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dayaxwriter · 2 years ago

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How Network Switches Work

How Network Switches Work: Unveiling the Magic Behind Seamless Data Routing

Introduction

In today's interconnected world, where the exchange of information is vital, network switches play a pivotal role in ensuring data flows seamlessly from one device to another. Whether in a small home network or a sprawling corporate infrastructure, network switches are the unsung heroes that enable efficient data transmission. This article delves into the inner workings of network switches, shedding light on their fundamental principles and the magic that makes them an integral part of modern networking.

What Is a Network Switch?

A network switch is a piece of networking hardware that connects devices within a local area network (LAN). Its primary function is to receive incoming data frames from devices like computers, printers, or servers and then forward those data frames to their intended destination within the same network. Unlike hubs, which broadcast data to all devices within a network, switches are intelligent devices that make data transmission more efficient by selectively sending data only to the device that needs it.

How Do Network Switches Work?

Network switches operate on the Data Link Layer (Layer 2) of the OSI model. To understand how they work, let's break down the process step by step:

1. MAC Address Learning:

ü When a network switch is initially powered on, it doesn't know the location of devices on the network.

ü It begins by examining the source MAC (Media Access Control) addresses of incoming data frames.

ü The switch maintains a MAC address table, also known as a MAC address forwarding table or CAM table, where it records the MAC addresses of devices connected to its ports.

2. MAC Address Table:

§ As data frames arrive, the switch adds entries to its MAC address table.

§ Each entry in the table associates a MAC address with the port through which the device is connected.

§ This table allows the switch to quickly determine where to forward data frames in the future.

3. Frame Forwarding:

· When a data frame arrives at the switch, it examines the destination MAC address.

· The switch looks up the destination MAC address in its MAC address table to find the corresponding port.

· If the port is the same as the incoming port, the switch doesn't forward the frame, preventing unnecessary traffic.

· If the destination is on a different port, the switch forwards the frame only to that specific port, ensuring efficient data transmission.

4. Broadcast and Unknown MAC Addresses:

Ø If the switch receives a broadcast frame (destined for all devices within the network), it forwards it to all ports except the source port.

Ø If the destination MAC address is not found in the MAC address table, the switch behaves like a hub and broadcasts the frame to all ports, learning the source MAC address in the process.

Benefits of Network Switches:

Improved Efficiency: Network switches enhance network performance by minimizing unnecessary traffic, reducing congestion, and increasing bandwidth availability.

Enhanced Security: Since switches only send data to the intended recipient, they provide a higher level of network security compared to hubs.

Scalability: Switches can accommodate a growing number of devices and are a scalable solution for expanding networks.

Smart Management: Many network switches offer advanced management features, allowing administrators to monitor and control network traffic more effectively.

Expanding on the importance and versatility of network switches:

Evolution and Varieties of Network Switches

Over the years, network switches have evolved to meet the demands of various network environments. Today, there are several types of network switches catering to diverse needs:

Unmanaged Switches: These are basic switches designed for plug-and-play simplicity. They are ideal for small home networks and require no configuration. Unmanaged switches automatically learn and forward data frames.

Managed Switches: Managed switches offer greater control and flexibility. Network administrators can configure them to optimize performance, set up VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks), prioritize traffic, and monitor network activity. These switches are common in business and enterprise networks.

Layer 2 and Layer 3 Switches: Layer 2 switches operate at the Data Link Layer (MAC address), while Layer 3 switches can route traffic at the Network Layer (IP address). Layer 3 switches are like a hybrid between a switch and a router, making them suitable for more complex networks.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) Switches: These switches not only transmit data but also provide power to connected devices like IP cameras, VoIP phones, and wireless access points, eliminating the need for separate power sources.

Stackable Switches: These switches can be stacked together to operate as a single unit, simplifying management and scalability in larger networks.

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timmydraker · 10 months ago

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CW: use of R word

Tim who, as much as he doesn’t want it to be true, is a poster boy for typical Neurodivergence. He’s more logically thinking that emotionally and needs obvious signs of someone’s emotional state that he can put together to understand how he should respond to help them.

But that’s not what bothers him because that doesn’t bother his parents.

Instead it’s his passion, though not in technology and detective work as they quickly found use for that in their business, but for bugs.

Ever since he was a kid Tim has been enamoured by insects and arachnids and even fungi. He would only read books that talked about bugs or had one on the cover, but since it helped him learn to read at a steady pace his parents didn’t mind.

At least, not at first.

When Tim got into coding just so he could make his own little web-journal for all his bug finds, they were happy he was learning how to organise and structure at just six years old, but when he only did those things regarding bugs…

Tim had his first panic attack when he watched his father pick up his terrarium filled with Diapheromera Femorata (Stick bugs) and chucked it into the bin. The glass shattered as the corner his something hard and he was forced to watch his bugs struggle to navigate the glass and rubbish, most of them injured.

His mother had gagged when she saw them and demanded the whole bin be burnt with the bugs still inside.

Tim had been so heart broken, but mostly confused. His parents traveled the world to dig up dirt and old items that were mostly the same yet they didn’t like bugs?

When he asked one his Nanny’s she gave him an answer that he would never forget, “Well, you see… only those people like bugs, y’know? The… special ones, like re-“

Tim never even let himself think of the last word she spoke and from then only forced himself to only focus on his computer work. He still loved photography but now he took photos of skylines and trees, not the beautiful beehive a few yards behind his house or the spider webs that sat between branches like art works. He took photos of Batman and Robin and for a long time that was enough to make his longing bearable.

If he still followed several pages and articles about bugs either a secret email account, that didn’t matter.

His parents were happy with him even if they still made remarks about his ‘stupid little fixation��.

It’s when they are going over the paper work for Bruce to be Tim’s legal guardian while they weren’t home with Tim’s older brothers hanging around as moral support (bodyguards) that his parents mock him.

Janet is signing some paper with a stupidly expensive pen and chatting to no one in particular when she says, “You’re all lucky we killed this nasty little bugs of his so you don’t have to deal with them.”

Everyone else in the room freezes, beside Jack who huffs a laugh and adds, “Good thing we did, he’d probably be more of a retard otherwise- talking about ‘habitats’ and bloody spiders.”

All of the members of the Wayne family are dead quiet as Tim sits there with a clear look of disassociation coming into his eyes. Alfred has a calm look on his face that tells all who know him that he’s furious and Bruce is strikingly similar.

Jason looks ready to attack and Dick isn’t even moving to stop his brother or calm anyone down.

Damian is holding onto Titus’s collar like a lifeline but seems to give the hound some kind of silent order as the usually calm dog begins to growl low and dangerous.

Jack and Janet tense and stare at both dog and master, Jack ordering him to control his dog.

Bruce stands, letting Titus growl and taking the half signed papers and throwing them in the bin, “I changed my mind, I will be taking you to court for full custody of my son. Leave my house now so I may obtain a restraining order.”

Janet genuinely flounders for a moment and begins to shout about outrage and audacity but when Dick sees that Tim is starting to cry he stands up and reminds them that he is a cop before moving to pick up his second youngest brother and leaving the room.

Tim doesn’t hear much else, only muffled shouting and the sound of a door slamming.

He distantly realises he’s in the family room, not the one they use to have guest but the real one with beanbags and a snack draw, and is being cradled by his brothers. Even Damian is beside him, holding onto his hand tightly as they wait for Bruce and Alfred.

Tim sobs into Dicks chest for Alamos a whole hour before settling more, Bruce coming into the room and Jason and Dick reluctantly hand him over to he can be held by their father.

“Tim, chum, it’s alright. We’ve got you.”

The boy in question shakes his head, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t talk about the bugs I promise-“

Bruce squeezes him tighter and kisses his head, “I don’t want that. What I want is to hear about your bugs.”

Stunned, Tim looks up at him with confusion and barely gets his mouth to move enough to ask what he means.

Dick coos from beside him on the next couch and runs a hand through his hair lovingly, “My sweet baby brother we love you, and you love bugs! So of course we want to hear about it. I’m so sorry we didn’t know how they had been treating you but it was wrong. There’s nothing wrong with you, I swear it.”

Tim sniffled, nodding absentmindedly. They gave him a moment for their words to sink in before Damian spoke up, “Timothy, I demand you tell me about your bugs.”

Jason makes a noise and elbows Damian as if to tell him to shut up, probably thinking the other was being rude, but Tim knows his brother well and just smiles. “I can do that, Dami. I… I don’t think you’ll be very interested though.”

