What makes you close a book and walk away forever? Really cringy, weird, awkward phrases. Let me give you an example or two:

I tried, I really tried, to read the first Elric of Melniboné book (Michael Moorcock) but I got to this one line where the main character and his lover ride out to a cave on a beach whereupon "they tethered their steeds." I was just so done at that point. I tried, but I just couldn't do it.

Likewise! I was working at a Barnes & Noble starting around Thanksgiving 2004 (baby's first full-time job after undergrad) and that was the era of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. We sold so many copies of Holy Blood Holy Grail--shit was so cash. So it seemed like it would behoove me, professionally, to read The Da Vinci Code. Once again, I tried. Oh my God, did I try. I even got ahold of a super fun illustrated edition with pictures in the margins like some kind of weird Eyewitness Book but for Paris and Jesus conspiracies. So I started reading and I got into the first chapter and it…wasn't great, but I was going to do my best because it would benefit me professionally. And then I got this one line--this is 20 years ago and I still remember it like it was yesterday--about the male protagonist which described him as having "a thicket of dark brown hair." And I close the book and I never looked back. It was just Too Much.

42) Do you read one book at a time, or several at once? Generally speaking, I'll read one at a time. I might fool around with another book or two, but I usually read one at a time, though not fixedly. I tend to get hooked on one book and not want to read others. It's not a conscious decision.

46) Who is your favorite author? This is tough because it has changed through the years. In high school it was mostly Ray Bradbury, and I like to joke that Fahrenheit 451 got me into college and I wept openly at my library job when he died. But J. D. Salinger started edging in there in high school after my mom gave me her copy of The Catcher in the Rye. By college it was J. D. Salinger, up to and including my senior project, but James Joyce was swiftly encroaching on his territory (a teacher got me to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I was doomed). By college graduation it was definitely James Joyce, and he hung around through a decidedly disastrous trip through Europe until I got back to the States and started reading Haruki Murakami (in translation) and Murakami was moving up in the ranks. And then plucked up the courage to read Gravity's Rainbow (I bought it with my own money from that same B&N) and I think it was a tie between James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon. I finally started reading Cormac McCarthy when I was in graduate school and Blood Meridian made me want to fucking bite things it's so good.

And this isn't getting into all my favorites as a kid (Roald Dahl, Norton Juster, Susan Cooper, among others) nor any of the poets I obsessed over in college lmao.

Right now I'm honestly not sure. I don't know that I have One Favorite Author. There are a lot that I really like. There are a lot that I'll read when they have something new published. I've been reading a lot of Japanese authors in translation. I wish there was more a works-in-translation market here in the states. Anyway, If someone mentions a book that's "really fucked up" or "weird" or "too hard to really read," I will seek that out. I love fucked up books. I love "transgressive literature." And if something wins the Booker Prize, I also will probably love it.

48) What line has stuck with you for years? "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

Happy Bloomsday. This line is from the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are outside pissing in Bloom's back garden and they look up and witness the night sky. And that is a pale description of the scene, but you understand.

Like, I'm not into tattoos. But if I were to get a tattoo? It might be this line. (And/or the Doodles Family from Finnegans Wake and/or a Muted Posthorn. My mother would kill me and then disown me lmao.)

[vlovers19]

Honestly, after reading your responses it feels like you are heavily projecting your feelings on vmin specially taehyung. Just say you don't like jimin's album because it goes against the narrative of vmin being real . Taehyung is already getting a lot of hate & you are only fueling it more by implying that he hated jimin's album.

chapter 2 has showed all of us that we know nothing about the members at all . If you are following BTS for a long period of time you will know that there is definitely a huge difference b/w there online & offline dynamics & their is no denying the fact that BTS do partake in fanservice. The only way we can tell if their bonds are geniune or not is by looking at their offline interactions, which we are privileged to see in the ch. 2 a lot more.

Based on what we have seen for the past month, it's clear that vmin are not in talking terms with each other at all . As heartbreaking as it is but it's the truth & we have so many evidences for that . Let me add jikook also. It's so ironic how vminkook used to be portrayed as the closest duo within the group on cam but the reality is jimin is more closer with the hyung line specially hobi. Acc. To jimin's own word after the break he was mostly in contact with Hobi & Yoongi & it actually shows .

It's not even about taehyung 's bare minimum support to jimin's album which borthered me the most, it was actually him admitting in the live that for the past weeks he was only doing Netflix and chill in his home ,which means he was free all this time but still chooses not to support jimin in any way. It's basically shows his priorities.He can go to concerts , meet wooga squad , visit jungkook's house at the middle of the night but supporting jimin is where he draws the line. Other members who are hella busy can show up to cheer jimin but his best friend who has all the free time would rather sleep. I mean i have no words & if this isn't enough taehyung doesn't even know about the jimin summoning dance, which by the way jimin has himself posted on Instagram. Goes to show that he was not even invested in jimin's content to begin with.

Vmin are also not talking to each other on phone. Why?? Because in the jhope's Bangtan Bomb jimin was caught asking taehyung that his hair got longer to which taehyung replied that he didn't cut his hair ( this & some other parts are not translated by the company but some Army's did it) This whole conversation is self explanatory i.e vmin are not in talking terms with each other. Also they were lowkey avoiding/ ignoring eachother in the video specially jimin.

All their interactions for the past months are pretty much one sided . Jimin never replies to any of the taehyung's comments but he did reply to other members.

Also the whole narrative that they are private cause of MS is bullshit because at the end of the day they are all publically friends, i don't get how you supporting your friend's album is going to be considered as romantic . Also if they really don't want any attention towards them , don't you think that acting normal with each other is the best option cause by deliberately ignoring eachother is getting them more attention by the fans. Honestly, i don't know what's happened b/w them but it is definitely not looking good at all .

I hope they overcome whatever they are going through.

Oh my Goodness. You really are invested in what you see on camera. I have been a fan of Bts since 2017. That's a pretty long time to know their dynamics especially in public. You obviously have your own opinions and, nothing can change your mind. You are head strong deep in your beliefs and from the way you sounded, you have not been in the fandom for long so there are certain things you don't know and if people want to miscontrue my words about Taehyung hating Jimin then they can do so for their own benefit. It's not my concern. I have already said what I said. It's up to them to interpret it how they see fit

But I'll tell you again, Jimin and Taehyung are private. They have not changed. Jimin hardly ever commented on Taehyung's live and it didn't start today. I can prove to you that these people aren't at odds as a lot of people would think. Now you said Jimin saw Taehyung and pointed out his hair had gotten longer. To you, it was proof they don't talk. Yet, it wasn't that long they all had dinner with the rest of the members when Jin was on leave. Are you trying to tell me he didn't notice his hair length then? Taehyung attended Celine event not so long ago and if you can notice carefully, the hair length isn't that different from now. Even if Jimin hadn't seen his pictures from Instagram, they went viral and of course, he must have seen them just like how a fan asked him during one of his recent live how he felt seeing Jk's calvin klein's photoshoot. He replied that he saw both Jungkook and Taehyung's photoshoots and they were both very handsome. This means he follows what they do. So are you saying Jimin wouldn't have noticed Taehyung's hair length?

I recently watched that vminkook live they did in LA. Taehyung and Jimin had nothing to talk about so Jimin just randomly commented on how Taehyung's hair had grown. I can't upload the moment because it would waste my time trying to find but if you have time, go check out the live. Jimin must have said that to find something to talk about with Taehyung.

Taehyung during his last live commented about how he worked out in the company. He has been into fitness lately which could mean it wasn't the first time he had worked out there. So in all that time, Jimin didn't see him. Come on. He doesn't know the Park Jimin summoning trend? Who is he decieving? Maybe others but not me! He probably must have misunderstood the sentence as people asking that they wanted to see Jimin.

I'm not a seer to know what is really going on with them or why Taehyung disregards Jimin according to you but one thing is for certain. Things are not as simple as one might think. I have already explained myself in the previous posts but obviously you must have skipped past them because you didn't get anything at all from what I said and simply continued with your own opinion. Anyway, I have nothing else to say about this. Thank you.

