#computer hangs when connected to internet

[neurotypical-sonic]

I dont think most of the islands would have internet connection, or at least not widely available or easily accessible. 4 year old tails not knowing much about the internet or caring about it until he and sonic end up on the mainlands and in a public library and he discovers the Joy of Internet. whole new world has opened up baby and he is tapping away at that keyboard

[mariacallous]

On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down.

Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.” Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. “I need A.I. to text girls,” he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, “Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?”

OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Six days later, Sam Altman, the C.E.O., announced that it had reached a million users. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t “think” in the human sense—when you ask ChatGPT a question, it draws from the data sets it has been trained on and builds an answer based on predictable word patterns. Companies had experimented with A.I.-driven chatbots for years, but most sputtered upon release; Microsoft’s 2016 experiment with a bot named Tay was shut down after sixteen hours because it began spouting racist rhetoric and denying the Holocaust. But ChatGPT seemed different. It could hold a conversation and break complex ideas down into easy-to-follow steps. Within a month, Google’s management, fearful that A.I. would have an impact on its search-engine business, declared a “code red.”

Among educators, an even greater panic arose. It was too deep into the school term to implement a coherent policy for what seemed like a homework killer: in seconds, ChatGPT could collect and summarize research and draft a full essay. Many large campuses tried to regulate ChatGPT and its eventual competitors, mostly in vain. I asked Alex to show me an example of an A.I.-produced paper. Eugene wanted to see it, too. He used a different A.I. app to help with computations for his business classes, but he had never gotten the hang of using it for writing. “I got you,” Alex told him. (All the students I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.)

He opened Claude on his laptop. I noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. He told me, “I said, ‘Turn it into concise bullet points.’ ” He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.

Alex searched until he found a paper for an art-history class, about a museum exhibition. He had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions. “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with,” he said. After skimming the essay, he felt that the A.I. hadn’t sufficiently addressed the professor’s questions, so he refined the prompt and told it to try again. In the end, Alex’s submission received the equivalent of an A-minus. He said that he had a basic grasp of the paper’s argument, but that if the professor had asked him for specifics he’d have been “so fucked.” I read the paper over Alex’s shoulder; it was a solid imitation of how an undergraduate might describe a set of images. If this had been 2007, I wouldn’t have made much of its generic tone, or of the precise, box-ticking quality of its critical observations.

Eugene, serious and somewhat solemn, had been listening with bemusement. “I would not cut and paste like he did, because I’m a lot more paranoid,” he said. He’s a couple of years younger than Alex and was in high school when ChatGPT was released. At the time, he experimented with A.I. for essays but noticed that it made easily noticed errors. “This passed the A.I. detector?” he asked Alex.

When ChatGPT launched, instructors adopted various measures to insure that students’ work was their own. These included requiring them to share time-stamped version histories of their Google documents, and designing written assignments that had to be completed in person, over multiple sessions. But most detective work occurs after submission. Services like GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Originality.ai analyze the structure and syntax of a piece of writing and assess the likelihood that it was produced by a machine. Alex said that his art-history professor was “hella old,” and therefore probably didn’t know about such programs. We fed the paper into a few different A.I.-detection websites. One said there was a twenty-eight-per-cent chance that the paper was A.I.-generated; another put the odds at sixty-one per cent. “That’s better than I expected,” Eugene said.

I asked if he thought what his friend had done was cheating, and Alex interrupted: “Of course. Are you fucking kidding me?”

As we looked at Alex’s laptop, I noticed that he had recently asked ChatGPT whether it was O.K. to go running in Nike Dunks. He had concluded that ChatGPT made for the best confidant. He consulted it as one might a therapist, asking for tips on dating and on how to stay motivated during dark times. His ChatGPT sidebar was an index of the highs and lows of being a young person. He admitted to me and Eugene that he’d used ChatGPT to draft his application to N.Y.U.—our lunch might never have happened had it not been for A.I. “I guess it’s really dishonest, but, fuck it, I’m here,” he said.

“It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating,” Eugene said. He saw Alex’s art-history essay as a victimless crime. He was just fulfilling requirements, not training to become a literary scholar.

Alex had to rush off to his study session. I told Eugene that our conversation had made me wonder about my function as a professor. He asked if I taught English, and I nodded.

“Mm, O.K.,” he said, and laughed. “So you’re, like, majorly affected.”

I teach at a small liberal-arts college, and I often joke that a student is more likely to hand in a big paper a year late (as recently happened) than to take a dishonorable shortcut. My classes are small and intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silences linger, that are difficult to scale. As a result, I have always had a vague sense that my students are learning something, even when it is hard to quantify. In the past, if I was worried that a paper had been plagiarized, I would enter a few phrases from it into a search engine and call it due diligence. But I recently began noticing that some students’ writing seemed out of synch with how they expressed themselves in the classroom. One essay felt stitched together from two minds—half of it was polished and rote, the other intimate and unfiltered. Having never articulated a policy for A.I., I took the easy way out. The student had had enough shame to write half of the essay, and I focussed my feedback on improving that part.

It’s easy to get hung up on stories of academic dishonesty. Late last year, in a survey of college and university leaders, fifty-nine per cent reported an increase in cheating, a figure that feels conservative when you talk to students. A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is. Until we’re eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We’re essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential. But even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or a diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of A.I. means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether.

There are no reliable figures for how many American students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of students between the ages of thirteen and seventeen suggests that a quarter of teens currently use ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the figure from 2023. OpenAI recently released a report claiming that one in three college students uses its products. There’s good reason to believe that these are low estimates. If you grew up Googling everything or using Grammarly to give your prose a professional gloss, it isn’t far-fetched to regard A.I. as just another productivity tool. “I see it as no different from Google,” Eugene said. “I use it for the same kind of purpose.”

Being a student is about testing boundaries and staying one step ahead of the rules. While administrators and educators have been debating new definitions for cheating and discussing the mechanics of surveillance, students have been embracing the possibilities of A.I. A few months after the release of ChatGPT, a Harvard undergraduate got approval to conduct an experiment in which it wrote papers that had been assigned in seven courses. The A.I. skated by with a 3.57 G.P.A., a little below the school’s average. Upstart companies introduced products that specialized in “humanizing” A.I.-generated writing, and TikTok influencers began coaching their audiences on how to avoid detection.

Unable to keep pace, academic administrations largely stopped trying to control students’ use of artificial intelligence and adopted an attitude of hopeful resignation, encouraging teachers to explore the practical, pedagogical applications of A.I. In certain fields, this wasn’t a huge stretch. Studies show that A.I. is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English. In some STEM classes, using generative A.I. as a tool is acceptable. Alex and Eugene told me that their accounting professor encouraged them to take advantage of free offers on new A.I. products available only to undergraduates, as companies competed for student loyalty throughout the spring. In May, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a product specifically marketed for educational use, after schools including Oxford University, Arizona State University, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business experimented with incorporating A.I. into their curricula. This month, the company detailed plans to integrate ChatGPT into every dimension of campus life, with students receiving “personalized” A.I. accounts to accompany them throughout their years in college.

But for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.

Corey Robin, a writer and a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, read the early stories about ChatGPT with skepticism. Then his daughter, a sophomore in high school at the time, used it to produce an essay that was about as good as those his undergraduates wrote after a semester of work. He decided to stop assigning take-home essays. For the first time in his thirty years of teaching, he administered in-class exams.

Robin told me he finds many of the steps that universities have taken to combat A.I. essays to be “hand-holding that’s not leading people anywhere.” He has become a believer in the passage-identification blue-book exam, in which students name and contextualize excerpts of what they’ve read for class. “Know the text and write about it intelligently,” he said. “That was a way of honoring their autonomy without being a cop.”

His daughter, who is now a senior, complains that her teachers rarely assign full books. And Robin has noticed that college students are more comfortable with excerpts than with entire articles, and prefer short stories to novels. “I don’t get the sense they have the kind of literary or cultural mastery that used to be the assumption upon which we assigned papers,” he said. One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of “Bleak House,” by Charles Dickens, that “they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” And these were English majors.

The return to pen and paper has been a common response to A.I. among professors, with sales of blue books rising significantly at certain universities in the past two years. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, grew dispirited after some students submitted what he suspected was A.I.-generated work for an assignment on how the school’s honor code should view A.I.-generated work. He, too, has decided to return to blue books, and is pondering the logistics of oral exams. “Maybe we go all the way back to 450 B.C.,” he told me.

But other professors have renewed their emphasis on getting students to see the value of process. Dan Melzer, the director of the first-year composition program at the University of California, Davis, recalled that “everyone was in a panic” when ChatGPT first hit. Melzer’s job is to think about how writing functions across the curriculum so that all students, from prospective scientists to future lawyers, get a chance to hone their prose. Consequently, he has an accommodating view of how norms around communication have changed, especially in the internet age. He was sympathetic to kids who viewed some of their assignments as dull and mechanical and turned to ChatGPT to expedite the process. He called the five-paragraph essay—the classic “hamburger” structure, consisting of an introduction, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion—“outdated,” having descended from élitist traditions.

Melzer believes that some students loathe writing because of how it’s been taught, particularly in the past twenty-five years. The No Child Left Behind Act, from 2002, instituted standards-based reforms across all public schools, resulting in generations of students being taught to write according to rigid testing rubrics. As one teacher wrote in the Washington Post in 2013, students excelled when they mastered a form of “bad writing.” Melzer has designed workshops that treat writing as a deliberative, iterative process involving drafting, feedback (from peers and also from ChatGPT), and revision.

“If you assign a generic essay topic and don’t engage in any process, and you just collect it a month later, it’s almost like you’re creating an environment tailored to crime,” he said. “You’re encouraging crime in your community!”

I found Melzer’s pedagogical approach inspiring; I instantly felt bad for routinely breaking my class into small groups so that they could “workshop” their essays, as though the meaning of this verb were intuitively clear. But, as a student, I’d have found Melzer’s focus on process tedious—it requires a measure of faith that all the work will pay off in the end. Writing is hard, regardless of whether it’s a five-paragraph essay or a haiku, and it’s natural, especially when you’re a college student, to want to avoid hard work—this is why classes like Melzer’s are compulsory. “You can imagine that students really want to be there,” he joked.

College is all about opportunity costs. One way of viewing A.I. is as an intervention in how people choose to spend their time. In the early nineteen-sixties, college students spent an estimated twenty-four hours a week on schoolwork. Today, that figure is about fifteen, a sign, to critics of contemporary higher education, that young people are beneficiaries of grade inflation—in a survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson, nearly eighty per cent of the class of 2024 reported a G.P.A. of 3.7 or higher—and lack the diligence of their forebears. I don’t know how many hours I spent on schoolwork in the late nineties, when I was in college, but I recall feeling that there was never enough time. I suspect that, even if today’s students spend less time studying, they don’t feel significantly less stressed. It’s the nature of campus life that everyone assimilates into a culture of busyness, and a lot of that anxiety has been shifted to extracurricular or pre-professional pursuits. A dean at Harvard remarked that students feel compelled to find distinction outside the classroom because they are largely indistinguishable within it.

Eddie, a sociology major at Long Beach State, is older than most of his classmates. He graduated high school in 2010, and worked full time while attending a community college. “I’ve gone through a lot to be at school,” he told me. “I want to learn as much as I can.” ChatGPT, which his therapist recommended to him, was ubiquitous at Long Beach even before the California State University system, which Long Beach is a part of, announced a partnership with OpenAI, giving its four hundred and sixty thousand students access to ChatGPT Edu. “I was a little suspicious of how convenient it was,” Eddie said. “It seemed to know a lot, in a way that seemed so human.”

He told me that he used A.I. “as a brainstorm” but never for writing itself. “I limit myself, for sure.” Eddie works for Los Angeles County, and he was talking to me during a break. He admitted that, when he was pressed for time, he would sometimes use ChatGPT for quizzes. “I don’t know if I’m telling myself a lie,” he said. “I’ve given myself opportunities to do things ethically, but if I’m rushing to work I don’t feel bad about that,” particularly for courses outside his major.

I recognized Eddie’s conflict. I’ve used ChatGPT a handful of times, and on one occasion it accomplished a scheduling task so quickly that I began to understand the intoxication of hyper-efficiency. I’ve felt the need to stop myself from indulging in idle queries. Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media, constantly open in the corner of the screen, a portal for distraction. This wasn’t like paying someone to write a paper for you—there was no social friction, no aura of illicit activity. Nor did it feel like sharing notes, or like passing off what you’d read in CliffsNotes or SparkNotes as your own analysis. There was no real time to reflect on questions of originality or honesty—the student basically became a project manager. And for students who use it the way Eddie did, as a kind of sounding board, there’s no clear threshold where the work ceases to be an original piece of thinking. In April, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released a report drawn from a million anonymized student conversations with its chatbots. It suggested that more than half of user interactions could be classified as “collaborative,” involving a dialogue between student and A.I. (Presumably, the rest of the interactions were more extractive.)

May, a sophomore at Georgetown, was initially resistant to using ChatGPT. “I don’t know if it was an ethics thing,” she said. “I just thought I could do the assignment better, and it wasn’t worth the time being saved.” But she began using it to proofread her essays, and then to generate cover letters, and now she uses it for “pretty much all” her classes. “I don’t think it’s made me a worse writer,” she said. “It’s perhaps made me a less patient writer. I used to spend hours writing essays, nitpicking over my wording, really thinking about how to phrase things.” College had made her reflect on her experience at an extremely competitive high school, where she had received top grades but retained very little knowledge. As a result, she was the rare student who found college somewhat relaxed. ChatGPT helped her breeze through busywork and deepen her engagement with the courses she felt passionate about. “I was trying to think, Where’s all this time going?” she said. I had never envied a college student until she told me the answer: “I sleep more now.”

Harry Stecopoulos oversees the University of Iowa’s English department, which has more than eight hundred majors. On the first day of his introductory course, he asks students to write by hand a two-hundred-word analysis of the opening paragraph of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” There are always a few grumbles, and students have occasionally walked out. “I like the exercise as a tone-setter, because it stresses their writing,” he told me.