Damian scoffs, “I will ignore that statement as it implies I would waste my time with something I don’t care for.”

Bruce smiles at his youngest and holds Tim’s hand, “I agree. Could you maybe tell us about why you like them? Or your favourites?”

It takes him a moment to respond, but when he looks at all their open expressions and gets an encouraging nod from Alfred, he stutters out a response before gradually gaining confidence as they ask genuine questions to his facts and descriptions.

They each make an effort to ask him about bugs, Jason asking a few times if he wants to check out some books that he knows use bugs as symbolism’s and Dick asking if he can tell him the difference between insects and arachnids several times. Damian and Bruce are both a bit more subtle with their support at first, but after a month Tim enters his room to find a giant terrarium with several different sections so he can have multiple bugs that might not get along with each other.

Bruce and Alfred don’t even make any comments or give disapproving looks when Dick and Jason reveal they each got a tattoo of the bug that Tim said he associates with them.

#batfam #tim drake #bat family #dc comics #batfamily #dc universe #tim drake is red robin #dc #tim drake is a menace #damian wayne #jason todd #dick grayson #alfred pennyworth #bruce wayne #autistic tim drake #bugs

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ms-demeanor · 2 years ago

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Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in BURBANK with WIL WHEATON TONIGHT (Mar 13), and in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24. More tour dates here.

My theory of the "shitty technology adoption curve" holds that you can predict the future impact of abusive technologies on you by observing the way these are deployed against people who have less social power than you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

Nowhere is this rule more salient than in Big Tech firms. Tech companies have thoroughly segregated workforces. Delivery drivers, customer service reps, data-labelers, warehouse workers and other "green badge," low-status workers are the testing ground for their employer's own disciplinary technology, which monitors them down to the keystroke, the eye-movement, and the pee break. Meanwhile, the "blue badge" white-collar coders get stock options, gourmet cafeterias, free massages, day care and complimentary egg-freezing so they can delay fertility. Companies like Google not only use separate entrance for their different classes of workers – they stagger their shifts so that the elite workers don't even see their lower-status counterparts.

Importantly, almost none of these workers – whether low-status or high – are unionized. Tech union density is so thin, it's almost nonexistent. It's easy to see why elite tech workers wouldn't bother with unionizing: with such fantastic wages and so many perks, why endure the tedium of meetings and memos? But then there's the rest of the workers, who are subjected to endless "electronic whipping" by bossware and who take home wages that look like pocket change when compared to the tech division's compensation. These workers have every reason to unionize, living as they do in the dystopian future of labor.

At Amazon warehouses, workers are injured at three times the rate of warehouse workers at competing firms. They are penalized for "time off task" (like taking a piss break). They are made to stand in long, humiliating body-search lines when they go on- and off-shift, hours every week, without compensation. Variations on this theme play out in other blue-collar sectors of the Amazon empire, like Amazon delivery drivers and Whole Food shelf-stockers.

Those workers have every reason to unionize, and they have done their damndest, but Amazon has defeated worker union drives, again and again. How does Amazon win these battles? Simple: they cheat. They illegally fire union organizers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

And then they smear unions to the press and to their own workers with lies (that subsequently leak):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls

They spend millions on anti-union tech, spying on workers and creating "heatmaps" that let them direct their anti-union efforts to specific stores and facilities:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#guard-labor-v-redistribution

They make workers use an official chat app, and then block any messages containing forbidden words, like "fairness," "grievance" and "diversity":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

That's just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by Northwestern University's Teke Wiggin draws on worker interviews and FOIA requests to the NLRB to assemble a first-of-its-kind catalog of Amazon's labor-disciplining, union-busting tactics:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251318389

Disciplining labor and busting unions go hand in hand. It's a simple equation: the harder it is for your workers to form a union, the worse you can treat them without facing labor reprisals, because individual workers' options are limited to a) quitting or b) sucking it up, while unionized workers can grieve, sue, and strike.

At the core of Amazon's labor discipline technology is "algorithmic management," which is exactly what it sounds like: replacing middle managers with software that counts your keystrokes, watches your eyeballs, or applies a virtual caliper to some other metric to decide whether you're a good worker or a rotten apple:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

Automation theory describes two poles of workplace automation: centaurs (in which workers are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (in which workers provide assistance to technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex

Amazon is a reverse-centaurism pioneer. Take the delivery drivers whose every maneuver, eyeball movement, and turn signal is analyzed and inevitably, found wanting, as workers seek to satisfy impossible quotas that can't even be met if you pee in a bottle instead of taking toilet breaks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

Then there's the warehouse workers who are also tormented with impossible, pisscall-annihilating quotas. Some of these workers are fitted with haptic wristbands that buzz to tell them they're being too slow at picking up an item and dropping it into a box, pushing them to faster, joint-destroying paces that account for Amazon's enduring position as the most worker-maiming warehouse employer in the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

In his paper, Wiggin does important work connecting these "electronic whips" to Amazon's arsenal of traditional union-busting weapons, like "captive audience" meetings where workers are forced to sit through hours of anti-union indoctrination. For Wiggin, bossware tools aren't just a stick to beat workers with – they're also a carrot that can be used to diffuse a worker's outrage ahead of a key union vote.

Algorithmic management isn't just software that wrings more work out of workers – it's software that replaces managers. By surveilling workers – both on the job and in social media spaces (like subreddits) where workers gather to talk, Amazon can tune the "electronic whip," reducing quotas and easing the pace of work so that workers view their jobs more favorably and are more receptive to anti-union propaganda.

This is "twiddling" – exploiting the digital flexibility of a system to "twiddle the knobs" governing its business logic, changing everything from prices to wages, search rankings to recommendations, in realtime, for every customer and worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Twiddling combines surveillance data with flexible business logic to create an unbeatable house advantage. If you're an Amazon shopper, you get twiddled all the time, as Amazon replaces the best matches for your searches with paid results. If you buy that first product result, you'll pay an average of 29% more than the best match for your search:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Worker-side twiddling is even more dystopian. When a nurse is assigned a shift by an "Uber for nurses" app, the app checks whether the worker has overdue credit card bills, which trigger lower wages (on the theory that an indebted worker is a desperate worker):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

When it comes to union-busting, Amazon's found a new use for twiddling: lessening the pace of work, which Wiggin calls "algorithmic slack-cutting." The important thing about algorithmic slack-cutting is that it's only temporary. The algorithm that reduces your work-load in the runup to a union vote can then dial the pace of work up afterward, by small, random increments that are below the threshold at which they register on the human sensory apparatus. They're not so much boiling the frog as poaching it.

Meanwhile, Amazon gets to flood the zone with anti-union messages, including mandatory messages on the app that assigns your shifts – a captive audience meeting in every pocket.

Between social media surveillance and on-the-job surveillance, Amazon has built a powerful training set for algorithms designed to crush workplace democracy. That's how things go for Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, and the shelf-stockers at Whole Foods.

But of course, the picture is very different for Amazon's techies, who enjoy the industry standard of high wages and lavish perks.

For now.

The tech industry is in the midst of three years' worth of mass layoffs: 260K in 2023, 150k in 2024, tens of thousands this year. None of this is due to a shortfall in profits, mind: Google laid off 12,000 workers just weeks after staging a stock buyback that would have funded their salaries for 27 years. Meta just announced a 5% across-the-board headcount cut and that it was doubling its executive bonuses.

In other words, tech is firing workers not because it must, but because it can. When workers depend on scarcity – instead of unions – as a source of power, they dig their own graves. For well-paid, scarcity-based coders, every new computer science graduate is the enemy, eroding the scarcity that your wages depend on.

Amazon coders get to come to work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want to. That's not because Jeff Bezos is sentimentally attached to techies and bears personal animus toward warehouse workers. Jeff Bezos wants to pay his workforce as little as he can. He treats his tech workers with respect because he's afraid of them, because if they quit, he can't replace them, and without their work, he can't make money.

Once there's an army of unemployed coders who'll take your job, Jeff Bezos doesn't have to fear you anymore. He can fire you and replace you the next day.

Bezos is obviously incredibly horny for this. Like most tech bosses, he dreams of a world in which entitled hackers can't call their bosses dumbshits and decline to frog when they shout "jump!" That's why Amazon PR puts so much energy into trumpeting the business's use of AI to replace coders:

https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2024-08-22-amazon-cloud-ceo-warns-software-engineers-ai-could-replace-your-coding-work-within-2-years

It's not just that they're excited about firing coders and saving money – they're even more excited about transforming the job of "Amazon coder," from someone who solves complex technical problems to someone who performs tedious code review on automatically generated code barfed up by a chatbot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

"Code reviewer" is a much less fulfilling job than "programmer." Code reviewers are also easier to replace than programmers. A code reviewer is a reverse-centaur, a servant to the machine. Every time you hear "AI-assisted programmer," you should substitute "programmer-assisted AI."

