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regrettablewritings · 3 years ago

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DJ X READER HEADCANON you pick 😉😉

I blink at the request that stares back at me from my inbox, brow furrowing with every flutter of my lashes. "Sis . . ." I murmur, "you good?" As though my ass had not also been search for content relating to this forgotten POS just the other day. But if you insist . . .

4. What they do on date night:

To be brutally honest, DJ will look you dead in the eye and tell you that going for a night out on the town pick-pocketing is a date. Or, at least, he will try to. It's surprisingly hard to maintain eye contact with someone whose glare could probably cut beskar.

In his defense (if he even deserves any), DJ does try to make it a little more fun than he already finds it -- granted, it's done in a very DJ way. You get your little evening promenade through the streets, he tricks you to a quick bite to eat, you hold hands and run through the lantern-speckled streets before turning down a narrow alleyway that's just perfect for sharing an intense liplock . . .

Of course, this all translates into your evening together including: Walking through a marketplace, your asshole boyfriend slipping peoples' credits out of their pockets and purses under the guise of bumping into them; him using those sticky fingers of his to nick some street food off of a cart before its proprietor called the authorities on his theft; said sticky fingers lacing with yours as he guides you down the crowded streets (grinning like the little shit he was for enjoying the chase); all before making a sudden jerk down an alleyway.

You're breathless, irritated, and . . . maybe -- only just maybe -- a little excited by the thrill of it all. But you can't let him know that, otherwise, he'd never let you live it down and he'd be the cock of the goddamn walk for who knows how long. Worse: He'd consider this a win for his insistence that this sort of thing counted as a date! And there was no way in hell you were about to let that happen!

You only got as far as opening your mouth to hiss own some choice words at him when you instead got cut off by your thieving significant other pressing you against the grubby alley wall. Even if you hadn't been distracted by the action to remember to cuss him out, the words were instantly killed. They were inhaled by his own lips, his kiss encompassing your words, your thoughts, your . . . everything. They were speared by his tongue, as though it were his weapon against the beast that brewed within you.

And they were quelled by the feel of his callused fingers brushing against your cheeks before moving onward to the beck of your head, pressing you only further into his hold. DJ's fingers were deft, but that didn't necessarily mean that their carefulness was always directed at you. It's . . . something to savor . . .

Of course, it was meant to fool the chumps following the both of you but you don't mind. Not in that moment anyway. When you get back to wherever you're staying for the night, it's another story, but one DJ is more than happy to bring to a happy ending.

It's a bit nicer when he gets his hands one someone's credits, though: It means he can take you out to an actual establishment. However, be warned: It's only a bit nicer because you also need to be on the lookout for the authorities (or the poor bastard you stole from), or be prepared to make a run for it.

11. What their first impression was of each other:

Dirty. Old. Bastard. A dirty old bastard. And to your credit, you weren't wrong, but of course, the first impression is always the shallowest. And considering the shithead had just tried to put the moves on you when you were already having a rough day . . . Yeah, he honestly deserved presumptions with the depth of one's own navel -- an outie, preferably.

He stood out against the Canto Bight elite with his grubbiness, looking like a leathery garbage pouch at best and like a guy who'd try to sell you a faulty droid at moderate. A dirty, bastardly part of you couldn't help but muse that perhaps the worst he could do was be a nasty lay -- and not nasty in the way one might want, either.

Granted, it wasn't hard to imagine that: The fact he was hitting on you while you were trying your best to just survive your shift at the casino that evening did little to convince you he was any good.

And as for DJ, it was a one-two-punch type of introduction. Literally: First he eyed you, then he got a little too suggestive, and then you punched him. What a sleazeball, right? It was his own damn fault for assuming the least of you, though. You were cute like all the other servers, no doubt, with that shy smile of yours that made it abundantly clear to him that this sort of place wasn't your scene if you didn't have to work there. Unlike the other servers, however, he was feeling pretty brazen about you.

DJ has no interest in the concept of “fate” or “destined meetings”, but even months out from that point he wouldn’t be able to place precisely what compelled him to break his usual protocol of being discreet. Nor why he was so insistent. All he knows was that he called you over to him and, rather than requesting a drink, he “chatted you up”. And might’ve suggested that you two blow off this place and maybe “blow off somewhere else”.

He also knows that the moment you struck his cheek, cheeks burning and eyes widened with the realization of what you’d done, he was wrong and right about you.

You were frankly lucky he turned out to be a blight on the Canto Bight scene, otherwise your boss would’ve fired you the moment he had learned of what you had done. What you were unlucky for, however, was that from then on, the thief started showing up more often. Not enough to get caught (at least, not for long), but enough for him to determine that maybe the both of you really should blow this joint -- in the nonsexual way.

And in the end, you became unlucky once more: For someone so grubby and bastardly, he was also quite the charmer. Y’know, once you’ve smacked him around a bit.

14. What nicknames they call each other:

You honestly struggle to nickname DJ, predominately because, well, DJ is already a nickname. You think. After all, you sincerely doubt anyone would actually name their kid Don’t Join even as a political statement. Really, the fact you don’t know his actual name sort of calls for consideration of how healthy your obviously unhealthy relationship is. But any pleas to learn this asshole’s real name just winds up being like having a namana cream pie shoved in your face, because DJ just turns it all into a joke.

There have been many occasions where DJ would tell you different names he would swear were his own -- often times in the same week! Other times, his claim would be that he’s told you it while you were asleep, or that he once told you but you got conked on the head and forgot it.

Interestingly enough, it’s through these juvenile exploits that he’s earned a bit of a nickname from you: “Bastard”. Just rolls off the tongue, don’t it? To be fair, though, you’re with him for a reason: Even if he may not seem like it, he does have a soft sport for you. Even if it comes out about as smoothly as his features.

In a way, he reminds you of a mutt. A stray mutt. Especially when he shoves his head into your lap after a long day of fucking about and being a menace to whatever society you two decided to hop a ship to.

“You’re like a puppy sometimes, you know that?” you murmur. You scritch into his mess of hair, earning a low growl of contentment from your datemate. He never had to admit it out loud, but your touch clearly did wonders to him. This was evidence by how his already large body began to further sprawl along the couch the ship he’d stolen came with. Yup; just like a puppy. A big, raggedy puppy. Who needs a trip to the refresher as soon as this scritching session was over.

For DJ, on the other hand, nicknames come easily. Honestly, it’s mainly due to how he barely takes anyone or anything seriously: When you don’t concern yourself with all the muddled nonsense of society or wide circles of people, it becomes a whole lot easier to see everyone’s buttons. And considering he was a master slicer, button-pressing was definitely his thing.

Despite the fact that you were a one-in-a-million instance of being someone whom the thief actually trusted and treated with even a modicum of respect, even you weren’t immune to his acts of mockery.

“Mornin’, P-p-pipsqueak,” he’d smirk over a cup of caff, knowing damn well that his advantage of height bothered you sometimes.

“Ea-asy there, k-kitten,” he’d purr whenever your frustration would come boiling to the brim. Things like that.

“Lookie here, dollface,” when he wants to butter you up without losing his stance.

But that doesn’t mean he’s unable to be more affectionate. It’s in there, it’s just . . . in there. The best examples, however, tend to be when the both of you are having downtime and are actually safe somewhere. Or whatever safe could mean when you’re with DJ.

Generally, a jail cell wouldn’t be considered safe. Maybe not unsafe if the only occupants were your boyfriend of ill repute and yourself, but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable. And yet, the way DJ just seemed to laze about in them made you feel unnaturally calm. Well, calmer. It would’ve been nicer if your more-than-capable boyfriend would put those slicing skills of his to use and just busted the both of you out of there, but to DJ, a night in the clink meant at least a few hours of shut eye on a bed.

“B-bes-s-sides: We can alw-w-ways just grab on-e of those f-f-f-floating citadels they g-g-g-got docked out there,” he would reason, making himself comfy on the thin mattress. He had a point, you supposed. And it wasn’t as though you hadn’t been expecting this as a part of your life once you got together with him. Still, you weren’t entirely comfortable joining him on said mattress . . . Maker knows when it had last been washed!

You would be far from the first to consider DJ to be the most observant person, dating or not, but your concern must’ve been rich enough for him to practically sense it: Without hesitating, he sat up just enough to offer you his hand.

“C-come on,” he said. “I need to c-c-c-catch some shut e-e-eye, and it ain’t hap-p-p-penin’ if you’re standing d-d-down there the entire t-time.”

A feeling of mild dread seeped into you, followed by a wet blanket of acceptance. You were going to just spend an hour in the refresher of whatever ship you swept off with. Sighing, you accepted the hand, only for the hold to pull you up not onto the mattress, but directly on top of him!

There was plenty to react to -- the sudden movement, the feeling of being on top of DJ -- but the man himself didn’t seem at all fazed. Instead, he focused primarily on tucking in whatever lagging limbs you had and making sure he was cozy enough to continue serving as your mattress for however many hours he needed to recuperate. Which he apparently was: Not once did he protest to your weight pressing down on him, nor did he grunt with displeasure whenever you turned the direction of your head against his chest.

At the most, he only ever offered your back a brief circle of rubbing with his free hand, the other serving as his pillow, before uttering a drowsy, “You good there, kid?”

And, to your surprise . . . yeah. In spite of everything, yeah, you were pretty good . . .

And yet, interestingly enough, no matter what he calls you, none of that ever measures up to when he calls you by your name. Not pipsqueak, not kitten, not dollface or kid or whatever, but your actual name. Because DJ hardly ever refers to anyone by their actual title, let alone cares to remember it. By not only remembering it, but applying it, it shows you that he does care. It’s deep down -- like, real in there -- but it’s there. And you’re the only non-slicing being in the entire galaxy to have ever cracked that sort of safe.

Wear that badge with pride, Hotshot.

Thanks for your patience on this one! Clearly I had a lot of fun writing it! 💖 💖 . . . May gotta actually start writing for DJ. Maybe.

#dj x reader #star wars dj x reader #dj star wars x reader #star wars x reader #dj imagine #dj imagines #character ship meme #character x reader #character ask meme #regrettablewritings #Star Wars imagine #Star Wars imagines #Me: I saw @seraphinativan at the DJevil's Sacrement #@Seraphinativan: Girl what were YOU doing at the DJevil's Sacrement?#Me: lol u got me

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captainkirbypunch · 4 years ago

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My love has left tumblr once again.

As many of you may know, the account under the name MDZADR, has left tumblr. They felt unsafe in their fandom, and as such have deleted their tumblr and AO3 account due to the bad memories linked to them.

As a part of their departure, they have asked me to post something in their name, as follows.

If you want more details about how I came to this realization, continue to read. If not, here is your summary:

TL;DR: For the safety and health of this fandom, I wanted to spread the word that Mooping-10 is filled with people who absolutely cannot be trusted, creating a very hazardous environment for the zadr community, and MelodyoftheVoid is connected to all of those people, living a double life amongst those of us that don’t “ship zadr correctly.” She has plenty of friends her inner circle knows nothing about, and nobody on either side knows who she really is.

Full story below.

I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. Nobody did anything to me today, but this just wasn’t worth it.

My AO3 and tumblr are both gone. I didn’t say goodbye because I didn’t want to look like an attention seeker.

Here’s the thing. I wasn’t going to name drop, but you guys need to know the truth. I’m instructing my boyfriend (hi y’all) to turn asks off for his own safety after this because this is going to be a nightmare, but... allow me to tell you the full story. I’ll try to break up the text so it’s less difficult to read, but this is important. I’m sorry to air discourse so publicly, but please... I need you to listen to me.

I’ll start from the beginning, without being vague anymore about who “she” is. I request that you please read the whole thing and not skip parts of it. The whole story matters.

I finally returned to the fandom about two months or so ago. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t do well in my thoughts while left alone too long, so I posted saying I would stop messaging people I knew because I didn’t want to bother them. There were only two people I was talking to at the time, but one of them is famous so I didn’t want to message her directly saying that. Doing so would have put her in a position of feeling obligated to say “you’re not bothering me” rather than just simply being able to sigh with relief from no longer being contacted.

But the first person to contact me was the famous person, and she asked if I was okay, and told me she liked talking to me.

God, I actually cried.

But, that’s just her. Melodyofthevoid is the type of person to talk to people in the fandom, totally unaware of her demigod status. She comments on stories, interacts on posts, messages first... a pillar of kindness, so it seemed.

But let the story continue.

Over time, we were talking more often.

Mostly sending memes (cause everyone I knew, myself included, aren’t exactly great at holding conversations. No shade. Memes are a love language). I was still in the hero worship stage of our relationship, so my view of her was that that was perfect.

Now, let me bridge a connection with a new story idea I got around December 28th or so, and my thinking she was perfect.

I had recently finished watching Madoka and questioned “If I had magical powers, what would they be?” It then turned into its own story idea, basing creators’ powers around the strengths and weaknesses in creations. I actually realized “oh fuck. My stuff is incoherent. My friends’ works aren’t too different...”

Thus spawned the name “Incoherent” for the project.

What does that have to do with this? Well, here’s the thing that really fucked everything up quickly.

This was not on purpose, because originally the project (which I had told nobody of yet at the time) was all about improving your works, making platonic friends, dressing our personas in cute outfits, and writing fun magic.

While listening to music and thinking of the story one day, my brain accidentally shipped my persona with hers, and I couldn’t unsee it. And I’m lousy at keeping my own secrets (other’s are different) so she found out on probably day one or two about my weird crush because of an ask meme of all things.

She didn’t try to put me off any, which was another problem for future things to come, and so I decided that since Incoherent was finally making me feel alive again and feeling the euphoric feelings of love wouldn’t hurt anything (I figured they’d mellow out on their own eventually because that’s how infatuation works) since they helped fuel my inspiration, and then we would just continue from friends to better friends one day and this part of our lives would be over.

Besides, the forbidden is attractive somehow, and makes stories more entertaining. She’s aro/ace, so I had no chance anyway. Someone safe to crush on, in her own way.

This isn’t a story of a love betrayal however. There was no such thing. But it’s important to the story because Incoherent is where my mistakes were made, and hers brought to light.

By this time, I had a handful of people I was talking to, and I created a discord server for the project. Only my boyfriend (hi!) and I were in it at the time. I was not-so-subtly asking my friends what they’d look like if they were a magical person, what their names would be... I thought I would have had to lure Melody in to make her want to join us, but I managed to get her in very easily. Everyone was happy and excited! It was a no obligation, no time limit thing for us to enjoy, a little sandbox to play around in.

Sure there were plans to make it bigger and I was working on art to the best of my ability, but it was gonna be a fun thing mostly. No pressure on anyone.

And how things started becoming a problem was that the rest of us posted publicly about the project and interacted with each other’s posts relating to the story, but she had started to interact publicly less and less with our things, and everyone noticed it.

It wasn’t because we were greedy and wanted the popular girl to reblog our things. It’s because we had a feeling she was ashamed of being seen publicly with us. The reason we were worried before then and started making that connection was because I mentioned I was going to ask another user if they were interested in joining Incoherent. Melody was the only one that seemed uncomfortable, and I messaged her asking about it. We agreed I wouldn’t invite that person but I knew things were off about it.

That person is like me. How long until Melody didn’t want to talk to me anymore? A few days ago, the other shoe finally dropped. A member of our little group and I were talking and (let’s call them Friend for simplicity. They asked to not be name dropped here) Friend was worried they had made Melody upset by tagging her in a meme picture they drew of her persona, and the two had agreed that Friend remove the tag. This spawned an anxiety-filled conversation where Friend and I expressed our concerns about Melody not interacting with the project, or us.

So since I wanted reassurance that that wasn’t the case, I messaged Melody with my concerns. I told her I had the feeling she was ashamed of being seen in public with us because of her friends, and she didn’t refute me. She simply told me to go get some rest. I messaged back with “I’m right.”

I deleted Discord off my phone for hours and nearly deleted my Tumblr, AO3, and the server after my boyfriend helped pass messages between us. Melody confessed that was the case because her friends expressed discomfort with my works, and she was playing both sides.