The return of blue-book exams might disadvantage students who were encouraged to master typing at a young age. Once you’ve grown accustomed to the smooth rhythms of typing, reverting to a pen and paper can feel stifling. But neuroscientists have found that the “embodied experience” of writing by hand taps into parts of the brain that typing does not. Being able to write one way—even if it’s more efficient—doesn’t make the other way obsolete. There’s something lofty about Stecopoulos’s opening-day exercise. But there’s another reason for it: the handwritten paragraph also begins a paper trail, attesting to voice and style, that a teaching assistant can consult if a suspicious paper is submitted.

Kevin, a third-year student at Syracuse University, recalled that, on the first day of a class, the professor had asked everyone to compose some thoughts by hand. “That brought a smile to my face,” Kevin said. “The other kids are scratching their necks and sweating, and I’m, like, This is kind of nice.”

Kevin had worked as a teaching assistant for a mandatory course that first-year students take to acclimate to campus life. Writing assignments involved basic questions about students’ backgrounds, he told me, but they often used A.I. anyway. “I was very disturbed,” he said. He occasionally uses A.I. to help with translations for his advanced Arabic course, but he’s come to look down on those who rely heavily on it. “They almost forget that they have the ability to think,” he said. Like many former holdouts, Kevin felt that his judicious use of A.I. was more defensible than his peers’ use of it.

As ChatGPT begins to sound more human, will we reconsider what it means to sound like ourselves? Kevin and some of his friends pride themselves on having an ear attuned to A.I.-generated text. The hallmarks, he said, include a preponderance of em dashes and a voice that feels blandly objective. An acquaintance had run an essay that she had written herself through a detector, because she worried that she was starting to phrase things like ChatGPT did. He read her essay: “I realized, like, It does kind of sound like ChatGPT. It was freaking me out a little bit.”

A particularly disarming aspect of ChatGPT is that, if you point out a mistake, it communicates in the backpedalling tone of a contrite student. (“Apologies for the earlier confusion. . . .”) Its mistakes are often referred to as hallucinations, a description that seems to anthropomorphize A.I., conjuring a vision of a sleep-deprived assistant. Some professors told me that they had students fact-check ChatGPT’s work, as a way of discussing the importance of original research and of showing the machine’s fallibility. Hallucination rates have grown worse for most A.I.s, with no single reason for the increase. As a researcher told the Times, “We still don’t know how these models work exactly.”

But many students claim to be unbothered by A.I.’s mistakes. They appear nonchalant about the question of achievement, and even dissociated from their work, since it is only notionally theirs. Joseph, a Division I athlete at a Big Ten school, told me that he saw no issue with using ChatGPT for his classes, but he did make one exception: he wanted to experience his African-literature course “authentically,” because it involved his heritage. Alex, the N.Y.U. student, said that if one of his A.I. papers received a subpar grade his disappointment would be focussed on the fact that he’d spent twenty dollars on his subscription. August, a sophomore at Columbia studying computer science, told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

Kevin, by contrast, desired a more general kind of moral distinction. I asked if he would be bothered to receive a lower grade on an essay than a classmate who’d used ChatGPT. “Part of me is able to compartmentalize and not be pissed about it,” he said. “I developed myself as a human. I can have a superiority complex about it. I learned more.” He smiled. But then he continued, “Part of me can also be, like, This is so unfair. I would have loved to hang out with my friends more. What did I gain? I made my life harder for all that time.”

In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?

What if we take seriously the idea that A.I. assistance can accelerate learning—that students today are arriving at their destinations faster? In 2023, researchers at Harvard introduced a self-paced A.I. tutor in a popular physics course. Students who used the A.I. tutor reported higher levels of engagement and motivation and did better on a test than those who were learning from a professor. May, the Georgetown student, told me that she often has ChatGPT produce extra practice questions when she’s studying for a test. Could A.I. be here not to destroy education but to revolutionize it? Barry Lam teaches in the philosophy department at the University of California, Riverside, and hosts a popular podcast, Hi-Phi Nation, which applies philosophical modes of inquiry to everyday topics. He began wondering what it would mean for A.I. to actually be a productivity tool. He spoke to me from the podcast studio he built in his shed. “Now students are able to generate in thirty seconds what used to take me a week,” he said. He compared education to carpentry, one of his many hobbies. Could you skip to using power tools without learning how to saw by hand? If students were learning things faster, then it stood to reason that Lam could assign them “something very hard.” He wanted to test this theory, so for final exams he gave his undergraduates a Ph.D.-level question involving denotative language and the German logician Gottlob Frege which was, frankly, beyond me.

“They fucking failed it miserably,” he said. He adjusted his grading curve accordingly.

Lam doesn’t find the use of A.I. morally indefensible. “It’s not plagiarism in the cut-and-paste sense,” he argued, because there’s technically no original version. Rather, he finds it a potential waste of everyone’s time. At the start of the semester, he has told students, “If you’re gonna just turn in a paper that’s ChatGPT-generated, then I will grade all your work by ChatGPT and we can all go to the beach.”

Nobody gets into teaching because he loves grading papers. I talked to one professor who rhapsodized about how much more his students were learning now that he’d replaced essays with short exams. I asked if he missed marking up essays. He laughed and said, “No comment.” An undergraduate at Northeastern University recently accused a professor of using A.I. to create course materials; she filed a formal complaint with the school, requesting a refund for some of her tuition. The dustup laid bare the tension between why many people go to college and why professors teach. Students are raised to understand achievement as something discrete and measurable, but when they arrive at college there are people like me, imploring them to wrestle with difficulty and abstraction. Worse yet, they are told that grades don’t matter as much as they did when they were trying to get into college—only, by this point, students are wired to find the most efficient path possible to good marks.

As the craft of writing is degraded by A.I., original writing has become a valuable resource for training language models. Earlier this year, a company called Catalyst Research Alliance advertised “academic speech data and student papers” from two research studies run in the late nineties and mid-two-thousands at the University of Michigan. The school asked the company to halt its work—the data was available for free to academics anyway—and a university spokesperson said that student data “was not and has never been for sale.” But the situation did lead many people to wonder whether institutions would begin viewing original student work as a potential revenue stream.

According to a recent study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, human intellect has declined since 2012. An assessment of tens of thousands of adults in nearly thirty countries showed an over-all decade-long drop in test scores for math and for reading comprehension. Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the O.E.C.D., hypothesized that the way we consume information today—often through short social-media posts—has something to do with the decline in literacy. (One of Europe’s top performers in the assessment was Estonia, which recently announced that it will bring A.I. to some high-school students in the next few years, sidelining written essays and rote homework exercises in favor of self-directed learning and oral exams.)

Lam, the philosophy professor, used to be a colleague of mine, and for a brief time we were also neighbors. I’d occasionally look out the window and see him building a fence, or gardening. He’s an avid amateur cook, guitarist, and carpenter, and he remains convinced that there is value to learning how to do things the annoying, old-fashioned, and—as he puts it—“artisanal” way. He told me that his wife, Shanna Andrawis, who has been a high-school teacher since 2008, frequently disagreed with his cavalier methods for dealing with large learning models. Andrawis argues that dishonesty has always been an issue. “We are trying to mass educate,” she said, meaning there’s less room to be precious about the pedagogical process. “I don’t have conversations with students about ‘artisanal’ writing. But I have conversations with them about our relationship. Respect me enough to give me your authentic voice, even if you don’t think it’s that great. It’s O.K. I want to meet you where you’re at.”

Ultimately, Andrawis was less fearful of ChatGPT than of the broader conditions of being young these days. Her students have grown increasingly introverted, staring at their phones with little desire to “practice getting over that awkwardness” that defines teen life, as she put it. A.I. might contribute to this deterioration, but it isn’t solely to blame. It’s “a little cherry on top of an already really bad ice-cream sundae,” she said.

When the school year began, my feelings about ChatGPT were somewhere between disappointment and disdain, focussed mainly on students. But, as the weeks went by, my sense of what should be done and who was at fault grew hazier. Eliminating core requirements, rethinking G.P.A., teaching A.I. skepticism—none of the potential fixes could turn back the preconditions of American youth. Professors can reconceive of the classroom, but there is only so much we control. I lacked faith that educational institutions would ever regard new technologies as anything but inevitable. Colleges and universities, many of which had tried to curb A.I. use just a few semesters ago, rushed to partner with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, deeming a product that didn’t exist four years ago essential to the future of school.

Except for a year spent bumming around my home town, I’ve basically been on a campus for the past thirty years. Students these days view college as consumers, in ways that never would have occurred to me when I was their age. They’ve grown up at a time when society values high-speed takes, not the slow deliberation of critical thinking. Although I’ve empathized with my students’ various mini-dramas, I rarely project myself into their lives. I notice them noticing one another, and I let the mysteries of their lives go. Their pressures are so different from the ones I felt as a student. Although I envy their metabolisms, I would not wish for their sense of horizons.

Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think.

Despite all the current hysteria around students cheating, they aren’t the ones to blame. They did not lobby for the introduction of laptops when they were in elementary school, and it’s not their fault that they had to go to school on Zoom during the pandemic. They didn’t create the A.I. tools, nor were they at the forefront of hyping technological innovation. They were just early adopters, trying to outwit the system at a time when doing so has never been so easy. And they have no more control than the rest of us. Perhaps they sense this powerlessness even more acutely than I do. One moment, they are being told to learn to code; the next, it turns out employers are looking for the kind of “soft skills” one might learn as an English or a philosophy major. In February, a labor report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that computer-science majors had a higher unemployment rate than ethnic-studies majors did—the result, some believed, of A.I. automating entry-level coding jobs.

None of the students I spoke with seemed lazy or passive. Alex and Eugene, the N.Y.U. students, worked hard—but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous. They were radically resourceful.

When classes were over and students were moving into their summer housing, I e-mailed with Alex, who was settling in in the East Village. He’d just finished his finals, and estimated that he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes. Without the assistance of Claude, it might have taken him around eight or nine hours. “I didn’t retain anything,” he wrote. “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” He received an A-minus and a B-plus. 

[pathologicalreid]

pyrophoric | s.r.

in which Spencer seeks the help of a chemist to help with his research into white phosphorous

margotober masterlist

who? spencer reid x chemist!reader category: fluff content warnings: chemical warfare, WWI, willie pete = white phosphorous, spencer and chemist!reader's first meeting, i love them so hard, in 10x16 "derek" the show tells you to use copper sulfate but that's literally wrong don't do that, flirtiiiingggg, spencer reid is sooooo sexy in a lab coat word count: 2.65k a/n: the idea for this fic was sitting in my brain and then it turned out the information in the show is literally wrong so i had to cancel spencer reid, but here we are now. i fixed it, don't worry. tumblr user sunshineduda if you're out there this is for you.

pyrophoric - liable to ignite spontaneously on exposure to air

The knock on the door made you jump. Your face warms as a result of your nerves, acting like you haven’t been expecting someone to show up at the side door. In fact, you were the one who instructed him to go to the side door, and he’s just following your orders.

Sliding off of your stool, you make your way to the side door, undoing the lock on the crash bar and opening it. He was wearing a pea coat over what looks like a suit, which is maybe a bit overdressed for your lab, but you weren’t going to say anything about it. “Uh,” you finally speak, “You can hang your things up over there,” you nod to the corner of the room.

Once he’s properly hung up his coat and messenger bag, he comes back to you, standing dutifully in front of you, “I’m Dr. Spencer Reid,” he introduces himself.

You nod once in response, “Right,” you introduce yourself in kind, “You can just call me Y/N, though.” You feel no need to use your honorific with other academics, it’s easier to just go by first names. Pointing to a new corner of the room, you lead him in that direction, “I made sure we had a lab coat available for you. I wasn’t sure if you had one of your own,” you explain to him grabbing your own white coat from the locker and pulling it on.

“Thank you,” he responds, taking the spare that you left out for him and tugging it over his sleeves. His hair seems shorter than it was in the pictures you’ve seen of him, which is mostly just what pops up with a quick Google search, but there was something about Dr. Reid that is very unlike any other academic you’ve met before.

You watch him pull the cuffs of the coat over his sleeves, pulling the lapels closer together in front of his chest. “How long has it been?” You ask, handing him a pair of goggles and making a note of his discomfort in the sterile polyester.

He looks at you, big brown eyes with his eyebrows raising up in curiosity, “Pardon?”

Gesturing to the lab coat, you shrug slightly, “How long has it been since you’ve been in a lab?”

“Nine years, three months, and five days,” he answers, barely giving it a second thought as he adjusts his collar.

He has an eidetic memory. That information also shows up when you look him up on the internet, “Right well, I’m sure it’ll be just like riding a bike.”

Spencer gestures for you to lead the way back to the lab, and you take him to your station. It wasn’t clean enough to eat off of, but it was certainly clean enough for the two of you to begin a research plan. “So,” he begins, looking around the lab like he’s casing the place, “You went to Princeton?”

Nodding apprehensively, you wipe your sweaty palms on the fabric of your jeans, “Oh, yeah. For my doctorate at least.”

Spencer takes a seat on the lab stool across from you, nervously adjusting a few of the things in front of him, “Right, Johns Hopkins for your bachelor’s and master’s.”

It seems that someone else has been doing opposition research—Spencer Reid had googled you. “Well,” you tell him, turning on your computer, “It’s no CalTech.”

“Princeton has a great chemistry program,” Spencer points out, protecting your alma mater despite his lack of connection to the school.

Your face warms again, “Oh, I know. It’s just,” you look over at the genius in the room, a shy smile reaching your face. “I’m used to the dick-measuring contests, so I thought you might have a similar preconception.”

Spencer frowns at you, “You thought I’d want to have a dick-measuring contest with you?”

At this point, your face might as well be on fire, “When you put it together and say it like that it sounds awful.” You want to bang your head against the table. Even better, you want to go over to the rinse station and just let the shower head wash away your humiliation. “Can we just talk about chemistry? I’m good with chemistry,” you ramble, focusing your attention on your computer monitor.

“I was joking,” Spencer clarifies.

You swallow thickly, “I know.” There was no explanation in the world that you could give to yourself that would resolve this, so you elect to move past it.

Spencer hums next to you, placing his hands neatly in his lap while he waits for something to do, “So, the interaction that chemicals used in warfare has on modern medicine?”

Your head snaps over to him, your eyes looking at him widely, “You read my dissertation?”

