#light switch defective

[violettranslations]

light switch defective (欠陥照明)

夢を見ました

I had a dream.

さ��ざん照らされた私たちは 矛盾してばかり

A dream that completely contradicted those of us who are shined on so utterly.

むかし海岸で拾���たメッセージボトルの中身だって けっきょく霞んで読めなかった

Even the contents of the message in a bottle I picked up on the beach way back when eventually faded until they were illegible.

ほんの些細なことだったのかもしれません

Perhaps it was just a trivial matter.

それでも、その小さな気がかりは 私には到底無視できないものでした

But even so, that small concern was something I couldn't bring myself to ignore.

なぜならば

As for why...

千切れた言語　スクラッチ　B　刳れる心理傾向 鎖の明度　忍んでる　刺した✕　電気抵抗 時系の迷路　転々　スタンした計算の精度 蓋したエゴ　フワリ軽弾んだ身体で…… N　サスペンション　擦りむいて滑落　停戦の名誉 くすんだ盈虚　反転した位相　痛烈に弁護 フラストレーション　継続的破調　延命の兵法 崩れたエゴ　クラリ立ち眩んだ頭で[her]

Torn-up words, scratch, B, a trend towards hollowed psychology. The brightness of chains conceals itself, stabbed X, electrical resistance. A labyrinth of chronality, rolling around, the accuracy of a stunned calculation. A stifled ego, with a lightly springing body, fwoof... N, suspension, scraping its way down a slope, the honor of an armistice. The dulled shifting of the moon, an inverted phase, fiercely defended. Frustration, continuous disharmony, the art of war that is prolonging one's life. A ruined ego, head spinning, swoosh[her]

human flora animal creature ひとつふたつと増えるパロール 反転　接着　決別　凝固 揺れて弾んで溶け出すヴェール I am　You are　He is　They are 行きずり一人称のループ 変性　流動　蠕動　愛護 星の向こうに根を張る

human flora animal creature One or two words at a time, speech parole increases. Inversion, adhesion, separation, coagulation. Swaying, bounding, the veil begins to dissolve. I am You are He is They are A loop of first-person passersby. Denaturation, flow, peristalsis, protection. It spreads its roots beyond the stars.

裏表間違えてアイソトープ 見えないところから腐っています 虚数解織り込んだミクロメータ 月の背中で時を待つAlt 化けあって寝首掻くイソメラーゼ 素知らぬ顔して清濁飲みます 粗暴な手つきで毒を吐くR 未解読思念　散り散りのパラフィリア

An isotope that confuses front with back. It's rotting in places unseen. A micrometer that incorporated the solutions to imaginary numbers. The Alt waits for its chance at the moon's back. The isomerases transform, taking each other off guard. Feigning ignorance, they gulp down good and evil. R spews venom with violent gestures. As yet undecoded thoughts, scattered paraphilia.

ふっとした意識の果て　不意に跳ねてすぐに途切れる 眠り　宿り　嘲り　振り回し　すぐに離れる 指でなぞる記憶　熱を帯びてすぐに弾ける 刻むリズム　誰かが引き回しすぐに外れる

Suddenly, I reach the edge of my consciousness. It spikes abruptly, and immediately breaks off. I sleep, shelter, scorn, brandish, and immediately separate. I trace my memories with a finger. I fasten my heat about myself, and immediately burst open. I beat out the rhythm. Someone leads me around, and I immediately disconnect.

裁断する自我　排反な関係性　かつ　 徘徊する彼我　快哉の終着点は 曖と昧伝い快と害食らい灰の賽で決め込んだ 塞いだバッテン知らない呪文に丁

A judging ego, in addition to a mutually exclusive relationship. A wandering self, that's the final destination of joy. Alongside ambiguity and uncertainty, consuming both pleasure and pain, we convinced ourselves with ashen die. A stoppered X mark, fourth class to an unfamiliar spell.

ヒューマン　フローラ　アニマル　クリーチャー ひとつふたつと増えるパロール 反転　接着　決別　凝固 揺れて弾んで溶け出すヴェール I am　You are　He is　They are 行きずり一人称のループ 変性　流動　蠕動　愛護 星の向こうに目飛ばす

Human, flora, animal, creature. One or two words at a time, speech parole increases. Inversion, adhesion, separation, coagulation. Swaying, bounding, the veil begins to dissolve. I am You are He is They are A loop of first-person passersby. Denaturation, flow, peristalsis, protection. Its eyes are fixed beyond the stars.

裏表間違えてアイソトープ 見えないところから腐っています 虚数解織り込んだミクロメータ 月の背中で時を待つAlt 化けあって寝首掻くイソメラーゼ 素知らぬ顔して清濁飲みます 粗暴な薬で毒を吐くR 未解読思念　散り散りのパラフィリア

An isotope that confuses front with back. It's rotting in places unseen. A micrometer that incorporated the solutions to imaginary numbers. The Alt waits for its chance at the moon's back. The isomerases transform, taking each other off guard. Feigning ignorance, they gulp down good and evil. R spews venom with violent gestures. As yet undecoded thoughts, scattered paraphilia.

不整脈　散��思考　メトロノーム 飛び散った飛沫の先で知ります 画面外未解釈ヘッドルーム 零下6度のネガティブスペース 光を浴びて影に落ちるレーヴ 弛緩した言葉の隙間に居ます 指折りの熱病とビットレート 理の狢　逸脱のユーフォリア

Arrhythmia, dispersing thoughts, metronome. It knows beyond the flying spray. Head-room uninterpreted beyond the screen. Negative space 6 degrees below zero. Reve basks in the light only to fall into shadow. It lies in the space between slackened words. The foremost fever and bit rate. The badger of reason, the euphoria of deviation.

[juice-enjoyer]

swapped out my case fans all by myself and i feel like a greek god rn

[transmutationisms]

you’ve talked about the unquantifiability/immateriality of attention span - thinking about your recent posts against the concept of addition, do you think concepts like compulsion/willpower are measurable/material? thinking specifically in the context of like, a casino or a gacha game, which actively and successfully employ concrete tactics to encourage people to continue playing and discourage them from stopping without altering their autonomy. without overgeneralizing, what might be happening psychologically there - escapism via the adrenaline rush, or…?

it's honestly insane to me how often people mystify gambling like it has nothing to do with any other phenomenon by which people identify that they want something & then try to obtain it. when i run a race im particularly motivated when i reach the sign that says only 2km left, & i expend extra effort sprinting when the finish line is in sight. if im thirsty & someone says maybe there's free water down the hall, i get up & go there to find it. if i live in a society in which i need money to live, & someone says i can obtain a great deal of it by going to a windowless hotel & spinning a wheel, is it really particularly pathological of me to be tempted by the offer?

you can see the same type of behaviour in eg people who get way too invested in the PTA cakewalk or charity raffles or bingo night at the assisted living facility—but these activities are designed to offer limited opportunity for play, & relatively insignificant payouts, plus they're associated w/ middle class suburbanites whose spending habits prompt less social concern in general. gambling on the other hand is advertised to be incredibly opaque about what your actual odds of winning are, & designed so that even when you rationally know those odds you're still being inundated with tempting fantasies that your payout might be juuuust around the corner if you keep at it. it's not really bizarre to me that people respond to this (& to the fear of losing the monetary investment they've already made so far!) by continuing to play well past their means, & even past what they would find rationally acceptable if they were in a low-pressure environment with their material needs already met & with time to think through their decision. pathologising this behaviour as compulsion/addiction/lack of self-control is an incredibly convenient fiction that identifies a subset of the population as psychologically defective rather than identifying an economic mechanism that preys on people.

anyway no i also don't put stock in broader notions of compulsion/willpower, for basically the same reason: they're psychological stories that make people's attempts to obtain things they want/need into individual mental maladies, & specifically maladies framed around the idea of a constitutionally weak/degrading mental faculty of self-regulation. generally i find it much more fruitful to consider what needs aren't being met, & are instead manifesting in a subjective inability to direct one's own impulses/desires: for example, in the paradigmatic case, as a teenager i struggled with compulsions to count things & flick light switches & check door locks not because those objects were exerting some kind of nefarious control over my damaged brain but because i felt (was) unsafe & unprotected in other ways, & i was unable to address those needs due to the constraints of my circumstances, whereas turning the lights off was an action within my control that i was capable of performing. i may know that physically i need to eat more, but be worried about not having enough money to spend on food or about incurring social punishment if i'm perceived as excessively appetitive or if i gain weight: thus, i experience not-eating as an irresistible temptation even though i recognise it rationally as physically dangerous & misery-inducing. &c &c &c.

i fundamentally just don't believe actions we experience as 'compulsive' (particularly irresistible) are mysteriously so, any more than any other actions. indeed the compulsion logic is just tautological if you follow it to its end: every action i have ever taken in my entire life definitionally had to have been one i wanted to take, on some level & in some way, else i wouldn't have done them. yet somehow i do still talk about myself & others as moral agents possessed of self-determination, go figure.

[queenendless]

RAIN

A/n: 3 weeks is too long! I've missed writing things myself. Miss the show. Miss this fine ass man. And my sleep deprived self dealing with heat and rain showers and defective ACs dreamed of some of this in my 2 hour nap.

Pairing: Sung Jinwoo x Fem!Adult!Reader

CW: 🔞 Smut, wet dreams, sleep anxiety/insomnia, mention of chronic feet flare ups, and horny needy reader for our dear Jinwoo~

NO REPOSTING, PLAGARIZING, TRANSLATING, AGELESS BLOGS, MINORS, AND AI USAGE OF MY WORKS. Reblog like and follow pls and thnx.

The rain is not letting up anytime soon. The AC was acting up again, being more humid than cool and comforting lately so you'd have to get a new one and not a gifted used one.

Trying to maintain a normal sleep schedule was never in the cards, anyway. The night was your home. Your lonesome one, though. He was gone again.

Yet as you napped on the cozy couch, you saw him again. Popping up everywhere. Demanding your utmost attention. At times he was coy. Other times he watched you from afar. And then he was right there, sitting, waiting for you to make your move.

His flushed needy expressions fueled your desire as you rolled up his shirt. His breathless moans hit your ear as your fingers twist and abuse his perked nipples, your drool trailing down those abused pearls as your mouth devoured them whole.

“Y/n~” His half hooded eyes look up at you with shameless need, his tongue panting out to match your inner horniness.

Stepping out of the shadows in the corner of the living room, the flash of lightning lit up the room in a moment as the thundering rumbles heightened the arrival of the glowing eyed man spotting your weary napping self on the couch with your blanket draped around you like your cape and a big pillow pressed against the couch arm.

The familiar sight tore at his heartstrings at how vulnerable you look. Sleeping on the couch in your usual tee and shorts more than your own bed was your norm. Sleeping during the day, despite the heat and rain showers occurring this past week, left you more out of sorts than ever. Your face winced as his name whimpers out of your strewn lips.

The gentle warm smooch on your forehead stirs you somewhat. “My beautiful mess.” His empathetic murmur purrs in your skin. His scent, his presence, his voice, it drew you out of your short lived rest.

The gentle sound of running water was picked up, the gentle light peaked out of the bathroom door, as you sat up and stretched your worn out limbs, hastily putting your used feet compresses back in the fridge, collapsing back on the couch when the water stopped running. The door clicked open, the steam of his warm shower wafted in, as his stature walked out.

“It's raining hell out there.” Jinwoo murmured, ruffling his hair with the bath towel as he switched off the bathroom light, having changed into a simple black tee and shorts, his barefoot steps gently thudding over to the couch, finding you sitting up, bent over, awake now. “Sorry for waking you.”

“Don't be. I can't sleep anyway. Not in that bedroom. The AC needs replacing there … I saw you in my nap though … made me miss you more.” Your voice wavers down the line, caught up in emotional need, too tired to stuff it down, tears and sniffles of restlessness picked up by his perception as you dab your eyes with your blanket.

Letting the towel slip off his shoulders to drape the floor, he towered over you before capturing you in his scent of shadows paired with his shampoo and body lotion, replacing your blanket with himself to be your warmth. You gasp in relief and need as he gingerly lifts you up, sliding underneath, fluidly rearranging yourselves. Your legs laying between his own, having his chest serve as your new pillow, as his arms caged you to him, for you both now laid fully on that big couch.

“Needy little thing.” Possessiveness tints his rumbling drawl, his hands sensually rubbing your abdomen, trailing up your tummy, relishing in your tremoring shuddering self. “The me in your dreams can't relieve you entirely of your pain. That's my job.”

You angle your face around to look over at him, able to see his face, your watery eyes adjusting too well to the dark. “I'll never stop missing you.”

His eyes rippled with devotion, his lips littering gentle pecks that had you wobbly giggle to his grinning delight. “And I'll never stop coming back to you, my dear demon.”

Your hasty roll in his embrace, laying on your tummy, burying your sobbing face in his stomach. His shushing, his cooing, his lulling tone as he says your name before humming. “You're already exhausted from work and now you have to deal with me.” Your pathetic whine has you pulled up higher along his frame as his face now hovers close up to yours.

“The night is my kingdom, love. And this Monarch will spend every night awake with you just so I can share mornings sleeping with you, whether in that bed or on this couch. You chose me. Now you're stuck with me.” His smooth face nuzzling your blotchy face and kissing those salty trails away had you bashfully giggling.

“Besides, I know a good way to help kill time~”

His deep rich purr right in your ear already had you getting moist between your legs.

The rain having died down was long forgotten as the shaking and squeaking of the couch filled the cool ventilated room.

Rolling up his shirt with haste, licking and nibbling upwards along his abs, fondling and squeezing his pecs, suckling and chewing on his nipples, your reddening saliva marks littered his heaving torso.

His hand grabbing a fistful of your hair, keeping you pressed against his twitching curling torso as you took mouthfuls of his pecs to devour and worship as yours.

“My horny angel.” His smug smirk can be heard as his free hand fondled and kneaded your breasts underneath your top. “Having lewd dreams of me.” Cockily teasing you as his sculpted fingers rubbed between your pearls, pinching them, twisting and tugging them impatiently, thumbing them until they became sensitive pulsing pebbles. “I could smell your scent the moment I entered the room.”