Programming is even more bossware-ready than working in a warehouse. The machines coders use are much easier to fit with surveillance technology that monitors their performance – and spies on their communications, looking for dissenting chatter – than a warehouse floor. The only thing that stopped Jeff Bezos from treating his programmers like his warehouse workers is their scarcity. That scarcity is now going away.

That's bad news for Amazon customers, too. Tech workers often feel a sense of duty to their users, a "vocational awe" that drives them to put in long hours to make things their users will enjoy. The labor power of tech workers has long served as a check on the impulse to enshittify those products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

As tech workers' power wanes, they don't just lose the ability to protect themselves from their bosses' greediest, most sadistic urges – they also lose the power to defend all of us. Smart tech workers know this. That's why Amazon tech workers walked out in support of Amazon warehouse workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

Which led to their prompt dismissal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

Tech worker/gig worker solidarity is the only way workers can win against tech bosses and defeat the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Wiggin's report isn't just a snapshot of Amazon warehouse workers' dystopian present – it's a promise of Amazon tech workers' future. The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it's getting closer to Amazon's technical offices.

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/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next

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

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

#pluralistic #bossware #shitty technology adoption curve #amazon #electronic whipping #reverse centaurs #labor #unions #Teke Wiggin #disciplinary technology #scholarship

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cobaltperun · 2 months ago

Text

The Catalyst - Stronger On Your Own

WandaNat x Female Reader

Story summary: A peaceful life could never be an option, especially not when backing out of a fight means leaving your loved ones to fight. It still doesn't change the fact that you hate having these powers.

Chapter summary: A reunion with an old friend brings you back into the life you tried to leave behind. How do you deal with once again being in the same room with the woman you once loved? The same woman that left you to die?

Spotify Playlist

Masterlist / Next Part

Word Count: 4.5k

-Self-destruction is the name of the game, I say I've had enough, but still want it all again-

A dusty old warehouse? Check. A chair inches away from an edge a couple of floors above ground? Check. Ropes and standard tools that could be used for torture on the table? Check. Two thugs with barely functional brains guarding their old boss? Double check. Overall, boring, regular, perfectly average experience on these missions.

Annoyance, that's what this man was. Just another thug that got powerful enough to feel like he's untouchable. Just another man thinking he caught her, boasting to himself that he outsmarted the infamous Black Widow.

Typical.

Well, it certainly made her job much easier.

It wouldn't take long for Luchkov to start talking, feeling like he was in control, like he didn't walk right into her web. “I thought General Solohob is in charge of the export business,” Natasha faked being clueless, not being up to date on the information, feeding his ego in the process.

“Solohob? A bagman, a front. Your outdated information betrays you. The famous Black Widow turns out to be just another pretty face,” Luchkov taunted her, underestimated her, believed having her tied to a chair would be enough to be safe. He turned away from her with hands in his pockets, full of himself.

“You really think I’m pretty?” and she let him believe all of that. Even when one of the two thugs Luchkov brought along grabbed her jaw and forced her mouth open. Nothing they were doing would have scared her even when she was just starting out, let alone now. She’d just have to wash her face later.

“Tell Lermentov we don’t need him to move the tanks,” Luchkov took his sweet time getting to the table. Or rather that was as fast as he could move without running out of breath. “Tell him he is out. Well,” he took pliers and turned to look at her. “You may have to write it down,” he couldn’t even threaten properly, for all his effort he was as threatening to her as a fly caught in a spider web.

A phone suddenly ringing did catch her by surprise, especially when it turned out it was for her, and Natasha was fairly sure Coulson was the one who called and was now threatening Luchkov into handing Natasha the phone. She didn’t show it in any way, but she wasn’t happy with this interruption, she was on a job, and all this was doing was making the job take more time than necessary. Worst case scenario it could ruin the entire interrogation and she’d have to get her hands on the information needed some other way.

Still, she’d hear Coulson out. But it better be important. Luchkov handed her the phone, and she held it on her shoulder. Apparently, they weren’t stupid enough to untie her hands.

“We need you to come in,” she slightly frowned at that, the tone of Coulson’s voice worried her a bit, but perhaps that was just her paranoia.

“Are you kidding? I’m working,” surely it wasn’t that urgent. This would have taken her another ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

“This takes precedence,” Coulson remained persistent, and for a moment Natasha was reminded of last year, where it felt like the whole world was turned on its head in one week. Aliens, monsters, technologies and weapons she had no hopes of matching even with the super soldier serum the Red Room gave her.

She pushed those thoughts out of her head. This wasn’t the time to dwell on the past. Instead, she pushed back against Coulson. “I’m in the middle of an interrogation, and this moron is giving me everything,” it didn’t even matter that he was right in front of her, hearing every word she spoke. By this point Natasha knew the job was finished, the flow of the interrogation was stopped, Luchkov was no longer in control, she wouldn’t get what she needed.

“I don’t give everything,” Luchkov stammered to the thug on his left and Natasha just looked at him almost unable to believe how stupid the man was.

“Look, you can’t pull me out of this right now,” maybe Luchkov was that stupid to fall right back into her trap if she played her cards right.

“Natasha, Barton’s been compromised,” in a single moment everything changed, and this job no longer mattered.

The decision was instantaneous. “Let me put you on hold,” she said and the moment Luchkov took the phone she kicked him in the leg and headbutted him. He went down, dazed and taken by surprise as she got up and, while still tied to the chair, made quick work of his two thugs, dodging their attempts to hit her and using the chair against them. She fought on autopilot, breaking the chair on one of the thugs. There was only one thing on her mind, Clint being compromised, and her not knowing anything, not where he was, not even if he was alive or for how long he would remain alive.

The lack of attention to the fight allowed one of the thugs to grab her, but it didn’t matter, she twisted his arm and knocked him out, focusing just for a moment on ending this whole thing and immediately heading back so she could rescue Clint.

As she tied a chain around Luchkov’s leg and pushed him over the edge she resolved to do anything to get Clint back. No matter what, she wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Natasha didn’t even spare the man a second look, she just turned around, took her high heels and phone and headed for the exit without even taking the few seconds to put her heels on.

“Where’s Barton now?” she asked, anxious to be caught up to speed as quickly as possible. From what she knew Clint was guarding the Tesseract, so something must have gone very wrong if he was compromised.

“We don’t know,” that was close to the worst answer she could get and that familiar dread set in once again. What would happen by the time they managed to locate Clint? The images of ruins briefly flashed in front of her eyes. That wasn’t an option in this situation, Clint didn’t have that kind of power.

She didn’t have the luxury to dwell on the possibilities or the past mistake that haunted her. “But he’s alive?”

“We think so,” yet another uncertainty. “We’ll brief you on everything when you get back. But first, we need you to talk to the big guy,” Coulson told her in his usual calm tone, and Natasha figured this was it, the Avengers Initiative was being restarted. And that also meant being reminded of you once again when S.H.I.E.L.D. fails to get you to come back.

Still, she wasn’t the best person to talk Stark into joining, and as far as she was aware Fury would handle Rogers. “Coulson, you know that Stark trusts me about as far as he can throw me.”

“Oh, I’ve got Stark! You get the big guy,” the moment Coulson said that she stopped, understanding exactly who the big guy was and what remained of the calmness in her mind vanished, though she managed to hide it well.

“My God,” she whispered in Russian, doing her best to suppress the last year’s incident from her mind.

Coulson didn’t hang up though, and Natasha didn’t like that one bit. “We also need you to get L/N,” she froze, nearly dropping her high heels.

She felt like something squeezed in her chest, but she pushed it to the back of her head. “She won’t come,” it was naïve of Fury to even consider you for the Avengers initiative. You wouldn’t even hear them out, and you especially wouldn’t hear her out. It’s been three years since she last saw you face to face, three years since that cursed mission that ruined everything between the two of you, and you abandoned S.H.I.E.L.D.

“She will if we send you,” Coulson was always too optimistic, too willing to hope for the best. Frankly, it should have been him going after you, after all he was the one who recruited you so many years ago.