He chuckles at your shock, the sound easing some of your nerves, “I’ve read it a few times now. How did you think I found you?”

Scoffing in response to his question, you shake your head, typing in your username and password, “I just thought you went skimming through the white pages until you saw my name and thought ‘She’s probably available on a Saturday morning.’” Once you’re in the system, you turn back to face him, a slightly less timid smile now on your face. “So, what’s your interest in chemical warfare anyway?”

“I just… I’d like to try something new, and I was looking through one of the recent government reports, and your dissertation was cited at the end, so I decided to reach out to you,” he explains himself to you.

You nod in understanding, “You work for the FBI?”

Spencer’s head bobs, “Yes, but my work for the FBI and my interest in chemical warfare are not intertwined in the slightest.”

You raise your eyebrows in suspicion, “Did your boss tell you to say that to me? Was there an NDA I was supposed to sign?”

He laughs again and this time it makes your heart soar, “No, I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

“Couldn’t you get in any other lab and just do the work yourself?” You inquire, getting up from your stool and starting to get things out of the cupboards, stirring rods, beakers, and anything else you thought you might need.

Considering it for a moment, Spencer walks up behind you, grabbing a flask from a shelf that you were trying to reach and setting it down for you, “You already have the majority of the research done, and besides, most of my chemistry application is in analytical chemistry, yours is in biochemistry.”

Thanking him, you set everything down in your workspace, careful not to drop anything on the floor as you did so. “So, you’re just curious and you decided to reach out to me to do some experiments over the weekend?”

“I wanted to have your expert opinion,” Spencer tells you, watching as you make your way to the storage area, you type in your PIN and open the closet, setting everything you need on a tray before bringing it all back out to Spencer.

You smile when his eyes go wide at the sight in front of him, the rush of being in a lab hitting him for the first time in almost ten years. “So, Dr. Reid, tell me what you know about white phosphorous.”

He leans back in his stool as if he’s been waiting for you to ask this question, “White phosphorous is an inflammatory allotrope of phosphorous, it’s commonly referred to as the ‘devil’s element’ because it glows green in the dark and is pyrophoric—it’s liable to ignite unexpectedly when exposed to air.”

“I know what pyrophoric means,” you tell him, trying to hide your recognition of just how smart he is.

Spencer holds his hands up in surrender, “Militaries frequently use it to illuminate battlefields, cause smokescreens, and act as an incendiary. Once it ignites, it’s very difficult to extinguish, and it sticks to surfaces like skin and clothing,” he continues, glancing over to the small amount of white phosphorous that you’ve allotted for your experiments today. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Spencer was nervous around the phosphorous.

You nod at him in confirmation, “We store it underwater because it’s barely soluble, and the smoke from burning phosphorous can cause damage to the eyes and respiratory tract because of the acids and phosphine.” Your tone is deathly serious, which seems apt for the situation you’re in, “White phosphorous can penetrate through bone.”

“Did you have a liability waiver that I’m supposed to sign?” Spencer asks, taking his eyes off the chemical and looking over at you again.

Smiling, you let out a breathy laugh, “Did you just make a joke, Dr. Reid?”

Obviously proud of himself, he beams over at you, “Spencer,” he insists, “And yes, I did.”

Your head bobs at his insistence, “Right, Spencer. So, we’ll take what we already know about Willie Pete and use that prior knowledge to give us a few things to test. Obviously, I don’t want to blow up my workplace, so that limits our ability to have a controlled experiment. Once we have your options, we’ll put some protective gear and get the white phosphorous out.”

“Is that why you did your dissertation on mustard gas?” Spencer asks you, starting to look through the chemicals in front of you, “Because white phosphorous is so unstable.”

Humming, you get your notepad out and flip to a fresh page, “Partially. It was that and the fact that I was obsessed with World War One when I was a child, so mustard gas made the most sense to me.”

“A chemist with an affinity for The Great War,” Spencer muses, glancing over at you as he portions copper sulfate into a beaker.

Hiding your smile as you portion out silver nitrate into a graduated cylinder, Spencer adds water to his beaker, dissolving the copper sulfate, “If I hadn’t gone into chemistry, it would’ve been history.”

“You still could,” he says, using one of the stir sticks to get the rest of the compound to dissolve.

Laughing, you shrug in response, “Not everyone’s meant to get multiple PhDs, but sometimes I think about taking history classes here. I can take them for free because I work for the university.”

Once your test subjects were ready, the two of you put on protective gear, protecting yourselves from the deadly chemicals, “Next time someone tells me my job is dangerous, I’m going to tell them about you.” He sets his watch on a stool, not wanting to let it get damaged while you experiment.

You swore Spencer was nervous, holding his breath as you portioned out the white phosphorous in your controlled area, “So now we light it,” you tell him, and a rush of air later, the allotrope ignites on the fake human skin.

Carrying on the experiment, the two of you sat there for hours trying to set fires that wouldn’t lead to serious bodily harm. The best you find is Spencer’s copper sulfate solution, which reacted with the white phosphorous in a way that made it easier to see, which could help with the debridement of burns. “Why did you agree to help me with this?” He asks nervously, watching you scrawl notes on your legal pad.

You hum, “It’s related to my research, and I’m not in the middle of any other campaigns right now. Why did you send me a letter in the mail asking for help?”

“I don’t like email,” he responds as if it should’ve been obvious—and maybe it should’ve. “Only one more,” he tells you, “Test number nine, silver nitrate, point-two Molar aqueous solution,” he recites for your records.

Most of the experiment had been going so poorly that you half expected it to go up in flames. You took the stirring rod from the graduated cylinder and placed the clean end in your mouth before going to apply the solution.

“What are you doing? Don’t put that in your mouth,” Spencer scolds, taking the stick from your mouth.

You frown at him, righting your hand before anything has the chance to spill, “The chemicals are on the other side.”

He looks at you incredulously, “My point still stands.”

Pausing for a moment, a sly smile grows on your face, “Do I make you nervous?”

“Yes,” he admits, “Anyone who puts silver nitrate near their mouth rightfully makes me nervous.”

Rolling your eyes, you watch him put the stirring stick in its proper home before you apply the solution, your eyes going wide as you watch the reaction. Neutralizing the burn, “Oh my god, Spencer!” You exclaim, turning to look at him, you don’t even think before tossing your arms around him.

For just a moment, he hugs you back before looking at the result of the experiment. “So, silver nitrate is the best treatment we’ve found for white phosphorous burns, but if someone doesn’t have silver nitrate, then copper sulfate would also work.”

You nod in agreement, writing something similar on your notepad, “Yes, but the use of copper sulfate can also cause intravascular hemolysis and renal failure, so silver nitrate is the best conclusion that we’ve drawn.”

“You do realize that the people I’m sharing this with have never and likely will never encounter white phosphorous in their lives, so they don’t really care about the nuance,” he explains to you.

Rolling your eyes, you sit back in your stool, “Well I care about the nuance. What if this was something I wanted to publish someday?”

Spencer smiles at you, there’s something in his eyes that you can’t quite name, “You want to publish an article with me?”

Before you get a chance to answer, a spark goes off from one of your bigger failures of the day, causing you to jump from your stool, leaving you falling to the floor and your seat clattering on the linoleum.

“Are you alright?” Spencer asks, clambering from his stool to offer you a hand, which you accept gratefully.

Nodding, you stand in front of him, “Yeah, just my bruised ego.” Not to mention the bruise on my tailbone, you think to yourself. Looking over at the time, you sigh, “I should start getting everything back in order for Monday.”

Once the last of your mess has been properly cleaned up, you watch Spencer shed his lab coat. You were almost disappointed—it was a good look on him.

“Thank you again for helping to clean up,” you tell him, hanging your jacket in your designated locker. “You really didn’t have to.”

He shrugs nonchalantly, “It was my pleasure, and besides, it’s a small thank you for giving up your Saturday just to quell my curiosity. It was nice to work with an expert in the field.”

Laughing nervously, you pull a cardigan on over your arms, “Right, shame I didn’t get to ask about the vapor-liquid equilibria of alternative fuels,” you jest.

“You read my dissertation?” Spencer’s question is an echo of the same one you asked him that morning.

Your face warms as you nod slowly, “The chemistry one was digestible. I tried my hand at another one, the non-obvious relationship factors using cluster weighted modeling and geographic regression,” you rattle off the title of his engineering dissertation. “I couldn’t quite get through it, and I didn’t bother with the mathematics one.”

Spencer falters for a moment, studying your expression with something that resembles wonder, “I mean, I could explain them to you sometime. You’re brilliant, I’m sure you’d get it if you had someone to walk you through it.”

“Oh,” you breathe, “I’d like that.”

The smile on his face is worth all of the nerves you’ve ever felt, “Do you drink coffee?”

A small giggle escapes your lips as you hold the door open for him, “Habitually.”

[irisinluv]

Yandere Stardew Valley- Sebastian

I've been playing some Yandere Stardew mods recently. While I love them..... I feel like they do my husband (Sebastian) wrong. The citizens of Pelican Town are telling me that they can't hang out with me because Sebstian threatened them. That they've noticed some weird behavior. That he's physically violent. I disagree with all of these for Sebby.

He's our hot programmer boyfriend who lives in his basement bedroom, and only emerges to enjoy a smoke break, or to go see his friends. Now, while again, I do enjoy playing the mods...... I think his cannon behavior sets him up to be the perfect chronically online yandere. Pelican Town isn't exactly the most connected (6 out of the 11 rivals have access to a computer), but there's still potential. Obviously they're gonners if they have a computer. Sam finds himself doxed after making a comment about the gifts you gave him this week, and poor Haley's socials are blowing up with hate comments- from her personal insta to her photography blog.

But what about the other 5? The ones who are more disconnected? Well. It's easy enough to get Shane fired from joja. A little email to Morris from "HQ" saying he either fires Shane or his own pay gets docked..... well. Suddenly, everyone's favorite alcoholic doesn't even have a job anymore. Elliott suddenly has all these taxes he hasn't paid on his little shack..... beachfront properties cost a lot, you know. The parents stop letting Penny watch their kids after some..... explicit photos get leaked. It doesn't matter that they're edited. These people don't know about Photoshop. All they know is apparently Penny's making ends meet to support her mother..... and there's a new favorite subject to gossip on between all the older women. The other rivals are equally taken care of. All you need to focus on now is how Sebastian is the only reliable option in the whole damn town.

And he knows you so well, doesn't he? You, who lived away from it all until now. You, who WAS connected to the internet. Who had their entire life detailed through Facebook updates and Instagram posts. Honestly, Sebastian thinks that maybe he DOESN'T need to leave Pelican town... looking at the life you lived before coming to the valley, he thinks its much easier to keep you safe when he can control everything that goes on. There were too many factors to your old life. Too many parties to go to, coworkers to talk to, ex-boyfriends/girlfriends worry about. No. Sebastian thinks that city life isn't fit for the two of you to start you life together.

While he enjoyed seeing the trip down memory lane of who you were before becoming the farmer, and learning more about your likes and dislikes, he much prefers this version of you. The version of you who he found bouncing on their toes outside his door, excitedly shoving a frozen tear at him. Who eventually became the only person he was genuinely excited to have come barging into his room unannounced. And the thought of moving into the farm with you was all together far too tempting. He can picture it already. He'd set up a little area to work on his bike, he'd help out around the farm for you (he saw your hands covered in scrapes and splinters one day, and you sheepishly told him your fences had started wearing down.... but fixing a fence was another first for you. So you ended up scraping yourself up a bit on the old wood. Now, Sebastain, who, while he doesn't enjoy it, grew up with a carpenter mother..... well. He's going to make sure you never have that many splinters again.) Oh and he can already imagine it. The two of you, far away from the rest of the town, from prying eyes, no one to hear what you two would get up to as he helped you relax after a long day of working the feilds.....

This fantasy would sustain him until you eventually asked him to marry you. I don't think he would rush anything. To you, and the rest of the citizens, he was just normal Sebastian. Showing up for band practice, playing pool at the bar (although he seemed to play much better when a certain farmer came to watch). He just realized that the best way to control all the factors in town would be to remain anonymous. Avoid suspicion. After all. In a small town like that, it would be all too easy to turn against him if he decided to publicly threaten someone. And how would you react if you came to drop off some fresh sashimi to your boyfriend, only to find him being dragged out of his house by Clint, with Marlon standing nearby, ready to ship him off to face justice in the adventurers guild? No. That wouldn't do. He can't add any more stress to you like that. He'd remain the puppeteer, pulling the strings of the valley.

This isn't to say Sebastian never stalks you in person or anything like that. He can't help himself. He's a night owl. He knows the villagers schedules, has since before you even came to town. So, he knows he can get away with digging in the trash to find the straw you threw away at the bar. And if someone does hear him.... well. Linus is going to be everyone's first thought. He does, however, start adopting a stricter routine as far as monitoring your house after you mention how you sell your produce.

Sebastian was rightfully horrified when you explained that Mayor Lewis comes by your farm at night to collect anything you wish to sell. How it's such a relief to be able to just chuck things in the the bin as you're rushing to bed at 1:50 in the morning, only to get up first thing and start your day again, and not have to worry about lugging all your goods to the store. Sebastian won't criticize you for the lack of sleep..... no. That's not what's worrying. What's worrying is that this old man who has a gold statue of himself and who gets it on in the bushes with his secret girlfriend (of course Sebastian knows about that) is showing up to your house sometime after 2 am. His mind flashes back to his fantasy of the two of you, completely alone on the farm.... and then is mortified as this fantasy morphs into a nightmare where he looks up from bed with you, and sees Lewis' wrinkled face peering through the window. Yea. No. Sebastain installs some hidden cameras to make sure Lewis doesn't get up to anything funny while you're defenseless, asleep, alone..... ok he might need to get a new mayor elected. The old man might just have to go. Perhaps to a home outside the town. Regardless, he makes sure Lewis stops coming by as frequently. Frustratingly, he isn't able to completely stop it, but that'll be an easy fix once the two of you are married. He'll act surprised, "wow Lewis, that's so kind of you to help out the farmer all this time. But hey, don't worry, I'll take over. I'm up late anyways, and it's the least I can do!" But Sebastian still wakes up in a cold sweat and frantically rushes to check the cameras, making sure you're OK. That Lewis really is just checking the shipping bin.

