#unmolested

[eh-nonnie-mouse]

You know the game is getting serious when you have the wiki open on one monitor and the game on the other so you can double, triple and quadruple check ✨everything✨ you do

[elizmanderson]

IT KILLS ME that after the frankly OVERKILL of Stede's fake death, Mary finishes it up with, "he kept it to himself...but Stede had actually been quite ill" like how much more dead does this man have to be lmao

[pseudospectre]

Can I please have a month without vet bills. Please.

[divinekangaroo]

The difficulty w writing a hard/violent Tommy x Alfie is that they both seem genuinely amused by and in liking of each other - irrespective that they both expect one or the other will do something one day that requires a death strike in retaliation. (Because if they don’t, their whole artificially and self-consciously constructed sense of identity is suspect?)

[kyra-dev]

leadership of the most fucked up website being pathetic, spiteful, bigoted idiots. Must be a day ending in y

[coldgoldlazarus]

Having way too much fun writing the world's most sexually oblivious pansexual woman

[void-botanist]

🌼🎁🥘 for Bo plsssss

- @outpost51

These are great questions for actually knowing things about Bo, lol.

🌼 - Assign them an aesthetic Wizardcore. If that seems too on the nose, consider that Bo is usually wearing essentially a belted purple tabard over pants or shorts. People do look sideways at that, but when they notice Bo's leather gloves, they assume that Bo is a witch and kind of ignore anything weird about their appearance.

🥘 - Favourite food? Bo loves two foods more than anything: steak, in pretty much any form, and rich desserts. So in the real world, they would be that friend who always wants to go to a Latin American restaurant (not just the ones with steak dishes but especially those). I think one of their particular favorites would be flan mixto.

🎁 - Are they good at giving gifts? How about receiving them? Bo used to be bad at giving gifts because they would know exactly what kind of thing to get someone, but when it came to actually procuring it, they would get stuck trying to figure out what the best one was (not quite at the level of Chidi Anagonye trying to make a decision, but not too far off). They eventually figured out that the better way for them to gift was to give experiences, either through creating those experiences themself or through buying tickets or making reservations to do something with someone. Aside from making fun memories, that has the upside of being time limited, so if it sucks somehow, it'll be over soon and they won't have to live with the shame of buying a subpar object.

[chromalogue]

I was walking to work yesterday, quietly fuming because people in the apartment building across the street had moved out and left some really cool appliances on the curb, and copper scavengers had come and cut off all the cords, turning perfectly good stuff that people could have used into heaps of junk, and urgh, what could be more aggravating?

As it turns out, what could be more aggravating is not being told that May 1 is a public holiday in Germany.

[thisbibliomaniac]

So I guess that's the best way to get people to stop asking questions you don't want to answer

[silly-puppyboy-thoriumreactors]

At a perpetual tipped over.

[catboycumgutters]

>was asked to delay first apt today. sure yeah I should be able to make that.

>no prob. leave five min early from first apt, arrive right on time for second.

>pre-checked in like crazy last week. still have to check in. thing isn't picking up my id. have to put it all in manually. whatever.

>get behind the door, they ask for my phone number.

>"why" "someone put 5555555555" "yeah i don't have a phone number" "right well i can't proceed without one." "k whatever here's my old one. won't reach me tho."

>reminds me that i can sit down. sore from physical therapy, don't want to, already annoyed and restless. points out that i'm going to need to sit for the blood draw anyway. (okay? i'll sit then?) tech says it's making them uncomfortable that i'm standing instead of sitting (??)

>basically i'm not kissing ass, just wanna get in and get out. and. they say they're uncomfortable serving me and i need to go

>laugh bc it's so absurd

>they ramp up to threatening to call the cops when i don't just go. saying i've been nothing but uncooperative (only a tiny bit true? not even about you??) and it's suspicious that my insurance is pulling up some out-of-state insurance thing (?????) and i "won't give them my insurance card" (they didn't ask and it's literally in my hand and i've been trying to give it to them??)

>no, i'll be here until you let me speak. they keep interrupting me. i gotta keep starting over. they leave.

>other tech comes to life to suggest i go to another lab two towns over maybe?

>don't have a car, have to borrow one to spend grueling day out every month or so. so.

>literally just huffy bc i'm not playing the polite social encounter game where i have to flirt and be soooo comforting to everyone or i don't get vital services that i am otherwise unable to access

>cool cool cool. hope they fuck off and die.

[stumblngrumbl]

[read-marx-and-lenin]

There is no magic "abolish the state" button, which is why I'm an anarchist, as "when the state has socialismed enough it will just magically poof away in a cloud of smoke" is the leninist position.

That is not the Leninist position, the Leninist position is and always has been that the state cannot disappear until the material conditions for its disappearance are achieved. The withering away of the state, first outlined by Engels, is not a magic process but one that proceeds from the abolition of class and the dissolution of the bourgeoisie.

How are you going to get rid of the bourgeoisie without a state? Are you going to simply ask them nicely to leave you alone? If you are organized and if your organization is suppressing the bourgeoisie as a class, then you have created a state, you have created an authoritarian imposition on the free organization of some section of the people. If you are not doing any of this, then the bourgeoisie who you have left unmolested will invariably come to dominate you once more.

Anarchists have always played word games to get around these simple facts. There are the practical anarchists who will admit to some amount of authority, but always with the caveat that theirs is *just* authority, *necessary* authority, and that is is the *unjust* authority that they condemn. Just authority is not the State, because the State is unjust, and so if they see an authority as just then it cannot be the State. Fair enough, you can call things by whatever names you like, but if you put these ideas in practice you basically end up with Leninism. You want to create dual power? You want to abolish the bourgeois state and replace it with a democratic organ of the working class? Well so did Lenin, and now you know why the Mensheviks accused him of anarchism.

Then there are the quite impractical capital-A Anarchists, who are adamant that anarchy means anarchy and that even voluntary hierarchy and submission to democratic authority is impermissible. Whether pacifistic or militaristic, they are generally unremarkable and ineffective at their goals because they eschew most effective forms of organization as ideologically impure. Even the most advanced anarchists, the CNT in Spain and the Maknovists in Russia, were plagued by economic confusion and disorganization. Their lack of discipline led to their downfall.

If you want to read more, here are some pertinent links:

[vr-trakowski]

As someone who works at a gov’t facility:

Everybody’s told to remove their badges when they leave the building/base/campus.  People just forget, or they’re stupid about it.  (Note: I’d forget too if I weren’t paranoid about losing the blasted thing.  No end of trouble, that.) 

IT can shut down the USB ports on hardware so that they don’t work.  Plugging in a thumb drive will either have no effect, or the external device will be reformatted.  (I don’t know if the latter is still true, but for a while there were serious warnings not to try to charge your iPod via the computer.)

As per the last point above: depends on the colonels.  *grin* 

Your OPSEC is Bad and You Should Feel Bad

Okay so one of the many things that drives me absolutely nuts about most TV shows and (some) books that involve secret or classified information or secure facilities is how absolutely not secure everything is, so these are a few basic things that people get wrong:

You can't carry around classified information. There are, I assume, exceptions in specific cases, though they are assuredly very carefully managed, but random intel agent #12 cannot legally just take home classified information so they can work on it at home. That's incredibly illegal. And that's for a reason--secure facilities are, as the name suggests, secure. Everywhere else is varying levels of not secure. Even for people working with regular business or government materials on their work phone or laptop, there are varying levels of strict rules about where you can leave it, how to report a lost device, and not keeping it in checked bags.

Badges should be innocuous and limited in visible information. Any sensible security system doesn't have badges that are numbered/colored/otherwise identified by access level, because that is a really easy way to identify targets for thieves/people who want to break in. American federal ID cards (CAC for military, PIV for civilian) have really specific layouts. Some companies distinguish between full time employees, interns, vendors, etc in their cards.

Badges shouldn't be displayed outside of the office. This is not really followed by real people (if you get on the metro on DC you will see a wide variety of visible badges), but displaying a badge is not security-wise because 1) it makes them easier to steal, and 2) it can make you a target.

Names/access level/information shouldn't be openly announced. I'm looking at you, MCU Spider-Man fanfiction. Just. Don't.

Confidential/classified information shouldn't be openly discussed. Stop having your characters talk about confidential or classified information in front of people who shouldn't know it, or even just out in the open at all. They shouldn't be telling their parents, their friends, their spouses, etc. Even businesses or government buildings that deal with sensitive information, there may be spaces where certain things can or can't be discussed, and employees/contractors will go through approximately 8 million trainings on where you can't discuss certain information. This also involves erasing whiteboards, locking computers, etc.

You can't have cell phones in certain secure facilities. People shouldn't be having their cell phones with them in SCIFs. This prohibition extends to all things that can be recording devices, including furbies.

[mourning-again-in-america]

hm, wonder to what extent other people have in their toolbox of threat de-escalation techniques, "confuse the fucker"

[sbnkalny]

Garbage-empress can 1v1 me horses are beautiful creatures and they deserve more respect even it they could find fire, bread, and salt at many an inn and holdfast

grin