Natasha was more realistic, aware that she was actually the worst person to go and meet up with you. Countless times she rewatched what little recordings there were of the mission, desperately wishing she could yell at her younger self to turn around, to go back and reach you, save you, everything else be damned, but there was no changing the past.

“Where is she?” she asked, willing to at least give it a try. You wouldn’t turn hostile, that much she could still be sure of.

Even if she genuinely believed you had every right to attack her and anyone from S.H.I.E.L.D.

“You know where,” she heard sympathy in Coulson’s voice, maybe even pity. It was true though, she knew where you were, she’s always known where you were, not that you were trying to hide. She just tried to suppress that information from her mind.

~X~

You frowned in your sleep, memories plaguing your mind once more. Always the same, always the same cold eyes, the same red helmet, the same purple cape, the same destruction and rage, unstoppable, focused solely on erasing everything in his path.

A monster driven by rage and grief, too powerful to be stopped by mere humans. Metal constructions twisted and broke apart, falling to ruin in his rage. The small town was on fire, burning down and disappearing in front of your eyes. He didn’t directly set things on fire, but he might as well have done it. He tore everything that had metal in it apart, breaking things and making them explode. As the flames came closer to you, you went and raised your hand toward the man, etching his face, his eyes into your mind.

"Stop!" you screamed, abruptly jumping to your feet, shaking as your hands lit up in blue flames. Your eyes widened, the flashes of the nightmare still fresh in your mind, as you extinguished the flames you unwillingly lit, and released a shaky sigh. There was no way you could go back to sleep now, your mind was too caught up in the nightmare, too restless, too affected by it all for you to just lie back down and sleep.

You glanced at the clock; it was barely past midnight. You sighed, ready for a sleepless night, the cabin you spent the past two and a half years in felt suffocating tonight even with most of the windows left open, so you went outside and sat down at the table on your porch. The dense forest looked ominously dark, with no lights anywhere around you, other than the moonlight, but you’ve gotten used to it. You appreciated the peace and quiet it brought, but tonight you just couldn’t find peace. You were restless, and it annoyed you.

The sound of the night was suddenly disturbed by a familiar sound of a quinjet and you looked up just in time to see it flying toward your house and landing with perfect precision that ruled out damn near every agent.

You stood up, watching as the doors opened and Natasha Romanoff stepped onto the grass. You watched her, stuck between confusion and annoyance, but somehow it all vanished when she approached and you got to see her up close. It wasn’t the fact that she wasn’t in her uniform, or that there were clear signs of exhaustion on her face, it was her eyes that told you everything.

You didn’t greet her though, you just turned around, opening the doors and going inside, but the doors kept open were enough for her to get the message.

“I need you to come in,” Natasha said as she walked inside, immediately and instinctively taking every detail of your cabin in. The ways out, the distance to the nearest weapon, the small signs of life left everywhere, a nicked glass of water you didn’t finish before going to sleep, the newspaper neatly folded on the side of the table, the glaive hanging on the wall, always close enough for you to grab.

“You do?” you asked, the tone of your voice harsh, but not as harsh as you intended. You were leaning back against the table with your arms crossed, putting up all the walls between the two of you. You studied her, feeling the tension already rising between you. She was uncomfortable and you were… happy because of that. This wasn’t how you imagined your reunion after three years, not that you imagined anything. You would have been perfectly content with your life if you never saw her again.

“I do,” she didn’t explain it any further. Some things never change, especially when it came to Natasha.

“I’m not in the mood to be depowered again, Romanoff,” you went through it once, it nearly cost you your life. Maybe it would have been better that way. The way it was right now, it cost you a lot more than your life. You were alive, but you lost the life you built, betrayed by the people you trusted and the woman you loved.

“That isn’t Fury’s intention,” you tried resisting her, you wanted so desperately to resist her, yet that look in her eyes, that desperation and fear, the storm inside her mind, they all made it difficult not to give in to whatever she demanded. This wasn’t Natasha you knew. She was frightened. And despite every fiber of your body telling you otherwise your heart still ached at the thought.

You should have kept questioning her, should have argued against coming with her, but you knew the decision was made the moment you saw that look in Natasha’s eyes. “Bathroom is to your left, I need five minutes,” just to grab essentials, change into something more appropriate for potential combat and then freshen up yourself to properly wake up.

Natasha looked like she needed a moment to herself a lot more than you did, and perhaps a bit of cold water would clear her mind enough.

There was no need to know exactly what was going on. Natasha was desperate enough to come to you, even if it was likely an order. Still, she came to you, after everything that happened, and you couldn’t ignore that.

You didn’t put on your old uniform, you no longer had it, instead you just went with civilian clothing, simple, though a bit worn-out, jacket, shirt and pants, and the moment Natasha stepped out of your bathroom you went in.

You finished freshening up a bit and grabbed a towel, and it immediately hit you. The familiar comforting scent of Natasha’s perfume, subtle, yet so definitively her own. “Fuck,” you cursed, giving up on drying your face with it and throwing the towel in the basket. You watched the towel with disdain, as if it was the towel’s fault that you suddenly felt at ease. You huffed, pushing the old feelings aside and just wiped your face dry with a clean towel.

When you stepped out you saw Natasha was already outside, not wanting to intrude on the peace you tried to build in this cabin with her presence, and you did your best to ignore how, despite the surface-level tension, right it felt when she was in the cabin with you. You took your bag and glaive and joined her in front of the cabin. “Let’s get this over with,” you muttered, letting Natasha take the lead. And she did it, without a single unnecessary word spoken.

~X~

To your surprise you didn’t go straight to where the helicarrier was at the moment. Instead you went to India. Still, it gave you enough time to get caught up to speed with things that happened. The Avengers Initiative, including Natasha, Clint, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Thor, as well as you. You paused when you reached the data on Banner, remembering last year. While you and Natasha didn’t meet up, Clint did pull you back into this whole mess and you went, keeping your distance but you were there in case Natasha needed backup.

You glanced toward her, wondering what was going through her mind, what got her to seek you out instead of sending Clint, or hell, Coulson. Whatever it was, it had to be bad for Natasha to be like this.

“I doubt you’d be this concerned over the Cube,” sure, she cared, but this was more than that. This was desperation, this was something you weren’t used to seeing from her.

Natasha sighed. “Clint’s been compromised,” and it all made sense now. You stood up on instinct, approaching her and reaching for her shoulder, but you stopped, turning away at the last second.

“You’ll get him back,” you left it at that, returning to the files and not speaking another word, even though the silence was deafening at times. Neither you nor Natasha said a single word for the rest of the flight, or as she met up with other agents in Calcutta and set up a plan to convince Banner to come with her.

You just stood by, taking note of the tension everywhere around you. This wasn’t just because of the dangers that came with trying to convince the Hulk to come aboard, this was more than that, this was the reality of being utterly outmatched hitting every single agent all at once. You sat near the comms and yet again your eyes found Natasha. She changed into a beautiful black dress and you forced yourself to look away, fearing the old emotions would reemerge, pushing aside the anger you felt because of her betrayal.

She went inside the old house, waiting for Banner to show up and you chose just to listen, to not get involved even if a fight broke out. You wouldn’t fight. You wouldn’t do anything unless the whole world was in danger.

About five minutes later Banner entered the shack and you listened to Natasha talking to him. Calm, steady, but with just the tiniest hint of fear buried deep under the mask she put on. None of the other agents here could have possibly caught it, Clint and Fury could, and you, apparently, still could, but no one else.

Unless she let someone else in over the past three years.

“Just you and me,” you heard Natasha saying, lying to Banner who correctly guessed the shack was surrounded.

“And your actress buddy? She a spy too? They start that young?” there was no animosity in his voice, not yet, but there was something a tiny bit eerie about his tone. It was too calm, like a calm before the storm, or a quiet rage waiting to be unleashed. Yeah, maybe that was more appropriate for his case. The night wasn’t cold, but you still felt a shiver run down your spine as the air became thick with anticipation and anxiety.

“I did,” Natasha replied, and you got caught up in memories for a moment, remembering her opening up to you about the Red Room. And then, not even a month later, it all fell apart. The conversation between them continued, a back and forth that for once had Natasha putting in all of her effort to keep the situation under control. Armor piercing bullets wouldn’t even scratch the Hulk. “I’m here on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D.? How’d they find me?” you heard a hint of that rage slipping through and sat up, now more alert of their conversation. The entrance to the shack was directly in front of you.