Her words, not mine.

Melody told me she would be withdrawing from the Incoherent project because it wasn’t fair to us if her heart wasn’t in it.

She didn’t stand up on my behalf when they said things about me. Her friends are the type who talk behind creators’ backs for shipping zadr “incorrectly.” Worse than antis because they actually participate in the “pro-shipping” side of the fandom. I broke that day and messaged her at 3 am.

We finally spoke at 3pm. We both missed each other. I tried to understand more. I wanted it to be more like a conversation rather than an interrogation. It was only one-sided however, and she never opened up further. And I made some mistakes and poor choices of words, and we ended up parting ways permanently right there.

I nearly deleted everything, but much like a coma patient attached to many machines on a hospital bed, my blog was kept alive a little longer by people sending kind words in droves. I was briefly fuelled by spite, wishing to watch the world burn by making everyone on the "correct" side of the fandom upset by posting the worst, most vile content this fandom has ever seen.

I was also welcomed with open arms by a very kind server with fellow degenerates, all of them screaming and crying and partying when they managed to get me in their server. It was so heartwarming...

But as I spoke to others about my situation, I realized something. A disturbing pattern.

People telling me horror stories about how Mooping-10 was cult-like. How the people running it were antis. I was even told once that they have a secondary server where they go to have their talks and do their work, likely the place where the real bashing is held.

The server itself has rules against such behavior, but I suppose it's different when they do it.

One person (and this is the most unnerving part for me, personally) told me Melody actually set off alarm bells in their head without having even done anything yet, and the most disturbing part of the story was that one of the moderators was afraid and upset because they got Covid, and received basically no moral support at all. Only getting told "spoiler that. Sorry you got Covid".

I was horrified. That server has 100 people in it. How many of them are the same? They act like popular kids in school who picked up an unpopular main character and then bash others, and the main character joined in because they don't want to be left behind by their new "friends".

To put it short, back to my point:

TL;DR: I simply only wanted to spread the word that: Mooping-10 is filled with people who absolutely cannot be trusted, creating a very hazardous environment for the zadr community, and Melodyofthevoid is connected to all of those people, living a double life amongst those of us that don't "ship zadr correctly". She has plenty of friends her inner circle knows nothing about, and nobody on either side knows who she really is.

#Invader Zim #zadr #tagr #rapr #zagr #mdzadr #MelodyoftheVoid

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sktima · 3 months ago

Text

Well, here I am reblogging a year-old post because it was mentioned to me just now, which means people are still seeing it. Unfortunately, it has enough inaccuracies to warrant a response. I will move the personal/subjective beef the OP has with staff to the end, for those interested in that side of things. For now I just want to talk about the things factually wrong with the post. 1) The moderation team has no authority over card balance. The updates are done by a separate staff branch, fittingly called "Balancers", which do not have any power over chat. A few users are on both teams, but most of them do not overlap. 2) Not all balancers are top players, nor was that the case in 2023. All balancers are certainly good players, but as for "top" - as in at least top 30 in the leaderboard (small game keep in mind) - simply not true. Also, nobody ever had 5 alt accounts in top 10, lmao. 3) Balance team frequently nerfs their own decks. As a "top player", I personally suggest changes to key pieces of at least one of my decks almost every season. The notion that the team buffs their own decks every patch is blatantly false, further made clear by the fact the ranked meta - and so, the decks used by "top players" - changes monthly. 4) Sniping is an actual issue, though it is not really caused by spectating, but rather just by the game being small enough you can reliably match certain players in top ranks at certain times of day. This brings me to the point about moderators sniping people. Fortunately, most moderators have something that prevents them from ever sniping anyone, and that something is called Skill Issue. As I said, this practice only works at the very top, where there are few enough players, and chat moderation... simply isn't that good.

5) The case where a staff member called a user's religion "garbage". Oh boy. While this is indeed unprofessional, there's a lot of context missing from that one. The staff member in question is a transgender individual, while the user in question was banned for what is perhaps the most adamant and hopeless display of transphobia in the Undercards community. Harassment (including towards said staff member in particular), death threats, and all. This user justified the behavior via their religion. Cue some less than professional treatment. To be clear, I am not justifying this - not from a mod team member. However, I do believe that the context here is practically required, and omitting it is an exercise in bad faith (kill me). 6) New ranks could not make gains/losses "disproportionate". The reason? Undercards uses a pure elo system. The gain/loss is almost always the same, bar a few safety thresholds in lower ranks. Reason for the change? Legend, the game's top rank, was so easy to get that most intermediate/advanced players stopped playing ranked way before a season ended, leaving the rest in a much shallower pool. We made the climb harder, but the new rank equivalent to Old!Legend kept its Old!Legend rewards, and it was only up from there. We also made people unable to lose Legend rank once they got it, so people wouldn't just stop out of that fear. Overall, the ranked update had overwhelmingly positive reception.

------------ Overall, a lot of this post is unfortunately misinformed. But I did skip over the personal "call-out" stuff, which is what this claims to be - a call-out post. This part is a bit more subjective, but I still feel the need to include it for people who might come across this to have an actual representation of how the community is. First is the issue of "other discord servers" having Undercards' reputation as a generally toxic place. Unfortunately, this was somewhat true - back when the game was at its peak due to youtubers deciding they wanna play it, the moderation was... Well, we had one of the guys in charge of GLITCHTALE discord in staff, and that wasn't even the worst. This has long since been fixed. As for myself, the notion that I "only use the chat to mock people or complain" is verifiably false. We have an easily accessible log of all chat messages in the game since 2020. I've also literally never said the string of letters "whining little kid", which is something the OP put in quotation marks. The existence of chat log is widely known in the community and makes the "speaking out against mods during low activity hours" thing inefficient - we will find you anyway. YT stuff is out of context and is under a video talking about a specific group of people, rather than "the playerbase" as the OP claims.

However, I will not defend the staff team or myself further here. You can dislike me or anyone else, and that's perfectly fine and valid with me. While I'm aware that there are some people who don't like me or others on staff, I am also aware that there are more people who feel the opposite way. Otherwise, we'd all be out - the community has quite an epic history of revolting against corrupt moderation.

Also, Undertale Yellow is in Undercards (with creators' approval of course!). You should check it out if you read this far.

The absolute state of Undercards

This isn't the kind of post i usually make, but well, theorists can make call out posts too. And regarding this topic, it seems that no one else is going to do it if i don't so...

I need to talk about Undercards. And particularly what's been going on behind the scenes in this fangame & its community and that it seems no one wants to speak up about. I've been thinking of doing this for a while and at this point i think i should just go ahead and explain it.

Okay, before we get into the controversy, i'll present the game a little bit for those who haven't heard of it. (And for those who don't care about this part, just scroll down a little bit until the next bold text.)

Undercards is an online multiplayer Undertale/Deltarune fangame which is basically just Yu-gi-oh or Hearthstone, except that cards, spells and such are all Undertale & Deltarune themed. It was popularised a few years ago mostly by youtuber Merg.

The gameplay looks something like this :

This game has a bit of a Gacha side, but it is entirely possible for any new FTP player to climb the ranks quite quickly or to obtain anything a P2W player could obtain somewhat easily, making it not unfair in that regard.

The game has an entertaining mastery curve and progress in ranked leagues (the main part of the game) is primarly decided by improvements in one's strategy regarding synergy of your deck, artifacts & soul, which are all to be chosen by the player to get the best chance at victory.

So, this all sounds like a pretty neat fangame, doesn't it ? So what's wrong ? What is the point of this post about ?

The issues

Whilst the game itself can indeed be quite fun, there exists a very serious problem regarding its community, and particularly its moderation team which sabotages its own game.

I'll start with some of the more minor issues before moving on to more important ones. I will also mention that i will not cover personal experiences (as much as i want to) and rather focus on larger trends to avoid biases or fallacious generalisations of individual cases.

The balance bias

The game has a very severe balance issue, which is nearly entirely caused by the moderators serving their own interests over that of the game.

Because here is the thing :

Many of the moderators (and by that i mean, the ones who's opinions seriously count for the balancing, really) are also the game's top players.

This game not only has greater rewards for achieving higher ranks every month, but even beyond the highest rank, it also has a live public leaderboard of the top players of each month.

However, if you check the monthly rankings of the game in any given season, the top spots are practically entirely monopolised by the moderators and by the alternative accounts of the moderators. (Some have had up to 5 accounts at once)

In other words, those who decide which cards should be buffed or nerfed are also the same people who will benefit or suffer from rebalancing their own cards, or know what tiny change to make to a card to suddenly make it very valuable in their specific decks.

This leads to some pretty silly situations, such as moderators buffing cards that genuinely deserved to be nerfed to secure their own interests. Or, on the other side of the issue, there are regularly cases where 9 out of the top 10 players all use the same clearly overpowered card in all of their decks, but the moderators will continue to deny that the card needs to be nerfed, because they do not want to have to nerf their own decks.

These things are all still happening, and they have been for years.

Because, well, they are the moderators, they have the authority and some of them have been here for up to 7 years, who is going to monitor them ?

After all, moderators are the law, they can do no wrong, right ?

Moderator incompetence and toxicity.

See, the team isn't just biased, they are also frankly incompetent at handling their own game in a facepalm-inducing manner.

For instance, remember how the main entertaining thing about this game was the strategy aspect of how to select your cards, artifacts and soul in order to get the best possible deck you can create and use it to make progress ?

Well, the game also has a spectating function. Which isn't a bad idea at all in itself. But it does have some major issues, like deck copying.

It is extremely easy for anyone to spectate the games of a very high rated player, and simply note down all the cards they play until you have their whole deck figured out. After this, you can easily copy it, and just play with this stronger person's deck and rank up that way, skipping what is quite literally the main interest of Undercards.

Not only does this ruin a large portion of the point of the game for the person that does it, but the more people do it, the more everyone everywhere starts running around using copies of the same few decks and making the game incredibly blend for everyone else overall as the thousands of possible way to make interesting decks slowly get reduced to no more than a dozen considered "viable" possible decks as you climb up the ranks.

...So what did the Undercards team do about this ?

...They created a hub menu where you can publish and downloads decks.

Yes, this is completely counter-productive.

Yes, this means that anyone can publish any deck for any player to find and use, they don't even need to copy the deck, it does that for them automatically.

Yes, this means that someone else can spectate your games, note down your deck, and publish it online for everyone to see, copy, or specifically prepare counters for. And they do.

Not only has the team not fixed those issues, but they have added features to make things more convenient for the perpetrators. They are actively encouraging people to be copycats and anti-fairplay, severely damaging their game's main strength on the way.

Oh, talking about stalking people and anti-fairplay...

The spectate feature has another massive problem : Sniping.

See, a game in Undercards lasts around 5 minutes & involves just two players, and there is rarely more than a couple dozen games going on at the same time. The game also has a very large matchmaking pool, meaning that you can pretty easily be paired against somebody considerably higher rated than yourself.

What this all means is that, by spectating somebody and then entering the playing queue right after this person's game ends, it is very easy to purposely stalk somebody in order to have a match against this particular person.

So, not only can someone stalk you and post your decks and/or strategies online, but anyone even much lower rated than you can look at it, build a counter deck that exists specifically to crush your particular deck, and then stalk you to repeatedly beat you and leech off your rank points.

And there is absolutely nothing that you can do about this.

The only solution is to log off and come back online when the sniper won't be present, or stalk the person back yourself to make sure you only launch games when you know they are already playing and can't be waiting for you, which is quite tiring.

Okay, well what did the team so about that one, then ? Surely even they wouldn't like the idea of being sniped, right ?

Heh... Well, its a bit trickier.

Officially, the practice is not allowed and a couple of them are actually against it. But in practice, most of them actually do not care, for the simple reason that part of them are guilty of doing such things themselves, and simply only take action when someones tries to do it back against them.

In fact, while i actually do not actually have proof for that one, i do also suspect that at least part of the moderators who have several accounts decide on which account they're going to play at a given time by checking which other players are online right now, and picking a deck/account accordingly for easier wins.

Their crappy behavior does not stop at only in-game things, though.

For instance, one person brought up to me that members of the staff have called his religion "garbage". Which needless to say, is extremely inappropriate and disrespectful.

Beyond being scummy, the team also just doesn't know how to handle their player base in general. For example, not so long ago, they shot themselves in the foot by creating two new ranks despite the fact that their player base was already too low to fill up the many ranks they already had. This means stretching up the rank differences between the players, which makes rank gain/loss disproportionate compared to one's actual current level and renders progression even more frustrating for medium level players, as well as generalising higher differences between players for matchmaking, which thus makes all the previously mentioned problems like sniping even worse. (All of that just to make things feel a bit more comfortable for those at the very top like the mods, who won't have to match with lower rated players as much.)

There could still be a couple more things for me to say, but i think the picture is already fairly clear. The team is purposely throwing the quality of their own game under the bus for little more reason than to stroke their ego by seeing their own names at the top of their leaderboards and overall just don't make very good decisions for their game even outside of all that.

Okay, but that was a whole lot of speaking, now how about i give an actual direct example of what the situation is currently like ?

Consider the existence of a user named "Sktima".

Skitma plays the game every day, but practically only ever uses the public chat to either :

Trash talk his opponents either during a game or after a loss.

Complain about the game's RNG, calling it "rigged" or "scripted".

Condescendingly mock and talk down on players rated below 2200 ELO (that is, over 98% of players) for being bad at the game.

If ever called out on this behavior, Sktima will infantilise the whistleblower, calling them a "whining little kid" or similar term before painting them as the bad guy instead, and attempting to bully them into leaving the chat. (and holding grudges against them later on, too.)

All the while, of course, being arrogantly mocking and acting like he considers himself as superior to others.

The question is : How long do you think it took for this player to be banned ?

I encourage you to think about this for a second, before continuing to read.

...

...Okay, have you made your guess yet ?

Well, it was a trick question..

Sktima was never banned at all, for the very simple reason that Sktima is a part of the moderation team.

He even has a YT, too. And it kinda speaks for itself, honestly.

For those interested, here are a couple extracts from a conversation he had in the comments with somebody pointing out that with the size of that community, issues like sniping or hand peeking (another big problem i didn't bring up caused by another bad feature that allows you to directly see the opponent's hand with another tab via the in-game friend option) were bound to happen with the way the mod team handled some features.

Be warned, a good amount of rudeness as well as lying & manipulating to try and turn the situation backwards...

Im not going to analyse or detail more any of that nor point out some of the blatant irony in this conversation, but what i will bring up is that throughout all this, they've made their stance rather clear :

None of this is the fault of the moderator team, they consider that only the player base itself is to blame for the current state of the game, not them.

The underground status.

The thing is, a lot of players aren't oblivious to this, but won't speak a word when staff is present.

In just a couple weeks for instance, at least three separate users have admitted in the chats they thought Sktima was insufferable, including one which claimed he was "the most toxic person on the site." But all this was only at low activity times when the team members were offline.

This was even more obvious on discord, where the only results you could find when searching for "Undercards" in the history of other Undertale/Deltarune related discord servers were people complaining about how toxic the Undercards staff was.

People frequently complain about a lot of the previously mentioned gameplay issues like sniping, but it seems nobody dares to speak up about the actual responsibles, likely due to their position of power and because they consider it as a fait accompli.

Undercards is a great game with has the potential to be very fun, but it and its community are practically being held hostage by the game's staff, and yet it seems the community has just given up on itself and mostly accepted this unfair status quo. This kind of thing shouldn't be allowed to continue.

#undercards #undertale #deltarune #undertale yellow

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selfships-in-spanish · 5 years ago

Text

A lengthy response to big accusations that were made of me

Hello everyone.

I’ve been forwarded screenshots of a certain person calling me out publicly after receiving an ask asking specifically about me. And well, the another one with a more meaner message, from them both. So much for no anon hate huh. But since this person (and I won’t mention names) has me blocked, I am literally unable to even defend myself from their accusations. And they made heavy ones with words that shouldn’t be used this lightly.