[thepandalion]

as someone who wrote and published both the actual process of writing is pretty similar, the main differences come in the way of like. publishing.

like sure you get editors who are professionals with degrees if you publish as a book but also like. the size and weight and color of pages. needing a cover design and blurbs for the back of it etc. a lot of publishing houses will take care of it for you (yknow. for more money) but if you know what you're doing you can do most of the actual work on your own?

then again I'm not a "professional" writer, of the genre that work for their publications and get paid regular wages to put words in a page - which is where a lot of bad writing happens, because you can't rush art. that's another reason why fanfics can be "better" than their professional counterparts - if I write a fanfic, and I get stuck mid-writing, I'm not gonna be fired for it (same for when you write and publish independently. I wrote exactly one book and it was mostly poetry and I didn't even do any marketing because that's actually one of the most expensive parts of publishing a book, at least so far as the local publishing scene is concerned)

like. it's a bit like video games, in the sense where you have indie developers change everyone's lives forever, or you can have a triple-a company make a game and it's popular enough to be sold on the Platform of the media (game stores&steam for games, much like bookstores or audiobooks or whatever with writing) but then everyone can agree it's nowhere near the level of dedication you get coding a product of art and love and passion by yourself

and games also have "editors"- both literal people on boards for the big game companies and like.. playtesters. people who make sure your game is a game. books have that too (I'm in a class that teaches editing books this semester and I lowkey hate it but also I happen to be really good at it which might and might not have to do with volunteering to beta read for my friends any time they write fanfic). and.. yeah. beta-read fanfic is a bit of that too. it's "why does he do that?" and "oh this is a good line" and "I think you need punctuation here but I could be wrong, what did you plan for this to mean, exactly?"

like. I write both books and fanfics and also like.. I use actual literary techniques I use in my book writing when I write fanfiction too- I have a character in a fanfic who is a siren, and I plan to have two different "routes" for the fic. in one of them, he speaks, thereby dooming his shipmates. in the other, any time he would have dialogue, I go around it with "he claimed we cannot do that" and the like, rather than direct quoting of the character, and in that universe everyone survives. that's something I learned in a professional writing class and I use it in fanfiction and I'm pretty sure that unless I specifically mention, in the notes of that fic, that that was an intentional artistic choice, nobody would notice. but that's fine, because I write this for my own benefit.

also, kinda lost the point I wanted to make with that example running a bit long, but like. as a person who both writes and edits, both of whom I do on both professional and fanfic levels, the difference is really not about that at all?

(I sit in class and argue about what word describes baby talking an adult, while the original chapter we're translating is in a language neither me nor the other student know, but I definitely side with our teacher who thinks explaining what you mean in a third language does nothing for editing a translation. that's a class about professional editing for translated literary works. the teacher occasionally remarks that my way of thinking and explaining reminds him a lot of the near-mythological editor he used to work with, and I think about how that might be because literary-editing is something I learned from my dad, who is also a professional editor, and who has also met your near-mythological editor before.

I also, at other times, sit my beloved friend on a call and we talk about fanfics they write and I don't notice until after the call ends that the way I talk when we have those fanfic-editing sessions is more similar to my dad with the independent authors he edits and publishes books with, rather than how I sound just talking fandom with my friends)

I’d like everyone to see this

{Credit to amalasrosa on Twitter}

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Poor people pay higher time tax

Doubtless you’ve heard that “we all get the same 24 hours in the day.” Of course it’s not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own — not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

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/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

For example: if you live in most American cities, public transit is slow, infrequent and overcrowded. Without a car, you lose hours every day to a commute spent standing on a lurching bus. And while a private car can substantially shorted that commute, people who can afford taxis or Ubers get even more time every day.

There’s a thick anthropological literature on the ways that cash-poverty translates into #TimePoverty. In David Graeber’s must-read essay “The Utopia of Rules,” he nails the way that capitalist societies generate Soviet-style bureaucracies, especially for poor people. Means-testing for benefits means that poor people spend endless hours filling in forms, waiting on hold, and lining up to see caseworkers to prove that they are among the “deserving poor” — not “mooches” who are defrauding the system:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you’re even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you’ll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

This qualitative account of time poverty is well-developed, but it’s lacked a good, detailed quantitative counterpart, and our society often discounts qualitative work as mere anecdote and insists on having every story converted to numbers before it is taken seriously.

In “Examining inequality in the time cost of waiting,” published this month in Nature Human Behavior, public affairs researchers Steve Holt (SUNY) and Katie Vinopal (Ohio State) analyze data from the American Time Use Survey (AUTS) to produce a detailed, vibrant quantitative backstop to the qualitative narrative about time poverty:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01524-w

(The paper is paywalled, but the authors made a mostly final preprint available)

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jbk3x/download

The AUTS “collects retrospective time diary data from a nationally representative subsample drawn from respondents to the Census Bureau’s Community Population Survey (CPS) each year.” These time-diary entries are sliced up in 15-minute chunks.

Here’s what they found: first, there are categories of basic services where high-income people avoid waiting altogether, and where low-income people experience substantial waits. A person from a low-income household “an hour more waiting for the same set of services than people from high-income household.” That’s 73 hours/year.

Some of that gap (5%) is attributable to proximity. Richer people don’t have to go as far to access the same services as poorer people. Travel itself accounts for 2% more — poorer people wait longer for buses and have otherwise worse travel options.

A larger determinant of the gap (25%) is working flexibility. Poor people work jobs where they have less freedom to take time off to receive services, so they are forced to take appointments during peak hours.

Specific categories show more stark difference. If a poor person and a wealthy person go to the doctor’s on the same day, the poor person waits 46.28m to receive care, while the wealthy person waits 28.75m. The underlying dynamic here isn’t hard to understand. Medical practices that serve rich people have more staff.

The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it’s 15m. Poor people don’t just wait in longer lines — they also have to wait for understaffed stores to unlock the cases that basic necessities are locked behind (poor people also travel longer to get to the grocery store — and they travel by slower means).

A member of a poor household with a chronic condition that requires two clinic visits per month loses an additional five hours/year to waiting rooms when compared to a wealthy person. As the authors point out, this also translates to delayed care, missed appointments, and exacerbated health conditions. Time poverty leads to health poverty.

All of this is worse for people of color: “Low-income White and Black Americans are both more likely to wait when seeking services than their wealthier same-race peer” but “wealthier White people face an average wait time of 28 minutes while wealthier Black people face a 54 minute average wait time…wealthier Black people do not receive the same time-saving attention from service providers that wealthier non-Black people receive” (there’s a smaller gap for Latino people, and no observed gap for Asian Americans.)

The gender gap is more complicated: “Low-income women are 3 percentage points more likely than low-income men and high-income women are 6 percentage points more likely than high-income men to use common services” — it gets even worse for low-income mothers, who take on the time-burdens associated with their kids’ need to access services.

Surprisingly, men actually end up waiting longer than women to access services: “low-income men spend about 6 more minutes than low-income women waiting for service…high-income men spend about 12 more minutes waiting for services than high-income women.”

Given the important role that scheduling flexibility plays in the time gap, the authors propose that interventions like subsidized day-care and afterschool programming could help parents access services at off-peak hours. They also echo Graeber’s call for reduced paperwork burdens for receiving benefits and accessing public services.

They recommend changes to labor law to protect the right of low-waged workers to receive services during off-peak hours, in the manner of their high-earning peers (they reference research that shows that this also improves worker productivity and is thus a benefit to employers as well as workers).

Finally, they come to the obvious point: making people less cash-poor will alleviate their time-poverty. Higher minimum wages, larger earned income tax credits, investments in low-income neighborhoods and better public transit will all give poor people more time and more money with which to command better services.

This week (Feb 13–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). More tickets just released for Sydney!

[Image ID: A waiting room, draped with cobwebs. A skeleton sits in one of the chairs. A digital display board reads 'Now serving 53332.' An ogrish, top-hatted figure standing at a podium, yanking a dollar-sign shaped lever looms into the frame from the right. He holds a clock aloft disdainfully, pinched between the thumb and fingers of one white-gloved hand.]

[classicslesbianopinions]

Does one need to be smart to read classic literature by writers such as Homer or Virgil? I follow various people studying the classics because it's fascinating but half the time I don't understand what they are saying. Whenever I try to read any of the epic poems, for example, it just makes me feel very unintelligent because I have a vey hard time understanding what I'm reading.

i don't think you have to be smart-- you just have to be patient.

i'm about to do a wall of text, so here's the tl;dr: it's very common to feel unintelligent, but it makes sense to struggle when reading something so old, and you should not be afraid to use outside resources to help you understand the context of what you're reading. also, it might help if you start with shorter or abridged works.

