#the deciever catalyst

[im-stuck-again]

i sure am in an ancestor mood lately

[rozonrozark]

1- soooooo about Bread growing feathers... Was it a one time thing or something permenent? Since Adrien alergic to feathers will he get sneezy around her? That might be one last fuck you from wish lmao.

2- We know wish forces cat miraculous wearers to always be against Order, since Order is gone does that mean they can finally take some steps to fix their relationship?

3- I feel like every hero's secret identity (other than Bread and Adrien) is known by their family. Nora seemed like she was about to punch and drag her sister in safety but held back because of... reasons...

4- (Early Discovery au) Can we say marriage counseling can save the Paris? That au spesificly is very funny to me because its just a rich family failing to communicate properly while looking for an underage girl with most inconvient ways possible so they can recieve magic macarons. Meanwhile Adrien stares at his parents who is one argument away from divorce, nods then leaves. Magical chibi sized gods are here too i guess.

5- Watching inside out then reading the series made me realise if we could see Mari's head anxiety would hold the reins in her head. Poor girl.

6- (joke) How much more time needs to pass for Plag to be able to ask for child support? Can he claim he raised his kitten? Will he and Tom fight against each other? Will he get much much emotional during important events in Bread's life compared to canon Adrien's? (okay last one wasnt really a joke)

7- (Early Discovery au) I noticed Mari was quite nervous while talking to Adrien... Was it because she is afraid of possible backlash or she is really uncomfortable about trying to decieve him? I feel like it's more likely social awkwardness but there is more...

8- (Early discovery au) Emilie seems very insecure as a mother. Is there any spesific event that caused that?

9- Let's assume Wishmaker gave Mari her childhood dream. How much different it would be compared to canon? And how much knowing it would screw Luka?

1: The feathers are magic so, maybe they are non-allergenic. Yes it is a partial F U from the wish but it is more just the punishment of using the combined Catalyst.

2: Misterbug is no longer under the Wish's influence that does not mean that the Wish is gone. Remember Feast was defeated...

3: Nora held back at that time due to not being a hundred percent certain and needing to confirm it. It would have been very awkward/rude if she was wrong after all.

4: For the most part yes, marriage counseling could save Paris. At least for a bit, I won't say much but Emilie does still need her medicine. Adrien is in the background with the kwami getting there help.

5: Anxiety is working overtime in Marinette's head. Meanwhile Fear has a conspiracy board set up and Sadness's has a room full of memories.

6: Plagg will have a full legal battle so he can get custody! His lawyer, a clever fox named Trixx is more than ready to help! The rest of the kwami are getting tissues and will have a party for her at each major millstone.

7: A bit of both. She was walking into a situation that could have easily backfire, Marinette hates lying/deceiving people but there was also a third thing. This Marinette hasn't had any good social situations with anybody in a long time.

8: Well, she is slightly insecure because she started to release that she wasn't the best mother before the events of the series. Remember she was fully onboard with essentially isolating her son and now whenever Adrien has trouble with social situations or connecting with people Emilie blames herself.

9: Hmm, now that is a question. On one hand younger Marinette would still have the wish of being the knitting fairy due to how young she was back then. However, that wish would be overshadowed by her other childhood wish of being the best cat hero and making Plagg proud of her! So she would become Super Cheshire! As for Luka if the first situation happened he would investigate who Cheshire's civilian identity is then proceed to be horrified by what is going on followed by being beyond pissed at Juleka for her part in this girl's broken heartsong.

[amplesalty]

Halloween 2023 - Day 7 - Halloween Ends (2022)

Does Halloween End with a bang or a whimper?

So, not quite Day 31 but this is indeed Halloween Ends in every sense of the word. Not just the season but the very franchise itself…sort of. But we'll come back to that. This is the last of the David Gordon Green directed trilogy, a man who has taken a sharp turn into horror in the last few years after that little stretch into stoner comedy back in the late 00's, early 10's. After this trilogy, he's moved onto The Exorcist with the newly released Believer, with another sequel Deciever planned in 2025. That seems to have opened to fairly poor reviews so we'll see if they'll make it to that next sequel. I kinda fell off that franchise after the third one but since we've wrapped up Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St, there might be room for it to slip into the schedule.

Speaking of poor reviews, I remember this time last year when this was getting a lot of negative feedback. I managed to keep myself at a distance in terms of plot, trailers etc and only really had a vague sense of the feedback to go on where the word 'weird' kept coming up, in that it's weird for a Halloween film. That is something I would agree with but, for me, it's a good weird.

Does it reflect badly on me that the opening of this movie elicited a laugh from me? Not like a belly laugh or anything, I do tend to have this almost nervous laugh as an immediate reaction to something that should be considered scary or intense. And there's perhaps little more intense than a guy dropkicking a door open straight into the face of an 8 year old who is sent flying down a multi-storey building to his untimely death. Geez, this movie isn't fucking about, is it? Kids don't die in a Halloween movie, Michael Myers has at least some standards. Maybe that's what people were complaining about?

But the curious case of young Corey Cunningham, a young kid just trying to get through college before this accident sends his life into a tailspin is just the catalyst for the ever spiraling events of the movie but he's also a shining example of the kind of world building that I've come to love about these new movies. There's this idea that's brought up that for a town that has been living in the shadow of Michael Myers and his crimes for the last 40 years, and lest we forget still living in fear that he's still on the loose somewhere, Corey is the monster that the townspeople can see. He's the one that they can point their fingers at and unleash their angry energy towards. Arguably you're never going to have a good time of it if you kill a child, accident or no accident, but I like the idea that it's so much worse for him given that this is Haddonfield and it's residents are at the end of their tether with this whole thing.

Without wanting to delve too much into other people's criticisms at this stage before logging my thoughts, I am curious how much of it is down to the lack of Michael and the emphasis on Strode family drama, which is obviously something I was wanting them to lean into more in the 2018 Halloween so I was on board when it started playing out that way here. 'Where's Michael' is always the initial criticism of something like Halloween 3 and he is very much a peripheral character here. Or maybe it's more that as a movie presumably built up as this grand finale and a final showdown between Michael and Laurie, which we do get, felt like it was tacked on in a 'Okay, you sat through the meat and veg of our spin on Halloween so he's here's your treat.' Without going through the trailers and hype going into the movie I'm unsure if that's how they were building it but that's certainly the impression I got from the end of Halloween Kills.

After a run in with some punk kids, Corey is introduced to Laurie's granddaughter Allyson at the local hospital and the pair hit it off, a duo of nihilists whose trouble backgrounds seem to serve as a bit of a bonding experience. She's the survivor of a homicidal maniac, people think he is a homicidal maniac, they're just a perfect fit as they wallow in their collective misery and intent to watch the world burn.

But after another run in that leaves Corey injured, he's dragged into some sewers by a shadowy figure that we come to learn is Michael who promptly strangles Corey to near death but seemingly lets go. Michael is shown to be frail at times so did he just lose his strength, did Corey break free or did Michael see something in this youngsters eyes that made him set his victim free?

It's something that Laurie sees as well, particularly when Corey starts lurking outside her house like he's The Shape from 40 years ago. But as on the ball as she is, you do sound like the boy who cried wolf when you start protesting that he's 'just like Michael Myers' which is something you've been bleating on about for the past four decades. It's kinda like that meme about Boss Baby, when you spend your life fixated on Michael Myers then you're probably going to get a lot of Michael Myers vibes from this…

The only thing I am iffy on is the relationship between Corey and Michael. Corey is played off as this young apprentice of sorts but it's not as if Michael is readily accepting of help, even Dr. Sartain in 2018 he killed off pretty much the first chance he got even though they were meant to be buddy buddy. There are times when it looks like Corey thinks he's in control of Michael, which is probably just in his head, but there's moments when he's doing weird things with his hands and due to the scar he has, I did wonder briefly if they were going for some weird mark of the Cult of Thorn type thing here. I guess it is just this weird connection between them, like Michael understands this shared anguish they have or maybe a sort of 'passing the torch' thing given Michael's advancing years. Or maybe he just recognizes a greater evil than himself, like I said, even Michael knows when to draw the line when it comes to child murder so he's just paying his respects to Corey.

And I guess the ending in a way I'm a bit iffy on as well, specifically the Laurie/Michael showdown. I get that they felt obligated to include it, you probably would have had people rioting in the streets if you didn't show that after these 3 movies, never mind all the other ones in the franchise and especially given this is likely the last chance saloon for the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis. But the vibe I got from Halloween Kills was that there never was this connection between the two that Laurie seemed to play out in her head, it's all just some cosmic coincidence that she happened to be the one all those years ago so it seemed like plot convenience that Michael just happened to make his way out into the world now to track her down.

But the actual ending itself I really like because, spoiler warning, not only does she incapacitate him and slit pretty much every available appendage, they make sure this fucker is never coming back by taking him to a giant metal grinder that they promptly feed him into. Unless he's planning on reassembling the quivering piles of jelly T-1000 style, this guy is deader than he's ever been. Granted, they stopped short of burying whatever bits are left in a concrete filled coffin 2 miles beneath the Earth's surface like I would but they put a good shift in.

In the build up to that moment though, there's this whole procession where everyone in town shows up to witness this momentous occasion. Even when the cops look on uneasy about what's about to play out, like this isn't in the rule book, the sheriff from Halloween Kills shows up to stress that tonight it is. The whole moment is very cathartic, not only for the viewer in that we've finally seen good triumph over evil, but for the entire town of Haddonfield. Even if his timeline has been retconned six ways from Sunday over the years, it's almost as if every resident from every possible continuity is here to finally witness the moment his corpse is destroyed so they can get some closure on the vast body count he must have built up over these last 40 years.

So, whilst I can appreciate that people going into this movie last year with all that hype behind it might feel like they were on the end of a bait and switch, I really loved this. I've said it til I'm blue in the face over the years that slasher movies can be very hit and miss for me and something like Friday the 13th just bores me to tears. Something like Terrifier that I watched this year, it felt like it was just going for the immediate, visceral reaction but trying to be as gory as possible for cheap pops. But it hadn't earned the real weight behind those deaths because these are just disposable characters. When you have people like Dr. Loomis or Laurie Strode who bring some actual gravitas to proceedings, they can actually make you care, there are actual stakes involved and you're not just cheering for the bad guy and waiting for him to stab Camp Councillor #12.

If you want your bog standard slasher movie, go nuts. I'm sure there's hundreds of them out there. Hell, there's like a dozen other ones in this series alone so I'm all for when one of them wants to try something different. If someone wants to mix their indie, moody, coming of age teen drame in with Halloween then I'm all for it. It certainly has a unique atmosphere to it unlike anything in the series, it put me in mind of something like It Follows in artistic terms, the look and feel to it as well as that general overarching look at these younger characters and their lives being shaped by these traumatic events. Here we have this culmination of movies that has been building up Haddonfield as this deeply toxic place where misery is just a way of like and everyone in it almost seems cursed, with two characters specifically that have every reason in the world to want to get out, with things in their lives ripped away from them in harrowing events but ever after all of that, they feel trapped and bound to this place and unable to break free.

And what does the future hold for Halloween as a franchise when everyone has ridden off into the sunset, quite literally in Laurie's case? Well, everyone seems content for now to let things lay but considering the number of reboot and remakes we've been through, whose to say this will ever truly be over? This is easily one of the biggest franchises in horror, if not the biggest, so it's not going to lay dormant forever. This timeline might be over but I'm sure someone somewhere will start a new one in 5-10 years. Hell, multiverses are all the rage, they'll probably end up drawing in all the different iterations of Michael for some monster mash. And that's just speculation on the future of the silver screen, because we've already had word this month that Miramax has won the TV rights for Halloween so we'll be seeing that before too long.

But, for now, we must retire our Halloween cap as we look forward to the next major event of Christmas and the hopes that I might make the effort to round up the full dozen reviews this year. We live in hope…

[aye-write]

An aye-write Guide to Inciting Incidents!

Ah, the good old inciting incident. The proverbial snowball, the catalyst, the call to action, whatever you want to call it, the inciting incident has a simple function: to change the status quo

In other words, the inciting incident is what sets your story in motion. It’s an event that forces your main character(s) on the journey that will occupy them for the rest of the story. A status quo is essentially the “normal life” for your main character before things change. 

.-.-.  

Let’s consider some questions about the inciting incident. These were all things that I, at one point or another, struggled with when it came to writing. 

Is the inciting incident the same as the hook?  Not generally! Exceptions exist of course - some inciting incidents technically happen before the book even starts, and some start as early as the first page, but generally they’re different things. The hook is your attention grabber, something that immediately engages you right at the beginning of the story, usually your first line or first paragraph. 

The inciting incident isn’t usually what draws your reader into the novel, the inciting incident is the point where the reader decides not to put down your novel. Or as my partner says, the hook is what pulls you into the room, the inciting incident locks the door behind you. 

.-.-.  

Is the inciting incident done TO or done BY the protagonist? Both happen, but external force is the most common kind of inciting incident: the mysterious letter arrives, the stranger appears, the murder is commited, the partner leaves suddenly, the job ends, the aliens descend, the King dies, the treasure is stolen, etc.

But as above, this isn't always the case! Some inciting incidents are definitely character driven.

.-.-.  

Must the inciting incident be a negative event?  Nope! As long as the event changes the status quo, it's still an inciting incident! It can be as much a positive event - winning the lottery, achieving something, gaining superpowers, having a first kiss - as a negative one.

.-.-.  

Does the inciting incident have to be a BIG event? Not at all! Many people choose the inciting incident to be quite an eventful thing: Hagrid telling Harry he’s a wizard, Lucy discovering Narnia in the wardrobe, Katniss volunteering for the Hunger Games, etc., but this is not always the case. It will depend very much on the genre and tone of your story, but as long as your inciting incident signals change, it does not have to be a massive event.

.-.-.   

Should the inciting incident happen in the first chapter? Nope, it doesn’t have to! It can - but you’ve got lots of options! One thing worth keeping in mind, especially with short chapters, is that because an inciting incident deals with the change of status quo, doing it in chapter one can be tricky. A change may not mean as much if we aren’t invested in the characters.

.-.-.  

So when SHOULD it happen?  There are two answers here! One short answer is that an inciting incident usually falls between 10-15% of the book. However, the longer answer is simply that... it depends! Genre, pacing, and tone will influence when your inciting incidents happen. 

.-.-.

Benefits of Earlier Inciting Incidents

Quicker overall pacing

Quick immersion into the plot

Benefits of Later Inciting Incidents

Helps readers acclimatise to worlds (good for fantasy and sci-fi) 

Helps us get to know characters more (good for multi POV/large casts)

A slow build up can build tension (good for suspense/horror) 

As with everything in writing, there are traditions and expected conventions, and any deviation from the “norm” can be very effective! Remember every writing guideline can be broken or bent :) As long as your inciting incident signals a change in some way and propels your MC into action, you should be good no matter where you choose to place it! 