I decided to make a lengthy response with my own “version” of the events, so before judging me you can also have more info about this issue, about “the other side”. They may not want to stir the pot or create drama, but they did when they decided to say they hold the absolute truth to this and to reconsider if you should follow me without giving me a chance to explain my own side of the argument.

Well, that and openly insulting me. Welp.

I will attach the few screenshots I was able to gather to prove my points. The pictures attached will have a number so you can know what it references. Sadly I do not have more, but I hope those will suffice.

To be honest, this only shows me how they never actually cared about how I felt, even when we were friends. It’s easier to pin everything that went wrong in a friendship to the other side than to listen and recognise what you didn’t do well.

After our argument, I never posted anything related to them, insulting them or nothing of the sort. No tweets, no tumblr posts, nothing. This was something between us two, so I just let the issue die since I didn’t want anyone getting even more hurt because of two adults were unable to fix at the moment. I must admit I thought about contacting them, because I do recognise I worded my thoughts very wrong and I was hurtful and spiteful. I am not proud of that and of what I did and I am sorry for it. I was in a bad place and I directed my anger to them, took it out towards someone, and that is something one must never do. I am deeply sorry for that and I am working on correcting it because I don’t want that to happen ever again.

I recognise the wrong I did. But, as I said, I’m blocked everywhere, so I am unable to contact this person to even say this or talk it out like two civilized humans. I guess it’s better to make a public post and point fingers at me.

But, I’ve been accused of racism, of lying, of misleading and making them give me money, of grooming and corrupting minors, of ostracising people, creating servers, making myself pass as a woc… and I’ve never been more shocked to read all that with my own eyes than I am right now. Because all those accusations, what they say, the intention, is to cut any wings me or my art may have on this site. Art is my livelihood, and by throwing such heavy implications mean losing people, and we all know what that means when you are creative. Cancel culture doesn’t leave room for one to defend themselves, it’s easier to attack, to “consider who you give your support to.” Did I ever go after their head like this? I didn’t, because I am not that kind of person.

Right now I’ve been painted as some heartless monster. When I first started talking out with them, I was intimidated for sure; they were way more popular, got along with the “cool fandom cats” and I was (and still am) a nobody enjoying her little corner with her OC and bazillion AUs people enjoy. I knew they were very vocal with social issues and I was honestly glad that there were people being loud enough for others to hear, but when that was their whole life, that EVERYTHING had to do with social justice, every second spent with them was that same issue, it drained me down. My life was a mess, I was a mess, I was struggling with so many stuff that in that moment I didn’t need a person constantly telling me I was the fucking worst and a demon for almost anything I did or said. I couldn’t speak, my reasonings didn’t hold any importance because I was a white girl. I understood, even if it seems they do not think so, I understood why they were doing it, where they come from, but some days when you are struggling to even keep yourself alive, it was all too much. Being accused of being a racist is A Big accusation and something that shouldn’t be thrown to somebody’s face this lightly.

I do understand that I come from the privilege of being born with white skin. We are in a society, culture and education system that reinforces the racist behaviour, but it is also something us all are fighting against. We are not okay with racism, we want racism to end and that starts with acknowledging your own privileged ass. And I do, my boyfriend got stopped more than once in airports because he has tan skin and brown hair, easily mistaken for someone from middle east in the eyes of an ignorant. I do know it, but making me a monster doesn’t help it. Being constantly told that you are white scum (actual words if I recall correctly), aggressive tweets telling that all white people are vile and shouldn't be allowed anything, doesn’t help (1). I know what it sounds like, but becoming what you are fighting against only makes you become a bully yourself. I will always try to use my privilege to give poc a voice for them to speak and make their issues known. I’m still learning, I’m still unlearning what our society and culture has grinded down on us, but I’m making the effort to not be a white racist cunt like society expects me to.

I come from people who have been oppressed. Spain has a history of oppressing anyone on their path (colonialism, anyone?), and my people were part of it. We still cry for our freedom, and my grandfather and parents can vividly remember and tell you of how the Facist Spanish government would come in the night, take people and execute them to god knows where, because we still don’t know where our dead are. Until recently, Spain still had the fascist dictator in a mausoleum where people could come to pay homage to! Our culture, our language… everything was prohibited and on the verge of being wiped out from earth. So yes, I understood what struggles can other cultures and people face. Not the wholeness of it, because of course there are differences, but I can understand to a certain degree.

Does this mean I hate ALL spaniards because some do hate us catalans for who we are and where we come from? Absolutely not. So how could they say that because of me they hate all white women? Why do you make me the sole cause of your internalised problems? What about your white friends? You hate them too? Learn. Grow.

So, when they accuse me of lying about being woc, of not correcting them and misleading them when they thought Spain was full of poc people, when I explicitly said in more than one occasion, that I am NOT a woc, I am a spanish white girl and that Spain is in Europe, I was truly shocked to read that with my own eyes. If your educational system failed so bad on you, don’t accuse me of it. We all have google and we all can look where X country is placed. So I’m genuinely baffled that someone is pointing fingers at me for not correcting them and making themselves the victim when I did correct them. If they listened or not, is another matter. If they assumed something and expected me to know they assumed it… how would I even know?

I have never created a discord server in my whole life. I joined one (we all got those never-ending lists of discord servers you joined), but never created it. If people created one aside the previous discord where me and the person were in, that must be for some reason. Or not at all! Maybe some people get along better and decide to have their own chat so they don’t clog or make the other server members feel bad or weird. But, putting me as the whole “ringleader” of this all? Do you seriously think I got that kind of power over people? I’m a fucking nobody! I made some friends, true, but never ever encouraged them to do anything or obligated them to follow me. On the contrary, I joined other people. I never did anything of the sort! I got other friends besides this person, many other internet friends where we share discords, but I never created or instigated anything. In fact, I’m quite the opposite, I always lurk in the shadows minding my own damn business and not raining on anyone’s parade.

And linking on the whole discord servers, corruption of minors and grooming. How sick do you have to be to accuse me of that? Are you even conscious of what an accusation you are making? Understand what an uncomfortable position you are putting me in, of having to defend myself from those accusations, whether the claim is true or not. It’s a very heavy one to make and forces the accused party to go defensive, like it or not. You publicly said I’m a groomer as someone says it’s a sunny day. Just, what the hell is wrong with you?

Who is that minor? Where is that NSFW art you claim? Because I do not recall any NSFW art being gifted at me from a frigging’ minor. The only person I’m thinking about never, ever, drew NSFW. Ever. And the only person who did draw a NSFW picture of Ona and Connor, was a friend who was an adult. Also, when will you stop putting words in my mouth I didn’t say? Is it just to justify your anger towards me and keep painting myself as the heartless cunt and you the poor victim?

We never forced any NSFW content on those minors the person says, and the person who accuses me of this, even created a 18+ channel where all minors were excluded. But before that? That discord didn’t have one and spilled the NSFW on the general chat. Even the accuser spilled NSFW on a channel where a minor was present, but god forbid! I am the corrupting one! We only talked NSFW stuff in there dedicated 18+ channel and I don’t recall actively participating in it.

And, if we all recall it also, because I’m sure all of us who were in the discord do, there were mods there to prevent and do what their name says, moderate a chat. But instead of that, when one of us who talked about something NSFW in the general chat, the mod came over and said something along the lines of “i’m in public i don’t want to see nsfw when i enter the gen chat”. Then left.

1) It’s on the mod to keep NSFW things in the NSFW chat, and if they feel they need to enforce the rule with an iron fist, they do it. Instead said mod just moaned about it and did absolutely nothing. The affected parties apologised and made a conscious effort to keep the NSFW in its rightful place. Sometimes you may get carried away in a conversation and realise too late it was in the wrong place. It happens, you apologise and transfer the comments or continue the conversation in the right channel, deleting the old comments.

2) Said mod is unable to handle stressful situations, and when there’s a feud between users in the discord server, the mod decides to leave the discord for days, leaving the issue unattended.

Everyone has their right to self-care, but being a mod means you have to deal with such situations. If you are not fit, say so and there will be someone else to do it. No worries. But don’t come to complain about certain people behind their backs and face the issues.

Why am I the sole target of this, when in this case we were all to blame? Including the person who is targeting me in their call-out post, even more when they also talked about NSFW in the general chat, but the mod did not complain about it. Guess why? Because they were best friends. Which is another point to this all. The blatant favouritism in the discord chat.

As I said more than once already, it is totally okay to get along better with other people, it is natural and not something to fret over, but when your “getting along” means disregarding some people and only blindly listening and waiting for said people to follow your every whim? How they are able to hide their heads under their wings instead of facing the issues, even more when people are getting hurt by it? I’m not speaking for myself this time, but for people who was in there and left the server. It was there, they knew the favouritism over some people, and chose to ignore the damage they were doing by tearing the discord apart in two sections.

But, don’t you realise, person who is accusing me, what you just accused me of? The implications in it? For heaven’s sake, I even told this person about how my ex best friend was fucking a goddamn minor and I told her to rethink her whole fucking life. I was disgusted by it, talked several times with her to discourage her from doing that and even seek help, but instead she crossed me out from her life and demonised me. I am fucking disgusted. So, someone accusing me of such things, even knowing part of my past and life…?

How fucking dare you?

Also, how fucking dare you LIE about giving me a website? Paying for it? This person never did. I was planning on it on my own, when I got a job where I could pay for one, but they never once in their life bought me a website. They offered it? Surely, but I never told them to yes, pay for it right now. I always feel so fucking bad when people buy me stuff or give me money, and I never wanted them to do so under any obligation. And they never did, never explicitly told them so. A website was an objective I had as an artist, an illustrator, and I voiced such objectives with them as you would talk about your ambitions to a friend. But I guess I was wrong and they took it as ammunition to throw shade at me. But they did not buy it and I did not explicitly ask her to buy me one. Period.

And keeping on the money topic, they did donate money on my kofi, I think it was 9$ or 10$? I can’t remember right now, but you can look at the message if you’d like. But how sick and wicked do you have to be to emotionally BLACKMAIL people because you were such a saint and donated to someone who didn’t have a job at the time and was struggling in paying anything? How can you boast about how you donated money to someone who was in need of it, and then expect “I’m a good person points” for it? You donate to someone or something because you believe in them or the cause, because you genuinely want to help someone, but not to use it later to make the person you donated to feel bad after an argument. That is something seriously shitty to do. If I’ve donated money, I don’t expect eternal gratitude or the person I gave money to swear their loyalty to me. They are not in my debt. I gave them my money because I wanted to. I wasn’t expecting anything in return.

They talk about ostracising them, but in fact, it’s quite the other way. They created their own clique, which okay, it is fine, as I said earlier, everyone gets along better with some other people and that is fine. But when it gets to the point where the only important voices, the only ones that matter, are the ones in your own clique, and that any other voice who disagrees gets thrown under a bus? They said they supported everyone in the discord chat, but truth be told, they only supported what interested them.

They talk about the Notre Dame cathedral burning (2). I will speak for myself, but I was angry that they celebrated the burning of an artistic reference of a certain architectural style, a true exponent of it. I was angry because art was burning, and I was as angry and deeply saddened when the National Brazilian Museum burned too, because countless of art and knowledge of civilizations that were long gone were burned, to never be known again. You cannot celebrate the burning of art and culture, no matter where it comes from, and even less when you got a friend who is also deeply rooted to France itself. No “oopsie daises” will fix the fact that you said you were happy the cathedral burned down in front of a french person who was mourning the loss of a symbol of his culture.

But, as soon as those of us who got offended voiced those feelings, their excuse was that “it was just a joke”, which they also like to exclaim is an abuser and bigot tactic. How can you joke about that? Even more knowing that you got Europeans and even French people in your discord? How little do you regard your supposed friends feelings?

For example: someone says something racist, then people get mad. Then the person who said the racist thing defends themselves by saying it was just a joke.

Perplexing, right?

I just got one question for you. Did you ever think about how me, about how we all felt, when we also told you multiple times we weren’t liking where you were going? When we tried to talk to you about such issues, and you just lectured people instead of listening, trying to cover your ass? How many times we tried to fix everything up? Because we all make mistakes, we all think we have the absolute truth, but sometimes we don’t and it takes a great deal of willpower to apologise for those. It wasn’t that hard to get off the high horse and listen. If your white friends are hurt by you, stop and think as to why, instead of saying “good”. They are supposedly your friends, not your enemies. I told you you were becoming what you fought against for.

I was aggressive, I was angry, I was rude. And I do want to apologise to you for handling my feelings wrong. But you never gave me a chance, even less listen to a white spanish girl who you thought was a poc because you assumed things when I said in more than one occasion that I was European and Spanish and white. You jumped to the train when you saw a non-pasty white OC in the community. You yourself told me you were happy and gleeful to see my OC, which made me happy that it brought you joy. And now? Were those all lies? You lied to me for what purpose? What did you gain in getting close to me, as far as you saying two peas in a pod, to now disregard all that, thrash talk about my art, my OC whom you LOVED and praised, just because you’re hurt and angry at me and never, ever, dared to come after me in private, even if it was to yell at me? Never took my own feelings in mind because I was a white girl and thus I do not deserve empathy at all? And after a goddamn year?

But I guess it’s easier to paint me as a monster in public than try to talk things out, knowing where you could find me. Also it’s easier to accuse people of your problems than seeking out help to solve them. I admit I was immature in my execution of wording out my feelings, but that does not invalidate me or discredit me or the reasons pointed out. And it also doesn’t give you enough reason to call me a cunt publicly, besides more insults and truly hurtful things to my integrity and self. I thought better of you, but I guess you disappointed me on that, too.

Any of you who read this, first of all THANK YOU for sticking for so long. Feel free to do as you please. I only felt I had to at least try to defend myself from such hard and hurtful accusations, even more when I have no room to do so besides writing this out and hope it reaches their hands, in case anyone who wonders what is going on has another pieze of this puzzle. This is a direct attack to me, saying my name and also encouraging people to reconsider if they should be following me, telling my followers what they should do. What are you afraid of, accuser? I never once in my life told people to stop following them because of what little feud we might have. It was between them and me, and they didn’t care to solve it either, letting themselves fester in their hurt feelings instead of talking to me about them or moving on as I did.

Thank you for reading so far, and also thank you for the support you have all given me after all this time. It truly means so much to me that you decided to stick out here with me. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Have a good day.

