#What is Citizen Based Science?

[nirby-wirby]

.

[sjyuns]

OUT OF MY LEAGUE ┆ A SIM JAEYUN ONESHOT

SYNOPSIS! summer’s here and so is jake’s chance to finally muster up enough courage to talk to you — the prettiest lifeguard he’s even laid his eyes on. only problem? jake’s too awkward and unlucky, but fortunately that’s exactly your type.

OR IN WHICH! jake tries a multitude of things for the first time in hopes of gaining your heart

GENRE! loser nerd!jake x lifeguard fem!reader, down bad! jake, simp behaviour, mutual pining, fluff, humour, first love, strangers to friends to lovers

WORDCOUNT! 12.0k

CAUTION! drowning, reader wears a revealing swimsuit, jake gets a boner, boobs, jake is like geeky to the point where you’d get tired of his thoughts, sexual jokes, one joke about being gay (happy pride month)

MIKAELA’S! thought of a baywatch au, but got carried away and wrote something totally different... going to be one of my last few fics before i go on hiatus cause of exams so i hope you enjoy!! i might write some drabbles/sequel based on this jake☺️ btw i've never been to miami so hahaha… sorry NOT PROOFREAD! | collection

REBLOGS AND FEEDBACK ARE DEEPLY APPRECIATED!

read more on this jake: HERE

Jake can’t swim. Maybe that’s really the least of his problems right now since he’s already chin deep into the trenches of the vast ocean gasping for a catch of precious air to fill his screaming lungs.

And he really should be panicking because drifting metres away from the coast of Miami's sandy beach is wrong — at least that’s what you had said to the two ten year olds you had just saved from the ocean last week. 

Not that Jake was listening or that he was following you around the beach: no he’d never, he was just being a good citizen. Yeah, that’s what he’s telling himself.

Because Jake Sim was anything but a sucker for pretty lifeguards in red swimsuits who looked like they could solve all his problems with a kiss. With hair that swayed like chimes as sea salt sprayed you, a goddess-like smile as you sauntered around the beach as if it was your home. Skin that glowed under the sweltering heat of summer, you looked as if you were from a different dimension altogether, and Jake wonders if you’re real, if he’s really here, watching you.

Okay, so maybe Jake was watching. Really intensely. But you would never know that because everytime you came so close as to look at his vicinity, he’d hide his face behind his textbook — right, his coveted quantum physics textbook he brings to the beach, his idea of a good beach read. 

“She’s so pretty, can you actually believe we’re on the same planet as her?” Jake pesters Jay endlessly, mouth practically foaming at the sight of you in the signature red latex swimsuit.

“What other planet would we even be on then?” His best friend scoffs, the first time he’s ever seen Jake so down bad for basically anything other than wave particle theories.

Jake ignores him, eyes still fixated on you — a bright smile plastered on your face as the sun’s rays hit you like a spotlight. “I want to explore the science of the atoms that make up her being,” he says, absentmindedly.

“Okay nerd, wrap it up,” Jay stops his friend, before he embarrasses himself from the volume of his voice. “No hot chick is ever going to dig a loser nerd, more so one that’s head over heels for atomic structure.”

Jay’s right, you’d never be interested. And Jake pouts at that very idea as he watches you talk to your colleague, another baywatcher named Sunghoon. And he can’t help but envy a little at Sunghoon’s figure — tall, athletic, and definitely doesn’t look like he secretly enjoys the elements of the periodic table song. (Jake thinks it’s catchy).

Jake doesn’t even need to take a look at himself to know that he’s nowhere near Sunghoon’s level of physicality. With a body that’s only been to the gym to work there as a receptionist, Jake knows nearly nothing about sports or swimming to be exact, only dragging himself out to the beach to accompany Jay and to watch you save lives.

“If you want her to even know you exist, you have to do something other than hide behind that ass textbook of yours.” Jay points out, and Jake gets deep in thought. Jay’s absolutely right, but between your lifeguard duties and his nervousness from just being around you, he can barely think of a way to create an opportunity to even talk to you.

“How about I create a damsel in distress scenario where I desperately need help and she swoops in like my saviour.” Jake suggests and Jay groans at his best friend’s weird delusions.

“Do you think you’re in some kind of teen beach movie, that’d never work,” he scolds, “just go up and talk to her like a normal person.” 

Normal. Jake thinks his definition of normal differs far from one of a passerby. Normal to him was burying his head in books, building a ten thousand piece lego figurine and bragging about his accomplishment to Jay the next day, you’d never like his normal, that was obvious to him.

“But I’m shy,” Jake states, as if drowning in a vast and wide sea is clearly the better option as compared to walking up to you and saying a simple ‘hi’. 

It probably would be, in his defence, if he actually knew how to swim. Jake has never set foot in waters this deep or treacherous but it wasn’t rocket science, how hard could pretending to drown even be?

“Fine, whatever,” Jay gives in to him easily, knowing Jake would end up doing whatever he wanted to do anyways, “but don’t come wailing to me when you embarrass yourself in front of her.”

Jake scoffs, Jay doesn’t know that he’s got it all planned out in his head — from the moment he shouts for your attention to the moment he acts as if he needs mouth to mouth cpr and your plush lips touch his. A goofy grin lighting up on his face as he imagines the last scenario in his head, your fingers pressed gently against his skin, eyes glazed with worry as you call out his name in hopes that he’d wake up. 

How romantic, too romantic even to the point where Jake turns pink and giggly with excitement, ignoring the look of horror his best friend casts on him to search for you across the beach.

“I can’t believe you’re actually doing this, you’re going to get traumatised — like a trauma for the sea when you actually drown and can’t —” Jake tunes him out, used to his friend’s nagging. 

“Don’t worry man I got it,” Jake says with utmost confidence, “she’s gonna fall in love with me at first save and then we’d kiss and marry each other before adopting a dog that’d be named Layla.”

“Layla is such a bad dog name,” Jay scoffs and Jake shrugs, head and heart both racing at the thought of you.

Jake remembers the first time he’d ever seen you around the beach, the day when Jay dragged him out of his summer home to ‘exercise’: a mere ruse to get his nose out of his textbooks and enjoy summer vacation for once.

That day, he waddled through the sandy beach, grumbling about how the granules of sand stuck to his feet uncomfortably and how they occupied the spaces between his toes. His favourite spider-man comic that looked like it’d been through war and back settled neatly in his grasp as he hung his head down to avoid the piercing rays of sunlight.

It’d only been minutes and he already wanted to leave, unused to the sticky feeling of sweat coating his skin like glaze. It’s loud here, too loud — party remixes blasting through the speakers of multiple beach goers along with the nonstop chattering and constant movement.

The only time Jake had ever been to a place this crowded was comic con when he was ten, and even that was air conditioned. Eyes still locked at the sandy pathway before him, Jake mumbles a string of vulgarities, fingers curling around the pages of his tattered book, lips dry from the heat.

And suddenly a shout from afar, a piercing ‘watch out!’ that gave Jake no time to react before a beach volleyball hammered into the side of his head, the force causing him to plummet into the floor with a disgruntled ‘ACK’, comic now thrown to the side as he held his head in agony.

Stupid fucking beach goers, he thinks, after having nearly consumed a mouthful of sand from his fall of grace. Do they know nothing about trajectory? Parabolas? How hard could it be to hit a ball properly?

His eyes are shut, mouth open to let out a moan of agony, head thumping wildly. This was such a bad idea, textbooks would never hurt his head this much.

“Bro, are you alright?” The familiar voice enters his ears, and Jake musters the energy to open his eyes, giving his friend a dead stare.

“Is the grass green?” Jake replies agitatedly, head still beating like a drum.

“Well there’s a lifeguard coming to check up on you, you know the pretty one that’s on duty today,” Jay states and Jake couldn’t really care less — the spot on his head still swelling. As if some pretty lifeguard could change anything.

Then he takes in a waft of your scent before he feels your presence, lavender sea salt and dreams as your fingers gently grasp his arm, turning him onto his back. Jake doesn’t know what’s happening, your touch leaving tingling sensations that made him miss the warmth of your fingertips, no matter how short the contact was.

“Sorry, I was reprimanding the kids who knocked you out, are you alright?” The same words or care that once came out of his friend’s mouth now coming out of yours, yet for some reason they made his heart flutter and ears burn.

Everything’s suddenly in slow motion and long gone was the snappy feeling of annoyance once he heard you, a melodious voice that could calm waves causing him to glance at its owner, only to see you — eyes, smile, skin all honey sweet. Jake almost lets out a soft gasp at your beauty, something about the tenderness in your eyes and the mirth in your smile that made flowers bloom in his chest.

He feels a different kind of lightheadedness, the one where he feels like he’s drunk on champagne of love. “Is this heaven?” he mumbles, a mindless question that allows a soft giggle out of your lips.

Jake’s in a daze, staring at you with a gaping mouth and clear, innocent eyes — his hair a mess on his head and his face sprinkled with the tan granules of sand. It feels serene, almost surreal how suddenly everything around him feels calm.

“I don’t think we’re dead just yet,” you answer, fingers moving to tuck flyaway strands of your hair behind your ear. The eyes of the boy in front of you are so bright and inviting you almost forget what you’re actually here to do. “Is your head alright? Any headaches, confusion or vision changes?”

“I think I’m hallucinating,” he replies, breathless. The pretty boy in front of you looks like he’d just fallen from heaven as he tries to sit himself up, head still spinning a little from the impact.

And he stares at you as if you’re some goddess, some mythical creature he’s never seen before. “I think I’m very much real,” you reply, pearly whites flashed out at him he almost faints. 

“Yeah, cool, right,” Jake finally snaps out of it after receiving a sharp nudge from Jay who’s trying not to scream at his friend’s interaction with you. “Absolutely, same. I’m so real,” his cheeks flushed rosy red as his eyes left your figure to dart everywhere else.

Jake thinks that even the mighty spiderman hasn’t experienced embarrassment this bad before, in fact probably no one has. “So are you feeling alright?” you ask, worried as you finally take the time to scan his head for any major injuries. 

Previous situation long forgotten by him, Jake can only seem to focus on how excruciatingly close you are to him right now, with your body leaned over his face, cleavage literally dangling in front of his eyes like bait. 

And if it was possible to get even redder than he was before, Jake feels heat rush onto his face. It was probably two inches or three away, or should he say they? He doesn’t know, because he’s never been in such a situation before — the two of them, so perfectly shaped by the tight red latex swimsuit you wore just right there.

Jake also doesn’t know if he’s salivating or not, and he’s way too scared to even move a muscle to check or tell you about the weird position he was in, or maybe even adjust himself so his hard on isn’t poking through the material of his beach shorts so Jake just decides to lean back a little and close his eyes: respectful, gentlemanly, meditative.

“There seems to be no major problem from a look at it but if you’re feeling any of the symptoms i’ve listed before, don’t be afraid to come find me or any of the baywatchers.” 

“Sure,” Jake responds, eyes still closed and body shaking, too scared to open his eyes again. 

“Jake, are you feeling good?” 

He peeks open his eyes, only to find you with concerned filled features and Jay who looked constipated trying to hold his laugh in. “I’m alright,” he says, playing it off as nothing.

“You’re unusually red,” you point out, brows furrowed. 

Jake lets out a sheepish laugh, “it’s a sunburn, you know, the second degree kind when your blood vessels dilate which causes redness.” 

Oh, he’s cooked — reaching the third stage of awkwardness: babbling extremely useless facts. It’s a tier system, as Jay liked to term it and he’s reached the gold tier of loserification.

“You’re cute,” you state, and he momentarily goes into a shock, soul leaving his body for a split second before returning. Did you just call him cute? Him? The guy who slept with spiderman plushies and talked to himself when he was bored?

“Thank you,” he replies before cursing at himself on the inside. Thank you? What were you, his teacher? “You too, I guess.” His hands rub the nape of his neck uneasily, tongue darting out to wet his shriveled lips.

“Thank you, Jakey.” 

He’s so gone.

“He’s so cute, you don’t even understand Hoon,” you groan, face in your hands, wailing in such despair that someone else would think you were mourning. “His eyes, his face, his mannerism, everything.”

Your lifeguard partner leans back into the grey couch of your rest lounge, face full of boredom and annoyance at your nth time talking about the boy you’d seen on the beach.

Sunghoon’s arms folded over his broad shirtless chest as he said flat toned, “you know I got it the first time. If you like him that much just go up and talk to him.”

You sigh, fingers running through the ends of your hair in deep thought, you wish it were that easy, “there’s no opportunity to.” 

“What does that even mean,” Sunghoon questions, “you’re literally a baywatcher, you can create opportunities to talk to that loser. Ask him to join the team or something.”

“He’s not a loser,” you fight back, as if you knew Jake personally. Sunghoon shoots you a look and you immediately add on, “maybe he is, but that’s what’s cute about him.”

“He either carries a physics book or a spider-man comic to the beach everyday to watch you,” he points out, “he has no life.”

Well, Jake does do that but that’s what you liked about him. The way he frantically hides his face behind his books whenever you look at his direction, forehead and eyes peeking out once in a while to see if you’re looking away. His facial features and the way he talked so animatedly to his friend about god knows what. You think you could watch Jake talk about paint drying and you’d still be interested.

“Look, if you like him that much and he obviously likes you, then find a way to talk to him — or like I don't know, pray that he drowns and he needs you to save him?” Sunghoon suggests, seemingly getting into the idea of setting you up with Jake. Summer around here was boring anyways, and he needed entertainment.

“Wow, how charming of you to wish that upon him,” you scoff, rolling your eyes at your friend’s suggestions. In the past few days you’d been watching Jake, you’d never seen him step foot into the waters, not even a dip of his pinky toe. In fact, he’d always place his stuff the furthest away from the sea, under the shade of a palm tree that decorated the area.

If Jake Sim ever needed saving it would probably be from something unusual like getting his foot stuck too deep into a sand hole he’d dug out of boredom.

“Alright, fine whatever you want. I guess you could stick to bae-watching instead like a coward.” Sunghoon sweeps his hair back, glancing at the clock hanging on the lounge entrance that gleamed a bright red 16:00, an indication of the start of your next shift. “Just saying you could always just ask him to join you for your duties, Heeseung does that with his girlfriend all the time.”

“Jake’s not my boyfriend,” you point out and Sunghoon scoffs, grumpy about the start of the next shift, “yeah, I bet you wish he was.”

With a grunt he stands up, beelining for the entrance as you follow suit, millions of thoughts running through your head. 

Despite how people may have perceived you to be — a popular, outgoing person who had boys lining up for a chance to be by your side, you’d always found awkward boys charming: a nerd who’d focus on no one but you, who’d talk on and on about the things that interested them, who’d treat you special in a way no one else would; intelligently.

And there was something about the pretty boy on the beach, his awkward mannerisms and geekish way of speech that so starkly contrasted his attractive features. Jake looked nothing like a nerd at all and maybe it’s exactly that unexpected charm that pulled you towards him.