Once y'all get married, he shows a bit more of that possessive side to you. But you chalk it up to just bedroom spicy time, and honestly find his hand tightening on your waist as Elliot asks you to read his latest poem hot.

Just. Yandere Sebastian brain rot.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: The Yearbook

I just finished the expanded section of The Roottrees are Dead, and it reminded me of an idea that I've had kicking around forever. This will not spoil either of those games, but it'll spoil some of what it feels like to play those games.

In Obra Dinn you're an insurance agent attempting to figure out what happened on the titular ship, filling in a logbook with names and fates based on what you see in the past. It's a lot of fun, I highly recommend it.

In The Roottrees are Dead, you're an inspector or a genealogist or something, filling in the Roottree family tree, using your 1990s internet connection to comb through periodicals and books from the library and half-finished websites. It's a lot of fun, I highly recommend it.

Anyway, the idea came after I'd first played Obra Dinn, and thought to myself "wow, they should make like a million more of these" and then started thinking about what the low-hanging fruit was.

Here, you're trying to fill out a yearbook.

There are a bunch of names and pictures, and yes, there's a full grid, but there are also pages with the various clubs, and other pictures of life at school, and it's your job to complete basically full dossiers on at least the most interesting of the kids, with some of the less interesting ones reduced to "easy" puzzles.

And the mechanism of doing this? Teenaged text messages, poorly composed cell phone shots, a handful of websites, all the digital ephemera. This absolutely works best in the early 2000s, when our social media was fractured and you would naturally get a lot of variety, but the idea is to have a lot of variety and texture to what the player gets to sift through, whether it's AOL Instant Messenger, the robotics team's amateurish website, or a bunch of text messages.

Who are these people, how do they relate to each other? All the answers are out there for you to find and record, and you get to know these people in the process of unraveling everything.

One of the things to consider, in this sort of detective game, is how you open up new information to the player, because at least some of the information is going to be just sitting there, waiting to be entering, with the journey to get to the data source the thing that was most interesting about it.

And I think in this case, maybe the thing that you're slowly gaining access to is phones.

Early 2000s is a transitional era, so maybe you have iPhone equivalents living alongside Blackberry equivalents and Nokia bricks and flip phones and all those sorts of things, and you gain access to them one by one, for those who have one, or maybe their computers. I'm a little on the fence about the best way to do this, but having a picture of a phone/computer would at least be funny way to do it, so you're combing through pictures not just for the people and information contained in them, but for someone whose phone you've never seen before, since that will magically/technologically allow you to read all their messages.

And if you're looking through someone's phone, there are mysteries to solve there, cryptic conversations to unravel. There are aliases. You get a conversation that you know must be important, but the name is saved as just "T-Dog", and that could be anyone! And you have to wander through solving all these little issues, trying to decrypt the local dialect of emoji use, figuring out the timeline for when this guy was dating three girls to see whether he cheated or not. You can realize that someone was being catfished!

The thing that I like most about these games is that you have such great opportunities for organic storytelling, having a guy who you get to know from having seen him in a few places, forming a picture of people from the scraps you can see. And here, there's a high school's worth of personalities to unfold, to get your stereotypes corrected, to have thundering revelation after revelation, and all the ambiguity that crops up where the digital realm doesn't allow you to see the full truth.

I'm picturing 50 or so students, a graduating class that's small, maybe a tiny college town in the Midwest where there's a mix of the students of professors and farmers and lots of variety in terms of class, a place with homecoming and prom and sports teams and all that kind of thing. And somewhere in the early 2000s seems good in terms of what it brings to the table. Am I exactly describing my own small Midwestern hometown and the time period when I was going to high school? I mean, yeah. But I do think that's the best for gameplay purposes.

This is one of those things that I really would like to just throw a few years of my life at making. It calls to me. But while I have the programming skills necessary to figure out that end of things, and I'm a good writer, it would also call for a lot of art and UI design that would be extremely unfun and detail-oriented in a way that does not suit me. Why must we have finite lifespans?

(I think the very first time I noodled this idea, it was with supernatural elements, a single giant party that you would spend your time unpacking, one with cultists and sadists and things from the deep, all kinds of calamities killing these teenagers off, with the player being a supernatural inspector coming in after the fact. And this would ape Obra Dinn more closely, but calls to me a bit less.)

[thedarkestrivernymph]

Death

Yandere!Kidnapper x f!Reader

warnings: fanatic behaviour, kidnapping, unreliable narrator—split perspectives—contradictions, mentions of self-harm, suicidal tendencies, mentions of sexual topics, touching without consent, heavy religious themes, yandere has taken somewhat the role of a caretaker, forced infantilization

Note: Read at your own risk tbh, I perceive this story as pretty disturbing, however if you can handle heavy topics, then enjoy. :)

©Copyright -2024-thedarkestrivernymph - All Rights Reserved

He was righteous, has been all his life, or well, had been until he met you.

There just wasn't a way to stop himself, no, to stop the demons haunting him from taking you in his grasp, imprisoning you in his humble home.

Perhaps he was doing you a favour? Chaining you to the bed placed in his basement just for you, white ruffles decorating the sides of the countless pillows and the duvet cover. Everything pristinely white—linen, handpicked for you.

He even dusted it and cleaned it, installed an old-school TV and even got you coloured pencils and endless amounts of paper of all kind!

And it all was just for you. How romantic, don't you think?

Your captor was nice—he was soft, even his edges didn't hurt you. He never raised his voice, couldn't even imagine hurting you, even if it was just a hair on your precious head.

You were his entire life. His gift from God himself.

However he quickly realised that you didn't quite share his opinion. You weren't horribly hostile, tried to appease him in fear of his sometimes rash and almost fanatic behaviour, fearing one day he might just flip the switch and obsess over breaking a bone in your body, yet you never were overly soft. There was this wall between you two that bugged him greatly, but he just didn't know how to destroy it.

To top it off, you feared death at his hands, at first. However as days faded into weeks and then into months—and before you knew it a year had passed with no one succeeding in rescuing you from the obsessive stalker clinging to you—you started fearing a life with this man.

It started off with small things, like you eating less, your leftovers slowly increasing in size or you would leave the paper completely blank instead of scribbling something onto it.

Until it started affecting other areas of your very limited life like you starting to lose interest in watching TV, the only luxury that connected you to the outer world. Until that penetrating dark cloud hanging over your head affected you more severely, so much so, that it worried him.

You his sacred bride losing your excitement for life was terrifying. He couldn't imagine a life without you—he refused to even think about it, the sheer thought was too painful.

You refused to eat, laid around all day, didn't even fidget when he would not so subtly try to seduce you. Well he was a kidnapper, but he would never force you to spread your legs for him! So he was still waiting for your heart to warm up to him, however instead of warming up, you started fading away from his grasp.

It was so petrifying, so much so that he started asking his pastor for help, then his colleagues—he even searched through the internet at the computer of his local library!

Depression.

in big bold letters was what popped up first, a page dedicated to mental health. He was mortified reading through everything, the symptoms and what it could possibly lead to. Death. The word daunted him and haunted him.

He rushed home, your captor breaking out in a cold sweat, only experiencing sweet relief seeing you curled up beneath the covers, pale in the face as always.

Days have passed and now he clung to you like glue. “Sweetheart—Sweetheart you have to eat!” he whined, the spoon once more missing your mouth as you twisted your head away. He bound you to the chair to keep you still and yet you kept on avoiding his attempts at feeding you.

“Say Ahh love! C’mon for me! Be good? Please, sweetheart!” he pleaded and begged to no avail, you gazed at him empty-eyed and shook your head. That was when he finally caught sight of the red streaks down your neck and collarbone.

At first he thought it was an allergic reaction, then he remembered you hadn't consumed anything but water in the last few days. Then with a glance down at your shaking fingers, feeling over the broken and bloodied nails he realised.

Your own nails. You hurt yourself with your own nails.

He lost it. The bowl of boiling hot soup landed on the ground, porcelain shattering as he lunged forward, grasping your hair and tilting your head back to gauge the damage to your holy skin.

“How could you?—” he spat in revulsion, face mirroring the rage that was consuming him inside, yet he never could be mad at you for long.

“Sweetie—Sweetheart—” your kidnapper's voice faltered, face pulled into a grimace, he let go of your hair, easing the sting of your scalp, sinking to his knees in front of you, pleading with his eyes.

“Please talk to me baby, please tell me what's wrong. Is it the TV? I can buy you a new one. Do you want new pencils? Do you want crayons? Maybe watercolour? I can get you new clothes if that is the problem!— Sweetheart please, please talk to me.” he broke down, fat tears running down his cheeks, pathetically clinging to one of your calves, licking a strip up your knee.

“Baby—baby.” he whimpered, crying into your two knees, fingers now grasping your lap in such desperation that if it wasn't the man that kept you captive you might have felt more sympathy for him. It wasn't as if you hadn't considered just carving in by now and accepting him as the person that would be beside you till death, yet the thought hurt. It dug a hole in your heart and left you wanting to pluck each individual hair follicle out of your scalp.

You just couldn't bear stand his constant whining and begging, humping you dry from behind like a dog when he thought you were deep asleep, preaching that he was a devoted believer to god, when he had kidnapped you, forced you down here, kept you still chained up, with only limited times when you could use the restroom and then always with the door a split open to ensure you didn't flee from the narrow window placed over the toilet. Showering was even worse, he would insist on staying, waiting behind the shower curtain, eyeing your shadow. When you would step out he would be bright red, averting his eyes and adjusting himself before finally draping a towel over you that always managed to smell like his musk. It was disgusting.

Even though he claimed that he would never hurt you, he had overly violent episodes, where he would just throw things around, rip up the extensive pages upon pages of your emotional rant, threaten you with a broken glass bottle, before always falling to his knees, crawling on the floor begging and pleading for forgiveness.

All in all he was a walking contradiction and never could be trusted. So wasn't it clear why you would prefer death over being stuck with the constant fear of what's to come?

“Baby” he whined incessantly, clinging to you like a lifeline. Bastard. You kept on ignoring him. It wasn't just this day, but all the following days, opting to just leave yourself to rot away.

However it seems you didn't calculate that he was so transfixed with you, that he would protect you from anything and anyone, even if that someone was yourself.

“Sweetie” he whispered oh-so sweetly into the shell of your ear, still weary from your restlessness the night prior, you didn't even want to turn in your bed to face him. Big mistake.

Before you could see it, you felt it. Fingers grasped your jaw, some sort of fabric draped over the lower half of your face, a strong scent engulfing you all while he rocked your head back and forth, stroking your hair lovingly.

When you woke up, unbeknownst to you, you succeeded in losing all your privileges.

“Sweetheart! How are you feeling?” he chirped, the basement now completely padded, decorated in pink, filled with toys and plushies. That wasn't all—because you regretted looking down.

A diaper. You were wearing a diaper. You breath staggered, horror written across your features.

He snickered, stepping closer to you, kneeling down to your level on the floor. “Sorry Sweetheart, but— you just wouldn't listen to me. You were starving yourself! It was obvious that no one ever taught you properly. You didn't receive proper parental care—they didn't care for you enough, they didn't love you as I do. So I am just going to start from zero and reteach you everything! How does that sound? Good right? You will love it!” he cupped your wet cheeks, the real nightmare starting just now, with the prospect of being saved already having slipped from your mind, understanding that this hell was your new reality.

He leaned forward, lips brushing against your scalp as he whispered something so gut-wrenching you hoped that he would swallow his own tongue and choke on it.

“Cuz’ Sweetheart I gotta teach you real good, so when we get our own baby you will be a good mother, yeah? A great mother! The best mother!”

he laughed.

[homestuckreplay]

See No Anvil, Hear No Anvil, Speak No Anvil

(page 1737-1754)

In summary: Rose and John almost meet in person (again), fail to actually meet, and exchange animal companions. I have always loved seeing Vodka Mutini In Places and hunting him down in a lot of the Rose panels (sometimes he is there and SO small) and now I get to do that with John’s. The real goal of Sburb is to pass this adorable kitten between all four kids so he can go on adventures. Look, they are both having so much fun up there ^

Less importantly, Dave has added all the upgrades to Rose’s alchemiter, which was cool of him, and allows John to make FEAR NO ANVIL, a weapon Davesprite gave him the code for. John is the hammerkind guy, but with its red/orange color scheme and ticking clock hands, this is clearly a Dave-coded hammer. Dave and John have matching suits, matching internet glasses, and already exchanged matching movie prop gifts, so my guess is that John will one day find a blue wind-based sword (half-sword?) that he can give to Dave. Anyway, I love cogs and gears, and one time I saw one of those videos where they open up a watch and clean all the tiny parts inside of it which was immensely satisfying, so I like this weapon design a lot.

Davesprite continues to be evasive and not give straight answers, despite his promise to Dave (p.1658). He doesn’t give much information about the hammer’s abilities, Hephaestus, or how he actually got the weapon. Hephaestus of course is Dave’s web browser, seen way back on page 323 – a jet black, vaguely humanoid shape surrounded by flames – and we see his desktop again literally one page after Davesprite mentions the name. I think this is unnecessary for a lot of readers, as fans are regularly hunting through the archives and would have made this connection pretty quickly, but maybe this along with the recap is an attempt at making Homestuck easier for casual readers to follow. This also isn’t the first we’ve seen of web browsers made physical; Grandpa Harley has John’s browser Typheus (p.24) blocking the transportalizer in his house, much to Jade’s annoyance (p.857). So, I imagine at some point we’ll hear from Rose’s browser Cetus (p.239) and Jade’s browser Echidna (p.825). Though if one of them is based on Internet Explorer, maybe they’ll be super slow and easy to kill.

In case I haven’t said it before: the Firefox is my best friend, and I would never fight them. I would thank them for their service and give them berries and rats to eat.

Just like dream Jade, dream Dave’s computer corresponds with his waking one. But without a dreambot, he’s unable to affect the waking world – so can’t message John and tell him to wait – he can only watch. Rose is immediately like ‘goodbye, I’m going to hang out with my other friend’ and ends the sleepover early, and is impressively unsurprised by the appearance of a salamander in her bedroom. I guess this renaming/re-gendering of Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer is the payoff for John wondering about salamander gender earlier, and hey, I could argue this is the first canonically trans character in Homestuck. John and Rose are both excellent at silly pet names, and when they’re older their job should be naming all the pets on Petfinder.