SCREENSHOTS:

(1)

(2)

#discourse #personal #mius speaks

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blumenct · 4 years ago

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i guess no one from that community can see me here lol so here’s some fun stuff about a streamer that i’ve experienced the past year

so i started following the former vinesauce streamer j*****i_m**e a little over a year ago and subbed a bit after. person i found amusing and played things that appealed to me. joined the discord community and made friends and became a regular myself.

and you know, white 30-something new yorker, nothing standout or marginal about him. had a funny voice and was crude but like that was the appeal. being vinesauce-derivative is also a plus. very shitposty atmosphere it was nice. he attracted a lot of stick-in-the-mud types though, which was really super bizarre for said shitposty atmosphere. a big lgbtq crowd though. pretty wide age demo too.

anyway, little discomfort things happen over time. i recall a thing happening during stream that got chat to chant “eat the rich” and he didn’t like that because he “doesn’t advocate violence.” which for any thinking person is offputting. and possibly the worst timing of all, right at the peak of the george floyd protests he was playing sonic adventure 2, which involved a sequence where you’re chased by police. cue the acab’s and blm’s and whatnot in chat by people who were already heated. he said he didn’t want any of that because he had family who were cops. so at this point i’m like okay, yikes, i need to prepare to distance.

not long after was a stream where the topic of the military recruitment twitch crap came up. lots of disgruntled anti-military sentiment in chat of course, because again, this dude attracts a lot of marginalized people for an audience, and again he wasn’t having it. family and all that. this reached levels of hypocrisy when the topic switched to those high school army recruiters which he revealed he didn’t know was “serious” and didn’t believe was something they could do. people were quick to point out that, yes, they recruit children.

so as you can imagine it was a very “no politics” sort of environment, except the kind that plays so centrist it allows harmful rhetoric. classic.

the streamer in question was also weirdly bad with technology. he left the discord in the hands of his mods, very rarely appearing to speak in the server. maybe a dozen messages a month if you’re lucky enough to see them. normal interactions on twitter but he just could not bother to understand discord.

around that time one of the community regulars stopped showing up because she was 16, which everyone knew, and the streamers realizes he needs to enforce age policy. thing is, she was a very important part of the community, often running these streams from behind the scenes by helping with guides and emulations and junk. girl less than half his age being an important player like that felt scummy. she’s apparently got no hard feelings but wanted him to apologize for something, i have no idea. her being black and outspoken about blm makes it feel more and more not okay.

the streamer at one point made an announcement that there was some “creep” stuff going on that he was trying to prevent. there’s no way of knowing who precisely was involved but as of recent events having people air grievances it may have been her. allegedly part of the reason this lady was barred from the community was very intentionally the streamer distancing himself from the situation.

so this all culminates in something a couple days ago. the server has a /all ping announcing a new rule, that voice chat and streaming on the server is no longer allowed. and this really riled people up. the final say was that it was very difficult to moderate people streaming, was reasonable, but it was kind of ass we couldn’t have jackbox or among us sessions in our own community anymore.

but this REALLY riled people up. you had lurkers and new people coming out of the woodwork to defend the decision, but a lot of more regular people used this as an opportunity to complain about the community as a whole. this included a couple people mentioning how they barely watched the content on twitch or youtube. some of them weren’t even huge fans anymore, but they enjoyed the community and the friends they made.

so from on high comes the streamer and

he didn’t like that.

a complete failure to comprehend why anyone would want to stick around even if they didn’t like him. the tone was alarming and people were bothered by it and it riled everyone up more. someone posted a big paragraph mentioning stuff i’ve said above, cited them as bigoted behavior and cherry-picking political topics to allow. another doubled down saying that they weren’t into the content, and mysteriously they vanished from the server. a mod assured us they left on their own but minutes later the streamer confirms they were banned. again this was alarming.

and the thing was, despite my discontent with the situation, i was sitting on the fringes and shitposting about it in tried and true fashion. i felt attacked and was afraid to say anything damning, but i realized, i wasn’t totally participating in the discussion? these were other people completely independently feeling these things and venting. it made me see that i wasn’t crazy.

now i have a few friends i met through the community who had left a while back, so i also knew these problems existed in many forms. stuff regarding transphobia and obvious hypocrisies.

so the streamer and mods say that if anyone is spreading shit and bad worth of mouth to report it so they can get banned. the word “purge” is used. people i’ve never seen post on the discord applaud it and others are uncomfortable. i saw a couple announce themselves leaving and another couple disappearing. i received messages from friends who wanted to be in contact in case anything happened, and i dm’d a couple myself.

this morning you can feel it’s a bit tense because the people posting are different. there’s still discussion of the streamer being a stressed and anxious guy and his yelling at people is just how he interacts. i make a dry comment about most 35-year old men seeking therapy instead which i don’t believe anyone liked but hey. later this evening i found i’m banned from the server, like 6 hours after saying that or anything at all. gives you the impression they’re laboring over these ban decisions or it’s a more sweeping purge.

so, good riddance i guess. i was figuring out how best to leave, maybe tell anyone who wants to talk that they can approach me, but that won’t happen. i’m glad i got the few like-minded people i have because they’re good people. sometimes expressing solidarity can open doors you wouldn’t normally come to, and i’m happy some members of the community felt they could come to me.

yeah i would avoid the stream and its community if possible because i don’t see it improving, just sweeping potentially dangerous problems under the rug.

by some incredible circumstance i don’t think anyone involved in that community, friend or foe, interacts with my tumblr to any degree. i’m mainly looking to vent so i knew i could vomit out paragraphs here. if by chance you are part of that community and find this, well, i’d prefer you bring it up with me if this affects you at all. i am not doing this as a confrontation or call-out which is why i censor his name so heavily but leave it open. it’s a posthumous thing. a journal entry even.

#drama #personal

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sarcasticidi9t · 5 months ago

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you gotta understand. none of the ccs ever expected the batshit insane amount of attention the dsmp got, and its much more deeper then "clout."

it started off as a regular smp, to a roleplaying one, and then eventually it reached a point where the viewers treated it SO seriously that alot of ccs felt like they couldnt log on if they werent roleplaying or doing something big. i remember puffy used to do pranks sometimes, but stopped because she messed with an item/building of tommys and EVERYONE lashed out on her. do you know how much hate niki got for literally just being there? the existence of "theres only one main plot and everything else are side gigs that dont really matter" destroyed the servers creativity. and whats upsetting is that i think i remember eret saying how some ccs wanted to do lore, but never were able to because either it would disrupt the main storyline, it would in roleplay damage something important or "historical," or straight up just lack of communication.

there were also other factors that made dsmp infamous. like how dream would just. constantly start up/get into some random twitter drama every single week, and then apologize, only to repeat the exact same mistakes again. i used to be a fan of the dreamteam, but i lost all of my fucking patience after two years of no improvement.

chats werent well moderated, but how could you even handle chat with that large of a viewership? tommy was averaging 200K. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND. that still is unbelievable to me to this day 😭

so much babying, backseat gaming, spam, and ooo boy the trauma dumping was insane. particularly in philza and badboyhalo streams.

the ccs did their best to make a story and have their characters do cool shit. its unfair to literally blame the server dying on them. it was also literally the middle of quarantine. not very happy times.

everything and more, along with just a general lost of interest both on the cc and the fandoms part, was what killed off the server. the passing of techno was the nail in the coffin for the fandom and the ccs.

its super understandable that most dont really talk about it, or sometimes make jokes on what a terrible server it was. but yeah like you literally quoted phil saying how he hated dsmp only to say it was fun. it wasnt a perfect server, and i am also upset at how things ended because dsmp was something that got me through my worst moments in life, but its extremely unfair to blame the ccs.

i had extremely mixed feelings about dsmp after everything thats happened (dreams shitshow, georges literal fucking crimes, sapnaps shit personality, the WHOLE wilbur soot shitshow and also actual crimes) but that day tommy streamed with technodad to revisit old worlds of the dsmp, and how it was viewed through a nostalgic and a drama free lens, made me realize. i really did enjoy that crazy server, and i still love it present day. what tommy said at the end of the stream was exactly what i and alot of people needed to hear.

how the dsmp isnt about the ccs, but its about the story and characters in it, and how theres no shame in enjoying something like that. its also about keeping technos legacy alive.

we should all listen to what tommy said tbh. i wish more people did.

This is a bit of a rant. Something that feels so wrong to me on twitter is the fact that people genuinely think that the end of the dsmp meant the end of anything related to the series, when the dsmp ended people left because of their own personal issues and feelings. The fans moved on and then the stories that could have happened were lost. Think about the stories that because of the fandom’s response to even seeing dsmp, were lost. I think back to how when Ponk expressed interest in doing projects on the dsmp, her fans fucking freaked, thusly they stopped any mention of a new dsmp project.

The DSMP isn’t lost media because of lost streams or lack of content, it’s lost media because the streamers never came back to something that they enjoyed doing.

I think of the creators who actually credit their time in the dsmp as a way to grow their audience and now don’t mention it because it’s not a project that is still happening. I think of Eret just occasionally talking about the fun they had on the server, what their plans for their story and them actually acknowledge the existence of their time on the dsmp. Fundy had an interview a few months back and he fully acknowledged that he used clickbait to make it in the mcyt bubble. There are former dsmp creators who acknowledge, express admiration for being on the project and then leave it be. They are few and far between.

More and more I see creators who were in the space are stupidly trying to get the high of 2020-2022. Trying to get to those extreme heights and now they figure that dissing the dsmp as it’s no longer ‘cool’ and ‘popular’ to have any positive thoughts on it. Philza in particular is the one that comes to mind with the ‘i’d rather gauge my eyes out then ever go back the dsmp’ comment which he later went back on like ‘oh I actually had a good time’. I never have appreciated any of the comments considering my favorite person from the dsmp often talked about how much he enjoyed playing on it. How he died not thinking he wouldn’t be able to finish his storyline but he did. The storyline he started became buried in the sands of the dsmp.

Techno’s legacy as a member of the dsmp is one that had a great impact on so many people who now don’t even have that. The creators who decided clout was worth more than being able to be able to communicate with each other.

Complain all you want about Dream’s ‘lack of communication’ but it seems now knowing about the fuck show that has been about any fucking drama that has happened in the past year, everyone of these fuckers can’t fucking communicate.

Now creator want come back pretending to have enjoyed the project and now their fans are being annoying about how much they thought it ‘could have been so much better if x,y,z’ and really it’s their creator’s fault. It’s their own fault for not just realizing that they may have not actually enjoyed the dsmp. The fans are the reason the dsmp was dead. Because to dteam+munchymc fans we desperately miss the dsmp. Techno fans do too. The fans of the dsmp are not the ones that are coming back, it’s the ones that stayed.

I just am having so many issues with the current ‘dsmp discourse’ and it stems from idiots being idiots.

#sorry i had to rant on this to.#mightve gone offtopic lol but i think i made my point #dsmp discourse #dsmp #dreamsmp #tw wilbur soot #wilbur soot #dreamwastaken #georgenotfound #sapnap #dreamsmp discourse #sarctxt

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froggyphevoli · 7 years ago

Text

Froggy Used Safe Space... It’s Not Very Effective

My first mistake was checking the map.

Several weeks ago, when The Silph Road launched their map full of local Pokémon Go groups, I checked it to see if there was one for my hometown.

Why did I do that? There was no reason for me to do that. I like to keep my visits to my toxic hometown as short as possible, not to mention that I’m generally with family for the entirety of said visits. When the hell am I ever going to have the time or opportunity to raid while I’m there? Probably never.

But I was curious, so I checked. And there was one: A Discord server, which was very convenient because Discord is also what we use in SLO, where I live now.

My second mistake was joining that Discord server.

I thought of it as a “just in case” sort of thing. On the off-chance I ever had the need and/or ability to participate in a raid in my hometown, I knew I would want access to their Discord. I explained my situation to the moderators, and they welcomed me in anyway.

Nothing of interest happened until a few days ago. I got a message from someone with the username “Stranger,” who was also on my hometown’s Discord. He said that he was looking for a group of people to raid with in the mornings, since that’s when he’s able to but everyone else all seems to raid in the afternoon.

That’s when I committed my third mistake: I replied.

I told Stranger the same thing I told the moderators— that I no longer live there, but visit a few times a year and wanted to be on the Discord “just in case.” I expected the conversation to die quickly after that, but Stranger continued to answer my messages. Since my hometown is so small, he hoped that I might know some of the people who raid there, even though I’ve never raided there myself.

I didn’t know anyone off the top of my head, but Stranger had encountered two morning people not on the Discord and described them both to me. He hadn’t gotten either of their contact information when he ran into them before, so he was curious if I might know who they were. (Yes, we made jokes about him being named Stranger and acting like a stalker.) One of the people he described didn’t sound familiar to me at all, but the other... the other made my blood run cold as I read it.

Stranger told me that the person was heavy set and tattooed, what car he drove, and that he had a kid. All of those details except for the tattoos sounded like my stalker ex-boyfriend, the one I usually refer to as “Dumbass.”

My fourth mistake was telling Stranger that that person sounded like my ex-boyfriend.

Anxiety gripped me tight as I awaited Stranger’s next response. I tried to calm down by reminding myself that Dumbass really didn’t seem like the type of guy to get lots of tattoos, so the physical build, car, and child could have been coincidences. Still, I hadn’t seen him in nearly nine years, so a lot could have happened in that time. The kid was clearly proof of that.

In between Stranger’s message describing him and my message saying who he sounded like, Stranger apparently ran into the guy again, and this time got his first name and phone number. With this information, Stranger did some Instagram stalking for his last name, and we were able to confirm that it was indeed Dumbass that he’d been raiding with.

This was the point where my paranoia skyrocketed. I would never, ever, ever be safe from this man. No matter what I did, no matter where I went, he would always have a link to me. And now Pokémon Go, a source of great joy in my life and somewhat of a safe space for me, had become one of those links. Hell, for all I knew it could be even more direct of a link than I realized. How did I know that Stranger was who he said he was? How did I know that he wasn’t just Dumbass making all this up as a way to talk to me? It wouldn’t be his usual M.O. He’s always been pretty blatant about it when he messages me. But hell, what the fuck do I know? I didn’t think he’d get even one tattoo, but apparently he’s got loads of them. How could I ever predict what he would or wouldn’t do?

I did not relay any of this to Stranger. Again, I haven’t seen Dumbass in nearly nine years. He could be a completely different person now. The fact that my last message from him was less than a year ago suggests otherwise, but still. Maybe, other than his repulsive and persistent disrespect of my boundaries, he’s grown into an overall decent fellow. Who fucking knows. Either way, it didn’t seem important to fill Stranger in on the situation. The poor dude just wanted people to raid with. If Dumbass was a jerk to him, he would figure it out on his own, and if not, he could use him to get some Pokémon he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. To go into detail would have been petty and gossipy of me, right? So I didn’t.

That was my fifth mistake.

Stranger blabbed. He didn’t know my name yet, but told Dumbass about our conversation. Apparently Dumbass’s response was “That sounds like Katrina. Tell her I said hi.”

I cringed, hard, for multiple reasons. For starters, there was the use of my birth name and incorrect pronoun, which felt like a stab to the stomach. To be fair, I very much doubt that Dumbass is aware that I’m genderqueer, but it still made me dysphoric, just instinctively. To make it even worse, since Stranger lives in my super conservative hometown, I have no idea whether or not he’s safe to come out to. I told him that I go by Froggy but decided not to correct him on the pronoun for now, which I’m already kicking myself for because I know I’m opening myself up for more misgendering in the future.

But I have more pressing concerns than dysphoria. I already had to worry about Dumbass randomly contacting me before, but now I’m on his mind. Now he’s been reminded of my existence, which means the chances of hearing from him in the near future probably just got much higher. My anxiety has been on red alert ever since, making me jump every time my phone buzzes, dreading checking it just in case it’s him. I have him blocked on every social media account I have, but he has a habit of making new accounts.

And Pokémon Go. This all had to happen because of Pokémon Go. Somehow, I think that’s actually the worst part. My roommate phrased it best after I vented to her about it: “He tainted something that was pure.”

Obviously I’m not going to stop playing Pokémon Go. Dumbass can’t take that away from me. But I think the odds of me ever raiding in my hometown just plummeted to zero. They were already pretty thin odds just because of time constraints, but now? Even if the opportunity arises, I don’t think I’ll take it. I’ll be too worried about running into him. I’m already debating whether or not I should leave my hometown’s Discord server. Dumbass may not be able to take Pokémon Go away from me when I’m on my own turf, but sadly I think I’ll be avoiding it while I’m on his.

I guess this is what I get for believing that anything in my life could be pure.

#this is an angsty personal post #ignore if you hate those #Froggy Phevoli #is this the real life?#Pokemon Go

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pidgelings · 7 years ago

Note

AAAAA.Hello,I am that shy anon. And before I make a mess of your askbox and ramble about AUs,I want to talk about the long distance AU(your AUs are so good they give me life tbh like I would want a detailed expansion for every one but I don't want to bother you), so I imagine everyone lives in different parts of the world. I imagine Lance living in Miami, you know, and Pidge in Italy (I hc that Sam's parents are german that's why the Holt surname), Keith is korean (I really want Korean!Keith)1/?

Honestly, it’s a blast to get people asking about my AUs so you could ask to hear every single AU and I’d eventually get to them all and THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR DROPPING THIS IN BECAUSE I LOVE HEARING OTHER PEOPLE’S TAKES ON AUs !!

ALSO, SORRY THIS IS SO LATE! TURNS OUT I HAD A LOT MORE TO SAY ABOUT THIS AU THAN I THOUGHT AND I GOT BUSY!