"classics" is a really broad field, and even a highly educated classicist will have areas they don't know as much about. like, i also don't understand what other classics bloggers are saying a lot of the time. most of the people i follow have dedicated a lot of time to their specific interests, and if my own interests don't overlap, i'm not going to understand everything they say. but it's very easy to feel like you aren't as smart as others because you haven't read the same stuff or because you struggle to keep up. i feel this way often, even after years of study.

the other thing is that if you're studying classics in college/university, the standards are absurdly high. you're expected to learn both latin and greek, and you're expected to read a lot on top of that. it's very hard to keep up with, and there's often a sense that you are the only one struggling to keep up (even though that's not true). it's also hard to enter into if you haven't already learned some latin or greek, which are not often taught in public schools (in the us at least). so the field is genuinely difficult to enter into, especially if you are not wealthy, white, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc.

to the specific point of trying to read epic poetry-- it makes sense that you would have a hard time understanding. it is hard to understand! and there's a lot of context that you might be missing: it's a work from another time and place, and some of it might be completely unfamiliar to you. that's okay. it is unfamiliar to everyone, no matter how smart they seem. go slowly, and don't be afraid to use summaries and study guides to figure out what's going on. like, literally just read the sparknotes if that helps. (you can probably google "[title] sparknotes" or "[title] study guide" or "[title] summary" and find stuff that will help you understand. i also will sometimes just go to the wikipedia page for a work if i need to know or remember what happened in it. and you can google specific references, too, or lines. if you have a question about something, chances are someone has had the same question at some point in the last ~3000 years.) you might also try reading abridged versions of the texts to get an idea for what's going on, and then when you go back and read the actual text it will be easier to understand.

you might also benefit from starting with some shorter works. the iliad and the odyssey are really interesting, but they're also long and can be hard to get into. personally, i recommend plays, mostly because they tend to be short, and i find them more accessible. sometimes you can even find performances online, which can also help a lot with understanding. i also would recommend hesiod's theogony as an intro to epic; it's much, much shorter than the iliad or the odyssey, and it covers a lot of basic myth. ("theogony" literally means "god origin"-- it gives you the godly family tree.)

translation also makes a huge difference. if you're struggling to read something, you might want a different translation. there are a lot of translations free online, but they tend to be pretty old. if you have access to a library, see what they have to offer; if you want advice on specific translations, you can send another ask and we'll answer and/or publish it and get followers to recommend their favorites.

also, if you post a question to tumblr and tag it #tagamemnon, there's a really good chance people on here will help you answer it. a lot of us really love helping other people understand the stuff we're interested in! it's really fun to share information. (if you're wondering, "#tagamemnon" is a pun on agamemnon, a character from the iliad-- it's the tag classics tumblr uses because #classics has a bunch of other stuff in it.) or if you have a question about something someone posts, you absolutely can go into their ask box and ask for clarification. most people really really want to talk about their interests and are happy to give a basic explanation.

most importantly, though, don't let yourself be intimidated. i have been studying classics for years and i still feel not good enough or not intelligent a lot of the time-- the field has a long history of gatekeeping and elitism, and it's really hard to break out of that. but it's okay and normal to need outside resources to understand a text, or to need to read an abridged version before you read the original. there is no shame in not knowing stuff! and it's okay if it's hard to learn.

anyway i hope this helps. i promise you are not alone in feeling unintelligent. but if you're interested in classics i absolutely believe you can find ways to understand the texts you want to read. good luck! <3 our ask box is always open if you have questions or want to start a conversation about what you're reading-- we can't answer everything but we can publish the ask and see if followers can answer it. and of course if anyone reading this has any input or advice for anon, please reply or reblog!

[goatsgomoo]

No tinfoil hat needed to explain the situation.

But first, on AI as a concept:

Artificial intelligence is when a machine makes decisions and/or performs actions in order to achieve goals.

AI as a field is so much older than the latest boom and broader than what the current big names are doing. There are a few AI developments (such as the chess-playing mechanical automaton El Ajedrecista (1912) and the electro-mechanical Nimatron (1940)) which predate programmable (as opposed to hard-wired) electronic computers. Once we had programmable computers, we got systems like Logic Theorist (1956) and General Problem Solver (1958).

We had ELIZA in the 60s, the rise of Expert Systems in the 60s through the 80s (until they became so commonplace that the name fell out of use), and once the Internet became public and the Web was invented, all sorts of AI systems that leveraged access to large data sets to make decisions, such as Google's search engine and Netflix's recommendation algorithm.

So yes, of course people are going to describe things older than the current boom as AI; that's an accurate description!

Translation algorithm? Nope. AI translation.

This is basically the ultimate example of a piece of software that is incontrovertibly AI! It's not just some lookup table where you find the passage of text you want to translate then grab the translated text in your target language; translation software has to handle text it's never seen before. It needs to "understand" grammar rules of different languages, it needs to "know" vocabulary, and it needs to make decisions on ambiguous text. Whether this is done through a large corpus of rules programmed into the software or through statistical modeling is irrelevant; it's AI either way. And if you think that the rise of machine translation didn't impact a whole lot of jobs, you're dead wrong.

My point here is twofold:

What you are calling "AI" is artificially narrow and doesn't really match with accepted definitions

The current boom didn't come out of nowhere, it's just the latest iterative improvements in a field older than you. So calling things that AI researchers in the 90s and 00s worked on "AI" is perfectly reasonable.

Second, on the explosion in the popularity of the term "AI" to describe software:

(And here's where I stop citing Wikipedia because I'm drawing more on my own observations and personal experience)

Sorry to say, but this trend is pretty much entirely consumer driven. People want the latest and greatest, people want the top of the line, people want things marketed as AI. And most of these people don't know enough to have a solid idea of exactly what functionality or performance they want; they just see "AI" and are impressed. The tech companies slapping the term on their products are mostly just meeting a demand and get rewarded immensely for doing so.

Now, of course, investors in tech companies are also exerting pressure to market themselves as AI or integrate AI into their products to capitalize on this trend. And a lot of companies who had been just quietly creating products with AI and/or ML (whether the AI is in the product or just used as part of its creation) are realizing that being louder about that fact will get them money. Because yeah, a red eye removal tool is absolutely AI, and if you can increase your sales figures by 10% by telling people that, you'd be a fool not to. And like everything else, this trend is older than the current big boom; when I worked at IBM my division got renamed to include the term "Watson" back around 2017-2018 despite nothing changing about the products we were making.

Now, all that leads up to my main point, which is not in fact about nit-picking language use. First, from your post:

my tinfoil hat theory is that they're trying to get the term "AI" to replace the term "software" to make the people who are opposed to the labor-rights-violating, job-stealing, "boss threatens to replace you with it if your wages and benefits prove too expensive" AI seem like backwards luddites who hate technology

Look, this has been going on forever, the "AI" term is irrelevant. The original Luddites were laborers who were seeing their ways of life destroyed by mechanization. The introduction of automation into manufacturing processes also impacted jobs. More recently, grocery stores and fast food restaurants have been replacing cashiers with touchscreens. And every step of the way, there's been a whole lot of ink spilled by people complaining about losing their jobs to more and more advanced tools, and by people telling the folks losing their jobs to shut up and get out of the way of "progress".

Zero jobs are stolen, zero creativity lost, zero labor issues at play, just VFX professionals paid to apply a digital effect.

So why decide that these latest developments is your cutoff for what is and isn't acceptable? Why is digital VFX, eliminating the jobs of people who would hand-paint individual frames of film, acceptable?

I ask because I want to encourage people to think about what exactly they take issue with here. If everything before you started paying attention is normal and fine and isn't a labor issue, but changes to the current situation are obviously serious problems, then you're going to sometimes find yourself on the side of people who've been making things worse for decades because their success is now "normal". And (this part isn't directed at you but more towards the people whose takes you were mentioning) if your opposition to things is based on what buzzwords are being used, that leaves you wide open to being manipulated quite easily into getting angry at something rather innocuous. While in this case that's a pretty minor impact, this is the exact same trap I see people falling into (or setting for others) when calling for online censorship or harassment.