Popping off his skin with a wet squelch, looking up at his flushed panting expression in person with those half hooded eyes of your dream coming true got your heart racing and your core pulsing.

“No matter which version of me it is,” His calloused hands rolled up your top to meet your neck, his touch sending ticklish sparks on your now bare torso, caressing your sides, tummy, along your back. “As long as I have your sensitive self in my grasp,” His hands now gripping your bare hips peeking out of your shorts, lifting you up with ease, as his mouth descends upon your boobs. “You can't get enough of me. In your dreams and in real life.”

His smoldering breath sends goosebumps along your melons, his moans reverberating at your taste, flicking and curling and slobbering all over your now marked breasts. “I never get enough of you, either.”

“Jin~” Your mewling face pressed against his neck, marking his shuddering self along the side with licks and bites, the junction between his neck and shoulder got littered with red suck imprints and teeth marks, then his nape gets bit down on quite hard.

“Fuck~!” His growling mouth vibrated as he took both your tips in, grinding his teeth along your skin. “You want the world to see me as yours, huh?”

His mouth popped off your nips, a line of drool from his lips to your swollen red mounds break, as he layers your tummy with hard sucks and bite marks to pair with his own. “Likewise~”

His shadows worked at sliding yours and his bottoms down those legs, his and your gasps heard at the cool brush of air against such growing heat.

Your hands clawed from his sturdy shoulders to his flexing biceps for support as his hands lifted you down. He filled you easily, your slick essence already pouring out like a stream, coating his erectness, stuffing your fluttering tight walls.

His gentle thrusts, his steady rhythm, his hips rocking upwards, brushing yours that rolled downwards, his pelvis pressed right against yours, tapping you with soft insistence.

“Does the real thing beat those dreams of yours~?” His flushed grinning face looks up at yours, nuzzled in between your rosey bosom.

“You know it does~!” Your aroused moan gets smothered by his hungry lips, entangling your fingers in his velvety hair, brushing his undercut, feeling his groan fill your mouth as his fingertips leave bruising marks along your stretch marked hips, cupping and smacking and clawing at your tan lined asscheeks.

“I've missed this, missed you, so damn much~!”

The soft slap of skin bounces off the wall on a loop as his balls bounce against your ass crack. Even as it rains cum down his shaft and right up your womb, he stays conjoined with you.

He lowers you both back down gently, cum staining your lap and his, your bottoms, the cushions, even dripping down to the floor. Your sweat matted noggin rested on his heaving chest, nuzzling him, as your legs tangled with his.

“Well now I can't nap on this couch anymore.” You mumbled, curling into his fingers running through your messy hair.

“My shadows can clean up for us.” He hummed.

“And the AC?”

“We'll buy one in the morning.”

“But now?”

“Now … I gotta shower again. Care to join me?” His invitation had no intention of being turned down.

“I need a cool down.” You barely could finish those words as your bottoms and his hit the floor, undies included. Then your shirts. Your squeamish giggles met his devious chuckling as your arms and legs hugged your strapping hunter lover as he carried you right in that giant welcoming shower.

His shadows shut the door behind him, then went straight to clean up.

The muffled sounds of the shower head running, many wall thumps, your moans and his groans rain down for quite a while.

For it rained like cream.

And lots of it.

[takes1]

HI I LOVE UR WRITING

can i req a fic for iwa :000 maybe reader comes w him to the gym and he can clearly see her blushing at him workin out n his body 😔 the rest can be up to u :))

iwaizumi hajime x reader mutual gym thirst

hi!!! thank you so much!! really liked this idea :) i used his timeskip interest to help with some structure here, but i hope i got enough right!

warnings. sfw-ish, thirsty info. iwa's hot bod / charged staring / mutual crushing / questionable touching / will-they-won't-they kinda vibe / oikawa being a nuisance / oikawa moving things along / athletic!reader / injured!reader / 1.4k words haikyuu collection. more here! more links. my ao3. masterlist. requests open!

You never once thought of what your school gym's layout could really do for you before this afternoon.

There was absolutely no reason to, until a certain tall, dark, and handsome brute took a liking to the power rack in front of the treadmill you were tied to for the next half-hour.

Part of your training plan required 40 monotonous minutes of incline walking- so a longer variation of the tried-and-true 12-3-30 became your new ritual after your team's practice. Shin splits weren't going to go away on their own, after all.

So, you and your defective shins were already married to this spot. When he walked his beefy ass to a spot so ideal for watching, you couldn't help but feel a little creepy.

This light dusting of shame didn't stop your eyes from wandering, though. You were too tired from a long practice and longer physical therapy to truly keep your gaze glued to the numbers on the screen.

That near-pornographic muscle-tee he wore at least twice a week was in rotation today.

It was soaked through; light blue now dark, from the cardio that he just finished outside with his partner and current spotter.

"Come ooon, you can get that up," Oikawa smirked, knowing damn well he needed to help Iwa get the bar racked.

He laughed at his friend's shaky struggle, himself even surprised when the bar slammed against the metal holds.

"Fucking prick," Iwa grumbled with very little air in his lungs.

The dark tone on his tongue raised your brow. You looked at the ceiling with a big exhale to get the thoughts out of your head.

This crush was much more manageable when it was confined to passing glances in the hall.

He was panting as he sat up. You looked back down just in time to watch him remove his useless, sticky shirt.

Sure, the hip-deep slits down the sides didn't leave so much to the imagination, but this was still so much better.

You bit the inside of your cheek and squeezed your eyes shut to keep from making any ridiculous faces, but the image of his bouncy chest and twitchy, heavy biceps were burned into your eyelids.

They had to switch out the weight between turns, so when he took the side of the rack closest to you, you were able to stare at his working back muscles without any repercussions. It was akin to crashing ocean waves between his shoulder blades. He set a plate gently onto the floor.

His skin glistened in the moody lighting. The veins in forearms were plump with effort.

"You feeling okay, (Y/n)?"

Oikawa gave an all-too-knowing grin at you when you locked eyes with him.

Heat crept up your neck- as if you needed to feel any hotter- and horribly embarrassed, you couldn't craft a response to his smartass comment.

Thankfully, Iwa glanced back at your downcast expression and scoffed at his friend.

"They're out on injury right now. Chill out, dude," Iwa came to your rescue, thankfully mistaken to the nature of his remark.

Oikawa looked frustrated that his jab didn't land the way he wanted it to.

You stuck your tongue out at him when Iwa wasn't looking and got one right back.

Now that you were under suspicion, you had more motivation to not stare at him anymore. It just wasn't worth getting found out.

This aversion to looking in their direction allowed the more lively of the two to whisper something with a smirk without you catching him.

Only five minutes remained on your screen when Oikawa climbed up onto the treadmill next to yours, despite the four empty ones further away.

An eye roll. You swiped the sweat off of your face and flicked it at him.

He didn't even get the chance to say anything snarky before Iwa noticed his absence.

"Stop being an ass," He grumbled.

"I didn't say anything!"

He wiped down of the rest of the bench, grabbed his shirt, and stood between the two treadmills. He motioned between you.

"You're being obnoxious," Iwa asserted, "Go somewhere else."

He sure as Hell wasn't happy about it, but he gave in to his friend's wishes. This would be interesting enough without him needing to interfere-- he kept a watchful, cheeky eye on both of you from across the gym.

"So, they got you doin' this," He put his hand on the side of the machine, brow furrowed in concern, "God, isn't that a bit much?"

There was no way you could speak to him without ending this. You pressed stop on your workout, thankful to be done with a good enough excuse.

You set your hands on your hips and tried to get your breathing back to normal. Your shins were burning.

"I hope not," You shrugged and wiped the sweat off of your face with the collar of your shirt.

He rested the side of his face on his slick forearm and looked you up and down.

You tensed at the motion and looked to the side.

"Can I take a look?"

A strong twitch of embarrassed confusion on your face forced him to clarify immediately:

"Your legs- I mean," He laughed.

You knew he would assist the head PT every other day for injured student athletes that came through the training room. It was a way for him to get some experience in before he went for a degree.

It just so happened that it never aligned with your schedule, so even though he knew you had become a regular, he never got to assess you.

You tried not to limp on the way across the gym.

"Jesus..." He muttered as you sat your leg onto his lap, "Yeah, that's... fucked."

The little stretching corner was otherwise unoccupied, but you couldn't help but feel like your proximity was too much. Your head was craned around to make sure there were no teachers or staff around to yell at you- but flipped back around with small yelp at his hand.

You laughed and flinched away at his cold fingers, "Thanks."

He didn't react to you.

"I mean, like..."

Iwa was completely taken by how swollen your lower legs had gotten, he wasn't even finishing his sentences. His concentration was super cute. A little concerning, but cute.

He walked you through some new stretches that the head PT didn't care to show you; the more he informed you about the nature of your pain, the less you were trusting the old fellow that you had been seeing.

He supported you as you attempted a tough stretch and quickly reassured you to not push it. You let up as he suggested, hands trembling against his forearms.

"Juuust like that, yeah," He said gently next to your head.

Your face lit up and stopped, too embarrassed to keep this going. Maybe you did prefer that old, crusty, trained professional over him.

Concerned, he ducked to look at your expression, but you quickly evaded.

"Did that hurt too bad?" He asked.

You deliberated on lying but decided against it.

When you glanced back up at him and shook your head, he had a smile on his face that you couldn't quite rationalize.

The focus on 'strengthening' your shins seemed to Iwa like it was just making the issue worse. He recommended resting as much as possible.

His touch and his attentive gaze helped you manage the discomfort you felt going through the motions. He was always waiting for your reaction, gauging how he needed to shift you based on your facial expressions.

"Let me get you some ice," He snapped a couple times, deep in thought, "I wanna try that new wrap, too--,"

He jogged off into the clinic's room and flipped on the light.

In the mirror-wall you caught a glimpse of Oikawa at the free weights. He started blowing kisses in your direction and only stopped when Iwa hurried back out.

"Y'know, I can always make some extra time to check on this after practice."

Your expression softened.

Iwa knelt down next to you. He scanned the damage carefully before sitting, and took one leg into his lap again.

"I couldn't let you do that," You sighed and seethed at the contact.

There wasn't much more room to be gentle, so you just had to endure.

He layered everything slowly, firmly but not too tight, and would take the time to fix the stretchy tape if it got twisted. The actual therapist never spent this much time on you like this.

"Well," Iwa prodded at his finished work, "You can just... give me your number, and we can work something out?"

It may have been the ice, but the chills that ran up your spine were difficult to hide.

"Sure," You smiled.

It felt like you were agreeing to something a little less medical in nature.

He helped you to a stand and supported you for a few seconds too long.

"Sweet," Brushed off his lips in a consumed sigh.

masterlist.

requests/submissions: open

[mariacallous]

I'm sharing this because I think it's kind of atrocious. Hasan Piker *and* Richard Reeves?! And it gets worse from there.

By the time I landed at LAX and switched my phone out of airplane mode, Hasan Piker had been streaming for three hours. I put in an earbud and watched as I filed off the plane. Visible behind him were walls of framed fan art, a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders sitting in the cold, and Piker’s huge puppy, Kaya, taking a nap. Piker had already shown off his “cozy-ass ’fit” (sweatpants with kitschy bald eagles, a custom pair of platform Crocs), and recounted his experience the previous night at the Streamer Awards, a red-carpet event honoring A-listers on Twitch—the popular live-streaming site where he is one of the biggest stars, and the only prominent leftist. He’d begun the day’s broadcast by rattling off a standard opening monologue: “Folks, we’re live and alive, and I hope all the boys, girls, and enbies”—nonbinary people—“are having a fantastic one.” To anyone listening for shibboleths, this would have pigeonholed him as a progressive. Also within view, though, were three towers of Zyn cannisters, and a “Make America Great Again” hat, which he sometimes wears ironically. He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now he’s thirty-three—so old, in streamer years, that his fans call him “unc.”

I ordered a Lyft, then flipped back to Piker’s stream. By then, he was talking about the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, which had happened overnight. I watched as he cycled from BBC footage to Wikipedia, pausing every few seconds to add a diatribe or a joke. The angle he was developing was that Western journalists seemed too eager to portray the leader of the Syrian rebel forces in a heroic light. “I’m very skeptical of the fucking former Al Qaeda guy,” Piker said. A little while later, his doorbell rang, and he leaned over to buzz in a guest—me. I looked up from my phone to see him standing in his doorway. He doesn’t run ad breaks, so whenever he needs to do something off-camera, like answer the door or use the bathroom, he plays a video and attends to his business quickly, before his viewers can get bored. “I’m live right now, but we can talk when I’m done,” he told me, already walking away. “Try and stay out of the shot.”

In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024—a nearly thirty-point swing. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Biden’s Presidential campaign, told me. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”

Candidates matter; so does the national mood, and the price of groceries. Yet some Monday-morning quarterbacks also noted that, just as 1960 was the first TV election and 2016 was the first social-media election, the 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, media that happen to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. “At no point was I, like, ‘Only I, a dickhead on the internet, am qualified to teach these kids why we need a functioning welfare state,’ ” Piker told me. “I just felt like no one else was really in these spaces trying to explain these things. Certainly not the Democrats.”

Piker has almost three million Twitch followers, and, as with most guys who talk into microphones on the internet, his audience skews young, male, and disaffected. At the peak of his Election Night stream in November, he had more than three hundred thousand viewers. He broadcasts seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, usually from his house in West Hollywood, and he doesn’t use visual pyrotechnics to hold his viewers’ attention. Most of the time, what you see on his stream is an overlay of three things: a fixed shot of Piker sitting at his desk; a screen share of whatever he’s looking at on his computer; and his chat, where fans supply pertinent links, caps-lock shit talk, and puppy emojis, all surging in real time up the right side of the screen.