Honestly, our takes on this AU are pretty similar but I have some of the Paladins in different locations and slightly different inside jokes and meetings so here’s how those go:

Long Distance AU

Locations

Shrio - Fukuoka, Japan - UTC+09:00Boy has been born and raised in Japan and lives in an apartment here

Keith - Calgary, Alberta (Canada) - UTC-07:00You can blame r-i-v-e-r for my love of Canadian! Keith (and my desire to reference my family’s inside jokes (I live with a bunch of Canadians)(he’s pretty much going to be a mix of Canon! Keith and my family))

Pidge + Matt - Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) - UTC−05:00 and Bari, Italy - UTC+02:00Every summer the two have a mandatory trip to Italy to visit family and don’t come back until Winter

Lance - San Diego, California (USA) - UTC-08:00Family is from Cuba (took a long ass time to get into America and even longer to become Americans) but he was born a Cali Boy (that comes into play a bit later)

Hunk - Apia, Samoa - UTC+13:00Most of his family lives in a village outside the capital but he and his parents live in the capital

Allura + Coran - Dunedin, Otago (New Zealand) - UTC+13:00Allura is currently being taken care of by Coran

[More Under the Cut]

How They Met

Keith and Shiro were the first to meet when Keith’s family took a trip to Japan

Keith got lost and Shiro helped guide him back to his hotel

Shiro was surprisingly good at English despite having spent his whole life in Japan (his accent was heavy though)

When Keith went back to Canada, he stayed in contact with Shiro via Skype

The two bonded by playing free Steam games and making fun of them and also watching Youtube videos with each other

Keith met Pidge and Matt next

He was playing Overwatch and ended up in a party with her and her brother and they all ended up in voice chat

They all got along so well they ended up exchanging Skypes

Keith ended up introducing them to Shiro and everything hit off well

Pidge met Hunk through Minecraft

She was on a particularly cringy server (so many kids desperate to date someone) when she and Hunk started talking through the game’s chat

They started to build on the same plot and they soon exchanged Skypes to keep in touch

Matt met Lance on Instagram

Neither of them recalls who said hi to who first but they quickly became friends because of their similar interests

Eventually, they exchanged Discords and Matt invited Lance to play some Overwatch with him, his sister, and Keith

Lance accepted and he started a rivalry with Keith when he first met him and hit it off with Pidge really well (despite being annoyed by her constantly getting PoTG)

Lance made the jump to Skype to meet Shiro and that’s when Pidge also introduced Hunk to the group

Lance was the one who brought Allura into the group because she was one of his first friends from Instagram

Despite not being into too many video games, she got along well with everyone else

Coran would sometimes appear in the background of video chats with Allura and swing by to say hi to everyone

That’s how this mess of people met

Timezone Fuckery

Fortunately, their timezones aren’t too wonky that they can’t all be in a call at once (unless Matt and Pidge are in Italy)

When it’s noon where Lance is:Shiro - 5:00 AMKeith - 1:00 PMPidge + Matt - 3:00 PM (USA) and 9:00 PM (Italy)Hunk - 10:00 AMAllura + Coran - 9:00 AM

They still don’t regularly do group calls

Most of the time it’s small groups or just a duo that talk to each other because their schedules are the wonky things

Shiro, Allura, and Hunk are the busiest of the group

Pidge, Keith, and Lance are the least busy

Matt can either be very busy or very free

There is no between

Shiro

Dude is an introvert that knows how to people quite well

You’d seriously think he’s an extrovert but he isn’t

Give him that quiet alone time and he’s a happy camper

Probably the busiest member of the group because he’s trying to get into JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)

He has a love for Space and Science and is kinda a secret dork about it all (the Holts know it though)

He does enjoy video games but only in moderation

Keith has convinced him to play them a bit more than usual

Shiro does play Overwatch but he stays on the Asia servers (he has jumped onto the American servers once or twice to play a few games with Keith (it wasn’t easy))

Soldier: 76 Main (Team Dad)

Speaking of “Team Dad,” he’s the guy who makes sure everyone goes to bed at a decent time (especially the Holts when they’re in Italy)

He doesn’t really follow his own rule though because he has insomnia

He was in a car crash when he was a teen which is how he got the scar across his nose (he still has black hair and both of his arms though)

The car crash really screwed him up for a good few years as he became terrified of cars (one comes at him on his side and he’s freezing up and panicking)

He was late to start driving a car because of that

He’s much better about the whole thing now

He now just has the occasional nightmare about the event and he’s a rather cautious driver

He’s started to talk in English so often thanks to the calls with the others that he now sometimes forgets how to say the Japanese word of something he says in English a lot

He curses the group for this but everyone laughs it off

He was the one who started the trend of teaching everyone statements in your native language that doesn’t mean the thing the person teaching says it means

He’s actually a secret jokester and is not afraid to mess around with his friends

Gallows humor for days, m’dude

Probably works at a retail store while he finishes up his studies before trying to get into the space program

He’s dead inside, please help him

Keith

A strange mix of social and antisocial

He goes quiet in large group calls but will talk up a storm in small calls

Tends to call the most because he heads out a lot and he doesn’t want to have to deal with talking with a lot of people

Using a Skype call is a great excuse for that

The lone Canadian of the group and the most adamant that Canadians and Americans are nothing alike

Doesn’t seem to sleep ?? Like at all ??

You can message him at any time and he’ll probably respond within a few minutes

Very blunt way of messaging, using just a few words per text

Very much a user of video when he’s out of his house but not so much when he’s in it

He’ll show his surroundings while walking around and make comments about it

He was once in a call with Lance and Pidge while he was at Tim Hortons and when Lance tried to argue that Dunkin’ Donuts was better, Keith ended the call and called Pidge individually

He also complains about the weather a lot ??

“IT’S REALLY FUCKING COLD!”

He also hates when it’s June and the sun doesn’t set until nearly 10 at night

*turns on camera* “You see this shit?! It’s 8 PM and there’s still sun!”

Also gets oddly excited during the Calgary Stampede

Like, you don’t like crowds so why are you so excited ??

Turns out he likes watching Rodeos

Also, he wears a cowboy hat every stampede and Lance makes fun of him every time

Also, he says “Eh” without meaning to (it’s basically his way of saying “Right?”)

Lance calls him out every time he does so, causing him to be self-conscious every time he does it(My parents do that a lot and I call them out every time)

“IT’S ‘ZED’ NOT ‘ZEE’ !!”“WE DON’T CALL IT A ‘ZED-BRA,’ KEITH !!”

Also, he totally has a Kinder Surprise almost every call and whenever someone (Lance) asks him what it is he’ll just respond: “Something you can’t have.”(Kinder Eggs are illegal in the USA)

Korean but has never lived in Korea

Knows a few Korean words but not enough to hold a conversation

Genji Main in Overwatch

He’s an enigma of a boy --

Pidge

Doesn’t talk much unless either:A ) She cares about the person talking to herB ) It’s something she’s interested in

Tends to eat during calls so she’s either really quiet or talking with her mouth full

Worst potty mouth out of everyone

Tries to hide it from her parents but her parents know

They know all too well

Loves video games with a passion

Plays Overwatch a lot and mains Symmetra

She knows all the best spots for turrets and steals PoTG a lot

A true night owl and is not a morning person at all

Fortunately, due to timezones, no one really gets to see the gremlin she is in the morning

Can be very blunt on accident

Doesn’t really know how to people ??

She and Keith are good friend because of this

Likes spooky paranormal shit but doesn’t really believe in any of it

Acts like she does to screw with people though (Keith joins in on this)

Game Theorist before Game Theory was even a thing

Girl has a lot of crazy ideas

Also, she’s a hand talker through and through (it’s an Italian thing)

Uses every rude Italian gesture known to man

Keith and Matt are the only ones who know what the gestures mean

She and Matt prank each other a lot

If the camera is on while she talks, you’ll see a lot of robot and building projects behind her that are unfinished

Is totally the type of person who gets a bunch of projects started and jumps between them as she gets bored with one

Loves movies but loves making fun of them more

She’s a horrible person to watch movies with

She’ll spoil shit she’s already seen and comment on every cliche she sees (even if she likes those cliches)

If she’s driving, she’s very aggressive --

She’d give Shiro a heart attack if she drove him anywhere because he driving would seriously bring back flashbacks to his car crash

Fortunately, she can’t drive him anywhere so he’s safe

Matt isn’t though. Rip

Speaks in fluent memery

Likes Minecraft unironically for the cringe and the ability to build anything

Very snarky but also very sweet

She’s a literal Sour Patch Kid

Matt

An extroverted dork

He and Lance are the masters of keeping conversations going

Also, a total otaku ??

He loves his anime --

Tries to get Pidge to watch a few things but she’s only really found herself liking a lot more of the “edgy” anime (AoT, Parasyte (personal fave), Tokyo Ghoul, Another, etc)

He’s more into the upbeat and popular stuff (Fairy Tail, Lucky Star, SAO, Hetalia, OHSHC, etc) (not a true anime fan) (also, he watched and liked Free! (he doesn’t tell anyone though))

Shiro has had to deal with mildly racist (but not intentionally) questions about anime from Matt (not all Japanese people know/like anime, Matt)

That was towards the beginning of their relationship though so it doesn’t happen anymore

Now he mostly talk dorky space stuff with Shiro

Matt wants to get into NASA like his dad (Pidge wants to too, but is also focusing on other things)

He’s a D.Va Main. Fight me

Also a hand talker like Pidge --

He really likes strategy games too ??

But he also likes dumb games and rage games --

Hates horror games though (Pidge loves them)

He almost died when Pidge made him play a VR horror game --

She recorded his reaction and sent it to everyone in the group

No one lets him live down his girly scream

Pidge fucks with him by playing scary music outside his door or in his room when he isn’t expecting it

Anything mildly eerie can get him to scream within a few seconds

He does oddly well in scary mazes though ?? Like, the ones where people jump out at you ??

Like, he sometimes screams but otherwise, he’s really calm ??

Sends memes to everyone at ungodly hours

Actual sweetheart who’ll listen to your problems and try to help you

Also, he’s every one of his friends’ #1 fan ??

He’s a great friend tbh --

Lance

EXTROVERT

TALKS ABOUT ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING

Loves romcoms of all kinds (especially a really bad one called The Pirate Movie)

Pretty much an Instagram model with the help of his siblings

A morning person and almost everyone wonders how he does it

LOVES VIDEO GAMES

He’ll play anything tbh --

Dating Sims, Shooters, Bullet Hells, RPGS, Horror Games, name one genre and he’s got at least one fave from it

Really scared of horror games though but subjects himself to them anyways

Actually has a Youtube channel that gets kinda popular without him realizing it

He’s a Let’s Player and Streamer --

Everyone in the group knows about his channel and are subscribed

Pidge, Matt, and Keith show up in almost all of his Overwatch videos --

He’s a Widowmaker Main (her gun is a lot like his bayard (either a normal blaster or a sniper rifle))

Pidge made him react to the Bongcheon-Dong Ghost Comic once on a stream and he’s never been the same since then

He really likes heading out to the beaches of California --

He’s a surfer wannabe because he surfs a lot but he’s not that good at it

A fish flopped onto his board once and he freaked before wiping out from losing his footing

He doesn’t like talking about it but his siblings bring it up any time they can. They all saw it

Despite his tan skin he has very visible freckles during the summer (not during the winter though)

Does not handle the cold well --

Like, not at all --

Drops to 70 and he’s in sweatpants, a knit sweater, slippers, a scarf, and you question how he even lives --

Loves the idea of love and is a hopeless romantic --

Wants a fairytale romance but after he and Pidge end up together (yes, that happens in this AU (I’m so predictable)) he knows he’s not going to get one but couldn’t be happier

Really competitive and fights with Keith a lot still

Also a glory hog --

Bilingual with English and Spanish and tends to forget words in both languages

Also the type of person who walks through the process of figuring out the forgotten word vocally

The words he forgets vary from really simple to really difficult

No one else in the group speaks Spanish so they can’t help him

Nicknamed “Starboy” from his Youtube Channel

Really good boi --

Hunk

Soft and friendly introvert --

Like, he’s everyone's friend but also everyone’s biggest critic

He CAN and WILL CALL YOU THE FUCK OUT ON YOUR BS --

Mostly plays Minecraft but does play Overwatch from time to time

Like Minecraft for the building freedom

It allows him to brainstorm

Orisa Main in Overwatch and loves to kill people in embarrassing ways

Hello mini graviton surge~

Best cook of the friends

If anyone needs cooking help they’ll call him and have him guide them through the art of cooking

He has saved lives this way

Does not touch spooky shit at all --

He’s not a screamer like you think he would be but he tenses up and dies a little every time he is spooked before he glares and ignores whoever scared him by giving them the cold shoulder

Cold-Shoulder Hunk is the worst Hunk to be met with because it just hurts your soul when he does this

He and Pidge are the tech dorks of the group and have similar projects they both work on at the same time so they can help each other

Doesn’t do calls too often because his family isn’t rich enough for him to be doing international calls all the times

He also heads out to the village where the rest of his family lives often so he isn’t around his computer much

Has never left Samoa until he met the others

Traveling scares him but also gets him really excited because he’s going to be so far away from home but he’s gonna see a bunch of new stuff but he’s going to be so far from home ??

Gives the best hugs, no argument

Meet him in person and you’ve gotta hug him

He loves giving hugs too --

Tends to mutter a lot under his breath --

Don’t fuck with him unless you’re asking for this guy to put you on his bad side --

He’s not afraid to protect anyone

That’s how he met Shay

Best boy in the end !! Everyone loves him !!

Allura

Extrovert that sucks at reading social situations

Her new friends help her with that

Instagram model like Lance but does it all on her own (with Coran only helping with picture taking)

Natural white hair and gorgeous brown skin ??

Lance is always jealous of how beautiful she looks with little effort --

Girl is also hella smart too ??

She’s a fan of literature and can read books in just a day or two --

She’s also got amazing memory and is able to recall a lot of things

Not a big gamer like most of the group but she does have a handful of video games she likes

A Nintendo Girl tbh

Battle Mercy Main on Overwatch (she rarely plays though)

Likes watching shows like Game of Thrones and Once Upon a Time

Can get grumpy pretty easily but also jump back quickly

Her dad and mother’s deaths are a very sensitive topic and she doesn’t like talking about it

Likes making fun of the others by mimicking actions they do (Keith crossing his arms, Pidge and Matt’s hand talking, Lance running his fingers through his hair, etc)

Most of them catch on to what she’s doing and complain while she just laughs every time

Likes vlogging a lot

Constantly switches between being very confident in herself and being very self-conscious

She hates that fact about her --

Like, brain, please just let her be confident all the time ??

Likes shopping but only when there aren’t big crowds (she hates bumping into a lot of people)

Pretty much the master of learning everyone’s secrets and no one is quite sure how she does it

Milkshakes are the bomb and she has one also every call (kinda like Keith and his Kinders)

FABULOUS !!

Coran

Doesn’t show up very often but is pretty much everyone’s uncle at this point

He’s crazy but everyone loves him

He’s a swell guy who’ll tell really random stories from his past if Allura lets him

She doesn’t often because he talks a lot omg

Once everyone knows where each other lives he sends them all gifts if he can ??

Small trinkets, food, ect.

He’s a dork

Inside Jokes

*Keith blasting California Gurls whenever Lance is in a call*

“Oh geez, who got Play of the Game ?? Pidge ?? No way !!” *pure sarcasm*

Lance and Keith’s constant fight to either get the most damage or PoTG

The Donut Discourse™

Teaching each other incorrect statements in their native tongues (if they have one)

All of the Vine References. ALL OF THEM

Someone playing “Kiss The Girl” from The Little Mermaid the second someone says something that can be interpreted as even slightly romantic

The 80′s Voltron References

Everyone tries to scare Matt

“What the fuck is everyone eating today?!” - Always a topic in calls

*water is even remotely cold* “Is that the Polar Bear Plunge?” (Always directed at Keith and it pisses him off)

Calling Pidge by every possible variation of her nickname

Shiro uses all the outdated memes

Pidge is the meme master

“I didn’t mean to send that!” (Totally meant to send that)

References to 11 Drunk Guys ??

The Star Wars/Star Trek War™

“What the fuck even is English?”

“UN-CLE! UN-CLE! UN-CLE!” *every time they see Coran in Allura’s screen*

Random inspirational movie quotes

“My theme song is...”

McPixel references and jokes (they’ve all played it)

There’s definitely more but I can’t think of them right now. XD

Relationships Form

Pretty much Plance, Sheith, and Mallura happens in my take of this AU

Lance and Pidge start playing video games together on their own

Keith goes into a lot of solo calls with Shiro

Matt and Allura talk a lot more

Basically shit happens

Lance and Pidge’s relationship actually starts out rather plainly

They were talking one game and they got on the topic of relationships and Pidge was like: “You wanna try it?”Lance: “What?”Pidge: “Wanna try being in a long distance relationship?”Lance: “Ummm.... Sure....?”Pidge: “Cool.”

Things got much more romantic after that

Lance is a romantic boy and even if their relationship didn’t start conventionally, he’s going to turn it into a sappy romcom --

Pidge isn’t complaining. She did ask him if he wanted to be in a relationship with her for a reason

Shiro and Keith had a bit more romantic of a relationship starter

Shiro flew over to Canada to visit Keith for a week or two (during the Stampede because Keith insisted that Shiro should come and see it)

Shiro made his move, not at the stampede (there’s no way he'd be able to grab Keith’s attention) but rather at the Calgary Tower

They were standing on the glass that sticks out over the street and Shiro was lowkey freaking out because he didn’t like looking down and seeing how far he could fall directly under his feet (Keith was fine because he loves to sit and chill on the glass regularly)

In his panic, he kinda went: “Keith, if I don’t get off this thing, I want you to know that I love you...!”

Keith knows that Shiro wouldn’t toss that around normally, so he pulls him off the glass and to a less crowded part of the tower so they can talk and it turns out, yeah, Shiro just confessed to Keith

Good thing the feelings mutual!

They almost get kicked off the tower for making out --

Matt and Allura was rather subtle as well

They started talking more and Matt pretty much complimented her daily and eventually she was pretty much like: “If you like it then you should put a ring on it!” (Not her actual words)

Matt shut down for a solid 5 mins before he was like: “uHH?? SURE??”

It’s fine though because they’re a happy, long-distance couple (but they hope the close that distance soon) and Matt treats Allura like the Queen she is --

Lance and Allura totally argue over who has the better Holt, much to the Holts’ embarrassment

Shiro is just like: “Holts are good and all but ‘Koganes’ are where it’s at!”

Cue the three arguing over who has the best s/o while those s/o’s die in a corner --

Also, Hunk ends up with this really cute but tall and strong woman (Shay) who lives in the same area as him

He brings her into the calls sometimes

Meeting In Real Life

The first ones to meet in real life (besides how Keith met Shiro) were actually Keith and Lance

The second Lance landed in Canada he Snapchatted and Instagrammed the whole thing

Poor Cali Boi was suffering because he came up just as fall was starting

Keith played California Gurls the second Lance got into the car

He also teased Lance for not being able to handle the cold

Lance got to try Tim Hortons and it officially ended The Donut Discourse™

Lance asked if they could try the Polar Bear Plunge and Keith was just like: “That’s a New Year’s thing, so no.”

The two messed with each other a lot during the trip but left with a better relationship

They’re like brothers now

Pidge and Matt met Allura and Coran next

It was really fun and Matt got to see his wonderful girlfriend in person and it made the whole trip even more amazing

While Matt and Allura did couple things, Pidge and Coran hung out

Pidge now brags about the fact she knows more of Coran’s crazy stories than everyone else besides Allura

Hunk and Lance met after when Hunk flew over to California for a week

Lance dragged the poor boy anywhere he could

Totally brought him to Disneyland and learned the hard way that some rides are not good for Hunk’s body

Hunk still had fun though

The Shiro and Keith confession trip followed that

Shiro didn’t really understand the Stampede even after Keith explained it but he still thought it was pretty cool

He much preferred going on the fair rides than going to the rodeo though

Also, there was one day it got really cold and the new couple got to cuddle by the fire ??

It was soft as hell ??

Lance flew over Virginia to see his girlfriend and her brother not long after Keith and Shiro’s trip because there was no way he was going to let Keith one up him

Pidge gave him the tour of American History while he was over there because he had never been to the East Coast before

Lance didn’t pay attention too much and just enjoyed the fact that he was actually with his girlfriend in person

There was a lot of hugs and stolen kisses that trip

The big trip where everyone gathered in one spot soon followed that trip

Pidge and Matt’s home in Italy was chosen for the destination because it was during the summer and who doesn’t want to visit Italy ??

Since the Italian side is Colleen’s side, the family’s last name on that side is Marino

The Marinos pitched in to help get Hunk, Keith, Shiro, Allura, and Coran over because they knew that the trip was expensive

Lance’s family was able to support the trip on their own

They all were together for about a week then Shiro and Keith headed off to Rome for a week to have some couple time before heading home

Hunk flew back home after the week was up (he couldn’t stay long)

Coran flew back home as well but Allura stayed with Matt for another week because he ended up surprising her with a trip to Venice

Lance ended up staying the longest because he wanted to get to know Pidge’s family and life quite well

He stayed 3 weeks with them and unlike the other couples who went to different locations, he and Pidge stayed local

Pidge and Matt’s family really like Lance and Allura

Questions about when the wedding would be were tosses around a lot

Those are pretty much all the trips up to this point as there still friends who need to see each other individually

Still, they’re excited about these trips whenever they do happen

So, yeah, that’s my take on the Long Distance AU --

49 notes · View notes

easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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Why the No-Tipping Movement Failed (and Why It Still Has a Chance)

Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world

One year after we first spoke in July 2019, Andrew Hoffman tells me I need a “disclaimer” for this piece. “This article was started pre-pandemic. Back in the Great Before,” jokes Hoffman, co-owner of Berkeley’s Comal and Comal Next Door, who eliminated tipping at his table-service restaurant around six years ago. I like that, I reply, repeating “the Great Before” with sardonic gusto. Hoffman laughs. “Take that playbook from the Great Before and throw it away,” says Hoffman. “You don’t need it anymore.”

Since COVID-19 spread through the United States, millions of food service workers have been laid off or furloughed, and those who are still employed are risking their health each day by returning to work. And despite all the pivoting — to delivery and takeout, to corner stores or bottle shops, to outdoor dining — between a third and half of all independent restaurants will shutter as a result of the pandemic. This economic reckoning comes commensurately with a social one, as calls amplify to address systemic racism and anti-Black violence following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, and, more recently, the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Depending on who you ask, these crises make right now either the worst time to talk about tipping, or render it a conversation that has never been more urgent.

The case against tipping is compelling: It facilitates racism, sexism, and widespread wage theft; perpetuates a growing income gap between front- and back-of-house staff, particularly in cities like New York and San Francisco; and contributes to a stigma that service work is transitory. “No matter how you do it, tipping hits BIPOC workers in the pocketbook, it exposes more female workers to sexual harassment, and it keeps all workers from making a steady, solid salary,” says Amanda Cohen of New York City’s Dirt Candy, a longtime anti-tipping advocate.

Around the U.S., independent restaurateurs are newly experimenting with no tipping: from Hunky Dory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which re-opened in July with menu prices that include gratuity, to Colleen’s Kitchen in Austin and Last Resort in Athens, Georgia, which have in recent months instituted service charges that, they say, will help provide fair and stable wages for all staff. “Before the pandemic, tipping was baked into the industry and we all inherited it,” Cohen says. “Right now, no one wants to go back and consciously, purposefully inflict its inequities on their staff.”

The end of tipping has been heralded before, and not all that long ago. In 2015, acclaimed restaurateur Danny Meyer announced that he would eliminate gratuities throughout his sprawling Union Square Hospitality Group, hoping to narrow the stark income disparity between servers, who received tips, and cooks, who did not. “I hate those Saturday nights where the whole dining room is high-fiving because they just set a record, and they’re counting their shekels, and the kitchen just says, ‘Well, boy, did we sweat tonight,’” Meyer said at the time.

Meyer’s move came on the heels of decisions to eliminate tipping by several Bay Area restaurateurs who, for similar reasons, did away with gratuity over the prior year: Berkeley’s Comal; Oakland’s Camino (now closed) and Homestead; and San Francisco’s Trou Normand, Bar Agricole, and Zazie. While other New York chef-owners, like Cohen, had banished tipping earlier, Meyer’s decision marked a tectonic shift: As the founder of Shake Shack and the CEO of a dozen-plus New York restaurants, if anyone could lead in putting tipping to rest, the thinking went, it was Meyer.

Other influential New York players, including David Chang and Tom Colicchio, acted around the time that Meyer did, resulting in a full-fledged “no-tipping movement.” Within months, Andrew Tarlow announced that he would go gratuity-free throughout the Marlow Collective, his restaurant group that helped define dining in a gentrified Brooklyn; Tarlow even designed an open-source logo for demarcating no-tipping venues, of which Gabriel Stulman made use after banning tips at Fedora, one of his then-six downtown restaurants. In the East Village, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler likewise pledged to eliminate tips at their restaurant, Huertas.

By May 2016, data bore out the beginnings of a cultural shift. An American Express survey released that month found that of 503 randomly sampled restaurateurs, 18 percent said they had already adopted no-tipping policies, 29 percent said they planned to do the same, and 17 percent said they would consider implementing no-tipping if others did. The EndTipping subreddit, one of the more complete records of no-tipping establishments from the time, listed more than 200 restaurants that were, at one point or another, without gratuity. Although these comprised a sliver of the roughly 650,000 restaurants across the country, momentum appeared to be building.

Until, it seemed, the wheels came off. Most of the restaurants that participated in the Meyer-catalyzed no-tipping movement had, by 2018, returned to gratuity. Meyer, whose organization never fully recovered from the shift to what he called “Hospitality Included,” capitulated earlier this summer, announcing that he would bring back tipping to USHG. Thus tipping won, and decisively.

Now, facing a potential reset of the entire restaurant industry, no-tipping could once again be on the proverbial table. “The big reason why people didn’t switch to getting rid of tips was because they were scared that they were going to lose their staff. And then they were scared that they were going to lose their guests. And now they’ve lost both,” Hoffman explains.

But if the post-pandemic restaurant industry stands any chance of successfully moving beyond gratuity and toward more equitable compensation methods, it is worth asking: What exactly went wrong before? What went right? And how, if at all, can sustainable change be made?

When the Brooklyn restaurateurs David Stockwell and his wife, Carla Swickerath, opened their modern Italian-American bistro Faun in August 2016, they debuted as a tip-free establishment in part because, Stockwell said, “it seemed like we were going to get in front of a rising tide.”

The anti-tipping cohort of the mid-2010s largely consisted of restaurants like Faun: moderately priced, casually upscale table-service spots that promised a mix of hospitality and affordability. By contrast, fine-dining establishments already had a history of no-tipping, as their guests expected to pay top dollar and were therefore less likely to resist prices that included the cost of gratuity or an automatic service charge — although this willingness was not entirely without exception. Still, these restaurants were largely not considered part of the tip-free trend, and neither were the fast-food and counter-service venues that traded primarily on price and often forewent tips anyway.

“Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?”

And in the case of Faun, Stockwell found himself explaining to guests why menu prices were higher than those at comparable restaurants. “Once you get people to understand that you’re gratuity-inclusive, there’s still the next level of this visceral connection with numbers on a menu,” he told me last summer. “When entrees are all up in the 30s versus in the 20s, it doesn’t matter if [customers] know that you are gratuity-inclusive.”

Stockwell and Swickerath waited for other restaurateurs to follow suit. But several early adopters had already reversed course, including Craft, Fedora, and Momofuku Nishi (which has since closed entirely). “It was a miscalculation that this tide was growing,” Stockwell confided. Despite positive reviews, by winter 2017, Faun was struggling. Stockwell was unsure if the restaurant could survive the coming January, with its crowd-killing short days and frigid temperatures. He didn’t want to revert to tipping, but he felt his hands were tied. “So many times that you are operating as a business, you realize, ‘Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?’”

Faun reintroduced tipping the first week of January 2018. According to Stockwell, the effect was striking. “Immediately, it made this whole thing possible,” he recalled. Although he and Swickerath would have preferred to remain tip-free for ethical reasons, he said that ultimately, “we couldn’t let the ship keep sinking.”

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Mike Fadem was confronting a similar challenge: determining the “right” price of pizza — one that factored in gratuity but also didn’t cause guests to mutiny. In October 2016, Fadem and his partners Marie Tribouilloy and Gavin Compton opened their Bushwick pizzeria, Ops, as a service-inclusive establishment. Before this, Fadem spent seven years climbing the ranks at Tarlow’s Marlow Collective, where, as a manager, he had helped oversee Roman’s 2015 transition to tip-free. Based on that experience, he knew that Ops couldn’t simply raise menu prices by 20 percent across the board. Instead, he calibrated his opening prices to those at comparable pizzerias, and played primarily with the cost of wine. For its first two years, Fadem says, Ops did not turn a profit.

Despite the financial challenges, and watching Roman’s and the rest of the Marlow Collective revert to tipping in December 2018, Fadem and Tribouilloy were hopeful they could make tip-free work. Still, Fadem remained a realist about tipping’s prevalence when we spoke last July. “I think a lot of people don’t see the system as being broken, or anything. And a lot of people love tipping,” he observed. “They feel some kind of power.”

Time would prove him right. In September 2019, still unprofitable, Ops abandoned gratuity-free. “It just wasn’t working,” Fadem said later that month. Ops’s labor costs were too high, and Fadem and Tribouilloy were unable to reward longtime staff members with higher pay. Introducing tips, Fadem said recently, allowed them to give “every staff member a substantial raise.”

Ultimately, the issue was guests’ perception of value. “In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work,” he says. “People are happy to pay $25 for a pizza if it’s $20 plus tip, but if the menu reads $25 for a pizza you’re looked at as ripping people off, even if it’s the right price for the cost of getting the food to the table.”

“In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work.”

But diners alone didn’t doom the mid-2010s anti-tipping movement; workers who saw lower earnings were also reluctant to embrace the shift. At Faun, for example, Stockwell started servers at $25 per hour when the restaurant was tip-free. Even then, he says, it was “virtually impossible” to compete with what servers could make at a “similarly ambitious local restaurant with tips.” If a tipped server could make $40 to $50 an hour, or up to $350 over the course of a seven-hour shift, why do the same work for half the money?

At Huertas, USHG alums Jonah Miller and Nate Adler struggled to increase back-of-house wages as much as expected after going tip-free in December 2015 — they sought to reduce the kitchen-dining room wage disparity by raising cooks’ wages by $2.50 an hour. “We did pay cooks more than we had before, but in many cases not a full $2.50 per hour more,” Miller said last summer.

Even Meyer grappled with staff departures at USHG, in addition to reports of a corresponding decline in service quality and an inability to close the wage gap. In 2018, Meyer stated publicly that 30 to 40 percent of USHG’s long-term staffers quit following the phased introduction of Hospitality Included across the group’s restaurants. In the aftermath, the company continued to confront staffing issues caused by HI, according to a USHG front-of-house employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in both July 2019 and this past March.

“There hasn’t been a fix in the morale,” said the USHG employee, in part because of decreased front-of-house compensation as compared to pre-HI rates. The employee shared an internal USHG memorandum, which showed a comparison of 2018 average hourly pay from multiple USHG restaurants with HI against the average hourly pay from two USHG locations without the policy. Servers’ average hourly pay was $26.13 with HI and $32.88 without, a difference of $6.75; bartenders’ average hourly pay was $29.88 with HI and $35.23 without, a difference of $5.35.

As a result of reduced earnings, it was harder to hold onto staff at restaurants like Blue Smoke, one of the last Meyer restaurants to move to HI. Employee trainers left, and managers leveled up inexperienced hires even if they were not ready for additional responsibility just to get “bodies on the floor.” Another part of the problem was a perceived take-it-or-leave-it mentality that ran contrary to USHG’s ethos, and that made some staff feel replaceable. “It just sort of felt like, if [HI] doesn’t seem right for you, it’s totally okay if you leave,” said the employee.

USHG was not especially effective in closing the pay gap between the front and back of house — a primary rationale for going tip-free. In 2018, average hourly pay for USHG prep cooks was $14.45 with HI and $15.06 without, a difference of 61 cents, according to the internal memo. The average hourly pay for line cooks was $15.88 with HI, 29 cents higher than the non-HI average of $15.59, but a rate that was still $10.25 less than the average hourly pay for servers under HI. (USHG declined multiple requests for comment.) According to the employee, management wasn’t willing to raise prices enough to meaningfully increase back-of-house wages, or to maintain front-of-house salaries: “They didn’t want to raise the prices so high that people have sticker shock.”

These results, in combination with the financial pressures caused by the pandemic, may have contributed to Meyer’s decision to bring back tipping in July. “I think the timing and rationale is totally understandable,” Miller said of Meyer’s return to tipping. Miller notes that the reversal may be an example of “‘COVID exposing a fragile system’ in the same way that restaurants that were just barely surviving pre-pandemic are likely to choose this moment to move on.”

“Danny Meyer has abdicated his right to be a leader in this industry,” Cohen says of the move, arguing that if there was any time for Meyer to hold firm, it is this very moment. “What happens when his customers don’t feel so generous three months from now?” she asks. “I did no tipping before Danny Meyer, and I’ll keep doing it long after he’s given up. I think women and BIPOCs are used to white guys not being there for us when the chips are down.”

It remains to be seen how the pandemic will intersect with wages for servers, at a time when so many are out of work. This July, Marketplace reported that restaurant traffic has declined by 60 percent in some parts of the country, but according to the BBC, those who are ordering out seem to be tipping generously, with tips up by nearly 15 percent for Grubhub and Seamless drivers, and up 99 percent for Instacart shoppers since the pandemic began.

Though a sense of altruism may be responsible for this increase in gratuity, larger tips can also widen the earnings disparity between the few servers who remain and kitchen staff, so that a handful of tipped employees are making as much or more than they did previously, “whereas their cooks and managers are being asked to be more dexterous and take on more responsibility than ever before,” Miller says.

Even as sticker shock and worker turnover shredded the no-tipping cohort in New York, a sizable percentage of Bay Area restaurateurs who began experimenting with tip-free in the mid-2010s managed to make it work. The difference may owe, in part, to regulatory flexibility and a greater number of policy alternatives available in California. Most notable, it seems, is the ability to append a mandatory service charge to checks at the end of the meal, a practice that is currently illegal in New York City.

“People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip.”

“I am fully convinced that even at our very popular, busy restaurant, if we raised the prices by 20 percent starting tomorrow, we’d do significantly less business,” Hoffman said last July. Comal’s mandatory service charge allowed Hoffman and co-owner John Paluska to increase revenue while avoiding the sort of business loss attributable to sticker shock. “People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip,” Hoffman observed, which accords with studies that show consumers’ preferences for prices that are partitioned, rather than bundled.

Corey Lee, the chef behind the San Francisco restaurants Benu, Monsieur Benjamin, and In Situ, agrees that a service charge is a necessary bridge for diners in the U.S. “The idea of a ‘tip’ is so ingrained in American dining culture that most diners aren’t ready for service-inclusive pricing,” Lee said in July 2019. “Therefore, we break it out for them as a separate charge so they can see what’s happening.” Lee, who has imposed this charge at both the three-Michelin-starred Benu and the more casual Monsieur Benjamin, says that it avoids sticker shock while stabilizing wages for all staff and raising earnings for those individuals on the “lower end of the pay scale.”

But for some restaurateurs, the service charge is not a silver bullet. When Fred and Elizabeth Sassen decided to eliminate tipping at their Oakland restaurant, Homestead, in March 2015, they eschewed an automatic charge, believing that a tacked-on fee might confuse and frustrate guests and staff alike. Instead, they opted for service-inclusive pricing and, to incentivize employee performance, implemented a compensation model that factors in skill, experience, and hours to arrive at a base salary; from there, total salaries are set based on individual effort. Though the process was not without its difficulties — “what we realized quickly was that we would eventually have to cycle through the whole [front-of-house] staff” who expected the higher wages of a tipping model — Fred Sassen said that the new system has been, overall, more equitable in terms of compensation and advancement opportunities. “I’ve had a dishwasher that’s been with me for four years, he makes more than some of my servers,” he said, an industry rarity.

Jennifer Bennett, part-owner of San Francisco bistro Zazie, said that replacing gratuity with service-inclusive pricing in June 2015 allowed her to implement a pay-for-performance system that not only equalized wages, but improved service. It is a system, Bennett said last summer, that “is very different” than the static hourly no-tipping models used by many other proprietors, which divorce work quality from earnings and thus fail to effectively incentivize employees. In her model, on top of the minimum wage, servers make 12 percent of their individual sales, while kitchen staff earn 12 percent of shift sales. Because the entire restaurant is engaged in a sell-more, earn-more mentality, servers are quick to refill mimosas, while the kitchen profits too. Before, Bennett noticed that cooks would be furious if an eight-top walked in the door right before closing. “But now, what do they see? Another $15 in my pocket.”

Bennett, who split ownership of Zazie with three longtime employees in January, believes that the benefits go beyond economics. “Everyone thinks they are judging their waiter,” she said, “but really, from the moment you walk in the door, your waiters are judging you also.” With gratuity, Bennett noticed that some staff would make tipping stereotypes based on race and gender; servers fought over “good” tables and avoided “bad” ones “like the plague.”

Despite the tip-free movement’s waning trajectory, Bennett is confident that tipping will inevitably fall out of favor in the United States. “The inequality between the front and the back of the house has got to change,” she said. “We can’t keep having these people working in hot miserable conditions for 10 hours a day, making a third of the money of the cute bartender.”

Now is the “perfect” moment for reformation, new Zazie co-owner Megan Cornelius said in July. “These workers have been deemed essential and are putting themselves at risk. To walk out with a living wage that is secure and accurately coincides with how much they sell in a night, and isn’t reliant on the whim of guests who have been [sheltering in place] for months, is actually extremely important, now, more than ever.”

“My heart breaks every time another restaurant gets rid of its no-tipping policies,” Cohen said in pre-pandemic March of the setbacks faced by her New York peers. One of New York’s most notable tip-free successes — she opened her second restaurant, Lekka Burger, last November, after nearly five years of gratuity-free at Dirt Candy — Cohen has a specific aim beyond solidarity for its own sake: creating a critical mass of tip-free restaurants.

Eliminating tipping can be considered a collective action problem: a situation where short-term self-interest conflicts with the achievement of longer-term collective benefits. If a few restaurants charge $27 for lasagna under a gratuity free-model, a nearby restaurant that charges $22 and collects tips can gain by acquiring price-sensitive customers and servers who are attracted to tipping, even if all restaurants would be better off with a fairer and more sustainable payment structure. “If you’re a no-tipping restaurant, you just look so much more expensive than the restaurant next door to you,” Cohen explained.

Some restaurateurs believe that the government could generate sustainable buy-in by offering a tax break or some kind of subsidy to tip-free establishments. “For more restaurants to be tipless, I think it would take some economic incentive,” Lee said when we spoke last year.

Bennett, for instance, said that she would “love to see” a tip-free tax break, or even a tax incentive that simply rewards restaurateurs for paying staff higher wages. It is the kind of relief that, in the wake of COVID-19, Congress has already enacted for the airline industry, and could be added to a broader aid package for restaurants. To a similar end, Danny Meyer and One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman recently penned a Time op-ed that, among other proposals, advocated paying a full minimum wage to all workers plus a cut to restaurant payroll taxes — a form of tax relief that could, perhaps, be increased for tip-free establishments.

State labor laws can cut several ways, including by reducing an employer’s incentives to rely on tipping. Forty-three states maintain different minimum wages for tipped and non-tipped employees. In states like New York with a “tipped minimum wage,” employers can pay tipped workers a lower minimum than their non-tipped colleagues (called a sub-minimum wage), as long as the employer can prove that tips make up the difference between what the employer pays and the non-tipped minimum. Seven states, including California, currently impose one minimum wage for all workers, regardless of whether or not they’re tipped, which also means that restaurant owners do not have the option of off-loading labor costs onto customers.

But other policies may work to “save tipping” by reducing some of the system’s socio-economic discordances, albeit while leaving in place tipping’s problematic and often punitive dynamics. A 2018 amendment to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act legalized unlocked tip pooling — allowing gratuities to be split between front- and back-of-house workers — in most states, as long as the entire staff is paid the full minimum wage. This means restaurateurs can equalize earnings between the front and back of house without eliminating tipping or building the entire cost of labor into menu prices. (Unlocked pooling remains illegal under New York state law even after the national statutory change.)

The idea is popular: In the Time op-ed, Jayaraman and Meyer voiced support for “a full minimum wage with shareable tips on top.” After the FLSA change, chef-owners at several prominent, moderately priced Bay Area restaurants announced that they would adopt unlocked pooling, a group that included Tanya Holland of Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen. Even some of no-tipping’s earliest adopters have considered reintroducing gratuity and pooling it. “We’re looking at all of it,” former Chez Panisse general manager Jennifer Sherman told me last year during ongoing discussions to modify or replace the restaurant’s 30-year-old service charge. More recently, current GM Varun Mehra, who succeeded Sherman, said that the compensation question remains undecided as the restaurant and more affordable upstairs cafe remain closed for dining during the pandemic.

Despite tip pooling’s appeal as a relatively straightforward solution to industry-wide wage disparities, it leaves unresolved the dynamic that remains central to tipping: placing worker compensation directly in the hands of diners, a power that can be at the root of harassment, discrimination, and inequitable treatment of employees. “Shared tips are still the fruit of a poisonous tree,” says Cohen.

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food.”

Lacking a more persuasive financial case, the no-tipping movement seemed unlikely to win over more supporters in the Great Before. But now, as the pandemic’s social and economic crises unfold and larger swaths of the public pay greater attention to racial and financial equity, the case for tipping may be challenged anew.

“You could argue that restaurants have a cover and ready explanation for raising menu prices,” hypothesizes Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University and an expert on tipping. “Under the circumstances, we’ve got extra cost. We’ve had to implement whatever safety protocols and we have less seating capacity. And so, the cost of business has gone up, we have to charge more. And I would think that customers would understand that.” That type of empathy and comprehension could alter what has previously comprised a longstanding undervaluation of the costs involved in eating at restaurants, and align them more closely with compensatory practices in other parts of the world.

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food,” said Karen Bornarth, head of workforce development at the East Harlem bakery and business incubator Hot Bread Kitchen, when we spoke last July. “And I think that those of us who love to eat out and enjoy our food need to wake up to that, and realize that maybe we have to pay a little bit more for that dinner out so that we can create a more equitable system that works better for everyone, business included.”

That there will be fewer places to leave gratuity may circuitously aid the cause for tip-free. In the New York Times, Besha Rodell wrote that the pandemic could “end the age of midpriced dining,” as the trends in Melbourne — away from “casual gastronomy found in its cafes, pubs and wine bars” and toward higher-end concepts with to-go options — could be a “bellwether for other cities around the world.” As more U.S. proprietors stick with menus designed for pickup and delivery, there may be an even stronger lurch toward limited-service, which, as the name suggests, calls into question the need for any related charges or gratuity. As Eater reported in mid-August, 150 restaurants have closed in New York alone since the onset of COVID-19.

It’s a shift that’s already happening. Both Chez Panisse and Comal have swapped separate service charges for service-inclusive pricing as the pandemic has forced them into takeout- and delivery-only. “All three of our menus are just the prices plus tax and that’s it,” Hoffman says. “There’s not the traditional tipping environment anymore... There is no restaurant server, bringing you food, bringing your bill, and then receiving the tip at the end of it, that whole dynamic is gone.” Besides, customers report greater irritation when asked to tip at counter-service restaurants, according to research conducted pre-pandemic but published in May 2020.

In the midst of widespread suffering, Hoffman isn’t quite ready for optimism about a renewed push for no-tipping. But he continues to believe in its potential. “This is incrementalism. It’s gonna be slow evolution and change, based on the [restaurants] that survive,” he says. “It’s going to be the savvy ones that make it, and let’s hope they have their heads on straight with respect to the biggest issue in restaurants, which is the relationship between pay and work.”

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2GiLAtL https://ift.tt/2EXh085

Five years ago, both diners and restaurant workers pushed back against efforts to go tip-free — efforts that could play out differently in a post-pandemic world

“Okay, my politics and my ideals are one thing, but what’s the priority here?”

“In Brooklyn especially, I don’t believe it’s possible to charge the correct price to make tip-free work.”

“People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip.”

“We have a history in our country of not paying the real cost of food.”

Kathryn Campo Bowen is a Bay Area-based writer.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2GiLAtL via Blogger https://ift.tt/3gI1Aly

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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realtalk-princeton · 4 years ago

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@Faun maybe the question wasn't submitted? just wanted to know more about life in Japan, especially culture (food, people) and language barrier

@faunJapan hey Faun, could you describe your experience in Japan? especially about the culture and people (and maybe safety)? thanks in advance :-)

Response from Faun:

Hey, sorry I’ve been away for a bit! Thanks for your question; I’ll do my best to answer it however I can. Just want to say in advance, all of this is based on my personal experience, so it could definitely vary for other people who have lived in/traveled to Japan. I am by no means an expert on Japanese culture, which in and of itself is hardly monolithic, so I’ll strive to avoid making uninformed, overgeneralized assertions about anything from my (outsider) perspective.

That being said, I think one general broad perception many people will have of Japan(ese culture) upon first arriving is the high emphasis on civility and order. Compared to countries such as the United States, Japan has a lot more organization and structure in nearly every facet of everyday life: buses always arrive on time, commuters queue up in perfect lines for the train, city streets are kept spotless and litter-free, etc. Furthermore, most people whom you meet (especially those who work in hospitality) will be extremely polite, from taxi drivers to restaurant servers to department store clerks—it’s very rare that you would encounter someone in Japan who is outwardly discourteous to you. A lot of this is derived from a sense of collectivism, which promotes group harmony and the good of the community above that of any one single person, that distinguishes Japan (as well as many other Asian countries) from some of the individualist cultures of the West. Nevertheless, I don’t think you can make any sweeping assumptions about how your interpersonal interactions with people in Japan will turn out before you actually get there.

For example, the first time I went to Japan, I lived in a fairly rural farming city in Fukuoka, which is located on the southernmost island of Kyushu, with an older couple without any children. They lived a pretty “traditional” Japanese lifestyle: their house had tatami mat flooring and sliding doors, they both took a bath after dinner every day, and we slept in futons on the ground in lieu of beds. I was only fifteen at the time, so being still a child I wasn’t really allowed to venture out too much on my own, but I remember enjoying the slow pace of summer life and the beautiful scenery of the Japanese countryside. I spent a lot of time with my host family and grew quite close to them, especially my host mother; we would pick vegetables from the garden and cook meals together, go on evening walks around the neighborhood after dinner, and sit in front of the television watching afternoon programs, me doing my homework while she folded the laundry. My host parents introduced me to a lot of local culture, bringing me to visit their family’s tea fields and taking me to various historical landmarks in the region. They weren’t super talkative, but in a way that was a plus, since it allowed me to slowly develop my comfort with the basics of the language as I lived with them. Overall, they demonstrated a lot of care for me, and I cherished them as if they were my own relatives.

