#this is how you remove the structures that make people billionaires

[edge-oftheworld]

descriptions and reasons under the cut

this is a cashton sponsored post

okay. So. This is gonna be a long one so buckle up. Basically, long story short, changing the entire industry and the way we consume music as a result. Charting won’t matter nearly so much, and promo will have a lot less of a monetary incentive.

pros: I hope on a site like tumblr this is pretty obvious. All people deserve a living wage and the whole broke musician sleeping in their car til they make it big stereotype excludes a lot of people and actually causes a lot of trauma that probably has something to do with the high mortality rate of musicians even after they make it. More people from poor backgrounds being able to do music ESPECIALLY in countries that are marginalised by the industry. A lot less ability for labels and managers to take advantage of people which we see all the time. Musicians can afford things like therapy and actual instruments and education without having to work another job even before they’ve made it big.

basically what I’m proposing is this: streaming services like spotify reverse their tiers of income to artist per stream and it’s more like tax brackets: the less streams you get, the more you earn per stream. until you can from one full length album earn enough to survive. you do earn marginally more the more it’s streamed so I don’t get yelled at too badly—but it’s like being in a higher tax bracket, you take home more in the end but the government or streaming company takes a higher portion, so it should be a win win situation. Ticket prices to shows are also capped but not unreasonably: you can still sell packages with VIP and merch there’s just a top price that’s only waivered if you do some charity donation with a percentage.

cons: need regulation to ensure streaming services don’t completely bar the work of lower performing artists (but remember they still take a cut. and if you get zero streams you still earn nothing so you will need some promo, just so the streaming services don’t get mad at me. I know that’s not quite UBI it’s the best I got sorry). there’s the whole idea that artists will make bad low effort songs just to get a high percentage of the cut of them—but refer to previous point, this may not be a problem. also, with so many good songs already there do you think people are genuinely gonna put in no effort? if you made a song that’s already a lot of effort. HOWEVER

Using AI to make songs might cause problems so idk maybe some regulation there—I think there is already is there? or can we just tell when there’s humanity in something?

there’s the possibility that the streaming services go out of business because bigger artists remove their music from them (bigger artists being their main source of revenue). I don’t know how to properly mitigate this risk—other than stopping said big artists creating competition platforms that are basically the same as the platforms we have now. idk maybe it’s just me but I can’t see this making it any worse, only better. we need to value art and artists and the income discrepancy does no one any good.

[level2janitor]

tactiquest structure

so i've posted a lot about tactiquest's classes and monsters and everything on here but i haven't really talked about the non-combat subsystems much yet and i wanted to go into detail about them, bc tactiquest has very different goals from most heroic fantasy systems.

tracking inventory, travel time, worrying about actually running out of your adventuring budget, are things a lot of big-damn-heroes fantasy systems throw out because they're just paperwork that gets in the way of your cool fights. that's not the case in Tactiquest! these systems are so core to the experience that removing them will make a lot of classes unusable. the game is built around them.

travel & exploration

tactiquest explicitly assumes you're running an open-sandbox hexcrawl and is designed to support that, including the fact the game is designed around random encounters. this is the sort of thing D&D 3e expected you to do, but people ditched random encounters because they thought they were boring and tedious. so classes balanced around that attrition of resources ended up with a huge spike in power other classes couldn't match.

the boring-and-tedious problem is mostly addressed by trying to make combat really good and resolve really fast. if i fucked that up the whole thing falls apart, but so far people are liking it

the second thing that helps with random encounters is your resources don't fully restore immediately at the end of each day like they do in 3e. resting is less effective in the wilderness and resources expended are a tomorrow problem, not just a today problem. so you don't have to have 3+ fights every single day just to maintain parity - 0-2 fights per day still adds up to difficult resource management.

because the game has such a focus on it, you can have classes like the ranger actually be good at travel and exploration instead of just giving them vaguely-naturey combat abilities.

economy

in most D&D-likes, even usually OSR ones, you accrue so much gold. just as a side effect of adventuring. to the point money no longer actually matters because you can throw piles of it at any problem. this is bad. it's a system that defeats its own purpose; there are no interesting choices involving money when you have so much the only real expense is like, 50,000-gold-piece magic items.

i don't just want players to care about money, i want them to worry about money, like a normal person. you're not batman who's a billionaire as a side hobby, you're spiderman who has to deliver pizzas in between superhero work because he's got bills to pay like everyone else. so a whole lot of effort has been put into actually designing prices and treasure amounts around this dynamic.

i also hate how games will usually go "oh adventuring gives you 900,000 gold for existing but a normal person's living wage is 2 gold a month". i don't want to be fantasy jeff bezos, thanks

inventory

this is something i just lifted from OSR games outright. you can carry ten things (and tiny things don't take up an item slot). that's the whole rule.

tracking inventory can add a lot of interesting decisions to a game and adds a new lever for abilities from classes and magic items. having a character play the merchant class which gets a bunch of extra inventory slots feels really impactful. finding a bag of holding that doubles your carry capacity feels so good when you actually have to watch your inventory.

supply

the only thing i felt was really unenjoyable when running games with strict inventory limits was tracking rations for each character that you eat every night; it felt too much like busywork with not enough payoff. so in Tactiquest rations are abstracted into a single Supply stat that's tied to the party rather than any individual character.

you can only restock Supply in towns, and it drops by 1 each time you rest. you can sleep without resting and this won't cost supply, but you won't regain any HP or other resources. this gives you the impactful decision-making of tracking rations without the annoyance of "okay it's been a day of travel, everyone make sure you dock a ration from your sheet" like twice per session

Supply is one of the things that slowly drains your funds and gives you a reason to keep seeking out treasure, tying back into the economy. it also gives merchants and rangers some extra mechanical levers for their class abilities to pull on.

[idk6123]

A Deserving Reward (Handsome Jack X Male Reader)

The sun is shining bright yet again on the wastelands of Pandora. Corpses of bandits are lying around a town nearby a dried up lake. The only things that remain is shacks of the bandits. Currently, Hyperion is looking around for any survivors. Amidst the chaos is one of the highest Hyperion generals. As he looks around the dead town, he walks over his super visor, who’s currently busy planning his idea out.

“So, we all fill this up. And I was thinking to build all these fancy lodges near the water.” Besides Handsome Jack is loader that is taking notes. “Ooh! I’m way too excited for this! I didn’t even thought about blowing these shitholes first.” The billionaire refers to the shacks with disdain. “Send your buddies to pile up the corpses first and burn them, eat them, or whatever you want to do. Destroy these low class structures and then we talk about the build plans.”

“Understood.” The loader turns around and walks away.

Handsome Jack watches it leaves, then he notices his general behind him. He can’t help but smile at him. “You did good today, pumpkin. Now, I can finally let one of my dreams to become true, making my own resort!”

“I thought getting rid of the bandits was your dream.”

“I said one of my dreams. Dreams.” Jack emphasis like Y/N is an idiot. “For someone good at killing stuff, you can’t even listen to me properly.” He still smiles despite making fun of Y/N. “Get over here.” Y/N walks over to Jack, who puts his arm around him. Both of them turn around to take a great look at the empty crater. “Tell me. What do you see?”

“A hole.”              

“Correct. But I was looking for a hole with potential.” Jack then realizes how wrong that sound. “I could’ve phrased that better, but my point still stands. Besides, you probably like it if I use euphemisms. Anyway! What I see is a future beach, where people can swim without worrying about getting killed by some dibshits.” He then moves over to the side. “And here I will put a some lodges, or even a five star hotel. Then there, I will make a tropical town with a shopping district. Even though this is now a shit hole, I can make a different to make it amazing. You understand that, right kiddo?”

Y/N can see Handsome Jack’s smirk looking at him and so close. Most people would be extremely scared to be so closed at him, yet Y/N is merely unbothered by it. “Yes.”

“Of course you do. It’s like you. Was shit first, and then I came by to fix you and now look at you! One of my strongest men.”

“Was I really shit?” Y/N frowns a bit.

“Honestly, yeah. But that doesn’t matter anymore, so don’t cry about it.” Handsome Jack removes his arm to walk back at the crater, thinking. “Speaking of which… Perhaps I should reward you? How about a nice beach house or something. One that you’re never going to use.”

“Because I’m too busy working for you?”

Jack finger points towards his worker. “You know it!” He then thinks further about it. “Nah! That would be too mean. I will reserve that to someone else, like Tony. Fucking cocksucker. So, what do you want kiddo? You can get anything unless it revolves a free day.” Despite his words, Jack tries to make enticing.

“Dunno. I still haven’t got a chance to get a partner-”

“Then I will buy you a boyfriend!” Jack says with a wide grin, though Y/N doesn’t.

“You can’t buy a boyfriend.”

“Said the guy that said you can’t buy a diamond pony.” The CEO retorts. “You will have no choice, pumpkin. I’m going to get you the perfect man. You want regular one, or should I create on in the labs?”

“By the love of-”

-

Back at the quarters in one of the bases, Y/N is ready to rest for the night. Though once he walked in, he sees Handsome Jack with a proud smile. Besides him is a human size wrapped up present.

“Surprise! Here is your boyfriend!”

Y/N still can’t believe Jack did this. “Don’t tell me there is a guy in there.”

“There is, and this time, I made sure he can breathe.” Jack gives a pat on the present. “Open it. I want to see your reaction.”

“Of course you do…” Y/N mutters. Jack stands aside as Y/N get over to the box. He grabs the piece of paper, starting from the top and rip it down, where he quickly see the boyfriend Jack got him. “The fuck-!?”

“Ta-daa! Isn’t he perfect?”

Y/N looks back at his boss. “Why did you put one of your doubles in there?”

“Why not? I was thinking about the best qualities your man has to have. He needed to be smart, good looking, great at sex. Basically perfect. And that’s when I realized that you needed me.” Handsome Jack casually explains.

“You’re saying I should get one with a doubleganger?”

“Yes.” Handsome Jack merely answers. “Now, let him out to check it out. Let’s hope everything turned out alright…”

Y/N removes all the paper and opens the plastic box to allow the clone to get out. The general get a bit freaked out with seeing two Handsome Jack. Although he saw this situation before, he never thought one of them would be gifted as his boyfriend.

“Y/N, I want to meet your boyfriend, Handsome Jack. Less Handsome Jack, this is your boyfriend, Y/N.” The real one introduces each other. “Be sure to tread him well. You know what happens if you don’t.”

“Of course I do, pumpkin.” The doubleganger responds. He looks back at Y/N. “What’s up handsome? I’m up to anything if you want me to. Dates? Sure. Movie night? Fine by me. Sex? Always.”

Handsome Jack holds his product proudly. “And he’s into anything. So all your kinky desires can be become true. So, do you love it, or love it?”

“You’re encouraging me to have sex with someone that looks like you?” Y/N questions.

“Yes. Why do you keep asking unnecessary questions?” Jack looks a bit irritated by Y/N’s behavior. “Anyway, I’m bored. Have fun with your boyfriend.”

The two sees Handsome Jack leaving. After he left the room, the doubleganger looks back at Y/N. “Wanna have sex, sexy?”

“No thanks.”

-

Back at Jack’s office in the space station, the big boss is sitting on his chair with his legs on the desk crossed.

“I don’t care if they can’t make it.” Handsome Jack says while eating chips, one by one from the bag. “I have an important event that day.”

“Sir, the spa can always be-”

“Martha, did I ever gave you permission to talk back?” Handsome Jack looks at the phone, daring his assistant to talk. “Thoughts so. Now, I don’t want to move my spa day. Let the rest of board know I have this meeting exactly one week from today. And if they’re complaining that falls on their vacations, let them know they’re free to have an unending vacation once I fire them and blacklist them from any future job.” Without a respond, Jack hangs up the phone and let out an annoyed groan. “God, why am I doing everything?”

From the other side of the room, Y/N enters, which lightings Jack’s mood. “Finally, someone I find competent…” Y/N walks towards the desk as Jack put his legs back on the ground and adjust his posture. “Good day, kiddo. What can I do for you?”

“Jack, I want you to get rid of the double jack you gave me.” Y/N says with a hint of irritated voice.

“It’s rude to be so dissatisfied with your gift, Y/N.” Jack sternly says.

“I don’t care. He makes me uncomfortable in many ways. He’s constantly wants sex, even when I decline, and that’s just to put it lightly. And since he looks exactly like you, it’s hard to distinguish him and you.”

“That’s the point of a double, dummy.” Jack casually points out.

“And I’m fine with that. But I don’t want my partner to be a double of you, so let him know to get out of my quarters.” Y/N tries to sound as insistence as he can, while still acting proper in front of his boss.

Jack doesn’t look amused. He merely looks deadpanned at him, which Y/N worries a lot. This usually means bad news when he looks like that. To his surprise, a smile creeps on Jack’s smile, which makes Y/N worried even more.

“Oh, I know what this is about.”

For whatever reason, Y/N feels like he doesn’t. “You do?”

“Sure am.” Jack stands up to walk to the other side of the desk and sit on it. “The reason you don’t want a double, is because you want the real thing.”

“E-Excuse me?” Y/N raises an eyebrow.

“You heard me. I know you have a crush on me. That’s why you follow me around.” Handsome Jack shows his smug smiles.

“Yeah, because that couldn’t be my job.” Y/N sarcastically respond.

“Keep telling yourself that.” Jack gets off the desk to walk over to Y/N, with their faces in front of each other, with Y/N starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable. “It’s alright if you do. I like the attention.”

“Uhh…”

Jack smirks. He walks back behind the desk to sit on the big chair. Afterwards, he pats on his legs. “Sit.”

Y/N gulps, though he doesn’t question it. He walks over to the smug man to sit on Jack’s lap. The Hyperion hero put a hand on Y/N’s lower back. The commander looks literally down, while Jack looks up. “It’s been a while when I got a proper partner. You can blame my high standers for that, but you barely passed them. Consider it a complement.”

“Alright…”

“So, how about I take you out on a nice date? I can buy you the best quality of food, no matter the price, no matter the restaurant. Then, after we dine, I would love you to show me what your made of. Whaddaya think? A hero needs a lover by his side.”

Y/N is having difficulty processing the info. Since when did Jack had feelings for him? Was this all some kind of ploy to get him dating him? Is it wise to be in a relationship with your boss, who’s the most controversial man in the galaxy? As Y/N thinks, he didn’t realize he already answered.

“I would love to.”