I am so glad John did a prank here. He’s always talking about how much he loves pranks, but hardly ever attempts them. I guess he doesn’t have many people who he can prank in person, and probably lost a lot of prank confidence trying to go up against his dad: ‘Looks like DAD will enjoy the prankster's gambit on that exchange, as is usually the case’ (p.92). Here, John is both successful in pranking Rose, and his prank is very kind. A meaner prank would have been to unwrap all the Gushers so that Rose had hundreds of tiny, sticky candies in her room that would burst under her feet and be basically inedible. Here they’re still in their packets, plus they’re a healing item in Sburb, so John is giving Rose a present in prank gift wrap. ‘thoughtful but mischievous’ (p.1749) is exactly correct.

It is unsurprising I guess that John and Rose miss each other, as I don’t think this would be the most impactful moment for them to meet. I am calling it now that we’re gonna get meetings between all of the guardians before we get them between any of the (waking) kids, and that the kids won’t meet in person until they reach Skaia.

Finally, we get a glimpse of the trolls’ transtemporal chat client, Trollian. It’s fairly simple, with a timeline and direction for each of the four kids. Presumably, the gray bar turns to black when the corresponding kid enters the Medium, as GA is messaging Rose right after Dave’s entry. According to this, the gap between John and Rose’s entry was smallest, the gap between Rose and Dave’s entry is a little longer (we know this was four and a half to five hours), and the gap between Dave and Jade is longer still. Though this means very little in a story that jumps around in time so much.

The trolls can also scroll backwards, presumably to when the kids first installed Pesterchum, or forwards into the future. From the position of the scrollbar, there’s more time forwards than backwards, indicating a long future for the kids even after their accelerated Sburb session. It’s understandable that the trolls focus on this period of time because it’s the one that impacts them, but surely one of them is a little curious about the kids’ far future? Where do they end up after all of this? I’ve never wished a page was interactive more than this one.

Finally, there’s a ChumpRoll, listing the kids’ usernames (including both of John’s), and a viewport, through which the trolls can see the kid (or perhaps their computer). Every time I think ‘surely these kids are being surveilled enough?’ the story adds another layer of surveillance – the reader, Sburb server players, exiles, Jack Noir, AH, dream server players, and now trolls – putting them in an absolute nightmare of being inescapably watched. On a totally unrelated note I was telling a friend of mine about Homestuck a while back, and three months later their social media still recommends them Homestuck content, even though it’s something they’ve never explored outside of our conversations. So yeah, I think this theme is an incredibly accurate commentary about the internet.

Overall, these pages were definitely a simpler update, with no long Pesterlogs or major plot development, but they can’t all be life changing. It is still wonderful to get a few pages every day, and I’m certain something exciting will happen soon – I have my fingers crossed for the next in Rose and GA’s sequence of conversations.

[iridescent-skeleton]

It’s time to make a centralized post with some of my AvA universe headcanons!

Warning for a text-heavy long post with lots of analysis.

There’s three layers to the digital world: The physical computers with by human users, the Internet, and the Outernet. All connected by the classic “series of tubes.” However, while information travels the tubes between the computers and the Internet well, the tubes going to the Outernet are very much one-way. There’s a sort of barrier that keeps the whole structure of the Outernet solid and unified in a way the other bubbles of Internet don’t have.

This means that while digital beings can receive information from the Internet, they can’t contribute to it—so they are fairly “analog” for a digital society until they invented their own version to share information among themselves. (I’m now calling it the “Intranet” because it’s a network within the digital universe and it sounds cool.)

(Does this mean there’s a secret tiny digital-digital world within the Intranet? Who knows.)

When a digital being comes to life through being uploaded or otherwise, they tend to spawn near beings that resemble them. They might be from the same creator, or just happened to look similar.

This means there’s basically a stick figure country, that neighbors but is unlikely to include other “similar” anthropomorphic animations (more detailed human-looking characters, furries, robots, etc.).

Digital beings take after their designs and animations. Stick figures are not usually designed with gender, but there are plenty of exceptions.

This has resulted in a society with an any-pronoun norm. There’s an acknowledgment of gender by defaulting to using “they” with sticks you don’t know. Then when you get to know each other and there aren’t social cues to use gender-specific language, you switch to “he/she/they” as a default.

(Mitsi has been a “she” from the beginning, with her heavily femme-coded design. King Orange was originally following the default, but has since transitioned to using “he” pronouns.)

Most stick figures were not animated with visible injuries, even during their battles, unless they were literally killed and exploded into a mess of stick gore. That means identifying and treating injuries involves more tactile- or audio-related methods. A hot body part means some kind of injury, not necessarily specifically inflammation.

Many digital beings are animated as if adults, so they are generated with some basic factual knowledge and maturity that makes sense for their design. Things make sense to them with minimal explanation, and they can adapt well, unless they were designed otherwise.

Some of that factual knowledge relies on the society their creator came from—we see sticks reference Christian imagery, for example, but if you were to ask they probably would need to do more research to understand the full context of what they were saying (unless they were animated/designed with that specific imagery). Societal information passes through to the Outernet by coming from sticks through their creator, completely bypassing the original human element (sort of like how a parent passes on social norms, except it’s more “genetically” passed on here).

After being first uploaded to the Internet, a digital being will experience most—if not all—of the experiences in their original animation. Then they’ll suddenly spawn in the Outernet afterwards, without really knowing how they got there.

It is not a guarantee that being uploaded to the Internet will lead to being generated in the Outernet. This transition relies on a complex, streamlined website that is sent more data than can be contained within that particular bubble of Internet. The Outernet works to kind of offload sapience from servers that can’t handle it.

This is why the color gang were hanging out in a webpage instead of going to the Outernet. They had been uploaded to a small, DIY website that could handle all of their sapient data and project it client-side to any computer that accessed the webpage.

(This may mean there are clones of these four living on other computers, as the webpage is opened and closed, without the experiences opened up by Orange/TSC. A fic idea for another day.)

[greater-than-the-sword]

How to Back up a Tumblr Blog

This will be a long post.

Big thank you to @afairmaiden for doing so much of the legwork on this topic. Some of these instructions are copied from her verbatim.

Now, we all know that tumblr has an export function that theoretially allows you to export the contents of your blog. However, this function has several problems including no progress bar (such that it appears to hang for 30+ hours) and when you do finally download the gargantuan file, the blog posts cannot be browsed in any way resembling the original blog structure, searched by tag, etc.

What we found is a tool built for website archiving/mirroring called httrack. Obviously this is a big project when considering a large tumblr blog, but there are some ways to help keep it manageable. Details under the cut.

How to download your blog with HTTrack:

Website here

You will need:

A reliable computer and a good internet connection.

Time and space. For around 40,000 posts, expect 48 hours and 40GB. 6000 posts ≈ 10 hours, 12GB. If possible, test this on a small blog before jumping into a major project. There is an option to stop and continue an interrupted download later, but this may or may not actually resume where it left off. Keep in mind that Tumblr is a highly dynamic website with things changing all the time (notes, icons, pages being updated with every post, etc).

A custom theme. It doesn't have to be pretty, but it does need to be functional. That said, there are a few things you may want to make sure are in your theme before starting to archive:

the drop down meatball menu on posts with the date they were posted

tags visible on your theme, visible from your blog's main page

no icon images on posts/notes (They may be small, but keep in mind there are thousands of them, so if nothing else, they'll take up time. Instructions on how to exclude them below.)

Limitations: This will not save your liked or private posts, or messages. Poll results also may not show up.

What to expect from HTTrack:

HTTrack will mirror your blog locally by creating a series of linked HTML files that you can browse with your browser even if tumblr were to entirely go down. The link structure mimics the site structure, so you should be able to browse your own blog as if you had typed in the url of your custom theme into the browser. Some elements may not appear or load, and much of the following instructions are dedicated to making sure that you download the right images without downloading too many unnecessary images.

There will be a fair bit of redundancy as it will save:

individual posts pages for all your tags, such as tagged/me etc (If you tend to write a lot in your tags, you may want to save time and space by skipping this option. Instructions below.)

the day folder (if you have the meatball menu)

regular blog pages (page/1 etc)

How it works: HTTrack will be going through your url and saving the contents of every sub directory. In your file explorer this will look like a series of nested folders.

How to Start

Download and run HTTrack.

In your file directory, create an overarching folder for the project in some drive with a lot of space.

Start a new project. Select this folder in HTTrack as the save location for your project. Name your project.

For the url, enter https://[blogname].tumblr.com. Without the https:// you'll get a robots.txt error and it won't save anything.

Settings:

Open settings. Under "scan rules":

Check the box for filetypes .gif etc. Make sure the box for .zip etc. is unchecked. Check the box for .mov etc.

Under "limits":

Change the max speed to between 100,000 - 250,000. The reason this needs to be limited is because you could accidentally DDOS the website you are downloading. Do not DDOS tumblr.

Change the link limit to maybe 200,000-300,000 for a cutoff on a large blog, according to @afairmaiden. This limit is to prevent you from accidentally having a project that goes on infinitely due to redundancy or due to getting misdirected and suddenly trying to download the entirety of wikipedia.

Go through the other tabs. Check the box that says "Get HTML first". Uncheck "find every link". Uncheck "get linked non-html files". If you don't want to download literally the entire internet. Check "save all items in cache as well as HTML". Check "disconnect when finished".

Go back to Scan Rules.

There will be a large text box. In this box we place a sort of blacklist and whitelist for filetypes.

Paste the following text into that box.

+*.mp4 +*.gifv -*x-callback-url* -*/sharer/* -*/amp -*tumblr.com/image* -*/photoset_iframe/*

Optional:

-*/tagged/* (if you don't want to save pages for all your tags.)

-*/post/* (if you don't want to save each post individually. not recommended if you have readmores that redirect to individual posts.)

-*/day/* (if you don't feel it's necessary to search by date)

Optional but recommended:

-*/s64x64u*.jpg -*tumblr_*_64.jpg -*avatar_*_64.jpg -*/s16x16u*.jpg -*tumblr_*_16*.jpg -*avatar_*_16.jpg -*/s64x64u*.gif -*tumblr_*_64.gif -*avatar_*_64.gif -*/s16x16u*.gif -*tumblr_*_16.gif -*avatar_*_16.gif

This will prevent the downloading of icons/avatars, which tend to be extremely redundant as each image downloads a separate time for each appearance.

Many icons are in .pnj format and therefore won't download unless you add the extension (+*.pnj), so you may be able to whitelist the URLs for your and your friends' icons. (Honestly, editing your theme to remove icons from your notes may be the simpler solution here.)

You should now be ready to start.

Make sure your computer doesn't overheat during the extremely long download process.

Pages tend to be among the last things to save. If you have infinite scroll on, your first page (index.html) may not have a link to page 2, but your pages will be in the folder.

Shortly after your pages are done, you may see the link progress start over. This may be to check that everything is complete. At this point, it should be safe to click cancel if you want to stop, but you run the risk of more stuff being missing. You will need to wait a few minutes for pending transfers to be competed.

Once you're done, you'll want to check for: Files without an extension.

Start with your pages folder, sort items by file type, and look for ones that are simply listed as "file" rather than HTML. Add the appropriate extension (in this case, .html) and check to see if it works. (This may cause links to this page to appear broken.)

Next, sort by file size and check for 0B files. HTMLs will appear as a blank page. Delete these. Empty folders. View files as large icons to find these quickly.

If possible, make a backup copy of your project file and folder, especially if you have a fairly complete download and you want to update it.

Finally, turn off your computer and let it rest.

[yonahsienna]

This Was Supposed to Be Fun

Or: WTF happened to the online Commons, and where do we go now?

Let me start by saying that I don't want to be a "content creator" or “online influencer”. I don't want to "optimize engagement" or “build an agile social strategy”. I don’t even particularly want to Start a Blog or Podcast. I just want to f#¢&!ng hang out with my friends and community online, and I feel like we should have The Technology to just do that by now.

Of course (infuriatingly) we did have that technology! I first connected to the World Wide Web in 2001 when I was ten years old. Back then, the whole family shared one computer, which I mostly used to play Age of Empires, Bugdom, and Oregon Trail. Connecting to the Internet meant that nobody could use the phone, so we would log on quickly (accompanied by a symphony of discordant whistles and beeps), check emails and/or MSN messages, and then pass the computer to the next person.

As our access to the Internet grew through my teens, so did the diversity of content we consumed, shared, and bonded over. eBaum’s World and Newgrounds hosted a plethora of simple, free webgames we'd play once we got bored with the handful my parents were willing to buy, as well as the first viral videos like Numa Numa and Star Wars Kid. We also connected in new ways with a growing “social web” — profiles on sites like Myspace and Livejournal and eventually the early Facebook were a way that anyone could have their own site on the web, a little virtual locker that you could decorate and fill up to your liking, and have your friends stuff with virtual notes.

In my late teens and early twenties, the Internet was mostly for research and keeping up with student government and clubs via long weekly emails stuffed with hyperlinks and attachments. It wasn't until I was well into my twenties that I got my first smartphone. At university, the only way to connect to the Internet “on the go” was to tweet my on-the-go thoughts by sending an SMS text message to Twitter at 21212. I also hardly used the social web anyways, other than for a quick dopamine distraction or break from long study sessions in the library. I had even deleted my Facebook account that I'd had since high school, since the campus coffee shop and bar served as more than enough of a hub for socializing, philosophical and political debates, and important announcements posted on cork boards or delivered by intercom.

I know I probably sound like a stereotypical Millennial, whining about the “good ole days”, but I wanted to spend this time on memory lane for a reason. I think that no matter when you grew up, this feeling is probably close to universal: from the early 2000s to early 2020s, the Internet and social web seemed to just work. There were a lot of things wrong with the world, but the Internet was where we went to complain about other problems, not a source of them. But of course, even back then we were living on borrowed money and time. The virtual Commons we had grown comfortable in never actually belonged to us, the users. From the moment they incorporated, the big sites belonged to venture capital, who sold them out to the oligarchs, who sold them out to the fascists. We were never the customer, always the product.