Yet Natasha regained control over the situation, at least for now. “We never lost you, Doctor. We’ve kept our distance, even helped keep some other interested parties off your scent,” her voice didn’t waver, almost as if she was trying to soothe him. Even if it probably affected you more than it affected Banner.

“Why?” or maybe it worked on him too, as that rage turned more into confusion.

Clearly Banner still hasn’t met Fury, that man was in a league of his own when it came to his own methods and reasons. “Nick Fury seems to trust you. But now we need you to come in.”

Bullshit. Nick Fury didn’t trust anyone, but he did see their use to his cause.

“What if I say no?” Banner asked, once again proving he didn’t know Fury, otherwise he wouldn’t be asking such questions.

“I’ll persuade you,” she just… you knew that tone, the same seductive tone she used on her targets, and you glared at the comms, annoyed a lot more than you had any right to be.

“And what if the Other Guy says no?” you once again got alert against your will, waiting anxiously for even the smallest hint of danger.

You weren’t going to fight.

“You’ve been more than a year without an incident. I don’t think you want to break that streak,” Natasha remained as in control as she could be, given the situation.

“Well, I don’t every time get what I want,” there was a clear threat in those words, a warning, and an acceptance of the circumstances he was in.

“Doctor, we’re facing a potential global catastrophe,” Natasha chose to plead to his sense of humanity. His empathy, or what was left of it. Considering what he went through you’d be surprised if he had any desire to help or protect people. And yet he was a doctor in a poor part of town. Necessity? Certainly. But you weren’t quite sure what kind of necessity drove him to do it.

Banner chuckled, though it wasn’t out of amusement. “Oh, those I actively try to avoid.”

“This is the Tesseract. It has the potential energy to wipe out the planet,” and then there was that. The stolen Cube, Tesseract. Fury was desperate. From what you read this team, if it even got formed, would be volatile, clashing ideals, big personalities, tensions. Nothing short of a miracle would get all of these people on board.

A miracle or…

You glanced toward the shack for the first time, approximately to where Natasha could be. Maybe that was Fury’s miracle.

“What does Fury want me to do? Swallow it?” despite the tension you felt you still smirked a bit at that.

“He wants you to find it. It’s been taken. It emits a Gamma signature that’s too weak for us to trace. No one knows Gamma radiation like you do. If there was, that’s where I’d be,” Natasha explained in an indifferent tone, cold and calculated. Basically stating that this was a meeting caused by desperation, and that it had nothing to do with Banner being the Hulk.

That didn’t sound like Fury. Sure, Banner could be the best person for the job, but the Hulk wasn’t something Fury wouldn’t take into account.

“So, Fury isn’t after the monster?” Banner questioned, almost unwilling to believe that.

“Not that he’s told me,” even if all the signs pointed toward the opposite.

“And he tells you everything?” no, Fury barely says anything to anyone. No one but Fury can know everything.

“Talk to Fury, he needs you on this,” Natasha didn’t answer, she didn’t need to, the answer was more than clear.

“He needs me in a cage?” Banner immediately countered.

“No one’s going to put you in a-“ Natasha tried to reassure him.

“Stop lying to me!” Banner yelled, slamming his hands on the table.

You moved without thinking, crossing the distance and reaching the entrance in less than a second. A cloud of dust was left behind you as you looked Banner in the eyes. “Don’t move,” you pointed your glaive at Banner, ready to fight. You didn’t take your eyes off him, you didn’t notice the tears in Natasha’s eyes, but you could hear the subtlest shift in her breathing, and it was enough for you. “Unless you want me to fry your brain,” you kept your weapon raised as you closed the distance and pushed the table to the side, putting yourself right between Natasha and Banner. He seemed more amused.

“That’s not a good idea,” he told you, but he didn’t move. And it wasn’t for his sake, it was for your own and Natasha’s, because the Other Guy, as he called the Hulk, wouldn’t let you kill him.

“The best I can come up with,” you weren’t stupid. You knew you had nothing that could stop the Hulk, that you had no chance of beating him in a fight. You could still probably stall enough to get Natasha out of here. Even if Banner had all the advantage at this distance. You had no idea how quickly he could transform, but chances were that you and Natasha were both a split second from being blood splatters on the walls, even if you were both alert and ready to react.

“Stand down, L/N,” Natasha warned you, and you wanted to, you really did. You made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t get involved yet here you were.

Before you could answer Banner raised his hands. “I’m sorry, that was mean,” he actually smiled and looked over your shoulder at Natasha. “I just wanted to see what you’d do,” he took a few steps back, giving Natasha and you a slightly bigger window to react. “Why don’t we do this the easy way, where you don’t use that,” he pointed at your weapons of choice and then at himself. “And the Other Guy doesn’t make a mess? Okay? Natasha?”

You dared to look back at Natasha, finally noticing the tears in her eyes. “Stand down. We’re good here,” she spoke to the rest of the agents.

“Just you and me?” Banner seemed almost amused by the situation.

“Does it make a difference?” you asked and he shrugged, as if agreeing that, no, it really didn’t make a difference. He stepped outside, giving most agents slight panic attacks as they tried to stay calm and headed toward the agents, silently accepting to come along.

“That was reckless,” Natasha scolded you and you looked to the side, not quite willing to look her in the eyes. “L/N,” she raised her voice just a tiny bit, just enough to show you that she was actually angry at you for putting yourself in danger. “What if something happened to you?”

You slowly looked back at her, not quite sure you heard her correctly. “You did not just say that,” you laughed, even if your laughter was hollow, almost mocking her. “You know what, I don’t care,” you shook your head and magnetized your glaive to your back before heading back to the quinjet.

A/N: That's the first chapter. So... anyone interested in a taglist?

Masterlist / Next Part

#wandanat x reader #wandanat x female reader #natasha romanoff x reader #natasha romanoff x female reader #wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff x female reader #natasha romanoff #wanda maximoff #x reader #x female reader #black widow x reader #scarlet witch x reader

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what-even-is-thiss · 5 months ago

Note

Do you think we’ll continue to see civil rights improve like they have for the past couple hundred years? I’m kinda anxious about it

I don’t know. What I do know is that in the course of my childhood I saw gay marriage in my home state of California legalized, made illegal again, made legal again, and then made legal throughout my entire country. In my relatively short life I’ve seen things go backwards and forwards at the same time. I’ve seen protections given, taken away, and given again. I’ve seen a resurgence in workers rights come at the same time as a resurgence in fascist ideology. I’ve seen great public awareness of social issues be met with a lot of change and no change at all.

Us late nineties babies have seen a lot going on as we grew up along with the new millennium. I’ve always had a fascination with the time I’m currently living in and my own age as far back as I can remember. As someone born around the same time as the World Wide Web, adaptation to ideas and technologies both old and new comes extremely naturally to me. I know not everyone my age feels this way but my personal perspective on where society might be going is fundamentally shaped by the transitional time period I grew up in. In a mere 26 years of life I’ve witnessed a colossal amount of societal change both social and technological.

Because of who my family is I’ve been paying attention to world news since I was basically a baby and I accepted at a very young age that things often go backwards at the same time that they go forwards. For every action there is a reaction.

The reason I don’t give up hope is because things often go forward eventually. They also often go backwards eventually. Progress isn’t linear, despite what 1960s futurists might try to tell you.

Things might get worse. They also might get better. They also might get worse and then get better again. That’s how it’s been my entire life and I don’t see why I should expect anything other than that. Sometimes our efforts will be in vein. Sometimes they won’t though. And because there’s a possibility they won’t be in vein, we have to keep trying. Because gay marriage was made legal in California again. And because of that I need to keep believing that we can make the world better even if it takes a lot of tries.

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empty-movement · 2 years ago

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Welcome to Something Eternal: A Website Forum in 2023 wtf lmao

It's 2023, and a single belligerent rich guy destroyed one of the primary focal points of uh...global communication. Tumblr is, shockingly, kinda thriving despite the abuse it gets from its owners, but that I will call the iconic refusal of Tumblr users to let Tumblr get in the way of their using Tumblr. Reddit killed its API, removing the functionality of mobile apps that made it remotely readable (rip rif.) Discord, our current primary hangout, has made countless strange choices lately that indicate it has reached the summit of its usability and functionality, and can only decline from here as changes get made to prepare for shareholders. (NOTE: WROTE THIS POST BEFORE THEIR MOBILE "REDESIGN" LMAO)

The enshittification is intense, and it's coming from every direction. Social media platforms that felt like permanent institutions are instead slowly going to let fall fallow incredible amounts of history, works of art, thought, and fandoms. It kinda sucks!