[wutheringmights]

"Red, White, and Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston is extremely dated. I know it was published in 2019, but spiritually this is a relic from 2013. This is a 2/5 for me.

The rest of this post is overwhelmingly negative, so skip if you don't want to see.

I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't buy into its escapist fantasy. I like silly romcoms, but this novel felt like it had to excuse every aspect of itself. "Don't worry about the love interest being a British prince! He also hates the empire!" Okay, but now you got me thinking about British imperialism so much I can't ignore it.

Don't even get me started on how American politics is handled. Again, I am more than willing to turn my brain off and just enjoy a lighthearted romance, but the narrative didn't want you to turn your brain off. This would be fine if it went beyond buzzword acknowledgements of systemic injustice and the cesspool of American politics. Yes, rich white men in power is an issue. Do you have any else to say besides that?

And the thing that really grinded on my nerves was the narrative's insistence that Alex was some kind of underdog (you know, to contrast, Henry's privilege). But Alex isn't an underdog! He's rich! Both his parents were lawyers before they became politicians. His dad owns a lakehouse. His mom remarried a tech billionaire. Alex is rich and his lifestyle is rich. If the story wanted to be about a smart-aleck rich boy-- great! I'd actually prefer it that way! But instead it's all about how he feels like an outsider compared to how rich Henry is. I know it's not at the same level, but I would have preferred some acknowledgement over this insistence that Alex is Just Like Everyone Else (this in particular reminds me of how Sasha Alsberg accidentally revealed how blinded she is to her own privilege in "Breaking Time", but I digress).

Some other miscellaneous thoughts:

No story gets to call itself enemies-to-lovers if they fall in love in the first 100 pages

A book gets a free pass to make one Star Wars or Harry Potter reference; any more and it starts to read like it was focus-grouped for mainstream nerds

At the very least they should reissue this book to remove the (and I am loathe to use this word) cringey Harry Potter references

The prose is insanely readable, which is a rare feat of skill. McQuinston can write, I just wish she didn't write this story.

I've seen a lot of people say that this is written like a fanfiction, which I initially was going to fight on principle; upon reading this, I can concede that this story is at the very least structured like a fanfiction

Specifically, I think this story started as Hamilton fanfiction. No, I will not elaborate on this

[should-know-better]

I put this interview through a translator - it’s a bit clunky in places but readable.

“If things were like when I started, right now I would be a billionaire"

With "One Man Band" (Modern Sky, 23) the one from Liverpool returned this summer to the direct, optimistic and resounding chorus songs he carries in his soul.

Through Zoom Miles Kane sounds exactly like his songs, or more specifically like his latest video, where he spends a great sunny day with his dog on the promenade of Brighton: a sympathetic and unmistakably British euphoria, as contagious as he is unpretentious stains his answers.

It is not that sophistication has not been an integral part of who is still half of The Last Shadow Puppets, but these days it's time to go back to the essentials. That in addition, one thing does not take away the other. In a few days he begins an extensive tour that will take him in March to Spain in an unprecedented format: electric but solo. It will be the 5th in Barcelona (Sala Bóveda), 6 in Bilbao (Kafe Antzokia), 7 in Madrid (Jaguar) and 8 in Valencia (16 Tons). Kane is excited both for the novelty and for returning to our country. And it's nice to talk to him.

We should start by talking about the title of the album and the song of the same name, which is one of the most representative.

Yes, it was the first one I composed for the album. With it I was proving to myself a little that I am good enough, that I am going to lead the way of my own trip, do you understand me? And with a lyric like that I sing about the good times and leave the bad out. It's a pretty positive song that gave me confidence to make the rest of the album.

It is full of a luminous and optimistic energy. What did you have in mind when you started recording it?

Well, exactly that! I fell in love with the guitar again. I was loving playing it again, and I wanted to make an animated rock album. With words that had a meaning, but in a simple way. Put my guitar in front with the catchy lyrics and melodies and look at the plan. That's the heart of my sound, so we got down to work. The idea was to make Miles Kane's ultimate album.

Did you get tired of the guitar, then?

A little yes, before making this album. I think there are times when it can happen to you. I love Motown, soul and that kind of thing. And I love what we do in The Last Shadow Puppets, with all the strings and the woodwind that gives it a rather cinematic air, of a soundtrack. All that freaks me out. The songs have layers, and they end up having a dramatic tone. But I think you can keep the drama in a simpler way. In this case I wanted my guitar to be there. It may not sound so sophisticated, but I think you still have that feeling. And that's what I've tried to do, strip everything, remove all the strings, the pianos and have only guitar, bass, drums and voice.

Do you think people have a hard time making optimistic music? I say it because there is a lot of dark music out there, it seems that it has more prestige.

Well, I write about how I feel. And I think people identify themselves because it's real. I write from my experiences. I'm already looking back at my life, love, friendship or the classic material that I suppose everyone composes on. It's just that. I do it my way, I really tell what is happening to me in every moment. That's what I've always done. I think my best songs come from there.

The second side of the disc is softer and more delicate. Why did you structure it like that?

The album begins with a song called "Troubled Son" but is very animated and heavy. And it ends with a song titled "Scared of Love" and it's just the voice and an acoustic guitar. For me it's the perfect ending of an album: we started very high, kicking the door down. And then I tried to take a trip between those two songs that summarise everything. I think it makes a lot of sense to start like this, then to end with "Scared of Love". It's like starting with the fifth gear and then going down to the first, I don't know if I can explain.

For your new single "Time of Your Life" (song included in a seven-inch that accompanied the special edition of the LP) you have made a great video. It's Brighton, isn't it?

Yes, it's Brighton.

There you are with your dog, enjoying time on the promenade, in the clothing store, eating "fish and chips", that is, enjoying the small pleasures of life. It has caught my attention because we are used to having only the negative, miserable image of your country.

Honestly, all I wanted was to drive to Brighton, spend the day there and take the opportunity to make the video. I took my dog. I wanted it to be very simple. I like the mod atmosphere of Brighton and we combined these ideas without thinking too much. In 3 hours we had recorded the video. Me with my dog, walking. I like fish and chips and I'm a mod, so it's a day in my life. That simple, no nonsense. It's basically what I like.

It's just that many times we tend to wallow in the mud, don't we?

Yes, we all have our moments of depression, don't we? I get it. I have them myself. Of course. It's normal. But it's an animated song, and I wanted a video that was very simple and animated, very much from real life.

I guess that in this world many people are afraid to look cheesy, I don't know.

Yes, because I imagine it can happen. There may be people who think that the video is. And that the song is sugary. But if you think about it, well, I don't care. I like it and that's what matters. And yes, I think you have to have balls to do it. The people who will seem cheesy are probably sitting at home spending the day miserably. And it seems very good to me, that they are still there.

In January you start a huge tour with dozens of dates. You start in the United Kingdom, don't you?

Yes, I start with my band in January and February. But the tour I'm going to do in Spain I do alone, which is completely new to me. I'm going to play with drum loops and my electric guitar. It's not going to be something acoustic, but hard, a little like Sleaford Mods. But I wear my guitar, so I will play my riffis and stuff. It's something new, but I think I can move it forward. And it hits with the name of the album, "One Man Band". I want to go out and test myself.

I guess it's quite a challenge. How do you make it work?

It's a challenge, yes. It's very difficult to know what it will be like because it's the first time I've done it. I've always had the idea in my head to do a little Sleaford Mods-like thing, with drum loops and playing my guitar on top. You will still have the Miles Kane experience. It sounds a little cheesy, but it's going to be sugary. I did a test when the album came out, a bit like a teaser. And next week I'm going to do a solo like this in Sheffield with the same format as when I go to Spain and the rest of Europe. I think it works and I'm working to take the format to another level. I think it's going to be super fun, it's going to be stuck and it's going to be rocking. I haven't played solo in Spain for centuries, so I really feel like it. I think it's something completely new, and that's why it's very exciting. It seems to me that in Madrid all the tickets were sold and the concert was moved to a larger hall. I'm looking forward to getting to Spain. It's an honour.

And in those solo concerts are you going to play a little of everything?

Yes, a little bit of everything. I'm going to play my best songs. The good thing about this album is that many of these songs have connected and I still have to play them. I haven't played in Spain for years. But I think some of the venues are already sold out. They are going to be small, but I really feel like it. And this album is very fun to perform live. And I will also play the old hits, so it's going to be a full-blown party.

How has getting on a stage changed for you?

Performing is what I like most in the world. Sometimes life makes it hard precisely because I can't perform. You have to wait, you can't play every night. I still have the same tingling as when I started playing the fucking guitar at school, as a child. When I grab the guitar and go on stage, I don't care if there are ten or thousands of people. I love it.

That's the attitude. And it shows: recently I watched Youtube how you faced "The Back of Love" by Echo and The Bunnymen, live in a studio and I told myself: this is how a version is made.

Do you like them? I love them.

I'm freaking out. But it's a very hairy song, with that sharp guitar and the crazy drum beat. Why did you choose it?

I love making versions. I have done a lot throughout my career. Especially live, I like to play versions. And Echo and The Bunnymen is one of my favourite bands ever. There are many songs I could have chosen, but I still remember when I heard that song in Liverpool for the first time. It's quite unusual, isn't it? You have a crazy battery and it's like very epic. It has something from Scott Walker and also a surfing side. And it's very rocky. So it seemed appropriate to me. When I recorded it in Liverpool with my cousins we remembered when we were younger and how much we liked it. We started to do it, and it's true that there are times when it doesn't work. But in this case we decided to make a punk version, it went well and it sounds very cool.

And how do you see the Liverpool scene these days? From here we have the impression that there are always things happening throughout the United Kingdom.

It's fine. There are many young bands knocking on the door. There will always be kids in the bedroom wanting to be stars or making songs, and it often depends on the attention you put on them. But I think it never disappears, it depends on whether people look or not.

You yourself started very young in this world, but things have changed a lot, haven't they?

Yes. Obviously, if things were like when I started, right now I would be a billionaire. Streaming doesn't seem fair to me, it's hard how things have been put. It can be hard. But I am grateful to be able to still be here after twenty years. It is true that it is becoming more and more difficult, but this album has brought me back to where I wanted to be. What is difficult after being in this for so long is that you already know how things are. But it reached the 5th position. It is the highest position that a solo album of mine has reached. So I'm freaking out with it. As a 37-year-old man I feel like I'm in a good place, let's cross our fingers. For me, going out and doing these shows next year is going to be super special, I have never wanted to do something so much in my life.

By the way, do you have plans to do new things with Alex (Turner)?

Not at the moment, but never say never again...

[mattel-is-nobody]

Some people really can't stick to their guns. They're so firmly latched on to some certain thing they believe that even if another of their beliefs contradicts it, they refuse to change either of their stances and instead end up being a quandary of contradictory beliefs.

Some feminists say equal rights for all, but as soon as a trans woman says she wants to play women's sports or use the ladies' room, that's a no-go. Sorry, Christina, it doesn't matter that you're fully transitioned, or that you have been for 5 years, or that you got bottom surgery as well. It doesn't matter that you are now no different from a woman in any way except minor bone structure differences that not all women have to begin with and a couple now-completely-useless internal organs. Your birth certificate says you're a man, so go use the men's room where there's a good chance you'll be raped so that we can ensure you don't rape our daughters with a dick you no longer have. Because everyone knows that the only reason men transition to women is so they can sneak into the ladies' room to rape little girls.

(That last bit was sarcasm for those of you who are illiterate or, like a shockingly high percentage of Americans, read at or below a 6th grade comprehension level)

Some Christians (thankfully nowhere close to all of them, but some) ask for certain books to be banned, simply because they give a more accurate view of how gender and sexuality works (there are more than 2 genders btw, if you actually studied biology any further than that one semester you took in high school you'd know that). But when the Freedom From Religion Foundation says that we should ban the Bible from public schools because it contains graphic depictions of rape, incest, murder, genocide, and cannibalism (all of which really is in the Bible, along with explicit mentions of donkey cock and horse cum), those same Christians who spewed that shit about "tHiNk AbOuT tHe KiDs" will lose their fucking minds defending a book that, removed from its context as a holy book, no reasonable person would allow a child to read. Would you allow your child to read a Dead Dove: Do Not Eat smut fic on AO3? Didn't think so. And if that's how you roll, you shouldn't be letting your child read the Bible either.

People will defend billionaires for being obscenely and excessively wealthy and swear up and down that privilege had nothing to do with it. But as soon as I say "well if it's so easy to make a million dollars, go out and do it by this day next year", they'll fire off so many excuses as to why that's not possible for them, and suddenly it's not so easy to become rich. I've had exactly one person take me up on that, and you know what happened? They failed. Miserably. I'm not even asking you to become a billionaire, I'm just saying go out and make a million dollars. Surely if that guy on TV can do it in 90 days with no contacts and only 100 dollars to start with, you can too, especially considering that you have contacts and hopefully quite a bit more than 100 dollars to your name, as well as 275 additional days in which to do it.

Honestly it's so sad to see just how little some people think about their own thoughts. If your beliefs directly contradict other things you believe, you need to weed out what's causing that and update your beliefs. Anything less is just pure cognitive dissonance.