“Hey, isn’t that Jake?” Sunghoon stops in his tracks, finger pointed at a figure in the water that was flailing around, splashes of water visible from the elevated platform you were on. “Can he actually swim?”

You have to squint your eyes to recognise the figure that’s not too far off the shore — a mop of messy brown hair and a white tee shirt that clung onto his body like second skin. Yup, probably Jake. No one else would have the idea of wearing a shirt to swim like he would.

Another indicator was the tossed away comic book at the shore, spider-man on the cover prominent alongside Jake’s nike slides. And you’d think that Jake out of all people would know better than to jump into the ocean recklessly, especially when he seemed like the kind of guy to watch water safety videos for entertainment and enrichment.

There’s immediate urgency in your steps, rushing down the creaky wooden steps and onto the soft sand, heat scorching the soles of your feet before you take a dip into the ocean, rescue tube against your back as you swim towards him.

Sunghoon follows suit, recognising your intent. Toes padding across the wooden groyne for a better entry point to Jake. 

Jake is struggling. And he wonders why Jay didn’t try to talk him out of this plan even more than he did. The water’s cold in contrast to the heat he’s gotten used to, engulfing him with nowhere to go. He kicks his legs in sheer attempt to keep himself up, arms mechanically swinging in circles like the demonstration video he’d watched on youtube just last night.

The salt water stings his eyes and he has no option but to close them — hoping that his best friend would notice that he’s now metres away from shore and finds a baywatcher (you) to save him.

It then all happens in a flash as he feels a board prop his body up, his back bent over the buoyant material as someone pulls him to safety, water no longer encapsulating his limb.

Is it you? He really hopes it is. Jake wishes that he had the capacity to open his ends right now and endure the stinging sensation to take a look at his saviour but he’s weak and his eyes are burning.

Sooner than later he finds his feet dragging through wet sand, sticking onto his leg with a sensation he wants to shake off. 

“Jake, can you hear me?” your voice resounds in his ears but before he has the chance to reply, another voice cuts him off.

“I think he’s passed out,” a deeper voice, a man. It makes his heart palpitate, “check if he’s breathing.”

Jake’s senses now heightened from his loss of sight, feels your presence getting closer, body hovering over his, and he can feel them brush over his chest — his mind is in a frenzy and he holds his breath, trying to keep still.

“Hoon, I don’t think he is,” he hears your voice filled with nervousness. Should he open his eyes now? Or should he continue acting?

Amidst his decision making process, you move in a rush, palms getting situated on the centre of Jake’s chest, periodically getting distracted by the outline of his lean body through his translucent white shirt.

Jake doesn’t need to decide because one push of your body weight causes him to wheeze, a lough cough leaving his mouth from the heavy chest compression.

Opening his eyes to be greeted by the sight of you and your counterpart both looking down at him with worry, Jake flashes his audience an awkward grin, unknowing of what to do next.

Half of his mind has drifted away, feeling betrayed by how his plan had failed him, how swimming was actually way harder than it looked. The other half was scrambling to redeem himself in front of you, not wanting to seem like a loser, because it was 2025 — almost everyone knew how to swim.

“Jake, you okay?” you say for the nth time since you’ve met him, seeming as though every time you manage to interact with your crush it’s always about him needing saving and you being the saviour.

He nods, a soft cough under his breath in hopes to clear the saltiness lining his throat before propping himself up with his elbows and passing a look between you and Sunghoon. “Thanks guys,” he mumbles, fully taking in how embarrassing this was, “fuck this is really embarrassing.”

You giggle, extending a hand to pull him up. “Why would you go in the water if you don't know how to swim?” You questioned, head tilted cutely as you looked at him with curiosity that filled his heart.

“I do know how to swim,” Jake lies, “I mean it’s really all about buoyancy and overcoming it due to the lower position of our centre of gravity. Plus, if your lungs are full of air and you’re on your back you’d float for a substantial amount of time—”

Sunghoon stares at you in horror, as if he was asking you if this was really the guy you liked. 

“Sorry guys, i got too carried away,” he catches himself before he could spiral into viscous forces, upthrust, let alone rotational equilibrium. And he catches how you’re looking at him — an adoring smile so perfect his heart skips a beat and his stomach flips. Jake swears he can hear angels from god’s heaven harping love melodies as you exchange his gaze.

“Don’t worry man, she’s into that kind of stuff,” Sunghoon says beside him, patting his back encouragingly, “it’s like she has a nerd kink.”

A loud slap echoes through the air as you send a betrayed look to your friend, cheeks heating up at his confessions about you. Jake, similarly wears the same look — as if a fairy had sprinkled rosy dust over the apples of his cheeks.

His teeth gnaw at his lips in discomposure as he watches Sunghoon flee the scene, a victorious smirk etched on his face. 

“Sorry bout him,” you speak up amidst the silence, moving over to sit yourself next to Jake, a slight breeze making you shiver, “he’s really…weird.”

You tuck the stringy strands of your wet hair behind your ears, toes playing with the granules of sand under them. 

Jake feels resentment in his heart for the very first time. Not for Sunghoon or anything else, but for the evening sun and the way it kisses your skin. He watches you in soft adoration before replying, “it’s not weird.”

You look at him, a soft hum leaving your lips in curiosity of the meaning behind his words. “I mean the nerd kink, not Sunghoon. Like—there’s nothing wrong with having a kink or being kinky. It’s just a preference, a kink— I should really stop saying the word kink right now.”

You laugh out loud, not a shy giggle but a real one. Your head thrown back in sheer entertainment from the boy beside you who looked like a moonlight’s kiss. And you think that you like him a lot. Because with Jake you felt as if you were at ease, it seemed so natural to talk to him about odd things: something you’d never really done before. But now you could only think of the things you have yet to hear him talk about, all the things that’d be nice to do with him.

Jake thinks that if the cosmos had a lullaby, it’d be your laugh resounding freely in accompaniment with the waves that hit the shore. He only now realises that it’s already evening and the beach is clearing out. And for some reason today, the beach feels like home: or maybe it’s just because he’s next to you.

He soon realises that you’re much more than just the pretty face that he’d noticed you for — for some reason, you bring out a different side of him: and he didn’t mean the loserish antics or babbling of nonsensical facts, you make him want to try new things, act wild, take risks. Around you he feels like living, something he’s never once felt like cooped up in the four walls of his study room.

“Yeah, you definitely should,” you grin at him cheekily, teasing him, “wouldn’t want people around to think you’re kinky.” 

He lets out a soft chuckle, eyes glazing over your face. He realises that you not only look pretty under the morning sun, but throughout the day; a different kind of pretty, the kind that reminded him of seasons. And Jake feels the sudden need to lean over and kiss you without knowing why. 

His fingers crawl towards yours, fingertips brushing over your soft skin cautiously, as if he was asking for consent to touch you, to feel you as if you were a sacred being and he was just him: in all of his geekish glory and ways.

Fingers wrapped around yours delicately, he wonders if you can feel how nervous he is through the sweat on his palms. Jake leans closer, breath slightly erratic in his own way — he’s never done this before, never felt this before: wanting to kiss a girl, and he thinks that he really should’ve searched up more about the topic of love or watched a tutorial on how to french kiss and maybe practice it on his arm before he actually gives you a kiss.

You welcome the warmth of Jake’s touch, fingers twirling over his in quiet acceptance and need. You wanted this, you wanted to kiss him, feel his lips on yours. The heat of his breath hitting your lips as he stared at you intently, eyes searching for some sort of answer to questions unknown to you.

Before you can lean into him, Jake pulls back, breathing heavy as he stares at you with complex feelings. Your shoulders sag a little in disappointment as you call out to him, voice soft and airy.

The way his name rolls off the tip of your tongue almost makes him lose his mind but Jake holds himself back, tongue darting out of his lips to satiate the lack of your lips against his for now. 

It’s an indescribable feeling, to hold himself back from pressing his lips on you, temptation and desire clouding his mind. But he thinks to himself that you deserve more than that, more than just a kiss and frantic panic from him. Jake knows himself well, that without a plan he falters and the last thing he’d ever want is to leave you hanging while he took his own time to figure out his thoughts.

It wasn’t that he needed to figure out his feelings, no — from the very beginning Jake knew he liked you, that much was true. The swelling, hopeful feeling in his chest every time he sees you, how he loses his mind and forgets almost everything about his being when he is with you. The catch in his breath when you look his way and the comfort of your simple touch. It was more so the aftermath of such a rushed feeling of want: Jake had never dated anyone, let alone liked a girl. You were his first, and he wanted it to be right, be good. Not perfect, just genuine.

“I’m sorry, I just–” he whispers under his breath, his puppy dog eyes softening your heart. He cuts himself off, and he didn’t need to say more because you understood. His affection was prominent and sometimes love, in its whole entirety, didn't have to be rushed through like the world portrayed it to be. You think that love, sometimes deserves to be slow, like the calm dwindling of a campfire that mocks the sun, a feeling that warms us, feeds us, and cares for us. And for now, the heat of Jake’s hands on yours is enough, and you’ll hold on to this pulsating heart of yours against other rhythms. Because the world will come and go in the tide of a day, but here, his hand, with your future in its palm seemed to be everlasting.

“It’s alright Jakey,” you hum, a wordless confession of acceptance as he falls into your orbit just as you do his, an unspoken connection as sure as gravity that said I will wait for you, unconditionally. 

A soft sigh escapes your lips as you turn to look up at the sky, a mix of orange and pink, as if the universe was dictating a story of your feelings. The once blaring sun now a calm hue and you think you could stay here forever, with Jake’s trembling fingers wrapped around yours and the rhythm of his slow breaths.

“The sky is really beautiful today,” you gasp, watching the sun dwindle down in real time.

Jake’s still staring at you and he can’t seem to peel his gaze to the scenery you’re complimenting because nothing could seemingly ever compare to your beauty. And he’s seen this scene before, in those romcom movies and he always thought it was cliche but now, he understands it. 

“So are you,” he whispers, and you catch it. You’ve heard this one before. Many times. But it was something about his voice, something different that told you it was the truth, like it wasn’t the same like the rest. “You look like a princess.” My princess, Jake thinks.

“And you look like a prince,” you tell him, your fingers tracing the veins along his hand. And you could sit here for hours doing that: tracing his veins like streets in a city made of Jake; all leading you back to his heart.

Jake holds back a smile, his heart beating inevitably. “I think a prince would know how to swim,” he jokes.

His eyes glimmer under the stars, and you wish Jake would just take your heart. “Well, I guess my prince doesn’t,” you say offhandedly, absentmindedly.

He catches on without a beat, the darkness of the skies seemingly giving him a burst of confidence. Or maybe it was just because it was you — his pretty girl who’d unexpectedly become his home.

“You’re my princess then,” he sighs contentedly, “we can be Eric and Ariel, you know, since you’re basically a mermaid and I’m a land being.”

Oh my god, you laugh (something you seem to do a lot whenever you’re with Jake), “I’m a lifeguard Jake,” you correct him, incredulously.

“But it’s synonymous to us,” he tries to explain, “unless you want me to be akin to Ursula, I could totally rock the villainous sea wizard character but then it’d be incest.”

Jake says it too innocently you almost tumble into him from laughter, corners of your lips burn from excessive smiling. The summer in your bones warmed the winters Jake’s skin has weathered as he catches you, steadying you as your body moves erratically from laughter.

“Jake, you’d be my uncle,” you breathe out, and he shrugs.

“That’s why I said that it’d be incest,” he exclaims, “but it’s common in some cultures — they’re called avunculate marriages, kinda cool if you ask me. Not the incest, I mean the fact.”

“Just shut up,” you tell him endearingly, head moving to rest on his shoulder.

Both of you don’t address the insinuation of a relationship but instead you and Jake just stay quiet, basking in the comfortable silence between you with occasional teases and questions. And Jake can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly.

You continuously tease Jake that he has a thing for people in red latex suits. The outfit of the superhero on his coveted comics he so often brings around having a close resemblance to the red of your baywatch swimsuit. Jake groans every time you bring it up, face buried between the nape of your neck as you continuously humor him. He takes it like a champ though, because it’s you, and he knows you’re secretly obsessed with the comics he brought to the beach too, oftentimes sneaking a read between your shifts that you now spent with him under his favourite palm tree.

It’s a comfortable cycle, coming to the beach with Jake, clocking in, taking a break with Jake, doing your second shift, and Jake sending you home. Your Jake-filled routine filled with laughter and stupidly knowledgeable facts that you’d never use in your life: like how if you break the word 'helicopter’ into prefix and suffix, it’s not ‘heli’ and ‘copter’, it’s ‘helico’ and ‘pter’. 

You were stumped for a long time, as he proudly showed you the definition of it in his very own Oxford Dictionary (who the hell owns a paperback Oxford Dictionary?). “See,” Jake said, chest pumped out as his finger underlined the word, “Pterodactyl too, because pter means wings.”

You don’t ask how he knows all this or how he also knows that starfishes apparently poop through their mouths. And you vividly remember how animatedly Jake talked about the sea creature and its habit to expel waste through their mouths. “Their stomach extends out of their mouths to engulf and digest their prey, marine invertebrates like clams and smaller crustaceans like corals, and then it goes back in then the waste comes back out.” 

Jake gives you a live demonstration without you needing to ask, waddling through the sands as he searches for a starfish, shoving it into your face in pure enthusiasm as he pointed out the different parts he was just talking about. 

Not to mention his extreme love for comics, a cute framed picture of a ten year old Jake at comic con beside his bed along with other minifigures and intricate lego sculptures. It was endearing to say the least, how Jake wanted to share everything with you and wanted to know everything about you.

And you want him in the bluntest way, you wanted his lips, his hands, his arms. You wanted him the way the ocean wants the shore, constantly reaching again and again. 

You share with Jake everything about you and he memorises it like it’s facts, like it was supposed to be his form of common sense. He knew your favourite book, your drink order, and the way you always tapped your fingers on your thigh when you were deep in thought. And he wanted to tell you that he prided himself in the fact that he memorised the freckles on your skin from the sun, how they were like miniature stars forming their little constellations. He wanted to hear you laugh, and know that he was the reason, and tell you that you had completely beguiled him, that you were his entire world.

It’s crazy how fast you can get to know a person, how fast someone can feel like a blanket of warmth even under the summer sun. Jake for once doesn’t have an explanation to this feeling, he just feels like this is what he’s for. It’s pure coincidence, or maybe fate, or even sheer blind luck but no matter what it was, you had his heart. 

Not only that, you also had the breath caught in his lungs, each bone in his spine, even bone in his body, every single finger that shakes whenever you are near, all the muscles that ache in his mouth to kiss you, his eyes that are always looking for you. You had much more than just his heart, you had everything that kept his heart alive.

Jake watches you as you do your superhero duties. Right now you’re watching a flock of kids, pulling them away from the oceans cautiously as you talk with them, facial expressions spirited and eyes shaped like crescents. The past few weeks of being around you did nothing but fuel his desire to be with you — well technically he was already with you but you get the gist.