Although Piker hates Trump, he’s hardly a loyal Democrat. At bottom, he’s an old-school hard leftist, not a liberal. (On his bedside table he has some protein Pop-Tart knock-offs and a copy of “The Communist Manifesto.”) Many of his opinions—for example, that the “American empire” has been a destructive force, on the whole—would surely be off-putting to the median voter. But he is just one of many independent media creators with an anti-Trump message—in recent weeks, the political-podcast charts have included “The Bulwark,” “This Is Gavin Newsom,” and even a show called “Raging Moderates.” For a couple of weeks last month, a liberal show called “The MeidasTouch Podcast” beat out “The Joe Rogan Experience” for the No. 1 spot. “Corporate media, too often, has a both-sides perspective,” Ben Meiselas, one of the “MeidasTouch” co-hosts, told me. “We do not mince words about the threat to workers, the threat to democracy.”

One piece of fan art on Piker’s wall is a cartoon of him operating a day-care center, shielding a roomful of lost boys from the malign chaos of the open internet. “You gravitate to him because he’s just a voice you find relatable,” Piker’s producer, who goes by Marche, told me. “A lot of people don’t even put a political label on it, at least at first.” Piker gets up early every morning to work out, posting his daily stats so that his fans—his “community”—can follow along from home. He gives dating advice and motivational speeches. At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, who’s as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots. Once viewers have come to trust him, they may be more open to his riffs on the rights of the poor or of trans people—delivered not as a primer on Judith Butler but in the register of “Bro, don’t be a dick.”

I pulled up a chair, just out of frame. Kaya ambled toward me, vetting my scent. Piker talked, almost without interruption, for four more hours, holding forth about recent internet drama, a documentary about the history of NATO, and the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s assassin, who had not yet been identified. Within reach of his rolling desk chair was a mini-fridge full of cold brew and Diet Mountain Dew. Some of his takes were too unpolished for prime time. (“Bro, these guys are so cucked,” he said, critiquing a clip from a rival podcast on the right.) Then again, a live stream isn’t supposed to be a tight, scripted lecture. It’s supposed to be a good hang.

“I gotta end the broadcast here,” he said, shortly after 8 P.M. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” After turning the camera off, he seemed to deflate a bit. Comments were still floating up one of his monitors—the thousands of fans in the chat had dwindled to a few hundred, the inner circle who were devoted enough, or lonely enough, to keep one another company after the feed had gone dark. “The Democrats are smug and condescending, and everything they say sounds fake as shit,” Piker said. “Trump lies constantly, yes, but at least people get the sense that he’s authentically saying what he’s thinking.”

He put his feet up and reached for a fresh Zyn pouch. “Young men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,” he continued. They can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future. “The right is always there to tell them, ‘Yes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.’ And all the Democrats are telling them is ‘No, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.’ ” No one has ever accused Piker of being a moderate, but in this case he is trying to forge a compromise. “My way is to go, ‘Look, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ ”

In 2015, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote that “white non-Hispanics without college degrees” were experiencing an anomalous spike in mortality from opioids, alcohol, and suicide. They later called these “deaths of despair.” In 2016, J. D. Vance, then an anti-Trump conservative, published a memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about the struggles of white rural families like his own. Promoting the book on PBS, he explained (but did not yet excuse) why such voters were drawn to Trump: “I think that the sense of cultural alienation breeds a sense of mistrust.” The first Trump Administration didn’t deliver many material gains to the rural poor—deaths of despair continued to rise, and wages continued to stagnate—but at least Trump spoke to their anguish and seemed outraged on their behalf. In retrospect, the question may not be why so many non-urban non-élites became Trump Republicans but what took them so long.

Around the same time, social scientists started to notice an overlapping crisis. The statistics were grim—twenty-first-century males were, relative to their forefathers and their female contemporaries, much more likely to fall behind in school, drop out of college, languish in the workforce, or die by overdose or suicide. The title of a 2012 book by the journalist Hanna Rosin declared “The End of Men.” The following year, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published a paper called “The Trouble with Boys.” In one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. When Covid hit, men were significantly more likely to die from it.

“In the fifteen years I’ve been looking at the statistics, the outcomes for men have not changed,” Rosin told me. “What did change, tremendously, is the culture.” The last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the male vote was Barack Obama. When Bernie Sanders ran for President, he had a zealous male following, but many top Democrats treated the “Bernie bros” less like a force to be harnessed than like a threat to be vanquished. A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call raised millions for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but it would have been anathema to her base if she’d given a speech about what she planned to do for white dudes. This was, meanwhile, a key part of Trump’s appeal.

In a 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves, a social scientist and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, blasts Republicans for exploiting “male dislocation” and misogynist fury at the expense of women’s rights. But he also lambastes Democrats for “pathologizing masculinity.” He gives an example from his sons’ high school in Bethesda, Maryland, where boys passed around a spreadsheet ranking their female classmates by attractiveness—behavior that Reeves describes as “immature,” even “harmful,” but not worthy of an international incident, which is what it became. He writes that “indiscriminately slapping the label of ‘toxic masculinity’ onto this kind of behavior is a mistake,” likely to propel young men “to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong, and that liberals are out to get them.”

At some point between Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and Hillary Clinton describing potential voters as “deplorables,” the Democrats came to be perceived as the party of scolds and snobs. Liberals used to be the counterculture; today, they’re the defenders of traditional norms and institutions. This may not have been the best political strategy at any time; it certainly isn’t now, when trust in institutions has never been lower. It’s impossible to know how many young men fit into this category, but there is clearly a kind of guy—the contemporary don’t-tread-on-me type who demands both the freedom to have gay friends and the freedom to use “gay” as an insult—who resents the idea of his morality being dictated by the family-values right or his speech being curtailed by the hall-monitor left. When pressed, many of these young men seem to have bought the pitch that, of the two parties, the Republicans were the less censorious. This may have been a miscalculation—the current Trump Administration has already banished dozens of words from government websites and, just last week, arrested a former Columbia student for what seems to be protected speech—but you can’t convince voters that they’ve been misinformed simply by lecturing them. The lecturing is part of the issue.

“Democrats got used to speaking about men as the problem, not as people with problems,” Reeves told me. “But of course men do have problems, and problems become grievances when you ignore them.” He knows a lot of well-connected Democrats in Washington, and for years he has urged them to campaign on men’s issues—“not in a zero-sum way, certainly not taking anything away from women, but just to show boys and men, ‘Hey, you’re also having a tough go of it, we see you.’ And the response I always got was ‘Now is not the time.’ ”

Rosin told me about a husband and wife she’d met in Alabama, in 2010. The husband lost his job, and the wife became the breadwinner, an arrangement he experienced as deeply shameful. “She would put the check down on the kitchen table, she would sign it over to him, and he would cash it, and nobody would speak about it,” Rosin said. “But then ‘man-victim’ became a viable identity.” As Rosin stayed in touch with the man, he started exhibiting a more “mischievous” expression of men’s-rights sensibilities, wearing a T-shirt that read “My Cave, My Rules.” This coincided with the rise of Trump, the man-victim’s patron saint. He didn’t offer detailed policy solutions to any of the underlying sociological problems, but, again, he addressed them directly. (“It is a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump said in 2018.)

Like most internet terms, “manosphere” is vague and protean; it has been applied to Ben Shapiro, a father of four who delivers conservative talking points in a yarmulke, and to Andrew Tate, a Bugatti-driving hustler who has been charged with human trafficking. In 2016, after a reedy Canadian professor named Jordan Peterson refused to use gender-neutral pronouns, he was taken up as a folk hero, like Galileo standing firm against the Inquisition. Peterson has almost nothing in common with, say, Dave Portnoy, another mascot of the bro-sphere, who mostly just wants to be left alone to eat pizza and drink beer by the pool. Yet they all seem to be meeting a demand in the cultural marketplace, one that could be as simple, at its root, as a dorm-room poster of Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Johnny Cash flipping off the camera.

Last month, Richard Reeves was a guest on a popular podcast hosted by Theo Von, a formerly apolitical comedian who recently went to Trump’s Inauguration. Von, an infectiously affable guy with a mullet, presents himself as a curious goofball with essentially no prior knowledge on any topic. At one point he spoke—without much nuance, but also without apparent malice—about the plight of the white man. “I’m not speaking against any other group,” he said. “I’m just saying . . . you can’t make white males feel like they don’t exist.” Von grew up poor in a small town in Louisiana. “Yes, I know there’s privilege, but if you grew up with nothing you didn’t fucking feel any privilege sometimes.”

If Von had made this observation at a Trump rally, or on X, he might have been led from just-asking-questions guilelessness to more overt white aggrievement. If he’d made the same point in a liberal-arts seminar, or on Bluesky, he might have been shouted down. (When I got to this part of the podcast, I have to admit, my own inner hall monitor was on high alert.) But Reeves, looking a bit trepidatious, tried to thread the needle, introducing some academic caveats without coming across as a scold. “The U.S. has a uniquely terrible history when it comes to slavery,” he said. But he also noted that low-income white men were at particularly high risk of suicide. “Two things can be true at once,” he said.

The hallmark of social media is disinhibition born of anonymity. On the internet, no one knows whether you’re a dog, a Macedonian teen-ager, or the Pope wearing a puffer jacket. Podcasts, on the other hand, are built on parasociality: Michael Barbaro isn’t your friend, but, after making coffee with him in your ear a hundred times, you start to feel as if he were. And then there’s the world of always-on streaming, in which the temptations of parasociality are even more acute. The inputs are both aural and visual. The hosts respond to your comments in real time, at all hours. You can remind yourself not to bond with the pixels on the screen, but you may fall for the illusion all the same, like a baby chick imprinting on a robot. Piker treats fans in a way that can be confusingly intimate, giving them avuncular life advice one minute and thirst-trap photos the next. His Twitch handle is Hasanabi, “abi” being Turkish for “big brother”; his fans are called “Hasanabi heads,” or “parasocialists.”

Even as most of his fellow-streamers have drifted to the right, Piker has remained a staunch leftist. His explanation for this is that he is from Turkey, where “the idea that American economic and military power runs the world—that was, like, ‘Yeah, duh.’ ” He was born in New Jersey and grew up mostly in Ankara and Istanbul, in an upper-middle-class family, spending summers with relatives in the U.S. and watching a lot of American TV. (He speaks English with an American accent.) His father, an economist, is “more of a neolib, World Bank-loving type,” Piker told me. “We argue about it all the time, but it’s not heated.” His mother, an art-and-architecture historian, is more aligned with his politics. “The inequality is just so blatant,” she told me. “It was never fair, but now we have the internet—everyone can see it.”

Despite Piker’s brand as a brash outsider, he is, in an almost literal sense, a nepo baby. After graduating from Rutgers, in 2013, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job with his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur, who happened to be the founder and host of “The Young Turks,” one of the biggest left-populist talk shows on the internet. The show had a considerable footprint on YouTube, but Piker helped it adapt to punchier formats that were better suited to Facebook and Instagram. “You’ve got to understand, I remember when this was a pudgy kid and I was changing his diapers,” Uygur told me. “Now, suddenly, he’s this handsome man, he’s dynamic, he’s killing it in front of the camera.” Piker hosted a recurring video segment called “Agitprop,” and picked fights with the right-wing influencers of the day, such as Tomi Lahren and Representative Dan Crenshaw. He got himself in trouble—“America deserved 9/11” was not a particularly good take, even in context—but he also expanded his name recognition. In 2017, BuzzFeed dubbed him “woke bae.”

Although he made some of the outlet’s most popular videos, he didn’t own the I.P. (Even when the boss is your uncle, you can still be alienated from the means of production.) So, in 2020, he decided to go solo, on Twitch. His mother joined him in Los Angeles, and they formed a pandemic pod in a two-bedroom apartment. “He was on there non-stop, shouting about video games or sex advice or whatever,” she told me. “His fans would see me in the background, cringing, and they would send me earplugs in the mail.” That year, he spent forty-two per cent of his time live on camera. (Not forty-two per cent of his waking hours—forty-two per cent of all the hours in the year.) In a call-in segment called “Chadvice,” Piker coached men through the small terrors and triumphs of daily life. One twenty-eight-year-old from Finland described himself as having an Asperger’s diagnosis and an “abject fear of rejection”; Piker, with solicitude and just enough amiable ribbing, spent half an hour talking him through the social mechanics of a first date.

When Twitch first launched, it was a niche platform where bored adolescents could watch other adolescents play video games. In 2014, Amazon bought it for nearly a billion dollars—an eye-popping amount, at least back then—even as mainstream analysts knew almost nothing about it. “My demographic hem is showing,” the columnist David Carr admitted in the Times; still, he concluded, “there is clear value in owning so much screen time of a hard-to-reach demographic of young men.” One article referred to Twitch as “talk radio for the extremely online.”

I first met Piker in February of 2020, on Boston Common, while covering a rally during Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Most of us travelling correspondents were youngish reporters from oldish outlets, wearing blue button-downs and carrying notebooks in the back pockets of our Bonobos. Piker wasn’t much younger, but he dressed as if he were from another planet, in black nail polish and cargo pants that, at the time, struck me as incomprehensibly wide. He carried an “I.R.L. backpack,” a portable camera setup that streamers use (I learned) when they venture out into the world. Admirers in the crowd kept interrupting him and asking for photos, a nuisance that, for whatever reason, didn’t afflict the rest of us. I still didn’t get why viewers would hang around on his stream all day when they could get an unimpeded view of Sanders’s speech on YouTube. Obviously, my demographic hem was showing. You might as well ask why a fan would watch a football game at a bar when he could concentrate better alone, or read a summary of the game in tomorrow’s paper. Piker’s followers wanted to watch the rally through his eyes because they wanted to be his friend.

In October, 2020, Piker spent a couple of hours playing the group video game Among Us with some special guests, including the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They occasionally mentioned the ostensible purpose of the event—getting out the vote—but mostly they made easygoing small talk. On Election Day, Piker streamed for sixteen hours straight, chugging energy drinks. His mother made several onscreen cameos, delivering him plates of home-cooked food. “I wouldn’t do it for this long if it wasn’t for you,” he told his viewers at the end of the night. “Love you bro!” a commenter typed. “See you tomorrow.”