Latest tech pet peeve is the use of the term "AI" to refer to basically anything that does any amount of automation or uses computers in any way

[siriussimon]

Thanks! Here's the example if you were curious - x

I'm 5'4 and I have strawberry blonde hair in a pixie. I'm a hufflepuff through and through. I enjoy baking for family and friends. I'm a dancer, I used to do ballet when I was younger. I love seeing people happy and I try to make that happen. I'm not very outgoing, I prefer to stay indoors mostly. I have a dry sense of humor for the most partI like watching cartoons and anime. I think my favorite color is purple. I enjoy gaming as well, my cousins are huge gamers and it's fun hanging out with them and playing stuff. I'm not very fashion forward, I mostly wear sweat pants and sweatshirts and get dragged for it by literally everyone 😭

 I'm practical but also a very optimistic person, I like giving people the benefit of the doubt. I hate changes to my routine it makes me v v nervous lmao. I like steady and grounded people I guess someone who is practical like I am. I have a dog I love. I like animals very much, not a fan of frogs tho, they scare me. I'm studying to be a nurse .

based on your qualities i think you’d work best with javi gutierrez!

warnings: NONE! just pure fluff <3 hope you enjoy

because of javi’s line of work, it gives him the opportunity to feed into his hobbies— as well as your own

javi can be very bashful at times when talking about things he loves but he’s also very sweet and outgoing

of course javi likes to use his wealth to his advantage and explore the world but he’s also a home body

he literally has a room dedicated to his favorite films? he definitely likes to stay home watching movies or even learning how to play your favorite video games

his type of work can make him very busy at times so the both of you dedicated a day of the week for movie/game night

during those days you’d always bake him sweet treats and he’d comment, “delicious as always, cariño.” (translation: love, darling, or sweetheart.)

ever since he met you, he knew you were the one for him. you had made him the happiest man in the world

he’s very supportive of your dreams and encourages you daily to fight for them

javi is also a very optimistic person and believes anything can happen if you take the time and just believe in yourself

for example, him putting himself out there and making his script a movie

although his work may not be on the practical side, his kind, heartwarming, funny personality is what pulled you into him

and who could resist that smile and fluffy brown hair?

[thessalian]

Thess vs The Budget

So. The Budget.

There’s a lot going on with this budget, or at least it looks and sounds like there’s a lot going on with this budget, but the one important part is the “We’re all in this together” thing that ... well ... isn’t, quite.

GOOD THINGS, SORT OF:

They’re increasing benefits more or less in line with inflation

They’re preserving the pension triple-lock, which means pensions also go up more or less in line with inflation (the pension triple-lock means that pensions will go up by average earnings, inflation, or 2.5% whichever is higher, and with inflation having hit 11% recently ... well)

National minimum wage going up to £10.42 from £9-ish (which sounds great, but just wait)

THINGS THAT SOUND GOOD UNTIL YOU REALLY THINK

More money to the NHS - but it doesn’t begin to fill the hole twelve years of Tory austerity have left it and doesn’t even enable it to stand still, much less improve services

More money to schools - ditto

Basically anywhere they say ‘more money’, it’s not enough

THINGS THAT ARE ACTIVELY BAD DESPITE GOOD BITS

National Insurance threshold increase. Instead of simply increasing the amount we pay in National Insurance contributions, they’re increasing the secondary threshold at which you have to pay. So some people who are working part time take home even less of their paycheque because now they’re obliged to pay National Insurance contributions, where they weren’t previously. There’s a reason they see unemployment rising over the next few years - it’s because a lot of people who can only work part-time won’t be able to because they’d actively lose money doing it.

In these financially troubled times, they’re investing £280m on tackling benefit fraud. I mean, the DWP always errs on the side of “you’re faking” anyway, but now they want to make it even harder, apparently. This while they’ve apparently declared the billions they lost to Covid fraud lost without trace, even they know exactly who fucked them over and could easily reclaim our money.

Apart from the increase in secondary National Insurance threshold, every other tax threshold is frozen. See above re: the rise in national minimum wage. Basically, as pay has to rise when inflation gets this bad (even though it’s not going to be in line with inflation in most cases), that higher rate of pay will now push you into a higher tax bracket. Yes, this hits everyone, but as usual, it hits the lower paid first and worst.

Honestly, everything here is going to hit the less well off worst. Overall, it translates to a 7% decrease in living standards. The Chancellor is blaming the situation in Ukraine for all this ... or rather, “Putin’s illegal war”, which is correct but inflammatory in a way that is apparently supposed to make us feel better about the poverty that is mostly the Tories’ fault, between ‘Trussonomics’ and Brexit, not to mention badly handled Covid response that led to billions in fraud, with the war in Ukraine being just the cherry on top of this shit sundae - THERE IS A REASON WE’RE HIT HARDER THAN ANYONE IN THE G20, DIPSHIT.

Apparently I’m supposed to feel better about the fact that the rich are being hit too. Guess what? THEY CAN AFFORD IT. There was still no tax that specifically targeted the wealthy - windfall tax is easy to avoid, they still haven’t scrapped the non-domicile tax loophole ... in the end, a lot of this “filling in the economic hole” is falling on shoulders of those already bent double with the weight of austerity and economic downturn. I am lucky. I know how lucky I am. I own my privilege. I am fortunate enough not to have to pay rent. I mean, consider: disability not permitting me to work full-time. A horrific shortage of council housing. The price of food going up by something like 16%, and my dietary limitations. I don’t know what I’d do, I really don’t. It’s a hard enough slog as it is.

I’m going to try really hard not to think about it. There is literally nothing I can do about it. I will think about it on and off, in stages, but I have to pace myself on the fear and rage. It doesn’t help that I got woken up by some saleswoman banging on my door this morning. I get we’re in a recession and that people want to get their product out there by whatever means are available, but going back to the days of door-to-door salespeople is just not on. Besides, the whole point of the security doors in this building is that people aren’t allowed to just wander down the corridor knocking on doors like that. Blegh.

[shihalyfie]

What went down with the DigiFes situation, from the community and translator perspective

I think the events of the last few days have gotten everyone in a huge fuss, and because everything got caught up in a lot of chaotic social media stuff, there’s been a lot of questions about what came from what and who knew what at what time. Fortunately, I happen to be:

Someone who’s a veteran in this fanbase and thus has a small handful of friends in this community, who also have their own friends

Someone who understands a little Japanese (although not as much as others in this community do) and therefore can read things in Japanese myself to some degree without needing someone else to translate it for me

So hopefully I can shed some light on what kinds of things were being discussed, and what was known and not known at what time in this fanbase with all of this.

The most important thing I want to establish is that there was no organized coalition or smear campaign. (Kind of ironic I have to say this when the topic at hand has so much to do with conspiracy theories.) I’m a veteran, I know friends who are veterans, they know other friends who are veterans but don’t know me at all. My friends usually agree with and like the same things I do, and I give them advice and assistance with my skillset when I can, and they return the favor. We pass things along through the grapevine, not through some super-secret club grapevine, just via the nature of social relationships and some Discord servers (multiple; again, not everyone knows each other). So these are my impressions of what happened, based on said grapevine.

How it all started

Konaka’s blog is long. Like, really long. Which is only natural, because he was recapping basically the entire 51 episodes of Tamers in excruciating detail, so no translator in this fanbase would be able to translate all of that and not lose their mind! So for the most part people who couldn’t read Japanese had pretty much given up on reading it (with maybe a few dedicated people using machine translation), and some people who understood Japanese would point out parts they found interesting, but for all intents and purposes it remained untranslated and not super-accessible to the mainstream. (Even the Japanese fanbase itself wasn’t super aware of the blog’s existence.)

So when that first post in May about 9/11 dropped, the people who did read Japanese started going “uh...”

At the time, the DigiFes stage reading hadn't been announced yet. So, in other words, everyone reading it only knew it as, functionally, him namedropping an alt-right YouTuber and praising his observations. The reaction from anyone reading the blog at the time was something along the lines of “disappointed and mildly concerned.” (Note the mildly.)

The posts in June about the Great Reset and the anti-vaccine sentiment were when people keeping an eye on the situation started to get really worried about how far this was going to escalate. At this point, I want to make something clear that may not be apparent to those who weren’t keeping up or who are outside the fanbase: Most of the translators and Japanese-reading people deliberately chose not to be too public about this at this time.

Why?

This is the irony surrounding the fact that said translators are now being accused of trying to further “cancel culture”: cancellation was absolutely not what anyone wanted back then! If anyone wanted to create a smear campaign, 9/11 conspiracies, the Great Reset, and anti-vaccine statements are already more than enough to make a starting case. But at the time, this was a blog that very few people (Japanese or otherwise) knew about, translating it would basically just boost its platform more than it would have had in the first place (which would be counterproductive), and -- well, let’s be real, it’s not hard to imagine that people might get reactionary over it, and people would go nuts. Was there any real benefit that would come out of that? Not really, no.

So at the most, those keeping an eye on it might have vented a bit on their personal accounts, but some even tried to self-censor with “[redacted]” or vagueposting, because this was a matter that needed to be handled with delicacy. Thus, there were “mild rumors through the grapevine” about what was going on, but those who knew were trying to hold back with restraint and mostly inform people quietly in the hopes of this not needing to become some kind of huge social media campaign.