And he decides that if he really wants to get this right he needs to ask people of experience, those that have dabbled in the field of dating anything, though more specifically hot women who were way out of their league, so he approaches his best friend who he hadn’t seen in a while; given, he was too caught up in your pretty smile and twinkling eyes.

“Simp,” Jay rolls his eyes at his best friend’s sheepish smile, “you leave me hanging for weeks and suddenly when your girlfriend has work you come to me for entertainment.”

“Not my girlfriend, yet,” Jake corrects, acknowledging the title of being a simp, “which is exactly the topic I came to talk to you about.”

“What, you want to know how to rizz up girls?” Jay cocks his head as Jake lays down next to him, head hitting the soft sand with a thud.

“No, I want to know how you managed to bag someone out of your league,” Jake says and Jay rolls his eyes, unable to believe the nerve his best friend had of insulting him right when he needed advice. “You know, how your palms don’t get sweaty around her, how you even managed to get her to like you— just saying you look nothing like the type of guy your girlfriend would ever go after.”

Jay takes a deep breath, forgetting about how much he missed his friend’s company the moment he opened his mouth. “Number one, she chased me so I am definitely her type,” he starts, “number two, that lifeguard of yours literally loves you, she looks at you with heart eyes I don’t get what you’re asking me. Just ask her if she would ever accept some geekish freak like you as her boyfriend.”

“You suck at giving advice,” Jake scoffs, his best friend giving him little to no substance to even work with. No manual on how to ask a hot girl out, where to go, what to do, if he should bring you to a fancy restaurant or the movies — actually scratch that, Jake probably didn’t have the caliber to keep his mouth shut about the different facts running through his mind in the movies and he’d probably clumsily find a way to embarrass himself with his lack of decorum at a fancy restaurant too.

“Well, I answered, didn't I?” Jay fights back, “why are you even asking me, shouldn’t you be asking her — you’re not bringing me out on a date, are you?”

Jake cringes at the thought. “Touche,” he grimaces, “I’d never take you on a date, you’d probably drain my wallet with the way you eat. No one would ever want to date you after seeing that.”

“And guess who out of the two of us actually has a girlfriend,” Jay grins, “plus, you should be nice to me, I’m literally helping you. Don’t you know the saying — the one that goes never bite the hand that fingers you or something like that.”

“You’re not fingering me, what the hell,” Jake groans, mind consumed with a disgusting image of Jay. How the hell did I even become friends with this man, Jake thinks. “Please, never finger me or say that ever again or I’m actually going to hex you or worse, I’ll tell your girlfriend you confessed to me over the summer and you’re actually a closeted gay.”

Jay flashes an expression of horror, as if he’d just seen a ghost. Jake crumples up in laughter at his friend’s expression, arms hugging his body as he rolls around. “I’ll do the same if you do, I’ll tell your girlfriend.”

Again, not his girlfriend yet, but Jake doesn’t take the effort to correct it, liking the ring of the title a little too much.

Jake spends his afternoon thinking while you’re hard at work. What would be the best way to ask you about all of your dating preferences without making you suspicious? And he settles on his grand idea of a survey, you know like a buzzfeed quiz he could make and slip a few integral questions in that would help him fill in the blanks in his head.

He scrambles onto his phone, fingers flying over the keyboards as he logs into his buzzfeed account (user pinktiger551, long story) before he inputs questions to his buzzfeed quiz, occasionally pausing to think of filler questions to throw you off. And when it’s completed in its full 7 question glory, he thinks it’s perfect — not too obvious of his true intentions yet lighthearted and easy.

When your shift is over, you’re greeted by an over enthusiastic Jake, phone in hand and he shoves the device into your hands. 

“Hi Jakey,” you greet him, overwhelmed by the particular amount of energy he had today, “what’s this?”

Oh shit, Jake didn’t think of that — he panicked for a short while, “uhm, it’s for my psychology course, yeah.” Jake settles on that, trying to convince himself more than you as you stare at him knowingly. Jake didn’t take psychology, hell a few days ago he was grumbling to you on how people who took psychology were wasting their time and physics was way better.

But you accept it for now, wanting to see what Jake had up his sleeve. 

“First date,” you read, scrolling through the poorly written options, one of them directly stating ‘something else (tell me)’. You hold back a laugh at the sight of Jake’s serious facial expression, “do I just click this if my first date option isn’t on this list?”

Jake nods fervently, eyes of curiosity gazing at you, “now you have to tell me what it is,” Jake says, prepared to take a mental note on what you say.

“Well, I’ve always liked the thought of a beach picnic, you know those romantic ones where it’s late at night and there’s fairy lights surrounding us and we eat a load of junk food and laugh at everything but nothing at all? Yeah, I think a beach picnic would be nice.”

Jake’s supposed to take mental notes, but his mind is too caught up in the pronouns you’d used. Us? We? Barely catching on to your mention of junk food and jokes. 

You said us, he grins, a lopsided one that showcases his set of pearly whites.

You scroll through the rest of the questions, unable to stop yourself from chuckling at the amount of times Jake had managed to sneak his name into the answers. It was adorable, too adorable. “Jakey, are you sure this is for uni? Seems a bit too informal for it,” you ask again once you reach the second question, a filler question asking for your priorities in a zombie apocalypse, one of the options being Jake, “I mean, not everyone who takes this quiz would know you personally let alone have kids with you…”

Two options below Jake’s name was the option of ‘our kids (perchance?)’ and you’d like to think that this option was dedicated to you and that this was not some random survey Jake gave around to random girls on the street.

“You’d pick our kids over me?” Jake gasps from your head, his mop of hair moving over to block your vision of the phone screen as he double checks the choice that brings him to his despair. “Our fake kids over me? I can’t believe it!”

“Well then you shouldn’t have put it in as an option, you know I’m a sucker for kids,” you argue and Jake has no retaliation, only having himself to blame for his lack of deep thinking.

The rest of the questions pass by in a blur, Jake’s intentions as clear as day as you reach the end, confetti flying pass your screen as the screen read: “You want to date Jake” in bold, an adorable picture of Jake in glasses underneath it along with a short paragraph:

Jake is the one for you! Even though he may be geekish or weird, Jake is your soulmate. This is a sign from the universe! Don't miss the chance to date Jake! Please, date Jake!

“So do I have to go on a date with you now?” you grin, waving your results into Jake’s face, the soft glow of the screen illuminating his features as he stared at it with glossy eyes.

Even though this was all planned by Jake, his cheeks are a pretty coral shade, his teeth gnawing at his lips in habit of nervousness as he shrugs, “I guess the universe is telling you to do so.”

“And I guess I just have to take this as a sign,” you answer. Jake under the evening glow of the sunset looked even more golden than he was before, and in this instant you realize that this man in front of you, who you think could be crowned the most attractive, funniest person in the world, actually wants you back in your whole entirety.

One of Jake’s favourite things about human physiology is the way one’s eyes changes when they look at someone they love, he watches the way your pupils dilate automatically like they do when it’s dark outside but this time it’s because of him — and he’s pretty sure he’s looking at you the very same way. The edge of his eyes soften a little and sometimes they even get watery which he can’t seem to control. Tears of joy, of course. And he has this habit of raising his eyebrows around you, as if he is trying to make his eyes bigger, trying to get a better vision and see all the details, blinking less in hopes of elongating this moment even if it was just for a millisecond more.

“Next tuesday?” Jake asks, and you nod your head in confirmation. “Is the universe telling you that that’s the day?”

“Yeah, and so is tarot.com,” he adds, “scorpio men are supposed to be filled with luck next tuesday, I think I’d probably need it then.”

“You’re such a nerd,” you laugh.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. But you love it don’t you,” he teases, “I still haven’t forgotten about your nerd kink, princess.”

You groan, never forgiving your coworker for it, “you’ll never let me live past that, huh?”

“I don’t know, will I?” Jake’s eyes crinkle around the corners, clear and radiant.

“I sure hope so,” you state, unable to keep your eyes off him, “or I’m going to start on my red suit theory again.”

This time it’s Jake who groans in embarrassment, whispering soft ‘no’s as his hand reaches out towards you, fingers caressing the back of your hand. “It’s just a mere coincidence, this is absolute torture.”

“Is it?” you grin, pulling Jake closer towards you, his presence welcoming as you inhale the soft scent of his being — a hint of vanilla and musk that you’ve come to recognise as home.

That night, Jake giggles on his way home, victorious from the results of his survey. You totally bought the psychology thing, Jake convinces himself that as he kicks his feet under his duvet, fingers flying across the screen as he texted you.

Jakey (my nerd🫶🏻) [ 11.45 PM ]  goodnight pretty princess☺️

Jakey (my nerd🫶🏻) [ 11.45 PM ] i miss you

Jakey (my nerd🫶🏻) [ 11.45 PM ] btw what is your idea of junk food🧐 just some details i need for psych class

You [ 11.46 PM ] Jakey go to bed

Jakey (my nerd🫶🏻) [ 11.46 PM ] I can’t I’m shaking from excitement haha

It’s Tuesday and Jake’s freaking out (as he has been the past few days) — having already triple checked tarot.com's daily love horoscope tab just to make sure that today or all days would be his lucky day. Jake, although a believer of science over anything, decides that today he’ll leave it up to fate.

He faces himself in the mirror, chest puffed to imitate confidence as he straightens his dress shirt for the nth time, going over the creases of its collar. The time on the digital clock hanging on his wall showed ‘18 00’ and he pats himself on the back for being right on time, having told you he’d pick you up at 6.20.

Jake picks up the single white rose flower he’d built with lego carefully in between his fingers, the delicate structure having taken him seven hours to figure out how to landscape; but Jake didn’t mind because it was for you, and he knew you’d cherish his effort and time.

Unlike Jake’s clean look, his bedroom is a mess: courtesy to his extreme panic when he woke up late from his nap, his usual alarm seemingly only unsounding on the most important days of his life. Tiny pieces of green and white lego splattered over the floor as Jake tiptoes through the mess to finally escape the confines of his bedroom.

As he walks to your house, Jake dials up his best friend, in hopes that everything is already in place. “Did you do it? Jay I swear if you dip on me again like you did five years ago during our science olympiad presentation I’m going to hex you into another dimension.”

“Calm down schoolgirl,” Jay’s voice ringing across the phone, occasionally cracking up, “I did it, and I told you I had a stomach ache that day, I wasn’t lying.”

Sure he wasn’t, Jake just enjoyed teasing his friend. “Did you get the junk food?”

“I said I got it man, everything you sent on the list: cheetos, doughnuts, bread, and whatever the hell lobster butter chips are — those were six fifty by the way, you better pay me back.”

Jake hums, he’s not going to be paying him back, the view of your house now directly in his view, “okay now scram, I’m picking her up right now — wait actually I’m kind of scared, like not kind of, I’m freaking out on the inside. Quick question, do you think I should’ve carried my lucky charm with me today? You know the one I take to all my science competitions?”

“You mean the piece of spider man's suit that you claim is real? No?” Jay almost reprimands, “you’re going on a date Jake, not to a comic convention.”

“Right, right,” he whispers under his breath, inching closer to your front door by the second, “thanks dude, you’re the man.”

Jay grunts over the phone, a half assed reply before he hangs up and leaves Jake standing alone before your front door, single lego rose in hand making him feel bare. Maybe he should’ve brought a gift, oh he definitely should have.

Before Jake dwindles into full panic mode, the door opens and all his thoughts fly out the window because you look like you fell from heaven, white fabric of your dress draped across your silk skin, smile that embarrasses  the sun into chewing its glory, stingy thick rays of you stealing the air from his lungs.

“Hey Jakey,” you greet him, and he feels all his worries wash away — like your voice was raw harmony that trickled throughout his body and soothed his soul.

Jake for a second is speechless, mouth a gaping mess as he just looks at you, pupils dilated and all. “Is that for me?” you ask, kitten heels clacking down the cement stairs of your home, extending your hand to take the lego flower from his grasp. “I’ve never seen a lego flower like this before, is this a limited edition of their series?”

“Kinda,” Jake manages to croak out, still entranced. He realises that he’s never really seen you outside your usual working clothes or a large, oversized shirt you usually wore home. Blush heat lips and honey ocean skin wrapped in soft melodies of lace satin, Jake with the whole dictionary memorised in his head, can’t seem to find a word to describe you; and maybe that was exactly how you looked, indescribable.

Jake doesn’t tell you that he spent seven hours rummaging through his lego collection like a mole digging through soil to find the correct pieces for this very flower, disassembling some of his favourite figurines to attain the fitting pieces. He doesn’t tell you that he built a white rose because it represented pure, true love and he felt it was fitting of you — his first love.

Falling in love, it’s a weird feeling. Jake can’t remember the moment he realised that he was actually in love with you and that this was much deeper than a shallow attractions based on your looks, he feels it burn so intense like an explosion of fireworks in his body; it’s the sleepless nights that left him feeling exhilarated at the thought of seeing you the next day.

“You look really pretty today,” Jake whispers as he pulls you in for a hug, breath tickling your cheek, painting them a sheen of pink. 

“Do I?” you lift your head from his shoulder, arms still wrapped around his neck, “you look handsome, like a prince.” 

“I suppose I’m pass the Ursula stage then?” He jokes and you giggle, “am I promoted to Price Eric now?”

“I’ll see,” you reply, pulling away with a lingering touch, fingers running down his arm to intertwine your hands with his as you lead him down the familiar path to the beach.

“So this is a test,” he furrows his eyebrows and you shrug.

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”

“C’mon baby, don’t do this to me,” Jake says absentmindedly, endearment dripping out of his lips like second nature. Your heart pumps, a song of fragile birds flooding your soul. Jake speaks in whispers of warm summer rain and silver rivers dancing through the abyss of the morning sky, and you smile, falling into this daydream. “At least tell me the prerequisites, is this a point based exam or like an aptitude type.”

“Charm me,” you tease, and Jake looks at you knowingly.

“You’re making fun of me again,” he groans, guiding you to the set up his best friend had prepared for him. And Jake thinks that his best friend has outdone himself yet again, and he starts to forgive him for all the times he’d ditched Jake during important science competitions because it looked like a dream — fairy lights draped around the area with a romantic ambience, food set up on the picnic mat that Jake guides you to. 

You take in a breath, shocked at the view. Jake seemingly always outdoing himself whenever it came to surprising you. “It’s beautiful Jake.”

Jake’s shoulders rise up in victory and confidence, his first date looking to be going extremely smoothly for him: or perhaps it was because it was with you and you brought comfort with you everywhere you went.

“Lobster butter chips? These are so expensive,” you almost squeal, letting go of Jake’s hand to pick up the bag of chips in excitement. 

Making a mental note to thank Jay when he sees him, Jake makes space for the both of you to settle down, summer breeze blowing as the waves hit the shore rhythmically.

And it’s in moments like this, you wonder to yourself why no one has ever been entranced by Jake as you are right now, how someone like him — so innately pure and beautiful in all definitions isn’t seen as he is in your eyes. Because his laugh is utterly contagious and his smile makes you giddy for no reason, the jokes he makes etched in your mind that you still burst out laughing days later: you’ve fallen for every second you get to spend with Jake, even if those seconds have left you wanting more. But in those small moments of wonder, you look at Jake and feel glad that no one else has seen him like you do, because if they looked deep enough to see all of those things within him, then you’d never have been able to.