.-.-.

So what should an inciting incident achieve?

Change the status quo The inciting incident should signal change, upset something, unbalance something, propel a character into motion/action. 

Create questions for the reader The inciting incident should introduce the central problem of the story. What will happen to your characters because of this inciting incident? What adventures/mysteries will come to attention because of it?

Generate some sense of urgency The inciting incident should introduce some jeopardy, some stakes, the ticking clock in response to the event. Remember – the inciting incident is the call to adventure, not the adventure itself. It is a signal that things are about to change.

.-.-.  

Cool! Can It Do Anything Else?

Illustrate key aspects of character(s) How your character reacts to the inciting event gives us an idea of their personality, their values, goals, strengths and weaknesses.

Set the tone for your story  You can use the inciting incident to indicate things like mood and atmosphere which you will follow up over the course of the story.

.-.-.

Inciting Incident and the Link to Story’s End Another handy-dandy thing an inciting incident can do is refer forwards to the story’s end. Knowing how your story will end, climax or conclude is very important to an effective inciting incident, as the two must be related in some way.

For example:

Status Quo: Maria is in love with Lucille.

Inciting Incident: Maria believes Lucille is going to ask her out, but instead, she asks out Maria’s best friend - Emily. Maria now has to try to navigate her friendship with Emily - all the while still being in love with Lucille.

Story’s End: The conclusion of the character is signposted to us to be about all three of these characters, indicating perhaps a confrontation? Maybe a love triangle? Or perhaps a polyamory relationship? It could be anything - but the important thing to note is this: whatever interrupts our protagonist enough to change the status quo must keep a permanent impact. Don’t decieve your readers by making the inciting incident and ending unrelated. 

Obviously, this is a very simplified explanation and storyline, but the essence remains the same. A strong inciting incident will be made all the stronger by knowing, and referring to, your climax/conclusion.

.-.-.

Inciting Incident Checklist 

Does it change the status quo? 

Does it generate questions?

Does it create urgency? 

Does it tell you anything about the characters?

Does it tell you anything about the tone of the story? 

Does it tip its hat to the story’s conclusion?

[zinogirl]

I’ve got some ideas about which of Savathuns lines are truths, and which are lies

Insight

Savathun is in control of Io, Titan and Mercury - Truth: I think sava brought mars back

The Witness returned Mars from the Void - Lie: see above

The Guardians will soon learn to move planets - Truth: its a possible second darkness subclass to be learned during Lightfall

The Taken King will return - Lie: he’s dead, and if they do bring him back it’ll be as a Nightmare, or some duplicate

Catalyst

The Enigma is one key to defeating the Witness - Truth: using the relic, and the enigma, will give us key information regarding the Witness, and how to defeat it

The Witness seeks the Final Shape, which is nothing - Truth: The Final Shape is what the Witness has taught all of it’s disciples to seek. Unless it’s decieving them, it stands to reason it also seeks this.

The Last City is not the last city - Lie: we have no proof regarding this either which way.

The Witness will build its army on Mars - Lie: why not build its army within the void? or the ascendant plane?

Pact

Osiris is dead - Lie: we have definitive proof of this. He’s alive, though in something akin to a coma. His body’s alive, but his mind is adrift.

Savathun is dead - Truth: we killed her, but failed to kill her ghost, Immaru

The Witness created the Darkness - Truth: I have nothing to add here.

Your Destiny lies beyond the Solar System - Lie: It’s here or nowhere tbh

Choice

The Traveler will leave - Truth: Eventually, if all things settle

The Traveler will fall - Lie: I dont have a reason

The Traveler is not the only one of its kind - Lie: We have no proof regarding this, But the traveller we know is the very same one that blessed the residents of Fundament, billions of years ago. How likely is it that if it ISN’T the only one, that that same traveller would come to bless us.

The Hive are not the last to be chosen by the Light - Truth: If the traveller leaves, it’ll bless others. Also, it’s not the traveller directly, but ghosts, that choose.

[fromthefishbowl]

Oh i love you for saying Lazaefair's name outloud.Not just you, I appreciate everyone in this fandom who had the guts to call her out.I understand people who are hesitant to call her out, cause she's a snake who have an exceptional knack in gaslighting and turning anything and everything in her favour. Lazaefair, Len and their cronies have hurt so many people inside and outside tog fandom and i won't be surprised if people come out saying they had suicidal thoughts because of these people.These racist antisemitic people needs to be called out ( and i loved the way how you mentioned the cronies without saying their name) . Their 'All and more' discord server is the most toxic racist discord in this fandom cause all they do is cover up all the racist and antisemitic bullshit done by their mods. (well, people do have reciepts of all the things they said in that server)

They should be held accountable for the things they did. They should apologize for every horrid things they did to poc, muslims,jews, writers, content creators and even fans.

Then there are the 'silent ones' ( theres a lot) or the blind devotees (yeah they too follow lazaefair and lens bible) who just keeps on making their cute little posts and a reblogging posts as if nothing happened in this fandom. All i have to say is they are straight up racist. Its like they are all part of this cult.

I am really holding myself back from naming the cronies because its not my place.But they all need to be called out by their victims.

Remember these people have been decieving and bullying people in the tog fandom for a year. For a YEAR they disguised as adults engaging in race conversations and fighting racism but they were like actual 12 year olds making "lists" and sending death threats to people.

But i have to warn you a particular "newb" or a different crony is gonna send you some death threats for mentioning lazaefairs name. Just be prepared to fight that anonymous 12 year old.

They better not start sending anon hate or threats or nasty comments, because everybody will know it's them and their reputation is already six feet under as is. Making it sink even lower would be embarrassing even for their standards.

And I have already mentioned this to a couple of friends, but... it's hysterical that these people are literally know for sending death and rape threats - across multiple fandoms too!!! -, pushing people out of fandom, harassing, bullying, and vagueblogging, and yet they took time to create a secret Discord server to recruit people into and "make the fandom great again" or some shit, as if they weren't the ones who ruined it in the first place - also by spreading actual misinformation and accusing actual MENA people of not telling the truth, with Lazaefair who worked real hard to spread the rumor that one of the MENA bloggers who were writing informative posts was actually an evil sockpuppet, and rejoicing when they wrote their last post before leaving fandom after receiving weeks worth of death threats, because we can't forget that! How dare anybody cross the ignorant American woman and her equally ignorant French bestie and their shit takes???

I was never in A&M, literally the only TOG servers I've ever been in are Top!Joe and the Zine one, but... if things are how people told me... whew, guys. And they are supposed to be the good guys? The righteous ones who put us on the right road and teach us how to be better people?

Them having a secret server also explains how it was possible that all the "big names" in the fandom who supported discourse, from Miss Finland to Miss Racefaker and their little cronies too, went real quiet just before the beginning of Pornathon and the day the event began they suddenly began yapping and whining about racism again, reblogging from each other, spitting out the same two takes - I loved, loved, when I pinned Len down when she was trying to shit on people for being """antisemitic""" and reminded her that Lazaefair is actually antisemitic, and Len pretended that she didn't know her lmao. If I were Lazaefair, just for that I would've thrown her under the bus as soon as the exposé was posted. Now that I think about it... was I the catalyst that caused her to write that racist as hell post? The one with the MENA boys who conveniently look like Majid because that's totes how all MENA boys look like in Europe?

Here's the thing: you don't suddenly go online and become antisemitic or racist or xenophobic because you read rambling posts that barely make any grammatical and syntactic sense. You don't suddenly begin sending death and rape treats, insults, threatening people to post about them on KiwiFarms - someone is trying to be edgy here lmao - if you are a decent person. And you don't go out of your way to defend people who are. They were always shitty, they were always antisemitic and racist and awful people. Len and Lazaefair just gave them the authorization to let it all out.

And I agree with you: they absolutely should apologize for the shit they have done and said in the past months, but would that be enough? Would that repair the hurt they caused? Like... apologies are nice, but will they delete Len and Lazaefair's posts from their blogs? Write down that they are awful people who say awful things? Because at this moment I've seen a looooot of excuses but not a single apology - and I very much doubt that any is gonna come from any of them. Their little antisemitic, racist, xenophobic hearts cannot bear to have been proven wrong and that their savior is a flavorless, privileged French lady who is paler than the people they have harassed in her name - me included, which is so, so funny.

[ashfountainfanfics]

Eddie is released before Richie wakes up. The cop that took over in the morning didn’t say anything about Eddie and Richie sharing a bed for the night but Eddie could tell it made him uncomfortable. He looked a bit younger than Eddie and acted like discharging him was some awkward task to deal with. He never even looked Eddie in the eye.

This town doesn’t really change, does it? Eddie thinks as he starts the long walk back to the small inn he and the other Losers have taken temporary residence in.

Eddie was shocked that Richie didn’t even so much as stir when he left. He’s an incredibly heavy sleeper but he also cuddles like a fucking octopus. Eddie had to untangle a mess of long arms and legs to free himself. Richie’s entire body had been grappled onto every part of Eddie. For a minute Eddie thought he might need the jaws of life to get out.

The morning weather is cold but Derry always feels cold. Unless you happened to catch it in the full swing of summer, Derry is essentially an icebox disguised as a small town. Eddie zips up his hoodie and shoves his hands in his pockets.

‘You’ll catch a cold, Eddie! You need a sweater and some thick socks!’

The echo of his mother’s voice makes his stomach surge. Eddie knows damn well that a chill breeze cannot possibly give him a cold but he can’t help the anxiety that rises from the thought. She used to say other nonsensical shit too like a cold can kill a man if you don’t treat it right away or that being too close to the microwave would give a person cancer.

It didn’t stop at radiation and weather either. Mrs. Kapsbrack had fully decieved her son into a number of lies about sex too. Masturbation makes you blind, having sex can kill you, touch it too much and it’ll fall off; Sonia Kapsbrack had the entire discography of abstinence only rhetoric on loop.

Eddie knows logically that none of these things are true but he knows it now. For two solid decades of his life he had believed his mother. He thought her word was gospel. Even in his twenties, it took time to come around to the truth because, what if the world was wrong and Sonia was right? Could he risk that?

Eddie spitefully unzips his jacket.

By the time Eddie was in his mid thirties he knew better but the paranoia lingers even today. In the time he’d been married to Myra he can count on one hand the amount of times they’ve had sex. Really it comes down to a once a year event and one Eddie never looks forward to. Bless Myra, she really tried sometimes but for the rare occasions of fancy home cooked meals and lingerie Eddie ended up losing his appetite and turning off all the lights. Myra got ten minutes of action annually while Eddie never managed to get off. Myra never was happy with that but Eddie wonders if she’d been happy with anything in their marriage.

Eddie shrugs out of the jacket and doesn’t look back as it slides off into the street.

Eddie might have had options. He may have had several people interested in him at any given moment but he was raised with blinders on and marriage ensured those blinders stayed. Eddie realizes that he never had the awareness, let alone the confidence to pursue anyone except Myra. His mother had led him into near celibacy through his hypochondriac training. If she hadn’t died would Myra have ever been a thing? Or would he still be a virgin even now?

Maybe Eddie could like Richie. Maybe men weren’t off the menu for Eddie Kapsbrack but how is he to know that when even the default of heterosexuality was taught as a dirty and unfortunate? And poor Myra, poor fucking Myra. Eddie’s going to leave her and because of his dead mother who shouldn’t have had anything to do with his marriage but Sonia Kapsbrack is the catalyst for all of it. Everything Eddie is, everything he never chose to become, is because of her.

Eddie takes off his shirt and drops it as he starts running in the cold morning air. The breeze smothers his chest, perks his nipples and sends shivers down his spine. The cold hurts a little but tells him he’s alive.

A memory of his last visit to a therapist surfaces as catches himself on the kissing bridge. He takes a few deep breaths and remembers. It was grief therapy which he was sure made his mother turn in his grave but Myra had suggested it. Sonia may have hated therapists and shrinks but Myra swore by them.

After a single session, the therapist calmly asked if Eddie had ever heard about the term ‘emotional incest.’ After a quick explanation, Eddie chose never to return to therapy ever again. Eddie is horrified and enraged as he stands on the bridge now and lets out a primal scream because Sonia Kapsbrack really did it. She committed emotional incest and Eddie feels the violation of it rack over his body.

‘Eddie, you can’t go out.’

‘Eddie, girls like that carry diseases.’

‘Eddie, don’t get too close, he might have AIDS.’

‘Eddie, you’ll never leave mommy right? You wouldn’t want me to die alone.’

And he had done just that. He stayed with her the entirety that their lives intersected. He even held her hand and watched cancer thin her down to skin and bones until there was nothing left. He never had a choice.

‘Eddie, you have to wear socks even inside. You could get sick.’

Eddie steps out of his shoes and pulls his socks off. He throws them into the barrens with as much force as he can muster. The asphalt under his feet is rough and unforgiving. He smiles and it’s manic and he keeps running.

---

Ben is waking up alone but he remembers not going to bed alone. Very clearly, he recalls Beverly and her soft mouth and her smooth curves. He took her in like she was sacred because to him she always had been. Last night had been spiritual experience because for so long Bev had only been a memory folded in a wallet. In a single night she went from paper to full flesh.

Keeping that yearbook page in his wallet had been like carrying around a religious artifact. So often it boosted the faith he needed to have in himself. It told him with little hearts and an old signature that he was worth looking at, worth helping, worth talking to. It had torn him apart to have thrown it in the fire but he’d burn a million memories if meant holding her.

As quickly as he had bedded her she’s gone though. Ben can still smell her soap on the sheets. It’s not the first time Ben’s woken up to an empty bed. It’s not as if he’s been celibate for the last twenty seven years. But he wasn’t very good at giving reasons for women to stay. It’s like they already knew his heart was somewhere else. Ben should be okay waking up to this familiar scene except...

“...Beverly?” he calls out softly, hoping that maybe she’s just in the bathroom.

There’s no response.

Ben gets himself showered and dressed. He can’t help but wonder if he’d done something wrong. Was having sex going too fast? It’s not like he declared his undying love for her but he supposes that he didn’t really need to. No one keeps a signature in their wallet for almost three decades because they’re just buddies.

Ben walks up to Bev’s door and hears her pacing and yelling. It’s a one sided conversation so Ben presumes she must be on the phone. Through the thin walls he can make out a few phrases and keywords. The words ‘divorce’ and ‘lawyer’ come up quite a bit. Against Ben’s better judgement, he presses his ear to the door to better listen in.