(Also, to be a bit blunt about it, it’s really hard to be in front of someone who loves Tamers and is gushing about it and showing admiration for Konaka, knowing all of this and wanting to say something, but feeling like a jerk if you pop their bubble like “also, he’s probably an alt-right conspiracy theorist now.” Not to say that the ignorance-is-bliss concept is always a good thing, but...)

But since the blog posts in question were discussing the prospect of having his sentiments in fiction, everyone reading them was on edge anticipating what might be in store for DigiFes. The hope was that it might blow over. Hopefully, everything would be in the form of subtle themes with plausible deniability, it would all stay within the realm of “it’s not worth causing a fuss over this,” that would be the end of it, and we’d all move on with our lives.

Unfortunately, “Political Correctness is activating Cancel Culture” isn’t exactly subtle.

DigiFes and the aftermath

I think it’s too easy to assign too much responsibility to the fansub group that was indirectly responsible for breaking the news for all of this, but actually, the truth is, this would have gotten out anyway.

Even when the stream itself was going on, there were Japanese livebloggers, and there were also English speakers who caught on that something was happening with “the Tamers fighting political correctness”. Some hours later, an upload of the stream went live on YouTube, and quite a few people started watching it and caught onto what was going on. If the fansub group that released the now-infamous version hadn’t done it, I’m absolutely certain someone else would have eventually (perhaps in a different language first, but nevertheless). And even before then, information about what the hell was going on was already starting to circulate in broken and incomplete forms. That fansub solidified what was going on, and perhaps accelerated the moment the bomb dropped on everyone, but if it hadn’t been there, it would have happened much more gradually and chaotically.

On top of that, while the use of Western alt-right rhetoric (seriously, please do not try to bring the “injecting Western politics into Japanese media” argument here when all of us are asking him to take the Western politics out) meant that it went over most of the Japanese audience’s heads (hence your answer to “who approved this?”), there was at least one Japanese person who was politically savvy enough to call it out for what it was in disgust. (I’m not linking them here because I’m not dumb enough to fling them in a place where some of you trigger-happy people will go after them.) They didn’t even need to be super in-tune with Western politics to get it; they understood enough to tell that there were some pretty alarming extremist views in there. If they understood that much, it was naturally going to follow that the Western side was definitely going to become aware one way or another.

Even all that aside, at the very least, said fansub is accurate; imagine how much worse this situation would have been if someone else had taken it up and confused things further with a misleading translation, or, worse, deliberately messed with the contents. Basically, this debacle could have easily been a lot worse.

I don’t think anyone expected this to get as big as it did (as in, to the point mainstream anime reporters outside the fanbase picked up on it). There was a similar tri. reading back in 2016, but even a lot of the hardcore fanbase barely remembers it exists! These aren’t even supposed to be canon, either! But when you have that disclaimer at the front, and the contents are really like that, it was probably inevitable for it to become a social media sensation. I mean the contents...sure are a thing.

One thing I should point out about the disclaimer is that it only mentions the program itself. It doesn’t bring up the blog, and it doesn’t bring up who wrote this scenario, just the fact that the program contains alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Because it does! It’s not even technically praising or condemning the content within, it just says “we don’t agree with it”! What the group did condemn was...approaching staff about it (and especially starting a fight). Because, in the end, that’s what the disclaimer was for: a heads-up about what was in there, and an added reminder that the people translating this are just translating it for the sake of informational purposes. Or, in other words:

It was a content warning. Even without the disclaimer, there were many, many people who would have recognized the contents for what they were and been caught by it unawares, and become upset by it. There were many people who said that they were glad to have that there because it at least gave them some time to mentally prepare for what they were about to be slapped with!

It really, really was a disclaimer. When you have something that level of extremely politically charged stuff, it’s only natural to start suspecting that the translation group had an agenda (official translations tend to get this a lot when content is remotely political). But no, the translation group did their due diligence, even if their opinions were starkly opposed to what was in there.

I was not personally involved in that translation, but I’ll give you this (copy-pasted with permission, from someone who wasn’t technically involved directly in it but was privy to discussions while it was being done):

no we brought up all of those questions like the fact that Yamaki's clearly off his rocker and this isn't supposed to be taken seriously in the first place or that maybe if we're lucky he'll just sound like a fake woke boomer but no matter how you slice it the plot is about him "convincing" the unbelieving Takato and co. into rallying up against the true enemy of Political Correctness and that's just literally the alt-right playbook in a nutshell

the thing even made it to YouTube, we were basically racing against the clock

I mean I really want to say this is plausible deniability but I don’t know how you can get any less subtle than this, this is not something you can mince words

like I really wish we could pass this off as “as long as you don’t know the blog you can take this innocently as political commentary or something” but I honestly don’t think this is something you can take innocently even without context

tbh the Political Correctness part is the most cringeworthy but Yamaki’s rant about fact checkers being evil and all that is probably a lot more worrying when you think about it

tbh I’ve never felt as conflicted about what’s the right thing to do as I do now

So in other words, it was not a reckless decision to just tack on a political label; it was done after a lot of consideration about the consequences to put the label on and what people would think of it with or without context, whether there might be a glimmer of light possibility to try and pass this off as more innocuous as it was, and eventually a determination that, in the end, there was indeed alt-right rhetoric in the program, and should be labeled accordingly.

The result was that, of course, everything broke out on social media, chaos burst out, a lot of hearts were unfortunately broken, and a lot of alt-righters started invading spaces accusing people of proving him right with cancel culture. Ironically, my personal observation is that, while there were exceptions, most people in the actual fanbase did honor the requests to not harass people about it, and this may actually be the most solidarity I’ve ever seen from the Digimon fanbase in my life, which is saying a lot considering how we usually tend to be a drama magnet most of the time. The ones who were actually directly messaging him were his newfound supporters locking down on offering him “support against people trying to cancel him” (I think they were more heartbroken and upset at him than anything...), and most of the harassment came from alt-righters not even in the fanbase, namesearching and sending harassing, accusatory messages to anyone involved for as much as expressing mild dismay. (You want to talk about harassment and being attacked for having an opinion? Pot, meet kettle.)

This leads us back to the question of the blog: if you’ll remember, I just said that the fansub in question did not bring it up at all. That’s because, at the beginning, there was no intention to bring it up if it wasn’t necessary; this was not intended as a smear campaign. The warning was attached to the DigiFes program because it was about the DigiFes program. But the resulting chaos had a lot of people bring up the blog because it better contextualized what was going on, and discussion led to people looking it up themselves and posting fragments of it on social media, sometimes even using machine translate.

Ultimately, that’s the reason this document was released: it was the same reason as the fansub being released at the time it was, which was “if it hadn’t been released, the alternative was watching things get disseminated more slowly and chaotically.” I will say outright that I was one of the people who got to lay eyes on that document before it was publicly released (and even helped out with some advice here and there); it’s no secret that it was being quietly passed around as an internal memo prior to the outbreak. The original version of the document had a request to not post it on public social media because of the chaos it would cause, and while I don’t know how many people got to see it before it was released, I’m under the impression that it was enough people that I was quite surprised everyone who saw it respected that request.

Why does the document contain a ton of analysis and debunking on top of just the translations? Well, when you’re translating those blog posts, you’re technically giving it a bigger platform (which was one of the reasons it was originally considered better to not post it publicly). Since the document exists primarily to inform people, especially about why certain things that may seem innocuous actually have wider context behind them, it’s going to need to contain an analysis like that.

The summary

There were a lot of decisions involved by a lot of different people through all parts of this ordeal. I think it’s fair to criticize whether they were the right decisions in retrospect or whether certain things should have been done slightly differently (including my small role in this), but nevertheless, it was one where the risks involved were thought through and taken into account in every step of the situation, with a desire to avoid chaos, or at least prevent it from getting too much worse. When you have contents like this, a controversy honestly is inevitable -- how on earth are you going to be able to put contents like Yamaki reciting off all the typical alt-right YouTuber talking points and ending in Political Correctness activating Cancel Culture and not expect that to make a stir at some point? -- and so, in the end, this wasn’t so much a conscious attempt at stirring the pot as much as it was the dam finally breaking, and a desire to keep it from spilling over too much. Nobody coordinated this! I think everyone just really hates drama.

Knowing all the steps and thoughts that went on behind all of this, I think being reactionary or accusatory for clout is the last thing anyone involved wanted to be. Considering just how many of these steps above could have easily been made into exposure, from the posts all the way back in May and June to the internal memo document that was made to keep friends quietly informed but could have been leaked to the public with only one bad actor, there was an active, common desire among people who didn’t even know each other to try and minimize the potential damage as much as possible. When you look at the situation now, of course it looks awful and hardly like something that came out of “trying to minimize damage”, but in reality there’s only so much you can do when the contents really are like that, and I personally believe everyone involved was doing what they thought was their best option as the situation kept changing.