You don’t even have to think about what to say, Jake already midway in a tangent about how excited he was for this day to arrive, something about extreme rituals and late night searches on some sketchy website called doctornerdlove that made him question his whole being.

“This man was a virgin at thirty nine, I thought I was reading about my future self,” he explains, pulling out his phone to show you the extremely sketchy website he had to get through two security warnings and five closed advertisements to reach, “and there was something about how someone tells him that sometimes a girl actually tried to flirt with him but he was too scared to even talk to them so he never got a girlfriend. And I was like oh my gosh, that could’ve been me— thank god you appeared before I turned 39.”

“Jakey, you’re twenty-two,” you look at him, adoringly, just like you’ve always been. “And you’re not even scared to talk to girls.”

“Age is just a concept, you know baby,” he starts, and the endearment still makes you shiver in delight, “and I am scared of girls, I was especially scared of you.”

Oh, you croon your neck in curiosity, you never knew that. Jake takes that as a signal to continue, hands flying through the air as he tries to mimic the exact situation, “okay, it wasn’t really fear, it was more of a wow-my-eyes-are-going-to-fly-out-of-my-sockets thing when I first saw you. You were checking up on me after the ball whammed into the side of my head, remember? And I asked you if you were real.”

“Jake, I literally thought you were so attractive then, I flirted with you,” you exclaimed.

“You did not,” he argues, “no way you did.”

“I called you Jakey and said that you were cute,” you point out.

“Yeah but my mom calls me that too,” he tries to retaliate, “not saying that the way you say it makes me think of my mom–”

“We were strangers.” And Jake realises. Oh, maybe it was possible. Maybe. Not that he’d recognise it in the heat of that moment where he was way too busy ogling at you and your things, but he’d never confess that to you. “W–well, I flirted with you,” Jake stammers.

“You said like five words to me and your face was as red as a tomato,” you shake your head, leaning into the banter you’ve come to enjoy with the boy you’ve come to love.

“Well it was nerd flirting, you know what I mean?” You let out a laugh that makes his stomach flutter and his heartbeat soften, and he wishes that that very sound could suffocate him in the morning dew and evening light.

“You’re the stupidest person ever when it comes to love,” you gasp as his hand finds the dip of your waist, pulling you closer into him, “even though you may be slick sometimes.”

“I sure hope so, because I didn’t do all that research on the dark web for nothing.” His fingers knead your skin absentmindedly over the fabric of your summer dress.

And suddenly, while he stares at you under the midnight sky, he just can’t take it anymore. He wants more, more than just looks and brushes of arms and legs and the stupid endless flirting. He wants to taste your lips and your neck and your cheeks and everything, to run his hands through your hair and feel the electricity of love rush through him as he has read in all of the books in his life. Jake wants to pull you in and never let you go.

“Kiss me,” you whisper and that was all it takes for him to kiss you like every fibre of his being was dying, and you were his medicine. 

You’ve never lost yourself in a kiss, you’ve in fact never experienced a kiss like this; pure psychedelic inebriation instead of just lips against lips. And it felt like transcendental metamorphosis as Jake licks the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of passion before delivering it back to you, over and over again.

Jake places his hands on either side of your face, and the room falls away, the space between the two of you explodes and his heart keeps missing beats, hands unable to bring you close enough to him. Jake tastes the skin of your lips and realizes that he’s been starving, his lips leaving your lips to place chaste kisses at your neck.

In that very moment you believe that his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over you like stars.

It leaves both of you panting and wanting more as Jake traces tiny little circles on the lines of your palms, heat of the moment evident through the red tips of his ears. And Jake thinks that he’s found his new obsession and he can pen it down in his notebooks that his favourite hobby would now be kissing you, holding you close, feeling your lips touch his and your limbs wrapped around him.

“Can you also read palms or something?” You ask, breath heavy as you almost shiver from the delicate dancing of his fingertips.

“I actually can,” he admits, chest heaving in similarity to you, his signature lopsided grin on his face.

You raise your eyebrows with a gentle smile, he’s so weird, you think as you play along.

“What’s does my future look like?”

And you swear, Jake’s eyes light up like a thousand fireflies, he takes in a deep breath before he speaks without hesitation, with certainty.

“It looks like us.”

It’s three in the morning and you’re laying in Jake’s arms, the warmth of his arms draped over the curve of your hips and under your head as he can’t stop placing chaste pecks around your face and down into your collarbones. 

“Jakey, it’s three in the morning, please go to sleep,” you almost have to beg your boyfriend, your eyelids heavy as the still energetic boy who has your heart doesn’t stop at your command.

“Did you know that kissing was invented from Hindu Vedic Sanskrit texts from over 3,500 years ago and was described as inhaling another's soul?” Jake whispers, trying to keep his voice down, his lips continue to press kisses along your jaw, tongue occasionally darting out to place sloppy kisses.

“You’re like a dog,” you mutter, eyes prying open to be met with Jake’s mop of bessy bed hair and glowing skin.

“You dog at least?” he tries and his heart does a victorious pump of its fist when you hum in agreement, too tired to coax him.

“You know you’re so pretty,” he sighs, nuzzling his face into the crook of your neck.

“Jakey,” you murmur, and his head leaves its place of comfort to look up at you in attention, “I’m going to inhale your soul if you don’t sleep right now, not the kiss kind.”

Jake gives you a guilty grin and it follows with moments of silence before it breaks again.

“One more thing, since we’re on the topic of dogs, would you ever adopt a dog and call her Layla?”

“Jake.” You say and he gives in at the mention of his government name, telling himself that he’ll ask you tomorrow instead when you aren’t so sleep deprived.

And unfortunately for you Jake doesn’t forget, constantly in your ear about getting a border collie with white and golden fur. “She can be our child, you know co-parenting. You could be a mom and I could be a dad, we’d be dog-married.”

“Dog married? Jakey, are you dog-trapping me?” You suggest and he shrugs, lips jutting out in habit — the type of expression he has when he wants something really bad now amplified on his face.

“Perchance, is it working?” Jake wonders aloud and you chuckle, throwing your legs over his under the shade of your designated palm tree. It seems like even during your day off, some things never change; you’re still with Jake, you’re still at the beach, and you’re still entertained by his antics.

Jake takes your legs, palms caressing over your summer skin and you sigh in relief. “Maybe, we’ll see.”

Your boyfriend takes it as a win, a goofy grin spread across his face. The checklist he made in his mind almost fully ticked, the only thing left unchecked being the part about getting married but he’ll get there, Jake’s extremely confident because he’s if he’s managed to bag the prettiest girl out of his league, even flying cars would be possible in his books.

“You’d be an amazing dog-mom for our dog-child, dog-daughter to be exact, and I’d be the best partner dog-dad. We’d be such good dog-parents, our dog-baby would look up to us.”

“Babe, it’s a pet, let’s not get carried away.” But Jake does get carried away, imagining the moments where he’d dress your joint dog-baby — Layla in accessories and clothes, pamper her with you, do everything together with the two of you. “And stop dreaming of dressing our dog-baby up in spider man accessories.”

You know him so well. 

“Have I ever told you I love you baby,” Jake tries, fingers skillfully massaging your leg.

“I love you too Jakey,” you reply, leaning forward to place a kiss on his lips. Jake leans into it instinctively and sighs in contentment. 

“So what do you think of a spider-dog, or should I call her dog-women– dog-girl? With a mini cape and all.”

“Jake,” you deadpan and he slouches in defeat, unable to fight the use of his government name. 

“Fine, no dog-hero,” he sighs and pouts.

Three months later, you appear at Jake’s doorstep with a dog in your arms, the shiny new collar embossed with the name ‘LAYLA’ in bold, the white and golden furred border collie wearing a red mini cape. 

That night, Jake kisses you just like every other night, whispering unbeknownst dog facts that you don’t question how he knows because that’s your boyfriend — Jake in his geekish walking encyclopedia thoughts and talkative mannerisms, the most beautifully loserish nerd you’ve ever laid your eyes on who can recite the periodic table by heart but can’t seem to follow a pancake recipe, who has now chosen to abandon the spiderman plushies on his bed whenever you’re around to hug you to sleep instead, who you love with your whole heart.

Jake, though, swears it’s statistically impossible for you to love him more than he does you. Just because he gives you more kisses and in his words, kisses are the measurement units for the metric system of love, whatever that means.

You proceed to tell him to shut up (endearingly, of course) and he does, only to come back to you at the end of the week with a comparative affection count in the form of a double bar graph. It's so dorkish you can't take it seriously, making up for your loss in percentage of kisses by peppering him with more on the spot.

© SJYUNS

[reasonsforhope]

"In the 1750s, an Italian farmer digging a well stumbled upon a lavish villa in the ruins of Herculaneum. Inside was a sprawling library with hundreds of scrolls, untouched since Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 C.E. Some of them were still neatly tucked away on the shelves.

This staggering discovery was the only complete library from antiquity ever found. But when 18th-century scholars tried to unroll the charred papyrus, the scrolls crumbled to pieces. They became resigned to the fact that the text hidden inside wouldn’t be revealed during their lifetimes.

In recent years, however, researchers realized that they were living in the generation that would finally solve the puzzle. Using artificial intelligence, they’ve developed methods to peer inside the Herculaneum scrolls without damaging them, revealing short passages of ancient text.

This month, researchers announced a new breakthrough. While analyzing a scroll known as PHerc. 172, they determined its title: On Vices. Based on other works, they think the full title is On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and in Whom They Are and About What.

“We are thrilled to share that the written title of this scroll has been recovered from deep inside its carbonized folds of papyrus,” the Vesuvius Challenge, which is leading efforts to decipher the scrolls, says in a statement. “This is the first time the title of a still-rolled Herculaneum scroll has ever been recovered noninvasively.”

On Vices was written by Philodemus, a Greek philosopher who lived in Herculaneum more than a century before Vesuvius’ eruption. Born around 110 B.C.E., Philodemus studied at a school in Athens founded several centuries earlier by the influential philosopher Epicurus, who believed in achieving happiness by pursuing certain specific forms of pleasure.

“This will be a great opportunity to learn more about Philodemus’ ethical views and to get a better view of the On Vices as a whole,” Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London who is working with the Vesuvius Challenge, tells CNN’s Catherine Nicholls.

When it launched in 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge offered more than $1 million in prize money to citizen scientists around the world who could use A.I. to help decipher scans of the Herculaneum scrolls. 

Spearheaded by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, the team scanned several of the scrolls and uploaded the data for anyone to use. To earn the prize money, participants competed to be the first to reach a series of milestones.

Reading the papyrus involves solving several difficult problems. After the rolled-up scrolls are scanned, their many layers need to be separated out and flattened into two-dimensional segments. At that point, the carbon-based ink usually isn’t visible in the scans, so machine-learning models are necessary to identify the inked sections.

In late 2023, a computer science student revealed the first word on an unopened scroll: “porphyras,” an ancient Greek term for “purple.” Months later, participants worked out 2,000 characters of text, which discussed pleasures such as music and food.

But PHerc. 172 is different from these earlier scrolls. When researchers scanned it last summer, they realized that some of the ink was visible in the images. They aren’t sure why this scroll is so much more legible, though they hypothesize it’s because the ink contains a denser contaminant such as lead, according to the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, which houses the scroll.

In early May, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that contestants Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak, computer scientists at Germany’s University of Würzburg, would receive $60,000 for deciphering the title. Sean Johnson, a researcher with the Vesuvius Challenge, had independently identified the title around the same time.

Researchers are anticipating many more breakthroughs on the horizon. In the past three months alone, they’ve already scanned dozens of new scrolls.

“The pace is ramping up very quickly,” McOsker tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “All of the technological progress that’s been made on this has been in the last three to five years—and on the timescales of classicists, that’s unbelievable.”"

-via Smithsonian, May 16, 2025

[crystaldragon1997]

🤌✨RANT✨🤌 Personal rant

(Edit: Links to forums and updates added in reblogs and a page break for convenience)

iNaturalist (Parent company to the app Seek) just announced a collab/sell out to Google GenAI with no concerns about user data, data collection, and privacy. They issued a non apology explanation that was kinda just wishy washy and saying it's better this way. Information brought up when finding matches for your observations are going to be AI generated and so will some examples images... 

I use iNat regularly to assist my natural practices. It was like an on the go field guide to what is essentially what I consider a sacred part of my practice. And it's all getting sold to train GenAI...

I feel genuinely betrayed because we all know Google's GenAI(the lil blurb at the top of Google searches) isn't always accurate and sometimes egregiously and dangerously false. And now an app that for so long has been crowd funded, citizen science based and peer reviewed is going to instead rely on AI.... 

Waiting a little bit to delete my account hoping they take it all back but I guess I will be going to some nature centers, parks, and libraries now in hopes of collecting field guides ..

Not to mention the environmental impact Google and GenAI have on a global scale is completely opposite to what iNat has stood for and gained its following for over the years. It absolutely is breaking my heart.... Over 1.5 million dollars....

Maybe I will cool down and think this is all silly. Maybe they will walk it back. I know there are genuinely great conversations happening on the iNat forums .. but the trust feels broken.

https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/113184-inaturalist-receives-grant-to-improve-species-suggestions

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.

The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:

Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.

And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.

More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1

Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.

That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.

Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:

https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-59

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action all over the world: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.

It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end. The reason the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell – if anything, it only makes people madder.

It's hard to overstate just how weird the antitrust surge is. We've been fighting for decades for even tiny concessions to the interests of working people – a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.

But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust – again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy – is the most successful popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth trillions of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.

Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it – rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies. Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

The success of the antitrust movement happened in spite of the Democratic Party, in spite of the GOP. To the extent that either party embraced an antitrust agenda, it's because the people demanded it, so undeniably that the parties chose the public interest over the interest of the billionaires who call nearly every shot for them.

It's impossible to overstate what an anomaly this is. On today's episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen reminisce with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's former DoJ antitrust boss, about a conference they attended together in 2017 where the after-dinner keynote speaker was Richard Posner, a judge who was hugely influential in the dismantling of antitrust in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Dayen, the substance of Posner's keynote was:

Antitrust. That's dead, isn't it? I don't know what you guys are even talking about. This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as antitrust law.

And Kanter, Dayen, Stoller and future FTC chair Lina Khan were all sitting around a table, listening to this in 2017. By 2021, Kanter and Khan were running the DoJ and FTC antitrust agenda, and they did more in the next three years than all their predecessors over the past 40 years, combined.

Khan, Kanter, and their colleagues (like Rohit Chopra at the CFPB) did incredible work during the Biden administration. There is no denying their skill, their competence, their commitment. But the reason they were able to bring all those virtues to bear in service to working Americans is the massive popular surge of rage at corporate dominance. In other words, the Biden administration's prodigious trustbusting accomplishments were the effect of the antitrust movement, not its cause.