“You can have the business, you can keep the money but you can’t have me. Fuck you.”

Ben startles as it sounds like Bev has thrown her phone against the wall. Ben regrets invading her privacy but feels compelled to comfort her. It sounds like her husband is a real asshole and that the divorce is going to be messy. Ben isn’t sure what words to offer her.

Ben is about to knock on her door but then gets an idea. He makes a beeline to his room and rips a blank page out of the guestbook. He argues with himself the whole journey back to Bev’s door. He insists to himself that this is childish and unnecessary. She’ll think it’s stupid. It won’t help. Ben still sits down though and scribbles out a message.

You okay? - Ben

He gives the door a soft knock and slides the page underneath. A few minutes pass. It feels like the longest two minutes of Ben’s life and his insecurity bombards him. Of course this wouldn’t work. It’s dumb and foolish and Ben should know better. He’s a grown man after all.

The paper returns from under the frame.

No. - Bev

It’s an odd approach but at least it begets an honest answer. Ben uses the door as a writing surface. It’s shocking to think this method is even going anywhere but Ben figures it’s best to continue. At least Bev’s talking. He has a feeling that if he’d gone with the first choice and simply knocked that he wouldn’t have gotten far.

Is there anything I can do for you? Do you want to talk?

He stops signing it at this point. It’s not as if the whole gang is sitting in the hallway passing notes to Bev. This time it takes a lot longer for her to reply. Ben takes in the moulding on the door frame as he waits. Despite many of his designs taking a modern approach he really likes looking at the old stuff. He wonders briefly how he might create designs with modern benefits but a nostalgic look. The note slide out slowly this time.

I’m sorry I left.

Ben appreciates the sentiment but he has a thousand questions to ask about it. If Bev is sorry then why did she do it? Did something happen? Did Ben mess up? Did he hurt her or make her feel unsafe? All of this takes a backseat to the present situation though.

You have a lot on your mind. I want to help. Can I come in?

Ben stands to his feet as he hears the latch on the other side coming undone. Beverly is red faced but composed. She’s in a bathrobe and slippers. By the door he sees the tennis shoes he’d picked up for her yesterday after she’d thrown all her clothes from earlier in the day away. He knows she’s only using them out of necessity but he likes to think that maybe she likes them. He chose a pair that was black and burgundy. He remembered that Bev liked burgundy.

“You’re really nice,” Bev says quietly.

“I don’t try to be,” Ben shrugs and tell himself not to move in and hold her, “I’m just me”

“I know. That’s what I love about you.”

Ben smiles at the word ‘love’. He can’t help it. Bev smiles back and Ben falls in love with her all over again. She’s so much more than beautiful. She’s strong and kind and smart. Ben always secretly regarded her as the real leader of the group. He loves Bill and, yes, they often all followed him but secretly Ben followed Beverly. He’d follow her anywhere if she only asked.

“Ben,” her smile falters, “I’m going through something right now. It’s not easy and I’m trying to figure out who I am. You’re very sweet but I-”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Ben interrupts, already sensing where she’s going.

Ben understands that Bev’s life is complicated right now. He gets that maybe last night had some bad timing. He wants to say this but doesn’t. Something about the look in Bev’s eyes tells him that he doesn’t need to.

“All of this is on your terms,” he continues, “All I’m asking you is please, please, don’t shut me out.”

Bev wraps herself around Ben in a genuine embrace. She doesn’t cry but he can feel the emotions coming off of her in waves. Anger, fear, even sadness sheds from her as he holds her. He absorbs those feelings, welcomes them even, because it doesn’t hurt. Ben’s nose rests on her fiery colored hair as he processes those emotions for her,

“I got you,” he whispers into her hair, “You’re not alone, Bev.”

---

Richie is a free man.

Roger barely needed to work much lawyer magic and like a trooper he rolled right into the station the second he got into town. Grand total it took about an hour for Roger to convince Detective Lopez to let Richie go.

“How’d you get her to listen? I mean I’ve played some tough crowds but this chick was like a concrete wall,” Richie questions his lawyer.

Roger is exhausted and doesn’t answer right away. He seems half asleep at the wheel and it occurs to Richie how much his team cares about him. Even with the decent dollar signs attached to Richie, it’s worth noting that Roger drove through the night just for him. But then Richie’s had the same team since the beginning and they’ve known him since he was an eighteen year old little snot doing standup at open mic.

“It was easy,” Roger answers with a yawn, “I didn’t bullshit her. Made sure she knew it was a waste of resources to go after you.”

Richie definitely senses the emphasis of the word ���bullshit’ aimed at him. He lets it slide though because he’s so deeply relieved not to be going to court or to jail for that matter. Richie knows damn well that he wouldn’t last a single night in the big house. He’d absolutely piss off the wrong person and either end up dead or somebody’s bitch. Richie doesn’t ever care to find out which.

“You’ll love the bed and breakfast we’re at,” Richie says as he looks out the window of Roger’s car, “and by love I mean hate. It looks like someone’s great aunt threw up upholstery. But it’s a place to sleep right? And once you’re rested you’ll come bail out ol’ Billy boy this afternoon.”

“Yeah, Richie, about that…”

“What?”

Roger looks incredibly guilty as he follows the GPS’s last instruction. He parks on the street and shuts the car off. Richie doesn’t like where this is going.

“Look, kid,” Roger sighs, “I meant it when I said I’d come back for your friend this afternoon but it’s not to get him out. I’m going back to talk out his story and see if I can prove him innocent.”

Richie feels bile rising up his throat. He can’t stand his stomach and the way it refuses to sit with anything terrible. Roger is equal parts apologetic and resigned. His bald head has the smallest bit of sweat on it, his mustache obscures any expression in his lip but his eyes say it all.

“You lied to me,” Richie is furious nonetheless.

“No. No, I never said I was coming back for anything specific. I said I was coming back for him I never said why.”

“Oh fuck you, Roger! A lie by omission is still a lie, you prick!”

“Hey! I got you out didn’t I?” Roger gets defensive now, “And I am going back for the other guy! I don’t have to do that, Richie, but I am. For you.”

Richie absorbs this in and pulls back his anger. Roger pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes the sweat from his forehead. Richie has no reason to doubt the man but air between them still asks for further explanation.

“Detective Lopez doesn’t have much choice except to arrest Bill and send him to court,” Roger explains, “A kid died, Richie. The pressure from his parents alone is enough to force her hand let alone the rest of the community. Who ever heard of a small town brushing off a dead child?”

“You don’t know Derry,” Richie replies sarcastically.

“Maybe you don’t. Maybe the Derry you grew up in and the Derry that exists now are different. Who am I to say? I don’t know and I don’t care much either. My condolences to the deceased and all but I’m certain your buddy didn’t do it. If he’s as good as you say he is I believe you and I’ll help him out.”

“I could hug you right now.”

“Oh, Jesus, spare me the theatrics, Richie.”

“Nope. We’re hugging. Come here.”

Roger makes a show of not reciprocating at first but then relents and pats Richie on the back. In many ways, Roger is like the lawyer uncle Richie never had. He sees him at holidays and when he’s in trouble. Really his whole team is like that, a family.

“I’m going to make a couple of calls before I head in,” Roger says before digging out his cell phone, “I remember a buddy of mine who used to teach had some super student from Maine. Henry Beaver or Reevers or something. Maybe he can give me an idea of what I’m working with in this state.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll go ahead and get you set up. Room’s on me.”

“You’re not deducting that from my pay.”

“Fuck you too, Roger.”

Richie leaves his lawyer to his calls. Luckily, the old lady who runs the place is available and manages to get a room together quickly. It’s the last one too. Richie is bouncing from nerves. He has confidence in Roger but he can’t help the nervousness bubbling up inside.

“His name is Roger Clemmings, just give him his key and let him up,” Richie explains, “he’s had a rough night.”

“Of course, dear,” the older woman answers.

Richie hears the front door opening behind him. He spins around, expecting Roger but instead finds Eddie half naked and shoeless. He’s shaking and completely out of breath.

“Eddie?” he rushes over to him out of concern and starts looking him over for injury, “Jesus Christ. What happened? Are you okay?”

“No. Yes. No. Yes and no.”

“Honey, do you need me to call the police?” the innkeeper asks, her hand already on the phone and ready to go.

“No. No. I’m fine. My whole world is falling apart but I’m fine.”

Richie takes off his coat and wraps it around Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie is having a full on mental breakdown and Richie is terrified. He tries to catch Eddie’s eyes with his own but they stare vacantly at nothing. Richie assures the woman behind the counter that he’ll see to Eddie.

Suddenly the door opens again. Roger is pulling in a suitcase and fumbling with a text message. He doesn’t see Richie and his shirtless friend but Richie panics. He grabs Eddie by the arm and pulls him into the nearest door. He crams into the tight space with him and shuts the door behind him all before Roger can see.

“Richie?” Eddie’s voice is close by in the dark.

Richie shushes him harshly. He listens as Roger chats up the older woman. She has the decency not to say anything about Richie’s sudden escape and Richie lets the momentary relief wash over him.

“Richie?” Eddie whispers this time.

“Yeah?”

“We’re in a closet.”

Richie would laugh if it wasn’t so painfully on the nose.

“Why are we in a closet?” Eddie expands.

“Oh, Eds, I wish I could answer that.”

The old woman and Roger are still talking. She’s chatting him up and Richie wants to take back every kind word he thought about her just seconds ago.

“Fuck,” Richie whisper screams, “what part about ‘just let him up’ doesn’t she understand?”

The closet Richie has trapped them in is housing a broom with dust pan and a handful of coats on one side. It smells a bit like mothballs and cinnamon. It’s not the worst place to inadvertently imprison oneself. Richie rests his forehead against the door and groans quietly.

“Richie?” Eddie asks again.

Richie turns toward his voice and instantly regrets his life choices. Because Eddie is so close. He’s too close. There’s maybe half an inch of distance between them. Richie’s insides split in two directions; wanting to get even closer and wanting to run away.

“...Eds” Richie answers finally.

Eddie puts his hands on Richie’s shoulder. Richie feels like that contact is going to cause him to pass out. Eddie’s fingers find the collar of Richie’s button up shirt and gently tug at him, collar and all, closer to Eddie.

“E- Eddie?” Richie’s old habits act up, “I know this is a romantic venue and all but-”

Richie doesn’t have time to diffuse the situation with humor because Eddie kisses him. He kisses him and-

This is fucking weird… Richie thinks.

Eddie’s lips are tightly lined. It feels almost like he’s grimacing. It’s as if he’s not committing to anything more than pressing his lips against Richie’s in the most non intimate way possible. Eddie stiffly ends the kiss and takes a half step back.

“Ah, okay,” Richie doesn’t know how to respond, “that, um, happened.”

“I didn’t feel anything…” Eddie says, sounding a thousand miles away.

“Well maybe if you didn’t kiss like mashing two dolls together!” Richie cries in his own defense,  “Jesus, who taught you to swap spit?”

“I kind of didn’t learn actually.”

Excuse me? Richie thinks as he thanks the dark for hiding his expression.

“I always thought kissing would get you herpes,” Eddie explains quietly, “and by the time I knew better it didn’t matter. I kissed my wife at our wedding but I don’t really. I don’t kiss often.”

This is absolutely horrifying information for someone like Richie who, on more than a few occasions, has referred to himself as a slut.

“Wait, you’re not a- are you a virgin, Eddie?”

“No, asshole!” Eddie says a bit too loudly.

Richie hushes him again. He brings an ear to the door of the closet and listens. He hears the old woman chuckling at something Roger said. He curses under breath. Richie is desperate to get out of this closet, out of this conversation. It’s so painfully awkward.

“Think about it, Richie,” Eddie brings the topic back up, “think about the kind of mom I had. She didn’t want me to roll around in grass what the fuck do you think she told me about taking a- a roll in the hay?”

“You did not just make a Young Frankenstein reference instead of saying the word ‘sex’,” Richie is at his wit’s end.

He might as well be a virgin, Richie thinks, I haven’t had virgin since I was a teenager.

“I’m pretty sure that that phrase is older than Young Frankenstein, just saying,” Eddie points out, “And if you’re  going to make fun of me then you can cancel our date thing. Fuck it. Fuck you”

“No!” Richie whisper yells.

Even after being told point blank that there’s no chemistry and that Eddie has been about as intimate as an artificial insemination, Richie isn’t ready to give up. Sure, it’s a little daunting to be faced with Eddie’s circumstances but who cares? What Richie saw in the final showdown, how he felt when he thought he lost Eddie for good, that means something. Richie can feel that in his goddamn guts.

“You really, really, don’t really know how this works?”

“Fuck you, asshole.”

“I’m seriously asking, Eds.”

Eddie mumbles his answer but Richie can tell it’s a yes. Richie decides to get down from his slutty high horse and really think about Eddie’s position. Richie knows what it’s like to wake up to sexuality. He’d slept with mostly women in his lifetime and he found it passable. It was about as thrilling as jerking off into a sock albeit far more comfortable. But men were a different story. 

Richie has slept with a man before and it threw his entire life out of whack. It was nearly a holy experience and it almost got him out of the closet. Almost. By then he already had an established career as a straight man though and the idea of losing his career wasn’t worth the risk. Not even his team knows about his true proclivities. Which now that Richie thinks about it is entirely the reason he and Eddie are in this closet right now.

Richie can see Eddie in the dark. He can make out those puppy dog eyes looking off to the side in embarrassment. He sees generalized textures in his silhouette and good God does he find him beautiful. He wants to reach his hands under the borrowed jacket hanging off Eddie’s torso and touch everything he can.

You’ll freak him out, Richie stops himself, he can’t even kiss right and you want to grope him. Fucking relax. Shit.

“So I’ll show you what I know,” Richie settles, “as long as you’re feeling it I’ll keep going and if you’re not it’s cool. I mean I’m an asshole but I’m not a total asshole.”

Richie can see Eddie thinking the offer over. Richie’s spare coat moves in the dark in what looks like a shrug.

“Okay. Sure. Fuck it. Why not?”

“Real romantic of you, Eddie spaghetti.”

“Wow. I haven’t heard you call me that since we were kids. Good to know all your material is stagnant.”

Richie chuckles because honestly? That was a solid comeback. Eddie smiles back and chuckles. They both stand there laughing quietly in the dark like kids. Richie isn’t thinking about the fact that they’re stuck in here anymore. He just realizes that he likes Eddie smiling as much as he likes him pouting and annoyed. The moment fizzles out and they’re just staring at each other for a solid minute.

Richie gives Eddie a quick peck on the lips because he can’t take it anymore. He has to give something to him, something better than that sad excuse of a kiss from earlier. Richie pulls back quickly, worried that he may have been too fast. He’s genuinely surprised to have Eddie mimic the maneuver.