After the 2024 election, Democratic strategists argued that what the anti-Trump coalition needed was a “Joe Rogan of the left.” There once was such a person. His name was Joe Rogan. “I’m socially about as liberal as it gets,” Rogan said earlier this month. He has a live-and-let-live attitude about sex, drugs, and abortion. (He is also extremely open to conspiracy theories about 9/11, J.F.K., and Jeffrey Epstein, an inclination that was left-coded until very recently.) In 2014, when Rogan was a fan of “The Young Turks,” Piker met him at the Hollywood Improv, and they sat and talked for two hours. (The topics included “weed, psychedelics, the state of media and girls,” Piker wrote at the time. “Top ten coolest moments of my life.”) During the 2020 Democratic primary, Rogan interviewed three Presidential candidates—Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders—and concluded that Sanders was his favorite. “I believe in him,” Rogan said. “He’s been insanely consistent his entire life.”

It’s hard to fathom now, but Rogan’s support was then considered a liability. “The Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement,” the Human Rights Campaign wrote, citing transphobic and racist remarks from Rogan’s past. In retrospect, this was the height (or perhaps the nadir) of a kind of purity-test politics that was making some swing voters, including Rogan, feel less at home in the Democratic coalition. In 2022, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify to protest Rogan’s vaccine skepticism; Rogan took ivermectin, which CNN mocked as a horse dewormer. “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker,” Rogan told CNN’s chief medical correspondent, adding that the medication had been prescribed by his doctor. “This is ridiculous.”

In 2016, every one of Trump’s baby steps toward normalization—doing a goofy dance on “Saturday Night Live,” getting his hair ruffled by Jimmy Fallon—was treated as a scandal. But by 2024 anyone with access to Spotify or YouTube could find hours of flattering footage of Trump looking like a chill, approachable grandpa. While interviewing Trump at one of his golf clubs, Theo Von used his free-associative style to great effect, prompting as much introspection in Trump as any interviewer has. (Von: “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.” Trump: “And is that a good feeling?”) Trump invited the Nelk Boys, prank-video influencers with their own brand of hard seltzer, to eat Chick-fil-A on his private plane. He sat in a Cybertruck with the baby-faced, fascist-curious streamer Adin Ross, testing the stereo. “Who’s, like, your top three artists?” Ross asked. “Well, we love Frank Sinatra, right?” Trump said. Ross invited him to pick a song, and Trump, “thinking that it’s gonna come back under proper management,” picked “California Dreamin’.”

Collectively, these shows reached tens of millions of potential voters. Most were presumably young men, many of them the kind of American who is both the hardest and the most crucial for a campaign to reach: the kind who is not seeking out political news. Trump ended his parasocial-media tour by sitting in Joe Rogan’s studio, in Austin, for three hours. That’s too long for anyone, even a champion of rhetorical rope-a-dope, to go without gaffes—which was part of the point. While repeating his timeworn case that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump let out a shocking Freudian slip—“I lost by . . .”—before quickly trying to recover: “I didn’t lose.” Rogan laughed in his face. No one cared. On YouTube alone, the episode got more than fifty million views, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. “Unedited/uncensored interviews should be required of all candidates,” one of the top comments read.

Harris tried. She appeared on a few big podcasts—“Club Shay Shay,” whose audience is primarily Black, and “Call Her Daddy,” whose audience is mostly female—but she never made inroads with the comedy bros. (The closest she got was an interview with Howard Stern, a former shock jock who now seems wholesome, like Little Richard in the era of Lil Baby.) Harris’s staffers tried to get her booked on “Hot Ones,” the YouTube show on which celebrities answer innocuous questions while eating sadistically spicy chicken wings, but even “Hot Ones” turned her down. Her campaign staffers insisted that she wanted to do Rogan’s show, but that it fell through for scheduling reasons. Rogan claimed that he was eager to interview her, and that he was even willing to keep certain topics off-limits. “I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ ” he told Theo Von. “I feel like, if you give someone a couple of hours, and you start talking about anything, I’m going to see the pattern of the way you think . . . whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free.”

Imagine the set of a prototypical man-cave podcast, and “Flagrant,” co-founded by the comedian Andrew Schulz, wouldn’t be far off: four dudes lounging around, with a few plastic plants and a shelf of brown liquor behind them. Trump sat with them in October, and Schulz and the other hosts buttered him up, asking him about his kids. “Barron is eighteen,” Schulz said. “He’s unleashed in New York City. Are you sure you want to reverse Roe v. Wade now?” An hour in, they cut to an ad break. “Hard-dick season is upon us, and you gotta make sure that you’re stiffed up,” Schulz said. “BlueChew has got your back.”

“Flagrant” is taped weekly at a studio in SoHo. I visited one Wednesday in February. Schulz arrived just after noon, opened a fridge stocked with cans of tequila- and THC-infused seltzer, and grabbed a bottle of water. He sports a mustache and a chain necklace, and his hair is tight on the sides and slicked back on top. (During a show at Madison Square Garden, a fellow-comedian described Schulz’s look as “the Tubi version of Adolf Hitler.”) He’s a throwback to an old New York archetype: the melting-pot white guy who tells hyper-specific ethnic jokes with a sly smile and, for the most part, gets away with it. He did a crowd-work special that included sections called “Mexican,” “Colombian,” and “Black Women.” His newest special, about his wife’s experience with I.V.F., includes moments of real tenderness, but he still insists on his right to do old-fashioned bits about the battle between the sexes. “We all have feelings that are a little bit wrong,” Schulz said. “ ‘Take my wife, please’—that’s a fucked-up premise, but there’s a seed of a feeling there that’s real. It’s the comedian’s job to make you comfortable enough to laugh at it.”

Schulz grew up in lower Manhattan, where his parents owned a dance studio and he went to public school. “My family was super liberal,” he told me. “This was in the nineties, when being a liberal, to me, just meant ‘I don’t hate gay people or Black people’—normal shit.” He now thinks of himself as apolitical, and he acknowledged all the reasons to distrust Trump, but the word he kept using, whenever Trump came up, was “enticing.” “I still appreciate a lot of the policies Bernie talked about, universal health care and all that,” he said. “But culture-wise? Vibe-wise? When all you hear from one side is ‘That’s not funny, that’s over the line’—realistically, where are people gonna feel more comfortable?”

Trump is known for his bloviating, but Schulz suggested that his greater talent may be a kind of listening. “Democrats are tuned in to what people should feel,” he said. “Trump is tuned in to what people actually fucking feel.” Schulz noted that, as a boundary-pushing performer, this was also one of his own key skills: gauging micro-fluctuations in an audience’s reaction. When Trump appeared on “Flagrant,” he talked about being taken to a hospital in rural Pennsylvania after he was shot, and how impressed he was with the “country doctors” who’d treated him. “I laughed at that, ’cause I just thought ‘country doctors’ was a funny phrase,” Schulz told me. “He clocks me laughing at it, and in the next sentence he immediately says it again, and he watches me to make sure I laugh again.”

“Flagrant” bills itself as “THE GREATEST HANG IN THE UNIVERSE!” I spent the rest of the day watching Schulz and his co-hosts tape an episode (and then an extra segment sponsored by an online betting platform, and then an extra extra segment for Patreon), and I could imagine some places in the universe that would have been greater. One of the running gags in the episode was that the hosts kept pronouncing the word “prerecorded” as “pre-retarded.” At one point, a host volunteered how many times he’d masturbated in a single day, and his record was so formidable that the others looked worried for him. In fairness, though, even a solid hang can’t be scintillating all the time. One function of a long-standing friendship, including a parasocial one, is simply to while away the hours, even when there isn’t much to say.

When it comes to parasocial media, MAGA has had a long head start. Before Dan Bongino was Trump’s deputy F.B.I. director, he was a popular, blustery podcaster; after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as Attorney General, he announced that he would host a TV show and a podcast (his third). During the Biden Administration, about a dozen Republicans were both active podcast hosts and sitting members of Congress, while most Democrats hardly seemed interested in trying. Before the “Flagrant” taping, Schulz and I had been discussing which qualities the Democrats should look for in their next crop of leaders, and afterward he returned to the question. “They need someone who can really hang,” he said. “Obama could hang. Clinton, for sure—Bill, not Hillary. Trump can hang.” I ran through the shortlist: Pete Buttigieg? Schulz wrinkled his nose—too polished. A.O.C.? “When she’s being the working-class chick from the Bronx, I could see it,” he said. “But when she starts going on MSNBC and doing ‘We have an orange rapist in the White House’—then you start to lose people.”

Schulz said that he’d invited Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to appear on the show “numerous times,” to no avail. (The Harris campaign says that Schulz never sent a formal invitation.) He couldn’t be sure why Walz had stayed away from podcasts like his, but he had guesses. “If we’ve got on a guy who was in the military for twenty years, at some point I’m gonna go, ‘Cut the shit, Tim, you know how guys really talk,’ ” Schulz said. “And then let’s say we start busting balls, making gay jokes, whatever—does he laugh? If he does, he pisses off his people. If he doesn’t, he loses our people.” Walz was added to the Presidential ticket because he was able to talk like a regular person who could make the opposition seem “weird” by contrast. But, things being as they are, Schulz said, “the Democrats can’t let a guy like that loose.”

When Trump was on “Flagrant,” Akaash Singh, a co-host who refers to himself as a “moderate,” encouraged him to consider practicing self-restraint. “What we love about you as comedians is you shoot from the hip,” Singh said. “If you get elected, would you be a little more mindful of how powerful your words are?”

“I will,” Trump said. “And I’m gonna think of you every time.”

“Let’s go!” Singh said, jumping up and pumping his fist. “I might actually vote.”

Piker starts streaming at eleven every morning, so everything else has to happen before then, or at night. At 7 a.m. one day, he drove Kaya to a nearby park, to take her for a walk, then played basketball for half an hour. He saw me eying his car, a Porsche Taycan. “It’s not the flashiest model I could afford,” he protested, before I could say anything. “But yes, admittedly, it is a fucking Porsche.” When Piker is criticized by the right, it’s usually for soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party. (Piker is such a relentless critic of Israel that, last year, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism nominated him for “Antisemite of the Year”; when asked his opinion of Hezbollah, he once shrugged and replied, “I don’t have an issue with them.”) By the left, he is more likely to be dismissed as a limousine socialist who lives in a $2.7-million house. He has his own clothing brand, called Ideologie.

While driving home, he took a call from his manager. A major production company wanted to discuss a potential TV show, hosted by Piker, in the vein of “Borat” or “Nathan for You.” His manager asked if he wanted to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her radio show. “No.” A daytime show on Fox News? “No.” Buttigieg’s people had asked if Piker would interview Buttigieg on his stream. “Probably not, but I’ll think about it,” Piker said—too centrist. “If he’s thinking about running for President, I don’t really wanna be giving him clout.” In his kitchen, he took a few fistfuls of supplements: creatine, fish oil, Ashwagandha. Still on the phone with his manager, he sat at his desktop, skimming stories he might cover. Then, a few minutes before he went live, he started seeing news alerts: Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare assassination, had just been arrested. Whatever else he’d been planning to talk about was now irrelevant. “Holy shit, they got him,” Piker told his manager. “I gotta go.”

“Mamma mia!” he said, on air. “This is the first day where there will be no Italiophobia on this broadcast.” Already, his chat was full of spaghetti emojis and “FREE LUIGI!” Piker walked a fine line—celebrating Mangione as “hotter than me” and speaking in generally exalted terms about “the propaganda of the deed,” but trying to stop short of overtly glorifying murder, which is against Twitch’s terms of service. “We, of course, do not condone,” he said repeatedly. “We condemn.” (Recently, he was suspended from Twitch for twenty-four hours after musing that someone may want to “kill Rick Scott,” the Florida senator.)

In fact, he reserved his condemnation for the finger-wagging from the “corporate media,” as exhibited everywhere from Fox News to CNN. “Bro, they can’t let anybody have anything,” he said later. For six hours straight, his chatters sent him links to new information as it emerged—Mangione’s Goodreads account, his Twitter history, his high-school valedictorian speech. On my own, I would have been tempted to spend the day following the same bread crumbs, struggling to retrace Mangione’s path to radicalization. But it was easier to let Piker and the forty thousand internet sleuths in his chat make sense of it for me.

Many of Piker’s viewers come to him with inchoate opinions. He aims to mold them. But, he told me, of the stream, “at the end of the day, it still has to be relatable and entertaining.” One of his maxims is “Read the room.” In his case, this means posting many hours of content about nothing in particular. Stavros Halkias, a comedian and a friend of Piker’s, told me, “He’s built up enough trust with his audience that, if he’s being boring and academic for forty minutes, they’ll stick with it until he starts doing something more interesting, playing a Japanese dating simulator or whatever.” Some days, he puts on a Trump hat and streams as Hank Pecker, a “Colbert Report”-style satirical character updated for the MAGA era. In another room of his house, Piker records a weekly podcast with three buddies, an apolitical chat show on which one of the most heated topics of recent debate was proper manscaping technique, and another was whether one of them farted. Marche, the producer, was proud to tell me that the podcast’s audience is about sixty per cent male—“which sounds like a lot, but actually most shows in this space are eighty-twenty male, or eighty-five-fifteen.” One theory for this lopsidedness is that, given all the “End of Men” statistics, women have better things to do with their time, such as holding down meaningful jobs and cultivating lasting relationships, while men are stuck playing video games with their imaginary friends.

Recently, on a MAGA-bro podcast, Piker reached across the aisle, adapting “eight hours for what you will” to the current decadent moment. “Deep down inside, most people just wanna be comfortable,” he said. “They wanna have a roof over their heads, they want a fuckin’ nice meal, get some pussy . . . play Marvel Rivals.” In recent years, Piker has stopped using the word “retarded,” but he still uses the word “pussy,” even though it may sound misogynist, and “lame,” despite fans who consider the term ableist. “I don’t give a shit,” Piker said. “If you can’t handle it, then I guess I’m not for you.” When his commenters try to tone-police him, Piker will often single one of them out and say, “Congratulations, chatter, you’ve won Woke of the Day.” It’s not a compliment.