In contrast, I had a somewhat harder time with my host family last year, when I participated in PII. I lived in the suburbs of Kanazawa, which is a moderately large coastal city, with a family of two parents and their two children, around my age. They had a much more “modern” lifestyle: their house was Western in style, located in a fairly new housing complex, both the father and the mother worked, and the family would take meals separately, depending on when they each came home from school or work. However, I had a more difficult time connecting with the individual members of the household; the children were usually out and about doing their own thing, and the father often came home rather late from work. I spent the most time with my host mother, but at first I had trouble adjusting to some of her stringent expectations of me—she would instruct me to put up my hair if I had it down, for example, or tell me to sit up straighter at the dinner table, and I wasn’t comfortable with such a familiar level of “parenting” in my relationship with a host family. Additionally, I struggled more with the language barrier this time around, even though I was much more advanced in Japanese at this point, likely because my host family thought I would be able to handle more complex grammar structures or vocabulary than I actually could given my current level. It wasn’t as if the family was rude or cold or anything like that; they were always kind and courteous to me, and we would also sometimes go on outings to restaurants or local cultural sites, which were pretty fun. Altogether, I just didn’t click as well with them as I did with my other host family (though in their defense, I was also severely depressed last summer so that probably played a part lol).

With regard to food, I feel like it varies so much depending on where you are, but there are a few staples that you can expect to find anywhere. In Kanazawa last year, my friends and I often ate soba, ramen, curry, etc. as well as boxed lunches (e.g. with rice, pork cutlet, etc.) that you can pick up from any convenience store. At home with my host family, my host mother would alternate between traditional Japanese breakfasts (with rice, miso soup, and some other side dishes) and more Western breakfasts (usually toast with jam and a cup of yogurt), and for dinner she’d either make something simple (like steamed fish or vegetables) or order some takeout. A lot of the foods you’d “typically” associate with Japan, like sushi or sukiyaki, are not commonly eaten on an everyday basis, and they might be different from what you’ve had outside of the country (Japanese sushi is a lot smaller and less convoluted than American sushi, for example!). Similarly, some Western chains in Japan will have different localized menus than what you might be used to, such as teriyaki burgers at McDonald’s or cherry blossom lattes at Starbucks. ALSO, the snacks and bottled beverages in Japan slap so hard—my favorites are definitely honey butter chips, kinoko no yama (lil choco mushrooms), oi ocha green tea, and c.c. lemon soft drink. All in all, some of my recommendations for food experiences in Japan include getting soba at a noodle stand (where you eat standing up), getting yakitori (chicken skewers) at an izakaya (a barlike setting where you can get late night snacks and drinks), and getting okonomiyaki (super delicious savory pancake, often cooked on a steel hotplate right in front of you) anywhere in Osaka (where it originated!).

In terms of safety, I’d say it also depends on where you go, but generally I found Japan to be a lot safer than the average city in the United States. When I was in Ishikawa last year, I would often go out on my own or with a group of friends, and very rarely did I feel any sense of unease while roaming the city of Kanazawa. I absolutely loved the freedom of wandering the streets late at night, something I never really got to experience growing up in the United States. One factor that helped was the accessibility of the public transportation in the area: there were tons of buses and trains whose maps and schedules were not difficult to follow, and in the worst case scenario I could always hail a taxi to reroute me to my destination. The language barrier wasn’t necessarily a hindrance at this stage of my time in Japan, but I would say that it’d probably be a lot harder to do some of the things I had to do, like reload a bus pass or buy bullet train tickets, if you didn’t understand/speak some degree of survival Japanese. However, I do want to acknowledge some of the privilege I have as an individual of East Asian descent traveling around Japan; because I often “passed” for a Japanese native (as long as I kept my mouth shut lmao), I rarely got any looks or stood out when I was making my way through my daily routine. I will say though, there was one time that I genuinely did feel unsafe in Japan, which took place not in Kanazawa but in Osaka, a much larger city that I had visited for vacation with a group of friends: I had gone out late on my own (while wearing a nice dress), and an older man had come up to me and tried to follow me back to where I was staying, but I eventually lost him by ducking into a restaurant bathroom. So in general, I don’t consider Japan to be dangerous for the most part, though again it never hurts to be vigilant, especially in a big city.

Wow that was a lot—I hope that was able to address at least some of the things you were asking about! I want to stress once again that my thoughts are by no means the final say on all things Japanese, and also emphasize that Japan and its culture cannot be simply boiled down into one homogenous description. Please feel free to reach out if there’s anything else more specific you would like to hear about (especially with such a broad topic as culture, there’s so much more to talk about, e.g. activities, etiquette, traditions, holidays, etc.)—I’d be happy to answer whatever I can given my own body of knowledge. Ultimately, I’m hoping that this helped to provide you with an initial sketch of Japan, and that you’ll be able to fill in the picture with your own travels there someday! :)

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marcythewerewolf · 7 years ago

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Quick Kierarktina fic inspired by @princekierz post about them getting older. I’ve touched on this theme before, but it’s fun to explore!

Kieran stuck to the shadows of the their booth, unnoticed by servers and other patrons alike. Gently, he prodded his eldest daughter, who was engrossed in whatever exciting mundane things were flickering on her glasses.

“Where are the bees?” he asked, “Apples, I can smell a few of, but bees seem few and far between. It is a misleading name.”

Araceli sighed the deeply disappointed sigh of a fourteen year old confronted once again by the fact that her parents were embarrassing. It was a small sorrow, but one that struck her to the heart every time. Honestly, Kieran was glad he hadn’t acted this way at her age. Gwyn never would have let him get away with it.

“It’s a mundane thing, t’Ada, you wouldn’t understand it,” she told him, with a weary shake of her head, before retreating back into the open arms of technology. Kids these days.

Since it seemed to be a night for iron and steel, Kieran moved across the sticky pleather of the bench and started prodding the device at the far end of the table, which, Mark and Cristina always assured him, would order their food for them.

Sure enough, whenever they went to mundane restaurants, the food did usually arrive, so Kieran was ready to trust whatever strange witchcraft they knew which he didn’t. He could do actual magic, he let them have the fake replacement of metal.

Family nights out were bad enough without having to confront actual servers. Mundanes got so difficult, and they never quite knew how to deal with Kieran. (Cristina insisted he didn’t know how to deal with them, but no, that couldn’t be right.)

Lights flickered on the display, mortal text moving to fast for even Kieran’s knack for tongues to follow, and the heat of it burned his hands. Even buried under layers of plastic, he could feel the iron lurking there and he fancied it could sense him too.

“You’re going to break it,” Araceli warned, barely glancing up from thin air.

“Nonsense,” Kieran said, even as it began to sputter under his finger tips. Drat. The magic of the fair folk didn’t mix well with fragile electronics, and sometimes he forgot how much of it he had these days. At some point, Kieran Kingson had grown up. They all had, and they had the clinging brats (beloved though they were) to prove it.

Cristina came back first, with Antonio slightly cleaned up and wrapped in her sweater. The boy seemed to have moved on from swimming to dumping everything he came across down his shirt. It wasn’t his fault he was clumsy on land, but sometimes Kieran felt it might be his. Did nixie blood skip a generation? Out of some measure of misplaced guilt, the not insignificant desire to keep Cristina from being too mad at him, and the much more pressing need to protect Antonio from his bully of a big sister, Kieran patted the seat next to him and smiled when Antonio clambered over, followed quickly by his mother. Trapped two deep in this mundane hell was almost claustrophobic, the presence of his family made it tolerable.

Cristina tapped futilely at the now erratically flickering screen and then grimaced. “He did it,” Araceli offered helpfully, not even bothering to nod to Kieran. There was only one ‘he’ who it could be.

Kieran strove to look above it all. Once, that had been easy. Usually it still was easy, but mundane places threw him off guard. Cristina like this, soft lines around her mouth, chipped nails, hair greying into finest silver under the abominable golden lighting; she threw him off.

“I’ll go find a server,” she said, and leaned down to kiss him as she left. Kieran ran his fingers through the fine hair on the back of her neck and breathed in her scent, soft citrus and a hint of Antonio’s spilled apple juice.

When he came up for air, Araceli had detached herself from ‘web’ (whatever that was) and was staring at them. No, Kieran corrected himself, staring past them. He followed her gaze to the table oblique to them, where an elderly woman was looking mildly scandalized. An echo of youthful rebellion surged in Kieran’s chest, bringing back memories of the Clave and disapproval and wars. Some were even recent, though they had tried to shelter the children from the worst of the nastiness.

You could never fully succeed at something like that, he reflected, as he saw the hurt in Araceli’s eyes. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she whispered, drawing her brother’s attention now as well.

Kieran looked at her steadily. “No electronics at the dinner table,” he said finally, “You know that’s a rule.”

It served the intended purpose of distracting her, with the minor side effect of starting an argument which Kieran didn’t manage to win until Mark returned, bringing Aine and another dose of parental authority. (Heaven and earth, they were all so terrible at this. Even waiting a few years, far longer than Shadowhunters usually did to have children, hadn’t helped much. Sometimes Kieran felt like they were flying by flapping their arms very fast. Sometimes he suspected all the other parents were as well.)

“It is a rule,” Mark opined, plopping a changed Aine (their children being apparently incapable of going five minutes without either spitting up, or dropping something on themselves, or otherwise needing immediate hygienic intervention) down on the bench next to Araceli. “And it does count in restaurants. You can talk to your friends when we get home.”

“Home doesn’t have wi-fi!” Araceli pointed out, with the desperate air of someone making a very important point. She might have been, for all Kieran knew. “Because we live in a forest or in the dark ages or another dimension or something-”

“It’s just for a while, you know that-”

“I like our new house,” Antonio said as if that settled the matter, and smiled up at Kieran guilelessly. His heart melted, until he realized the boy had managed to get his hands on another juice box already, and was poking at it furiously like that hadn’t been the cause of the first disaster.

Mark was just as quick on the uptake, “Tony, give that here...” he began, holding out a hand for the juicebox. Araceli had already palmed something else mundane and bright and probably under the heading of technology. Kieran, slipped under the table and over to her side, blocked a curious Aine from and moved to scold her in one smooth motion.

All the wars in the world couldn’t prepare you for this.

It seemed like hours before Cristina came back, serving staff in tow, though in reality it was probably only a few frantic minutes.

Mark was trying to interest Araceli in a game of something called hangman, which was much less bloody than it seemed, except he’d forgotten most of the rules and she was being surly. Kieran had his other two children gathered around him and was listening to Antonio and Aine talk while he stroked her fine, dark, toddler hair. Ears, just pointed enough to need a glamour, unlike her siblings’ dubiously human ones, poked out from underneath it. Already, she seemed made of too many odd parts. Too big ears, too long limbs, Mark’s bright sea eyes and Kieran’s stormy hair. Less changeable, a little more shadowhunter- angel blood was so reliably dominant- but still a little too faerie.

Just like him.

Their neighbours across the way, the nosy old biddy and a younger couple, were still staring and whispering. He wasn’t sure why. Was a father not allowed to spend time with his children?

He glared at them as Cristina introduced the serving man (his name was also Mark, which seemed entirely unconscionable. Humans needed to find a sense of originality.) Mark apologized for the useless hunk of plastic at the end of the table, and then started taking drink orders. Antonio’s request for grape juice was toned down to a less stain-prone milk, Araceli was grudgingly allowed a soda, and Kieran took it upon himself to be the grownup and asked for wine.

“A significant amount of it.”

Mark the servant blinked at him, a look of confusion quickly replaced with smooth control, “Do you have an ID, um, sir?”

Cristina and Mark already had the looks on their faces that meant they were rapidly going into damage control mode. Kieran trusted them with that, so he forged ahead. “No?”

Their server looked pained, “Well you, uh, you do need one of those.”

“Sorry,” Cristina said quickly, “He’s European, and I think he left his passport at home tonight. Can I have a bottle of wine? Please?”

“Yes,” the server said, pivoting with relief to face her, “But I’m afraid you can’t share it with your friend. House rules, we have to assume you’re underage until proven otherwise.”

Most of the words in this conversation were flying over Kieran’s head, but one detail stuck out, and he had mostly made it in politics by taking little details and dragging them to death. “You didn’t ask her for an eye-dee,” he said, in a tone of flat accusation. He didn’t add ‘You cur.’

“Yes... but you’re...” Mark the server floundered.

“What he means to say is that Mom looks like an old lady and you look like a model who escaped from a ren faire, Dad,” Araceli snapped, “Now can we order? I want a vegetarian burger with the works and chili-mashed potatoes.”

There was a sort of sullen silence, different from the usual sullen silences, from Araceli while their food arrived. Kieran knew the many shades of sulking, and knew this was the amalgam of terror and pride and disappointment which came with saying something you’d been thinking for a long time, to only a moderate response. For her sake, he tried to think up a reply, in between stolen sips of Mark’s wine.

It tasted better with his breath on the rim of the glass, but Kieran couldn’t help but resent not being allowed his own. He was an adult, a father, a prince, a diplomat. A lack of simple mortal legal documentation shouldn’t prevent him from getting moderately drunk at a family dinner.

Mark, always attuned to his heart, squeezed his hand under the table and whispered, “Sorry, we should have glamoured you. You know mundanes.”

Kieran leaned into the gesture and smiled back, but kept silent, not in the least because Aine was trying to hand feed him bits of mozzarella stick.

When Mark and Cristina kissed over Mark’s salad, he resisted the urge to join them. They soft and warm and beautiful and his, and that was enough, and besides, Araceli was groaning loudly enough already.

After dinner, with the younger children secure with their parents (their Shadowhunter parents, their legal parents as far as the Clave was concerned) in the car, he waited with Araceli to give Mark their check. He had been reassured the credit card process was quite simple, even he couldn’t mess it up, and if it wasn’t, he had some suitable gold coins on him.

Araceli was looking at him funny, and he realized he was staring at her, trying to put his thoughts into words. Perhaps mistaking his concern, she said “Don’t t’Ada, it’ll work.”

“I know it will,” Kieran said, a little annoyed, “I’m not a child, no matter what you might think, little star.”

He held back from ruffling her hair, aware of her new, prickly boundaries, and she shrugged a sort of acknowledgement of this. “I know. It’s just... you’re very young looking sometimes. Like when people ask if you’re my old brother, and not my father, or when people see Aine and think you must be my step-dad instead. It gets annoying.”

“It is flattering,” Kieran pointed out, “You have excellent blood.”

Faerie parentage didn’t mean slower aging, but it didn’t hurt. Mark showed the years less than Cristina did, and Kieran was almost unchanged. Helen Blackthorn had settled into a kind of stable permanent flawless fifty, silvery gold and shining. It was vain, but Kieran could rest a little easier knowing that even if he did outlive his children, they would look excellent as they aged.

(And that was if he didn’t manage to steal them away to faerie permanently. The technology fixation was a minor bump in the road, but Kieran would work on it.)

“Maybe for you,” Araceli mumbled, “It’s just... it gets weird, okay.”

“We are weird,” Kieran pointed out, “Even by the standards of the fae, even by the standards of the angels. Certainly by the standards of the mundanes. And that’s hard, I won’t pretend it isn’t. Part of the reason we thought so long and hard before we had you was because we knew it would be a life both strange and merry. You can hate us for that, if you want, though I’d prefer if you were a bit older before you came to any final conclusions on it. But one bad dinner at an Apple-sans-bees does not a family ruin, does it? It does not erase the love I have for your mother or for Mark, a love that only grows the older they get. It does not erase the love I have for you and your younger brother and sister.”

She knew he couldn’t lie. She used it every day to her own advantage. Now she smiled.

“Please don’t talk about being into mom and dad being super old. But yeah, I guess.”

“Wonderful. Now, let’s forge your father’s signature, shall we?” Kieran said, too loudly.

Needless to say, they got kicked out of the Applebees.

#kierarktina #black rose triad #mark blackthorn #kieran #cristina rosales #m writes #fanfic #the dark artifices #araceli and antonio are kieran and cristina's kids #aine is mark and kieran's daughter #(mark identified as a boy from very young in faerie and andrew ran with it since the fae are flexible)#they're all officially blackthorn rosales to the clave and kieran's kids to the faeries #they like to keep things simple #and honestly officially they're just the three of their's children #all of them together #the a alliteration was not intentional but kieran loves it to bits and made sure it continued once he figured out

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