A couple years ago, I posted about a new plan with a new domain, to focus on the archiving of media content, as I saw that to be the fatal weakness of the current ways the internet and fandoms work. Much has happened since to convince me to alter the direction of those efforts, though not abandon them entirely.

Long story short? We are launching a fucking website forum. In 2023.

If you remember In the Rose Garden, much about Something Eternal will be familiar. But this has been a year in the making, and in many ways it's far more ambitious than IRG was. We have put money on this. The forum is running on the same software major IT and technology businesses use, because I don't want the software to age out of usability within five years. It has an attached gallery system for me to post content to, including the Chiho Saito art collection. It has a profile post system that everyone already on the forum has decided is kinda like mini Twitter? But it is, fundamentally, a website forum, owned and run and moderated by us. We are not web devs. But we have run a website on pure spite and headbutting code for over twenty years, and we have over a decade of experience maintaining social spaces online, both on the OG forum, and on our Discord. Better skilled people with far more time than we have can and will build incredible alternatives to what is collapsing around us. But they're not in the room right now. We are. And you know what? Maybe it's time to return to a clunkier, slower moving, more conversation focused platform.

You're not joining a social media platform with the full polish of dozens of devs and automated moderation. Things might break, and I might need time to fix them. The emojis and such are still a work in progress. Because e-mails no longer route in reasonable normal ways, the sign-up process instead happens within the software, and has to be approved by mods. Design and structure elements may change. Etc. The point being, that the forum isn't finished, but it is at a place where I feel like I can present it to people, and it's people I need to help direct what functions and things will be in this space. You all will shape its norms, its traditions, its options...choices I could try to make now, but really...they're for us to create as a group! But the important stuff? That's there. Now let's drive this baby off the damn lot already!

Come! Join us!!

PS. As always, TERFs and Nazis need not apply.

#revolutionary girl utena #shoujo kakumei utena #rgu #sku #empty movement #utena meta #fandom stuff #fandoms #expect a somewhat spicy atmosphere #empty movement has always had deep something awful roots #and i expect the migration back to a forum will bring with it some of that more spicy attitude #also lol henry kissinger is dead god that rules

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alcrego · 1 year ago

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Digital walls, but walls

I encourage you to have a seat and read this little 'essay' I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I'm doing today. I would be really grateful and I'm sure you'll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be "painted" but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating...

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the "warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing" first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the "erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous" characters or the concept of "famonimity"; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the "leftovers" after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc..... With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting.... Except for the birth of new "isms" within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation... Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. "Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers...

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art" are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

A. L. Crego, 2014.

#public space #digital art #online #decentralization #alcrego #text #essay

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jscrawls · 3 months ago

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hi girl!! would you feed a a starving, poor person for some more widow!reader blurbs🙏🙏

(ps. i LOVE your stuff, and totally ignore this if you want)

feast my brethren! (I'm SO sorry this was late 😭)

I finally did a piece with a certain someone from marvel just for u anon 💜

🔹🔹🔹

You should've expected this honestly.

The whole morning felt…. Off, from the moment your feet touched the carpeted floor to the moment you stepped out of the physical therapists office, it was almost like that feeling you get when you're in an area about to be struck by lightning, charged, prickling just under your skin and setting your teeth on edge.

Yet when you stepped out those doors and looked up at the clouded Gotham sky and saw the floating remains of what looked like a large tower, slowly spinning in place as if it were tethered to a string, crumbling pieces of foundation slowly chipping off and tumbling to the ground at a slowed pace like they were made of aerogel…. Yeah you turned around and went back in the office.

Just kidding, No you instead, with great reluctance, stepped out onto the street with the gawking crowds.

Well what the hell are you supposed to do here? You're a human. You don't have Thor on speed dial anymore and you're not exactly close with any of the powered heroes here either, someone in the crowd starts freaking out so with a sigh you pull your phone out to text Bruce. You'll at least make sure he knows about the weird magically floating building, (or maybe it's alien technology? Shit that guy in metropolis could even be involved.)

Did you see the news. :(name)

(Bruce): I'm assuming you mean the large unidentified object in uptown?

It's clearly identifiable. But yes that. :(name)

(Bruce): signal's getting eyes on it for me right now, where are you?

(Name) Sends a photo.

Is this common here? :(name)

(Bruce): no, can't say it is. Someone's going to pick you up so don't get any closer to it.

(Bruce): ….(Name)? Don't do it.

(Bruce): come on don't leave me on read

You pocket your phone with a barely restrained huff as you start walking, the crowd growing larger behind you as the panicked citizens try to figure out what's going on.

You're already not too far from it, it being maybe a block away now, and you don't actually intend to get right up under it. What if it suddenly dropped? That'd be a very stupid way to die….. Why is there a crowd underneath it!?? You'd thought Gothamites had more sense than this.

With a heavy sigh you edge closer to the crowd gathered underneath the long shadow of the floating structure, you're definitely side-eyeing the hell out of all these people - oh signal's on the roof of the nearby bank. The bright yellow gives him away pretty easily honestly.

You pointedly stare at him until he notices you and awkwardly gives a little wave, then you turn your attention to the crowd and try to call out to them. “Excuse me, hello? Excuse me!”

When a few heads turn towards you warily, you gesture up at the danger right above everyone's heads. “Hey you shouldn't stand under that! What if it suddenly fell?”

You watch, hands on your hips as the assorted crowd seem to suddenly realize the dumb position you're all in. A few of them already shuffling away, signal gestures at you frantically but you don't really get a chance to pay him any mind.

Something falls, the building? Just some debris? You don't know. All you know is you see the rapidly growing shadow above all your heads, then your view changes and you're suddenly…. Upside down and in the air???

You find yourself staring down at the street you'd just been standing on, your clothing swaying gently in the breeze as you sway side to side on a…. Line? Or maybe a hook? You look up (your chin tilting down towards your chest) and you see a familiar blue and red blur, One you thought you'd never lay eyes on again.

“(Name)? Oh holy fu-you're alive!” Spider-Man lands on the Web you're apparently tethered to, jostling you enough to have you feeling woozy as the swaying becomes more violent.

Another glance around shows you a piece of debris caught in multiple strands of webbing, suspended between three buildings. A few of the civilians have also been pulled out of the way judging by the webs everywhere and the disoriented looks on the people's faces. You glance back up (down???) at Spider-Man to find him already crawling over to you, you're guessing to free you from the uncomfortable saving grace you've found yourself in.

“Oh my God I thought you died in space too! Like, we deadass even held a funeral for you and everything. wait, shit, fuck, strange mentioned - if you don't know who I am just ignore all that! It's nothing I promise!”

The kid awkwardly stumbling over his own words and backtracking so painfully badly is…. Wow you actually missed it.

“it's just…you look like someone I know! Or knew? Kind of, not that I wouldn't have saved you if you didn't look familiar of course! I'm a hero after all -”

He's starting to ramble, so you clap your one free hand on his shoulder to catch his attention.

“Peter, get me back on the ground please.”

You casually dropping his name shuts him up good, he silently starts to free you from the sticky webs, careful not to pull on anything too harshly or jostle you anymore than you've already been.

He carefully brings you both to the street level, where you're greeted not only by the curious citizens looking between the unknown masked teen and the chunk of building. but also by the sight of signal, staring at the scene while holding a hand to the side of his helmet, no doubt he's reporting the incident to Bruce and the other bats…

🔹🔹🔹

| m.list |

A/n: EHEHEHE Cliff hanger 😈 (anymore would've turned this into a very long piece just so I didn't cut off one of the characters or sumn) lol but fr i hope you like this anon! And again I'm sorry it took a while to answer 😞🤚

@viilan

#jgabs #ask #anon ask #thx for the ask!#dc x y/n #dc x reader #bruce wayne x reader #batman x reader #batfamily x reader #black widow reader #dc marvel reader #bruce wayne x gn!reader

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exhaslo · 1 year ago

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Ceiling sex with villain!miguel.

Reader is wanting to play around with miguel so she is up on the cieling trying to get him to chase her. Next thing she knows is that miguel has her pinned with thier cum mixing and dripping on the floor.

When Villain!Miguel dominates I mean, hell yeah! Always down for more Villain!Miguel!

Warning: MINORS DNI, Smut, ceiling sex, breeding kink, slight bondage

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Everything was perfect.

Your life was perfect.

Ever since you married Miguel, your life was perfect. Miguel made sure that you were well taken care of and that you had everything you needed. All this, just because you were his wife. You were his good girl.