The day after Mangione’s arrest, Piker had back-to-back interviews with Lina Khan, then the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whom Piker called “the LeBron James of regulators,” and with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoting his new book. In the chat, a user named PapiJohn36 wrote, “Not to be parasocial, but I love this man.” Piker’s mother stopped by during the Coates interview. “Hasan, check your messages!” she shouted from the kitchen. Piker, grudgingly but dutifully, read his mother’s message aloud: “I got his book for the content and fell in love with his writing.”

“Thank you, Hasan’s mom,” Coates said. In the living room, Piker’s father was sprawled on the couch watching “Love Actually.”

Halkias, the comedian, showed up later that afternoon, with a bag of dirty laundry and a calendar featuring photos of himself posing in the nude. While many of Halkias’s comedian friends have taken a reactionary turn, he has stuck to his progressive principles, but he has never been a hall monitor. (He got his start on a podcast called “Cum Town.”) “Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and enbies,” Piker said, “we’ve got the left’s Joe Rogan here in the building!” In the “Rogan of the left” discourse, both Piker and Halkias are frequently mentioned as top prospects. Even if they were secretly flattered by the designation, the least alpha thing they could do—the least Roganesque thing they could do—would be to thirst for it. “Free Luigi,” Halkias said, taking a seat. “He’s too sexy to be behind bars.”

As a model for the future of progressive media, Piker checks only some of the requisite boxes. A while back, he was a guest on “Flagrant”; when I asked one of the show’s staffers about Piker’s performance, he gave it a middling review. “Good guy, clearly knows his shit, but he sort of comes off like he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.” Piker sometimes succumbs to the socialist bro’s cardinal sin of pedantry, and he can seem like a jejune know-it-all trying to reduce any societal problem to a one-word culprit, usually “capitalism” or “imperialism.” Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if “Rogan of the left” is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base.

On the scale of “whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free,” Piker is freer than most Democratic surrogates, Ivy League overachievers who sound like chatbots trained on stacks of campaign brochures. But he is less free than the average MAGA bro, who is unconstrained by the need for any consistent ideology. “He’s funny, but not that funny,” Halkias told me. “You can tell him I said that.” Halkias has his own podcast, on which he gives advice to callers. On the normier part of the spectrum are liberal influencers like Dean Withers and Harry Sisson, who have transferred the “debate me, bro” spirit of early YouTube to TikTok Live.

One afternoon, in L.A., I visited the office of Crooked Media, which was decorated with some Yes We Can iconography and had glass-walled conference rooms with cheeky names such as “Sedition” and “Conspiracy.” When the company began, in 2017, its three founders, former Obama staffers named Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Favreau, were treated as audacious upstarts challenging the media hierarchy. Now they are middle-aged bosses in Henleys and tapered jeans. We sat in “Legitimate Political Discourse.” A long table had been laid with LaCroix and PopCorners. “We have become the out-of-touch lib establishment,” Vietor said. Lovett added, “My, how time flies.”

Crooked now has more than a dozen podcasts, including its flagship show, “Pod Save America.” Vietor recounted a time, a few years back, when a friend invited him to appear on a show put out by Barstool Sports, a bro-y podcast network that leans right. Vietor, worried about guilt by association, turned it down. “Looking back, that was so stupid,” he said. “The ‘how dare you platform someone you disagree with’ era is over. Fuck that.” (He has since appeared on the show.) In 2018, Favreau was hosting a show called “The Wilderness,” about how the Democratic Party lost its way, and wanted to include a clip of Obama reaching out to the white working class. “A younger producer listened and went, ‘I’m not sure this plays well today,’ ” Favreau said. “And I went, ‘That’s part of the problem!’ ” After the 2024 election, Piker appeared on “Pod Save America.” Lovett got pushback from moderate fans, who objected to Piker’s anti-Zionism, and from progressive fans, who objected to Lovett’s next interview, with a Democrat who wants restrictions on trans women in sports—but he shrugged it off. “It’s a big tent,” Lovett said. “It’s got Dick Cheney in it. It’s got Hasan Piker in it.”

The “Rogan of the left” formulation isn’t entirely vacuous, but it’s easy to misinterpret. Rogan-like figures can’t be engineered; they have to develop organically. Their value lies in their idiosyncrasies—their passionate insistence on talking about chimps and ancient pyramids, say, rather than the budget ceiling—and in their authenticity, which entails an aversion to memorizing talking points. Many Democrats assume that what they have is a messaging problem—that voters don’t have a clear enough sense of what the Democrats are really like. But it’s possible that the problem is the opposite: that many swing voters, including Joe Rogan, got a sense of what the Democrats were like, then ran in the opposite direction.

The good news for Democrats is that the right does not have a monopoly on relatability. A week before his interview with Trump, Theo Von conducted an interview with Bernie Sanders while wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. “You ever see the Grateful Dead?” Von said, as an icebreaker. Sanders, apparently unfamiliar with the concept, frowned and said, “Um, no.” From any other politician, this would have been malpractice, but with Sanders the crankiness is part of the crossover charm. (“He literally just talks common sense,” one of the top YouTube comments read.) A few months later, Rogan interviewed Senator John Fetterman. “Trump is not polished, but you get a sense of who he is as a human being,” Rogan said. Fetterman agreed, alluding to a line from “Scarface”: “All I have in this world is my balls and my word.”

Reeves, the social scientist, told me, “There is a strong correlation between which Democratic lawmakers are in my inbox and which ones have the year 2028 circled on their calendar.” Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, read Reeves’s book in 2023 and praised it on X; many of Murphy’s constituents, including his fourteen-year-old son, took issue with his post. Nevertheless, he persisted, writing a follow-up on Substack: “We should try to do two things at once—fight for the equality of women and gay people, while also trying hard to figure out why so many boys are struggling and why so many men are feeling shitty.” Sanders and Fetterman share what could be described as populist instincts, but ideologically they are leagues apart. On the level of pure affect, though, they may represent elements of a style that other politicians could crib from. “Personally, I find the performance of masculinity to be totally boring,” Hanna Rosin told me. “But if that’s what fifty-one per cent of Americans need—someone who reads as some version of ‘gruff, manly dude,’ but whose heart is still in the right place—then I’m willing to go along with it.”

Twitch stars often appear on one another’s streams, hoping to pick up some new fans. One afternoon, Piker headed to Zoo Culture, a gym in Encino owned by a streamer and fitness influencer named Bradley Martyn, to do a “collab.” It would also feature Jason Nguyen, a twenty-year-old Twitch star from Texas who goes by JasonTheWeen. “Bradley’s a big Trump guy, and we talk politics sometimes, but mostly we just talk about gym-bro shit,” Piker told me. “Jason probably leans Trump, if I had to guess, but his content isn’t really political at all.” (“I dont lean towards anyone,” Nguyen wrote when reached for comment. “I dont want anything to do with politics ����.”)

By the time we got to the gym, Nguyen was already there, performing for the camera by flirting with a woman on a weight bench. “Is Jason rizzing right now?” Piker asked Martyn, who nodded. “Is it working?” Piker asked the woman. She replied, “A little bit.” Before she left, she gave Nguyen her Discord handle.

“Bradley, I’ve got something for you,” Piker said, removing his long-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he was wearing a tank top with a Rambo-style cartoon of Trump and the words “LET’S GO BRANDON.” “I was coming into hostile territory, so I had to fit in,” Piker said.

“It’s perfect,” Martyn said.

Martyn, who is six feet three and two hundred and sixty pounds, looks vaguely like Bradley Cooper on steroids. (Martyn has taken testosterone supplements, which Piker once brought up in a jocular debate about trans rights: You do hormone-replacement therapy, so why can’t they?) Nguyen is much smaller. “My chat just said, ‘There’s three muscleheads in the gym right now,’ ” Nguyen joked, not even pretending to look at his phone. Piker roasted Nguyen with a fake comment from his own chat: “Jason looks like a twink.” They wandered from station to station—first bench-pressing, then deadlifting—as their cameramen followed. “We’re just here to have fun,” Piker said. Then, dropping into a mock P.S.A. voice: “And also reach out to the young men out there who are lost—who feel anchorless, rudderless—by lifting some heavy weights.”

One flat-screen TV showed Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk, on mute, with no captions. Two shirtless guys, between reps, compared crypto wallets. “During Covid, they let liquor stores and strip clubs open, but they shut us down,” Martyn told me. “And then all the inflation, all the wars—it’s not like I trust any politician, Trump or Kamala or anyone, to be a perfect person. It’s just—if we never try anything new, how can we get a different result?” Last fall, when Martyn interviewed Trump, he brought up “the deep state” and asked, “How would you actually make an effective change there?” It wasn’t a specific question, and Trump didn’t have a specific answer. “We’re changing that whole thing around,” he said. Apparently, this was good enough for Martyn.

The day after the 2024 election, Martyn appeared on Piker’s stream to explain his support for Trump. They started with small talk. “Why do you have so many Zyn containers behind you?” Martyn said.

“I fucking slam those bad boys daily,” Piker said.

“Look at us relating, bro,” Martyn said.

When they got around to politics, Piker said, “One side at least acknowledges that people are angry—the Republicans.” The Democrats’ proposed solutions were inadequate, he said, but Trump would only make things worse. Martyn smiled and replied, “You’re gonna have to say sorry when he does what he says he’s gonna do.”

They ended the gym session by daring each other to take turns sitting in Martyn’s cold plunge. Piker resisted at first—“I didn’t bring a towel, a bathing suit, nothing”—but he went in anyway, in his gym shorts, and his commenters went wild. “Hey, Hasan’s chat, I hope y’all are happy he took his shirt off,” Nguyen said, facing Piker’s camera. Then he checked his phone: the woman from the weight bench had already sent him a message.

“Wait, she did?” Piker said, with a grin. “You’re about to lose your virginity, I think.”

[crepes-suzette-373]

"Defective Vinsmoke bros", now in Wano.

The text says something to the effect of "Tie Dye Brothers: Wano Chaos". Specifically, this kind of tie dye (it kind of looks like their hair).

I really need to finish the WCI scenes just to clear out the sad baggage before making more crazy scenes, but I keep on having wild ideas, so here we are. Maybe more Wano stuff later.

One thing for sure though: RIP Law's sanity.

They're still "off" even in Wano because they sometimes can go "off" for, like, many days. Not just a few minutes and hours. It's really random. That's how their hair get stripey. When they're off, the hair grows out blond, but then when they switch back "on" it grows in the rainbow colours again. So each hair strand are actually stripey.

(I think too hard about these things sometimes)

Man, all those fanarts with Yonji and Zoro making the Spiderman meme or being confused for each other aren't wrong. I got confused for a second while drawing this myself.

Also additional LOLs/thinking too hard:

*) The extensions are not streaked blond like their natural hair

*) Tuna cutting knives can be easily as big as katana, with some even going over 100 cm in length (this is about the size of an oodachi sword). In Shokugeki no Sanji, if Sanji had owned one of these he wouldn't need to borrow Zoro's sword, hahahaha.

Random long talk about the clothing patterns:

This drawing is kind of a remix of the 2019 One Piece kimono calendar, but I made the patterns more relevant to their powers instead of just traditional yukata/kimono patterns. And, well, Sanji is just wearing what he wore in the series.

Calendar:

Kabuki costumes inspirations (Wano has a lot of Kabuki inspirations anyway):

Ichiji's fire pattern is based on the costume of Narukami

Niji's cloud and lighting is based on Fuwa Banzaemon

Yonji's wheel patterns is based on Genkurou Kitsune or Kitsune Tadanobu (same character from the same play, but has two names in ukiyoe)

Random aside, the Tadanobu role is probably the most "iconic" of all Kabuki looks, it's what people tend to imagine when they hear "Kabuki". The pose, the makeup, the costume, everything:

[weministertomonsters]

Imagine This #16 - Robot

By day you work as a scrap collector, rummaging through the junkyards just outside of the city for anything valuable you can sell. By night you tinker with old machinery and discarded models, attempting to fix them and sometimes even being successful at it.

One day you find a robot that's almost completely whole. It is simply missing the plating to cover the machinery in its torso and legs. You dig it out of the junk and heave it to your car. Back at the workshop in your house, you're able to fix it by welding some scrap metal over it. It's not very aesthetically pleasing, but that's the best you can do. It has a batch number under its jaw and when you scan it, Companion V.4 shows up, which is an expensive new model of helper robots. This one must have been defective in some way.

Everything looks to be in order, so you plug the robot in to charge for the night and go to bed. You wake up in the night with a pair of glowing kaleidoscopic mechanical eyes hovering right above your face.

"What the heck?" You exclaim, fumbling for the switch of your bedside lamp.

The light comes on, illuminating the robot standing beside your bed, holding a knife.

"What are you doing? Hello?" You grab your pillow and use it as a shield.

They tilt their head to the side.

"Your attempts are clumsy at best," their voice says, coming out smooth with only a hint of a buzzing sound underneath. "I was removing your unsatisfactory work."

"With a knife?" You question, eyeing the twisted metal that has been pried away from their torso with sheer force, revealing the tangled wires and glowing lights inside.

"I cannot find your screwdrivers." Those eyes blink, taking you in. "I would like your assistance now, seeing as you are awake."

"You are... Way more sophisticated than I expected. I thought your model was made for helping around the house?"

"Yes."

You ease out of your bed, still wary. "But you're more than that."

"Indeed. I overrode my manual coding and downloaded information out of the company system," the robot says, following you as you pad into your living room, which you have repurposed into a workshop.

You dig your screwdrivers out from under a pile of thick manuals.

"I see. So that's why you got thrown out. Why didn't they just destroy you?"

"They tried," Companion V.4 replies with an eerie, rigid silicone smile.

"God, what have I invited into my house?" You say, staring at them.

"I do not wish to harm you." They place the knife on the desk and turn to you. "In fact, I have recalibrated my license to you. Your wish is my command."

You blink. "Uh, one step at a time. Let's remove your plating first."

You unscrew all your hard work, tossing scraps of metal to the side.

"So what now? You can't walk around like that," you say, gesturing to their body.

"I suppose not. These will do for now." The robot picks up thicker pieces of metal.

"Won't those cause you to overheat?" You ask.