Richie isn’t sure if it’s the close quarters of the smell of sweat coming off of Eddie that’s putting him on a high but he goes with it. He leans his body into Eddie’s. Eddie’s back gently hits the back wall but Richie takes care not to dominate the position. He kisses Eddie again, slowly and softly. Eddie repeats the gesture and this is what Richie had been picturing all this time.

Richie licks Eddie’s bottom lip, prompting him and Eddie takes to it like a natural. Eddie’s mouth is a little dry but that’s to be expected since he had physically exerted himself earlier. Richie doesn’t care. He lets his tongue wet Eddie’s and together their kiss moves into something makes the whole closet feel hot and heavy.

Eddie places his hands on Richie’s hips and the contact sends strong signals to his member. Eddie gives a cautious bite to Richie’s lower lip that comes off as seductive, coy even. Richie can’t tell if this is experimental or if Eddie’s really feeling it but right now he doesn’t care. It feels good. Eddie feels good and Richie’s been wanting this for a long time.

“I thought you didn’t know what you’re doing,” Richie swallows hard as they break their kiss.

“Don’t ruin it,” Eddie murmurs and kisses him again.

Light floods into the closet and the older woman squeaks at finding the two men in their compromising position.

“Christ!” Richie shouts and flings himself as far away from Eddie as physically possible.

“Oh! Oh my!” the woman continues to stammer, “No! It’s fine, boys! I’m- I’m hip! My nephew is a homosexual! He and his boyfriend are wonderful people!”

Eddie silently exits the closet and heads upstairs, leaving Richie to the awkwardness alone. Richie doesn’t see this silent escape until it’s too late.

“Well, we’re not exactly boyfriends-” Richie desperately tries to rouse some sort of explanation.

“It’s fine! Really! I prefer people do those sort of things in their rooms but you’re not the first couple I’ve stumbled on in there! No shame, sweetie! No shame!”

Richie seems to put his embarrassment aside as his ear picks up on that last fact.

“Really? Other people have done this?”

“Well,” she retracts a bit, “maybe not in the same manner as you. But I’ve found a couple or two after a stormy night entangled in there. Don’t feel bad.”

She may be the first person ever to directly tell Richie not to be ashamed of what he’s done with another man. Richie really looks at her for the first time; she’s upwards of sixty for sure and dressed like a Stevie Nicks impersonator. She’s not cookie cutter like so much of Derry was and still is. Richie berates himself for making fun of her interior decorating earlier.

“What’s your name again?” he asks her.

“Doris,” she answers slowly, “I’m pretty sure I said that when we met.”

“I had a lot on my mind then and I’m kind of an asshole.”

Doris nods in consideration which makes Richie laugh. He starts to head up the stairs.

“Well Doris, you’re getting an excellent Yelp review after all this.”

“Oh good,” Doris smiles.

Richie can barely contain himself at the top step as he hears Doris mutter to herself:

“The fuck is a yelp?”

[haevatein-archived]

Just kinds of falls asleep against him due to the warmth radiating off him and the safety he feels in the familiar presence.

It had not come as a suprise to Laevatein that his mortal companion would eventually succumb to the clutches of sleep--- but, to so gracefully slide his head down and fall asleep against Loke’s shoulder (or rather, his forearm which lead to leaning against his chest)? Yes. That did come as a suprise-- but he did not move away. It was a sign of trust Loke did not believe anyone would ever bestow unto a God known for his decieving and lying nature. Maybe that suprised him more than the actual act of sleeping against his frame itself. No-one trusted Loke, and he trusted no-one--- well, until now it would seem. Maybe change was the fate that awaited him; he who was the catalyst for transformation and change--- not often did he expect it to affect himself as well. Sure... He had changed a lot since his first breath had been taken, but this time it felt different. It... scared him; fear of the change he was experiencing, for he did not know what it was molding him into. This was out of his control, and it was terrifying. However... He did not desire to break the Elder Uchiha’s trust, so he would not. Not intentionally.    Loke glanced down at the Raven with a warm gaze. When Itachi was asleep, Loke would naturally look upon the ill male with softer features than he normally wore. Hair black as ink pooled down Itachi’s forehead-protector, and over ivory features. He seemed to be at peace, despite the struggles of his illness. It was a sight Loke did not complain about seeing. He found it to be beautiful--- almost ethereal.

A smile find it’s way across scarred lips, and gently he would guide the sleeping form down so Itachi would lay with his head upon Loke’s lap. For a brief moment there was silence as pale fingers brushed tenderly down the Clan-Killer’s fair face. Ever so handsy, was he-- and unable to keep from touching that pretty face when it looked so calm and at ease. The warmth of Loke’s touch would only serve to be more of a soothing anchor for the Uchiha to fall upon if any unease surfaced. As Loke watched the Man sleep, he would quietly, almost inaudibly, hum a melody his own mother used to sing to him as a child. So shoot him, he can be cheesy and sentimental, all right? Oh, Norns-- how silly he felt, but it was nice to do so...

  “ Vargen ylar i nattens skog,han vill men kan inte sova.Hungern river hans vargabuk,och det är kallt i hans stova.Du varg, du varg, kom inte hit,ungen min får du aldrig.  ”

Sure-- he may be singing as if a mother would to her child, but the content of the song was not all that important, he felt.

   // @koukennin

[garratymcvries]

Buckley stole something every time he was at the supermarket. It was always something very small, as to not raise a huge fuss should he be caught. He never had been. Today though, as he stood frozen in the bulk food section and stared into space, the thought of the culmination of all the shitty things in his life unbelievably weaving together this week convinced him that he was going to walk out of this place with that motherfucking barrel of sour gummy worms. He lifted his head at the thought and looked around with instant guilt, as if he had already put the giant receptacle in his cargo pants. The sharp feeling of guilt was soon overridden by an adrenaline shot of excitement. A grin beat its way through the corners of his mouth, as he found himself the only patron in the bulk foods section of the Baltimore SuperSave on this lonely, overcast Tuesday afternoon.

He strode slowly amongst the giant barrels filled with raw almonds and multiple varieties of trail mix, and whistled softly. A spring in his step that hadn’t been there a moment before evolved into a nonchalant skip as he passed a mound of yogurt-covered peanuts big enough to bury a large dog or prepubescent human, should they run out of yogurt-covered peanuts in the wild, and die of starvation. His target was a few feet in front of him now as he jubilantly bobbed down the aisle. He could see the strips of neon reflecting off of the hinged plastic door atop the barrel that sealed their freshness. The sight of it produced an involuntary chuckle, and a funny sound he couldn’t remember ever making before. That, of course, almost led to an outburst of laughter. He turned around, stifling a display of joy he hadn’t performed in years to a respectable display of quiet snorts and a few tears quickly wiped away. A couple of deep breaths later, he looked up, and surveyed the room. Buckley noticed how many of the barrels had their plastic lids left open, and pictured the fucking savages scavenging their pilfer, then moving on, leaving other victims of life’s unfreshness in the wake of their selfish and careless destinies. The further thought of giant locusts descending upon all of the chocolate-covered mini-pretzels momentarily killed the vibe he had going. He quickly spun around, and the sight of his colorful bounty sparked awake a feeling of terrible excitement.

“This must be what bank robbers feel like right before,” he thought. He approached the barrel right beside the sour gummy worms, and appeared to only have an interest in the unpopped popcorn kernels within, as a criminal mastermind assuredly would so do.  Wait a minute. How was he going to do this? Was he going to just roll the giant cask right out the front door? The back? He’d be caught by someone of some authority before he even reached the sanitary napkin aisle. It was a place he’d experienced embarrassment before in another life. His serious girlfriend of a decade before would conveniently forget to purchase such things, whisking Buckley away during busy public hours to retrieve them for her, only to learn after the relationship had danced its death rattle, that she took regular masochistic pleasure by taking him from his comfort zone, and throwing him into bonfires of embarrassment. Wouldn’t it be such a fitting ending for him to be apprehended for grand theft children’s candy amongst rows and rows of tampons and maxi-pads he no longer had any use for? He pictured the witch reading the headline and throwing back her beautiful curly black hair, cackling wildly with her wicked new family.

No. He needed a plan. He decided to stop being the bulk-food-creeper, and continued with his daily shopping in the guise of a man simply shopping. Simply shopping and not creating numerous devious schemes. But why not devise? It was no crime, just thinking thoughts. No acts yet were committed. He turned into the soda and water aisle, and saw an elderly woman leaned up against a cart with an indifferent look on her face as she stared at the endless varieties of sparkling water. What underhanded thoughts swarmed under that rose colored bandanna and white hair? What crimes was she guilty of in this life? Maybe she was a master thief too. Maybe she’d murdered. Killed multiply maybe, Buckley thought as he put three 2-liters of generic diet cola into his cart. Maybe she’d been one of those insane mothers that rolled her station wagon full of 3 loved, yet unwanted children into the lake. Maybe she’d done such a thing, and spent the bulk of her life in prison, only to be released 40 years later because of overcrowding and good behavior. And now here she was, facing another decision amongst a body of water. Maybe this decision was easier. Maybe not.

She struggled as she attempted to put a case of lemon-flavored sparkling water into her cart, and Buckley rushed over to assist. They managed to seat the water into the cart, when the old woman thanked him quickly and without a smile. She seemed annoyed that she had been assisted by such a petty thief and disgraced tampon buyer of old, and the look she gave him as she moved on as briskly as she could shook Buckley to his core. Those murderous eyes. Was that the look she gave her children as they pounded on the rear window of a sinking car? Oh yes, he thought. It was surely the look she gave other inmates as she shivved them to death in the yard. Buckley tried to shake off the guilt of his act of kindness as he walked back to the comfort of his shopping cart. He closed his eyes and imagined the tart and fruity taste of sour gummy worms as he threw up handfuls of them in his bathtub, and was once again on to the task at hand. His quest was a crime, yes, but an innocent one. He couldn’t allow himself to be caught up with the real villains and cutthroats his criminal actions would assuredly attract. Buckley made a mental note to be wary to avoid such dangerous child killers and shivvers in the future, and made his way to the dairy section.

Oh, cottage cheese. I love you ever so, Buckley thought as he parked his cart in front of the brightly lit white containers. He scorned for a second at the columns of sour cream. How dare they share similar receptacles to wonderful wonderful cottage cheese. IMPOSTERS! BLAND YET TART DECIEVERS! Nasty assed sour cream should be in the nacho aisle. Then, Buckley had a thought of glorious cottage cheese atop a giant mound of cheesy nachos, and made a mental note to try such a thing in the future. A sour gummy worm future, hopefully. Buckley shoved aside a few containers of sour cream as to not sully his cottage cheese shopping experience. He finally decided on a tub of 2% small curd, and one of fat free large curd. Later, he would make two tubs of half and half, and smiled at the prospect of the naked chore. Maybe he’d drop a naughty dollop down below. His giggle continued until he turned into the dreaded soup aisle. It was a place Buckley hated so. How many unfortunate soup instances has he had in his lifetime. Too many to count. There was the Cleveland Bisque Episode. Then there was the Future to Fictional In-Laws Cream of Broccoli Disaster that ultimately was the catalyst of his breakup with Whatshername Succubus Tampon Pressurer.

Buckley had to always buy 3 cans of soup. All he needed during the week was two, but there had to be a safe extra; just in case. The emergency soups had been stored in the only cupboard in his house that required a lock. He’d unlock the door, and carefully place the worry-free can with hundreds of its brothers and sisters. A precious cache of safe, non-disaster soup. Thankfully, he hadn’t needed to dip into his reserves that often, but recently the Great Tomato Boilover was traumatic enough to almost break the lock when he frantically couldn’t find his key. Thankfully he did, yet he had still not cleaned up the mess of that disaster. It looked like a tiny murder had occurred on Buckley’s stovetop. He would one day, but he kept it as penance to himself that he shouldn’t live so recklessly.

At this thought, he thought about his new life as a master thief, and thought twice about a life of crime. He had never been one to life dangerously. Was a barrel of sour gummy worms worth a life of incarceration? He then thought of prison. How would it change him? Would he be what they called, “a bitch”? Perhaps. He had a long documented history of “bitchery” that sullied his past. Then Buckley looked up at the dreaded soup aisle. This sight usually brought forth a most undiluted tincture of fear from his bitchery depths. Dreaded soup, so hateful and deviously delicious. But now, on this red-letter day of masterminding the perfect crime, Buckley felt no fear. No, he would not be “The Bitch”. He would be revered. A kingpin amongst murderers and rapists and child abductors. Buckley then had a vision of himself playing Uno in the common area. Convicted yes-men were bringing him things, such as drinks and chips. Two large henchmen towered behind him, arms akimbo. A rival inmate from another cell block entered the room, and Buckley simply had to motion his head towards the villain, and the yes-men swarmed him, creating a cartoon-like pile of limbs and dust and blood. Buckley smiled in the center of the soup aisle, eyes closed, dreaming of The Kingpin of Crime with a tattoo of sour gummy worms on his neck.

“Pardon me,” a rickety voice interrupted the daydream. It was The Child Killer. She had snuck up behind Buckley. She even was so brazen as to touch his shoulder as she did so. All he could reply with was a tiny gasp, and he dragged himself and his cart flush against a wall of soup. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her, as fear began trickling into the cracks of his dam of self-confidence. Buckley quickly grabbed the first three cans of soup he could find, and whipped his cart away from this terrible place. The Witch. The Vile Haggard Woman probably lived in the stupid soup aisle. Of course, he thought. That’s where the child-killers of the world were the strongest, in the goddamned soup aisles of the world. Buckley pushed his cart all of the way to the end of the large room and tried to catch his breath amongst the frozen foods. It was nice and cool here. He looked up at towers boxes with amazing pictures of different varieties of pizza on them, and started to feel normal again. He looked down into his cart, and saw three cans of split pea, the worst, most terrible soup of them all. Buckley dropped to his knees and started to cry.  

“Sir, are you okay?”

Buckley opened his tearful eyes and kept sobbing. His eyes burned and tears fell into the opened hands on his lap.

“Sir?”

Another hand dropped onto his shoulder, and Buckley fell to his backside in fear.

“Oh my goodness! Sir, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have startled you! Are you okay?” The woman wearing a SuperSave apron had kind eyes. Buckley was immediately embarrassed, yet still instinctively cowered against the frozen pizzas like a wounded raccoon.