The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:

[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.

https://labornotes.org/blogs/2025/04/viewpoint-why-oligarchs-want-recession?

American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:

https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1909607195961917687

To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

Worried that the EPA has been put in an induced coma and that means your kids will grow up with asthma and lead poisoning? You're actually angry about corporate power:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/04/air-pollution-trump-administration/682361/

The Department of Education is in the hands of a woman who took over her rapey husband's professional wrestling monopoly, a corporation that misclassified performers as contractors, leaving them without health care so they have to beg for pennies on Gofundme so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

Trump's Secretary of Education is monumentally unqualified for her position. Not only is she is planning to fire teachers en masse and replace them with AI, she doesn't know what AI is and just gave a speech where she repeatedly referred to it as "A-1":

https://gizmodo.com/trumps-education-chief-linda-mcmahon-repeatedly-calls-ai-a1-in-school-speech-2000587329

Angry about this? Worried that your kids' teachers are about to be replaced with steak-sauce thanks to the incompetence of this fucking muttonhead? Me too. But you're not just angry at Trump or Linda McMahon – you're angry at corporate power.

In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?

https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf

The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Something remarkable is happening, right under our noses. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. The world is terrifying, but this? This is exciting.

Smart political organizers have a once-in-a-century opportunity here. Trump's wildly unpopular destruction of the antitrust enforcement system opens up all kinds of opportunities for state enforcers (remember, states can also enforce antitrust law):

https://www.thesling.org/state-antimonopoly-enforcement-must-be-a-guardian-of-american-democracy-heres-how/

A massive political change that bubbles up from the bottom, aimed directly at the richest, most powerful people in the history of the human race, is an amazing thing. As bad as things are – and boy are they bad – this remains true, and important.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever/#oligarchism

Image: umseas (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/snre/34605145761/

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

[phoward89]

Based on this ask

Dark!Coriolanus, Delulu!Coriolanus, StepDaddy!Coriolanus, DaddyCoriolanus

You've known Coriolanus Snow ever since you were kids. Your fathers were serving in the war together, in 12, and you both lived in the same building. Hell, he was the one you ran to when an officer came to your door with the heartbreaking news that your father was killed deep in the woods of District 12 by rebels alongside General Crassus Snow.

Coriolanus’ father.

Coriolanus, despite being a young orphan boy, hugged you and tried to give you comfort. He told you that he'd be your best friend forever.

God, you both were 8 when that happened.

Fast forward 13 years and now, at age 21, you’re finding yourself running to his door once again over another life change.

This time though, you’re going to him to make an announcement. An announcement that would change your friendship. One that he'd most likely view as scandalous.

But you had to tell him before he found out from gossip.

When the elevator doors dinged open, you stepped out onto the 12th floor. Taking a deep breath, you closed the distance between you and the penthouse door.

You prayed that he wouldn't push you away after your announcement.

He was the only real friend you had left after Sejanus' death. It'll kill you if Coryo cuts ties with you because of the situation you're in.

Even though you were afraid of his reaction to your news, you balled your hand up into a fist and quickly knocked on the door. God, you were so nervous to see him. Maybe you should just tell him your news in the doorway and then run off in shame?

Yea, that's what you should do. No way in hell is Coriolanus Snow, an assistant game maker to Dr. Gaul and a University student only a year away from graduating with degrees in both military strategies and political science, going to stick by your side once you tell him your scandalous news. What you've got to tell him is a big no no in proper Capitol society.

God, he'll probably just call you a whore and turn you away once he hears it.

The door opened, revealing Coriolanus standing in the doorway. A wide smile cracked his face open as his icy blue eyes took in your presence. “Darling, I wasn't expecting a visit from you today.” Reaching for your hand, he said, “Come in, we'll have tea with Grandma'am.”

You snatched your hand away from him before his long fingers could grasp it. Your eyes fell to study his floor shines (damn, you never realize how big his shoes- well his feet, were til now. Like damn…), as you told him, “I can't stay for tea. I only came by to tell you something; then leave.”

“Surely you can come inside and sit with me. Grandma’am adores you and whatever you have to tell me, you can do it while we have tea.”

“Coryo, I can't.” You heavily sighed.

Coriolanus furrowed his brows, your words making him concerned. You've never declined the invite to come in and have tea before. Usually you'd just walk on in, shoulders brushing by his, whenever you came over. The fact that you refused to move an inch, never made any motion to come inside, concerned him.

Instantly, he was placing a comforting hand on your shoulder and tilting your chin up with his knuckles. Your worried eyes meet his baby blues. Baby blues that searched the windows of your soul for answers on why you were acting so unlike yourself.

Even tho he'd never admit it, Coriolanus was worried. The way you were acting was so unlike you; it scared him.“Y/N, what's wrong? What aren't you telling me?”

“I'm pregnant.” You told your best friend, breath shaky, afraid that he'd view you with the same stigma and shame that Capitol citizens viewed unwed mothers with.

You're pregnant?

Pregnant!

Coriolanus couldn't believe his ears. How did this happen? Okay, he knows how it happened. But he just didn't know that you were fucking somebody.

How could have Coriolanus missed the fact that you were seeing somebody; fucking somebody? Weren't people so disgustingly happy and flighty when they were young and in love? When they were having their innocence stripped away?

And then another thought struck him. One that made his blood boil. You had no reason to tell him that you were knocked up (since in the Capitol accidental unwed pregnancies always led to quick weddings) unless whoever got you in trouble abandoned you; forsaken and tricked you.

Had betrayed you.

And now you need your Coryo to fix everything; make everything all better.

“Who do I need to threaten?” The platinum blonde asked you, dead ass, and it took you by surprise.

You were expecting Coryo to be upset with you, disgusted even, but you weren't expecting him to ask who the baby daddy was and to offer to threaten them. Yea…That took you off guard.

“Coryo, you don't need to do that.”

“Of course I need to do that.” Coriolanus simply said. He rubbed your shoulders in a comforting manner while telling you, “Whoever got you into your delicate condition buttered you up with lies only to use you and turn their back on you. They betrayed you; broke your heart and I'm going to make them pay.”

“Coriolanus, no.” You shook your head. “You're not going to go hunting down my ex to maim him because he's not ready to be tied down.”

“Yes, I'm going to do exactly that because that scoundrel knocked you up and ran away from his responsibilities. He's living his life, without any second thoughts of you, while you're at risk of social damnation.”

“And here I thought you'd send me away and call me a whore, but instead you want to confront Livinius.” You scoffed incredulously.

“Livinius? As in Livia Cardew’s older brother, Livinius Cardew?” Coriolanus asked, his baritone full of disgust, as his icy blue eyes narrowed and turned cold.

Oh shit…did you just accidentally tell Coryo that Vinny’s the one that knocked you up? Yea…you did…

“I'm going to kill him.” Coryo swore as steam literally came out of his ears. He was so mad it wasn't even funny.

Hoping to calm him down, you placed your hands on his chest. “Coryo, please don't. Just leave it alone.”

Locking his eyes with yours, Coryo asked, “Do you love him?”

Did you love Livinius? No, you didn't. You only went out with him because your mother pushed you to. Your mother who had disowned you once you told her that you're pregnant. You did care about Vinny tho, even if you didn't love him.

“No.” You shook your head. “I don't love him, but I was with him long enough to care.”

Coriolanus was relieved that you didn't love Livinius, but he thought you were foolish for still caring about him. He didn't want you to feel worse than you did, so he gave you the well meaning advice of, “Well, stop caring about him because he surely doesn't care about you.”

You were feeling a bit overwhelmed emotionally (blame it on the hormones) so you told your best friend, “Thank you for not turning me away, but I think I better go now.”

“I know how much of a bitch Helenium can be. Where are you staying?”

“Coryo…” You heavily sighed, not wanting to get into things with him about your mother kicking you out and disowning you.

“Jesus, she kicked you out, didn't she?” Coriolanus concluded with bitterness in his voice.

“Yea.” You confirmed with a nod. “I've been staying at a hotel near the rail station for now. It's just until I can get a job and find an apartment.”

“You're pregnant, Y/N. You don't need to stress about working long hours in retail and finding some shithole flat to stay warm in.” The platinum blonde said, only to push his apartment door open as wide as it'd go. Ushering you in with a large hand on your shoulder, he said, “Come on, you’re staying with me.”

“Coryo, you don't need to put me up. Really, I'm fine staying at the hotel until I figure things out.” You told him, as he closed the door behind you.

Turning you around to look at him, he told you, “I know that I don't need to do anything, but I want you to stay with me because you're my best friend. It's always been my job to protect you; keep you safe, Y/N.”

How could you argue with that? He was only looking out for you. Was only doing what he's always done for you, which was to try and protect you.

You let out a heavy sigh, only to tell him, “Okay, but it'll only be temporary. I promise, I'll figure something out.”

“You don't need to figure something out because I said you're staying with me. And don't worry about the expenses, I'm more than capable of handling it.”

“Okay.” You gave in, knowing fighting your best friend (who was as stubborn as a mule) on livng with him was a losing battle. “But, please, don't tell Grandma’am yet. I can't bare to see her disappointment at me about once she finds out.” You told Coriolanus while letting him usher you out of the entrance hall.

“Okay, we won't tell Grandma’am until you're ready.” Coriolanus agreed to your request before the living room came into view.

“I still can't believe you have a car.” You told Coriolanus as he opened the passanger’s side door of his black luxury sedan for you. The car looked imported, but you weren't sure since you didn't know much about cars. Well, other than how to sit in them that is.

“I told you, darling, I’ve got money now.” Coriolanus told you, a smug smirk painted on his lush lips, before shutting the door and rounding the car to the driver's side. He opened the door and took his seat behind the wheel. “So, do you have a lot of things at the motel?”

“No.” You shook your head as your best friend cranked the car engine to life. “Just a cardboard box of stuff and a couple trash bags of clothes.” You told him as he pulled out of the parking lot behind the Corso apartments.

“You have your clothes in garbage bags!?” Coriolanus exclaimed, giving you a scandalous look. “Little dove, you should've came to me as soon as Helenium kicked you out. I would've moved your things from the 8th floor to the 12th.”

“I didn't come to you right away because my mother gave me enough money to rent a hotel room for a few weeks. I had things under control; I just came over today to tell you about my pregnancy so you wouldn't find out from gossip.”

“Y/N, you don't have things under control. You're living in a one star hotel by the Panem Rail station, you're living out of trash bags, and you're unemployed.”

“Corio-” You began, only for your bestfriend to cut you off with, “Don't, Y/N, don't you dare try to convince me that you're okay because I know you're not.” He switched lanes (without using his blinkers, which is a big no no), while telling you, “You need my help and I'm in the position to give it to you. The Plinths, after losing Sejanus, have made me their heir and are very generous to me and my family.” His icy blue eyes looked between you and the road, only to say, “I'm not that poor boy giving you most of his share of cabbage and broth after letting you sleep over. I'm able to help you; support you the way you need now.”

“I know, but I don't want to be dependent on you.” What you left out was that you didn't want him taking care of a baby that wasn't his problem. He had the world at his fingertips, he didn't need his best friend's scandal holding him back.

“You're not dependent on me, darling. We're bestfriends and I want to help you.” Coriolanus told you while turning a corner and nearly clipping a car.

Oh hell, how did he even pass his driver's test? He drives like a maniac.

Oh, wait a minute, Strabo Plinth probably just paid off the DMV to give Coryo his license.

Not wanting to talk to your bestfriend anymore, you leaned forward and turned on the car’s radio. You fiddled with the tuner until you landed on a station you liked.

The music filled the atmosphere for maybe a minute or so before Coriolanus turned it off. Looking between you and the road, he said, “Look, Y/N, I know how it is to be manipulated and used by someone you love. To give them everything only for it not to be enough; for them to turn on you and betray you.” He took one of his hands off the wheel, only to grab yours and say, “Darling, you're my bestfriend and the only person who's truly ever been by my side genuinely; not because you want to use me for something. You mean a lot to me and I just want to help you because I know how stupid and foolish you feel right now after getting your heart broken by Livinius.”

You just nodded and squeaked out, “Okay.” You really didn't feel like talking about this stuff right now.

And when did Coriolanus become somebody that talked about feelings? For as long as you've known him he always ran away from feelings.

What you didn't know is that Coryo's been harboring a decade-long crush on you. A crush he never acted on because he was afraid of ruining your friendship. Afraid that you'd push him away for being too obsessive (he knows how he can be with his things). So, he just pushed his feelings for you onto the prettiest face he saw (Lucy Gray once he became her mentor). And when he came back to the Capitol, he threw himself into his studies and interning with Dr. Gaul that he only saw you occasionally.

Now he wishes he would've just acted on his feelings for you, then your child would be his. But, he was going to fix everything and make it all better. Starting by getting rid of Livinius Cardew.

“Just let me handle everything for you, my little dove.” Coryo said while pulling into the parking lot of your hotel.

A run down hotel right next to the rail station. The flashing sign reading ‘Vacancy’ looked about to burn out. The tall blue sign next to the hotel reading Motel 6 seemed to mock you as Coryo asked, “What room in this pre-Panem horror's yours?”

“205.” You simply said as he pulled into an empty parking spot.

He cut the cars engine and pocketed his keys, only to hold his hand out. “Key.” Was the simple word he said.

You grabbed your bag from the floor and fished your room keys out. When you dropped them into his palm, he cringed.

They were brass keys, not a key card like the nicer hotels had. Coriolanus didn't say a word, but the disgusted look on his face was enough to know that he didn't approve of your choice of room. Opening his door, he said, “I won't be long, wait here.”.

You just nodded, watching as he got out of the car and went to get your things.

How did you end up here, you don't know. You went to see Coryo earlier to tell him about that baby, you never meant for him to take you in. To drag you to your hotel to get your things. It feels like everything escalated so quickly and you don't know how to feel about it.

After collecting your things, Coryo brought you back to his penthouse and helped you get settled in the guest room.

At first staying with the platinum blonde man was hard, since you felt guilty about him taking care of you, but eventually after a few weeks you got over it.

Truthfully, it was nice spending time with your best friend (that you haven't seen in a while) and his Grandma'am, who you adored. You wish that Tigris, Coryo's cousin, was around more. But since Coryo helped her get a shop and become a stylist for the games, she moved out and into a luxurious condo that was located above her boutique.

But, unknown to you, in the last few weeks you've been living in the Snow penthouse, Coriolanus has been viewing you as more than his best friend. He, for some reason, has started viewing you as his girl. And that baby you're carrying, well…he's starting to view it as his child.

Especially when you came home from an appointment with the first printed scan of the baby. You waited until Grandma'am was tucked in bed before asking Coriolanus if he wanted to see the scan. You were scared he'd say no, but you asked because you wanted to share it with somebody.

You wanted somebody to be your partner during this time, this pregnancy, even if that someone was your best friend.

Was Coriolanus Snow.

Turns out that you had nothing to be scared of since Coryo flashed you a genuine smile and told you that he'd be honored to see the printouts of your first ultrasound scan.