[hanzi83]

Just Going Off Vibes

Blog 

I normally jot shit down that I will talk on the podcast, but I did want to write another pretentious blog where I am probably gonna repeat the same shit I have probably already said, I am going to try and incorporate big words to make me sound smarter but once you get to seeing the shitty grammar and structure to this shit, you are gonna write me off because I haven’t read too many books in my life and I am just going off vibes, which can sometimes help or be detrimental to how I come across. But once you are catching up with shit and taking in the social media discourse of the day because I can’t remove myself from the online shit since I know that everything that trends is manufactured by different factions and cults to change and dominate the  narratives, and it becomes fascinating to see how it plays out because I can already feel where the end goal is, every day you see why attempts at comedy has gone through the shitter and has just been watered down, when you see the most uncreative shit from people like “Mike Obama” trending because right wing shit heads are regressive and self hating toward themselves because most likely their search history for porn has all trans related shit to it but even if the joke was funny how does everyone repeating it and getting boosted by other billionaire funded think tanks make it even funnier, you couldn’t have come up with a better name? Like where is the creative output? It is one of those things where people have to hype up other people’s shitty jokes so in turn their shitty jokes get boosted up because by their logic, if it gets retweets it suddenly fucking means it is top shelf comedy, if that was the case, then someone like Brooklyn Dad on twitter would be considered the funniest person on the fucking planet. They think because they dominate the algorithm, that it is gonna cure their mental illness and having to cope with the fact that you ride for people who literally want to marry children and put them to work with loosened child labor laws, like most of you mother fuckers don’t even think human lives are worth it because it means you will have your shitty guns, you suffer from this online shit where you think because it is going back to 90’s regression on HGH supplied by Vince McMahon, that you think because you repeat shitty comedy that it suddenly makes it more funny because other compromised sex offenders being forced to be an online troll are the ones slapping their knee and having celebratory high fives in emoji form in their shitty fucking group chats. I am not even defending the Obamas as far as the elitism goes in being in that political world, but even if Michelle Obama was trans, so the fuck what, she is still attractive. I don’t care one way or the other, listen I am not saying she is but why is that the own on someone, like even though I don’t like Hilary Clinton and her track record, and I thought you should call her out for her resume of shit she has done, the funded sports entertainment personalities and social climbers hype up other horrible regressive shit, like even if we agreed she sucks, why would I want to be on the side of someone who is doing it because it is rooted in their misogyny they have for most women, just like if I don’t like the neoliberal shit the Obamas are involved with, the fact that people who claim to be “left” will share a laugh with some shitty right wing trolls even if their shit is rooted in racism, misogyny and transphobia. People will shit on you for voting for a democrat because there is no lesser of 2 evils to them, but then they will align with funded ideology under the guise of “Well I hate the Obamas so I am gonna agree with their anti trans rhetoric”. We are living in an era where people who have a different past then the one they presented is gonna be “exposed” because there will be documentaries, books, and television shows etc about it since everything on this fucking planet has to be exploited. I have predicted, we will get a whole series of different people who we will find out that they didn’t die and they are still alive, and we are gonna wonder how it was done and orchestrated. We have already exhausted all the fucking horrible scandals that would’ve been a bigger deal like 10-15 years ago. The reason why I wanted to mention this first is because since CNN now has a legit right wing owner, which is why the alt right targeted CNN specifically as the “fake news” because they didn’t want to actually get truth, they wanted one of their own there so it now makes it seem like it is being fair to the right wing when it has always been centrist to the right for majority of the time it has been on air, so now that anything that is said on there and other MSM outlets, it is designed for the social climbers and funded thought leaders to then dunk on it so now for a bunch of people on the right wing who hate anything LGBTQ related, you are literally doing the gayest thing ever when you are Stanning for different first ladies to begin with, you might as well be looking at US Weekly’s “Who wore it best” for different celebrity get ups to even give a shit of who Don Lemon thinks is more beautiful, like it is cool if you are into it but it is kind of gay and that is not a negative thing but the fact that so many anti LGBTQ people are obsessed with this kind of shit always makes me laugh, but you are sitting there discussing this shit while your legs are flailing in the air as you pick out your asshole hair, while trying to hide that you have trans related shit in your porn search history, you hate black people but you probably secretly hire a black male sex worker to fuck your wife while you jerk off in the corner, and then you project all that shit onto other fucking people, especially talking heads and celebs, who literally hate themselves for who they are but they then take their self hatred and direct it at a general community and influence an audience who are going to grow into the shittiest bigots on the planet and repeat your shitty humor because they are too unorginal to have their own personality. But that shit Don Lemon did was by design because he knows the right wing hates him, or is it symbolism that on the surface Don Lemon is the last kayfabed democrat there, and if he says anything nice about the wife of an ex democratic president, that the right wing leader will get the funded accounts to dunk on Don Lemon and come up with the most unclever trans joke about Michelle Obama. This is the comedy that the left is supposedly scared of because the right wing are getting too fucking good at it. This is the shit that clearly is not agenda driven and very organic unlike all that “LIBTARD WOKENESS IN OUR BEER” while all of you are basically doing product placement so you get free beer most likely. I know I am not mentally right in the head, and I have spent my life being such a caricature, but it is so alarming how much of our lives are a complete parody at this point. People perpetuating that the internet is some underground chat room that no one is looking to so their opinion seems more organic and real are the biggest sociopaths on the planet, they spend their time online organizing how to make more chaos in the discourse, then other mentally ill social climbers say fucked up shit and the ones who are perpetuating it get to have a cult to pretend they are more normal than everyone else, when they spend time destroying any art that doesn’t have their cosign or their efforts, you have to accept most online “critics” will most likely praise something if they have some involvement with it or if it goes with their political agenda, while their only saving grace is dunking on the villain of the day in an America’s dumbest criminal aesthetic, and act like they are not aligning with problematic people in the system. They know that no one interacts with my twitter or social media because I am a red flag account for group chat people who play by a script, to avoid, and they will secretly monitor what I say or write and then get angry about it that they flood your entire timeline by boosting up the worst narratives and double down on it, they will then cooperate with the hired online mercenaries, who have probably taken from my private journal to inform people if I write about them, and they will try to put me through mental torment over an opinion.

I do feel bad for specific talent who are cogs in the system who have to go through shit their billionaire bosses make them do but god am I really getting sick a lot of you in the entertainment business who help perpetuate to the toxic online shit and play innocent because you will have a sociopathic cult that will constantly fucking defend your every fucking move. All of this shit for entertainment that no one is supposed to take seriously but if you don’t like the ideas conjured up for this modern work shoot shit, people who “never take anything seriously” will have a whole fucking shrine to this shit while calling out others for lack of morals and integrity when most of you are into products that are “outside of WWE” that are still connected to WWE under the table most likely. You will give people shit for attending a shitty WWE media conference while you’re all doing Perry Mason level of investigating for this CM Punk and Elite shit, maybe the 13 year old Hanzi would’ve been into this shit but this has been completely watered down and I have never cared less about one of these, the reason why I do because they sabotaged their product for more rebooted worked shoot shit that was already exhausting itself in the 2000’s and 2010’s shit,  the pro Punk contingent who would get on anyone for having critiques of the company prior to Brawl out, suddenly have all these fucking complaints while they organized harassment campaigns against talent that spoke out but now that is their favorite messiah who got kayfabed victimized, suddenly their job was to tear down the product, undercut talent by implying their narrative of “It wasn’t supposed to happen because Bucks and FTR were supposed to face but they didn’t” and then shake down people to be pro Punk and don’t get me started on all the Elite cult members. Now we are making Alvarez and Meltzer workers in this scenario too because you know eventually CM Punk is gonna slap the fuck out of him at a press conference when it becomes official that CM Punk was getting fucked over and phased out of the company and all of this booking and sabotaging of talent just so we can cater to CM Punk’s Super Cena status. And when he comes back, they probably won’t even wrestle each other because the other part of the work is that the Elite might leave, because they need to have a “shoot” angle then as months pass by, everyone kind of gets on the same page of it being a work, and then when the match doesn’t happen, then it is “OH I THOUGHT IT WAS A WORK HUH??” like works can’t make money in other ways. But I am sick of the “smart fans” who think they are smarter than everyone else dumb down narratives and they can get away with it because the owner of these companies and some of the talent give them social permission to be allowed to get boosted up while they pretend they are against the system, but the more the days pass, their mask comes off and they are the phoniest people on the planet, they have never been on the right side of history when it comes to pro wrestling and all the shit they let slide while someone who goes off on a rant because their mental illness was triggered by racist behavior, will get shafted and isolated but an owner who has had a history of some of the most horrendous shit will get a million passes and people still defending him to this day. The only reason why people are invested so much into this is because a lot of people have helped organize this work. If it makes money it makes money, but this has really exposed how mentally depraved a lot of people are, I am not even talking about the over the top accounts that go too far, basically they are designed to get dunked on, those people are still allowed to function online to play that role, but the people who have sophisticated their propaganda and their sociopathic tendencies, and maybe I take it seriously because people like this in society will not get better and will get worse with the more power they accumulate. If they are willing to lie this much for entertainment, I am afraid to see what they would do to manipulate people into their fundamentalist beliefs that they will disguise as something else completely. 

I feel the more I write about this shit to get off my chest, I feel less and less interested in entertainment as a whole, and wrestling was the last entertainment I constantly watch but now I rarely care for anything in the product and even the online discourse feels like retreads of previous generation discourse because everyone has this attitude era fetish and all the same problematic shit from that era is gonna repeat itself and people’s mental health will get worse and there will be more tragedies etc, and people who are aligned known this so they will pretend to feign concern but then advocate for the most dangerous shit to happen because aesthetically it isn’t the WWE and that would’ve meant something 10 years ago but all these promotions are probably aligned with the head honcho company anyways, and then they present this new company like the anti WWE company but then gimmick a way for stuff WWE would do to to be implemented in this new company because it is getting out of control, like that isn’t being done by design, you really think these talents are really not supposed to be on social media saying problematic shit? Pretending these people live by regular rules is tiresome because you can’t apply the same fucking rules you do to a mom and pop shop. The discourse has just made people a lot more dumb. You can boast about how many books you read to counter me to show how smart you are, but how come people who boast about all the books they have read never have any interesting personalities, they act sitcom smart. I am not shitting on people who read books, there are plenty of them that do that aren’t assholes about it. It is like the same people who pretend they are outside but they literally go outside and are still online most of the time to get off their cookie cutter heel persona because that is all they are gonna have when they sell out and will feel more miserable that people can be a little bit more free with their opinions. When someone like me goes outside, then they hate that too because that was one of their key talking points. I know the word gas light has lost all of its meaning, especially since the wrestling world got a hold of it and prepare for that shit to be in everyone’s promos, but literally these accounts try to gaslight people because that is their only form of freedom they have, they have to be muses for other industry people to use and when they are done with them, then they will get cast aside for someone new. I say this as someone that was used as a muse for Artie Lange and I was supposed to be super happy that a celeb I grew up watching was talking to me on the phone at late hours of the night, and then he would change up one and do the same shit he claimed he didn’t about Howard doing that to me. Since then I will be happy to meet a celeb here and there but I am never going to make the mistake being a fucking “Stan” for one again even if it means I am not gonna have much social relevancy, in fact I hope I am not here longer for the eventual fascist takeover they keep normalizing anyways, and realizing a lot of your entertainment is tied to fundamentalism to the right side, it has helped me kind of not wanting to give a shit, I think if I write and bitch more, I can finally blog through it and eventually stop watching, but chances are I will wake up and I will consume more and act like George Costanza, like I didn’t just talk a gang of shit. I just wish I stepped away from this fandom shit a long time ago, especially when you know there is political motivation in the art forms you consume, some can be for good but a lot for the bad. 

Even the leaker shit in the Pentagon, even that has to be gimmicked, because every person that has been a “whistle blower” or “leaker” has always been a narrative to get information established while they make characters of the people who play those roles, and they really have to get locked up even if it means there is more than meets the eye, so the left differentiating why this leaker is bad and why that one is good won’t work either because these things, to me at least, are done by design and especially in this era where it is basically an episode of the Boys playing out where new variants are becoming public figures for the right wing causes while we keep pretending it is just some normal situation, like the creative is so fucking shitty for this “WELL HE WANTED TO LEAK IT TO IMPRESS HIS ONLINE BUDDIES” because it’s easier to accept than, it was supposed to leak so all the right wing grifters can use this to further cement their point that the establishment hates this guy and the leftists are agreeing with the establishment when “back in their day” you applauded people leaking the corruption going on. I don’t even know what was specifically in that leak, but all I feel is that it was designed to happen so now we will have debates talking ourselves into a circle of which kind of leaks are acceptable and which are not, and most of the establishment people will come off as pro US imperialists and the ones defending this guy are doing it and pretending to be anti war but more aligned with pro Russian imperialism that is gonna have  meet up at a mutual spot with the neocons in the US but you wouldn’t think that because we have to continuously sports entertain our ways into fascism. Even the manipulation of you having to sell your audience on this fake in fighting between Trump and DeSantis is dumb, because you will say you are not for either of them but you are giving your audience the impression any of them is better than one another like they aren’t going the same route. This is why the political analysis has become shittier sports entertainment with a bunch of shitty sports entertainers who think they have to present everything in a comedic lens while the world is going to implode and nothing is going to stop it. But sure, let’s talk about DeSantis’s pudding fingers or some shitty product placement with the culture war framing. This is just my opinion, just like everything written. It is gonna be another incident where it will have a bunch of elitists who will rally against video games, Gen Z, and the people who will defend this guy are gonna prop up his religious beliefs, his racism, then you got a mixture of conspiracies that he was spewing since they want to align any conspiratorial person with right wing aesthetics, then the worst post left personalities like Greenwald will pretend this guy is a hero and that means if this “leftist” is being agreed with from Tucker Carlson, that suddenly you have clowns like Jimmy Dore go on a media blitz about how Tucker is the only one who is out lefting the the Squad or whatever repeated bullshit he will spew. But the basic point is, the world is heading for very dark times, even more so than the last couple of years and we still have to present this shit in a theatrical way and dumb down our villains and gimmick up how this shit is being presented, like leaking something on discord or twitter is just as MSM as the MSM and I feel even people on the left fall for that shit, because if you were to get a little conspiratorial, maybe you could outdo the right, but it feels like some people limit it because they have plans on crossing over to the right at some point. But then again, don’t believe what I say. My aesthetic and situation in life would check all the boxes of what people consider the most discredited and people who control narratives have put me in that situation, you still hate me at your core even more so because I didn’t cross over to the right wing side. You tried so many gimmicked ways to get me there since I was the cookie cutter conspiratorial person in the 2010’s plus I have severe mental illness, you have gotten your online mercenaries to photoshop me beating up people to have my name searched and the result of “Hanzi beat up a gay couple” to dominate, in fact it is all negative shit about me when you search me and that was purposefully done and it makes you even more upset that you didn’t manifest that into a reality. You know how many times they tried to hammer home that people in my life have helped keep me in this place that I am in, and then perpetuate that I will beat up my parents, there are layers of how they can play with your mind. One of the biggest examples is when I stopped doing my journal shit and watched them double down on harassment and instilling paranoia so they could push me to suicide and having to put up with a bunch of fake “Howard Sterns” who think they could produce chaos and harassment for their own social value. And you better believe those same people who advertised my name to a bunch of patriot groups are waiting for the perfect time to go full throttle, it is just right now I technically don’t have an audience, and I am probably at my most irrelevant but dangerous people are the ones who still pay attention to me, anytime I express myself in any way it becomes a threat to their egos, it doesn’t take money off their table, because I am at my most irrelevant but they still don’t like someone writing about the possibilities of how this could be operating so they will surely have the paid trolls to smear me much more or maybe at the next limited gathering I am brought to, I will have to put up with more elitist horse shit while everyone practices their sports entertainment character like the last fucking 10 years I have been on this fucking planet. Who knows how they will extract their revenge, but people are never fucking happy whenever I publish one of these fucking blogs, mostly because it is all over the fucking place but the worst kinds of people have been given permission to be the biggest assholes, and then they get shocked that their influence and the mental illness involved with the entertainment shit, doesn’t bring in a bunch of assholes, if there are this many assholes involved in becoming these “online characters” maybe analyze the industry leaders and how they have helped this shit while a bunch of you then pretend “Oh my god why are people reading into my subtle tweets in the midst of a heavy news day where everyone is is mouthing off in all kinds of ways” you people are the one who are supposed to be respectable members of society, you go to all these gatherings and you have all the sex in the world yet most of you act like a fucking whack packer, I think I could get more sense of the world if I talked to BeetleJuice from Howard Stern over a lot of the people in the entertainment or political world. Anyways I don’t know what the point of this was. 