“Sir, should I call someone?” the concerned employee asked. “What?” Buckley soon realized his current position, and how he must have looked to the SuperSave Angel that held her hand out before him. “Oh, dear me,” he responded. He attempted to rise, but his hand slipped upon the condensation of the freezer door, and fell with a thump once again to his backside. “Oh no! Here, let me help you,” the Angel said. He couldn’t help but notice her touch was kind, yet firm enough to help Buckley get to his feet. He dusted himself off and rubbed the wet from his face. “Here,” she said. She magically produced a tissue from her apron pocket and offered it to him. It may as well had been a slice of bread offered to a starving leper, and Buckley took the offering as such. He cradled it in his hand, and blew his nose into the soft aloe-plied treasure. He attempted to offer it back, and she rightfully shied away. He realized what he had done, and another wave of embarrassment washed over him.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. He put the tissue into his pocket and hung his head in shame. “Thank you very much.” “Are you alright?” “Oh, yes. I am now. It’s just been a very…trying time today. Actually more than just today, but it seemed to hit me all at once. That sounds stupid.” “Oh, no no. That doesn’t sound stupid at all. It sounds…” She searched for the right word. A moment of brief silence, and Buckley looked up into hazel eyes that seemed to search for something deep within what was assuredly an extensive lexicon of unsurmountable genius. “…normal.” She finished. She cocked her head to the side, and Buckley sighed relief. “I’ve never been accused of THAT before,” he replied. It seemed the right thing to say, as she responded with a genuine chuckle that made Buckley weak in the knees. His eyes threatened to well up again at the sound of a seraph’s glee, and turned away towards his cart before he became a blubbering mess again.

“Wait,” her voice stopping every bit of him dead. She knew. About everything. About the sour gummy worms. About his past with women’s sanitary applicators. About the security of a closet filled with emergency soup. Oh no! The split pea! She saw the 3 cans of split pea, and knew him for the wretch that he wa-

“Here,” she said. She handed him a small thick book of coupons. “Some of these you can’t use all at once, but it really adds up in the long run, y’know?” Buckley looked at the small flip-book in his hand and managed a small “thank you”. He stared at the heavenly savings too good for him, and she touched the side of his arm. “Well…I’m glad to help. Just let me know I can do anything else to help you with your SuperSave experience.” She started to walk away. Buckley put his hand to the place on his arm where she touched him, and now it was his turn to say-

“Wait.” She stopped and turned towards him with a smile. “Do you-“ he started. He stood for a bit and thought. This is what he needed! An ally! A collaborator in his quest, on the inside! He had to be careful, though. She already assuredly saw him as an emotional maniacal sex-fiend. He would win her confidence-

“Do I what?” she asked hesitantly. “I do apologize,” Buckley started, “My mind seems to wander off sometimes and drags me along.” She chuckled again. It was the best sound Buckley thinks he’d ever heard. He glanced at her nametag. “Amy. It seems to me, at this moment, in your act of kindness, that I should treat myself more kindly that I have been doing so in recent times. I think I deserve a treat. I have a question about an item in this store that you might be able to help me with.” “Shoot!” She replied with genuine glee. “Would you accompany me to the bulk food section?” “Sure!” Glee once again.

“Know where glee leads, yeah?” A whisper within Buckley asked. “Oh, you shut up now,” he responded. “Pardon?”

Buckley quickly dismissed what the girl had overheard, and picked up the pace a step. She seemed to say something, but alas, he did not hear. OH NO! Would such a Venus de Milo grant him a boon of repeating herself to one such as low as he? He must dare. HE MUS-

“I’m sorry, what was that you were saying?” Buckley had done an about-face to give her his full and undivided attention, still keeping up his pace in a backwards jaunt. “ “LOOK OUT!”

OH NO! HE’D ANGERED HER! WHY WAS SHE YELLING? HE WAS SURE SHE WASN’T YELLING JUST A MOMEN-

---

Darkness

It was comfortably brisk on the water that day. There was a slight breeze that nibbled crisply on exposed flesh. Buckley closed his eyes and breathed in the cool fresh air. He opened his eyes and looked at the shoreline. His pace was slow, but steady, as he drifted down river.  He must have dozed for a bit, because now he was facing stern-side. That was good, he thought. He needed to conserve his strength, as it was a long journey to…

to…

Oh, it didn’t matter where. Not right now. Right now the journey was the thing. He looked down to see himself waist deep in sour gummy worms. He grabbed onto the sides of the barrel that floated downstream and could hardly contain his excitement. MY BOOTY! HOW COULD I FORGET IT?! Buckley put his hands into the sweet fluff and brought handfuls up to rub them lovingly on his face. He could practically taste the tart sweetness from the artificial fruity sugar aroma as the worms stuck to his face for a moment before peeling off and dropping back into the barrel. One particularly orange and green one stuck to his forehead, and Buckley wore it proudly.

Okay, back to work. Buckley rocked back and forth and around and managed to get himself facing bow. All he could see ahead of him was more river. Things were good. Clear skies overhead and beyond. His pace was good. “Moving right along,” he said to himself. He looked down at his soft neon treasure and let the excitement take hold of him for a moment. “Moving right the fuck along!” He threw a red and purple worm into the air, and caught the red side in his mouth. He let the rest dangle out as he savored the wonderful strawberry sourness for a moment. Then he slurped in the purple and let the grape sail him all the way to Jubilation.

He slammed his right hand into the worms and rummaged around until he felt something paperish. He got a nice grip onto it, and ripped it from the gummy unknown. His map was an extremely well detailed straight blue line that led to a giant red X. He figured he was about ¾ to the X now. How he figured that, he couldn’t be sure, but for some reason he felt quite sure. He slammed the map back down into the worms, and rummaged even deeper for something else. Buckley instinctually stuck out his tongue as he searched frantically for… for……..THERE! He jerked his hands from the pile with a motion that sent quite a few sour worms overboard. He dusted sugar from his pirate hat and smiled at the skull and crossworms on its front. He dipped the hat into the worms at the front of his waist and slammed it onto his head. The heaviness of the hat was empowering. Sour gummy worms hung from its brim, and Buckley’s line of sight above the horizon was a stringy neon rainbow.

“Yarr!”

Wait. Something was missing. Oh yes! Buckley shoved his hands even deeper into the foam candy deep, and came up with an eye-patch. He filled that as well, and put it on his left eye, worms protruding out from its edges. Now, he was complete. He drifted along, Buckbeard the Worm, in his grand frigate to his ultimate destiny.

“Garrrr!”

After quite a bit of garbled mouthful pirate calls later, something familiar about his surroundings put him on full alert. He quickly chewed on the candy in his mouth, dropping wet pieces back into the barrel. Something there in the distance. Something big, and grey. Buckley rummaged around in the wormily depths once more and came up with a giant telescopic spyglass. He polished the sugar from both ends of it with his sleeve, and extended the spyglass as far as it would go. He leaned his elbows on the rim of the barrel, and took a look.

The grey was concrete. A giant open expanse of concrete, with a railing on its edge. A group of people stood behind the railing and pointed at things.

“An observation deck,” Buckley said without thinking. He lowered the spyglass, and the colors of the people’s clothing made them look like sour gummy worms in the distance. He picked up two worms from his waist, and wiggled them in front of his view, as if they were the people on the giant concrete deck.

“OOH! Looky there!” he mimicked with a pretend people-worm. “Oh yes, I see! That’s a good observation!” the other gummy-person said. “We’re good observers!” “Oh yes, the best! We’re the best observers on the observation deck!” Buckley mushed the two together and made kissy, then fart noises and popped the two good observers into his mouth.

“YUM YUM YUM!” A few moments passed, and Buckley looked again into the viewer. He was closer this time and could make out the deck in more detail. Something super familiar about all of this (and an incredible sugar high) raised the hairs on the back of his neck. A sudden crisp breeze put his gooseflesh on high alert, as a feeling of absolute dread followed.

“Oh no,” he muttered. There was a couple on the deck arguing. He waited a few moments to catch his breath, and to get a better look at the couple, but he knew deep down in his large bucket of foamy candy happiness that there was no treasure to be found at a giant red X scrawled on a crumpled map somewhere near his knees. He looked into the glass again, and found the couple. The woman was attractive, and angry. He always kind of liked when she was angry. She was so sexy when she was angry, and he had come to terms early in their relationship that he would set forth the anger sometimes to please himself, despite the consequences. This time, though, was different. It was the worst argument they ever had. Buckley remembered now.

“Niagra fucking falls,” Buckley said with ire. Now he wished his vessel had a full arsenal of cannons and greek fire to take down the deck and be done with it forever, but all he had was his spyglass, and his worms. He shoved a handful of them into his mouth, and looked again. There she was, emptying both barrels into him, and him standing there with his hands in his pockets, shamed like a beaten dog. Buckley remembered he had simply mentioned his annoyance at her picking the honeymoon capitol of the universe as a vacation destination, after his two already failed attempts at proposal. He saw her mouth “As if I’d marry a piece of shit loser like you,” and heard the voice in his head.

But now, it was different. It wasn’t quite her voice, was it? That distinct shrill Cry of the Succubus that he would remember even after he was waist deep in real worms was not the voice he heard. He squinted into the spyglass as if it would help him focus, and it indeed showed him that the woman he was arguing with in the distance was not the masochistic queen of the forced tampon purchase twice-removed pseudo-fiancée sexy angry b-word that would haunt him for eternity. It was someone else. Someone nice. Someone he hadn’t heard talk to him in a way that would have him contemplate jumping off a bridge as he stood in his pajama pants and trenchcoat at an ungodly hour waiting to pay for tampons and a bag of dill-flavored potato chips. This woman yelling and pointing at him wore a green SuperSave apron. Buckley squinted even harder. The nametag on the apron read “Angel”, quotation marks and all. He lowered the spyglass.

“You’re no angel,” he said, “you’re all the same.” Buckley threw the spyglass with all his might at the observation deck, and it splashed ahead of him, far from the intended target. The sound of rushing water filled his senses now. The falls. Of course. OF COURSE! This was his Giant Red X! This was the treasure that he so desperately sought. It would be different now! The falls would change everything! He gathered speed as he gained closer to the edge, and saw the vast wilderness that sprawled beyond the swirling mist. He grabbed two great handfuls of candy and shoved them into his mouth and yelled “GARRRR!” as the falls took hi-

---

LIGHT

“Garr!” Buckley yelled. His vision slowly refocused as the fluorescent lights poured painfully into the back of his eyes. He was on his back, and a group of people were looking remorsefully down at him, like a thirsty village looking into a dead well. The polite girl that he thought he knew as pure and good knelt by his side, showing what seemed to be genuine concern. Buckley’s vision sharpened a bit more, and saw that her nametag read “BECCA”, and his stomach plummeted down the falls. What an atrocity. He should have known a name as repulsive as “short for Rebecca” would bring forth the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Her close friends probably even call her Reba. Gag.

The crowd reeled as Buckley gagged, thinking communally that a geyser of vomit was sure to follow. Reba leaned back as well. Then Buckley sat up. The crowd dispersed a bit, and the few rubberneckers left looked quite bored of the situation. The Devil in Angel’s apron got to her feet, and extended a hand to help Buckley up. He refused this helpful boon, and sprung to his feet with surprising agility.

“Are you alright? That was quite a fall you too-“ “Yes, thank you. I’m just peachy keen fine. Thank you for all of your help.” He started to walk away. “But, wait. Are you sure? Didn’t you need my help with something?” Buckley continued to walk away. “No, thank you, you’ve done quite enough for me already,” his pace gaining like a waterfall’s current. “You’re all the same,” he said defiantly beyond Reba’s earshot, and continued like a man possessed to the bakery.

[writtenatthebarr]

Buckley stole something every time he was at the supermarket. It was always something very small, as to not raise a huge fuss should he be caught. He never had been. Today though, as he stood frozen in the bulk food section and stared into space, the thought of the culmination of all the shitty things in his life unbelievably weaving together this week convinced him that he was going to walk out of this place with that motherfucking barrel of sour gummy worms. He lifted his head at the thought and looked around with instant guilt, as if he had already put the giant receptacle in his cargo pants. The sharp feeling of guilt was soon overridden by an adrenaline shot of excitement. A grin beat its way through the corners of his mouth, as he found himself the only patron in the bulk foods section of the Baltimore SuperSave on this lonely, overcast Tuesday afternoon.

He strode slowly amongst the giant barrels filled with raw almonds and multiple varieties of trail mix, and whistled softly. A spring in his step that hadn’t been there a moment before evolved into a nonchalant skip as he passed a mound of yogurt-covered peanuts big enough to bury a large dog or prepubescent human, should they run out of yogurt-covered peanuts in the wild, and die of starvation. His target was a few feet in front of him now as he jubilantly bobbed down the aisle. He could see the strips of neon reflecting off of the hinged plastic door atop the barrel that sealed their freshness. The sight of it produced an involuntary chuckle, and a funny sound he couldn’t remember ever making before. That, of course, almost led to an outburst of laughter. He turned around, stifling a display of joy he hadn’t performed in years to a respectable display of quiet snorts and a few tears quickly wiped away. A couple of deep breaths later, he looked up, and surveyed the room. Buckley noticed how many of the barrels had their plastic lids left open, and pictured the fucking savages scavenging their pilfer, then moving on, leaving other victims of life’s unfreshness in the wake of their selfish and careless destinies. The further thought of giant locusts descending upon all of the chocolate-covered mini-pretzels momentarily killed the vibe he had going. He quickly spun around, and the sight of his colorful bounty sparked awake a feeling of terrible excitement.

“This must be what bank robbers feel like right before,” he thought. He approached the barrel right beside the sour gummy worms, and appeared to only have an interest in the unpopped popcorn kernels within, as a criminal mastermind assuredly would so do.  Wait a minute. How was he going to do this? Was he going to just roll the giant cask right out the front door? The back? He’d be caught by someone of some authority before he even reached the sanitary napkin aisle. It was a place he’d experienced embarrassment before in another life. His serious girlfriend of a decade before would conveniently forget to purchase such things, whisking Buckley away during busy public hours to retrieve them for her, only to learn after the relationship had danced its death rattle, that she took regular masochistic pleasure by taking him from his comfort zone, and throwing him into bonfires of embarrassment. Wouldn’t it be such a fitting ending for him to be apprehended for grand theft children’s candy amongst rows and rows of tampons and maxi-pads he no longer had any use for? He pictured the witch reading the headline and throwing back her beautiful curly black hair, cackling wildly with her wicked new family.