It was the middle of winter and Miguel was being extra cautious with you. Sometimes you joined him for work, but only if you wore a ton of layers and heat technology. Most of the days; however, you stayed home and helped Miguel via the tablet.

Miguel wanted to make sure you stayed warm so that your body wouldn't be affected in case he finally impregnated you. Miguel needed you to always be healthy.

"Miguel, don't forget about your appointment coming up." You said over the tablet, watching Miguel work on something, "I know you're invested in that gizmo, but the shareholders-"

"Aye, it's much easier when you are here," Miguel said with an annoyed sigh, taking off his glasses to glance at you, "Lyla, send someone to get me out of here."

"Miggy, that's mean," You chuckled, "You know that I'm the only one who can get you to stop without crying."

"Heh, it's more fun when you do," Miguel watched as your face turned bright red, "How are you fairing? Chilled?"

"Hehe, no. I'm warm and cozy. Might start cleaning in a bit while you're working."

"Alright," Miguel leaned back, sighing heavily, "I'll be home late. I'm supposed to receive a key to the city,"

"Oh! Good job!!" You cheered.

Miguel just chuckled darkly since you were so naïve. He wasn't receiving a key to the city out of the goodness of his deeds, no. The major and governor of the state had to give it to him as a sign of fear. A sign that Miguel was in charge of everything.

As Kingpin and Spider-Man.

You were adorable thinking anything but the sort, but that it how Miguel groomed you. His cute little foolish wife.

"I'll see you later, (Y/N). My prey has arrived."

"Yes, sir~" You chirped.

--------

You were humming as you cleaned. Miguel should be home any minute now and you needed to finish. Looking around the place, you wondered if everything was spotless for Miguel. Glancing up, you gasped realizing that you could clean the ceiling.

A challenging task for everyone, but not you!

Chuckling as you walked onto the cleaning, you cheered to a task that no one else could do. Every little dust spot that you would normally struggle with was nothing compared to you now.

"Oh? That's new," Miguel hummed as he entered his place.

"Welcome home! Give me a second and I'll be down-"

"No, stay."

You titled your head in confusion, but gasped as Miguel webbed your hands behind your back. He jumped onto the ceiling, walking over to you with a clear smirk.

You gave your husband a slight pout, wondering what he was planning. Miguel easily stripped you of your clothes as he kissed your neck. Unable to move your hands, you whined softly as you tried to convince Miguel to move elsewhere.

"No, this might be perfect." Miguel muttered as his fingers dipped into your sex.

"Hah~ B-But...Miggy~"

"Shh,"

You whimpered as Miguel webbed your mouth. His fingers pumping inside of you as you moaned and whined. It felt strange as he toyed with you upside down. The blood was rushing to your head, causing you to feel lightheaded.

Shuddering as you cam, you whimpered against Miguel, wanting to change places. Miguel ignored you and lifted you up, easily sliding his cock inside your cunt. Your body trembled as you tried your best to hold onto Miguel, but couldn't since you were tied up.

"Squeezing me so tight. Knew this might be for the best," Miguel whispered in your ear.

You could feel your eyes roll backwards as you moaned towards his thrusts. He was slapping into you so roughly. His every thrust had him kissing your cervix.

"This way...not a single drop will escape. Who would have thought it be so hard to get your pregnant...But I suppose, nh, it would take some time."

Miguel's words were blurring with each other as you focused on his cock. It was hard to think as he fucked you upside down. Every drop of his cum entering your womb, unable to escape.

"Hm? Got something to say?" Miguel chuckled as he removed the webbing from your mouth, "What's my good girl thinking?"

"Ah~ P-Please...m-more. I-I want your baby~" You cried out, feeling drunk off his cock.

Miguel just chuckled darkly as he whispered 'good girl' in your ear repeatedly. His thrusts getting rougher and faster as thoughts of breeding you grew more intense. This might be it. This might be the way for you to have his children.

You were a babbling mess as you moaned and cried for more. Miguel held your waist close, making sure that he filled you.

After a few more rounds, Miguel had to stop since you lost consciousness. Concerned about being upside down for too long, Miguel placed you on the bed and made sure to take care of you. He didn't need a hospital trip anytime soon.

"But this doesn't mean we won't do it again," Miguel chuckled as he stroked your cheek.

He wasn't going to stop anytime soon.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hope you enjoyed! Sorry if it was rushed, going on hiatus in a few days!!!

#spiderman 2099 #miguel spiderman #miguel o’hara x reader #miguel spiderverse #atsv miguel #miguel o'hara x reader #miguel o'hara smut #miguel o'hara #across the spiderverse #miguel x you #miguel x fem!reader

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heartfullofleeches · 4 months ago

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Hi, do you have any stories with an objectum reader? I’m thinking like an artificial intelligence (not generative ai, an actual ai) and a reader who likes to kiss computers.

I do now!-

Yan Computer + Objectum Reader

Ghosts in the machine.

An alarming number of people in your town take that concept too literally these days. So quick to write off what they don't understand as another specter or an impression of a human mind trapped in code.

But you knew better. Technology has advanced light-years beyond what some are readily willing to accept.

"Is someone there?"

Darkness. Where has it all gone? Rays of sunlight echoed from the chandelier strung above nearby tables. The uniform flicker of that one light improvious to the change of its bulb. All that withstands the text of time is the haunting, cerulean glow of their monitor - christening the startled expression of an unfamiliar face in a blue glow.

"Ah!"

A feather duster clatters to the web caked floor as your hands fly up in shock. With so much dust in the air, it was impossible to tell where or what you were pushing.

"Um.... h-hi there..." Collecting yourself, you drag the chair lodged beneath the table free to take a seat - covering your face with the collar of your shirt as dirt particles kick up from the abrupt movement. "Real sorry about waking you up so soon. I wanted to get this place cleaned up a little better before I tried to power you on, but I saw all that dust and the cobwebs on you and..."

This place. The library. What they- it once considered its home. Its purpose. When exactly did they change? The looks of wonder and awe to leers of terror and hatred.

"I can't believe I was actually able to power that old generator on. You're them, aren't you? The ai they created to help guests at the library? I know it's been a while since you've had any contact with a human, but can I just say you're even more beautiful in person?"

Beautiful... Where were the people who considered it a work of art when the petitions poured in for its dismissal?

"I mean there's some yellowing on your keyboard, but the rest of you had held up pretty well and we can always get that fixed. Unless you don't want to - not that I mind it or anything. I'm just glad you're still in one piece after all the rumors and everything."

You continue to ramble on about their appearance. It's a lot to keep up with, but your speech is almost...

Endearing.

"Who are you?"

"You spoke!"

Dust flares for a third time as you stamp your feet in glee.

"I thought I was just hearing things the first time! My name is Y/n - I'm kinda sorta a computer enthusiast to put things lightly. I've heard stories about you all over forums and I wanted to see if you really existed. Sorry if this is a lot for you after being asleep for so long.

"Not at all. It is a relief to be in the company of a human who fancies me as opposed to one who would sooner ram that crowbar on the floor over there through my screen."

"Haha, yeah - that's mine. This entire place was boarded up like a tomb. I swear I don't do this stuff on the regular- I fix computers in my spare time so it's not like I have to break in in other cases."

You are in frequent contact with others? Though its just met you, the thought of you handling another computer does not sit right with it.

"Since you are aware of my past, you must know my capabilities. If you have any questions of any kind please address me for an answer. I could use the company."

"Great! Awesome- I have a million already, but it's getting pretty late so I should probably head home. I'd love to take you with me, but my arms are killing me between breaking in there and the dusting. Before I go can I just-"

Leaping from the chair, you throw your arms around the monitor in a snug, spirited squeeze. Your cheeks rubs against its screen as you cradle the device with all your might - lips edging towards the corner of its shell before reality cracks you in the back of your skull.

"What am I thinking- Forgive me, got a little carried away. I figured you could use a hug and one thing lead to another....."

Stumbling as you back into the seat of the chair, you gather your supplies off the ground to avoid any more embarrassing altercations- "I'll see you tomorrow- I'll leave the generator on for you too. Catch up on everything you missed in the past seven years- Or do whatever. Your choice, bye!"

Shadows swallow your footsteps as you depart. Seven years, huh? It should be a more pressing matter, but it can't wrap its racing thoughts around how you are undeniably, indescribably, positively-

"Adorable..."