[stressfulsloth]

sun/uranus/10H!

Sun- name five things you like about yourself. Oughhhh that's a hard one. I like my hair- it's very curly and it's tolerated being bleached to shit incredibly well. I like my taste in music- I am the kind of person who is banned from picking music on long car journeys but I think my taste is exemplary. I like that I'm creative- I run a weekly dnd game and I think I'm quite good as a dm. I make really really good gyoza. And I like that I'm getting better at consistent writing.

Uranus- what things do you think should change in society? There are so many things. So many. If I had full and total control I'd be upheaving the entire social and economic structure of the world, eviscerating billionaires, forcing universal basic income, all the big things I imagine most of us would do. Removing the word lazy from people's vocabularies entirely. Closer to home, the way the UK press report on trans people desperately needs to change, because frankly its immoral and dangerous. So many things!

10H- how do you want people to remember you? Hmmmmmmm. I'd like people to think I'm kind. Or at least that I try to be? And I'd like people to remember my writing, maybe. I write outside of fic, I publish poetry and have a fiction book out there in the world, and I'd like people to remember me by that but only if they like it :')

Thanks for asking 😊

[futureisorg]

Author: Nate West

The Future Of Democracy Is Now

Join The Future is Now Coalition (FiNC) in building the next chapter of American democracy with our powerful, fact-based tools to reform the political landscape.

If you’re like most Americans, you’re fed up with the current political landscape. You don’t identify with either of the two major parties and you probably feel as though your voice isn’t heard. You’re not alone.

The direction of politics in America today is dictated by who’s the loudest and has the most money to spend on advertising. It’s a shame that our country’s democracy was sold to corporations and billionaires. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone developed an objective, fact-based platform to level the playing field and bring true democracy back into the hands of the people?

Luckily for you, that’s what the Future Is Now Coalition (FiNC) aims to do. 

Current Issues in Political Landscape

The root of many of our problems in America today stems from a few core issues with how our system is run. The notions of left vs. right, blue vs. red, and conservative vs. liberal all remove the focus from the issues and empower campaigns to raise funds by vilifying their opponent. This focus on money and the next election is nothing but a distraction from doing the work they were elected to do. 

Polarization

Led by Media, Politicians creating divide

Our current political landscape comprises Democrats and Republicans. Our ballots and government bodies are split between the two parties, with little to no room for outsiders. Polling shows that even with a decline in the last year, most Americans still feel the need for a major third party. 

In recent years, an incredible number of votes in the US legislature have fallen upon party lines. Members of Congress cannot vote in a way that reflects the will of their constituents. We know Americans aren’t divided on every issue, so why do our representatives’ voting records say otherwise? 

These groups thrive on disagreements and polarization. Furthermore, the media receives the most viewership when stories are dramatic and controversial. Campaigns raise more money when their base is fired up and the easiest way to do this is by blaming the other side. 

Solutions come from working together

It’s difficult for us, as humans, to change our minds. We tend to stick with what we know or at least what we think we know. Presented with a solid case backed by facts, we can see the other side and make a conscious decision. 

As a society, we’re only going to solve our problems by working together. We can lower the temperature of these interactions by having an undisputed reference for what we can agree on.

A society based on indisputable information will emerge once we’re able to objectively look at the issues. In order to have informed views in our Collective Reality, we must have access to Universal Facts. We need more than a bridge between the left and right, we need to highlight all the stances in between and focus on goals that work for everyone, rather than our labels. 

Influence of Money

Candidates structure their campaigns to raise the most money and have the loudest voice. The public sees the richest or perhaps the best salesperson. This isn’t always the candidate with the best ideas or intentions. More money enables more advertising and exposure by politicians with large corporate donations, super PACs, and dark money while silencing the underdog. 

Citizens United

In 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations are considered ‘people’ and that their free speech is protected. This also lifted many campaign donation limits and regulations, paving the way for big money to influence our elections quietly. In today’s political ecosystem, corporations write the script for those holding the microphone. 

This ruling enables corporations to donate incredible sums of money to politicians that will work to represent their business interests, not those of individual citizens.  The power and resources available to massive organizations leave working taxpayers in the shadows.  

Efforts focused on campaigns, not the issues

Modern election cycles are seemingly never-ending. Immediately after a new President is elected, we’re talking about midterms, and politicians are thinking about fundraising once again. 

Every two years the United States gets a freshly elected House of Representatives, with 435 elected officials from districts across the country. The Senate has 6-year terms, with roughly ⅓ of the body elected every two years. There are 100 Senators, with two from each state. The power within these bodies typically comes with majority control. The party with more seats has the best chance of passing legislation, while the minority often faces slim odds.

The two major parties recognize the significance of retaining the majority and campaign excessively to do so. Two-year election cycles turn into constant campaigning and fundraising. Instead of worrying about representing the citizens who hired them, politicians are concerned with the next election and the big bucks that come along with it. 

It’s time to take the decision back from the corporations and their deep pockets and return it to the hands and minds of the American people. FiNC is working to make this a reality. Our goal is that DD will free up politicians from worrying about their campaigns and let them spend their short terms in office working with one another for the people's benefit.

Who is FiNC? 

The Future Is Now Coalition empowers and represents all Americans by creating powerful, fact-based, democratic tools, services, and organizations.

These fact-based, democratic tools, organizations, and services are custom-designed to provide an ethical, accountable, and transparent view of the political landscape. We aim to earn the American people's trust and reform the democratic process to serve the American people better.

We’ve combined the multiple disciplines of politics, psychology, sociology, and economics, and are developing factually-based strategies that focus the will of the American people toward combating the inherent greed and corruption in the economy and government. By guiding the American people to fight the current predatory economic and government systems, we aim to usher in a new stage of ethical capitalism and participatory democracy. The government and economy will begin to work for the average American and not just a select few.

A bit about us

FiNC is a remote organization with over 60 team members all across the country. Our team is passionate about our mission and firmly believes that change can happen. We’re working hard to get FiNC off the ground and start making a difference. Many of our team members are still working other jobs while contributing their time to our mission. 

What do we aim to accomplish?

FiNC aims to bring objective information back into political discourse and reform the political process to serve the people better. All of our employees are working hard to build tools and systems that will empower voters, turn down the temperature in political debates, and allow the truth to speak for itself in a way that benefits every American. 

Accountability and Transparency

Our tools and organizations will bring accountability and transparency to our elected officials. There will be no more hiding behind well-funded campaigns, ads, and social media promotions. FiNC is creating the answer to twisted narratives in American politics.

How will we do it?

Data can sometimes be interpreted out of context and wrongfully weaponized. Our tools will be objective and thorough. The information available will be complete and freely accessible to the American people. 

FiNC Resource Hub

We are building a Library of Universal Facts that most Americans can agree upon. These are facts that are indisputable such as how the middle class is shrinking, money’s increased influence in politics, and other facts directly impacting citizens’ lives. Our Resource Hub will house this information and make it available to view. Voters can take this objective information and make thorough, informed decisions when they make ballot choices. 

Digital Democracy

Another tool FiNC is working diligently to build is our Digital Democracy Platform. We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks and months, but DD will be an objective platform for politicians and organizations to use to interact with citizens. 

Emotions make the worst decisions. The best decisions come from setting aside our egos, looking at the Universal Facts, and making objective choices for our future. As a society, we have more knowledge than ever before, yet it seems we’re also more opposed to what those facts tell us. To overcome our feelings in favor of our thoughts, we need the right tools and systems to help us. 

How You Can Help

We will only accomplish our goals with the hard work of our team and the support from like-minded Americans, such as yourself, who are ready for change. Nothing worth having comes easy, and our mission is no different. We are dedicated to reforming the political landscape and giving power back to the people.

Donate - First CTA to GoFundMe

FiNC is funded by mass donations from Americans ready for change. Your contribution will help fund our mission and bring your voice back into the political conversation. Any donation, big or small, is greatly appreciated. We vow to make the best use of your contributions to our mission. 

Consider consolidating your other charitable donations to a single cause that will benefit all others. By donating to FiNC, you’re helping to level the playing field against big money interests and corruption in politics.

Become an Advocate

In addition to monetary contributions, we would love it if you could spread the word about our organization and mission to friends and family members. Together, we can overcome the hurdles in front of us and give the power back to the people. 

Be sure to follow us and share our donation page on social media and help us achieve our goal of reforming the political process! 

Join Our Team

Want to be an active part of changing the world? FiNC is looking for passionate professionals to join our team who are dedicated to turning the tables on politics. If you’re interested in joining our mission and working for a people-first team, head to our Careers page and fill out our application!

By donating and sharing, you can help create the next chapter of American democracy! Your contribution will help us build an ecosystem for objective research and fact-based political work. 

[theculturedmarxist]

Twitter has done an about-face and sold the company to the richest person in the world for $44 billion.

Rightists are having a merry old time making fun of the melodramatic reactions from high-profile liberals who fear Elon Musk's purchase will lead to more free speech on the platform for people who don't align with them politically, and many of the blue-checkmarked commentariat who live on Twitter and can't go five minutes without checking their notifications are making a big show of pretending they're about to leave.

Many critics on the left are responding to the news by ringing alarm bells about a powerful oligarch controlling an influential social media platform, as though Twitter was anything besides oligarch-controlled before today and as though billionaires buying up media is some shocking new development. Some anti-imperialists have expressed tentative hope that this new development may lead to some rollback of the jarring escalations in censorship we've been seeing on the platform in defense of US empire narratives, due to the plutocrat's comments on the importance of free speech.

From what I can see, though, the overwhelming majority of excitement on Twitter about Musk's purchase is coming not from those who challenge power in any meaningful way but from those who want Donald Trump's account restored and want to be able to say mean things to trans people. And I suspect that says a lot about what we're looking at here.

This important distinction was summed up by journalist Michael Tracey, who tweeted, "The biggest test for Elon Musk will not be whether he rolls back the most obvious 'woke' content policies -- that should be a given -- but whether he continues to let Twitter be used as a vehicle for the US national security state to 'counter' official enemies like Russia and China."

Speaking for myself I won't be surprised if we do see some of the former, but I will be absolutely astonished if we see the latter.

You don't get to be a billionaire, much less a billionaire with massively influential media ownership, unless you collaborate with existing power structures. Musk has certainly been collaborating with the oligarchic empire very nicely up until this point, and it's a safe bet that his purchase would not be happening if the empire felt its narrative control machine was in any way threatened by it.

Believing Elon Musk is going to save Twitter is as naive as believing Joe Biden was going to save America. Arguing over which oligarchs should control the media is as silly and undignified as arguing over which oligarch-owned politicians should run the government. 

Billionaires coming to the rescue only happens in movies and comic books. You're as likely to be saved by Elon Musk as you are by Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark.

How many times are people going to fall for this "a billionaire is about to stick it to the man and save us all" schtick? It's very sad that we're at a point where speech is being throttled so severely that people are hoping an eccentric billionaire will swoop in and rescue them from oppression. Real life is like a dumber, more boring version of Gotham City, except Batman is working with the bad guys.

I'll start paying attention to Musk's talk about free speech if and when Twitter stops censoring Russian media and unbans people like Scott Ritter who were removed from the platform for questioning official empire narratives about what's happening in Ukraine. Until then I'm going to assume he's at most only interested in protecting speech that doesn't threaten the powerful like Republican partisan bullshit and hate speech against marginalized groups.

The billionaires are not coming to save us. The idea that they might is a carefully constructed propaganda narrative that we've been sold for generations. The leaders of the capitalist class are not going to overturn the systems of oppression and exploitation which form the very foundation of capitalism. Superhero stories are designed to prevent us from realizing that only we the people have the power to rescue ourselves.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Charter schools are money laundries

Critiques of charter schools usually focus on poor quality education (disproportionately affecting racialized and poor people) and dangerous ideology (the movement is funded by billionaire dilettantes and religious maniacs), and with good reason!

Charters hand public funds to private institutions with minimal oversight. Public money should not go to schools that endorse slavery and indigenous genocide, nor schools that deny evolution and claim humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180604002542/http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/school-zone/os-voucher-school-curriculum-20180503-story.html

Charter students know they’re getting substandard educations — that’s why the 2019 valedictorians for Detroit’s Universal Academy used their speech to denounce the school, its curriculum and administrators.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/06/10/salutatorians-criticize-charter-school-graduation/1381474001/b

The more we learn about charters, the worse the situation gets. Take New Orleans, where, post-Katrina, the Republican statehouse and wealthy dilettante “philanthropists” eliminated all public education in favor of charter schools.

https://www.nola.com/news/education/article_0c5918cc-058d-11ea-aa21-d78ab966b579.html

A decade later, the state education regulator gave half these schools “D” or “F” grades.

No wonder that charter teachers joined LA public school teachers on their Red For Ed pickets in 2019:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-edu-lausd-strike-accelerated-school-20190114-story.html

Charter schools pitch themselves as grassroots phenomena, made possible thanks to the passion of parents seeking quality educations for their kids. The reality is that the movement is funded and promoted through a corrupt network of ultra-wealthy ideologues.