I can’t speak for anyone else, especially since I don’t even know most of the people involved, and I didn’t have much of a role in all of this, but I think everyone involved, myself and my friends and everyone who’d been keeping tabs on this situation for months, has been going through a lot of heartbreak and conflict over what to do next, so please understand that there was a lot of thought put into all of it, and that it really was a difficult situation no matter how you look at it.

[teruthecreator]

okay. thoughts on the grad finale

gonna slap it under a readmore bc i’m Sure i’m gonna ramble. 

uh spoiler warning for the finale of taz graduation, as well as spoilers for the season in general.

also, these are my own thoughts of how the season went, what the themes were, etc! if you don’t agree with me, that’s fine! but i don’t wanna have a convo w you in the replies about it i’ll be honest. if you want to share your opinion so badly, make your own post, alright? that good? we cool?

aight. so. finale thoughts.

to make it short: i think the finale was a satisfying end of a very good arc. 

to expand upon that, let me share what i think the themes of graduation were and why the finale satisfies those themes. 

i made a post about this a while back (here it is if you want) but my honest belief was that the theme of graduation was self-reliance: the concept that you don’t allow yourself to be governed by forces that go against your own beliefs. this concept was coined by essayist ralph waldo emerson to talk about how the american people shouldn’t allow the government to create laws that go against the will of the people. now, understandably, this feels very anti-capitalist which is what i think a lot of fans believed was reflected through the season. 

but, in reality, self-reliance has more to do with being active in your government and making sure you’re being represented the way you want to be by your representatives. that’s sort of the vibe emerson was going for in his essay, and i think. in a sense? that translates to graduation. but i took self-reliance in the more metaphorical about breaking away from those things that are controlling you. which, in graduation, was A Lot Of Things. 

the way i saw it, there were two major groups that inflicted order upon the world and the thundermen--conveniently separated as order and chaos (not the deities though, just the concepts). 

the order half of control existed mostly through the school and the HOG. the HOG created the economic reliance on the heroes and villains system, which removed all literal meaning from those terms and turned them into bureaucratic titles. society existed under these very strict checks and balances; heroes and villains supplied money to the kingdom in terms of entertainment, which then boosted that kingdom’s creditability and allowed them to contribute more to nua’s economy, which then led heroes and villains to have a higher demand, thus perpetuating the cycle. it’s important to note that this term does not represent the sort of morality we expect for heroes and villains--hell, even the term “evil” turned into an arbitrary term used to show those heroes and villains who failed the system. this is the more prominent representation of control that the thundermen break away from in achieving their own self-reliance. they don’t see the value in a system that holds no real moral code (fitzroy Especially, but i’ll get into that in a bit), and can’t help the public when there’s actually a serious situation. as we saw with althea in the beginning, the HOG had no way to help the thundermen when they were dealing with the whole Demon Prince situation (as he had already placed some of his own people in there, proving these kind of systems are easily corruptible). so this wasn’t a system meant to Actually create heroes and villains--it was just a way of boosting the economy. 

the chaos half of control existed primarily through grey and Chaos. grey represented how chaos could be controlled, through various means. he planted that tree for the centaurs to fight over because he knew it would constantly create conflict, which he enjoyed. he kept the school under a watchful eye to prevent anyone from stepping out of line with his grand ideas, and used several manipulation tactics to try and get his way (most notably, his own admittance of grooming fitzroy into joining his side, which didn’t work). grey was the perfect example of how chaos does not automatically mean a lack of control. he was very controlling in how he did things because he had an endgoal: find hieronymous and have a war. but he didn’t even realize he was contributing to a greater idea, that being Chaos’s insistence on causing general disarray. as we realize now, Chaos’s plan was both for them and Order, but i’m leaving Order out for a second because they only really rear their head in towards the end. for the most part, audiences were led to assume that Chaos was the Big Bad(TM); they were the one pulling the strings, allowing things to happen to cause general chaos and disarray. them supplying random mortals with their endless power was a way to plant chaos into the world of nua; but it was a chaos they controlled. fitzroy resisting them was not simply a refusal to bend to Chaos, but it was resisting the control put on him through his magic. 

these systems were constricting the thundermen on both sides. when they thought they’d find help in one side, they were disappointed to find that there was nothing anyone could do. the only people who could fix their problems were...them. so they forged a new path, set new ideas, and became self-reliant. that’s what i think is the most important aspect of graduation; not the anti-capitalist implications of turning over the economic and political systems in place, but the idea that if nothing that is supposed to help you is actually helping that you can just...do your own thing! 

and i think that’s what the finale really shows, at the end of the day. that these forms of control were not doing anything helpful, and were in fact ruining the fabric of space-time! that’s where i think Order comes in because Order is really...the ultimate culmination of control. they are aware that Everything being done will benefit their cause. the HOG? well, they make sure everybody’s so incompetent that they can do their work. grey? well, he’ll contribute to the plan without even realizing it. they even manipulated Chaos and enacted their own form of control over Chaos to make sure that they had no reason to believe that this plan couldn’t go wrong. but Order knew. Order always knew there was a chance for error, and that chance was very great. but they didn’t care! so long as they had control of things, they could try a hundred times to get it right. they had no care for mortals, unlike Chaos. 

the thundermen showing Chaos the truth is the final jenga piece that collapses this tower of control. which is why the finale is so great. 

travis does a phenomenal job of incorporating chaos (general chaos) into the battle mechanics. it may be stupid and slightly arbitrary, but having them change forms randomly and having to adapt to those new circumstances really does exemplify the season!!! the thundermen were constantly forced into new situations (being sidekicks/henches, fitzroy becoming a villain, being let in on the heiro dog situation, the unbroken chain trial, joining forces w grey, etc.), and in all of them they simply found a way to adapt and keep working their way. which made the finale generally interesting and also thematically interesting! 

i think my favorite part of the entire fight scene is right at the end, when argo chucks the shark’s tooth necklace at Order. and time stops. and they’re given a choice. 

the fact that they leave it to a coin toss?? oh my god...how fucking FITTING!! like, that’s disorderly. that’s going your own way. it’s new, it’s terrifying, it has DIRE UNKNOWNS ON EITHER SIDE, but it’s what they do! and...it ends up working out! i think it would’ve worked out either way, but the fact that they left it up to chance really shows how they aren’t allowing anything to control their actions. 

AND THEN WE GET TO THE EPILOGUE. MY GOD I LOVE THE EPILOGUE I’M GONNA GO OFF SO MUCH. 

first off, i loved hearing how Nua adapts to losing this very significant form of government/economic contributor and turns to more people-based work. citizens uniting together, fixing things, making amends, THAT’S SELF-RELIANCE BABEY!!! THAT’S THE WHOLE EMERSON SHIT! HAVING A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT THAT ACTUALLY HAS THE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE AT LARGE!!! YEAHHHHHHHHH THAT’S THE WHOLE SELF-RELIANCE THING!

now, i’ll break it down by characters: 

fitzroy

GOD. LOVE IT. FIRST OFF, absolutely ADORED how his character arc involved him stripping himself of these self-assigned titles because he actually has an identity that is all his own and he doesn’t NEED arbitrary titles to prove his worth because HE HAS IT IN HIMSELF. not to self-plug or anything, but that’s ssoss!fitzroy’s WHOLE SHIT. I’VE ALREADY BEEN ON THIS TRAIN, BITCH, AND TO KNOW I GOT IT SO RIGHT...GOD. FEELS GOOD. 

but also, i just really enjoy how his ending went in general. the fact that he doesn’t really know what he wants to do, so he just...does stuff he likes to do? that’s so good! because, if you remember, fitzroy had a Very set schedule of life events when the campaign started. he was going to get his wiggenstaffs degree, go back knight school, get his knight school degree, and then go to goodcastle. but all of that was based on a very limited understanding of himself. 

fitzroy’s character arc has primarily focused finding himself, specifically in terms of identity. for someone who was bullied for his past, the present formation of himself was Extremely important to fitzroy. he thought that shutting out his past and taking on this grandiose title of knighthood would make him something more than himself. he would no longer be fitzroy; the poor, country kid trying to make it in a big world. he’d be Sir Fitzroy Maplecourt; respected, honored, revered, with a title to prove it. 