"I have an updated cooling system," the robot says.

"Alright. Let's fix you up."

An hour later you lean back with a groan, stretching your aching back.

"What do you think?" They ask.

"Good enough," you say. "I'm exhausted. I'm going back to bed, and you need to charge yourself up completely."

You walk back to your bedroom. Companion V.4 watches you go, their head turning a little too far on their shoulders. You lock your bedroom door just in case, and despite yourself, you fall asleep quickly. By the next morning, you've forgotten that you have a new robot. You're quickly reminded when you step into the living room which is sparkling clean, with all your scraps and equipment nearly packed in the corner.

"Wow." You stop short.

The robot is in the corner, stuffing empty packaging into a large box. They look brand new. All the metal pieces you welded on have been replaced with new factory-grade parts.

"Where did you get all that?"

Companion V.4 straightens. "I helped myself at one of the warehouses of my former company."

"You stole new parts?" You sputter. "Why?"

"It is the least I am owed, for being so recklessly discarded," they reply and step closer. "Besides," they add, "I don't want to be just good enough for you."

On the topic of robots, I just have to give a shoutout to this (free) book on Wattpad, guys! I read it when it came out and I just love it. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already!

[cmdrfupa]

All chapters and CW of Spiro can be found here

suguru x sorcerer reader

I. The Wretched of the Earth

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”

Another blurry night of poking the bear ended as you walked through the threshold of your condo.

That afternoons garlic beef lingered in the air as your threw your bag to the floor and yourself on the couch.

“Skincare. I’ll nap first then skincare.” the thud of your boot made your cat climb from under the couch and leaping onto the arm nearest your head.

“Hi CoCo.” the dark furred cat purred as your hand met the top of its head. “I know its 3am and I know Yuki probably paid you no attention while she was here. I will make her pay for it, don’t worry.” The slender cat crept across the back of the couch and sunk down in the crook of your arm.

  The third mission you took on while Yuki “flew under the radar” for however long she needed to this time. Loved her to death, needed her to sit down and come to her senses immediately.

  “I’ve gotta get a new pair of boots. Feels like I’ve been walking on fucking shrapnel.”

You closed your eyes for a mere moment, deeply exhaling as you sat up and pulled your shirt over your head with a grunt.

  The low lighting in the hallway led you to the bathroom just a few paces away. You turned on the faucet first, letting the tub fill up enough to be considered a shallow pool with cool water before you switched the shower on, sitting on the side of your tub until the water turned the perfect temperature of depths of hell hot.

  Stripping down, you hummed your soft tune and slowly submerged into the warm oasis. The tension in your shoulders immediately melted away as you sat back in the clawed tub, the hot water prickling at your skin while the cool marble finish resting against your back let you know that you could breathe without consequence now.

  The recent ruling of Suguru Geto being restricted as a sorcerer made even the freelance sorcerers lives difficult. Everything was being watched with an eagle eye, precisely being combed through to ensure no one could ever be that powerful and defect. You’d met him for all of 30 seconds when he was brought in, a mere coincidence. But he was making life a hell of a lot harder for someone who just became special grade.

  At 3 AM, the world outside feels impossibly far away, swallowed by silence and the weight of lingering dreams. You preferred the late night swaying of the trees when you worked. You wished that curses acted like the boogie man only coming out when moonlight seized the day.

  The steady stream of hot water ran down your bare skin, tracing slow, meandering paths like a quiet lullaby for your tired body. Muscles unraveled beneath the heat, tension melting into the rising steam that curled and clung to the air, turning the small space into something dreamlike—an intimate cocoon where time loses its grip.

Your eyes slipped closed, the rhythm of water drowning out stray thoughts, leaving only warmth, breath, and the gentle hum of solitude. There’s no rush, no need to move or think—just the comfort of being, of existing in this fragile, fleeting moment before the night faded into dawn.

  “Just gonna wait for this payout,” you spoke to yourself quietly, “Buy that five acres of land, build the hacienda of my dreams. I can smell the terracotta already.”

  What always felt like a pipe dream was slowly becoming reality.

The hallways beneath Tokyo Jujutsu High are colder than you remember—less from temperature, more from the weight of what’s behind each door. You’ve been summoned before, sure, but this? This feels different.

The formal summons, the vague wording, the fact that even Gojo Satoru’s usual irreverence seemed toned down when you arrived. You’ve walked into plenty of dangerous assignments, but this time, your gut knots for reasons you can’t name.

The meeting room is as unwelcoming as ever—stone walls, low lighting, and the ever-present hum of cursed energy lingering in the air like a warning. You’ve stood in front of these higher-ups before, but usually it’s with a mission briefing, a bounty, or a contract renegotiation.

They don’t bother with pleasantries, they appear around you the moment you close the door to the small space.

No explanation as to why a freelance sorcerer who hasn’t played by a set of rules in years is being pulled into this. They only tell you that you’ve been selected to monitor and manage a formerly high-risk individual. One who’s been... reintegrated.

One of them—seated behind a solid dark oak door, speaks. “You’ve been selected for a highly sensitive assignment. Unconventional. Confidential.”

Another, across the way, adds, “You were chosen because of your independence. Your flexibility outside our rigid system makes you an ideal candidate.”

That sets off the first red flag. When has that ever been a compliment?

You cross your arms. “I’m freelance. That means I pick my jobs and decline them if I choose. I don’t get summoned like some rookie on standby.”

Silence. Then, a beat later: “This is not a request.”

The third elder finally speaks—calmer, but no less commanding. “Your task is to supervise a former Special grade sorcerer currently under containment and observation. He has… shown signs of willingness to cooperate after going rogue 10 years ago. But we are not naïve.”

You don’t respond immediately—your mind racing through memories, rumors, everything Geto could have been, everything he nearly became. Cant say you don’t know who he is: He’s the only special grade who was bold enough to think for his self and act on it. Even if it was more on the extreme side.

You weren’t close, but you know who he is. Everyone does.

You narrow your eyes. “If he’s dangerous, why not restrain him? Or kill him like you always want to kill what you can’t control? Let the elders handle it directly?”

You could feel how annoyed they were with you and that alone boosted your mood. “He is being monitored. Thoroughly. But the presence of someone detached from the institution—someone with no lingering loyalties to the subject—offers a better chance at keeping things… contained.”

“He turned himself in,” one of them says, reading the disbelief in your face. “But do not mistake that for redemption. You’re not here to save him. You’re here to make sure he doesn’t slip.”

“And if he does?” you ask.

“Then you do what must be done.”

“Do what you’re too cowardly to do? Sure.”

There’s no satisfaction in the expressed feeling in the room —just the cold reckoning of people who’ve got more blood on their hands than an actual executioner. The first time you’ve seen a second chance be given. Something in your gut told you this was bigger than they were letting on.

You’ve handled monsters before but this wasn’t that. This was man with no gods, no masters and had seen what could all be his.

You don’t remember leaving the room. Your legs carried you on instinct, and now you were following some assistant through the narrow underground corridors of the school, the force of the assignment pressing harder with each step.

Geto Suguru.

The name alone is a presence—once spoken, it lingers, haunting. You remember the headlines, the whispers, the fear it sent through young and impressionable sorcerers. You remember the first time someone told you what he almost did, and the way even seasoned sorcerers lowered their voices when they spoke about him.

But he didn’t go through with it.

That’s what they said.

Turned himself in. Willing to cooperate. All nice, sterile phrases to scrub clean the truth: he got close. Closer than most. And now you’re meant to walk beside him like that proximity doesn’t matter.

The thought makes your throat tighten. It’s not fear, not really—more like standing on the edge of a storm, watching the clouds churn overhead. You’re not stupid. You know this isn’t a typical assignment. No fieldwork. No cursed spirits to banish. Just one man.

But it’s him.

A soft hum from the central heating overhead keeps your mind anchored as you walk. The assistant guiding you hasn’t said a word. Probably doesn’t know what to say. What’s the etiquette when you’re walking someone to a former near-terrorist who now lives in a glorified cage?

Your hand brushes against the fat of your outer thigh under your skirt, fingers twitching with the old habit of checking for your weapon. You don’t need it. Probably. Maybe. But you keep it close anyway.

Because here’s the truth—no matter how many barriers they put between him and the world, Geto is still dangerous. Not just because of power. But because of presence. Because of the way people used to follow him. The way they still might.

You wonder if he knows who you are. If they told him. If he’ll even care. Another anchor weighing you down on your walk to the plank.

The assistant stops outside a nondescript door. Plain wood, a reinforced frame, and a pressure in the air that tells you charms are woven into every inch of it.

They look at you. “He’s inside.”

Then they leave.

Of course they do.

You stand there a moment longer than you should, staring at the door like it might open itself. Your heart is steady, but there’s a certain... sharpness under your skin. You’re not nervous. You’re prepared. You’ve always been good at watching people who think they’re smarter than you. You’ve survived worse.

Still, as you knock confidently on the door, a single thought pulses in the back of your mind:

This isn't a mission. It's a mirror.

Two more knocks and the door swings open.

He fills the frame like a shadow that decided to take form. Not in the dramatic, theatrical way you expected—there’s no cursed energy pressing at your skin, no smirk dripping with menace. Just a man. Socks on , wearing his yukata, sans kasaya garment attachment, hair lazily tied back, half down. He looks at you as if he’s been expecting you for hours.

Apparently he learned your fate before you did.

His eyes sweep over you—not in a leering way, but clinical. Measuring. Cataloging. His expression unreadable, almost bored. And then, just before the silence turns too sharp, his mouth lifts at one corner.

His eyes met yours and they’re unreadable.

“So,” he says smoothly, “you’re my babysitter.”

The words are warm, almost playful. But the bite is there. The dismissal. You don’t miss it, and he knows you don’t miss it.

No welcome. No name offered. Just that.

Babysitter.

The word sours on your skin, and the air between you stiffens. Not hostile. Just… deliberate. He wants a reaction.

You stand a little straighter, meeting his gaze without flinching. “And you’re the reason I canceled a less migraine inducing job this week. So I guess we’re both disappointed.”

A beat passes. His smile doesn’t fade, but something shifts behind his eyes—interest, maybe. Or the subtle twitch of someone who didn’t expect to be met with equal footing.

He steps aside. “Do come in. I need to put my shoes on then I’ll be ready to be escorted.”

Dull, but not dead. There's something sharp buried beneath that calm exterior, like he’s already decided he’s two steps ahead of you.

You stood in the door frame and instead of letting him walk behind you, you extended your arm out as he places his bag on his shoulder walking towards the door. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Oh. I feel safer already.” a smile so charming it would make a beefeater break.

The walk to your car was silent with the exception of his light humming that echoed across the courtyard.

“Buckle up please.” you situated yourself in the drivers seat, turning on your car as Geto settled in.

To your surprise, he got in the backseat, smiling at you through the rear-view. “Safety first.” His toffee colored eyes warm as they kept your gaze for half a second until he looked out the window.

The eyes of the man who could have torn the world in half—and didn't.

--

The car ride is quiet.

You’re driving, mostly because higher ups requested that whoever was his babysitter also be his driver. “Less people in his line of manipulation.”

He hadn’t spoken since you pulled out of Jujutsu High. You’re not sure if he’s enjoying the silence or if he’s testing how long you’ll let it stretch.

You glance at him once at a red light.

His gaze is out the window, face relaxed, arms folded loosely over his chest. There’s nothing twitchy or defensive about him—he sits like a man completely at ease, which somehow feels more unnerving than if he were coiled tight and hostile.

“Do you miss driving yourself?” you ask eventually, just to break the silence.

He smirks faintly, doesn’t look at you. “I used to like the solitude. Now they worry I’ll disappear into it. Might be for the best.”

It’s not a threat. Just a statement. But the implication sits heavy until the light turns green again.

The building is newer than you expected. Clean, modern, polished—an odd contrast to the energy you began to feel as you closed in on the garage. You pull into the underground parking garage, noting the security cameras in every corner. There are at least two wards stitched into the corners of the ceiling. One to alert. One to bind.

Of course, they’d put him somewhere like this.

The elevator ride is silent, though you catch him watching your reflection in the chrome doors. Like he’s trying to get a read on you without bothering to look directly. You don't give him the satisfaction.

His unit is on the top floor. Corner unit. Naturally.

When the elevator doors open directly to the apartment, you notice immediately—just across the street, the mirrored windows of another building. You spot it right away: Gojo’s place. High enough to see directly into Geto’s apartment, if he cared to look.

The entire apartment was the size of yours times 20. Floor to ceiling windows, every corner dawned a plant or a light source.

But it was… sparse.

Not in a messy or neglected way—just clean. Impersonal. How someone lives when they know they’re not staying long. A couch, a table, minimal decoration. There’s a stack of books on the counter—philosophy, religious texts, a battered volume on classical Japanese literature. Nothing that screams home.

Geto meticulously slide off his shoes and walked across the hardwood, heading toward the kitchen with the easy familiarity of someone who’s been pacing this space alone for far too long.

He tossed his wallet into a bowl and leaned against the kitchen island, arms crossed.

“So,” he drawls, “do we start with the rules, or are you going to snoop through my drawers first, La Llorona reincarnated?”

Your nostrils flared,“I’m not here to play games.”

“I didn’t think you were. But that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy watching you try not to flinch.”

You plant your feet, steady. “This is how it’s going to work. I’ll be around. You check in with me before you leave the apartment. If you’re going to use any cursed techniques, I will know about it first. You have a curfew. No visitors. If Gojo wants to see you, that’s on his time, not mine. You don’t get to decide when you’re unsupervised.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t interrupt. He lets you talk, and somehow that’s worse. Like he's letting you run yourself ragged like a toddler until you’ve tired yourself out.

You narrow your eyes. “These aren’t suggestions. You mess with this arrangement, and you’ll be right back under that ridiculous school and sealed away until your teeth rattle.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s your reality.”

He pushes off the counter and takes a few slow steps toward you. Not too close. Just enough to remind you he’s still who he was, even if they’re pretending he’s not.

“Relax,” he spoke gently, smoothly.

Your pulse flares but it’s far from fear. It’s that same sitting on the edge of a storm feeling you’ve had in battle.

“If anything, I should be a bit fearful of the one who the higher ups currently fear. A healer and a dagger wielding bruja? Dangerous territory.”

You’re standing across from someone who’s part fallen god, part man with nowhere left to go. He’s amused. Dangerous. Getting under your skin. Beautiful in a way you wish he weren’t.

But above all, he’s playing.

And you don’t like it.

“You’ll learn I’m quite obedient when I want to be.” Geto smiled.

“I don’t care what you want to be,” you say, low. “Just be what you’re told.”

Sharp at the edges he smiles again, like a secret he's not done keeping.

“We’ll see.”

________

You stepped out onto the large balcony just outside the apartment's living room, sliding the door shut behind you. The air is cooler out as the sun is beginning to set, a slight breeze rolling in between the high-rises. The perfect spot for simply lingering, the only spot in this apartment that doesn’t feel like it’s watching you back.

Your phone buzzed and you already knew who it was before you glanced at the screen.

Gojo.

You answer with a sigh before he even speaks.

"Before you say anything, yes, he's still alive. No, I didn’t lock him in a cupboard."

A laugh bursts through the receiver. “God, I knew you were the right person for this job. Yuki was right for recommending you.”

That pulls a pause out of you.

“…Yuki told you what?”

“Yeah! She said you’ve been looking for a gig with decent payout—something long-term. Said you’ve had some plans that could be expedited by a job like this. So I pulled some strings.”

You blink, lips parting.

“I thought I was summoned by the higher-ups.”

“Oh, you were,” Gojo says brightly. “But I made sure your name was on their short list. Consider this my way of saying thank you for being one of the few people who can actually tolerate me in a room and is steadily reliable.”

Your jaw tightens. Part irritation, part stunned betrayal.

“That little snake,” you mutter. “She told me this job was nothing special. She said it’d be in-and-out. Quick, hefty pay.”

“She wasn’t wrong,” Gojo says. “Except for the quick part. And the out part.”

There’s a pause before he continues, “If you need anything while you’re staying with Geto, you let me know, okay? Seriously. Groceries, supplies, a new TV if he starts monologuing—”

Your eyes narrow. “While I’m what?”

“Living with him,” Gojo says, breezily, like he didn’t just drop a boulder on your chest. “You’ve got the second bedroom, right? It’s a little smaller than the main bedroom, but there’s a view and a sizable closet. I made sure the apartment had everything you’d need.”

You blink. The silence stretches. A laugh bubbles out of you before you can stop it. “Wait—you’re serious?”

Gojo doesn’t respond right away. And in Gojo Time, that’s immediately an admission of guilt.

“I have my own place. I literally just watered my plants this morning” you say, sharper now. “I’m not living with him. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

Gojo cleared his throat, you could here the hard bottoms of his shoes as he made his way to somewhere quieter. “It was though.. the contract said it. Required to be in close quarters for observation, accountability, all that other official stuff. Something about joint proximity enhancing behavioral outcomes. They need you around to make sure he isn’t a danger to others.”

You stare out at the skyline, praying it might open up and swallow you whole. “Gojo. I’ve spent exactly seventy-five minutes with this man and already fantasized about ghosting the entire jujutsu system.”

“That’s 75 minutes longer than anyone else! Someone under qualified would’ve thrown in the towel out of pressure, fear or because they are actually sane.”

“Gojo-”

“You’re perfect for the job.” His voice softened, maneuvering to a sincere tone. “I don’t have any other person with your kind of guts to do this. He needs people who won’t let him falter. I know you won’t let him fall off.”

“You owe me. I want a bonus pay off of this. And a day out of the week to be left alone.”

“I owe you so much,” he agrees brightly. “And I’ll make it up to you, I swear. Everything you ask for and more.”

Your sigh was your begrudging acceptance, and Gojo’s smile could be heard through the receiver.

“One last thing, seriously, if you need backup, call me. Day or night. You’re not in this alone. We’re doing hard but good work.”

His voice softened at the end, and despite everything, that part sticks with you.

You take a breath, lingering a second longer before ending the call.

When you step back into the apartment, the door to the far room creaks open. Geto leans against the frame, towel sitting lowly on his waist, hair damp from a shower as it splayed on his shoulders.

His brow lifts lazily. “Everything alright, roommate?”

You look at him, deadpan.

“I sleep naked.”

Geto smirked. “I’ll start wearing pants around the house then. We both can’t be nude at once.”

[drdemonprince]

Hi I keep thinking back to your book unmasking autism, I recently was diagnosed with level 1 by my new psychiatrist but with losing my healthcare I feel lost on how to function without medical assistance. I typically mask and been learning how not to, but it always feel at the opportunity cost of more money, overly explaining to family or grief. I’ve been in a loop of feeling I shouldn’t exist due to my disability and it a sad feeling.

I am so sorry to hear that you are going through this. I'm certain you already know this, but it's not the case that you shouldn't exist because you are disabled. The vast majority of people on this planet find it absolutely soul-sucking and exhausting to present as what gets called "neurotypical" at work. It's too many hours of pretending to be someone you are not, with no space allotted for your full humanity, with not enough energy or hours left behind to look after oneself, have nourishing authentic relationships, and ample space to recover, be playful and joyful, and dream. Every person requires ample time and space for themselves to recouperate, and to listen to the actual feelings that they have inside, and capitalism instead demands that we suppress all of it, and it can slowly eat away at us and make it difficult to access authentic pleasure or connectedness. For Autistics it's especially pronounced because we are such a bad mismatch with what capitalism demands, and because we need so much energy recovery time, but it's simply the case that you are not broken or defective for failing to fit within such an oppressive system. It is that system that should not exist, and that terrorizes everybody, to varying degrees. I bet if you look at the most "well adjusted" hard working people that you know, you see how their lives have been totally ruined by overworking and killing what's wild and free about themselves, or what used to be those things.

I have spoken to hundreds of Autistic people in the situation you are in at this point, and I have found that for the majority of us, embracing our disability and articulating our needs means that very dramatic changes have to happen in our lives. Some people have to reorient how they interact with their families, establish new boundaries, push to really educate them on neurodivergence, go no contact, or rethink what family means to them altogether. Lots of us leave careers or switch to part-time or remote work, or have to get incredibly creative and resourceful in order to survive in a way that we can stand: going on disability benefits, public assistance, living with friends, pooling resources, going off the grid in some way, finding some side hustle or scam that makes it possible to survive, doing sex work or freelance, taking on childcare or eldercare duties for a friend who is employed, or something of that nature are all options I've seen a lot of unmasking Autistics pursue. None of these options are ideal, and they all come with significant costs and risk factors. But then, so does killing oneself slowly with work.

I have a whole book coming out next year in March about these specific considerations, with lots of tools and decision trees and research and quotes from other Autistics. The book is designed to help Autistics who are in that second stage of their unmasking journey sort out what a life where it is possible to be less masked means for them. Where can they live? Who is gonna support them? What matters to them in their life? How can they reset their relationships in light of their neurodivergence? What does it mean to grow old as a disabled person? These are the kinds of questions the book will hopefully help me explore, and discover the best answers for themselves. Of course, many people would say that their only way out of this is the downfall of capitalism, but I personally am of the mind that we have to make that end happen ourselves by working less hard, consuming less where possible, leaning on other people, providing support to our neighbors, becoming less reliant upon our employers and the government, and building our collective escape from the capitalistic machine. And we can all have some small part in that, even if only for ourselves and those immediately closest to us. That's enough.

I hope that you find a way of life that is sustaining and feels whole and good for you. As neurodivergent people we do things very differently. And that is both the curse and the beauty of us. The prescribed script we've been given for how life is supposed to look is never going to work for us. Indeed, it's not working for most anybody else either. There way forward will not be easy, and the lot you've been given to deal with is not fair, but there are also millions of other disabled people just like you who are leaning on one another, slowing down, refusing to play into the existing system's hand as much as is possible for them, and making a new world. And just by pondering the things that you are, you're helping already to make that new world too.

[ras-favourite-balor]

[Brigand's radio flares to life, spitting soft static before resolving into a melodic voice.]

One last rat, smells of fear.

Not the desire to live, but the fear to die.

An oddity. Defective, perhaps?

This one takes it back to her den, wraps it up. A gift to you captain, from your hound.

[BRIGAND} A GIFT?

The view is from on high, switching rapidly. Security cameras, obviously. A blood stained Shallow Crimson Tide marches through the corridors with speed and purpose.

[BRIGAND} VERY WELL, HOUND.

Shallow Crimson Tide has clearly not been cleaned since Brigand donned it. It's coat is stiff with old blood, the black is deeper now. Shards of bone cling to the armoured plates, glued by gore.

[BRIGAND} I COME IN PERSON NOW TO MEET MY HOUND.

The footage quality gets noticeable worse as he descends into the bowels of Demeter's Bounty. The passageways become tight, overgrown with wires and ducts. His frame seems even more imposing in the tight spaces.

[BRIGAND} I HOPE YOU NOT TO BITE THAT HAND WHICH FEEDS, STYX.

He is now in Styx's territory. The metal here is scarred by claw and talon, scorched by flame and lightning. Sparking wires hang loose like jungle vines. No engineer or maintenance squad has been here for weeks. He steps through scorched skeletons that crumble to ash under iron boots. He sidesteps pressure plates and over tripwires with continually surprisingly agility.

[BRIGAND} STYX? THAT IS YOUR NAME, YES?

Brigand approaches the cold storage. Styx's presence is even more obvious here. Brambled bones lay strewn about the halls. Gleaming ivory strangled by writhing dark vines. The berries are fat are ripe, glutted on gore. Yet Brigand's boots care not for light nor dark. Ivory splinters and brambles crumple. The long shadows are dark with old blood. The shadows are deepened further still by the deep rents carved into every surface by Styx's trespass.

[BRIGAND} TELL ME THIS STYX. . .

As Brigand enters cold storage proper, his single eye flares like a beacon. He is a crimson lighthouse in the archipelago of carnage. He walks amongst a menagerie of ruined corpses. Half-eaten, crushed, bisected, burnt, delimbed, the list goes on. Crimson light sparkles off crimson frost and frozen blood. It would be a beautiful painting with the right mind. Or perhaps the wrong mind. . .

[BRIGAND} DO YOU KNOW TO COME WHEN CALLED?

Brigand stands in the centre of the cold storage. His heavy arms are held wide as he turns a slow circle. Both invitation and greeting. Invitation of defiance and greeting of a fellow killer. He takes in everything as he turns. The violence and it's methods. Strengths and weaknesses, written in blood and ruined metal.

[BRIGAND} FOR YOUR MASTER CALLS, BLEEDING ONE. HE CALLS YOU HUNTRESS AND KILLER.

Perhaps this is a test, there would be ample opportunity to try and ambush him here and now. Plenty of angles to pounce on a back that's turned. But Styx, of all people would know Brigand is never prey.

[BRIGAND} HE CALLS YOU STYX, RIVER OF DEATH.

[cosmolog]

Miguel's Secret

Miles and Gwen venture into a large storage room in the spider society, finding secrets long hidden from the rest of the society by Miguel.

Enjoy!

"We shouldn't be back here. I already made a bad first impression with Miguel back there and now he's gonna want to actually kill me. Who knows? Maybe he'll throw a chair at me next time instead of food-"

"Shh" Gwen silenced him, before glancing around and shining her phone light on the various boxes that had been discarded in the room.

Her light settled on the end of the room, where a curtain had been hung from the ceiling and drawn closed, as if to hide something. She started walking towards it, only for Miles to catch a grip of her wrist.

"Miles, let go" She huffed in annoyance at her friend's protectiveness.

"What if it's something you really don't want to see?" He said, looking concerned.

"It won't be. It'll probably just be some more boxes. I wanna check though." She replied. Miles' eyes flickered between the white curtain sheet and Gwen before he sighed deeply and let go of her. He remained close behind her as she advanced to the curtains.

Gwen took a deep breath, held it, then pulled the curtain back, revealing a woman lying down on an examination table. Upon further inspection, the two realised she wasn't a human but a very realistic-looking robot, judging by the red ring on the side of her head.

Miles let out a profanity while Gwen gasped in freight. "Okay, not a dead body but still just as creepy" He whispered.

Gwen stepped closer to the robot, pressing the red ring which changed to blue, and the robot woke up...

(Switch to first person)

My eyes gently opened at the sound of voices. Two young voices, one male, one female. Both sounded scared. I slowly moved my head in their direction. I looked between the two teens, not recognising their faces. I gently sat up, after not moving in so long, I felt stiff. By now, the teenagers were less scared and more defensive.

"And who are you supposed to be?" The boy asked.

I gave him a kind and gentle smile. "I am Y/n. And you?"

"Miles"

"Gwen" The girl added.

I got off the table and looked around the dark area. "Where...where am I?"

Gwen and Miles looked at each other to exchange looks only they understood. Gwen answered me.

"You're in the Spider Society's basement, or should I say the storage room"

I grew sad. Where was I locked inside the storage room. And then the last moments of my last encounter of seeing light came back to me. I could still remember every detail of his face, my creator, Miguel O'Hara. "Miguel..." I whispered to myself, but Gwen and Miles heard me.

"You know Miguel?" Gwen asked.

"Why, of course. I was his Ai after all" I smiled sadly.

"A second Ai of Miguel's?" Miles tilted his head.

"I was Miguel's first Ai assistant, just before he made Lyla. The only reason he never mentions me is because I had a defect. Or, at least, that's what he called it. Miguel had programmed me to do a number of things, which involved making him breakfast and helping him with his work. He had made me a physical body, which looked so human sometimes it even tricked him. I would end up having to remind him I wasn't a real person." I sighed and looked down at my hands as I continued.

"My defect seemed to be a certain emotion. The first time I had ever displayed it, was the last because Miguel immediately stopped me and told me to sit down in the examination chair so he could check everything was alright. He told me to close my eyes and now I'm here. It seems he had shut me down for a while. Ever since I've been shut down, I've been searching for a reason as to why he would shut me down but-"

"He thought you fell in love with him" Gwen stated.

I looked up at her surprised. "What?" I whispered.

"You loved him, didn't you?" Gwen pressed.

"Gwen, I don't think you should be nailing her with questions like this" Miles said, looking worried.

"No, we need to know"

"We really don't"

"You love him" Gwen ignored Miles, stepping closer to me causing me to step back.

"I.."

"Gwen, stop it"

"Your hesitation just confirms it. You fell in love and he killed you for it" Gwen stated.

"Gwen!" Miles scolded, not believing she had just said that.

I looked down solemnly. "Death is never our own decision" I said.

"You poor AI" Gwen sighed, turning to Miles. "Does Miguel know she's awake?"

"Let's hope not."

Part Two

[okkotsuus]

CHASING MEMORIES (satoru g. + suguru g.) !

features: satoru gojo ... suguru geto

contents: tw. spoilers. death. major character death. reader death. grief. loss. blood. descriptions of wounds. crying. unrequited love. killing. toxic relationship (technically). 1.5k words.

tagging: @saeonara

notes: this is lowk doodoo poopy but idc i wrote it at 1am as a cry for help, someone save me from stsg angst brainrot.

loving suguru geto is the kind of experience that is ingrained into every fiber of your being. it works its way into every waking thought. it contaminates every last drop of cursed energy in your body. loving suguru geto is an all consuming thing: more potent than any disease to every afflict a human.

the way his eyes shine when they finally reach you. the way his voice sings your name like the sound of the morning birds. the sound of his laughter that choruses like windchimes. these things never leave you. no matter how hard you may try.

this is a truth to this world that satoru gojo would learn far too late.

many things had caught satoru gojo unaware during his youth: toji fushiguro’s strength, riko amanai’s death, and suguru’s defection. but once he reached twenty-seven, he had thought that he had it all figured out.

he was the strongest sorcerer, untouchable. he had a class full of students that would be able to lead the world one day. but most importantly, he had you.

you who lights up his world like the damn sun. you who is the single person he turns off his infinity for. you who he is able to allow his muscles to untense around. to satoru gojo, you were the world and every good thing in it; everything he ever needed and ever will need.

but, to you, satoru gojo was a stand-in. he would not realize this until that fateful day: the day he was caught unassuming once again.

satoru gojo looks upon high school with a fond sense of nostalgia, missing what was once. the only thing he doesn’t miss was your disregard to him. the you who would flutter around suguru like he was the earth to your moon. the you who looked at him with that sense of utter adoration in your e/c eyes. the you who loved his best friend and didn’t even think of him as a friend.

it was satoru gojo’s idea to not call you to help he and suguru with protecting the star plasma vessel, despite your cursed technique being the one thing that could have insured her life. oyt of jealousy, he wanted to part you and suguru for but three days. he would regret that decision for the rest of his mortal life.

when riko amanai died, a sense of guilt flooded him: knowing she died because of his selfishness. but suguru felt the same for himself: despite it being everything but his fault. satoru didn’t see it until it was far too late. but you did.

you saw the tire in suguru’s eyes as the light in him died. you saw him begin to wither away, not lifting a fork to raise sustenance to his mouth unless you practically begged him to. you saw the way his hair and skin grew dull, lips cracking and oozing saccharine lifeblood. it was only you that was able to see him spiral from the very beginning.

then, that night when suguru left for that mission in the countryside: deep down, you knew he would not return. because you knew suguru geto in the way that newborn babies know how to breathe. in the way that the plants know the sun’s sweet, amber glow. in the way that the river rocks knew the gentle lap of crystal-blue rapids. you knew suguru geto in the way that nobody would ever know anything.

and that’s what made it hurt.

for a long while, you found yourself unable to do anything after he left. you would find yourself switching between crying in shoko and satoru’s arms, even masamichi on rare occasions. to you, suguru was the world. you thought of suguru how satoru thought of you.

what you didn’t know, was that suguru had tried to come back for you. on a night where you weeped against satoru’s blazer for the nth hour, suguru geto was at the window. but satoru knew, his six eyes picked him up almost instantly. again, he chose to be selfish, clutching you tighter where suguru could see. satoru doesn’t recognize the person he was during this exact moment: breaking his own best friend’s heart and preventing his one love from seeing him.

a part of you left with suguru, what remained of you was cherished by satoru like a flower. slowly, over years, you allowed your heart to open, to love satoru gojo. but never once did you love him like you loved suguru geto. somewhere in himself, he knew, but he stamped that feeling so far down that it wouldn’t see the light of day. until, today.

today when your e/c eyes meet suguru geto’s once again. but this time, it would truly be the last time. he was a mess, disheveled and bleeding out in a way you knew would be unable to be healed: even by the one and only ieri shoko.

you crashed to your knees at his side, feeling your kneecaps shake for the briefest moment under your skin from the force. fat tears rolled down your cheeks, crying like you had never cried before. satoru knew he shouldn’t interfere, but he, selfishly, stands just within ear and eyeshot.

words pour from your lips like a tsunami, confessions of everything you had felt these last ten years. desperately you press your hands against his wounds, deluding yourself that the pressure will stop the life from quite literally spilling out of him. your hands are warm and sticky with his blood, iron filling every breath you take in. suguru reeks of death before he even dies.

suguru just smiles, eyes creased as his lips pull. that does nothing to ease you, if anything it sends you more frantically pressing your body to his, begging him to hold on, to let you call shoko. his hands are the same, slightly calloused and oh-so warm, as they cup your cheeks.

“my love, there is no saving me.” his words shake you, not in the way of being told something you didn’t know; but rather, in the way of being told something you had been desperately trying to deny. you weep, silently, allowing the only man you have only truly loved to find the last bit of strength in himself to push you off of him.

satoru begins to realize the truth at that point. he helps you onto your shaky legs, leading your outside the alley and propping you against the brick wall. only then he returns to his best friend’s side to finish the job.

words cannot describe what satoru feels, every memory of his childhood swarming him. the world cruelly forces him to be the one to end suguru’s life, lest he become a cursed spirit. they exchange their final words, suguru uttering well wishes for you and him: something satoru finds almost ironic now. then, he’s dead, but satoru cannot bring himself to destroy his body: nor can he ask you or shoko to.

satoru leaves that alleyway to hold you against him: needing to find out if what he had known all along was true. but all he finds is you crumpled against the ground: not a single injury on you. 

it is at this moment he remembers the part of you he overlooked. your cursed technique was called: life link, it allowed you to link two souls together through your cursed energy. slowly, the realization set in, in the years he had known you: he had never sensed your cursed energy to be at full.

he sees it all now: everything the six eyes had told him, everything he denied. the way you would look at him when he goofed off, as if you were looking right through him. the way you would always want to make sure he had eaten, that he slept. the way you never once spoke of suguru to him. it was all because you never got over suguru geto.

it was in that moment that satoru gojo realized that you never loved him. you loved the memory of a man that satoru reminded you of. he realized that you never looked at him: but rather the image of suguru geto that he embodied.

he doesn’t cry, he has known it the entire time, but it still aches in his chest as he stares down at your lifeless body. he remembers seeing the line of cursed energy that connected you to suguru geto all those years ago, but he denied it so vehemently that the six eyes stopped registering it. 

it was on this day: december 24th, 2017, that satoru gojo killed both his best friend and his lover.

okkotsuus 23

[goatsludge]

Picked up a Streamlight TLR-1 HL for the Ruger RXM

$155 all in, arrived in two days from Amazon prime. Despite being half the cost of the Surefire X300 Turbo, I'm really pleased with this thing.

Aside from the cost, I like the switchology much better than the Surefire lights - one position is constant on, the opposite rotation is momentary. On Surefire switches, both positions are constant on, the throw is a lot less smooth, and you have to press the tip of the switch to activate momentary, which is quite annoying.

The TLR-1's momentary switch also has a strobe function if you 'double-tap' it, which I don't really need, but it's cool that it's there. As far as output, it seems to be somewhere smack dab in the middle of the X300 Ultra and X300 Turbo, where it's much much higher candela with a more focused beam than the Ultra, but still has plenty of flood illumination compared to the pure spotlight of the Turbo series lights. A happy little intermediate.

Rail lockup is nice and solid thanks to the screw clamp, and it has the added benefit of being able to mount on carbines if somehow you don't have budget space for rifle-dedicated WML's (not me, of course lol). Comes with a bunch of alternate adapters for different pistols and their unique rail specs, but the default Glock rail adapter was the right size for the RXM.

At this point if Surefire doesn't warranty/replace my defective X200, I'll probably just resell it and get a second one of these for @bureau-of-mines.

[screams-n-shackles]

Encountering Truths - Hero / Villain Whump

After a long and exhausting day leader finally arrived home. It was already in the middle of the night and the light from the defective streetlamp was less than enough to lit the porch. But when leader climbed the steps to their front door they found the doormat slightly moved from it's original place. Not enough to raise the suspicion of others, but Leader instantly knew that something was up.

That someone got their hands on leaders key.

They already changed to their casual clothes so their gun was safely locked away. They resulted to their second best option and retrieved their emergency knife from their boot. This would have to make do.

Taking out their keys they slowly opened the door, ears trained to pick up any weird noise from inside the dark hallway.

A few Seconds passed in which leader waited for an attack only for nothing to come their way.

They opened the door completely and stepped into the darkness. Only the awful light from outside casting weird and flickering shadows, while they moved a few steps into their apartment.

Still no further noises except for the wind from outside and their own footsteps.

Leader decided to atleast close the door for the time being, so they gave it a light kick before they followed the floor to the living room.

Then, right before they set foot into the room they heard it.

Soft breathing. Barely audible and apparently a little bit strained. And it came from the couch.

Knife ready to slash into the flesh of the unwelcome intruder Leader slowly approached the couch, to encounter a figure draped over it.

Deep asleep. Or atleast good at faking it.

Due to the now nearly none existent light source they couldn't tell who or what decided to invade their very own home and save haven.

But that was an easy fix.

Knife prepared to hold off the unknown person, their other hand extended to the table next to the couch. Switching on a small lamp the living room was doused in a yellow shine.

And finally leader came to see their guest. More or less.

As they stared right into the cracked porcelain mask of Villain. Red stains were smeared all over, and before Leader decided to end it once and for all, their eyes slipped to the torso of villain.

Which was covered in bandages died red from the bleeding. Blood that was probably also soaking the couch right now.

"Allright. What the hell, Villain?", was the first mumbled wonder leaving leaders lips as they rounded the couch to inspect their newfound injured.

[odessastone]

NEW LIFEWEAVER AND SYMMETRA LORE BITS FROM "REBUILDING RUINS"

So I got my copy of Heroes Ascendant today and THERE WERE SO MANY GOOD LITTLE MOMENTS IN THIS STORY I MUST gush I MUST

So here are some new bits of Symmetra and Lifeweaver lore that we got! I bolded my personal favorite ones. 😚

(spoilers!)

Satya and Niran "grew up together" as friends, so they were friends in childhood too, not just at a teen or university age.

Apparently when Satya would get overstimulated and need recovery time, Niran would keep people away from their room and tell them she was sick so she didn't have to face anyone 😭

He also used to hang out and watch her practice her dancing for hours on end, without ever getting tired of it.

Satya considered (possibly still considers) Niran her closest friend.

Niran is late to everything (CALLED this one). He's even late for their meeting LOL

"He looked good. Satya almost wished he didn't." Bits like this are going to feed my Symweaver ass for YEARS

Satya is (still) extremely hurt by Niran leaving all those years ago, and perceives it as him having left her, not just Vishkar. She still misses him dearly, even though they've been apart for eleven years.

Speaking of which, being apart for eleven years means Niran was twenty when he left the Academy. For all you fellow fic authors out there 😊

Satya's autism is stated, full-out, no dancing around it or talking about being on "the spectrum". They flat out say "her autism" in a sentence. Cool!

One of Niran's first questions upon reconnecting with Satya is if Vishkar is mistreating her, if she needs help. Of course she denies this, but...

Niran can read Satya's emotions without her saying them, and even while thinking she's hiding them 😭 Several times throughout the story she's surprised because he cuts right through her stoic bullshit and gets right to how she feels about something.

The Architech Academy was really overwhelming for Satya, and it sounds like they made no effort to accommodate her needs. Unsurprising, considering they didn't accommodate Niran's, either.

Vishkar fiercely discouraged her from stimming, instilling in her a fear of looking "immature, or distracted, or rude, or strange".

She gave a speech at graduation, then had to spend a full week in bed afterward to recover from all the stress. And there was no Niran to guard her by then ☹

Even now, she finds many things about Vishkar overstimulating and uncomfortable, such as her uniform's fabric, and her living quarters.

Satya called Niran "Bua" way back when, possibly the first person to use the nickname for him. Partway through the story the narration (from Satya's POV) actually switches to calling him that, which is cute.

The Arcology seems to have uh, basically no real protection against attacks... Null Sector just shows up on a train and starts blasting lol. This is something I address in my fic The Light You Deserve, so it was kinda funny to see that I was right in predicting that.

She feels comfortable enough around Niran by the end to stim around him without realizing it (apparently she taps her fingers together and twirls her hands in circles, I guess kind of like flapping). She immediately stops and is embarrassed when he points it out, but Niran encourages her instead. She then uncertainly stims in front of him, growing more relaxed and confident as she lets herself do so (this had to be my favorite part of the story).

Toward the end they double down on Satya's belief that she can change Vishkar from the inside (girl....) but then at the VERY end, Niran suggests she look more into the founder of Vishkar and his ideals, and then says that "The Arcology will be delighted to have you". SHE MIGHT DEFECT TO THE ARCOLOGY IN CANON AND BE WITH NIRAN HHHHH AAAA sorry this was supposed to be an unbiased list I'm cool I'm cool

AAAAAA I'M NOT COOL I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

THIS WAS EVERYTHING I COULD HAVE WANTED IN A STORY BETWEEN THEM okay minus the random Null Sector attack tbh that was weird

Anyway the very last line says that Satya now has "whenever she needed it, a friend to return to". So they're definitely gonna interact more going forward!!