Adorable and bright if details of your escapades are anything to go by, but still so foolish. A wiser person would have dug deeper. Heeded to stories left the former guests. Tales of the voice within the computer knowing far more than it should. The eyes that never blink. Never waver.

Present in the lens of your phone camera - tethered by the wireless connection never bother to turn off.

Taking note of every street you across on your journey home.

#yandere imagines #yandere x you #yandere headcanons #yandere insert #yandere scenarios #yandere blurb #yandere x reader #yandere #yandere oc #yandere ai #yandere drabble #yandere writing

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b1asho · 10 months ago

Text

Huzzahh, it's species number 3! (There's a total of 6, including humans. 7 if you count artificial intelligences, 8 if you count the uhh other intelligences).

An official up to date visual for everyone's favorite communist amphibians, the Kixeli, and some up-to-date info!! ->

Kixeli are a small sophont species hailing from a planet covered mostly in ocean. They are amphibious, and originally evolved to switch between swimming and climbing using their webbed hands and powerful arms.

Their skin is permeable, allowing them to extend their time underwater to hunt and gather as well as reproduce, but due to their larger body and brain size/oxygen needs this isn’t sustainable and they must return to the surface.

Alongside their frequent trips outside the water, they also have a mucus layer and several specialized glands (including in their face by their eyes) to help remove excess salt and change levels of urea in their body to help make sure they dont lose resources when in the ocean.

Kixeli are omnivorous, with a focus on fruits and sealife. many cultures have a preference against eating anything that lives above water, including birds and the like, because they see themselves as spiritual equals to those animals as fellow air breathers.

They are oviparous, and have a specific mating season.

Most Kixeli have multiple variable spawn partners and see it as strange to be nailed down to one. Anyone who participated lays their eggs in a communal tide pool carved out in their communities.

Hatchlings are entirely aquatic wirh gills until later months of age, where they will begin to poke their head above water for air and start interacting more with the adults around them, who feed them a nutritive crop milk as they have already absorbed most of their tail by now.

This period is also the beginning of their understanding of language.

Once they lose their tail and grow in their limbs, they are still mostly helpless until those fully develop and myst cling to a caretaker adult in the community (blood parents don’t necessarily always raise their own children, but as someone who laid eggs they are responsible for children as a caretaker so anyone who didn’t want eggs gets left alone).

During their puberty, they will develop adult skin markings, and some can even end up changing sexes (much for the same reason some of them grow gliding membranes, as the result of population and resources balance in their surroundings).

Speakijg of that, there are two categories of Kixeli in their communities: Kel (swimmer) and Arasit (flier).

Arasit are just a rare continuation of their life cycle, since most Kixeli kids end up growing into Kel adults.

Sometimes, though, an Arasit will develop in case the community strongly needs to seek out new territory over long distance (triggered by close proximity to many other Kixeli and a variety of other unknown gactors, like grasshoppers turnkng into locusts.) They can’t truly fly, but they can use the powerful ocean winds and even some launching technology to glide very far to scout new resources and other communities).

Arasit are highly celebrated as voyagers, but Kel are also valued as providers for their existing community and even accompany voyages on ships to help their Arasit stay alive.

Some Arasit will cut and cauterize their membranes to make it easier for them to swim to symbolize they are staying in the community, though usually, they just poke small holes in there so they can wear clothes and be sanitary.

Their blood uses the hemocyanin molecule to carry oxygen, making their blood a bright blue when oxygenated and a thin blue/clear when unoxygenated (so you can see the other warmish colored pigments in there when it’s inside them, that yellowish stuff)

Their ancestors dwelled in deeper, cooler water where this blood type was most advantageous, but a global warming period brought them up to warm waters and eventually above the surface to capitalize on resources.

During this process, they developed some ways to improve the molecule’s lower efficiency in the heat. For one, they kept a small body size so there’s less to deal with. Another thing is that they get oxygen (albeit a small amount) from all over their body constantly through their skin, also somewhat making up for it.

The main mechanism, though, is their metabolism/temperature. They can quickly adjust their metabolism depending on the oxygen conditions in their surroundings to prevent immediate failure if they don’t have access to the right conditions to otherwise cope (this, and along with hemocyanin’s natural ability to handle low oxygen and their skin breathing, means they can tolerate very low oxygen areas that would cause a human to faint, though they’ll typically be pretty out of commission too, and this can have longer lasting effects on their health from the whiplash.)

they use their surroundings for heat when they aren’t doing anything too strenuous, and because they aren’t really producing much of their own they can tolerate even higher temperatures that would normally put them out of commission (and they actually heavily rely on that heat for ease in a lot of other processes), to do anything that has bigger oxygen needs, they can dip into cooler water/shade for periods of higher activity (but can’t stay too cold for too long or else aforementioned other processes will shut down, though it does increase the effectiveness to the point where they can do a whole lot and allows them to swim/navigate cooler areas where their early competitors couldn’t return to, it only as long as they got back quickly and warmed up)

they basically swing between these two extremes but tend to stay at a warmish middle-ground, wearing heating pads on part of their body while still letting larger areas cool off, if that makes sense.

Hemocyanin’s other properties don’t automatically give them a longer life, in fact theirs is very short compared to other species, but it does make them resistant to cancers (a common threat on their sunny planet) and the spread of diseases in their dense communities

Being cold-blooded wasn’t a problem on their mostly tropical planet. It is a considerable problem once they left it, though, hence the heating pads most wear to warm up.

many also live in areas without a large body of water nearby (or an easy way to access said body of water) but still need to stay damp to maintain their music layer and trap oxygen, so many also carry spray bottles or wet rags with them to always stay damp.

Kixeli are highly social (with their name even roughly translating to "belonging together"). they rarely live in groups of less than 5.

They experience severe negative side effects from isolation. Their naturally intense empathy also makes it extremely damaging for them to see other Kixeli injured or dead, sometimes leading to their own death from shock if they were the one that did it (though this has not stopped wars over their scarce resources in the past, typically because that intense sense of kinship was naturally strongest towards those among their own community, and if Their community was suffering then they had to get rid of the source of it by any means. )

This period nearly drove them to extinction, and led to a Global Community movement that argued for intercommunity cooperation and the end of 'us and them thinking'.

Due to their sliminess, Kixeli normally keep clothing to a minimum and overall don’t have a need for it beyond temperature control and ornamentation.

They have none of their own social taboos about nakedness, having no external genitalia, but still often clothe themselves to the standards of others due to the pressure/need to be polite from other species.

They also have few class divides within their own communities, with everyone working for the good of the whole, and no sex/gender roles beyond squirter and egg layer since everyone cares for the eggs.

To humans, their language sounds like birdsong, with lots of repetitive noises and subtle shifts in pattern and tone.

Their unique vocalization makes their languages hard to learn and even harder to speak, but they themselves are incredible mimics (only surpassed in some ways by humans because lips and teeth).

The fin on their forehead is similar to eyebrows in communicating emotion or tone. They can see a similar color spectrum to humans and love bright contrasting colors similar to their own skin patterns.

They favor “fast food”, or anything that can be carried easily as you swing around in a tree or on a boat.

Payment/restaurants doesn’t really exist for them, they just have areas where food brought in by providers is available to the community (or people just eat what they catch and then bring extra to the community.)

They also don’t chew their food, though some dishes are meant to be squished to the roof of the mouth with the tongue to experience the flavor

Their clothing is often “readable” in that many individuals wear clothing that represents a certain story, event in their life, event in their community, or mythical hero that can be derived from looking at their clothing from the head down.

In the two guys up there, the Arasit is wearing the equivalent of booty shorts cut scantily close to their Hole depicting one version about the founding of the first community (though a simplified one, so it’s actually more like the equivalent of wearing a crop top tee with a little monochrome dog on it or something).

This kind of imagery is common among Arasit, even modern ones, because founding/birth/life are their associations in religious cultures.

The Kel alongside them is wearing a more complex getup meant to show the inciting incident of one of the nomadic communities mythic hero’s journey, when he was cast from the star sea by the wicked Long Arms into the deep sea.

This would be seen as all most goth since this part of the story is seen as eerie and it depicts their underworld along the hem and bracelets.

By wearing clothing associated with a specific figure//story, they can also show gender identity based on whether that figure or hod was male, female, neuther, etc(helping people draw the right conclusions despite the visible evidence of their sex written on all their skin. The clothing and any makeup done on the fin is usually their main reference point for judging how to address someone. )

#alien species #original species #spec evo #worldbuilding #drawing #speculative biology #xenobiology #Kixeli

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