The Kochs and the Waltons (Walmart) have secretly funneled vast fortunes into disinformation campaigns aimed at demonizing teachers’ unions:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/12/teacher-strikes-rightwing-secret-strategy-revealed

They were joined by the likes of Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, a fundamentalist who makes no secret of her view that charters can remove the barrier between church and state and institute publicly funded Christian indoctrination in schools:

https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/02/politics/eli-broad-letter-betsy-devos/index.html

Destroying public education is the sport of kings. Bill Gates blew $775m on a failed charter experiment whose subjects were children who got no say in the matter:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-27/here-s-how-not-to-improve-public-schools

Gates has solid teammates in his anti-public-education crusade. I mean, who can say no to Mark Zuckerberg?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley-kansas-schools.html

Misery loves company, which is why the Sacklers — mass-murdering architects of the opioid epidemic — sunk so much blood money into the charter project (incredibly, this “philanthropy” is supposed to improve their reputation):

https://web.archive.org/web/20171113043810/https://www.alternet.org/education/notorious-family-contributing-opioid-crisis-and-funding-charter-schools/

But a critique of charters that starts with poor outcomes and ends with ideological billionaires misses the third leg of this stool: money-laundering and financial fraud.

Admittedly some of that has been in plain sight for years. Remember when an LA school board exec plead guilty to felony finance fraud and conspiracy for his role in the charter-backed takeover of the board?

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-edu-ref-rodriguez-resigns-20180722-story.html#

But “Chartered For Profit,” a report from Network for Public Education is by far the most comprehensive look at the means by which billions are transferred from public school districts to profiteers, at the expense of kids in both the charter and public system.

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Chartered-for-Profit.pdf

In an interview with Jacobin’s Meagan Day, NPE’s executive director Carol Burris discusses the blockbuster report, which is so damning that it prompted a bill in Congress that bans funding to charters that are managed by for-profit contractors.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/charter-schools-for-profit-nonprofit-taxpayer-public-money-oversight-education-salaries-real-estate-burris-interview

Burris explains that even though nearly all charters are nonprofits (except in AZ), there’s a widespread practice of contracting with for-profit corporations to “manage” these schools; the for-profits are often owned by the schools founders or their relatives.

Others are nationwide chains that offer comprehensive management services — “comprehensive” in the sense of steering schools to procure materials, services and supplies from affiliates that overcharge and kick-back to the management companies.

From substandard, overpriced cafeteria fare; to janky, nonfunctional ed-tech; to unqualified, underpaid teachers, these for-profit entities figure out how to minimize costs, maximize profits, and disguise poor student outcomes so they can keep doing it.

They deploy opaque corporate structures to give the appearance of a thriving ecosystem of suppliers — meanwhile, the largest chain, Academica, consists of 56 companies at one address, more than 70 at another, and a network of real-estate, holding and finance companies.

Real estate plays a major role in charter profiteering. Profiteers scoop up tax-advantaged funding and subsidized loans to buy buildings, leased at inflated rates to charters, with the tax-payer paying their mortgage.

When the mortgage is paid, more tax dollars are used to buy the school at inflated prices.

But it’s even more profitable to run a “virtual school” where you can deliver canned lectures and fake attendance records and pocket vast sums in public money.

For-profits are also loan-sharks. They offer credit to the nonprofit charters so they can afford the inflated prices for educational “services,” charging high interest rates that ensure they get an additional rake off of every public dollar the charter receives.

NPE’s “Another Day Another Charter Scandal” page is a good look at the tip of the corruption iceberg — the crimes that get caught, from fake invoices to outright embezzlement. Charter execs use the school’s credit card to pay for fancy dinners even trips to Disney World.

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/another-day-another-charter-scandal/

Charters shouldn’t exist, period. But if they must exist, then the loophole that allows for-profits to run the notionally nonprofit charter sector must be closed.

Meanwhile, if you want a look at education “reform” that works, check out Andrea Gabor’s 2018 “After the Education Wars,” and learn how eliminating hierarchy, funding the arts, offering good wages and good training to teachers transform schools.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/millionaire-driven-education-reform-has-failed-heres-what-works

The formula is rather simple, really: “a respect for democratic processes and participatory improvement, a high regard for teachers, clear strategies with buy-in from all stake-holders, and accountability frameworks that include room to innovate.”

“Robust leadership and strong teacher voice. Their success underscores the importance of equitable funding and suggests that problems like income inequality are far more detrimental to education that the usual suspects, like bad teachers.”

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

So not to be dramatic, but if you could get a degree in discourse-ology, the topic of my master’s thesis would definitely be “Which political candidates did the characters of the CW’s Gossip Girl (2007-2012) support?” I’m doing this in order from most to least obvious, and considering both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

[ little ivy interjection here: i haven’t changed ANYTHING, except adding a screencap of the title + the submission, because that made me laugh & more people deserve to see it, and putting this under a read more because that’s how i generally try & organise stuff on this blog. so this submission is exactly as it was when i received it! also while we’re at it, anon, this MADE my day.]

Blair Waldorf: “Hillary Clinton is one of my role models. I do not break treaties, you ass!” (04x13) There’s no question that Blair would go hard for Hillary in 2016, she praised her on multiple occasions throughout the series. Blair’s a classic American neoliberal, third wave Democrat-type: she’s decently progressive when it comes to social policies, and would be decidedly supportive of causes like gay marriage, racial equity, and women’s reproductive rights, but she’s still very much in favor of maintaining the status quo when it comes to capitalism and the hegemonic structure of power that, lets face it, heavily favors her own class interests. To use the American healthcare system as an example: Blair would have been all for the Affordable Care Act, and is largely supportive of the idea of creating a public option - but single payer, nationalized health care? It just wouldn't work in a country like the United States for “X” reason (although the real reason, deep down, is that she doesn’t want to see her tax rate go up in any meaningful way). So she’s thoroughly for Clinton in both the 2016 primaries and the general election, she maybe even comes out with a line of high-end “I’m With Her” merchandise if she’s still CEO of Waldorf Designs, and is personally heartbroken when Clinton loses.

Flash forward to the 2020 primaries. Blairhates Donald Trump, like emotionally, viscerally hates him - his misogyny, his incompetence, and his blatant tackiness are a direct repudiation of her beliefs, and the fact that he’s representing Manhattan society and the Upper East Side to the world in such a godawful way is frankly embarrassing. So in a certain sense, her strategy, like frankly many Americans at the time going into the 2020 Democratic primaries is, “Which one of these candidates has the greatest chance at beating Donald Trump?” I see Blair being rather conflicted at first, but ultimately going for either Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris. She has a certain admiration for Elizabeth Warren given her professional background, but her policies are a bit too progressive for someone like Blair. Buttigeg is fine, but not especially thrilling. Biden, quite frankly, doesn’t seem like he has any real chance at winning, although I think he’d be Blair’s third choice after Harris and Klobuchar. I can see her leaning more towards Harris ultimately - although, after the “Amy Klobuchar throws staplers at her interns!!” rumors start spreading, Blair cannot help but, at a personal level, kind of respect her for that. When Biden unexpectedly takes South Carolina and then the Democratic nomination, Blair is a bit disappointed, but not overly so, and quickly marshals her financial resources into supporting and fundraising for him for the remainder of the election. At least it’s not Sanders - or Bloomberg. As a New Yorker, of course Blair’s opinion is “Fuck Michael Bloomberg”.

Chuck Bass: Now here’s where it gets interesting. Chuck, as you said, isn’t stupid - there’s no way he falls for the “build the wall” crap or any of Trump’s rhetoric, he knows it’s a bullshit farce and sees right through it. But you know what he definitely is? Deeply greedy and deeply selfish. I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but Chuck Bass is, in many ways, the fictional equivalent of the Donald Trumps and Michael Bloombergs and Brett Kavanaughs of the world - new money billionaire who inherited his wealth from his father working in the real estate industry, who despite his lack of business acumen and deeply problematic history with women, has managed to coast through life failing upwards with absolutely no social or legal accountability? I mean, back in 2010, Forbes Magazine actually did a real interview with the fictional Chuck Bass in which they outright compare him to Donald Trump. I couldn’t tell you if the Gossip Girl writers meant to write Chuck as their Trump analogue - I mean, they did invite Jared and Ivanka onto the show, after all - but the parallels are just too strong to ignore. All of which is to say, not only did Chuck Bass vote for Donald Trump, he held exclusive political fundraisers for him and was probably a substantial donor to his campaign. Now, did Chuck distance himself publicly over time as the political climate became increasingly caustic and public sentiment towards Trump plummeted even further? Perhaps, perhaps not. It really depends on if the board of Bass Industries felt like being connected to Trump was a liability or an asset - but privately, I imagine Chuck once again voted for him in 2020, because the one policy Donald Trump did effectively execute during his tenure in office was massive tax cuts for billionaires, and for someone like Chuck Bass, that’s the only political policy that really matters. He wouldn’t wear a red hat and wouldn’t be caught dead within sniffing distance of a MAGA rally and the hoi polloi, but dude is basically the image of what the kind of rich conservatives backing the Trump administration for personal gain look like. On the off chance that the distastefulness of it all got to be a little much for even Chuck post-2016, perhaps he might switch his vote to Bloomberg. But I highly doubt Chuck would be politically invested in anything other than his own wallet to such an extent that he wouldn’t vote for Trump, no matter how much it would no doubt completely infuriate Blair.

Dan Humphrey: As the unofficial king of the hipsters, Dan has been a Sanders supporter since before it was cool. Seriously, Bernie Sanders appeals to Dan intrinsically on every level - his policies, his rhetoric, even his aesthetic - the rumpled old man with wild hair wearing mittens and railing against the upper class is the sort of thing that’s basically political catnip for someone like Dan Humphrey. Not only would Dan vote for Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries, he’d go out and be one of the celebrities campaigning for him. This would definitely lead to him butting heads with Blair, and she would no doubt call him out on supporting someone like Sanders when Dan himself is now a millionaire, who made his money from writing stories about the upper class. The fact that in 2017 he apparently gets married to Serena, a billionaire heiress, and may or may not have been engaged to her back in 2016 when the Democratic primaries were happening might cause him a bit of cognitive dissonance, but really, just because he’s climbed up the socio-economic ladder now doesn’t mean his values have really changed, have they? (Debatable.) In any case, in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections, Dan would definitely vote for Clinton and Biden respectively - although he’d be significantly more disgruntled about it than Blair would be switching from Harris to Biden. I don’t think Dan would be a “Bernie bro” in the way that term is used, but he’d definitely chafe against Clinton’s past policy decisions, and would probably make some snippy Tweets about her during the election. Nevertheless, once it became clear that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee and was a serious threat, I think Dan would change his tone and start encouraging his fans and followers to vote for Clinton. Likewise, in 2020, Dan would probably become one of the Sanders supporters doing outreach for Biden, having become more politically pragmatic following the experience of living under the Trump administration.

Vanessa Abrams: Much like Dan, Vanessa is a progressive, although unlike Dan, Vanessa’s activism is more focused around specific issues and less around specific politicians. I can see Dan and Vanessa being in roughly the same place in 2016, and given that the only real choices were between Sanders and Clinton in the primaries (RIP to Martin O'Malley), Vanessa would no doubt go for Sanders. Whereas Dan might campaign for Sanders directly however, Vanessa would instead focus her time and resources around advocacy for specific causes that are important to her, like climate change and racial justice, and would probably use her platform as a filmmaker and documentarian to advance those causes. I could very much see her getting involved with movements like Black Lives Matter and organizations like the Sunrise Movement, and taking part in protests, marches, and sit-ins. When the 2020 Democratic primaries come around, I could see her possibly switching from Sanders to Warren for a while (and Dan would definitely argue with her about it if she did), but I can also see her switching back to Sanders after Warren amended her support for single-payer, “Medicare for All”. She’d definitely vote for Clinton and Biden in the generals, but not enthusiastically.

Nate Archibald: For someone whose family business is politics and who, in 2017, is apparently a candidate in the New York City mayoral election, Nate seems to be rather removed from politics. As Vanessa puts it in 02x19, “The only thing Nate’s ever voted for is American Idol.” Still, as Editor-in-Chief of The Spectator, Nate kind of has to have an opinion, and in that respect, I see him gravitating towards the type of center-left “establishment” candidates that he and his family would no doubt have close ties with. In the Gossip Girl universe, the Vanderbilts are portrayed as being a lot like the Kennedys, and I think Nate’s policies as a mayoral candidate would really reflect that. In 2016, he would vote for Hillary Clinton in both the primaries and the generals without much of a second thought - after all, she’s the obvious choice, and there’s no way a candidate like Donald Trump could actually beat her, right? Actually, optimistically, maybe that’s why Nate decides to jump into the mayoral race in 2017 - previously, he had been for all intents and purposes politically apathetic, but seeing someone as genuinely vile as Donald Trump ascend to the office of the presidency stirs him out of that apathy, and he wants to make a positive difference in the only way an incredibly privileged white man from a politically prominent family knows how. So he runs as a Kennedy-esque center left candidate, further left of someone like Hillary Clinton, but more moderate than someone like Elizabeth Warren - sort of like Kamala Harris, now that I think about it. I have no idea if he would actually be able to beat Bill de Blasio given the major incumbency advantage de Blasio would have, but who knows. Come the 2020 Democratic primaries, I think Nate would probably just vote for whoever he believed was most likely to beat Donald Trump. I don’t see him having any sort of clear preference - maybe he would gravitate towards Biden on the basis of him being the most established candidate, or maybe he would gravitate towards Harris on the basis of her campaigning as the “moderate progressive” candidate. I could also seeing him liking Andrew Yang, come to think of it. In any case, he would most definitely support Joe Biden in the generals. How involved he’d be in supporting him really depends on whether or not Nate actually gets elected to mayor - if he was the mayor, he’d definitely endorse him and probably donate to him, but I think he’d be too wrapped up in his own political responsibilities to really do much more than that. If, however, he lost the election and was still the Editor-in-Chief of The Spectator, I can see Nate getting more involved alongside the rest of his family, officially endorsing him in The Spectator, hosting political fundraisers for him, and maybe even campaigning for him. The Vanderbilts in the Gossip Girl universe (I have no idea what the family’s actual political beliefs are in real life) definitely seem to me like they’d be Biden supporters, and I imagine they’d use their political clout to try and get Biden in, and more importantly, Trump out.