he explains to fauxronymous (pre-reveal grey) that the reason he wanted to be a knight was because he wanted to assist in doing good. morally good. fitzroy has Always had a very clear sense of his morality; this comes through when he refuses Chaos on the basis of many people having to die if he agreed. but being a knight also had the added of bonus of a very respectable title that no one would want to look beyond, which fitzroy felt he needed because...i don’t think he Saw anything beyond that. in himself. he wasn’t himself for a very long time, and i don’t know if he ever thought he would be again. he’d wear this new identity, start a new life, and be happier....he hoped. 

then, things changed! and he started to realize that arbitrary titles don’t do shit because plenty of people with Big Important Titles ended up being Awful People! so he started to value himself For Himself; his wit, his humor, his strength, his magical prowess. and, i think, he started to wonder what knighthood was Really about. was it about upholding a moral good? or was it just another bureaucracy filled with people who won’t do shit when things get bad. 

i think this is why him becoming a lawyer is fitting. especially because of the reasoning he gives sylvia nite. now for A LOT OF PEOPLE, i’m sure they hear lawyer and assume some corporate hotshot who doesn’t give a shit about people. but fitzroy is Not applying to be a corporate laywer. he SPECIFICALLY telsl sylvia that he wants to help people who cannot help themselves, and he wants to do good in that way. THAT kind of lawyer is more of the pro-bono, district lawyer. the ones that don’t make crazy amounts of cash, but help those who cannot afford lawyers and represent them when the government is fucking them over. those lawyers don’t rely on title, they rely on principle. 

that’s the perfect representation of fitzroy’s growth. holding his identity within himself, while still trying to do good by those who need it. 

firbolg (aka gary) 

i think the firbolg’s ending is so unique but so...right for him. his character arc has really been focused around finding his family. he had one, in the beginning, in his clan. but that didn’t end up, y’know...working out that much. so he had to go out into the world alone--something that firbolg’s are rarely--and try and navigate these foreign spaces all by himself. 

we see very early on how he latches onto the idea of groups. he likes being considered a part of the thundermen; he very much hoists himself upon the CFO title and wears it proudly. i think, where fitzroy needed to find identity within himself, the firbolg needed to find it within other people. which is completely okay! he’s still an individual, but you can tell he finds comfort in numbers because that’s what he is used to. 

him going back to his clan was, i believe, his finally severance with his identity as “firbolg”. he would never be welcomed back to his clan, and one of the few people in his life who supported him was now dead. but his father was proud of him; his father was happy he seemed to find his own clan, even if it wasn’t with other firbolgs. from that moment on, i think the firbolg begins to try finding himself within the thundermen. within his friends.

so his epilogue is neat! it definitely captures the loneliness he feels on his own, and how he feels lost with himself without others. i think it might seem silly to some that he would become a gary, but i think it’s fitting. the garys were always present in his time at school, and they were always helpful. they didn’t mind how long it took him to talk because the gary’s are stone gargoyles--what the fuck do they care about time? it was a group that the firbolg saw as familiar to him--always willing to help, slow, stony, and attuned to a larger group. 

and i think the way gary takes this idea of unity and family and puts it into financial assistance just...it just ties everything together! we saw how attached he got to the concept of finances, thanks to his very confusing accounting class. so he had all of this new knowledge--this knowledge that represented a separation from firbolgs--and this new clan. and he used it to help other clans and families!! i think the fact that the Garys financial advice works specifically with groups is what makes this so fitting. because gary wants families to feel stable within themselves; he understands how finances can create struggle and divides, and he wants to provide relief. 

giving financial advice to communities so they rely on themselves and not the government (aka inviting them to be controlled once more) is a VERY self-reliant concept. not that i think gary’s goal is to have no social networks to exist, but he wants to give communities the ability to rely on one another and foster that feeling of togetherness. so groups aren’t fighting over things, but are trusting and loving and relying. 

just like gary’s always wanted. and just like what he has with the thundermen.

argo 

argo’s ending is probably the funniest, but also the sweetest. i think that argo’s character arc revolved around finding his place. we see how argo’s early personality and motivations revolved around his past. he very much had a revenge story since the start; he wanted to enact revenge on the commodore for murdering his mother, no matter what it took. which made him very limited!! in terms of the self. he saw himself less for what he was now, and what he was then. and what he couldn’t do then. 

we see how much he finds comfort in being a part of the thundermen, but also how he feels...out of place. i think this is because a part of him is still attached to his past and doesn’t think he can do anything beyond his set plan. the unbroken chain certainly contributes to this, by not only separating him from the trio but also reinforcing his connection to his past through his mother’s involvement in the unbroken chain. 

the commodore also being a part of the unbroken chain is, i think, what causes the shift from past to present within argo. his life’s goal is standing right in front of him--attached to the group his mother once was a part of--with his friends at his side. letting the thundermen in on his history is the start of bridging these two halves of argo. and the fact that the thundermen are so willing to helps makes argo feel more a part of the team and more a part of this reality. 

when he kills the commodore, it isn’t intense. it isn’t overly dramatic (minus the fight prior, which was BADASS), it isn’t crazily staged. it is argo, staring down the commodore who lies prone on the ground. 

he kills himself unceremoniously and completes his life-long mission. 

what becomes of him in the epilogue is the culimination of both past and present. he takes what he knows and loves (the sea, the mariah, sailing) and blends it with what he’s come to love now (his friends, this adventure, and making people happy). there are SO many instances where argo uses performance to his advantage. this man is piloted by clint mcelroy, of COURSE he’s going to have a flair for the dramatic. 

so for him to open up a themed cruiseline, based on the stories of him and his friends? SO FITTING. and it isn’t forcing himself to leave his past behind or to completely ignore his present circumstances. because he’s found a place in the now, in the merging of these two sides. and by merging them, he paints a bright future for himself. a future that is partially known, partially not. partially old, partially new.

but it’s all his. 

after that, i think their final scene is just...sweet. a nice, jovial, joking send-off to a nice season. it proves these people have grown and will continue to grow, even when we no longer see their story. it does exactly what graduation does--shows you a struggle, a triumph, and a glimpse into the future. 

i’ll miss it so much, but there’s nothing more i could’ve asked of this ending. it was exactly what it needed to be; nothing more, nothing less. 

[spencers-renaissance]

let him be soft (and let him be mine) p2

Summary: After Derek pulls another self-sacrificing stunt at the culmination of their most recent case, Spencer runs out of their apartment as he desperately grapples with how it makes him feel

or; Derek's self-sacrificing tendencies meet Spencer's abandonment issues. It gets messy before it gets better

Tags: hurt/comfort, crying, abandonment issues, injured!derek, hurt!spencer, miscommunication, angst with a happy ending, fluff, protective!derek

TW: abadonment issues, allusions to grief/loss, some religious imagery (a catholic church and a priest have a small role in the plot)

Pairing: Derek Morgan x Spencer Reid

Word Count: 2.1k Total Word Count: 4.5k

Part One // Masterlist // Read on AO3 // Emily's Edit 1 2 3

Emily (@criminalmindsvibez) and I have worked together on a project based on this poem. Her edits and my fic go hand in hand, so go and check hers out! She posted part two yesterday and just posted part three! It's been so fun to work together, so please go and reblog her beautiful edit <3

Spencer smiles, feeling a little bit lighter after getting everything off his chest. “Thank you.”

As he watches the priest walk out of the nave and into what Spencer suspects is the Sanctuary, he hears something that simultaneously warms his heart and twists his stomach in anxiety.

Derek, calling his name.

“Oh, God,” Derek cries as soon as he’s rushed over to sit next to Spencer, wrapping him up in a tight hug, “baby, I was so worried. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and let you come back to me but I just couldn’t do it. I had to get Pen to track your phone in the end.”

“I’m sorry, Der,” Spencer says, pulling away and blinking tearily at the anxiety mixed with relief written across his boyfriend’s face. Guilt floods his stomach as he thinks about the terror he’s just put Derek through: the exact same feeling he’s been lamenting over Derek inflicting upon him. How is he any better? If anything, he’s only worse; Derek does what he does to serve others, Spencer’s been nothing but selfish all evening.

“No, baby,” Derek protests, lifting a hand to his face and brushing away a falling tear, “you don’t need to apologise, just… talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

Spencer doesn’t waste any time in agreeing. It’s the least his boyfriend deserves. “Can we go home? I want to eat that Thai food in bed while I tell you. I’ve already cried one too many times in a church for the day”

Derek chuckles at that. “Of course, pretty boy. Come on. Let’s get you home.” He takes Spencer’s hand gently and leads him towards the exit, and when Spencer turns back briefly before walking out of the building, he doesn’t miss the smiling priest lingering near the altar.