You had a couple of copies, so you gave him one. And when you gave it to him, standing nervously in his room, next to him as he sat at his desk, he smiled and ran his thumb over the tiny bean shaped baby (well fetus) in the scan. “How far along are you, little dove?” Coriolanus asked, never taking his eyes off of the piece of paper in his large hand.

Going over to the edge of his bed and sitting down, you explained, “I’m a few days away from being 9 weeks. Dr. Wellock says I'm due during the summer, in mid-June.”

The platinum blonde ran a hand thru his hair while grumbling, “Of course, baby's due when I'll be at my busiest preparing for the games.”

“I'm sure I’ll be on my feet by then, Coryo. Don't worry about it, the baby's not coming for another 7 months.”

But Coryo had to worry about it. He didn't want to be so busy with helping Dr.Gaul prepare for the games come mid-June that he misses out on the birth of his first born. And in his mind you were carrying his first born. Just staring at that baby, no bigger then a bean, on the print out he was holding made something paternal (and delusional) snap in his head like a rubber band. Now, after seeing that scan printout, he was convinced that your baby was his.

Coriolanus has never fucked you (ever), but he's convinced himself that the baby's his. That you're his perfect, innocent, little dove. His darling rose of a best friend. His baby girl. So that the baby you carry has to be his too.

The little tiny baby had a strong heartbeat and stats according to the print out, so he knew it was his.

His, his, his.

“You and the baby are staying here with me, Y/N. And that's final.”

“Okay.”, You agreed, only because you knew that you'd need help with a newborn. Who were you to turn away your best friend's help. Coriolanus cares deeply for you; wanted to make sure that you and the baby had the things you deserved. You couldn't fault him for that.

If only it was that simple, that innocent.

But it wasn't.

No.

Somewhere in the platinum blonde's head wires got crossed and he blew a fuse. He thinks the baby's his, and since he thinks that he'll never let you or the baby leave his penthouse.

Ever.

Nearly 3 months into living with Coryo, he came home one evening hunched over; coughing. The handkerchief he was coughing into was stained with blood. He staggered to his room, ignoring the startled cries and pleas from you and Grandma'am.

Turning to the worried old woman, dressed in her jewels and bright tunic, you assured her, “I’ll go check on Coryo.”

“Oh, should I call that maid, the Plinth woman, to put on a pot of tea for our Coriolanus?” Grandma'am asked as you rose from your seat.

When will Grandma’am realize that Ma Plinth (who lives on the 11th floor) isn't the maid? Ma Plinth just happens to be the mother of your late friend, Sejanus, and is just a warm, kind person who cleans the penthouse a few times a week and spends time with Grandma'am (and watches her when Coryo has to go somewhere for a long period of time or when you have appointments). Is Grandma’am’s memory, her senses fading that quickly? You know she can be a bit…much, sometimes- but still, is her memory getting worse?

“No.” You shook your head. Lightly patting her hand, you said, “I'll put some on if he wants it.”

Grandma'am just nodded, watching you as you left the main room and went down the hall towards Coriolanus’ room.

You knocked once on his bedroom door before opening it and peeking your head inside. “Coryo, are you okay?” You asked, seeing that he was sprawled out on his side, nearly falling over the edge of the bed, while bloodily hacking into his handkerchief.

Looking up at you, icy blue eyes full of pain, he croaked, “I’ll be fine, Y/N.”

You didn't know if you believed him or not. He didn't look like he'd be fine. Sighing, you entered the room and went over to him. “What’s wrong, Coriolanus?” You asked, getting into the bed with him and pushing a stray sweaty curl that got loose from its slick back style, away from his face.

“Nothing, just suppose it's something I drank.

“Something you drank?”

“I had tea with Livinius, after my work with Dr. Gaul today, to speak with him about you and the baby. The tea must've been bad because he dropped dead at the tea room and I'm sick.”

“Coriolanus, what did you do?” You asked, knowing deep down that bad tea doesn't kill people and make them jack up blood. That your best friend had a hand in whatever happened.

“I didn't do anything, darling.” Denied the platinum blonde, clutching his handkerchief as he welt blood tickling the back of his throat.

“Don't lie to me, Coryo. Please, as my best friend you owe me the truth.”

Coryo let out a string of loud, bloody coughs; staining his handkerchief and soaking it crimson. Lifting his head up off his pillow and looking at you from over his shoulder he told you, “I killed him for us and the baby.”

“What? Why?” You gasped, eyes wide, searching for answers.

“Livinius offered to give me money for you to get rid of our mistake, before you got too far along. I wasn't going to let him get away with that, so I poisoned him.” Coriolanus told you, body wracked with uncontrollable coughs. Coughs that made him spit up thick spools of blood.

“Coryo, are you insane? Just because he wanted me to get an abortion doesn't mean you had to poison him.”

“He was dangerous to us, little dove. He heard you moved in with me and invited me out for tea to discuss your condition and I wasn't going to let him threaten our baby and get away with it.”

You blinked as you took in his words. Our baby. Our baby as in his and your baby. Not your baby, but ours. He considered your baby his despite the fact that you've never fucked him, ever, in your entire life.

What the hell's wrong with him? Has he lost it? Was he delusional?

What the hell?

“Just hold me, baby. Please, just hold me.” Coryo asked between bloody coughs that had him gagging in pain.

You were beyond shocked. Your best friend had murdered your ex with poison and had inadvertently poisoned himself to the point that he's currently knocking on heaven’s door right now. And all because he had some delusion that your baby, your baby that was fathered by the man that he just murdered, was his.

How do you deal with this? Is there any way to deal with this?

Sighing, you decided to give into Coryo's request. He killed your ex, Vinny, to keep the baby safe. A baby he’s convinced is his. But, he did it with good intentions.

They say hell is paved with good intentions.

So…

You held him as his body shook and he coughed up a concerning amount of blood. He was always there for you, the least you could do was be here for Coriolanus. His baby blues had so much pain swimming in them. You couldn't imagine how bad he felt right now as his body was fighting itself.

“You're not going to die, are you, Coryo?” You asked, afraid that you'd lose him because of a rash decision he made.

“No.” Coryo weakly shook his head. Slowly turning around, so that he could comfortably rest his head on your chest, he told you, “I'm partially immune to this poison; I'll just be sick for a few days. He cleared his throat, fighting off a cough, and placed his hand on your belly. “You're slowly starting to get a tiny bump.” His baritone was full of pride as he told you, “I think we should stop hiding from the stigma of being unwed parents and just tell Grandma'am that she's going to be a Great-Grandma’am.”

“She's going to insist that we get married, Coryo.” You pointed out, hoping that he'd drop the notion of telling Grandma’am. You're certain that he's not ready to settle down yet.

If he was, wouldn't he have somebody by now?

Little did you know that he did have somebody.

He has you.

And that's why, in between coughing up blood, he told you, “I can convince Grandma’am that we'll have to wait until the baby’s born to have the wedding, so that you’ll be able to fit into your dress and drink celebratory champagne at the reception.”

And those words cemented that fact that your best friend was delusional. He didn't just want to raise your baby as his own, but wanted to marry you too.

Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, he told you, “Since we're telling Grandma'am about the baby as soon as I'm feeling well enough to get out of bed, we can end our charade of chastity. You can finally share my bed, my darling.”

Coryo smirked, thinking that his words were charming, before hacking and soaking his already stained handkerchief with more crimson liquid.

With the metallic smell of blood and the sweet smell of roses mingling in the room, you found yourself giving into Coriolanus' delusions. You agreed to tell Grandma'am about the baby and to move your things into his bedroom.

Because what choice did you have? Coriolanus killed to keep you and the baby safe. It was clear to you that he'd do anything for you and your child.

At least he'd be a devoted husband and father, even if he’s a bit delusional.

Tags: @kuroosbby001, @purriteen @poppyflower-22 @meetmeatyourworst, @whipwhoops @bxtchopolis @readingthingsonhere @savagenctzen @ryswritingrecord, @erikasurfer @tulips2715, @universal-s1ut, @thesmutconnoisseur, @squidscottjeans @sudek4l @wearemadeofstardust0 @mashiromochi @gracieroxzy @belcalis9503 @shari-berri @aoi-targaryen, @whiteoakoak, @spear-bearing-bi-witch @gisellesprettylies @loverandqueenofdragons @qoopeeya @mfnqueen1 @permanentlyexhaustedpigeon88 @v-love @staylowessafe

[victusinveritas]

From Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War:

"I’m putting a flag out front for No Kings Day.

If I can find an Army Corps of Engineers flag at the VA store, maybe I’ll put that out, too. That was my outfit. I didn’t “join” it any more than I “joined” COVID; I was just infected by it.

The process went like this:

1. I turned 24 and was drafted.

(1.5 I tried to be a conscientious objector, but that required a letter from from my minister, priest, or rabbi – and atheists don’t have those authorities.)

2. Brilliantly, I asked the Army what I could do. They said “volunteer for the draft.” That was still two years’ service, and you’ll probably get a low-echelon science job, cleaning test tubes or something.

(2.5 They threw away all that paperwork and just sent me to Vietnam.)

3. In Vietnam, they gave me a rifle.

4. I told the sergeant that I couldn’t kill anybody.

5. Oddly enough, the sergeant said “A lot of people say that. But you have to carry the rifle anyhow. You can decide whether to shoot it or not.”

6. I was issued an M16 that had THIS MACHINE DOESN’T WORK! Scratched into the stock. It indeed didn’t work.

7. Then I was issued an M14 rifle, but never fired it. As a combat engineer, that really wasn’t in my job description. I just blew shit up and tried not to stop a bullet.

8. About four months in, I did stop a bullet, and more: seriously injured by a booby trap.

8.5 My paperwork in Pleiku got screwed up, and instead of going to relatively safe hospitals in Japan and stateside, I stayed in South Vietnam.

9. I wound up in a relatively safe spot in the 6th Convalescent Center in Cam Ranh Bay, a large well-defended base, where I finished out my year (weirdly!) working as a volunteer for the Red Cross. I didn’t even have a gun, though I’d be issued one if the enemy broke through. We had to run for cover during frequent rocket and mortar attacks, but injuries were minor, and fatalities rare.

10. I personally suffered nothing but a few decades of anxiety attacks.

I guess that’s my unexciting biography as a “citizen soldier,” or semi-voluntary prisoner of wartime. Any objective observer would have to point out that although my injuries were fairly serious, I’ve wound up only slightly handicapped, and in about a year, I did get material for a lifetime of books and stories.

I may have wound up a science-fiction writer anyhow. If I hadn’t been drafted, I was slated to take a job with the Naval Observatory, doing bachelor-level astrometrics down in South America. (My main qualification for that, other than a weak B.S. in astronomy, was that my wife spoke Spanish.)

Anyhow, it’s No Kings Day, and I have the right to wear a little Purple Heart medal in my lapel. Lost it years ago, though.

Instead, I shall try not to vote for people who would send other people’s children into the furnace. "

[rubyvroom]

Fascism does have a logic. The issue is liberals are used to empirical, correspondence versioms of truth through discourse. So to find a truth we test for the objective, "out there", truth, an objective thing that truth measures. This is not truth to fascists. Truth is a verb. There is no "out there" truth to fascists. It is a mythic view of the world, reincorporated through the lense on instrumental logic. Long story short, the world exists as a struggle for power of different groups. The creation of group purity, destiny, providence, the essential character of their group, is what the myth centers around. So truth is power. Whatever brings more power, more domination, more humiliation for their opponents, is truth. The reason they attack institutions is that institutions create a knowledge framework that structures reality. They do not, fundamentally, believe in objective truth, so institutions that create science are in service of some group's power. The knowledge they produce is not the result of nonfalsifiability, it is a performance to further the ends of... big pharma, liberals, minorities, lgbtq people? Whomever, a degenerate group that is not them. So they play the same trick against every institution. They use the rules and taboos and good faith against them. So they accuse the institition of breaking its most fundamental taboos, not being empirical, not accepting heterodox views, being schills for interest groups etc. The group then tries to engage in good faith, and fascists use this as a toehold into the institution. Playing the victim of persecution, they claim to just want "open discourse". They slowly turn public opinion against the institution, and garner concessions. But fascists pantomine the liberal game without ever conceeding anything. And eventually, the perception created of a corrupt institution leads to a complete usurpation by the fascists. They then laugh as they purge any remaining scientists at the weak naivety of assuming they were themselves bound by scruples of fair play. The goal is attained, the husk of the institution now uses its language, its conceptual frameworks, its appearance to produce fascist knowledge. Truth is the ability to frame reality this way. It is why they don't mind when Trump lies. They fucking love it. Why? Because he is *producing truth*. He says "the gays have made technology to rain men from the skies, it's raining men!" Then the media for a week runs breathless coverage, liberals are outraged, the Republican party all immediately starts saying it is obviously true but also he was kidding. The New York Times launders it into normality by going to excruciating lengths to make it coherent in a liberal framework. "Trump Claims a Heightened Risk of Airline Collisions" is their headline. The immense power demonstrated, the histrionics of their enemy, the bending of reality around the statement, is to a fascist a more pure truth than any experiment. They are nihilists. There are no principles beyond gaining power and humiliating and hurting opponents. Certainly this is delusional from a liberal, Enlightenment perspective, but it does carry its own rationality. They have been trained by capitalism to function as consumers, not citizens, and they choose their products based on what feels empowering and gives them purpose. Fascism is the aesthetization of politics. Everything revolves around spectacle, perfromance, simulation. It is clownish because it is all based on television hyperbole, politics is a soap opera, Graham Hancock bases himself off what a regular person imagines an archealogist does. They are, in a very real way in our postmodern hellscape more true than true. They are the simulacrum of the things they signify. Trump is how Americans imagine politics. Authority, bravado, dick wagging, expertise is for nerds.

[pumpkinstrawbrew]

𝔐𝔶 𝔩𝔬𝔳𝔢 𝔦𝔰 𝔞𝔰 𝔞 𝔣𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯, 𝔩𝔬𝔫𝔤𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔉𝔬𝔯 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔴𝔥𝔦𝔠𝔥 𝔩𝔬𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯 𝔫𝔲𝔯𝔰𝔢𝔱𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔢𝔞𝔰𝔢, 𝔉𝔢𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔬𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔴𝔥𝔦𝔠𝔥 𝔡𝔬𝔱𝔥 𝔭𝔯𝔢𝔰𝔢𝔯𝔳𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔦𝔩𝔩, 𝔗𝔥’ 𝔲𝔫𝔠𝔢𝔯𝔱𝔞𝔦𝔫 𝔰𝔦𝔠𝔨𝔩𝔶 𝔞𝔭𝔭𝔢𝔱𝔦𝔱𝔢 𝔱𝔬 𝔭𝔩𝔢𝔞𝔰𝔢. █ 𝔐𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔰 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔪𝔶 𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔠𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔰𝔢 𝔞𝔰 𝔪𝔞𝔡𝔪𝔢𝔫’𝔰 𝔞𝔯𝔢, 𝔄𝔱 𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔣𝔯𝔬𝔪 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔱𝔯𝔲𝔱𝔥 𝔳𝔞𝔦𝔫𝔩𝔶 𝔢𝔵𝔭𝔯𝔢𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔡: 𝔉𝔬𝔯 ℑ 𝔥𝔞𝔳𝔢 𝔰𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔢 𝔣𝔞𝔦𝔯, 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔱𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥𝔱 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔢 𝔟𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱, 𝔚𝔥𝔬 𝔞𝔯𝔱 𝔞𝔰 𝔟𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨 𝔞𝔰 𝔥𝔢𝔩𝔩, 𝔞𝔰 𝔡𝔞𝔯𝔨 𝔞𝔰 𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱.