No. He needed a plan. He decided to stop being the bulk-food-creeper, and continued with his daily shopping in the guise of a man simply shopping. Simply shopping and not creating numerous devious schemes. But why not devise? It was no crime, just thinking thoughts. No acts yet were committed. He turned into the soda and water aisle, and saw an elderly woman leaned up against a cart with an indifferent look on her face as she stared at the endless varieties of sparkling water. What underhanded thoughts swarmed under that rose colored bandanna and white hair? What crimes was she guilty of in this life? Maybe she was a master thief too. Maybe she’d murdered. Killed multiply maybe, Buckley thought as he put three 2-liters of generic diet cola into his cart. Maybe she’d been one of those insane mothers that rolled her station wagon full of 3 loved, yet unwanted children into the lake. Maybe she’d done such a thing, and spent the bulk of her life in prison, only to be released 40 years later because of overcrowding and good behavior. And now here she was, facing another decision amongst a body of water. Maybe this decision was easier. Maybe not.

She struggled as she attempted to put a case of lemon-flavored sparkling water into her cart, and Buckley rushed over to assist. They managed to seat the water into the cart, when the old woman thanked him quickly and without a smile. She seemed annoyed that she had been assisted by such a petty thief and disgraced tampon buyer of old, and the look she gave him as she moved on as briskly as she could shook Buckley to his core. Those murderous eyes. Was that the look she gave her children as they pounded on the rear window of a sinking car? Oh yes, he thought. It was surely the look she gave other inmates as she shivved them to death in the yard. Buckley tried to shake off the guilt of his act of kindness as he walked back to the comfort of his shopping cart. He closed his eyes and imagined the tart and fruity taste of sour gummy worms as he threw up handfuls of them in his bathtub, and was once again on to the task at hand. His quest was a crime, yes, but an innocent one. He couldn’t allow himself to be caught up with the real villains and cutthroats his criminal actions would assuredly attract. Buckley made a mental note to be wary to avoid such dangerous child killers and shivvers in the future, and made his way to the dairy section.

Oh, cottage cheese. I love you ever so, Buckley thought as he parked his cart in front of the brightly lit white containers. He scorned for a second at the columns of sour cream. How dare they share similar receptacles to wonderful wonderful cottage cheese. IMPOSTERS! BLAND YET TART DECIEVERS! Nasty assed sour cream should be in the nacho aisle. Then, Buckley had a thought of glorious cottage cheese atop a giant mound of cheesy nachos, and made a mental note to try such a thing in the future. A sour gummy worm future, hopefully. Buckley shoved aside a few containers of sour cream as to not sully his cottage cheese shopping experience. He finally decided on a tub of 2% small curd, and one of fat free large curd. Later, he would make two tubs of half and half, and smiled at the prospect of the naked chore. Maybe he’d drop a naughty dollop down below. His giggle continued until he turned into the dreaded soup aisle. It was a place Buckley hated so. How many unfortunate soup instances has he had in his lifetime. Too many to count. There was the Cleveland Bisque Episode. Then there was the Future to Fictional In-Laws Cream of Broccoli Disaster that ultimately was the catalyst of his breakup with Whatshername Succubus Tampon Pressurer.

Buckley had to always buy 3 cans of soup. All he needed during the week was two, but there had to be a safe extra; just in case. The emergency soups had been stored in the only cupboard in his house that required a lock. He’d unlock the door, and carefully place the worry-free can with hundreds of its brothers and sisters. A precious cache of safe, non-disaster soup. Thankfully, he hadn’t needed to dip into his reserves that often, but recently the Great Tomato Boilover was traumatic enough to almost break the lock when he frantically couldn’t find his key. Thankfully he did, yet he had still not cleaned up the mess of that disaster. It looked like a tiny murder had occurred on Buckley’s stovetop. He would one day, but he kept it as penance to himself that he shouldn’t live so recklessly.

At this thought, he thought about his new life as a master thief, and thought twice about a life of crime. He had never been one to life dangerously. Was a barrel of sour gummy worms worth a life of incarceration? He then thought of prison. How would it change him? Would he be what they called, “a bitch”? Perhaps. He had a long documented history of “bitchery” that sullied his past. Then Buckley looked up at the dreaded soup aisle. This sight usually brought forth a most undiluted tincture of fear from his bitchery depths. Dreaded soup, so hateful and deviously delicious. But now, on this red-letter day of masterminding the perfect crime, Buckley felt no fear. No, he would not be “The Bitch”. He would be revered. A kingpin amongst murderers and rapists and child abductors. Buckley then had a vision of himself playing Uno in the common area. Convicted yes-men were bringing him things, such as drinks and chips. Two large henchmen towered behind him, arms akimbo. A rival inmate from another cell block entered the room, and Buckley simply had to motion his head towards the villain, and the yes-men swarmed him, creating a cartoon-like pile of limbs and dust and blood. Buckley smiled in the center of the soup aisle, eyes closed, dreaming of The Kingpin of Crime with a tattoo of sour gummy worms on his neck.

“Pardon me,” a rickety voice interrupted the daydream. It was The Child Killer. She had snuck up behind Buckley. She even was so brazen as to touch his shoulder as she did so. All he could reply with was a tiny gasp, and he dragged himself and his cart flush against a wall of soup. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her, as fear began trickling into the cracks of his dam of self-confidence. Buckley quickly grabbed the first three cans of soup he could find, and whipped his cart away from this terrible place. The Witch. The Vile Haggard Woman probably lived in the stupid soup aisle. Of course, he thought. That’s where the child-killers of the world were the strongest, in the goddamned soup aisles of the world. Buckley pushed his cart all of the way to the end of the large room and tried to catch his breath amongst the frozen foods. It was nice and cool here. He looked up at towers boxes with amazing pictures of different varieties of pizza on them, and started to feel normal again. He looked down into his cart, and saw three cans of split pea, the worst, most terrible soup of them all. Buckley dropped to his knees and started to cry.  

“Sir, are you okay?”

Buckley opened his tearful eyes and kept sobbing. His eyes burned and tears fell into the opened hands on his lap.

“Sir?”

Another hand dropped onto his shoulder, and Buckley fell to his backside in fear.

“Oh my goodness! Sir, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have startled you! Are you okay?” The woman wearing a SuperSave apron had kind eyes. Buckley was immediately embarrassed, yet still instinctively cowered against the frozen pizzas like a wounded raccoon.

“Sir, should I call someone?” the concerned employee asked. “What?” Buckley soon realized his current position, and how he must have looked to the SuperSave Angel that held her hand out before him. “Oh, dear me,” he responded. He attempted to rise, but his hand slipped upon the condensation of the freezer door, and fell with a thump once again to his backside. “Oh no! Here, let me help you,” the Angel said. He couldn’t help but notice her touch was kind, yet firm enough to help Buckley get to his feet. He dusted himself off and rubbed the wet from his face. “Here,” she said. She magically produced a tissue from her apron pocket and offered it to him. It may as well had been a slice of bread offered to a starving leper, and Buckley took the offering as such. He cradled it in his hand, and blew his nose into the soft aloe-plied treasure. He attempted to offer it back, and she rightfully shied away. He realized what he had done, and another wave of embarrassment washed over him.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. He put the tissue into his pocket and hung his head in shame. “Thank you very much.” “Are you alright?” “Oh, yes. I am now. It’s just been a very…trying time today. Actually more than just today, but it seemed to hit me all at once. That sounds stupid.” “Oh, no no. That doesn’t sound stupid at all. It sounds…” She searched for the right word. A moment of brief silence, and Buckley looked up into hazel eyes that seemed to search for something deep within what was assuredly an extensive lexicon of unsurmountable genius. “…normal.” She finished. She cocked her head to the side, and Buckley sighed relief. “I’ve never been accused of THAT before,” he replied. It seemed the right thing to say, as she responded with a genuine chuckle that made Buckley weak in the knees. His eyes threatened to well up again at the sound of a seraph’s glee, and turned away towards his cart before he became a blubbering mess again.

“Wait,” her voice stopping every bit of him dead. She knew. About everything. About the sour gummy worms. About his past with women’s sanitary applicators. About the security of a closet filled with emergency soup. Oh no! The split pea! She saw the 3 cans of split pea, and knew him for the wretch that he wa-

“Here,” she said. She handed him a small thick book of coupons. “Some of these you can’t use all at once, but it really adds up in the long run, y’know?” Buckley looked at the small flip-book in his hand and managed a small “thank you”. He stared at the heavenly savings too good for him, and she touched the side of his arm. “Well…I’m glad to help. Just let me know I can do anything else to help you with your SuperSave experience.” She started to walk away. Buckley put his hand to the place on his arm where she touched him, and now it was his turn to say-

“Wait.” She stopped and turned towards him with a smile. “Do you-“ he started. He stood for a bit and thought. This is what he needed! An ally! A collaborator in his quest, on the inside! He had to be careful, though. She already assuredly saw him as an emotional maniacal sex-fiend. He would win her confidence-

“Do I what?” she asked hesitantly. “I do apologize,” Buckley started, “My mind seems to wander off sometimes and drags me along.” She chuckled again. It was the best sound Buckley thinks he’d ever heard. He glanced at her nametag. “Amy. It seems to me, at this moment, in your act of kindness, that I should treat myself more kindly that I have been doing so in recent times. I think I deserve a treat. I have a question about an item in this store that you might be able to help me with.” “Shoot!” She replied with genuine glee. “Would you accompany me to the bulk food section?” “Sure!” Glee once again.

“Know where glee leads, yeah?” A whisper within Buckley asked. “Oh, you shut up now,” he responded. “Pardon?”

Buckley quickly dismissed what the girl had overheard, and picked up the pace a step. She seemed to say something, but alas, he did not hear. OH NO! Would such a Venus de Milo grant him a boon of repeating herself to one such as low as he? He must dare. HE MUS-

“I’m sorry, what was that you were saying?” Buckley had done an about-face to give her his full and undivided attention, still keeping up his pace in a backwards jaunt. “ “LOOK OUT!”

OH NO! HE’D ANGERED HER! WHY WAS SHE YELLING? HE WAS SURE SHE WASN’T YELLING JUST A MOMEN-

---

Darkness

It was comfortably brisk on the water that day. There was a slight breeze that nibbled crisply on exposed flesh. Buckley closed his eyes and breathed in the cool fresh air. He opened his eyes and looked at the shoreline. His pace was slow, but steady, as he drifted down river.  He must have dozed for a bit, because now he was facing stern-side. That was good, he thought. He needed to conserve his strength, as it was a long journey to…

to…

Oh, it didn’t matter where. Not right now. Right now the journey was the thing. He looked down to see himself waist deep in sour gummy worms. He grabbed onto the sides of the barrel that floated downstream and could hardly contain his excitement. MY BOOTY! HOW COULD I FORGET IT?! Buckley put his hands into the sweet fluff and brought handfuls up to rub them lovingly on his face. He could practically taste the tart sweetness from the artificial fruity sugar aroma as the worms stuck to his face for a moment before peeling off and dropping back into the barrel. One particularly orange and green one stuck to his forehead, and Buckley wore it proudly.

Okay, back to work. Buckley rocked back and forth and around and managed to get himself facing bow. All he could see ahead of him was more river. Things were good. Clear skies overhead and beyond. His pace was good. “Moving right along,” he said to himself. He looked down at his soft neon treasure and let the excitement take hold of him for a moment. “Moving right the fuck along!” He threw a red and purple worm into the air, and caught the red side in his mouth. He let the rest dangle out as he savored the wonderful strawberry sourness for a moment. Then he slurped in the purple and let the grape sail him all the way to Jubilation.

He slammed his right hand into the worms and rummaged around until he felt something paperish. He got a nice grip onto it, and ripped it from the gummy unknown. His map was an extremely well detailed straight blue line that led to a giant red X. He figured he was about ¾ to the X now. How he figured that, he couldn’t be sure, but for some reason he felt quite sure. He slammed the map back down into the worms, and rummaged even deeper for something else. Buckley instinctually stuck out his tongue as he searched frantically for… for……..THERE! He jerked his hands from the pile with a motion that sent quite a few sour worms overboard. He dusted sugar from his pirate hat and smiled at the skull and crossworms on its front. He dipped the hat into the worms at the front of his waist and slammed it onto his head. The heaviness of the hat was empowering. Sour gummy worms hung from its brim, and Buckley’s line of sight above the horizon was a stringy neon rainbow.

“Yarr!”

Wait. Something was missing. Oh yes! Buckley shoved his hands even deeper into the foam candy deep, and came up with an eye-patch. He filled that as well, and put it on his left eye, worms protruding out from its edges. Now, he was complete. He drifted along, Buckbeard the Worm, in his grand frigate to his ultimate destiny.

“Garrrr!”

After quite a bit of garbled mouthful pirate calls later, something familiar about his surroundings put him on full alert. He quickly chewed on the candy in his mouth, dropping wet pieces back into the barrel. Something there in the distance. Something big, and grey. Buckley rummaged around in the wormily depths once more and came up with a giant telescopic spyglass. He polished the sugar from both ends of it with his sleeve, and extended the spyglass as far as it would go. He leaned his elbows on the rim of the barrel, and took a look.

The grey was concrete. A giant open expanse of concrete, with a railing on its edge. A group of people stood behind the railing and pointed at things.

“An observation deck,” Buckley said without thinking. He lowered the spyglass, and the colors of the people’s clothing made them look like sour gummy worms in the distance. He picked up two worms from his waist, and wiggled them in front of his view, as if they were the people on the giant concrete deck.

“OOH! Looky there!” he mimicked with a pretend people-worm. “Oh yes, I see! That’s a good observation!” the other gummy-person said. “We’re good observers!” “Oh yes, the best! We’re the best observers on the observation deck!” Buckley mushed the two together and made kissy, then fart noises and popped the two good observers into his mouth.

“YUM YUM YUM!” A few moments passed, and Buckley looked again into the viewer. He was closer this time and could make out the deck in more detail. Something super familiar about all of this (and an incredible sugar high) raised the hairs on the back of his neck. A sudden crisp breeze put his gooseflesh on high alert, as a feeling of absolute dread followed.

“Oh no,” he muttered. There was a couple on the deck arguing. He waited a few moments to catch his breath, and to get a better look at the couple, but he knew deep down in his large bucket of foamy candy happiness that there was no treasure to be found at a giant red X scrawled on a crumpled map somewhere near his knees. He looked into the glass again, and found the couple. The woman was attractive, and angry. He always kind of liked when she was angry. She was so sexy when she was angry, and he had come to terms early in their relationship that he would set forth the anger sometimes to please himself, despite the consequences. This time, though, was different. It was the worst argument they ever had. Buckley remembered now.

“Niagra fucking falls,” Buckley said with ire. Now he wished his vessel had a full arsenal of cannons and greek fire to take down the deck and be done with it forever, but all he had was his spyglass, and his worms. He shoved a handful of them into his mouth, and looked again. There she was, emptying both barrels into him, and him standing there with his hands in his pockets, shamed like a beaten dog. Buckley remembered he had simply mentioned his annoyance at her picking the honeymoon capitol of the universe as a vacation destination, after his two already failed attempts at proposal. He saw her mouth “As if I’d marry a piece of shit loser like you,” and heard the voice in his head.

But now, it was different. It wasn’t quite her voice, was it? That distinct shrill Cry of the Succubus that he would remember even after he was waist deep in real worms was not the voice he heard. He squinted into the spyglass as if it would help him focus, and it indeed showed him that the woman he was arguing with in the distance was not the masochistic queen of the forced tampon purchase twice-removed pseudo-fiancée sexy angry b-word that would haunt him for eternity. It was someone else. Someone nice. Someone he hadn’t heard talk to him in a way that would have him contemplate jumping off a bridge as he stood in his pajama pants and trenchcoat at an ungodly hour waiting to pay for tampons and a bag of dill-flavored potato chips. This woman yelling and pointing at him wore a green SuperSave apron. Buckley squinted even harder. The nametag on the apron read “Angel”, quotation marks and all. He lowered the spyglass.

“You’re no angel,” he said, “you’re all the same.” Buckley threw the spyglass with all his might at the observation deck, and it splashed ahead of him, far from the intended target. The sound of rushing water filled his senses now. The falls. Of course. OF COURSE! This was his Giant Red X! This was the treasure that he so desperately sought. It would be different now! The falls would change everything! He gathered speed as he gained closer to the edge, and saw the vast wilderness that sprawled beyond the swirling mist. He grabbed two great handfuls of candy and shoved them into his mouth and yelled “GARRRR!” as the falls took hi-

---

Light

“Garr!” Buckley yelled. His vision slowly refocused as the fluorescent lights poured painfully into the back of his eyes. He was on his back, and a group of people were looking remorsefully down at him, like a thirsty village looking into a dead well. The polite girl that he thought he knew as pure and good knelt by his side, showing what seemed to be genuine concern. Buckley’s vision sharpened a bit more, and saw that her nametag read “BECCA”, and his stomach plummeted down the falls. What an atrocity. He should have known a name as repulsive as “short for Rebecca” would bring forth the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Her close friends probably even call her Reba. Gag.

The crowd reeled as Buckley gagged, thinking communally that a geyser of vomit was sure to follow. Reba leaned back as well. Then Buckley sat up. The crowd dispersed a bit, and the few rubberneckers left looked quite bored of the situation. The Devil in Angel’s apron got to her feet, and extended a hand to help Buckley up. He refused this helpful boon, and sprung to his feet with surprising agility.

“Are you alright? That was quite a fall you too-“ “Yes, thank you. I’m just peachy keen fine. Thank you for all of your help.” He started to walk away. “But, wait. Are you sure? Didn’t you need my help with something?” Buckley continued to walk away. “No, thank you, you’ve done quite enough for me already,” his pace gaining like a waterfall’s current. “You’re all the same,” he said defiantly beyond Reba’s earshot, and continued like a man possessed to the bakery.

[underthekillingmxxn-a-blog]

“Bleed for your religion. Bleed for your own belief. Bleed for your conviction.”

// Lyric sentence starters [x] - Still accepting! //

An amused smirk swipes across the holy Blade’s once serene features. Eyes light up, look shocking alive and alert as if a breath of life had animated him. If weren’t for his lowered s-shaped eyebrows, angled until they looked even more sharp and lethal, he would almost appear to be elated. But appearances could decieve. Especially for someone that once belonged to the ranks of masters of sinister secrets.

“Oh, must we do this again, Yellowfinger Heysel?” Adrian says as the smirk shows more and more teeth until it resembles a proper sneer, “Always so belligerent and begging for violence. Have you no patience or sense of timing? Have you grown bored?” While he speaks, the metal gauntlet of his left hand begins to tightly grip the catalyst it had been leisurely reasting on. Yet, he does not slide it out of his belt. 

Hungry anticipation grows in his eyes. He knew better to spring into action just because of a threat. No, he’d rather see to it that she uttered it as a promise first. Impulsive he might occasionally be, but impatient he was not. A well-trained and prized hound only lunges when he has had a signal.

[im-stuck-again]

[automated-decisions]

Foundations for Understanding Automated Decisions

There’s a lot of folklore surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elon Musk is worried, while Mark Zuckerberg believes it’s the answer to many issues, most recently fake news. For many of us, AI is magical, whether ominous like HAL and Ex Machina, or enrapturing like the Spotify Daily Mix and Alexa. And yet, while we usually love magic, we don’t trust it, because we don’t know how the rabbit got in the hat. When the same trick is applied to your insurance, job, visa or bail application, the apprehension, understandably, gets worse. If we want AI to be the magic bullet many believe (or are being told) it will be, this needs to change.

Understanding Automated Decisions is a research project that aims to do exactly this, and do it in a way that it makes as much sense on the street as it does in the lab. We call them ‘automated decisions’ and not ‘AI’, so that we can set the right context. Before moving on, here’s a broad overview of the goals we had for the research we conducted:

Be able to explain what makes a decision automated, cut through the noise around ‘AI’;

Explore the current state of the art, and how we got to where we are with these systems;

Inform people how these systems function, and how they can go wrong;

Highlight the importance of fairness, transparency, accountability and explainability of these systems;

Explore how this can be achieved for the systems we already use, and how we should build systems for the future;

Look at how greater trust can be built (where deserved) using the tools we have, by making automated decisions more transparent and explainable, both technically and through design frameworks.

An automated decision, is any decision that can be made (by a machine), with little or no ‘human involvement’. Machine learning is a promising area of applied automated decisionmaking with its roots in statistics, where a set of rules (or algorithms) can be designed to learn from data, and make decisions and inferences without express human input. A more evolved version of this is deep learning, takes inspiration from the way our brains function, where the learning process uses simpler concepts to learn and develop more complex ones about other kinds of data - this is the closest we currently are to achieving ‘AI’.

The state at which a mechanical artefact (like HAL) is able to make human-like intellectual decisions and develop complex reasoning by itself, is what is known as general artificial intelligence, is true ‘AI’. A machine learning algorithm might beat you at Go, but it doesn’t know the difference between playing Go and Golf - AI might.

Many of these systems were created in earnest, to be able to help us compute, predict and analyse better. Once we were able to combine this with a lot more data and computing power, we started seeing just how much we could do with these systems, and when we deployed them, it seemed like they really were doing a great job, until we realised they weren’t.

A big part of the problem is that the systems currently deployed, weren’t developed keeping tenets like Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and explainability in the way we now demand it, in mind - leading to a trust deficit. Trust is a complicated thing especially when you’re dealing with a machine, but here are some important things over 100 research papers and books we looked at showed us:

The technologies involved here are not new - concepts such as AI and machine learning have been around for decades!

Problems of bias and fairness in computer systems are also not new - even rudimentary computer systems running on basic algorithms ran the risk of making biased, unfair decisions depending on what they were optimised for doing, and the data they relied on.

Contemporary automated decisions rely on (a) access to unprecedented amounts of ‘raw’ data to work with - some of this is structured (purpose built datasets), and some unstructured (tweets, images, raw text). This, combined with our ability to compute more, and faster than ever before makes for the steroids that allow today’s automation systems to work their ‘magic’.

Rooted in statistics, predictions automated decisionmaking systems (ADS) make essentially rely on making complex correlations between different types of data. For example, some systems have been known to correlate using certain types of websites with success at certain types of jobs - how did it do this? By analysing millions of historical patterns of website use and employee performance, in order to make predictive assumptions based on such correlative trends. However, you could still be a great employee and yet not be using that specific website, but if the automated system can’t tell you just how it picked that employee, you’ll have no way of picking up on red flags like these.  

Allowing ADS to ‘think’ for themselves, making correlations from vast amounts of data, tweaking their rulemaking structures autonomously, allows them to optimise their performance, ostensibly, far better than a human would have been able to were one to scrutinise, verify and confirm each move. Imagine deciding to buy a cup of coffee, but having to wait for someone to sign off on your caffeine crunch, how you walk to the cafe, picked a coffee, interacted with the barista, and then paid. Annoying, right? Some argue that something similar applies when it comes to ‘scrutinising’ what an automated system is doing.

That said, we know increasingly, that many of these systems aren’t the panacea to fairness, optimisation and efficiency we thought they were. Quite the contrary, the systems can draw on tainted, biased data, making correlations (see above) they shouldn’t have, and produce outputs that may fulfil one criteria (accuracy) but not another (fairness). Fixing this, and soon, is very, very important.

The root cause of these problems is not evil computer scientists and business people - it’s different approaches between developers, users, and policymakers. (There are for instance, at least 21 definitions of fairness in computer science alone, imagine when we get to law and philosophy)

There is also a genuine move towards being able to fix these issues. Some stem from a genuine move towards improving systems, and laws like the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation, with a special focus on automated decisionmaking, act as an important catalyst for setting things right. There have been several inflection points where ADS have been deployed already - social media, criminal justice, object detection, predictive policing. A lot of great work is happening in academic research, and a lot more still in big tech - however the two seldom work together, and most of the time, we can’t see what the companies are doing.

We might manage to build fair ADS, but unless we can scrutinise this fairness against long held human values, we won’t know for sure - and until we can do that, we still won’t trust them. We might love the bunny (who doesn’t?) but we still really need to know how it got in the hat. Also, not all ADS deserve our trust - some may be specifically built to decieve.

Some promising solutions are emerging, which make genuine contributions towards balancing optimisation with explainability, allowing systems to explain their ‘thought process’.

Different solutions apply to different stages of the ADS process - some are needed to fix the ‘inner workings’ - what data they used and how, what correlations they drew and why, and allowing someone to be able to audit it all if needed. Others look at the end result, the output produced by the ADS in specific instances - why a loan for £1,000 and not £1,500?

We particularly liked ones that were largely independent of what sort of ADS was used (LIME). A lot of solutions however, while great, are still ‘in the lab’, and apply in very specific contexts. Some others we really like are Bayesian Rule Lists, audit tokenisation, Deep neural network activation based auditing, using NLP based explanations, generative interfaces, automated whitebox testing, and qualitative input easing (where relevant, we will explain these in subsequent blogs).

There are also some great ideas on how we can design frameworks and interfaces to make them more transparent, explainable and trustworthy to different sets of users relying on them (a loan officer seeing an ADS’s score, as well as a loan recipient seeing a loan decision).

That’s a wrap for now! In our next blog post, we will dig deeper into fairness, accountability and transparency and what these concepts mean for understanding and explaining automated decisionmaking, as well as the all important Trust.

[understandingautomateddecisions]

Foundations for Understanding Automated Decisions

There’s a lot of folklore surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elon Musk is worried, while Mark Zuckerberg believes it’s the answer to many issues, most recently fake news. For many of us, AI is magical, whether ominous like HAL and Ex Machina, or enrapturing like the Spotify Daily Mix and Alexa. And yet, while we usually love magic, we don’t trust it, because we don’t know how the rabbit got in the hat. When the same trick is applied to your insurance, job, visa or bail application, the apprehension, understandably, gets worse. If we want AI to be the magic bullet many believe (or are being told) it will be, this needs to change.

Understanding Automated Decisions is a research project that aims to do exactly this, and do it in a way that it makes as much sense on the street as it does in the lab. We call them ‘automated decisions’ and not ‘AI’, so that we can set the right context. Before moving on, here’s a broad overview of the goals we had for the research we conducted:

Be able to explain what makes a decision automated, cut through the noise around ‘AI’;

Explore the current state of the art, and how we got to where we are with these systems;

Inform people how these systems function, and how they can go wrong;

Highlight the importance of fairness, transparency, accountability and explainability of these systems;

Explore how this can be achieved for the systems we already use, and how we should build systems for the future;

Look at how greater trust can be built (where deserved) using the tools we have, by making automated decisions more transparent and explainable, both technically and through design frameworks.

An automated decision, is any decision that can be made (by a machine), with little or no ‘human involvement’. Machine learning is a promising area of applied automated decisionmaking with its roots in statistics, where a set of rules (or algorithms) can be designed to learn from data, and make decisions and inferences without express human input. A more evolved version of this is deep learning, takes inspiration from the way our brains function, where the learning process uses simpler concepts to learn and develop more complex ones about other kinds of data - this is the closest we currently are to achieving ‘AI’.

The state at which a mechanical artefact (like HAL) is able to make human-like intellectual decisions and develop complex reasoning by itself, is what is known as general artificial intelligence, is true ‘AI’. A machine learning algorithm might beat you at Go, but it doesn’t know the difference between playing Go and Golf - AI might.

Many of these systems were created in earnest, to be able to help us compute, predict and analyse better. Once we were able to combine this with a lot more data and computing power, we started seeing just how much we could do with these systems, and when we deployed them, it seemed like they really were doing a great job, until we realised they weren’t.

A big part of the problem is that the systems currently deployed, weren’t developed keeping tenets like Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and explainability in the way we now demand it, in mind - leading to a trust deficit. Trust is a complicated thing especially when you’re dealing with a machine, but here are some important things over 100 research papers and books we looked at showed us:

The technologies involved here are not new - concepts such as AI and machine learning have been around for decades!

Problems of bias and fairness in computer systems are also not new - even rudimentary computer systems running on basic algorithms ran the risk of making biased, unfair decisions depending on what they were optimised for doing, and the data they relied on.

Contemporary automated decisions rely on (a) access to unprecedented amounts of ‘raw’ data to work with - some of this is structured (purpose built datasets), and some unstructured (tweets, images, raw text). This, combined with our ability to compute more, and faster than ever before makes for the steroids that allow today’s automation systems to work their ‘magic’.

Rooted in statistics, predictions automated decisionmaking systems (ADS) make essentially rely on making complex correlations between different types of data. For example, some systems have been known to correlate using certain types of websites with success at certain types of jobs - how did it do this? By analysing millions of historical patterns of website use and employee performance, in order to make predictive assumptions based on such correlative trends. However, you could still be a great employee and yet not be using that specific website, but if the automated system can’t tell you just how it picked that employee, you’ll have no way of picking up on red flags like these.  

Allowing ADS to ‘think’ for themselves, making correlations from vast amounts of data, tweaking their rulemaking structures autonomously, allows them to optimise their performance, ostensibly, far better than a human would have been able to were one to scrutinise, verify and confirm each move. Imagine deciding to buy a cup of coffee, but having to wait for someone to sign off on your caffeine crunch, how you walk to the cafe, picked a coffee, interacted with the barista, and then paid. Annoying, right? Some argue that something similar applies when it comes to ‘scrutinising’ what an automated system is doing.

That said, we know increasingly, that many of these systems aren’t the panacea to fairness, optimisation and efficiency we thought they were. Quite the contrary, the systems can draw on tainted, biased data, making correlations (see above) they shouldn’t have, and produce outputs that may fulfil one criteria (accuracy) but not another (fairness). Fixing this, and soon, is very, very important.

The root cause of these problems is not evil computer scientists and business people - it’s different approaches between developers, users, and policymakers. (There are for instance, at least 21 definitions of fairness in computer science alone, imagine when we get to law and philosophy)

There is also a genuine move towards being able to fix these issues. Some stem from a genuine move towards improving systems, and laws like the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation, with a special focus on automated decisionmaking, act as an important catalyst for setting things right. There have been several inflection points where ADS have been deployed already - social media, criminal justice, object detection, predictive policing. A lot of great work is happening in academic research, and a lot more still in big tech - however the two seldom work together, and most of the time, we can’t see what the companies are doing.

We might manage to build fair ADS, but unless we can scrutinise this fairness against long held human values, we won’t know for sure - and until we can do that, we still won’t trust them. We might love the bunny (who doesn’t?) but we still really need to know how it got in the hat. Also, not all ADS deserve our trust - some may be specifically built to decieve.

Some promising solutions are emerging, which make genuine contributions towards balancing optimisation with explainability, allowing systems to explain their ‘thought process’.

Different solutions apply to different stages of the ADS process - some are needed to fix the ‘inner workings’ - what data they used and how, what correlations they drew and why, and allowing someone to be able to audit it all if needed. Others look at the end result, the output produced by the ADS in specific instances - why a loan for £1,000 and not £1,500?

We particularly liked ones that were largely independent of what sort of ADS was used (LIME). A lot of solutions however, while great, are still ‘in the lab’, and apply in very specific contexts. Some others we really like are Bayesian Rule Lists, audit tokenisation, Deep neural network activation based auditing, using NLP based explanations, generative interfaces, automated whitebox testing, and qualitative input easing (where relevant, we will explain these in subsequent blogs).

There are also some great ideas on how we can design frameworks and interfaces to make them more transparent, explainable and trustworthy to different sets of users relying on them (a loan officer seeing an ADS’s score, as well as a loan recipient seeing a loan decision).

That’s a wrap for now! In our next blog post, we will dig deeper into fairness, accountability and transparency and what these concepts mean for understanding and explaining automated decisionmaking, as well as the all important Trust.

[jonny-amethyst]

@tarot-dreams  tarot challenge days 12 to 22   Not been feeling well still so I’ve linked them all together to catch up - hopefully be back to posting daily or at least every other day now :)

Day 12. I release control, and in doing so I am rewarded with new perspective. What is the first thing I notice?

3 cards - Cat ( Knower of Secrets II / The High Priestess ) - threw itself from the deck Bison ( Ace of Fossils / Ace of Pentacles ) Albatross ( 8 of Feathers / Swords ) - insisted I drew it , wouldn't stay put at the top of the deck ! I think my cards are a little miffed that I haven't spent as much time with them as I've been a little ill and busy ... they've been throwing themselves all over tonight! So , for the reading : Inner knowing / intuition . love for all and awakening opportunities ... I notice I am allowing myself more and more trust , knowing that every event is an opportunity for growth ... what is percieved as bad can also be a valuable opportunity to grow and learn new skills or mindsets.

Day 13. How can I be more prepared to deal with loss? Spider - sacred Spinner x ( The Wheel of Fortune ) To suffer a loss one must have had something worth losing in the first place. I'm grateful for everything I have  in my life and realise I'm only a caretaker ... nothing is mine , and yet everything is mine for the taking. Things ( and people ) change and evolve . Experience both sides of the coin ... the joy of having , and the grief of losing ... proof of love that is eternal in your memory.

Day 14. In which ways do I connect to my higher self already? Which areas have I yet to venture upon? 3 cards Snake ( Ace of Branches / Wands ) Scarab Beetle ( 10 of Branches / Wands ) Prairie Dog ( 3 of Fossils / Pentacles ) Your creative spark for life lifts you into another realm and often sees you magically coming up with ideas which seem 'out of this world' Your enthusiasm and keen interest often connect you to higher self and the realm of spirit as a means of making sense of your life. In order to progress spiritually you need to take a step back , relax , let go of some responsibilities and just allow yourself some time. Take time to appreciate nature and art , talk with the earth , collaborate with the spirits and your inner self. Your confidence will increase as you take a step back ... and suddenly everything will become so clear ! New friends , new places , new energies ... all will align with your new persona as the doors open to your true self.

Day 15. The journey of healing requires dedication and an open heart, what is the first step I need to take in order to allow myself to heal from the past. Raccoon ( Seer of Fossils / Page of Pentacles ) Explore the journey from the outside. The past is a story which is over , which can be retold as the archaeologist pieces together the evidence . Look at your story - what is wrong ? what could have been different ? Look at other perspectives - what would you have done / felt / changed given the chance ? You have the chance to examine the 'evidence' and learn from it.

Day 16. Fears flourish within the darkness, what is it that my fears have to reveal to me? Owl ( Keeper of the Light IX / The Hermit ) Sea Turtle ( Nurturer of Shells / Queen of Cups ) The entire universe is inside your mind , and yet you are alone . You seek for company but the company you need is right here already ... once you are comfortable within yourself you will find comfort in life. Learn to love yourself and your talents will shine through - stop fighting to fit in , your path was never meant to be easy or understood by others but to prepare you for the tasks ahead. Embrace your intuition , embrace the darkness - give it a hug ,you cannot be afraid of that which you love .

Day 17. That which I do, is that which will come back to me. How can I remember to always keep this in mind? Bison ( Ace of fossils / Pentacles ) Have gratitude and respect for all things - the good and the bad. Perspectives differ , feelings can still be upset with well meant actions or words , try to see things from a wider viewpoint.

Day 18. Through the moonlight my intuition radiates, what is it I am not seeing? Magpie ( 7 of Feathers / Swords ) Eagle ( Guardian of Feathers / King of Swords ) Crow ( 9 of Feathers / Swords ) Deception . I need to work out what I want , what path to take ... and how to travel it. I'm decieving myself and dishonouring myself through ignoring my intuition and spiritual calls. Powers are hidden , they wait , latent , dormant ... seeking a catalyst to ignite them and give them purpose. Relax , allow , be the change !

Day 19. What are my daily allowances to refresh my body, rest my mind and nurture my spirit? Deer ( 7 of Fossils / Pentacles ) Llama ( Seeker of Fossils / knight of Pentacles ) Tiger ( Guardian of Branches / King of Wands ) Take time to yourself to plan ahead and keep sight of your goals. Seek solace within , find your paradise , drink from the watering hole of life , give thanks for creation then stride forwards with determination and vigour ... let nothing stand in your way !

Day 20. A mirror reveals more than just my reflection. How might I be a negative influence to myself? Raccoon ( Seer of Fossils / Page of Pentacles ) Fascinated by life itself , ever curious , you spend most of it daydreaming , playing out scenarios which might never happen and allowing life to slip by as though it were a movie playing in the background. Take the lead role , examine the part , and ad-lib like your life depends on it ... it does !

Day 21. Have I achieved things in the past year that are in accordance to my life plans? Am I on the right track for success? 3 cards - Falcon  ( Seeker of Feathers / Knight of Swords ) Horse ( Spirit of Freedom VII / The Chariot  ) Rooster ( Call to Awakening XIX /   ) Flying high on spiritual wings is making you more aware of the ground below you and where you need to travel. You know which direction to head and follow the winds to reach it , sometimes stopping off along the way for a tasty morsel or to take a breather. You are going on an adventure ... you may travel far and wide and you may even find what you are looking for , but ultimately the journey is within. Have faith in your plans , make the journey over land and sea ... it will prepare you for the more arduous journey to come - that of the self. Find time to enjoy life and as you begin to see that there are more paths available the right one will become clear. A new age is dawning , and you are perfectly prepared to greet the sun with a smile on your face and joy in your heart.

Day 22. Change is upon the horizon, what does the future hold for me? Cat ( Knower of Secrets II / The High Priestess  ) Crow ( 9 of Feathers / Swords ) Octopus ( 8 of Shells / Cups ) Things will be revealed which will alter your views of life , friendships will end and new beginnings will lead the way to a different way of dreaming. Reach out for opportunity and move forwards , true friends will understand , know when to draw the line and stop giving so much of yourself. Many spiritual journeys will open up as you piece together your reality and learn new things which cannot be observed or comprehended from your current path. Understanding brings many rewards but also much responsibility - your current path is paving the way for your destiny. < it was a bit more explicit than that ... but I'm not going into any more detail as it would be hard to explain , and it's ... personal :) >

[mcjulf]

I am always exhilarated when I either bump in,carter-cruise or settle down into d unimaginable world of d mighty through GOD weapons of warfare dat abhors carnality,it propels me on a divine fulcrum into a catalyst hacking into d revelational understanding of d mysteries & secretes of GOD tots. come to think of d fact that I am HIS weapons of war and battle axe which exposes d depth of this mystery,secretes,revelation etc connecting d info downloaded from Colossians & Galatians how GOD obliterated me/I & replaced me with CHRIST to ensure dat my weakness & frailty does not interrupt d flow of HIS divine operations.how can u explain d fact that I am dead & my life is hidden with CHRIST in GOD?secretes & mysteries,when HE was crucified,I was crucified with HIM wherein HE took me out of d equation,obliterated me & replaced me with CHRIST,revelation,HE told me to have faith in GOD & still gave me executive right to CHRIST operational faith,are u still dea?my mortal body became immortal by carrying d fullness of GOD HEAD bodily & warehousing d entire Glory of d Trinity in a suppose earthen vessel.I am now d house of GOD & d spirit of GOD lives in me.tell me,not for sympathy or condolences but for a treat,can u house Buhari in d poorest smelling face me I face u?answer is NO!churches & christians are worse than face me I face u,smelling,stinking & dirty,it is not about ur poor state or ur carnal mansion but ur sinful stinking life.u may live in face me I face u & still be an opulent house for GOD,it is about d righteous,holy,pure,dedicated life u live for GOD.HE went to build for me unimaginable mansion,why should I be a room & parlour house for HIM.HIS mercy endureth for ever yes. mercy&compassion is in d hand of d ALMIGHTY GOD yet we see men&women,leaders of int.&local bodies,groups,organisations,nations play GOD like Nebuchadnezzar,Herod,Sennanchareb,Pharoah etc &never learned 4rm past example of d consequences dat grounded dis men in dea time.u no who I am?,u don't no who ur messing with,I will show u etc.is a common word in d lips of men&women@slightest provocation.I keep wondering,who actually is strong&wicked as tot?after d man pharoah,uptil 2day,I hv not seen any other.d boast of men,women,politicians,leaders to be&various threatening islamic group make me ask does dis people no dat GOD holds d world in HIS Hands?d earth is d LORDS &d fulness dearoff?no body on earth today can ever be as stubborn,strong&wicked as pharoah was in his day bcos every of his frame,srtucture&formation was GODS orchestration.who art thou o man dat u become a fool suddenly?power belongeth to GOD only.why do u ascribe it 2 urself?so many religions 2day are based on illusion,falshood&deception yet followers cannot use dea tongue to count dea teeth.d purpose,products&utilities of time&chance can only form a capture on acceptance by individual.dis is why weda u run or will,is immaterial.all dat matters is a devine positioning 4 inta-juxta-positions of d magnet of time&chance.men&women walk in &out of occult homes,witch doctors,babalawo&all demonic cult group 4 charm,power,voodoo,spell etc.all false&fake but d original is with GOD.oh lala!power 2 tread on serpents,scorpion,snakes&all d powers of d enemy&nothing shall by any means hurt u in GODS capacity!woooow,wooow!no weapon of d enemy formed against u shall prosper,d LORD is with u as a mighty terrible one to cause ur enemies stumble&never prevail,fear not I am with u,dismay not I am ur GOD,I will strenghten,help&uphold u with my righteous right hand.dis is mouth watery & gain-full.is either u remain stupid&foolish in d world or u embrace GOD's wise ways.how does men sit&behead men&women as if they are chicken?without tot.Paul was d master of dat game until d table turned&day wea looking 4 his own head,if not dat he ran into d safe place.it also pains me dat in d corridors&lounge of lack of knowledge&wisdom,d church lost its purpose&usefulness to become a prey to d enemy.pastors,bishops,evangelist televangelist,prophets mounts d pulpit&declared if they buy gun,marchet,arrows buy ur own.dis is d reason 4 dis continual wars against d christain of stupidity &foolishness who hv neglected d unmatchable weapons of warfair@d christains disposal.I opined long time dat I love John d baptist as d greatest of all prophets but he died stupidly.he would hv laid down on d bed&gone to Heaven but he allowed his head taken off by a jezeebel.he read so much about Elijah&other prophets,he was Holigholistically raised up,enjoyed d followership of d spirits&powers of d prophet.why taciturn@ that crucial moment.dis is why I find it not necessary to follow foolish fearful men&women called pastors&bishops who do not even know wat they are following.I hv seen Holygholistically looking dangerous pastors,bishops@prayer sections shout Holighost thunder &fire&speak with every strength but @gun point,they melt,turn blacksheep of d name of GOD&fearfully forget d dangerous weapons @dea disposal.d threats&wars against Isreal by d philistine continued until Elisha (a prophet with a rare gift)when d syrian leader sent his best armies&ammunition on a dangerous mission to capture d man of GOD who utilised d unmatchable weapon@his disposal&maimed d entire syrian nation with unbeatable record&d syrians did not return again.Elisha did not rise with any carnal weapon.dis is why b4 u answer man of GOD,think twice.is not gotten as a degree in any school of tot or neither is it as a result of d huge congrgation of goats,gay-hazees,Delilahs etc u piled up as members or ur deceit by another evil means u use to decieve men&women.it was accorded to Elijah,Elisha etc by virtue of d great spiritual&supernatural proof of dea ministry.had d church known what to do today,d war in d North would hv ended long ago,had christains known how to rise to d occasion,d isis,d bokoharam attack against d church would hv become a trash.hey!time&chance is still available,GOD is still d same yesterday,today&forever.HE equated us as men of like passion with Elijah.d unmatchable christain weapon is ever active.d devil is aware thats why he gave u sin&u foolishly took it&sold ur birthright.pick it up wea u left it.d strength of bearing d weapon is in righteousness,Holness,purity,sanctification&dedication to GOD.in dat avenue,u cannever be wrong or miss road.GOD is waiting 4 d real champs of d end time,d whole creations of GOD are groaning in pain waiting 4 d manifestations of d sons of men.why are u manifesting sin&iniquity instead of GOD's righteousness&Holiness?dis is wea d actual change comes into play.embrace it&u will never be d same again.stay Holistically JESUS-tic.