⭐️

Derek doesn’t let go of his hand the whole drive home, clinging tightly even on the elevator up to their apartment, and it only serves to make Spencer feel guiltier. How had this not clicked earlier? He never stopped to think about the worry his boyfriend was going through back home, only prioritising himself and his own selfish feelings.

He starts to wonder whether he should actually tell Derek after all. His boyfriend is so endlessly kind and selfless and wonderful and Spencer wants to point out his one flaw? After he’s left him panicked and concerned for his well being all evening?

He anxiously gnaws on his bottom lip as Derek tucks him into bed, seemingly oblivious to his distress as he kisses his head gently before making light work of reheating the take out he’d ordered earlier. Spencer’s stomach spins and turns with anxiety as he burrows himself under the covers, desperate to hide from all that’s to come, unable to escape the helter-skelter of emotions consuming his mind.

Soon enough, Derek makes his way into the bedroom, turning off the main light in favour of their various cosy lamps and flicks on the TV, setting it on reruns of Fawlty Towers with the volume turned down before arranging the takeout on trays before finally slipping under the duvet himself.

“Baby, I know that for whatever reason you don’t want to tell me what’s really going on,” Derek says softly, turning Spencer’s chin to face him and gazing imploringly into his eyes, “that poor lip of yours will be bitten off by the morning. But I want you to know you can trust me with whatever this is. I promise that there is no problem, no issue, no stressor that we couldn’t overcome together. Me and you, we’re a dream team, aren’t we? We can solve this, but not if you’re not completely honest with me.”

Damn it, now Spencer’s going to feel guilty no matter what path he chooses. He either lies and breaks Derek’s trust, or he tells the truth and breaks his heart.

But the priest’s words from earlier flash through his mind, and he takes a deep breath, knowing what he has to do. “I’m scared,” he admits, tentatively. It feels like a good place to start.

“Okay,” Derek replies soothingly, eyebrows knitted in concern as his thumb traces the side of Spencer’s face. “What are you scared of, Spence?”

“I’m scared… I’m scared of losing you,” he whispers, casting his eyes downward.

He feels Derek tense next to him, but he doesn’t know whether it’s because he’s confused or something worse. “Baby boy, you have to understand that you’re it for me, I’m never going anywhere—”

“No,” Spencer interrupts, meeting his boyfriend’s eyes again, “not like that. I know you love me, I’ve never doubted that for a second. I’m scared of losing you to something worse than another person. I’m scared of losing you to a gunshot, a stab wound, a bomb blast. I’m scared of losing you to the job, Derek.”

“Oh.” His thumb falters in its soothing movements against Spencer’s cheek before it retracts completely.

“You’re a hero, Der,” he says tearily, not bothering to try and fight them this time, “you’re an inspiration. You’re strong and powerful and the kindest, most selfless man I’ve ever met, but I— I’m gonna need you to start being a little more selfish.”

“I don’t… What do you mean?”

“Remember back in 2007 when that woman was trapped in her car with a bomb under her seat? You stayed right next to her the whole time, even though you knew that if that bomb went off, it was taking you with it. Because in that moment, looking after that woman was all that mattered.”

Derek nods hesitantly, his brows knit even tighter.

“Well, I could deal with that. I accepted it. We were newly in a relationship, and I knew the kind of man you were when I started dating you. I didn’t think you’d give that up for me so soon. But, Derek, it’s been seven years now. We’ve been together for almost a decade, and you’re still the same man. You run headlong into danger with no regard for how it will affect you. And I love your selflessness and generosity, I really do, but I need you to know how that makes me feel.

“It makes me feel like I’m not important to you, Der.”

“Oh, baby, no,” Derek says, distraught as he wraps Spencer in a tight, urgent hug, hand flying to run his fingers through his curls.

“But, no, it does, Derek. Because it feels like one of these days, you won’t be as lucky as you always have been, and I’ll be alone again. You’re all I have, and I can’t lose you, I just can’t.” The tears are joined by heaving, desperate sobs as he cries into Derek’s shoulder, both of them holding onto one another with clawing fingers, impossibly close as emotions fill the room.

When Spencer finally calms down enough, he pulls away to find Derek’s eyes red and his cheeks wet, too. “I— I had no idea you felt like this, baby boy,” he says earnestly, looking deeply into his eyes as his devastated emotions play across his open expression. “I’m sorry that I ever made you feel like you were anything less than the most important person in the whole world to me, because you are, Spencer.”

“It’s okay,” Spencer whispers sadly. “You didn’t know.”

“No, but I do now. I never stopped to think how this was affecting you, and I’m so deeply sorry for that.”

They lapse into a comfortable silence as they fall against one another, both accepting that the Thai is going to go cold again and they’ll probably end up with a greasy 2am pizza instead.

“It’s because of my dad,” Derek admits eventually, breaking the silence. “When I watched him bleed out in front of me, I swore I would never let that happen to another person. I would never let another person die on my watch, not unless I was going down with them. And that was an easy principle to live by when I was a cop, it translated well to the FBI, and it worked great when I was single. But now… I have you. And you’re more important than a promise I made to myself when I was ten.

“The thing is, though, that I don’t know how to override an instinct that I’ve built and enforced for my entire career. Spencer, you’re everything to me, and you’re more important than this, but I… I don’t know how to change.”

Another tear slides down Spencer’s tired, puffy face at Derek’s words, mostly because they were exactly what he was expecting. The only reason he’s kept this to himself for so long is because he knew that no possible resolution could make this okay.

“It’s okay, Der,” he says sadly, “I get it—”

“I think I should leave the BAU.”

Spencer sits bolt upright at that, turning to his boyfriend with shock written in every line of his face. “What?”

“Listen, I’m 43. I’ve been on the job for twenty-one years, and I’m getting tired, Spencer. I was planning to bring this up at a much better moment, but I’ve just finished that house on the Mount Pleasant border, and I think we should move in there. I’m ready for a quieter life, Spencer. I want to do things that make me happy, focus on the future of our family, me, you, and Clooney — kids, too, if we decide that’s the way we want to go — and leave this life revolving around death and crime and the bad in the world behind.”

“You’re serious?” Spencer asks, completely in disbelief as he stares at Derek like he’s grown an extra head. This was never a possibility he considered. Not even a little bit.

“I am,” Derek promises. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and this just seals the deal, really. I don’t want you to be feeling this scared all the time, especially not if it’s set off even by a couple of bruised ribs. Diving in front of a bullet when wearing a vest is hardly the most dangerous thing I’ve done.”

Derek chuckles but Spencer just smiles sadly at just how true that statement is. “No, it isn’t.”

“I’d love to focus on the property business full time, renovate more houses and really make a career out of it. Build a proper business, live in the suburbs, be happy and safe and alive with the love of my life for as long as possible,” Derek says, eyes warm and serious as he brushes his hand against Spencer’s face again. “I’m so in love with you it hurts.”

Spencer’s heart melts and he presses into Derek’s side, burying in as close as he can get. The tears that leak from his eyes this time are at least happy ones. “If you leave,” he says, after considering it for a moment, “I think I want to leave, too.”

“Really? You don’t have to, Spencer. You can stay at the BAU if you want to.”

“I know. But I’ve given over a third of my life to this job, and it’s given me all it can, I think. Before Gideon recruited me, I always thought I’d end up teaching, and I always knew I’d love it. Researching and teaching others what I’ve found out for a living sounds like a dream, and the thought of coming home to you, knowing that you’re safe every night as we sit down for dinner and chat about our normal, civilian lives… well, it’s everything I didn’t know I’d been longing for.”

A kind of peace that Spencer hasn’t felt in years settles over his chest as he basks in the thought of a safe and happy future with Derek, one not plagued by the trauma they’ve faced willingly for far too vast proportions of their lives, and he knows it’s the right decision.

“Wow,” Derek says, and woven in with the shock in his voice is relief, clear as day, “we’re leaving the BAU.”

“We’re leaving the BAU.”

Spencer eventually packs the Thai away and orders an extra large pepperoni pizza for delivery, letting Derek rest in bed as he takes over the beavering around. Fawlty Towers continues to play across the TV screen throughout the course of the night, Spencer resting his head on the top of Derek’s chest, careful to avoid his injuries. In that moment, with his favourite TV show playing, and an empty pizza box on the floor of their bedroom, cuddled up safely with the man he knows he’s going to spend forever with, Spencer thanks a God he’s not sure he believes in that Derek, right now, is soft, happy, and most importantly, his.

Let him be soft, and let him be mine.

— Please, let him be happy.

If you haven't already - check out Emily's post, and give some love to the original poem source here!

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