...

(so mm. i’m working on BTAS scarebat fic atm, an’ my brain thought that i can also sit down an’ begin drawing smth related to that around 3 in the morning 6 days ago, bc why not.

nothing here is related to the plot of the story i’m working on. or well, not directly at least. i’d say, that i consider this collage of arts as ‘circle’ of their possible relationships in a way. including the ‘circle’ of their expressions an’ what can be or cannot be seen, regarding bruce’s shadowy batman mode an’ how in two arts, jon’s expression is hidden from the view. this all has an extra, tiny bit of a meaning. about which i’m on my way to ramble about. i have some of that good shippy energy inside my weary bones today! what a day!

but alright, so the first one *at the very top* is smth of a scarebat classic to me. snap picture centered on the idea, that even if they will have close an’ intimate relationships, jonathan still be jonathan, basically. still, be somewhat poisonous an’ dangerous to keep this near, even if he’s gentle of the bat back. an’ bruce even knowing all this, still gets tangled into it, as’ their ‘natures’ clash like that. as they are two ‘monsters’ of the night. two people with ideas, that feel larger than they are. this might be a moment in one of their 'fear battles', where bruce is pissed off, or well, righteously angry as i call it, while jonathan faces him an’ what kind of expression he makes is anyone’s guess, but it’s prob an evil one. even if personally, imagine it more whimsical. less dramatic evil an' more campy evil. the whole villainous monologue about how crane aches for bruce to actually see things his way for once. fear is nessasery for everything. it's not just passion of his. it can be smth so much greater. in other words, i think, that jon might attempt to coax batman into joining his case. bruce would not join, but it's still worth a try.

the second one *lower right* is low-key based on AU idea that i have or that be used for any version scarebat tbh. it's kinda universal an' bendy. the mere chance of ‘what if’, bruce mets jonathan before he becomes scarecrow *he will still become one still later tho*, an’ he pretty much seeks his ‘help’ as batman. i imagine, that this can happen early in bruce’s vigilante career, when he an’ gordon ain’t buddies yet an’ bruce need some assistance from time to time. or maybe, he needed jon’s help for one case an’ then, they kinda got on a friendly terms an’ it progressed from there. in this version, i think, jon would try to ‘hold back’ a bit, when it comes to his fear experiments. mostly bc he knows, that bruce won't like him doing smth like this. or he can think, that it can be a bit too early to try an' ease him up to idea of basically psychologically torturing people to progress the science lol. batman is an imposing, terrefying symbol of justice. but in crane's eyes, he's also a soft-ish kind of boy. cannot do smth nasty, just so that it will serve a greater good. anyhow, smth still goes wrong. crane still gets fired, bc even if the bat was none the wiser to what he was doing, his collegues were. which in the end, lead to bruce an' jon having a fight about it. an’ after that, jon pretty much disappears from the radar *like most of BTAS rogues do, when they're about to rebrand from normal citizen into a masked villain lol* an’ returns 2-3 years later as the scarecrow. with all of that in mind, in this AU, crane will have a clear advantage over batman at first, as he used to known him prior to this. an’ he got to see him work / talk, learned a few things about him, while the bat won’t instantly know that scarecrow is jonathan. but i imagine, he will figure this out fairly quickly. not only bc crane is short an’ thin an' obssessed with fear. but bruce also was around the other man a lot an’ considering how ambiguous their relationships were at one point, he also watched crane back. this art captures more sweet moment between the two, howerer. them having heart to heart or maybe, jon thought that bruce had died or rumors had it that he was serious injured in some fight against a villain an’ he was relieved to learn, that it’s not so. can be anything, honestly. regardless, jonathan hides his expression from batman, an’ bruce have his ‘game face on’, as they both don’t deal with vulnerability very well *also idk how do draw the back of jon’s head yet, but i gave it my best shot lol*

the next one *the lower left* is also a classic set up in my eyes an' also my fav art out of the bunch. this 'scene' can be connected to AU above, as in: batman takes his once-a-friend, who is also his-love-interest an’ his-new-rogue to arkham, after jon lost the fight. or as i drawn it, this is an imaginary of ‘what if BTAS did a justice to dark knight of scarecrow comic’. what if we got batman an’ scarecrow personal fight an’ bruce end up carrying jon all romantically into the sunset at the end, like he did in that issue. bruce face here is all shadowy like in the actual comic scene, an’ while i’m not sure if i managed to capture my intention with this one kinda well or not, the idea behind this exact ‘head portrait’ was to get a bit of a mixture between bruce’s unmasked features, his batman persona an’ also a bat-monster creature *that all versions of jonathan seen him as, at least once* it’s a bit of reflection on all of it. on who bruce is, who criminals see him as, an' what jon sees him at, when he's high on ft. in some capacity bruce is all of those things. or rather, they're all part of the same man. as bruce’s core will always be rooted in empathy. an' BTAS bruce is basically a golden standard of batman writing, when it comes to bruce wayne as character an' that very trait esp. so yeah, this art is nod toward that an' more broad approach to what could have been, if they given jon at least one more ep, where he an' batman would have been in focus. i imagined, that in this art bruce carries jonathan from whatever location they had fight in, an’ it’s like early morning, so there is mist. bruce walks an’ reminicents on fights an’ waste of jon’s brilliant mind, along with other things. expression close to melancholic. meanwhile, crane is out cold. an’ it’s one of those rare lax, relaxed expressions that he has, opposite to his sneers, smirks or frowns. as he's only ever in peace, when his mind isn't active. what a nightmare, indeed *mostly for bruce* so sweet dreams, spooky prince. may the big bad bat guard your slumber.

an' finally, the last art *at the very bottom* which shows jonathan during his staying in arkham. in BTAS he had long sleeved uniform, but i think, in the comics based on the series, he been seen in a gray shirt a few times. so i decided to give him that lol. this can also be connected with AU, i mentioned. like, that bruce will still come back to his old friend, even if those visits are somewhat painful. i guess, it will be even worse than when bruce has to interact with harvey as batman. but this also can be smth unrelated to that. for example, bruce needing crane’s assistance on smth, without them having any history between them, besides the canonical one. or it can be them, being in relationships an’ jon is kinda being difficult. each of his progress is shaky an’ he pretty much slips back into his old ways, as soon as he goes out of arkham. but whatever the set up is, jonathan is more accepting of his situation, or rather about what he is. while bruce is kinda torn about it. can hold him close, but cannot truly mend his mind. i also have a feeling like crane tells him smth fear related. be it his assessment onto bruce’s state or their whole ‘thing’. but whatever it is, this isn't a very pleasant talk for bruce.

an’ oh yeah, instead of using song lyrics like i usually do, i used shakespeare’s sonnet for this. an' it's one of my most favorite ones as well. i had to cut out the middle, bc i disliked how it looked. but you can go an' read the whole thing, if you will ever feel like it. i mean, that's fairly short one. but i honestly think, this fits them *an' generally scarebat as a ship* very well.)

[irishplaguedoctor]

Pale King and Hornet Excerpt

This was an idea based on @progenycursed characterization of the Pale King. (Go check out their stuff it's really awesome!)

I've been working on something off and on for a while now. They're bits and pieces of how a more alien/eldritch-like Pale King would interact with his family and citizens before the kingdom's fall. Nothing is concrete as of yet but I still wanted to show off a piece of it.

This excerpt focuses on Hornet's perspective when she was still very young.

Father’s a wierdo.

He acts really weird compared to all the other bugs I’ve seen.

He moves weird, he watches weird, and he talks weird too. Even godmother acts more normal than he does.

Even mom says he’s a weirdo, sometimes.

I asked her why she got with him in the first place but she said it was something that I would understand when I’m “older.” Am I not old enough now?

When I’m at his big, bright home he’s usually the one escorting me around. I love to climb and use my silk to get away when no one’s looking—it’s the best time to explore—but mom and the deepnest maids always chastise me and put me back on the ground.

Father’s different…in his weird way.

It takes my mom a minute or two to notice I’m not right behind her anymore—so at least I have a little bit of fun before she ruins it!—but father notices it right away. The minute my claws leave the floor he always stops walking and looks at me. He doesn’t yell at me to get down, or try to pry me from the walls, or even cut my silk down! He just looks at me and tilts his sharp head and then keeps walking!

At least he lets me have fun.

It isn’t just that either.

Sometimes he takes me into his workshop and lets me help him tinker with stuff. He also tries to teach me a bunch of lessons about math and science and bunch of other boring stuff so I kind of zone out. Other times he lets me run around and play with some of the small junk lying around (mom got real fussy when I told her that). Though, there were a couple of times that I swore he just appeared right behind me to snatch something sharp away or grab me before I could trip and fall.

One time, I was playing with what looked to be a broken piece of glass. This time, I looked directly at dad to see what he would do and I saw eyes on the back of his head! They disappeared so quickly too and before I knew it, dad took the piece of glass away from me.

“You have eyes…on the back of your head!” I exclaimed.

“Oh?” He put his claw to the back of his head, as if there was something to feel, “Are you sure my child? I do not feel anything.”

“I saw! I saw!”

He chuckled and threw the piece of glass in the trash. “Such a vivid imagination!”

Ever since I’ve tried to see those eyes again, purposefully trying to find more sharp stuff to mess with, but he doesn’t do it anymore (though he still takes it away immediately)!

[januwo]

Timbuktu - Africa's Forgotten Library

Timbuktu, to many that name is simply a term for "middle of nowhere", somewhere you'd go to if you didn't come back in home by dinner, and many don't even know it was a real place, on the other side of the Sahara from Morocco.

And if you look deeper, Timbuktu isn't just a place but one of the greatest intellectual centres of the Medieval era.

It didn't hold just books but a reflection of Sub-Saharan's intellectual hub, who's library was the largest in the world for centuries.

"View of Tombouctou from a hill" from Rene Caille's Journals, 1830

On the subject of historical libraries, the Library of Alexandria and the loss of scrolls is never one to miss. It is the subject of countless mourning for the 400,000 books that burned down (though that story isn't really true).

Yet, Timbuktu's libraries are home to an estimated 700,000 manuscripts dating back as far as the 11th century, almost double what was in Alexandria, about science, law, astronomy, health, philosophy, and more.

This number is so large it was only in the late 19th-century when British Library recorded hitting that milestone, centuries after the printing press.

And unlike the common belief that it was simply copies of Arabic texts, there were many, many original texts were written by West African scholars from Mali to Nigeria to Sudan, thinking and philosophising on concepts not seen elsewhere.

And unlike the unrecoverable books of Alexandria, Timbuktu's books are still out there, not in massive public libraries but hidden in homes, cellars, basements, under wells and beds. Away from the colonialist powers around the city that till this day keep trying to destroy its tradition.

So if one singular West African city is home to a unique repository of culturally distant Medieval knowledge larger than any seen at the time, why isn't it more well known?

Abdel Kader Haidara, director of the Bibliotheque Mama Haidara De library looking through manuscripts in his house. Photographed by National Geographic, Sep 2009.

Historians may debate the origins of Timbuktu in different languages and different etymologies, but local tradition dating back to the 17th century at least indicates that it's in the name itself:

Around 1000AD, among the northern tributaries of the Niger, sat a water well used by pastoralists and merchants crossing the Saharra, this much we do know of.

Oral tradition preserved in the manuscripts state that the well was cared for by an elderly woman named Buktu. The area became known as "Tim-Buktu", Buktu’s Place.

Her legacy, like many women in Timbuktu's history, was never erased and also reflects the more egalitarian society that it was known for.

"Arrival at Timbuktu" circa 1100 AD in Tifinagh and Magrashab Ajami, depicting a caramel caravan greeted by Buktu, edited from a print of Timbuktu in 1891 as I couldn't find any depictions of Buktu.

As an essential stop on the trans-Saharan route, it eventually became a permanent dwelling growing in size, becoming a commercial market and later a place of education.

And around the same time, Islam was spreading in Africa.

But you see, the stereotype of a religion spread by conquest wasn't true in West Africa, it was too hard to reach. It was spread through Islamic merchants that came and settled in cities, creating their own class of citizens.

These merchants created communities of learning, law, and commerce, and gradually over time converted people, taught others, and created a shared community based on Islam. Cities across West Africa had this revolution in time, but Timbuktu was the northern door leading the way. It was small at first.

Mansa Musa, king of the Mali Empire between 1317-1354, from the 1375 Catalan Atlas. His caption reads "This king is the richest and noblest of all these lands due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands"

But then came Mansa Musa, that guy, the richest man in history. His story is one most of us know and is a whole post on its own but he's the key originator of this story.

After travelling back from Mecca in 1324, he saw potential and peacefully annexed the city of Timbuktu on his way, full of ideas from what he found in the great cities he passed through.

He funded the already existing mosques and brought in scholars from North Africa, wanting Timbuktu to also be a city of scholars, as the gateway from North to West.

And it worked.

An 800 year old pre-Mali Empire Qur'an from the the year 1215, illuminated manuscripts were common among the Qu'ran found in Timbuktu, often incorporating local textile motifs mixed with Islamic geometry.

At its peak in the 16th century, it had a population of 100,000 people with 25,000 of its inhabitants being scholars. That's a quarter of a city engaged in education on a level unlike any other city in the world.

Mosques like the Sankoré Madrassa, a place of learning created around the same time as Oxford University, became libraries, classrooms, lodges for pilgrims, and more above the place of worship, and started writing tens of thousands of books.

These madrassa's were places where scholars could convene with their students rather than a strict university setting.

In Timbuktu, it wasn't a school's prestige that was important but the teacher that was most important, and usually the children of the teachers also became teachers, creating a culture of families renowned for their intellectual prowess.

Public libraries weren't common but scholars had their own big libraries. Ahmad Baba lost 1600 books in the Morroccan invasion, which his student famously commented was the smallest library out of any library in his family.

And unlike modern and ancient stereotypes, they created literature and developed entirely new genres of literature, and a new form of Islam too still practiced today.

The Sankoré Madrassa in Timbuktu, photo by Bert de Rulier

Timbuktu was remote, that's hard to deny, but it's fame was certainly not. Scholars from Morocco and Egypt came to study, coming from societies where differing views on religion could be deadly they were shocked at the wildly different and unique debates and hadith in Timbuktu.

One famous story tells of an Egyptian scholar coming to teach in Sankoré, but humbled by those around him that he became a student. This wasn't unusual, and Timbuktu's fame was in the pride of this sort of environment.

This relative flexibility of thought in Timbuktu was because of its remoteness, away from the strict standards of the North who couldn't keep a watchful eye.