Serena van der Woodsen: Oh Serena. Look, she knows it’s important, okay? It’s just, she’s been really busy lately, and she doesn’t really like to think about politics, and hey, remember that fundraiser she did with her mom for last month’s philanthropic cause du jour? Serena’s a Democrat, vaguely, but if you tried to really pin her down on her political beliefs she’d probably just change the topic. So who does she vote for in 2016? The truth is, she doesn’t. Not in the primaries, not in the general, not at all. She meant to, okay, Blair’s definitely been pestering her to send in her mail-in-ballot for weeks, but she just got distracted and forgot. Serena really strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t enjoy thinking or talking about politics, save for perhaps a few specific issues, and she has a sense that everything will work itself out eventually and she doesn’t really need to participate. And then the 2016 election happens, and holy shit, she didn’t vote. Blair and Dan might have spent early 2016 bickering with each other over Clinton versus Sanders, but the one thing they can definitely agree on is “What the fuck, Serena?!?!” They both reminded her like, a million times, how could she possibly forget?! Serena feels really bad about it - she didn’t think it was such a big deal, she didn’t think Donald Trump could actually win! - and so she starts overcompensating whenever the topic of politics comes up, maybe even joins Vanessa at a few protests and marches, even though she’s still sort of clueless about the actual issues at hand. She does vote in the 2018 midterms, although only in the general election - straight blue ticket, all the way down. She takes a picture of herself at the voting booth wearing an “I Voted!” sticker and posts it on Instagram, tagging both Dan and Blair in the post (who already voted weeks ago using mail-in ballots, but it’s the thought that counts). Flash forward to 2020, and she really needs to make a decision about who to vote for in the primaries… but there’s just so many choices. Everything seems so scary and stressful and real in a way now that it didn’t back in 2016, and she can’t just ignore it and assume things will work out for the best like she did back then. So who does she vote for? Well, Serena always wins, so she votes for Biden. Conspiratorially, both Dan and Blair privately wonder if her voting for Biden isn’t on some cosmic level the reason for his unexpected victory, even if they know there’s no logical way that’s possible, right? But it would be such a Serena thing to do… In any case, Serena’s just happy her candidate won, and would probably host political fundraisers for him with her mom’s circle of philanthropic friends. Assuming she and Dan are still married at this point, she offers to help him do political outreach to Sanders supporters to get them to vote for Biden, which he sweetly dissuades her from given that most Sanders supporters would probably dislike her on principle.

So that’s how, in my opinion, the main cast would vote, ordered roughly in how confident I am about that analysis. You could make the argument that perhaps some characters would vote or act differently based on whether or not they’re dating or married at the time - like, would Chuck openly fundraise for Trump when Blair is a dyed-in-the-wool Clinton supporter if they’re married? (He totally would.) But I tried to consider them purely on the merits of their personalities and values, and not on the particularities of their situations at the time (with the exception of Nate, just because him being in office or not would obviously make a huge difference in regards to how politically involved he’s going to be).

I wish I put as much effort into my actual university essays as I did on Gossip Girl political analysis.

[letterboxd]

Best of Sundance 2021.

From pandemic-era stories, via portraits of grief, to the serendipitous 1969 trilogy, the Letterboxd crew recaps our favorite films from the first major festival of the year.

Sundance heralds a new season of storytelling, with insights into what’s concerning filmmakers at present, and what artistic innovations may be on the horizon. As with every film festival, there were spooky coincidences and intersecting themes, whether it was a proliferation of pandemic-era stories, or extraordinary portraits of women working through grief (Land, Hive, The World to Come), or the incredible serendipity of the festival’s ‘1969 trilogy’, covering pivotal moments in Black American history: Summer of Soul (...Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Judas and the Black Messiah and the joyful Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street.

The hybrid model of this year’s Sundance meant more film lovers across the United States—a record number of you, in fact—‘attended’ the prestigious indie showcase. Our Festiville team (Gemma Gracewood, Aaron Yap, Ella Kemp, Selome Hailu, Jack Moulton and Dominic Corry) scanned your Letterboxd reviews and compared them with our notes to arrive at these seventeen feature-length documentary and narrative picks from Sundance 2021. There are plenty more we enjoyed, but these are the films we can’t stop thinking about.

Documentary features

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Directed by Ahmir-Khalib Thompson (AKA Questlove)

One hot summer five decades ago, there was a free concert series at a park in Harlem. It was huge, and it was lovely, and then it was forgotten. The Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 brought together some of the world’s most beloved Black artists to connect with Black audiences. The star power and the size of the crowds alone should have been enough to immortalize the event à la Woodstock—which happened the same summer, the film emphasizes. But no one cared to buy up the footage until Ahmir-Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, came along.

It would have been easy to oversimplify such a rich archive by stringing together the performances, seeking out some talking heads, and calling it a day. But Questlove was both careful and ebullient in his approach. “Summer of Soul is a monumental concert documentary and a fantastic piece of reclaimed archived footage. There is perhaps no one better suited to curate this essential footage than Questlove, whose expertise and passion for the music shines through,” writes Matthew on Letterboxd. The film is inventive with its use of present interviews, bringing in both artists and attendees not just to speak on their experiences, but to react to and relive the footage. The director reaches past the festival itself, providing thorough social context that takes in the moon landing, the assassinations of Black political figures, and more. By overlapping different styles of documentary filmmaking, Questlove’s directorial debut embraces the breadth and simultaneity of Black resilience and joy. A deserving winner of both the Grand Jury and Audience awards (and many of our unofficial Letterboxd awards). —SH

Flee Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Flee is the type of discovery Sundance is designed for. Danish documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen tells the poignant story of his close friend and former classmate (using the pseudonym ‘Amin Nawabi’) and his daring escape from persecution in 1990s Afghanistan. Rasmussen always approaches tender topics with sensitivity and takes further steps to protect his friend’s identity by illustrating the film almost entirely in immersive animation, following in the footsteps of Waltz With Bashir and Tower. It’s a film aware of its subjectivity, allowing the animated scenes to alternate between the playful joy of nostalgia and the mournful pain of an unforgettable memory. However, these are intercepted by dramatic archive footage that oppressively brings the reality home.

“Remarkably singular, yet that is what makes it so universal,” writes Paul. “So many ugly truths about the immigration experience—the impossible choices forced upon people, and the inability to really be able to explain all of it to people in your new life… You can hear the longing in his voice, the fear in his whisper. Some don’t get the easy path.” Winner of the World Cinema (Documentary) Grand Jury Prize and quickly acquired by Neon, Flee is guaranteed to be a film you’ll hear a lot about for the rest of 2021. —JM

Taming the Garden Directed by Salomé Jashi

There’s always a moment at a film festival when fatigue sets in, when the empathy machine overwhelms, and when I hit that moment in 2021, I took the advice of filmmaker and Sundance veteran Jim Cummings, who told us: “If you’re ever stressed or tired, watch a documentary to reset yourself.” Taming the Garden wasn’t initially on my hit-list, but it’s one of those moments when the ‘close your eyes and point at a random title’ trick paid off. Documentary director Salomé Jashi does the Lorax’s work, documenting the impact and grief caused by billionaire former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili’s obsession with collecting ancient trees for his private arboretum.

“A movie that is strangely both infuriating and relaxing” writes Todd, of the long, locked-off wide shots showing the intense process of removing large, old trees from their village homes. There’s no narration, instead Jashi eavesdrops on locals as they gossip about Ivanishvili, argue about whether the money is worth it, and a feisty, irritated 90-year-old warns of the impending environmental fallout. “What you get out of it is absolutely proportional to what you put into it,” writes David, who recommends this film get the IMAX treatment. It’s arboriculture as ASMR, the timeline cleanse my Sundance needed. The extraordinary images of treasured trees being barged across the sea will become iconic. —GG

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World Directed by Kristian Petri and Kristina Lindström

Where Taming the Garden succeeds through pure observation, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World relies on the complete participation of its title subject, actor Björn Andrésen, who was thrust into the spotlight as a teenager. Cast by Italian director Lucino Visconti in Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella about obsession and fatal longing, Andrésen spent the 1970s as an object of lust, with a side-gig as a blonde pop star in Japan, inspiring many manga artists along the way.

As we know by now (Alex Winter’s Showbiz Kids is a handy companion to this film), young stardom comes at a price, one that Andrésen was not well-placed to pay even before his fateful audition for Visconti. But he’s still alive, still acting (he’s Dan in Midsommar), and ready to face the mysteries of his past. Like Benjamin Ree’s excellent The Painter and the Thief from last year, this documentary is a constantly unfolding detective story, notable for great archive footage, and a deep kindness towards its reticent yet wide-open subject. —GG

All Light, Everywhere Directed by Theo Anthony

Threading the blind spots between Étienne-Jules Marey’s 19th-century “photographic rifle”, camera-carrying war pigeons and Axon’s body-cam tech, Theo Anthony’s inquisitive, mind-expanding doc about the false promise of the all-seeing eye is absorbing, scary, urgent. It’s the greatest Minority Report origin story you didn’t know you needed.

Augmented by Dan Deacon’s electronic soundscapes and Keaver Brenai’s lullingly robotic narration, All Light, Everywhere proves to be a captivating, intricately balanced experience that Harris describes as “one part Adam Curtis-esque cine-essay”, “one part structural experiment in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi” and “one part accidental character study of two of the most familiar yet strikingly unique evil, conservative capitalists…”. Yes, there’s a tremendous amount to download, but Anthony’s expert weaving, as AC writes, “make its numerous subjects burst with clarity and profundity.” For curious cinephiles, the oldest movie on Letterboxd, Jules Jenssen’s Passage de Vénus (1874), makes a cameo. —AY

The Sparks Brothers Directed by Edgar Wright

Conceived at a Sparks gig in 2017 upon the encouragement of fellow writer-director Phil Lord, Edgar Wright broke his streak of riotous comedies with his first (of many, we hope) rockumentary. While somewhat overstuffed—this is, after all, his longest film by nearly fifteen minutes—The Sparks Brothers speaks only to Wright’s unrestrained passion for his art-pop Gods, exploring all the nooks and crannies of Sparks’ sprawling career, with unprecedented access to brothers and bandmates Ron and Russell Mael.

Nobody else can quite pin them down, so Wright dedicates his time to put every pin in them while he can, building a mythology and breaking it down, while coloring the film with irresistible dives into film history, whimsically animated anecdotes and cheeky captions. “Sparks rules. Edgar Wright rules. There’s no way this wasn’t going to rule”, proclaims Nick, “every Sparks song is its own world, with characters, rules, jokes and layers of narrative irony. What a lovely ode to a creative partnership that was founded on sticking to one’s artistic guns, no matter what may have been fashionable at the time.” —JM

Narrative features

The Pink Cloud Written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

The Pink Cloud is disorienting and full of déjà vu. Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase constructs characters that are damned to have to settle when it comes to human connection. Giovana and Yago’s pleasant one-night stand lasts longer than expected when the titular pink cloud emerges from the sky, full of a mysterious and deadly gas that forces everyone to stay locked where they stand. Sound familiar? Reserve your groans—The Pink Cloud wasn’t churned out to figure out “what it all means” before the pandemic is even over. Gerbase wrote and shot the film prior to the discovery of Covid-19.

It’s “striking in its ability to prophesize a pandemic and a feeling unknown at the time of its conception. What was once science fiction hits so close now,” writes Sam. As uncanny as the quarantine narrative feels, what’s truly harrowing is how well the film predicts and understands interiorities that the pandemic later exacerbated. Above all, Giovana is a woman with unmet needs. She is a good partner, good mother and good person even when she doesn’t want to be. Even those who love her cannot see how their expectations strip her of her personhood, and the film dares to ask what escape there might be when love itself leaves you lonely. —SH

Together Together Written and directed by Nikole Beckwith

Every festival needs at least one indie relationship dramedy, and Together Together filled that role at Sundance 2021 with a healthy degree of subversion. It follows rom-com structure while ostensibly avoiding romance, instead focusing on how cultivating adult friendships can be just hard, if not harder.

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith warmly examines the limits of the platonic, and Patti Harrison and Ed Helms are brilliantly cast as the not-couple: a single soon-to-be father and the surrogate carrying his child. They poke at each other’s boundaries with a subtle desperation to know what makes a friendship appropriate or real. As Jacob writes: “It’s cute and serious, charming without being quirky. It’s a movie that deals with the struggle of being alone in this world, but offers a shimmer of hope that even if you don’t fall in fantastical, romantic, Hollywood love… there are people out there for you.” —SH

Hive Written and directed by Blerta Basholli

Hive, for some, may fall into the “nothing much happens” slice-of-life genre, but Blerta Basholli’s directorial debut holds an ocean of pain in its small tale, asking us to consider the heavy lifting that women must always do in the aftermath of war. As Liz writes, “Hive is not just a story about grief and trauma in a patriarchy-dominated culture, but of perseverance and the bonds created by the survivors who must begin to consider the future without their husbands.”

Yllka Gashi is an understated hero as Fahrjie, a mother-of-two who sets about organizing work for the women of her village, while awaiting news of her missing husband—one of thousands unaccounted for, years after the Kosovo War has ended. The townsmen have many opinions about how women should and shouldn’t mourn, work, socialize, parent, drive cars and, basically, get on with living, but Fahrjie persists, and Basholli sticks close with an unfussy, tender eye. “It felt like I was a fly on the wall, witnessing something that was actually happening,” writes Arthur. Just as in Robin Wright’s Land and Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, Hive pays off in the rare, beaming smile of its protagonist. —GG

On the Count of Three Directed by Jerrod Carmichael, written by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch

It starts with an image: two best friends pointing guns at each other’s heads. There’s no anger, there’s no hatred—this is an act of merciful brotherly love. How do you have a bleak, gun-totin’ buddy-comedy in 2021 and be critically embraced without contradicting your gun-control retweets or appearing as though your film is the dying embers of Tarantino-tinged student films?

Comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s acerbic directorial debut On the Count of Three achieves this by calling it out every step of the way. Guns are a tool to give insecure men the illusion of power. They are indeed a tool too terrifying to trust in the hands of untrained citizens. Carmichael also stars, alongside Christopher Abbott, who has never been more hilarious or more tragic, bringing pathos to a cathartic rendition of Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’. Above all, Carmichael and Abbott’s shared struggle and bond communicates the millennial malaise: how can you save others if you can’t save yourself? “Here’s what it boils down to: life is fucking hard”, Laura sums up, “and sometimes the most we can hope for is to have a best friend who loves you [and] to be a best friend who loves. It doesn’t make life any easier, but it sure helps.” Sundance 2021 is one for the books when it comes to documentaries, but On the Count of Three stands out in the fiction lineup this year. —JM

Censor Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, written by Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher

The first of several upcoming films inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic over gory horror in mid-’80s Britain, Prano Bailey-Bond leans heavily into both the period and the genre in telling the story of a film censor (a phenomenal Niamh Algar—vulnerable and steely at the same time) who begins to suspect a banned movie may hold the key to her sister’s childhood disappearance. Often dreamlike, occasionally phantasmagorical and repeatedly traumatic, even if the worst gore presented (as seen in the impressively authentic fictional horrors being appraised) appears via a screen, providing a welcome degree of separation.