Flash forward to 2025. The “big four” North American social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) have all been captured by the Trump administration. Smaller sites, like Reddit, Telegram, and Substack have long been a hotbed for bigotry and hate speech. Searches on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Pinterest are serving up LLM “AI” slop before authentic and unique human creations. Ads, suggestions, sponsored posts, and cookie pop-ups take up far more space than the content I came for. And if I ever want my family, friends, and community to actually see my updates, I either need to send them to each person directly, or market my posts not to them, but to an algorithm optimized not for users or even businesses, but shareholder profit. On top of all of this, there is a pervasive sense of how uncomfortably public, permanent, and surveilled it all is. (In parallel to all this: efforts to gather in person are cut at the knees by a lack of coherent and safe public health policies, the dismantling of Third Spaces and affordable public transportation, and the militarization of the police.)

It is horrifying that exactly when the biggest thing we need for survival is to build and strengthen community, that the only accessible tools to do so, are hostile to our very existence.

Obviously this isn’t a coincidence. Every time we, the people, can talk to each other directly, we start getting dangerous ideas about the fact that the ultra-wealthy and hyper-elite are so few, and the rest of us are so many. Pamphlets facilitated the French and American revolutions, the telegraph and radio hastened the collapse of the Russian and German Empires, and Twitter fanned the flames of the Arab Spring. And here in America, The Powers That Be, Red and Blue alike, overwhelmingly want the American government in strict control over where and how we can communicate with each other.

And here I am, just hoping for a single F#¢&!NG site on the whole World Wide Web where I can just hang out with family, friends, and community that isn't owned and operated by literal fascists, kept behind a paywall, or too technical for our Elders to use. A comfy virtual coffee shop with announcement boards, conversations, the occasional performance, and a locker nearby for collecting memories and passing notes.

I don’t really know what the Takeaway/Call to Action is here. Yes, I’m already on Tumblr, Mastadon, and Bluesky, and would love it if we all continued to grow these kind of alternatives while divesting from profit-driven social "platforms". I’m still on Discord, Snapchat, and Signal and even have accounts on Loops, Pixelfed, and Xiaohongshu, in case the center of gravity ever moves over to those places. All of them still feel very "under construction" though, so I don't even know which (if any) I feel comfortable asking friends and family to "switch over" to. In the meantime, I'm just feeling lost, sad, lonely, and adrift; and wanted to share these musings with y’all. Just in case anyone has any advice you want to share, or are feeling the same way and want to commiserate.

xposted to Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and WriteAs. God, I hate the Internet right now >:(

[aromacaque]

i think it's so weird how the internet used to genuinely be a nice place to be, because it wasn't really marketable and it wasn't the convenient "everything is on here and everything Will be on here" as it is now. it was just little groups of people in their own little corners making forums and communities. it wasn't ever like "oh no i can't put my laptop down!! i'm addicted to it!!!" it was just .. another way to connect with people. a place to have some games. if you were lonely and didn't have any friends it was a nice little escape. a GENUINELY nice escape. i remember it. i was alive for that. i was young when it was still like this, but it was like that and i remember it. and then phones started to become more like computers. my mom went from having a flip phone to a smart phone. i watched my older sister go from a phone with sliding keyboard where taking pictures was a novelty to social media apps till i got my first phone and suddenly EVERYTHING was in my pocket. phones started to overtake computers for sake of convenience and marketability, and now it's like. every second you spend on your phone is another cent someone else is making. everything you have to do in order to live a life is on your phone. you clock in on your phone. you look at menus at restaurants on your phone. you even order on your phone now!!! in advance! your food will be ready before you get here and you don't have to speak to anyone!!!!! you are constantly near your phone because it is so important to you and so you are now available 24/7!!! it's so convenient it can track your health and habits for you!!! we can also give this data to other apps for your convenience! would you like these companies to know your sleep schedule? would you like these companies to know how fit you are? your medical records are now on your phone! you make appointments on an app now! your medical results are now sent to you on your phone!!!! it's all on your phone! oh, you want to use your computer for this? okay, well the website is practically impossible to navigate because it was made with phones in mind. IT'S ALL ON YOUR PHONE!!!!!

you want a break from your phone for a bit? alright, that's fine, but if your friends are trying to contact you, to talk, hang out, or maybe even because of an emergency you won't know. not unless it's on you 24/7 of course!!!

i never use my phone. i am on my laptop first before i go to my phone. i've never cared about my phone and that hasn't stopped, but i've watched more websites die. more of the internet Die. more websites favor mobile interfaces and completely abandon or neglect computers. "download the app to see this!" "use your phone to log in!" AI is everywhere in search results. it used to be community driven wikis and forums.

want to watch this movie? want to read this book? download this app. buy a kindle! get it digitally get it online! need a textbook for your college class? it's online! it's digital! and it still costs you $70 to rent a digital copy of a textbook!!! isn't this so great!! it's so accessible!

i go to school for something deeply intertwined with the internet. i have film major friends, animator friends, and every other news/media/entertainment outlet intertwined with these fields. many of my friends are very wellversed in most of this stuff because it is literally our job. i've also never been surrounded by so many people with such genuine distaste and hatred for tech ever in my life than these people who work with it for a living. almost all of them i know are so vehemently against streaming services and go out of their way to find physical media, preserve it and salvage it. all my college classes are filled with discussions on dependence on this technology, the dangers of the things we work with, and etc. etc.

it's not really that walkmans and CDs are interesting and cool because they're vintage to us, but because we grew up with those and hate what we have to trade for the sake of "accessibility" that comes with streaming services. we miss years where it wasn't like this. younger generations, people only 5+ years younger than me, are interested in the novelty of a world foreign to them where your every move wasn't tracked and you actually owned the things you bought. that's SAD. AND HORRIFYING ???

and it's just like . i don't know. i've genuinely thought about going to a store, getting rid of my phone and getting a shitty flip phone for calls and texts only before. i WISH i could do that. i can't because i have 40 apps that i can't live without because it is necessary for my job and medical appoinments (i am chronically ill). i have to scan QR codes to navigate daily errands and experiences. i have to have an app for my concert tickets. for my movie tickets. for any reservation i make. i need an app to ride the bus. if i go to museums sometimes you scan QR codes to learn more about what's in front of you. AT A MUSEUM. without my phone i'd be completely isolated from the world. you never used to be isolated from the world for not having the internet. it used to be the other way around.

and well. okay. go outside and meet new people, yes, but everyone's online. social settings aren't what they were during the 2000s, not even what they were in the 2010s. 2020 quarantine fundamentally altered how everything is set up as well. to connect with people you get their tiktok or their instagram. you're more unreachable if you have neither.

and what about people who can't go out and find people like them? what if it's not that easy? what if they're disabled and can't get out of the house often? what if they're queer and live in a very conservative area

queer spaces irl are so heavily designed for allos too. not to mention, unless you live in a major city then these places typically are gay bars or the local libraries teen events. maybe i don't want to go to a bar to meet other queer people maybe i want to do something else.

and like. there's kind of not a solution? this is just the world we live in and we have to make due with it. my closest friends are all online and living near each other irl isn't viable for most of us in our current situations. i would love if that were the case. it isn't.

i have to clock into work on my phone. i have to check paystubs on my phone, i don't even get an option for it to be mailed to me. i have to access all my medical documents on the phone.

i appreciate the accessibility of some things, i really do, but my phone is not my phone, it is an android. it's samsung's. my data is theirs and they could brick it if they really wanted to. i have apps on my phone i can't uninstall from samsung.

idk. i hate phones i think.

[lilsoftext]

•~* BETWEEN THE FLASHES *~• part 3

part 2

-chris sturniolo x female reader

-summery: ?

——————————————————————————

for months, chris and sof had mastered the art of hiding. their relationship was a delicate secret, something they cherished and protected from the eyes of the internet, but it wasn’t without its struggles.

at every party or event, they had a routine. sof would walk in first, mingling with friends, laughing at jokes, blending in seamlessly. then, fifteen minutes later, chris would follow—always separate, never too close. they’d exchange the briefest of glances from across the room, a silent connection only they understood. it was painful, sometimes. the way they had to pretend like they weren’t everything to each other.

dates were no easier. sneaking around, always choosing quiet places where no one would recognize them. no fancy restaurants, no downtown bars. instead, they found peace in late-night drives to nowhere, deserted parks where they could sit under the stars, or small coffee shops on the outskirts of town, the ones no one ever visited.

"wish we didn’t have to do this," sof whispered one night as they sat by the beach, waves crashing softly in the background. her fingers traced absent patterns in the sand.

"i know," chris replied, his arm wrapped tightly around her, pulling her closer as if holding her could erase the world outside. "but soon…"

their phones were another challenge entirely. no photos, no videos, nothing that could tie them to each other. even when chris wanted to post a goofy picture of sof laughing at something he said or when sof caught him in one of those rare moments of pure, unguarded joy, they knew better. sharing those moments meant risking exposure, and they weren’t ready for that. not yet.

on streams, it was even more of a dance. chris would be playing a game with his brothers, the usual banter going on, and suddenly, sof’s name would light up his phone screen. he’d glance down quickly, texting back in record time, before anyone could notice. but matt and nick noticed. they always noticed.

"dude, you’ve got that ‘i’m texting sof’ smile on," matt would tease, barely hiding a smirk.

chris would shrug it off, but he knew it was true. that glow, that warmth, he couldn’t help it. sof did that to him. but he had to be careful, make sure not to linger on his phone too long, make sure the camera didn’t catch the way his face lit up when her message came through.

nick, always the editor, would groan. "seriously, stop smiling at your phone. i can’t cut that out every time."

chris would laugh, but the truth was, every time sof texted, he couldn’t help but smile. it was instinct, the way his heart raced just a little faster with each message.

then, there were the small, intimate ways they stayed connected even when apart. sof wearing chris’s hoodie, its sleeves hanging past her hands, smelling faintly of him. chris wearing a bracelet she gave him, something simple but meaningful, a secret only they shared. and sometimes, on stream or in a video, they’d wear matching outfits—a subtle nod to each other, but one the fans never picked up on.

and then… it was over. the hiding, the secrecy—it was all about to end.

they sat in the living room, the four of them—chris, sof, matt, and nick—huddled around a laptop. the video was ready. their moment of truth. it was a simple clip: chris and sof laughing, kissing, no longer hiding. a soft, intimate reveal of what had been there all along.

sof’s hands trembled as she sat beside chris. "what if this was a mistake?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper, eyes filled with worry.

chris turned to her, his eyes soft, his hand gently squeezing hers. "we’re ready," he said, his voice low and calming. "i’m right here with you."

matt chimed in, always the voice of reassurance. "people are gonna love this, sof. you guys deserve to be happy, out in the open."

nick nodded from the computer, finger hovering over the ‘post’ button. "it’s time."

sof took a deep breath, her heart pounding in her chest. the past months of hiding, the sneaking around, the lies—it all came down to this moment. "okay," she said softly, looking up at chris. "let’s do it."

nick clicked the button. the video went live.

as the video went live, there was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch on forever. sof’s heart pounded in her chest, her breath caught somewhere between anticipation and fear. she sat next to chris on the couch, her hands gripping his tightly. she didn’t even realize how hard she was holding onto him until he gently squeezed back, reminding her he was there.

“it’s okay,” chris whispered, leaning in closer, his voice soft in her ear. “we’re doing this together.”

sof looked up at him, her eyes wide and full of vulnerability. “what if it’s too much? what if they—” she paused, her voice shaky. “what if they don’t understand?”

chris smiled, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear, his touch gentle, familiar. “then they don’t have to. all that matters is us. i don’t care what anyone says, as long as you’re with me.”

she nodded, but her nerves were still there, bubbling just under the surface. “i’ve been so scared of this moment, chris. i feel like i’ve been holding my breath for months.”

he pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, his thumb lightly tracing circles on her skin. “i know. me too. but it’s over now. we don’t have to hide anymore.” he kissed her forehead softly, lingering there for a moment, grounding her. “you’re mine, and i’m yours. and now… everyone knows.”

sof let out a shaky breath, leaning into his chest, her fingers fidgeting with the sleeve of his hoodie—his favorite one that she’d ‘borrowed’ so many times. “it feels unreal,” she murmured. “like we’ve been living in this bubble and now… it’s just out there for everyone to see.”

“hey,” chris lifted her chin gently, his eyes locking with hers, filled with nothing but warmth. “it’s real. you and me? we’ve been real since day one. and now, we can finally stop pretending we’re just friends when we’re out. i don’t have to sit on the other side of the room anymore just so people won’t suspect anything.” he laughed softly, remembering all the times they had to do just that.

sof smiled, a small laugh escaping her too. “and no more sneaking around on dates or making sure we’re not caught in the same place on our instagram stories.”

“exactly,” chris said, his tone playful, but there was something deeper in his voice. he cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing over her cheeks. “we’ve been through so much just to keep this ours. but now… it’s time to let the world see how much you mean to me.”

sof’s heart melted at his words, her eyes filling with emotion. “you really mean that?”

“more than anything,” chris whispered, his forehead resting against hers now. “i love you, sof. so much. and i’m done hiding it. i want everyone to know that you’re the one who makes me happier every single day.”

she couldn’t hold back the tears anymore, but they weren’t from fear or nerves—they were from relief, from love. “i love you too,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, her fingers clutching the front of his hoodie as if she couldn’t bear to let him go. “you have no idea how much.”

chris smiled, that soft, adoring smile he reserved only for her. “i think i have a pretty good idea,” he teased gently, pressing a soft kiss to her lips. it was sweet and lingering, filled with everything they’d kept hidden for so long.

when they pulled back, sof rested her head against his shoulder, curling up into him like she always did when they were alone, the rest of the world fading away. “i can’t believe it’s over,” she whispered, her voice small but full of relief. “no more secrets.”

chris held her close, his fingers playing with the ends of her hair, his voice soft and full of love. “no more secrets,” he repeated. “just us, finally.”

they stayed like that for a while, just holding each other, wrapped up in the comfort of being together without having to hide anymore. the world outside could say whatever it wanted—good, bad, indifferent. none of it mattered.

what mattered was this—chris and sof, together, no more sneaking around, no more hiding. just them, out in the open, free to love each other the way they always had but now with the whole world watching.

and in that moment, sof felt lighter than she had in months. because for the first time in a long time, they didn’t have to pretend.