Conversions to Islam were done through cultural negotiation and persuasion, creating an Islam more tolerant of local African traditions, yet always respecting the Quran. This was something that famous Moroccan traveler Ibn Battutta infamously found horrifying in his 1350 visit to the Mali Empire.

And women were part of the conversation too, Nigerian scholar Usman dan Fodio, famous for innovating the famous Sokoto literary tradition in northern Nigeria, was part of a family that believed in gender equality.

His sisters were known to read and write, copy manuscripts, take care of his libraries, and Fodio's daughter Nana Asma'u became the most famous female poet, polyglot and teacher in West Africa. She formed a cradle of female teachers called jajiss who travelled across the region teaching women to the same standard as men did.

Tolerance and apathy for keeping the faith are reasons some modern researches would lead you to believe the rationale for this cultural mix, but it was simply a different blend that always ultimately followed the Quran.

One of Nana Asma'u's works, written in her mother tongue Fulfulde, 1822

Each town often had its own mufti, these were trained judges who handled local disputes: marriage, trade, inheritance, and even gossip. They wrote to other scholars for advice, receiving detailed legal rulings. These texts with the legal rulings are called fatwa.

Fatwas are a treasure trove of local legal reasoning, especially in West Africa where we see different approaches and belief systems compared to other regions. Topics ranged from dowry rights, camel disputes, and even cheating scandals.

West African fatwas reveal a lively, flexible, and deeply contextual Islamic world that often debated concepts in ways unthinkable in the Arab world.

And this is one of Timbuktu’s greatest contributions, pioneering an African scholarly tradition that merged worlds, and brought lived social context into theology.

Looking into specific fatwas and authors and analysing West African Islamic tradition and social roles is for a whole seperate post, but know that through it we can see a completely unique intellectual understanding of Islam forming.

However fatwa's are fairly common across the Islamic world, did Timbuktu or Mali contribute anything groundbreaking? Yes.

A page from a 19th century commonplace book, starting with a sheep-related fatwa and ending on a note about a hadith.

Timbuktu wouldn't last in its golden age forever, and in 1591 the city was sacked by the Moroccans, destroying manuscripts and destroying tombs. This event started a power vacuum and chaos between rivaling families.

To make sense of it all and to settle disputes on legitimacy, scholars started compiling histories of Timbuktu and the surrounding histories in the Sahel, these were called Tarikhs, historical chronicles.

In 1655, the Tarikh al-Sudan was published, Sudan being a name for the black African regions. It's actually THE primary source for where the histories of the Mali, Songhai, and Ghana empires that we know today come from.

The Tarikh genre in Timbuktu is particularly interesting, however what was revolutionary about it wasn't the text itself but where it was sourced from, oral histories and commentaries.

In most historiographic tradition at that time, only written material was accepted as legitimate for history, and everything else deemed irrelevant. Oral stories were usually performed to teach morality, a lesson, and thus events might be exaggerated or a narrative entirely fictionalised, so academia dismissed it as irrelevant.

But what Abd al-Sa'di realised was that oral histories sung and said by the bards (called griots) were generally very accurate at giving a general yet intimate view of moments in history, where even fiction when critically analsyed could give us deep insights in history. This revolution gave us one of the best examples of historiography in the African continent.

It would take until the 19th century for the West to even consider oral stories/fiction as having historical basis, when a very amateur archaeologist decided to forgo all established convention and believe Homer, in the process finding the city of Troy millenia after its name was first sung.

Many scholars turned to Ajami, the use of arabic script to write local languages, preserve and ideas that otherwise had no written form. The 20+ languages known to be written this way were part of a unique blend that elevated the languages of the people to an equal intellectual status as Arabic, in fact this was so much the case that foreign scholars to the region would often learn Fulfulde due to its prominence.

So knowing the massive, unique, distinct and large literary tradition in the city and abroad, why isn't it more well known and researched?

A more recent copy of the Tarikh al-Sudan sitting in the Metropolitan Museum.

The Moroccan invasions never slowed down the intellectual tradition but made people wary of outsiders. A couple European explorers were known to be murdered in their attempt to visit the city in fear of what they would bring if they brought back news. Teachers taught in their homes instead, if need be children were taught in secret. French colonialisation didn't help matters but people persisted.

After Mali's independence, there was renewed interest in Timbuktu which led to some digitalisation projects. Gathering books included literally knocking on people's doors and convincing them that the foreign researchers would do no harm to the texts, creating libraries with tens of thousands of copies.

In 2012, with a jihadist takeover that was much against what Timbuktu stood for, attempted to get rid of any manuscripts found in the city as part of a push against non-Sharia compliancy. Books were smuggled on rice bags, donkey carts, and re-hidden again with the help of researchers, successfully being able to smuggle a total of 300,000 known books, with many probably still in the city.

Digitalisation has largely been a success with over 150,000 books available in online archives, specifically in the Virtual Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. However, a tiny minority are translated and studied and even less are readily available. This was due to efforts prioritising conservation before research, and so it's knowledge remains underappreciated simply because the wide world doesn't yet have easy access and interest in it yet.

Timbuktu is a city of many wonders to uncover, and may it stand as a testament that West Africa, and the continent more broadly, has always been a cradle of knowledge, history, and depth the world can no longer afford to overlook.

READ MORE:

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library - Contains thousands of manuscripts I used for statistics

African Bibliophiles: Books and Libraries in Medieval Timbuktu by Brent Singleton - Interesting research on its book keeping and intellectual culture

Beyond Timbuktu An Intellectual History Of Muslim West Africa by Ousmane Oumar Kane - A book moving away from the Western lens on Timbuktu, with takes and information I found so fascinating I'll write much further on these topics when I finish reading it.

The Meanings of Timbuktu by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne - Fascinating deep dive, with many examples I used, into many specific aspects of the manuscripts I'd need many more posts to explore.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

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

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

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

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

[emieben]

This is an illustration of the the leading protagonist of the plot before the Great Amnesia, showing a crucial moment in his life:

His groundbreaking discovery— the beginning of the end for the old world.

Niklaas was a researcher working for the Republic's lesser-known scientific divisions as an alternative to serve in an ongoing magical war. The work was specialized and confidential: to develop better and stronger magical technologies based on emotion resonance. These devices ran on harvested feelings and nightmares, donated by citizens to support their state during wartime.

At first, the system worked. The science advanced quickly, and with it the state's dependence on aura supply grew. What few noticed was how emotional fields started to interfere with each other in the battlefields, eventually spreading their destructive force much further than the target they aimed for.

Niklaas was one of the first to notice these patterns. He began to document a series of anomalies during his time as a soldier, before he got recruited to work for the government: irrational behavior in his comrades, unexplainable energy spikes and eventually phenomena that couldn't be explained by existing theories.

The deeper he investigated, the more it dawned on him, yet despite the evidence his warnings were ignored.

In the illustration above (you probably should turn up the brightness of your screen to see all the details ;P) Niklaas sits at the point just after his realization. The notes scattered around him describe not a breakthrough, but a failure. A system- his work- pushed too far. A structure that cannot hold.

Some details from this illustration: I added private photographs of his family and books he might read about time-travel and timelines (a personal interest of his that will become very important later on), as well as generally personal belongings. (I just had to point that out, those details took millennia to paint :'))

That's it for this illustration. I will share more soon, aswell as concept art and sketches, so stay tuned;) Q&A about Niklaas and this project in the comments, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Take care<3

[asukaindetroit]

Post-Revolution DBH Headcanons: Android Culture Part 3

<< Back to Part 1 << Back to Part 2. On to Part 4 >>

Moar android cultural snippets for your perusal. As always, feel free to use but show me b/c I want to see where this all goes :)

The soft sciences have an absolute field day because of android cultural practices. While they were created by the STEM fields, which I’m sure Detroit had tons of job openings for pre-revolution, the soft sciences have a renaissance in the wake of android sentience becoming recognized. All of a sudden there’s a massive void of research into android psychology, sociology, the economic impact of giving them wages, etc. Cultural anthropologists flock to Detroit to witness the emergence of a new culture from a new sentient species firsthand. Grant money comes flooding in from government (how do these new citizens fit into our socioeconomic structure?) and private sectors (if androids are now entitled to wages, what do they want to buy with them? Inquiring marketers want to know). Androids are now entitled to get degrees and become scientists themselves—what’s the best way to create accredited education programs to qualify them for careers when they can just download a science.exe program? There are Questions to be Answered™, and where there are questions, scientists will go. They’re not a breed known for common sense. Fly to an active warzone to study the impacts of conflict on childhood development? Sure, why not. Drive to an industrial wasteland city under martial law that just stopped in the middle of committing genocide to document the cultural practices of the new sentient species conducting protests? Fuck yeah, it’s Science Tuesday, get in the car Anthropology Intern Guy we’re going to Detroit!

The Acespec/QPR scene sees a sudden boom. Androids aren’t inherently sexual beings. Though many do desire to engage in sex as a form of sensory exploration/input for their processors, or for the benefit of building emotional intimacy with a human partner, they fundamentally don’t have a libido derived from reproductive needs. CyberLife programmed the intimate partner models to have humanized “desires,” but they may choose to reject that when they deviate (other androids may incorporate bits of that programming just to explore what it’s all about). Some are built with ken doll anatomy and just don't care. Basically, the androids that do want sex often want it for different reasons than humans, and a large portion just…aren’t into it. Fortunately, a lack of desire can apply to some humans, too—so all the acespecs suddenly have a slew of potential queerplatonic partners who aren’t likely to get entangled in messy sexual or romantic hangups (am I projecting at this point? Probably!) Sudden availability of thousands of cuddle buddies who really, actually, don’t want to have sex makes post-revolution Detroit the San Francisco of ace relationships.

Android memes and social media. Androids develop internal networks for socialization using the remnants of CyberLife’s updating framework. They share their android-unique code-based art forms, dumb memes about things their human coworkers did, code patches to help accomplish different tasks, etc. There are subnetworks specific to certain model lines (think sort of like subreddits, but instead of topics it’s things like a/PC200 and all the male police models are using it to bitch about how the humans expect them to answer dumb legal questions). The memes involve android-specific oddities, like someone will say “I had three hundred processes running and one line of code got crossed and spit out 9f32e4ba8c237fec91 all of a sudden #processorfail” and then a hundred thousand androids will translate that to three hex codes and send off an image file to each other with the three colors and somehow that becomes an android meme for trying to run too many tasks at once and getting overwhelmed. Humans that see it ask, “uh, is this a new pride flag?” or, “do androids celebrate Mardi Gras?” And the androids start laughing. They now have freedom to express humor that humans have no chance of understanding. It’s a cultural in-joke.

^ An android meme example

Emojis require an update. The 2039 additions to the Unicode emojis includes a skin tone option for hand gestures and faces that’s a replica of bare chassis for the androids who don’t use synthskin. Other major android-additions are the three LED color rings, a thirium pump, thirium pump regulator, and other prominent android biocomponents, a droplet of thirium, and two hands clasped in interface. Rather than reacting with a thumbs-down emoji an android might use the red LED, or they might use the interface one instead of the hug if someone’s upset.­

This is an ongoing series of android culture concepts, so if you want a tag when the next batch is up, leave a comment! @iwillthinkofsomethingeventually @yeahhiyellow @starryeyedstray

<< Back to Part 1 << Back to Part 2 On to Part 4 >>

[karmas-void]

Venti, Barbatos and religion

@mielwritingmade the mistake of asking me my opinion on something so here it is, quick comment receipts so people ave context, this was under a post where I talked (complained) about how the Genshin Impact fandom used to have a problem with claiming characters were "minor coded"

Okay now that we're all caught up and I've proven this isn't my unsolicited opinion and someone did in fact ask me and I have my writing music on:

I've always found the religion within Mondstadt to be incredibly fascinating. If we think about what a god is, in a real world sense, it is a being given power through human believe, ways we've thought the universe into existence, explanations of the ineffable long before modern science and technology.

By that definition, I believe Venti to be the only "true god" within genshin. Every other god is present in their nation to a certain capacity and takes charge for better or for worse, but Venti doesn't wish to rule his people like that. Barbatos' wish for Mondstadt has always been for the citizens to decide upon their own freedom without divine interferance.

"Freedom, if demanded of you by a god, is really no freedom at all" - Venti to Dvalin in the prologue

As such, his interferance with his own followers, his worship, his religion, has been imited. Barbatos, the actual god, who hides among mortals as Venti, keeping a watchful eye on his people, is entirely seperate from Barbatos, the figment of him which the church has taken to worshipping. Yeah they have his ideas and wishes and the esence of his being is the same, but the Barbatos the church worships is not a tangible entity, it is a concept, as mot gods in the modern world are, one which their traditions and values are based off of.

As for Venti thinking of Mondstadt as his children, I've been wrecking my brain trying to figure out a proper analogy for this, but it goes without saying that the children of Mondstadt are *not* Venti's biological children. the parent-child bond Venti refers to here, I believe, only extends as far as his protection does. The citicens of Mondstadt are children of freedom, they are the charge of the divine idol Barbatos the church worships, and Venti feel responsible for their safety.

Anyways that's enough for now I'm gonna get back to writing my mondstadt rebellion fanfic now I might return with more thoughts later

[abeatrizcv]

MIGUEL OCK’HARA, CORPO-YORK &… Oh… The Conventional SpiderWoman

(small lore of my SpiderOC, my Miguel Ock’Hara, Corpo-York, and other versions of the illustration down below hehe ✨)

Welcome to Corpo-York!

A universe where New York is a black and white world. There are no in-betweens... or so it seems... the citizens are used to this strange dictatorship lead by (?) a certain Spiderman villain... Where everyone lives their life as if it were normal to be exploited at work, forced to dress the same way and follow a strict schedule day after day. However, despite this strange dictatorship, the villains do not stop interrupting what seem to be the orderly lives of the worker ants that allow the city to function. Most of the time, they work for someone, but sometimes they just want to make some chaos to have fun.

The Ordinary Spider-Woman is here to save the day!

Billie Andersen is an ordinary woman who works at Alchemax. Nice, generous, kind, and with the dream of working alongside the great geneticists of the company. However, despite being highly trained, she was forced to work as a secretary. Her life would be submerged in days of boredom and routine until she was bitten by a genetically modified spider. The rest is history.

Miguel Octavius O’Hara went from Science Nobel Prize winner to Villain to Anti-Hero?!

Miguel Octavius ​​O'Hara is a renowned geneticist and nuclear physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize in sciences, with multiple master's and doctoral degrees who uses his knowledge as a scientist at Alchemax and as a university professor. Everyone knows him. He's a sweetheart.

However, his life would change completely when one of his experiments failed. A mechanical harness with 4 appendages that resembles the tentacles of an octopus. This machine worked based on an artificial intelligence, which would later corrupt his mind and turn it into a series of diffuse memories and infinite knowledge.

No one knows if it was an accident or a plan created by Alchemax.

Now with the nickname of Doc Ock or Doctor Octopus, Miguel became a supervillain of uncertain intentions.