Nevertheless, Censor is definitely not for the faint of heart, but old-school horror aficionados will squeal with delight at the aesthetic commitment. “I’m so ecstatic that horror is in the hands of immensely talented women going absolutely batshit in front of and behind the camera.” writes Erik. (Same here!) “A great ode to the video-nasty era and paying tribute to the great horror auteurs of the ’80s such as Argento, De Palma and Cronenberg while also doing something new with the genre. Loved this!” writes John, effectively encapsulating Censor’s unfettered film-nerd appeal. —DC

CODA Written and directed by Siân Heder

A film so earnest it shouldn’t work, with a heart so big it should surely not fit the size of the screen, CODA broke records (the first US dramatic film in Sundance history to win all three top prizes; the 25-million-dollar sale to Apple Studios), and won the world over like no other film. “A unique take on something we’ve seen so much,” writes Amanda, nailing the special appeal of Siân Heder’s coming-of-ager and family portrait. Emilia Jones plays Ruby, the only hearing person in her deaf family, at war between the family business and her passion for singing. While Heder is technically remaking the French film La Famille Bélier, the decision to cast brilliant deaf actors—Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant—makes this feel brand new.

But it’s not just about representation for the sake of it. A sense of authenticity, in humor as much as affection, shines through. With a script that’s 40 per cent ASL, so many of the jokes are visual gags, poking fun at Tinder and rap music, but a lot of the film’s most poignant moments are silent as well. And in Ruby’s own world, too, choir kids will feel seen. “I approve of this very specific alto representation and the brilliant casting of the entire choir,” Laura confirms in her review. Come for the fearless, empathetic family portrait, stay for the High School Musical vibes that actually ring true. —EK

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Perhaps the most singular addition to the recent flurry of Extremely Online cinema—Searching, Spree, Host, et al—Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut ushers the viewer into a haunted, hypno-drone miasma of delirium-inducing YouTube time-suck, tenebrous creepypasta lore and painfully intimate webcam confessionals. Featuring an extraordinarily unaffected, fearless performance by newcomer Anna Cobb, the film “unpacks the mythology of adolescence in a way that’s so harrowingly familiar and also so otherworldly”, writes Kristen. Not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse has there been such an eerily lonely, and at times strangely beautiful, evocation of the liminal spaces between virtual and real worlds.

For members of the trans community, it’s also a work that translates that experience to screen with uncommon authenticity. “What Schoenbrun has accomplished with the form of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is akin to catching a wisp of smoke,” writes Willow, “because the images, mood and aesthetic that they have brought to life is one that is understood completely by trans people as one of familiarity, without also plunging into the obvious melodrama, or liberal back-patting that is usually associated with ‘good’ direct representation.” One of the most original, compelling new voices to emerge from Sundance this year. —AY

Judas and the Black Messiah Directed by Shaka King, written by King, Will Berson, Kenneth Lucas and Keith Lucas

It was always going to take a visionary, uncompromising filmmaker to bring the story of Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, to life. Shaka King casts Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as William “Wild Bill” O’Neal, the FBI informant whose betrayal leads to Hampton’s assassination. Both actors have never been better, particularly Kaluuya who Fran Hoepfner calls “entrancing, magnetic, fizzling, romantic, riveting, endlessly watchable.”

Judas and the Black Messiah is an electric, involving watch: not just replaying history by following a certain biopic template. Instead, it’s a film with something to say—on power, on fear, on war and on freedom. “Shaka King’s name better reverberate through the halls of every studio after this,” writes Demi. A talent like this, capable of framing such a revolution, doesn’t come around so often. We’d better listen up. —EK

Pleasure Directed by Ninja Thyberg, written by Thyberg and Peter Modestij

A24’s first purchase of 2021. Ironically titled on multiple levels, Pleasure is a brutal film that you endure more than enjoy. But one thing you can’t do is forget it. Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature follows a young Swedish woman (Sofia Kappel) who arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of porn stardom under the name ‘Bella Cherry’. Although Bella is clear-eyed about the business she’s getting into, Thyberg doesn’t shy away from any of the awfulness she faces in order to succeed in an industry rife with exploitation and abuse. Bella does make allies, and the film isn’t suggesting that porn is only stocked with villains, but the ultimate cost is clear, even if it ends on an ever-so-slightly ambiguous note.

Touching as it does on ambition, friendship and betrayal in the sex business, Pleasure is often oddly reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Or rather, the gritty film Showgirls was claiming to be, as opposed to the camp classic it became. There’s nothing campy here. Kappel is raw and fearless in the lead, but never lets the viewer lose touch with her humanity. Emma puts it well: “Kappel gives the hardest, most provocative and transfixing performance I’ve seen all festival.” “My whole body was physically tense during this,” writes Gillian, while Keegan perhaps speaks for most when she says “Great film, never want to see it again.” —DC

Coming Home in the Dark Directed by James Ashcroft, written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent

A family camping trip amidst some typically stunnin—and casually foreboding— New Zealand scenery is upended by a shocking rug-pull of violence that gives way to sustained terror represented by Daniel Gillies’ disturbingly calm psychopath. The set-up of this thriller initially suggests a spin on the backwoods brutality thriller, but as Coming Home in the Dark progresses and hope dissipates, the motivations reveal themselves to be much more personal in nature, and informed on a thematic level by New Zealand’s colonial crimes against its Indigenous population. It’s a stark and haunting film that remains disorientating and unpredictable throughout, repeatedly daring the viewer to anticipate what will happen next, only to casually stomp on each glimmer of a positive outcome.

It’s so captivatingly bleak that a viewing of it, as Collins Ezeanyim’s eloquent reaction points out, does not lend itself to completing domestic tasks. The film marks an auspicious debut for director and co-writer James Ashcroft. Jacob writes that he “will probably follow James Ashcroft’s career to the gates of Hell after this one”. Justin hits the nail on the head with his description: “Lean and exceptionally brutal road/revenge film … that trades in genre tropes, especially those of Ozploitation and ’70s Italian exploitation, but contextualizes them in the dark history of its country of origin.” —DC

The World to Come Directed by Mona Fastvold, written by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard

Mona Fastvold has not made the first, nor probably the last, period romance about forbidden lesbian love. But The World to Come focuses on a specific pocket in time, a world contained in Jim Shepard’s short story ‘Love & Hydrogen’ from within the collection giving the film its name. Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are Abigail and Tallie, farming neighbors, stifled by their husbands, who find brief moments of solace, of astonishment and joy, together. What shines here is the script, a verbose, delicate narration that emanates beauty more than pretence. “So beautifully restrained and yet I felt everything,” Iana writes.

And you can feel the fluidity and elegance in the way the film sounds, too: composer Daniel Blumberg’s clarinet theme converses with the dialogue and tells you when your heart can break, when you must pause, when the end is near. “So much heartache. So much hunger. So much longing. Waves of love and grief and love and grief,” writes Claira, capturing the ebb and flow of emotion that keeps The World to Come in your mind long after the screen has gone silent. —EK

Related content

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival lineup by Letterboxd rating

Letterboxd’s ‘Official’ Top 50 of 2021

Awards Season 2020-2021: our awards-tracker list

Letterboxd’s Festiville HQ: our home for up-to-the-minute festival coverage

[itsclydebitches]

What if you get really attached to a fan OC you made and want to put them in an original story? How would you deal with the legalities of that?

The “put them in an original story” part is where you negotiate that. Characters cannot (and should not) exist separate from their world. Their fictional world influences them in the same way they influence the world in turn, so if you change the world... you change the character along with it. Fans do this instinctively with AUs. If you have a Very Angry Protagonist due to their canonical war and then chuck them into a peaceful Coffee Shop AU, you need to come up with a new reason for why they’re so angry. Maybe they had a bad home life. Maybe there’s some oppressive system in place. Maybe they just pretend to be edgy because they think it’s cool. Whatever reason you choose, you theoretically want to maintain that anger as a core character trait because, as fanfiction, you want the character to be recognizable. Generally speaking, readers approach fic looking for some level of familiarity, so if the protagonist is no longer Very Angry they don’t feel like it’s that character anymore. So you adapt. For an original story though? Sky’s the limit! Not only can you make all the creative choices you’d make for an AU, you can make the character not angry anymore too. If your original novel is a coffee shop based romance you may decide that the OC you originally created doesn’t fit well into that world as they are. So you allow the world to change them, softening them, and in doing so create a new character. Few will look at Character B (original) and recognize that they were originally Character A (fanfic). 

Now granted, other situations are a lot more complicated. Let’s say you create a RWBY OC with a kickass semblance and that just has to stay. Their semblance is a crucial part of who they are and you like that version of the character, not the one that exists without their semblance. So then you can consider that “semblance” really just means “power.” You can give “semblance” a new name and (theoretically) be in the legal clear. “Semblance (RWBY),” “quirk (BNHA),” “mutations (X-Men),” “nen abilities (HxH),” and “devil fruit (One Piece)” are all different names for the same basic concept: a very wide variety of superpowers. But of course, you’ll notice that there are still plenty of differences among these stories. We don’t accuse One Piece of copying X-Men because one power comes from eating a special fruit while the other is a genetic ability. Then, the component “genetic ability” changes the fictional world to a staggering degree. What happens when some people are born with powers rather than choosing to obtain them? That’s one of the questions X-Men grapples with. Similarly, RWBY has a world where people can obtain power through avenues other than semblances, so not having a semblance isn’t the end of the world. In contrast, BNHA is a world where people are still just people unless they have a quirk, making quirks a huge part of the social status. As soon as you give your power a new name you have to think about the rules behind it, and once you’ve done that you can see how those rules shape your story. This leads you further and further away from where you started: another’s work. 

Now do that for every aspect of your character. If your OC is no longer living in the RWBY world, what does that world look like? If they didn’t grow up in Patch watching Atlas TV, where is their home and what did they do? If they aren’t best friends with Yang, who do they hang out with? The legal trap that fans fall into is changing the names of things and only the names. “Here’s my world of four Domains where a resource called Glitter powers almost everything. People train to become Predators, protecting the people from monsters made out of light. They can even unlock their Power. A young girl named Poppy, with incredibly rare black eyes, is set to save the world!” People are going to look at that (horrible description lol) and go, “That’s RWBY just with different terms, reversed colors, and Ruby with a new flower name.” If you put an OC into an original story, you have to make sure it is an original story, which necessitates doing that work to change the character to fit the world and the world to reflect the character. If you just try to transplant that character 100%, you’re requiring that they still exist in RWBY’s world - just with a new, deceiving coat of paint. 

This is why the Fifty Shades/Twilight is so complicated because we don’t have a firm legal foundation to determine when a story is “too much” like its inspiration. On the one hand, I can walk you through both novels and point out the glaring similarities across the cast and the basic structure of the story. On the other hand... a story about a woman falling for a BDSM obsessed billionaire in the midst of modern day drama is not the story of a teenager falling in love with a vampire in the midst of werewolf drama. The book is simultaneously too similar to and nothing like Twilight, which makes determining its difference a matter of opinion, up until there’s a court case to determine that. I’d personally argue that James didn’t allow enough of those changes to carry the story forward. Meaning, she wrote a Modern AU version of Twilight, following Twilight’s beats and characters as closely as possible within the AU, then just changed everyone’s names for an “original” novel. It’s removed enough that anyone who doesn’t know the story’s origin’s won’t notice the similarities, but others have done work to demonstrate precisely how close Fifty Shades is to its fic origins, Master of the Universe... so to say it’s murky is an understatement. 

The best way to avoid any legal issues is simply write an original story. Don’t try to re-create the world that your OC originally inhabited, use your OC as inspiration for something new. 

[kurtty-drabbles]

Ocean au (Harvey Dent part 5)

N/A: This is the last chapter, no, there´s one last but I can count that one as epilogue so in a sense, this is the last one.

@dannybagpipesarecalling @djinmer4 @bamfoftheundead @muninandhugin

Cheating is not exactly a novel concept and New Gotham has its fair share of cheating- as much in the love department as in every other section of life- even Felicia Hardy was cheated by an ex-lover before joining into the masked club of New Gotham-a case that makes her laugh as she´s the wife of a billionaire and is living more than well- but the point remains, everyone was cheated in New Gotham at some point, nonetheless, only MJ took such drastic changes once it happened to her.

In a way, MJ thought to flip the coin with a coy smile, this is all thanks to Columbina...what if my ex decided to sleep with another woman instead of Kitty? Would I have been here today?

The most likely scenario would have been a divorce and heartbreaking-she knows still a very good lawyer-but, the thing of what-ifs -all its beauty and ugliness aside- no matter what she conjures in her mind, she still has to face with reality.

"MJ" the woman stop flipping the coin and press the comcon to communicate freely- no one in New Gotham would bat an eye if she starts talking seemingly to no one, but, she´s a good actress and like to be prepared to every ridiculous situation-and take her cellphone, already turn off, to pretend to speak with. "You´re getting like a stalker, little boy" MJ teased and her eyes flick to the nearest skyscraper with a smug on her pretty face.

"MJ. I´m not a stalker" SpiderBoy states still nervous and she can sense the tone in his voice and can even imagine his expression. "I´m not a fan of this plan...I would prefer if we used Columbina for this...she´s the one with experience with creepy things" there´s a hint of malice here and MJ bites her inner cheek for a moment and let's go as she starts walking.

"Well, tiger...the thing is...I offer myself to the job, and what you think or approve doesn´t really matter right now. My last husband...always tried to control me in some way, MJ doesn´t do this...don´t wear that" she pauses to exhales. "Wanna know how this story ends?"

"You found someone much better? I know a guy who works in the News Gotham who has a thing for red hairs his name starts with Peter.." SpiderBoy jokes and MJ chuckles at that and even if he couldn´t see- no, he can see her just fine. She knows it and for the time being, won't see this as creepy, only for tonight. She wonders about his powers that sometimes are too based on spiders and not based on spiders at the same time.