——————————————————————————

i hope you enjoyed it. if you have requests leave them down below.

lilsoftext <3

[literallycalculester]

i love your calculester posts sm… your art is amazing too!! since his birthday is coming soon, do you have any personal headcanons for him? 👀

yes! tyty! i wrote down a longgggg list of them just now so here they are:

pansexual

dislikes being called "it/its" since people usually use it as an insult towards him

trans male for a couple of reasons. 1. machines do not technically start off with genders, its similar to how zoe transitioned into a girl. 2. its mentioned that he does get update cycles that are similar to menstrual cycles, implying that he isnt strictly male. even if people do typically see machines as males, it doesnt feel right to say hes strictly cisgender

asexual (in the way that he doesnt feel sexual attraction) and kinda aromantic (he desires romantic relationships but cannot feel romantic feelings. he doesnt desire sexual relationships.)

fear of rejection

loves socializing!! but gets overwhelmed real easily

not technically autistic but relates to the symptoms and makes friends with nd people more easily than nt.

also he masks a lot (ex. using emoticons as faces)

speaking of his face, he only uses emoticons to make others around him happier and more comfortable. when hes alone or with someone he trusts a lot, he'll just have a blank screen

takes care of his partner like he takes care of his plants (he likes taking care of things)

doesnt know the difference between robots and organic beings in real life situations (he can tell the difference when hes researching but if its not show directly in his face he wont know)

loves safety so much never can get enough of it

has an organicsona (he wants to be "normal" as perceived by the public)

he doesnt hate humans (though he pretends to mildly dislike them in order to fit in)

confused af when following conversations. sometimes he'll randomly join in despite him saying something irrelavant

HATES rejecting others. if you ask him out and he dont like you then he gets so sad because he hates hates hates rejecting others. being mean in the slightest brings him a ton of discomfort

love stickers. theyre like temporary tattoos.

tries not to buy from harmful companies. sometimes he doesnt know and if hes told he'll go into a mental breakdown and think hes terrible

hates those cut flowers that they have at stores. brings only potted flowers as gifts

smart with calculating and research, but anything that requires actual thinking he fails at

goes to school for the sole purpose of learning how to form relationships (he has all As except in subjects that require subjective views, like english)

loves writing on paper, has a print handwriting

technically can speak every language, as long as its popular enough to make its way into his code

extremely neat and organized

loves to clean and cook, despite not being able to taste (he is therefore terrible at it if he is using a bad recipe)

his house is futuristic almost frutiger aero but with plants absolutely everywhere

all his wires are organized and never tangled

doesnt use a phone or computer. he is the computer.

when he has no internet connection he has to rely on his memory. basically everything that can be searched up online is lost. "where is england" "cannot answer, internet is down :(" type of thing

works at a plant nursery!!!

antivirus is a vaccine for him and viruses are... well.. viruses. just like humans

2nd tallest behind scott

really strong but also kinda slow

walks everywhere. to school, to work, to the store.

this isnt really a headcanon, but unlike the games, i think that hed have significantly less features (LIKE WHY DOES HE HAVE GUNS JUST HANGING OUT IN HIS BODY??? WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?!?!)

sympathies with fake plants

likes reading! like, a lot! he reads a ton of non-fiction because he enjoys it, but he also studies fiction.

likes stray (game)

loves comfy games! (stardew, acnh)

doesnt really like horror

can heat himself up to be really warm so his partner can cuddle him

sees the development of AI as being slave labor but for robot

okay i ran out of things now. remember this are just my headcanons and this is kinda just streaming from my head so dont take it too seriously! speaking of his birthday though, i am gonna try (emphasis on try) to make something special for him. if so itll be an animation. hopefully i will succeed! but if i dont then ill post the WIP someday.

okay bye bye thank you so much for the ask!!!

[dr-spencer-reids-queen]

Risky Business: Part One

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~2.2k

Summary: The repercussions of being in prison finally take a toll on you. You're yelling at everyone, short and curt, and you're in a constant state of wanting to cry. Will this bitter cycle ever end?

Warnings: canon violence, canon language, canon talk of death, methods of kill

Season Five Masterlist

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Criminal Minds. All credit goes to their respective owners. If there are any warnings that exceed the normal death/kills from the show, I will list them.

x

"Life is a game, play it. ... Life is too precious, do not destroy it." - Mother Teresa

Spencer makes two cups of coffee in the break room with an extra shot of something good for you. He looks over at you to see you staring at your computer with a far-out look in your eyes. He hates this. He hates not being able to help you. Screw going to prison. He doesn't care that you didn't let you see him. He cares about what it's doing to you. Maybe it's best if you didn't let him see you. Maybe he might have seen something worse in your eyes. 

He walks over to you and holds out the coffee for you but you make no move to grab it.

"I made you some coffee." You shake your head in response. "I promise you'll like it."

"Spencer, I said I'm fine," you snap.

The only reason your being short is because you're so fucking tired. Spencer doesn't let this bother him and leaves the coffee by your desk. This is breaking your heart. You hate this. You hate treating him like this when he doesn't deserve it. Prison ruined you and you're letting it affect everyone around you.

You watch Spencer go back to his desk and you sigh. You open your mouth to say something to him but you decide against it. You grab the coffee and taste it. Damn, this is good coffee.

JJ walks into work and passes by both your and Spencer's desks. She would stop by and say hi but she's on a mission. She approaches Hotch's office and waits for permission to go inside.

"I'm not sure what we have here, but I just got a call and some case files from Sheriff Samuel in Uinta County, Wyoming. Six nights ago, two different teens were found hanging In their bedrooms. Trish Leake was dead when she was found. Ryan Krouse was revived on scene but then died a few days later in the hospital. I know we don't handle suicides, but the previous Friday, two more boys a few towns over were found hanging on the backs of their doors."

"Four successful suicides in the same rural county in a week? That's way above the national average."

"I know. These kids don't fit the pattern. None of them had drug or alcohol abuse, no antidepressants, and no prior arrests. These are just plain good kids who decided to hang themselves at approximately the same time on a Friday night." Hotch doesn't say anything so she continues. "When someone feels trapped in what feels like a hopeless situation, pulling the trigger or swallowing pills or hanging yourself seems like the only way out. None of that seems to exist here. Something's wrong. Hotch, I can feel it. Look, all these events happened on a Friday. It's Wednesday. We're not on another case right now."

"Alright," he nods. "Generate an equivocal death investigation and get everybody on the jet. We will determine whether these are homicides or suicides. Even if they are suicides, there's definitely something wrong here."

When you get the news from JJ about the case, you meet everyone on the plane. Penelope is going with you for this one because Hotch knows there is a connection between these victims and the internet. She'll be useful going with you.

"Sir, it's not that I'm not glad to be coming with you, because I am, but I just don't understand the why."

"One of the aspects of an equivocal death investigation when suicide is a probability is an indirect personality assessment. Our victims are all internet-generation kids. There should be invaluable personal data on their computers to mine for the evaluation. If they committed suicide, evidence of it will be in their cyber world."

"So, I'm gonna snoop through dead kids' computers?"

"This plane seldom makes pleasure trips," Rossi chuckles.

"We've all been over the files. Let's talk about victimology," Hoch says when you're in the air.

"Okay, all four kids were decent students ranging from different neighboring towns but in the same school and the same county. All were active in sports and the community. Their families were intact with no mental disorders and no precipitating events."

"These are just average good kids. There has to be some underlying issue," Derek says.

"Besides relative proximity, there's no obvious connection between any of them. It seems to rule out an overt suicide pact."

"The first few days leading up to a teenager's suicide are usually very telling. Their behavior is transparent. There's a multitude of indicators," Spencer explains.

"Yeah, but the most common don't exist here," JJ argues. "There are no prior attempts, no period of deep depression, no withdrawal from family members, and no spontaneous proclamations of love."

"Spontaneous proclamations of love?" Penelope asks as she gets out her knitting stuff.

"Sometimes a suicidal person, in the days leading up to the act, will just blurt out 'I love you' to family, sort of like a goodbye. We'll start with the latest two victims. If they were suicides, let's find out what drove them to it."

The plane ride is going to last around four hours so Penelope knits to pass the time, and Emily takes out some sort of puzzle that piques Spencer's interest. It's a weirdly shaped 3D puzzle that can be taken apart and fitted back together. She takes it apart so that all the pieces are on the table.

"What's that?" he asks.

"It's called a star puzzle. It's basically impossible to figure out. You have to put all of the pieces back together to form a perfect star." Spencer grabs a piece to examine it. "The origin of it is kind of a romantic tale." Derek, Rossi, and Penelope listen to the story from their seats. "There was this young prince who wanted to win the heart of the fairest maiden in the land. He climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the kingdom and caught a falling star for her. Unfortunately, he was so excited that he dropped it. It smashed into all of these pieces so he frantically put it back together again to prove his undying love to her. He succeeded and they lived happily ever after."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"What do you mean?"

"You can't catch a falling star. It would burn up in the atmosphere."

You love Spencer. His words almost make you smile. Almost.

"Yeah, but it's not literal, Reid. It's a fable."

"There's no moral. Fables have morals."

"Okay, so it's a romantic little story. The point is, it's basically impossible to do because you have to take all of those pieces and put them together exactly--" As she talks, Spencer puts the puzzle together easily. He slowly puts it on the table and she sighs. He seems proud to solve it. "There's a lot to hate about you, Dr. Reid."

"Play poker with him sometime," Derek smirks.

"Try playing chess with him," Rossi says.

"Or Go," Penelope chimes in.

Spencer's spirit is dwindled a bit and you look at him to see a slight frown on his face. He feels a twinge of sadness. He knows his teammates are annoyed with how smart he is sometimes. However, feeling that sadness comes from him sets you off. It's your anger. It's how tired you are. You're letting it control you.

"Like you guys are any better," you snap at them. You look at Penelope. "You are always too happy." You look at Derek. "You always have some snarky comment to everything." You look at Emily. "You try too hard." You look at Rossi. "You are arrogant. We all have our flaws so leave him alone."

That sends an uncomfortable silence in the plane. You scoff and put your headphones in so you don't have to listen to them anymore. You're lashing out because you're hurt and scared.

"Sorry," Emily mumbles.

"No, don't be sorry," Spencer sighs. "She's waking up every night screaming and covered in sweat. She's scared and she's not getting any sleep. She didn't mean it."

"What the hell happened to her in there?" Emily asks quietly.

"She won't talk to me about it," Spencer shrugs. "She's writing in her notebook a lot but that's it. I hope therapy will help her because it's killing me to see her this way."

If you were at any other job on any other team, you'd be fired right now. They are doing their best to work with you and you're making it so difficult right now. No one says a word about what happened on the plane even after you landed.

"Hello, I'm Rhonda Samuel," the detective greets you when you get to the station.

"Hi, I'm Agent Jareau. We spoke on the phone."

"Thanks for coming out. My county's getting pretty shaken up. I got this reporter who won't stop calling. I'm holding him off but he's connecting the dots on the number of suicides. Should I call him back?"

"No, not just yet. We need to be very careful about when we release this information. Sensationalizing these deaths may cause a domino effect on other kids."

"The term is suicide contagion," Spencer says. "The spread of suicidal thoughts among a group of people that sometimes results in copycat acts. It's especially prevalent in teen cases, and studies suggest that media coverage is sometimes associated with more deaths."

"Is there a good place for me to set up?" Penelope asks.

"Yeah, but I don't have much of a command center."

"Oh, fret not. I have my own command center. I just need your juice."

"You got it," Rhonda nods.

"You're with me," Hotch says to you. "JJ, we need to interview the victim's families. We should start with Trish."

"They are expecting me to show up at their house. I'll gladly give that conversation to you."

"Come on."

Hotch is the boss. You and JJ follow Hotch to Trish's house to talk to her parents. There is nothing that suggests she was depressed from outside her house.

"Please, come in," Trish's mom says when you get there. She leads you into the living room where her husband is. "I can't believe she's gone. She was so excited about graduating high school next year. She couldn't wait for her SATs."

"Was Trish dating anyone?" you ask.

"No."

"Billy Sullivan," the mother says at the same time as the father.

"Is that who she's--"

"Yes," the mother sighs.

"What is it, Mr. Leake?"

"She ran up over $100 texting last month. We grounded her and took away her cell."

"Not we. Me. I did that. Why didn't you tell me she had a boyfriend?"

"Because you would have freaked out."

"No, I wouldn't."

"You are right now."

"Not because she had a boyfriend, because I may have caused--"

"Mr. Leake, if your daughter committed suicide, it wouldn't have been because of some punishment," JJ butts in. You sigh at her choice of words. If. "It's so much more complicated than that."

Both the mother and father look at each other and then at her.

"If?"

"Excuse me?"

"You said 'if' she committed suicide."

"Would you mind showing us Trish's room?"

"Sure. It's this way."

You look at JJ who looks guilty for suggesting that her daughter might have been murdered. You walk into Trish's room and see remnants of herself inside the room. She studied. She hung out with her friends. She got ready for big events. There is no indication--physical or spiritual-- that would suggest she was depressed. Not even close enough to take her own life. She was happy.

"Well, she certainly was accomplished," Hotch says when she notices her trophies and awards.

You grab her journal and start to go through it. Maybe there is something in here that will give you some sort of clue.

"There's nothing unusual in her diary," you say.

"Do you really have to go through all her personal stuff? She was such a private girl," the mother sighs.

"We are terribly sorry to have to do this. We care about Trish, and we want to make sure this doesn't happen to anybody else's daughter."

"Mr. and Mrs. Leake?" JJ stands by the entrance to the bedroom. "There's a form I need you both to fill out. Can you come with me?"

"If you need anything, please let us know."

"Thank you."

The parents follow JJ out of the room, leaving you and Hotch alone.

"There's nothing indicating that she was depressed here. She was a happy girl. I can feel it." You cling to that happiness and soak it in but it doesn't help you feel better. "Those poor people."

"I just hope we haven't made it worse for them."

"Could we? The personal touches show she was comfortable here. Not to mention what I feel and see. She's a low suicide risk if I've seen one. It's pretty obvious Trish had everything to live for."

"Maybe Garcia will find something on the laptop that we're not seeing here."

"Okay." You're about to leave the room and pause. You have to get this out. "Hotch, I'm sorry. I know I seem like such a disappointment to you."

"You're not. I can understand what you're going through. You have to realize we're only here trying to help so yelling at everyone isn't going to get you anywhere."

"I know," you nod sadly.

"I am more than happy to give you more time off if you need it."

"I'm afraid I won't come back if you do. I have to be here. If I'm alone, I'm reminded of that time."

"Okay. Please let me know if you need anything."

"Okay," you whisper.

x

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[daughter-of-sapph0]

I think a lot of transfemme culture is formed and cultivated by how we were rejected and desperately tried to fit it.

like, take transfemme memes. a lot of memes are about how broad generalizations such as "trans women do this thing", the thing being computer programming or enjoying a particular video game. and while I won't deny that a lot of trans women do those things, the vast majority don't. so why are things like programmer socks and fallout new vegas and bionicals and gundam so popular with trans women despite them not being universally applicable?

I think it might have to do with our being rejected as kids and how we would do everything we could to try and be accepted by others.

maybe this only applies to me. I'm definitely not trying to make a broad generalization to explain other broad generalizations. I'm basing this primarily on my experiences.

but when I was in middle school and high school, I used to lie about watching certain movies or playing certain games even when I didn't. I could have been because my parents wouldn't let me, I couldn't afford them, or I just wasn't actually interested. but most of what I was interested was very niche nerdy things like anime and computers and math and art. but in a desperate attempt to join in conversations and make friends, I would lie and say I was interested in the popular things so other people would accept me.

now, years later, the internet connects us and helps us explore our nerdy interests much more. I remember I was the only person at high school who cared at all about undertale, but then I found tumblr and whole communities online who would talk about the game I played. they also got me interested in things I never would have been into otherwise. transgender people online got me into star wars (which I regret) and evangelion (which I also regret but not as much). and there are some things that I've never experienced, but still know about due to cultural osmosis. I know a lot about fallout new vegas and magic the gathering and ultrakill despite never playing them. I would consider myself part of those fandoms despite never really interacting with the content, just because I have so many online trans friends who are into those things.

I think that the most popular things just happened to become transfemme memes due to how many nerdy trans people unapologetically love them online, and people who have never experienced them but are friends with the people who do love them agree with them to fit in.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. it's perfectly fine to be part of a fandom or community even if you don't have a huge interest in it just to be with your friends. I'm not super interested in ttrpgs, but I still play just because I like hanging out with my friends.

computer programming is popular in trans women circles not because all trans women are computer programmers. it's popular because it's a booming industry and the small percentage of trans women who are computer programmers really enjoy it and talk about it online, and their online friends support them and agree with them even if they aren't computer programmers themselves.

idk. I forget where I was going with this. I just think it's really nice how trans women, and honestly the entire queer community as a whole, tends to support each other's niche interests and uplift each other.

[queen-of-deans-booty]

Halt & Catch Fire: Final Part

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~2.3k

Warnings: canon angst and violence, extra angst

Summary: You're done being a puppet in their plans. You're done letting them control you. You're finally going to take back your life by becoming something you didn't know was possible. your eyes are opened to something better and God forbid anyone who disrespects you.

Season Ten Masterlist

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. I love seeing any and all comments <3

x

Dean locks up behind Sam and Delilah yarns tiredly.

"You getting tired?"

"No, I'm used to it. I stay up all night studying. It is mostly to avoid the nightmares. My mom's thrilled with my GPA, but I'm just miserable. I think about Andrew all the time, and I've never even met the guy."

"This is what you get for leaving the scene of a crime. Idiotic move is what it was."

"Watch it," Dean glares at you but you flip him off.

"It's pretty crazy to obsess over someone you've never met."

"It's not that crazy. The truth is, I can relate. I have made more mistakes than I can count. Ones that haunt me day and night." He immediately turns to you. "I don't need to hear it."

You put your arms up in defense and turn away from him.

"How do you deal?" Delilah asks.

"Whiskey. Denial. I do my best to make things right, whatever that may be. For you, maybe it's coming clean. You know, finding a way to ask for forgiveness and not breaking the bank at your local florist. I mean real forgiveness. You can't just bury stuff like this. You have to deal with it." His phone rings and he picks up Sam's call. "What do you have?"

"Dean, Andrew's not using power lines to move. He's using Wi-Fi."

"Come again?"

"The wires that electrocuted Andrew feed directly into a Wi-Fi tower right across the street."

"Even ghosts are online?"

"Apparently. It would explain the truck kill. Billy's cell must have been using the local Wi-Fi signal so Andrew's ghost must have just hopped on to Trini, the navigation app."

"Julie's death was by computer and Kyle's death was by stereo with wireless speakers."

"It makes sense, Dean. We're all just a bunch of electrical impulses, right? Whenever Andrew died, his impulses just transferred to another current. You got to get Delilah somewhere safe. Turn off all the routers in that Sorority."

"Yeah, sure, Sammy. We'll just kill the internet. Wait, can we?"

"No," you roll your eyes.

"Alright, how the hell are we gonna deal with the lawnmower man?"

"I have an idea. Do what I said. Stay safe. I'll call you back."

"Do you know where the routers are?" Dean asks when Sam hangs up.

"I have no idea."

Suddenly, the lights and her computer start flashing on and off. Looks like Andrew is here to play. Delilah is the last one. It gets so cold in the room that you can see your breath. Andrew's face, albeit burnt, appears on all electronic devices that connect to the internet. Delilah screams just as Dean starts smashing the devices one by one.

"Is that gonna work?"

"It's worth a try. I need you to turn off everything that's connected to Wi-Fi." Dean takes Delilah's phone and smashes both his and hers. "Give me your phone."

"Come on, this is the new one," you complain. Dean yanks it from your hand and smashes it. "You're getting me a new one.

"Fine. Let's go."

"Where are we going?"

You leave her dorm room and see Andrew showing up on every computer screen that you pass by. He won't let Delilah out of his sight.

"Someplace that doesn't have a Wi-Fi signal."

"Head to the basement. The reception sucks down there."

"Alright, go, go, go!"

When you finally get to the basement, Dean starts to salt the doors and windows.

"I thought the salt didn't work."

"Because of the Wi-Fi. There's no signal down here. There are no computers, tablets, or cell phones. Andrew can't bypass it. At least, I don't think he can. Just try to stay calm, alright?" Suddenly, something starts buzzing in the room. It sounds like a phone that's on vibrate. "What was that?"

"Sounds like a phone to me," you say.

Dean shoves his hands under the couch cushions only to find someone's cell phone in there. Andrew uses this to appear in the room so he can take vengeance on Delilah in person. Delilah screams and you turn to see Andrew in the room next to her. Dean approaches Andrew from behind but he smacks Dean into the pillar as hard as he can.

"Please don't kill me. We didn't mean to hurt you. It was an accident. I swear. If I could do it over again, I would have done the right thing!"

Andrew grabs Delilah's throat and starts to choke her out. You stand there and watch this happen for five seconds before Dean screams your name.

"Y/N!" You grab the iron poker and swing it through his body until he disappears and Delilah is saved. "Let's go."

"Where?"

The door is locked so there is no way of getting out of here if the ghost is using its powers on the door.

"Andrew, listen to me. You have every right to be pissed." Dean takes the cell phone he found and dials a message to Sam. "Take it from me, the more you kill, the crazier you'll get. The blood fuels the rage. So, it looks like to me you've got two choices. You can keep killing and become something that you won't recognize or you can move on cause that is the only thing that is gonna give you peace. So it's up to you, man. Pain or peace."

Andrew appears behind Dean and shoves him into the closet door, breaking it into pieces. He turns to Delilah but you speak up before he can hurt her.

"Some ghost you are," you scoff and he looks at you. "Getting revenge on kids? Lame." He goes after you but you duck out of the way easily. "Death by electrocution? Lame! Maybe it sparked some life into you."

Andrew appears in front of you and slams you against the wall. He wraps his hands around your throat, pushing the device further into your neck. Maybe he might be able to get it off for you. You're not scared of Andrew but you do become concerned at the thought of him killing you.

Thankfully, you don't have to know the answer to that because his wife's voice fills the room. You and Andrew look at Delilah who has the phone in her hand which has his wife's face on it. Sam must have FaceTimed to get her to speak to Andrew.

"Andrew? It's Corey. Please listen to me. You have to stop this. Revenge is hollow, and it's pointless. It won't bring you back. I should have said this earlier but I couldn't let go. Now, it's time for me to let go and for you to do the same. Please. I'm begging you." Andrew lets you go and turns to her. "Do this for me. Do it for us." He nods slightly. "Goodbye."

Apparently, this is enough for Andrew to find peace. He closes his eyes and disappears in a flash of white light.

In the morning, Sam and Dean bring Delilah to Corey's house so she can talk to her and seek forgiveness.

"Looks like Andrew wasn't the only one who chose peace."

"Yeah, looks like. I think I'm gonna follow his lead, too."

"What do you mean?"

"My peace is helping people and working cases. I can't do that with this thing on my arm. I can't do that with my wife being the way she is. If I stay down this path, it'll be my downfall and I'll bring her with me." Dean looks at you who is across the street on your phone. You're absentmindedly picking at the device on your neck while looking at your phone. "I have to find this cure. If not for me, for her."

"Cas is so close to finding Cain. He has to know of a way."

"I believe there is a way. You said it yourself. You got through the literal devil and made it out alive. There's a way and we're going to do whatever we can to find it."

"What if she won't take it?"

"We'll make her. You should have seen her when we first met Cain. She was so determined to take it with me. I shouldn't have let her."

"You know her losing her soul isn't your fault."

"How is it not?" Dean asks with tears in his eyes. "Tell me how this is not my fault."

"Whether she had the Mark or not, she would have been soulless either way."

"Yeah, because I took it from her. Do you want me to be honest? I'm scared I'm gonna wake up one day and she'll be gone. I'm scared that when we finally do shove her soul back in her, it'll be too late."

"You don't have to shoulder this burden alone," Sam says and places his hand on Dean's shoulder. "We're going to find this cure. We'll cure you both."

"Thanks," Dean whispers.

He looks at you again and prays to God you don't get any worse.

You don't care if they have a remote that will activate your shock machine. You're leaving this Bunker tonight with or without their permission. As soon as you get back, you pack a bag as light as you can carry. You'll get more stuff along the way. Where will you go? You're not sure but it sure as hell isn't going to be here.

Sam and Dean are in the library when you walk past them into the war room.

"Where are you going?"

"Parading all over the country is not what I want to do. I'm sick and tired of you two controlling me. I'm done." You turn to face them by the base of the metal stairs. "I'm leaving and I'd really like to see you try and stop me."

Dean takes the remote out of his hand but you're a step ahead of him. You swiftly take out your gun and point it at him. Sam freezes in his steps because he's nervous you're actually gonna start shooting.

"What are you gonna do?"

"You can't press the button if you're dead."

"Do it. You're not leaving this Bunker."

Your finger twitches against the trigger like you're going to pull it. Then you see Sam with wide eyes and you know that if you kill his brother, all you're asking for is a Winchester up your ass. You'd rather not spend your entire life running from one of them. Instead, you aim at the remote and shoot. The remote explodes into pieces and Dean jumps back from the shock.

"What are you gonna use now?" you smirk.

You turn to the stairs but both Winchesters jump into action. They run out in front of you, effectively blocking your way.

"You might have a chance with one of us but not both," Dean glares.

"Oh? Just because you're big and tall, you think you'd win in a fight against me?" you scoff and take a step back.

"You've relied on magic all your life. You're not as good a fighter as we are."

You smirk and toss your bag and gun to the side. "If I beat you two, I leave."

"If you don't?" Sam asks.

"Back to the dungeon I go, and I won't fight you anymore on this cure for the Mark."

Sam and Dean look at each other before lunging at you. You see their moves coming from a mile away. While Sam and Dean are fighting to subdue you, you're fighting to kill. You have nothing to lose. They have everything to lose.

Sam swings his hand to punch you but you grab it at the last second and twist it behind him. Dean comes running at you two so you kick his ass and they go crashing into each other. Dean is the first one up and runs at you. He grabs you from behind thinking he got you but you're two steps ahead of him. You let them believe he got you so when Sam comes over, you kick off his chest and swing over Dean. You land on the floor and punch Dean to the ground, almost breaking his jaw.

The problem with the Winchesters is you're too damn flexible for them. You roundhouse kick Sam in the face, and he sprays a line of blood as he goes down. They start to think you might win this so they have to pick up their game or you will kill them. Dean ignores the pain in his jaw as he grabs one of the chairs and smacks you in the back.

You crumble to the ground in a grunt of pain. He and Sam grab you on either side and refuse to let you go. You struggle as hard as you can to get away from them but it's looking like you might lose this fight. The more you struggle, the more you get angry. The more you get angry, the more your Mark flares and burns. The metaphorical pot inside your body is bubbling over, and the only thing fueling it is the Mark.

"Let me go!" you yell.

"Admit it! You lost this one!" Dean grunts.

"Let go of me!"

"You lost, Y/N, just give it up!" Sam yells.

"I said. LET. GO!"

Bright red magic explodes out from all sides of you, causing Sam and Dean to go flying into the walls behind them. The entire war room is covered in a red hue, and you look down at your hands to see red magic flow out of them. The power you feel right now is so... exhilarating. Your Mark is burning so much but it's the good kind of pain. The kind of pain you crave. The kind of power you crave.

You look at the brothers with an evil smirk. They're too scared to do anything. They know you've fallen over the edge. There is no coming back from this. You lift the brothers with your magic and fling them so hard into the wall again that it cracks from the pressure. Both of them are too weak to do anything which is exactly what you want.

You reach up and peel off the device from your neck like it's a goddamn sticker.

"You don't control me anymore. I win. I'm leaving. If you want to try and stop me, well, you can't. No one can," you laugh.

You grab your bag and head to the metal stairs.

"This isn't you!" Sam yells loudly. You pause by the stairs but don't face him. "You're the Sapphire Witch! You help people!"

"Honey, the Sapphire Witch is dead."

"Yeah? Then what are you?"

You face the brothers with a smirk and bright red eyes.

"I'm the Scarlet Witch."

x

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