"No, tiger...he cheated on me. The woman found out he was married warm me and together we take him down" and MJ adds softly. "that woman is Columbina"

"Don´t you hate her?"

"At first...a little, but, my anger and the blame is direct only to my ex. So, when I say I chose to do this, tiger, you listen and offer me support and not criticism or nagging, got it?"

"Yes, madam!"

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dark Claw prior to delivering the coin to MJ was sure the said coin was magic or has some eccentricity about it-yet, the coin has no SCP´s abilities and nothing magical of the sort, just a regular coin that is held with affection by a new killer- and now watches on his screen- installed on his batmobile- as MJ is doing her round and tossing the coin in the air and doing all she can to show the object.

"So, this is the batmobile? Cool, can I drive next time?" Columbina asked looking around -Sparrow is not present as she´s leading the Young Blood, Polaris is helping in some mission regards T.I but still considers herself a neutral part- and Dark Claw only groans as his answer is curt as possible. "No, only I drive the batmobile and ...I saw how you drive, that´s a big no"

"Would be amazed if I told you Ryder said the same thing?"

"How long you knew he is Nightcreeper?"

"For a long while. I like to troll him here and there...he has no idea who am I, right?"

"He has a theory that you´re either a fae" Columbina chuckles at that and Dark Claw offers a ghost of a smile. "and another theory is that you´re trickest who never tells the truth about its origin"

Columbina blinks at this. Her eyes are owlish and she even takes off her cowl. "Is he always superstitious?"

"Always! but I think knowing the SCP allows some justification to his fears"

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nightcreeper is fully changed now. Watching MJ on the other side - SpiderBoy is very obvious about his feelings towards MJ and Nightcreeper is many, many things, but, not a hypocrite so he´ll not mention this or rather, he doesn´t have the mind to mention- his golden eyes inspect the surrounders as he´s jumping from roof to roof, to gothic structure to another and while giving off a very annoying and dangerous laugh.

The type that makes SpiderBoy want to shoot a web into his mouth- and Nightcreeper came up with several dirty jokes about such idea- the man is still somewhat sane-a a bit debatable- to spot a man with a scarred face approaching MJ with clearly bad intentions.

So bad intentions even a lunatic as Nightcreeper can see it.

"Spidey...our guest arrives," Nightcreeper said and didn´t wait to see his reaction or the others as Nightcreeper is contacting Columbina. "Scarface is here...Columbina"

Her voice is soothing- the situation is not warrant something soothing, but, Nightcreeper needs to say, at least in his own mind, how her voice is firm, yet, peaceful...so similar to a certain someone- "Got it, Kurt stay out, for now, keep watching"

"Sounds kinky...wait, what did you call me?" he asked and Columbina passed the conversation to Dark Claw who is giving the instructions.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Two-Face is pissed, maybe even more than in his nights of cleaning the city, and his movements are erratic and unhinged as humanly possible until he spots MJ tossing his coin- there´s no doubt this was his coin, what better coin to flip than his own?- and all the man can see is red. Literally in this case.

"You stole my coin?" he gets a knife- MJ is more than happy, guns are hard to deflect and not her specialty, but, knives? Oh, she knows how to deal it-"give me back or die?"

"Uhm, finders keepers, my friend" and MJ toss the coin again and asks one question. "but I´m more than willing to return this to you if you answer me this: Why you need this coin so much?"

"What good killer would I be...without my coin? I need it to clean the city" and the conversation is deemed over as Two-Face is charging at MJ, however, knives are her thing and she managed to dodge and with few good moves and hits manages to get rid of his knife.

Two-Face now draws a gun. And now Nightcreeper and SpiderBoy show up and the fight begins. Columbina arrives as well and it wasn´t needed to protect MJ at well.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Dark Claw observes the subdued Two-Face and isn´t needed to be the best detective to see who he really is. "Harvey Dent?" Columbina asked and her eyes meet with the insane pair of golden eyes of Nightcreeper. "So, Ryder was right this whole time?" SpiderBoy scoff and says is nothing but a mere lucky guess.

Nightcreeper is trying to pay attention to Columbina.

"I run the test, the beauty of technology" Dark Claw muses fondly "it seems Harvey Dent was poisoned by one of Hyena´s old venoms" Nightcreeper is piping in the conversation. "So, that´s why the Hyena is so silent?"

"Maybe, maybe not. He´s not very careful with the poison he makes...still, how Harvey Dent enters in contact with it is something I need to know." And Dark Claw now inquiry one thing from Columbina. "You were in his house, did you saw anything suspicious?"

"Aside from him having a painel with photos of now dead criminals and another where he give horns to Ryder? Is pretty normal, typical place in New Gotham"

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Columbina and Nightcreeper are away from the police and the media- Dark Claw is merciful to not let people know Harvey is behind the murders because it seems the man wasn´t in control of his actions- MJ and SpiderBoy are also there- Spidey seems a bit reluctantly in accepting the credit for a job MJ did(but, the best spy is the one no one would ever saw coming) and MJ is a great actress to pretend to be a hopeless victim Spidey saved.

"You were much needed in this plot" Nightcreeper speaks now with a big grin on his face.

"Yeah, I help a little but you heroes can do the rest without me...Kurt, don't you want to let people see you as Nightcreeper?" Columbina asked and Nightcreeper is about to laugh- a louder one and one that would make all eyes be on their figures- when Columbina tap his mouth with her hand.

He still laughs and she can feel the vibration. "Ryder...who do you think is behind this mask?" she points to her own mask.

"Who is Ryder?"

"You, your face is the same. The face is the same and I know you´re Kurt Ryder for a long while...wanna know how? Because I´m a fae!"

"REALLY?" Nightcreeper asked with fear and awe in his eyes laced with his usual insanity.

"No, just regular detective work..." and she removes the mask to show her face. "Hi, Kurt...I´m not a fae. Just Kitty"

[idairsauthor]

This Fcking Trial, Episode 2: Being Alive

CONN: Senator Collins just announced that she was going to vote to call witnesses.

PLAIDDER: That’s still only 48 people IF Manchin doesn’t do his fucking Manchin thing. Go away.

ETHIR: Don’t talk to him that way.

PLAIDDER: It gets worse!

ETHIR: I have a question and I really need to know the answer right now.

PLAIDDER: I guess in cyberspace it’s always time for freagair.

ETHIR: Who in the green earth or under it is Alan Dershowitz?

PLAIDDER: Ethir. This is unworthy of you. The night before all hope is lost, you come into my house and you ask me to dredge up from the cesspool into which they have subsided my totally 80s memories of celebrity lawyer, self-appointed gadfly, and massive narcissist Alan Dershowitz?!

ETHIR: I do.

PLAIDDER: Ethir, last night I saw Just Mercy, a film based on a real-life case in which a young lawyer named Bryan Stevenson devoted years of his life to obtaining a new trial for an innocent man who was framed by corrupt racist cops for a crime he didn’t commit, prosecuted for that crime by a corrupt racist DA, and given a bonus death sentence by a corrupt racist judge. Unlike most real-life stories in which underfunded young lawyers take on entire power structures, this one actually has a happy ending, and an innocent man who’s spent six years on death row for no good reason is eventually returned to his family. I think you should get a bucket of popcorn and some caffeine-free soda and go watch this movie. You will enjoy it.

ETHIR: But--

PLAIDDER:  I want you to go watch that movie, and then I want you to come back here. And then, when I tell you that Alan Dershowitz got famous in the 1980s for finding a way to get the conviction of a European billionaire who most likely murdered his diabetic wife thrown out and get him a new trial at which he was acquitted based on problems with handling of the evidence, and then gave a dinner party to celebrate which Alan Dershowitz attended and wrote about in his book Reversal Of Fortune which by the way was made into a TV movie in 1990 which I actually to my everlasting shame saw--when I tell you all this, and then tell you that Alan Dershowitz thinks that makes him Bryan fucking Stevenson, you will fully understand my rage. 

ETHIR: All right.

PLAIDDER: In the meantime, can we not talk about how Alan Dershowitz’s narcissism has set fire to the last shreds of our Constitution?

CONN: But that’s exactly what I’m most hopeful about.

PLAIDDER: That...BLOWHARD forgot that he’s not in a damn trial court where the worst he could do to the world is set one rich and guilty asshole free. To satisfy his insatiable fucking ego, that man just burned down the rule of law.

CONN: No, he didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s actually made things better.

PLAIDDER: This oughta be good.

CONN: All along we’ve been talking about that moment when everyone stops pretending. The moment when people just drop the mask for good and all and they just stop caring about whether people see their atrocities or not. We talked about that in July when that Congressional delegation went to see the detention camps at the border. You must have a clip of that somewhere.

PLAIDDER: OK, I found it:

CONN: Their lack of fear, that’s the worst sign. The fact that they don’t fear exposure. The fact that they’re not worried about the rest of the world finding out what they’ve done. Because that tells you that they know they’re protected. And that means they have no reason to stop. Not just that. They have no reason not to make it worse. No reason not to invent new indignities. No reason not to entertain themselves with making more misery.

PLAIDDER: That’s something I’ve always been afraid of. The moment when the state decides it doesn’t have to pretend any more. Theamh is afraid of that moment too–you know–on the magical side. That’s why that battle at Slieve was so important. It forced the corrupt government to go on pretending for a while. As long as they were pretending, there were certain limits to what they were able to do. Theamh and everyone else worked so hard to keep those limits in place.

CONN: You’re right to be afraid of that moment.  

CONN: And you’re afraid that this moment has now come.

PLAIDDER: It has. This is it. 53 Republican Senators--

CONN: Fifty-two--

PLAIDDER: Conn, you are on my LAST NERVE tonight. Fifty-two Republican Senators are about to vote to endorse the idea that the President can rig an election and nobody can do a thing about it.

CONN: No. They won’t be. Because Dershowitz and friends have already retracted that argument.

PLAIDDER: They can’t retract it now. Fox News has a hold of it. The Republican Senators have a hold of it. It’s out there and it’s going to become the new normal.

CONN: You’re not listening to me. THEY WALKED IT BACK. They realized they HAD to walk it back. Because 53 Republican Senators are not ready for this moment.

PLAIDDER: I bet 51 of them are.

CONN: No. That...circus act...that your President calls a legal team has withdrawn that defense because they now realize that these Republican Senators still want to pretend. And where there’s pretense, there’s hope.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, well I just refreshed the WaPo page and we lost Lamar Alexander, so I’m gonna go scream into the night now.

CONN: There’s still--

PLAIDDER: Don’t you get it? These assholes have got together and worked out exactly how it’s going to go down and what will happen is that they will let Collins, Murkowski and Romney vote for witnesses so there’s a 50-50 tie and then Roberts will refuse to cast the tiebreaking vote and there will be no witnesses and the whole thing will be over tomorrow. These people are not taking a stand, they are saving face in the most weaselly way possible. 

CONN: But surely you realize that it doesn’t matter any more whether they call witnesses or not.

PLAIDDER: I DO NOT realize that.

CONN: They don’t have to make Bolton testify. As soon as Alan Dershowitz made that argument, he admitted that your President has done everything he’s been accused of. Everyone saw that, everyone knows that. Anyone who will ever be willing to vote for removal will vote for removal now. And the people who will never be willing to vote for removal will never be convinced no matter how many witnesses you call.

PLAIDDER: So this is it. He gets acquitted. And I SWEAR TO GOD if you say “not yet” ONE MORE TIME--

CONN: All right, I won’t say it.

PLAIDDER: You won’t?

CONN: No. I won’t. Acquittal is what you always expected. That’s is what you always knew was probably going to happen.

PLAIDDER: BUT YOU TOLD ME NOT YET!!!

CONN: MAKE UP YOUR MIND! Or let me go back into the void! I never asked to be dragged out here to this horrible place.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, I’m not gonna watch any more of my favorite characters go through the door to oblivion tonight, friend.

CONN: 67 votes for removal was always an unrealistic threshold. It’s never been done before, I understand.

PLAIDDER: No.

CONN: Trust me when I say this, friend. They overreached. That always has consequences.

PLAIDDER: How can they overreach when they are about to take a vote that will ensure that their party will always have unlimited power?

CONN: That’s not what that vote is going to ensure.

PLAIDDER: Then what will it ensure?

CONN: That your president never gets a second term. And neither will many of them. 

PLAIDDER: Why should I believe you?

CONN: Look at what the Democrats in Congress have been able to do. They dragged that mac na mhada to the brink of removal. Where is your appreciation for Adam Schiff, who got up there day after day and told the actual truth?

PLAIDDER: You mean the “you know you can’t” speech.

CONN: Yes. That and many others. Because the thing is: they DO know they can’t. They definitely know that now. 

PLAIDDER: What does it matter? They will never cross him.

ETHIR: Hey, I’m back.

PLAIDDER: So you see what I mean about Alan Dershowitz.

ETHIR: Actually I saw something totally different.

PLAIDDER: What?

ETHIR: You know that scene where Ralph Myers takes the stand at that hearing and he tells everyone that he lied at that first trial?

PLAIDDER: Yes.

ETHIR: And he’s scared to do it. But once he does it, you can see the whole man come back to life. He’s told the truth and now no matter what happens to him, he doesn’t care, because he’s alive now. I mean you wrote our story but you spend all your time on the shriias, you’ve never really thought about how ordinary people experience the truth. I will tell you, I’ve seen a lot of people lie in court and I’ve seen a lot of people tell the truth and there is no comparison. Telling the truth is magic for us too. It’s...it’s being alive.

PLAIDDER: Anthony Scaramucci, of all people, has said as much.

ETHIR: I wish Theamh could have seen Slythe during the trial. She would have been so proud of her. Still an ordinary woman, but once she caught a hold of the truth again she never let it go. She understood it better than I can explain it. You could see it when you looked at her. I think she knew there was a good chance they would kill her. But it was worth it to her, just for that feeling of being alive. Humans are humans. They need joy. They need to feel alive. 

PLAIDDER: How are you making me cry when I don’t believe EITHER of you?

CONN: It’s like your Nancy Pelosi always says. Patience and time.

PLAIDDER: That was Kutuzov in War and Peace.

CONN: Well she doesn’t say it. But she knows it. She dragged this process out as long as she could safely drag it and what can be exposed has been exposed. Whatever happens tomorrow, you got more out of this than anyone expected. Be mindful of that. And just...be all right. All right?

PLAIDDER: All right. I guess this will be our last episode.

CONN: Maybe not y--

PLAIDDER: THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT.