#(and not just because of the depravity of wealth or whatever)

[fictionadventurer]

According to the app, I've got fifteen minutes left in The Heir of Redclyffe, but I don't want it to be over.

[quintsentenial]

Klonnie Week Day #2

Portrait of a Muse - Unresolved Sexual Tension.

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Summary:

He captures her in soft moonlight, posed in silence, a living dream... "They say he might've loved her..." One of the viewers comment. "I mean look at how he drew her! How can they not?" A touch of fingers, a stolen glance, yet their boundaries stay held in a cautious dance... "They say you might've loved me..." She repeats to him one night. "And what do you think?" "That things were rarely that simple." Or, an AU starting in 1492 Bulgaria where Bonnie is but the simple daughter of a traveling merchant and Klaus a man on the hunt.

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Story Blurb:

“I’d like to draw you,” a stranger asks, his words hanging in the air between them like an unexpected

Bonnie blinks at the man before her, her eyes widened in bafflement. "Draw me?" She utters, because that wasn’t the first thing she was expecting to hear from him with all the days he’s spent watching her work the inn, his eyes tracking her every move yet never approaching. 

No.

It was a different kind of proposition she'd expected, one she loathed responding to; and yet such depravity is not what he's asked from her tonight.

Though the man before her doesn’t bother repeating himself, all but a fleeting twitch upon his lips as sea-green eyes continue boring into her. “I’d make sure that you were well compensated for it,” he adds, nodding towards the dishes in her hand. “Double whatever you might be making here.”

…

Double?

Bonnie instinctively pulled the plates closer to herself, a bit defensive as she asks, “And just what would such an agreement with you entail?” 

"That you pose as I ask, allow me to dress you however I desire for a scene, and make yourself available to me whenever I want."

…

Just who was this man?

“It would be easy for you to abuse such rules,” she retorts, her skepticism lingering. 

Though the man only shrugs at her, his expression bored. “It would. But you’ll have to trust that my intentions aren’t wicked.” A subtle grin played on his lips now, a tilt that Bonnie isn't sure she should like. 

This was a bad idea…

And he seems like the kind of cautionary figures her mother always warns her about—men who purposefully sought out naive or disadvantaged women, disguising their ill intentions with the facade of opportunity that proved advantageous only to them and detrimental to their victims. 

…

Still…she was no regular woman—the magic constantly stirring against the surface of her skin could attest to that—and she certainly wouldn’t call herself naive.

She glances away for a moment, teeth worrying at some of the dry skin on her bottom lip. “I don’t know you…you’re a stranger here.” 

This was a very bad idea…

“A stranger offering you a grand opportunity,” he counters, eyes alight with a ferocity she can’t comprehend, one that seems to draw her in further. “Do you need more evidence of my wealth before you can agree? I can assure you that it’s nothing to scoff at.” 

That much was obvious with the way he was dressed, the way he looked; opulence in every thread, his attire draped in velvet and gilded finery, intricate patterns of embroidery matching perfectly with the few bits of gold jewelry he wore on his fingers, his blonde hair seeming soft and perfectly styled on his head.

Yes, this was a man whose comforts surely matched that of a king, his offer hanging in the air both tempting and treacherous.

…

She could always use the gold…

The innkeeper here was kind enough to pay her what he could in exchange for her modest services, but it was never going to be enough to put certain plans of hers in motion, the idea of orange grove trees and sandstone beaches flashing temptingly in her mind's eye.  

Bonnie looks back at him, gaze assessing. 

She could have it…

…

…she could have it all in exchange for what? A few pictures? 

“I want the option to say no if your requests prove to be against my liking,” she demands, taking the first step toward the precipice where either her success or peril surely awaits.

The man, seemingly unfazed, shrugs again, conceding easily to her demand. “Fair enough.”

“And for the first few drawings…” She continues, unwilling to let a single condition of hers slip their current negotiations. “We’ll do them here in the inn.”

Where she could call for help if anything were to go awry. 

“Easily done,” he quickly agrees, tossing her a smile that was something both dangerous and beckoning. “Now….do we have a deal?”

Bonnie nods once, sealing her fate. “We do.”

He extended a hand toward her, and she discarded her dishes to a nearby table before taking his hand in turn. “Klaus. Klaus Mikaelson.”

An interesting name she thinks, looking down at their hands, that familiar dark energy coursing through their touch, surprising her eyes back to his; her heart beginning to beat sporadically in her chest. 

Vampire. 

…

Witch, his eyes seem to answer, grin widening further to show all his teeth. “And your name is?”

Bonnie licks her lips, wondering just how desperate she seeks to become before finally making a decision, bowing slightly as she answers, “Bonnie Bennett, my lord," though the answering look of glee on his face does nothing to help the shivers running up her spine.

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For @klonnieshippersclub KlonnieWeek.

Read the rest below!

Closing Note:

A bit late to the party but here nonetheless! xoxo

[soft-and-bitter]

Not for the first time, you realize just how badly you need to escape from Steve. You have to, before he decides to turn a passing comment into reality and you’ll be trapped with him forever.

The Cure & The Cause

Mafia!Steve x Captive!Reader

Word Count: ~2k

Notes/warning(s): some sexual content, coercion, Steve is sweet but a little psycho, no plot just vibes. Reader’s been kidnapped by Steve and is being held captive for a bit before story begins. Part of the same universe that Failed Bargaining belongs to.

If you enjoyed this, please consider reblogging or leaving some feedback, thanks! ❤

When the car rolls up to the curb and a member of Steve’s unit opens the door, Sharon exits first before it’s your turn. You’ve barely stepped out of the black Range Rover before several bodyguards usher you towards the entrance of the multi-storied boutique, but the small stretch of sidewalk you cross is simply not enough for you to attempt an escape. Figures.

You’ve only ever gone shopping for a wedding dress once, when you had accompanied your best friend in search of hers. But with the costs of her traditional wedding adding up quickly, Lisa had been forced to make some concessions where her dress was concerned. Her final choice was still lovely, in the end, though admittedly it wasn’t perfect in every capacity that she’d envisioned.

As soon as you step foot into the bridal boutique, you realize right away that whatever financial concerns Lisa had during her own wedding planning, Sharon will not have. Money is, quite frankly, the least of her worries. For starters, Sharon is one of Steve’s highest-ranking, and she’s getting married to Sam, so it’s no surprise that all the stops have been pulled out. This upscale boutique is apparently one of many salons she has in mind to visit, but already it’s proving to be the most impressive. 

“We have the whole place to ourselves,” Sharon mentions with uncharacteristic giddiness, just as you and the rest of the group settle into plush white sofas. You thought that that in itself spoke to Steve’s influence and wealth, but when the senior manager in her stylish black dress and six-inch heels pops open a bottle of Dom Perignon circa 1996, you’re left wondering how much of Steve’s largesse these people are truly hoping for. 

Together with the champagne, the store’s personnel offer you and the others an assortment of French pastries while Sharon gets into her first dress. A collection of them has already been set aside for her based on previous consultations, but today is when she gets to try them on. You’re already reaching for your second flute when you think that for just a second, you want to imagine that this is all a normal picture, that these women you’re here with—Sharon, Nat, Wanda and Sarah—are in fact your girlfriends, rather than accomplices to your captivity. That without him present, you might just be able to subscribe to the illusion. Combined with the right amount of ridiculously expensive champagne, it’s more than possible. 

This scares you more than you want to admit. Mostly because you’re stuck realizing how lonely you’ve been up to this point, even before Steve decided to take you, but also how your perception of your captivity is beginning to morph into something less depraved, a jagged picture where the edges are becoming dulled. 

You swallow down another bit of champagne in response, and then a little bit more; the next thing you know, time is flying by and your reaction at every dress Sharon steps out in gets more expressive, louder. Somewhere along the way you even end up in Nat’s lap, arms flung over her shoulder, the both of you choking on laughter at a snide comment Sharon’s made about the gown that Wanda—yes, her—has chosen to try on. It’s the very portrait of idealized friendship, of closeness and devotion and support. Of course you want to believe all this, even if only for a minute.

“It looks like you ladies have gone through most of the champagne I sent,” says a low, timbrous voice that slices through the racket of laughter and loud talk.

You, together with everyone else, process Steve’s sudden presence in the salon at the same moment, only your reaction is nowhere near as positive. Amongst the wild cheers and drunken shrieks that the other women let out, you merely stare at him with your mouth agape, blinking at the sight of him in the doorway, Bucky lingering not so far behind. Rather than disappointment, your brain can only process how fucking handsome this man is, how the top of his head nearly grazes the lintel as he enters, every step full of confidence. You’re completely out of his league, your brain foggily reminds you, though you know that—just like you know what’s beneath the gray suit he’s wearing, the one tailored to perfection. 

More treacherous thoughts, you realize, just like most of them today.  

“It feels like I’ve stepped into a party,” Steve says, rounding a sofa to enter the fray. His blue eyes cut to you, take in your place on Nat’s lap and the way you’re holding on to her, but he says nothing. 

“That’s because it is a party,” Sharon insists, a little too loudly, the tendrils of her hair dancing along the sides of her face. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“We were driving through the district and I thought I’d drop in,” he says, still hovering over them. Bucky’s leaning against the doorway with his arms folded across his body and a look of mild amusement on his face, but he doesn’t attempt to intrude any further.

With his hands poised on his hips, Steve looks over at Wanda standing before the wall-to-wall mirrors. “Last time I checked, you’re not getting married. What’s happening here?” 

“Nobody says you have to be a bride to try on a pretty dress,” Nat explains beneath you, one arm still loosely wrapped around your waist. “Sharon needed a breather, actually, so we’ve decided to take turns modeling now. Right, babe?” 

She knocks a shoulder against one of yours.

When Steve swivels his head to look down at the both of you, there’s a smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. “In that case, it’s your turn,” he commands, eyes fixed squarely on you. “Now that I think about it, I'm curious to know how you’d look in a wedding dress. And you want to please me, don’t you?”

You blink at him, letting his words wash over you. You remain sitting on Nat’s lap, even though you’re still not sure how you ended up there in the first place, and you can’t quite believe that Steve’s here too, but reality is starting to sink back in, your little fantasy cracking at the edges. These women around you aren’t your friends, and this isn’t some typical shopping excursion at a designer bridal house.  

When you respond, you’re only vaguely aware how much the champagne you’ve been knocking back has emboldened you. His champagne, no less.

“Forget it,” you say, shaking your head. “I don’t want to.”

You think you may be imagining it, but the room suddenly feels quieter. Steve, though, is still looking down at you, his face still set in a calm expression.

“Find a dress, sweetheart, or I’ll choose one and get you into it myself.” He sinks into the plush sofa adjacent to yours, the sole occupant. “Knowing your tastes, you won’t like what I have in mind for you.”

You know that Steve’s not messing around, because he’s made good on a similar threat before. Worst of all, none of the women around you dissent on your behalf, not even Nat, sitting so close to you. You should feel betrayed by their silence, but it’s partly your fault you helped craft the illusion you so badly wanted to believe in. 

“Come on beautiful, let’s go find you something,” Nat says gently, nudging you to stand. Maybe it’s the hurt you’re feeling, but this time around you don’t object as you follow a sales consultant, Nat trailing close behind. You pass by Bucky as you leave the private room; he throws you a look akin to mild sympathy before he joins the rest.

“My god, look at you,” he breathes, slowly rising from the plush white sofa. “My sweet, sweet girl, all dressed up to get married.”

You’d chosen a dress that made you think of a suit of armor. But by the way Steve studies you, his gaze sharp enough to pierce through any material, you just feel vulnerable. Exposed. Ironic, because your first and final choice felt the most conservative compared to all the dresses that Sharon and the others had come out in. Nat had coaxed you into wearing a veil, too, completing the whole look. 

The champagne keeps your fiery spirit afloat, your tongue looser than normal. “I'm never getting married,” you say.

Steve lifts an eyebrow, his eyes twinkling with amusement. "Never?"

"Never," you parrot.

“Well that's too bad, 'cause that won't be a decision you get to make. Now come here.”

You think about ignoring him for a second, just turn right back where you’d shuffled from as your own quiet brand of fuck you. But there’s a look of expectancy on his face, and at his full height, Steve isn’t one to spar with. 

His hands are already on your waist when you turn to the expanse of mirrors. You weren’t wrong when you deemed this dress less eye-catching than the others, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less lovely. 

“What do you think?” he asks. You can feel his fingers playing with the veil that waterfalls behind you, the way his knuckles ghost along your back.

“It's . . . fine, I guess,” you say, staring at yourself in the mirror.

“Oh, I think it’s more than fine,” he insists. “Stunning, in fact. Should I buy it?”

He doesn’t mean it, you convince yourself, but it’s not enough to clamp down on the panic rising within you. Didn’t he just hear what you’d said a second earlier?

Until now, Steve has never mentioned marriage or anything of the like. But since when did you know how his mind worked? You wouldn’t be here if you did. 

“Well?”

You shake your head. “Don’t. I can’t wear white to another bride’s wedding,”

Steve chuckles as he gently draws back the veil and your hair away, sweeping both over your left shoulder. “In that case, you can wear it at home, just for me. And you’ll make sure not to wear anything underneath, won’t you?”

Goosebumps dance along your skin. His hands on your waist have you trapped in place, body pressed against his. To your alarm, you feel him hardening against your back, a threat and a promise.

" I liked it more when it was on the rack," you say hastily, trying to ignore his growing desire, "now that I'm in it, I'm having second thoughts."

In the mirror, you can see Steve shaking his head. "No, you're absolutely radiant in this. It's perfect . . . and it's just so you."

He acts without warning. You inhale sharply as his tongue trails up your neck, slow and hot. Steve was licking you—licking you—in front of everyone, without an ounce of shame. It reminds you all too well of the other night, when he had spread you out across his desk and eaten you out while he'd taken a call on speaker. He'd taken his damned time too, keeping you on the very precipice while the caller spewed all this babel your mind couldn't comprehend, all thanks to the desperate state you were in. And when he finally let you come, it had been with his hand shoved against your mouth.

Not for the first time, you realize just how badly you need to escape from Steve. You have to, before he decides to turn a passing comment into reality and you’ll be trapped with him forever.

Yeah I have no idea what this is lol; it was such a basic and simple premise that really didn’t need to be 2k plus words long, but here we are I guess. Graphics by me.

[rosebancroft]

The Man:

I crave a man who clings to me with a fervor born of desperation, unafraid to drown himself in the depths of my being, heedless of the shadows lurking within. Someone who will revel in the depths of my depravity, his pride unyielding even in the face of my collective transgressions. To bury his secrets on my itching skin and be bare in my sight. Someone who would cry like a child with a tantrum when he does not catch a glimpes of me, wanting to be woven to the sight of my skin, itching closer to his.

Now, when I need comforting, he is to snuggle me in the night, wrapping his arms on my curves, his tongue trailing on my skin in the cold night. To my neck, my arms, my bosom, anywhere he knows I find pleasure. That is when his silence reigns supreme, but when he does hold the power to mutter, oh my, my darling, when he does. He can whisper in my ear, soft intimacy of words that sends shivers down my spine—reaping me naked in the night, bare in his arms with his eyes so sure.

A desire to be kept so close and be touched so tenderly yet the ache for those moments where he could break me is as lovable as those tender trails of kisses. Although the feeling is heavenly and pure, it pales in comparison to the intoxicating moments when he sinks his teeth into my skin, leaving his mark—trailing his tongue behind, a fiery dance of pleasure and pain.

Touching my fingertips with his own—the contrast in size palpable as he trails it to my wrist, grabbing it softly and bringing it to his lips before he breaks me asunder. 

I ache for his unwavering gaze, transcending all distractions, companions, and activities. To lock eyes with him is to be consumed by his very essence, and whatever it may be, it should be as he relentlessly shadows my every move. And when those eyes plead, when they do, my darling, I’m sure, I am to falter. In every inch, the searing heat of desperation intertwines with the tender embrace of love. It promises solace in my darkest of nights, an eerie tranquility that both soothes and unnerves me—in a good fucking way, casting shadows that dance with whispered secrets, enticing yet chilling in its beauty.

In other circumstances, like when I'm gone and he does not know why, oh darling when he sees, he would throw every sense he has left and look for me, every inch of the earth will be unkept but he would not lay a breath on what I love—those beautiful roses he would burn the world just to find for me.

A man that has a spirit well-versed in the pangs of existence, carrying the weight of every sorrow the world could muster, haunted by the echoing whispers of what, when, where, and what might have been. Yet, amidst the shadows of desolation, he is to falter in my presence, his facade of fortitude crumbling beneath the gentle inquiry of what troubles his soul and I would, I promise I will, whisper in his ear, soft words until those thoughts are no longer.

I need someone who wants to open my skin and live within my bloody sins because they find solace and comfort within. A soul who craves my attention, my very breath, and existence itself, and every inch of thought I would give, no matter the uncertainty. I long for him to yearn for me, not for material wealth, but for the essence of who I am, to cherish the complexities of my soul and the depths of my heart.

Obsessively so, when I no longer breath, I don't want him to cry and waste his tears, but be one who will sheer me headless to keep me for himself, as he shower on my blood just so he can feel my warmth on his, tracing every inch of his skin and making him feel as though I still breath and trace my being on his inches. Grappling his soul, and keeping my head to kiss every night and morning, no matter how rotten.

I felt it the moment my thoughts wandered too far, an unsettling intuition that something within me was awry. Despite the persistent shame, there lingered a stubborn sense of pride in cherishing every thought and word, a sensation crawling up my neck like tendrils of ivy. And soon enough, I'll be rent asunder by the weight of these neglected thoughts, left to rot in the recesses of my mind. My sanity will unravel until my desires manifest into reality and is brought to fruition.

These feelings refuse to dissipate; instead, they saturate my mind with an intoxicating satisfaction. Every doubt and uncertainty is assuaged by the mere thought of him, filling the voids I once questioned with his presence in my mind. And perhaps, even in my inadequacy, he remains true. But alas, am I deluded? How enduring will this perception be? Why does it fulfill me so? More than my thoughts could wonder? Is this my ultimate purpose? And what purpose is he when he is not true? Oh my, my dear...I plead the heavens that my doubt is not true. That what ends with me is with him. No matter my sins, give me what I'm deprived of so I am to be satisfied. My dearest, give me the definition of my love, the ache and desperation... please... give... me... The Man.

-Bancroft

[monstersdownthepath]

Scourge Spotlight: Oitos

CR 11

Lawful Evil Medium Outsider

Complete Book of the Damned, pg. 249

While most velstrac believe in the beauty of mutilated flesh and twisted muscle, for the Oitos, such beauty is only skin deep. These gilded fiends eschew tinkering with flesh in its entirely, believing in the perfection of bone, despite how inflexible it is when compared to the myriad of shapes helpless flesh can be molded into. Rather than be discouraged by the restrictions placed upon themselves, Oitos take the challenge in stride, representing the fiends of greed among the velstrac race, decorating themselves and the exposed bones of their victims with elaborate scrimshaw, gilding with precious metals, and gemstones gruesomely embedded in the surfaces.

Mortals enticed by the idea of wealth are the primary victims of the Oitos who, like other “ambassador”-type velstrac, can use Plane Shift not only to move themselves around the universe, but take other Lawful-aligned creatures along with them. Whenever an Oitos uses its Plane Shift to travel to the Plane of Shadow or any Evil-aligned plane, it arrives at its desired location with perfect accuracy thanks to them being skilled Dark Travelers. Dark Traveler also doubles the speed at which an Oitos travels with its 3/day Shadow Walk, letting it cover preposterous amounts of distance in incredibly short amounts of time. If, for whatever reason, it needs to travel to one of the transitive planes or the Negative Energy Plane, Shadow Walk allows it--and any passengers it’s carrying--to reach such destinations in just a few hours. They even have Deeper Darkness at will to always assure they have an entry point/escape route!

With Charm Monster available to it 3/day, an Oitos can easily kidnap someone who’d otherwise wise up to the fact that this talking golden skeleton might not want what’s best for them, inviting them into a life of wealth and splendor only for them to find out it literally costs them (all the skin off) an arm and a leg. Oitos don’t actually need to install the gold manually, mind--though they often do--they just need to score a critical hit with any one of their three natural attacks to afflict someone with Golden Bones. This curse permanently transforms the victim’s skeleton into radiant gold, lowering their Con score by 4, afflicting them with a Faerie Fire aura that can’t be dispelled, and potentially burning out their eyes from the inside to blind them if they fail a DC 21 Fortitude save that they must make every round.

Luckily, they must first fail a DC 21 Fortitude save after being critically struck by the Oitos to suffer this cursed transformation in the first place, but as previously mentioned, they can attempt three times a round to afflict an unwilling creature with this splendor. Two claws (1d6+11 +2d6 Cold) are their primary means of offense, but they also have a Lash on hand made up of the leather and skin of past victims that deals 2d4+11 +2d6 Cold damage. While flesh is discarded, skin is kept to be made into fashionable accessories and even weapons by the depraved fiends, their curse of Golden Bones transferring through any such leather weapon they field.

Side note: the book says the cleaned skeleton of someone afflicted with Golden Bones is worth about 1,000gp, but I find that figure insultingly low. Yes, if you melted them down you’d get about 1,000gp worth of ingots, but I bet if you really looked around in any large enough fantasy town you’d be able to find a real weirdo who’d pay top dollar for a solid gold skull. Like, perhaps, a devotee to Raetorgash...

Second side note: Because they have Fabricate available 3/day, Oitos can and will reshape the bones of unworthy victims into jewelry and decorations for themselves or their more worthy victims.

While potentially damaging all the gilding they worked so hard to apply makes Oitos hesitant to actually engage in a combat they could reasonably be damaged in, if victims have no weapons that can bypass their DR 10 (bludgeoning weapons that are silver or Good-aligned), they’ll at least stick around enough to try and get some licks in before they attempt a hasty escape. In battles where they need to stick around, they can make sure EVERYONE stays where they are with a 3/day DImensional Anchor, which is especially useful when hunting down fellow Outsiders and their nasty tendency to Dimension Door or Teleport away.

Their DR isn’t where their defenses end, though. Their Unnerving Gaze can cause nausea in any creature that fails its save, preventing them from fighting back as they’re peeled by the skeletal fiend, and they have Eyebite available 1/day to sicken and panic lesser beings with a single glance. Eyebite can also render a target comatose for two hours if they have 4 or less HD, making the Oitos terrifyingly efficient kidnappers and slavers... and excellent at churning out gold in exchange for sacrifices. The Golden Bones curse only works if the victim is critically struck, but a helpless or willing target can allow the Oitos to coup de grace them, which is always a critical hit.

You can read more about them here.

[roobylavender]

Was thinking about that succession post you reblogged a few days ago and I think what I really love about it (or what sets it apart from most "family dramas" out there in the post-succ landscape) is how the show holds the characters as complicit in very serious crimes (such as their influence on the media, their influence on the ELECTIONS). I think most TV shows have the whole: yeah they suck and they're annoying but uwu they have childhood trauma thing, but succession doesn't hesitate to show how the explosiveness of their trauma doesn't just affect them but affects the whole WORLD and while you can sort of sympathize with them, you can never allow yourself to let them get away with who they are as people. The SHOW doesn't let them get away with who they are as people. Even small things, like how Logan encourages the children to compete against each other to bring out the best heir (and how that fucks them up), reflects on big things (like how capitalism, as a system, encourages competition over cooperation and how that fucks society up as a whole). Your sympathy for them will only go so far though, because at the end of the day, they're still perpetuators of this cycle they haven't escaped from — and they never WILL escape from it, because they're billionaires. Every petty thing they do has small consequences for them, but big consequences for the world.

It all comes down to that, as it always does, because the show is aware of the corrupting influence of wealth on people (and the corrupting influence of RICH PEOPLE on everyone else), which, to me is a very smart work, even if the fans can sometimes get a little overboard or annoying. This isn't me saying you should watch it or anything, but that post birthed a lot of thoughts I had about the show and I just wanted to share☺️

i don't mind you sharing at all, it's insightful! and for whatever little exposure i have to the bulk of succession canon this does seem to make sense in line with what i've seen and it hits the nail on the head as to why i wouldn't like it if i watched it lol. it's very rare i dislike a property bc of the characters but on the occasions i do it's truly bc i cannot stand them bc at the core what they are is rotten (as another example, i hated 1984, bc i absolutely could not stand winston as a person, even if the point was to criticize his participation in and futility in the face of the overarching system). it's good that succession didn't shy away from that and fully embraced the depravity of its characters, regardless of whatever individual quirks made them marginally sympathetic in a given moment!

[sevillacf]

Dread

How could I describe the cocktail of anger, helplessness and misery that bubbles up inside me at the thought of my employment? I am a bit of a Romantic, I think everyone deserves to skip around in fields and hold hands and fill the air with rich laughter. I believe that this human part of the world is quite horrific and it is made doubly so by the fact that it is malicious without any sort of reason. Laughable are the excuses shouted from on high as to why people should be suffering each and everyday. 

It is a mirthless chuckle I give to the scum that continue their plunder of this place that I call home. 

Now, back to my sweet drink. When I was younger and dreamed of the future, I had many naïve hopes. I thought an owl would show me a magic castle or that aliens would whisk me far, far away or that my veins would course with ichor from ancient gods. I thought that you became 18 and you immediately got your own place and that college would bring with it endless access to knowledge from all over! Dreams of monsters and single-income minimum wage rent dotted my nighttime travels. How odd a dream to have. Nowadays I bolt myself awake for fear of sleeping too long and missing a shift. Every moment outside of my place of employment is spent waiting for the moment I have to step back in. I am sentenced to this factory line work for laughable reasons. 

We are not about profits, we’re about creating community! 

Thank you for shopping at your local Company!

Embody Company values, wagie! Make us look good!

It is a ridiculous thing, it is a sham way of life. I sell my labor in this place for less than I generate, how ridiculous! The threat of termination looms over my head because a life without wealth, without the crumbs from Master’s loaf is worthless. Not literally speaking, of course. I think this money caste that we live in is quite dreadful. I think we all realize how bad it is or at the very least can point at the part of everyday that sucks in that special way where you know it doesn’t have to. 

I hate going into work everyday. I hate the ridiculous charade of subsuming myself into the folds of the company and coming out as a node in their profit making machine. I hate that people are forced into the position of paying more for the same thing that they were getting cheaper mere months ago. It’s almost sci-fi like how these prices swing. There’s nothing the consumer can do to make the prices change and then it is peddled that it is in fact the consumer rapacious appetite that has caused the poor uwu innocent company to price gouge, it is an utter shambles! At least the serfs were only farming, 6-8 hours on your feet with 15 minute breaks would make a medieval sadist soak their bloomers or whatever’s the historically accurate version of undergarments. This, I believe, is one of the depravities of modernity. To not own our bodies or the fruits that it produces. 

Actually, I just don’t want to go to work because I am lazy and feel entitled to all the pleasure in life. I will never stop complaining until both those desires are sated or I am dead. 

[justanotherpersonsuniverse]

Demon Alya submission (starts off angsty, gets fluffy at the end) made by Anon

Alya hissed with pain and strained to get up, but the magic sigils which had been chalked around her blazed with a strange pale light and her body slammed back to the hard cement floor. Her tail lashed back and forth wildly, hard enough that it hurt when its tip smacked against the wall, and her wings beat futilely to break out of the iron bindings that bent then flat against her back. “You sure we can’t work this out?” she asked in the best ‘temptation’ voice she could muster despite her pain. “I can give you power, wealth, fame…”

“I need no fame, demon scum,” boomed the exorcist who had bound her. He was an older man whose hair was going silver and who wore what looked like a cross between a priest’s cassock and a military uniform. He had a sword at his side whose blade was carved with holy sigils, and a few other exorcist accoutrements hung off his belt. Now he raised a book high while his eyes, which seemed almost to be trying to bulge out of his head, fixated on her. “All I need is the knowledge that you shall be destroyed forever, as God intended!”

Alya bit back a curse. She was still mad at herself for letting this guy get the jump on her, but by the time she’d realized that she was being followed, he was close enough to use some kind of magic spell to make her pass out. She’d awoken in what looked like a cheap basement, with a cement floor and bare plaster on the walls, and with sigils and iron bonds preventing her from escaping. “You can’t destroy me forever,” she snapped. “You might be able to banish me back to Hell, but I’ll be back on Earth eventually.”

Of course, that wasn’t a great scenario for Alya. Not only would she get in trouble for losing a fight with an exorcist, and not only would she fall behind on her soul quota, but her classmates wouldn’t know where she’d gone. It would be just like she’d abandoned them. And Alya couldn’t bear to think of how sad Juleka would be if Alya cut and run, or the rest of her cult, or… or Marinette. Alya knew Marinette would be devastated, and she desperately wanted that not to happen, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it.

Then the man laughed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you little depraved beast? You’d love to be able to turn and wreck havoc once more. But I’ve found a way around it!” He tossed a little voodoo doll next to Alya. “I will bind your spiritual essence to this doll, then burn it. As the doll crumbles in the flame your spiritual essence will be split asunder. When I’m done you’ll be little more than millions of tiny bits of demon, each tied to a tiny bit of ash, and that ash scattered to the winds.” He grinned. “It could take thousands of years for the bindings to weaken enough for you to reconstitute yourself and even begin trying to regain a corporal form. And seeing as how you’ll be in utter agony the entire time, I highly doubt you’ll be sane enough to tempt any more innocents into your clutches!”

Alya gasped. What the man proposed might actually work, and would subject her to millennia of torture. And worse than that… by the time she put herself back together, her classmates would have been dead for millennia. She’d never see them again unless they went to Hell. And she’d never see Marinette, period, because that girl was so pure she’d surely get rushed right to Heaven the moment she died. 

She’d never see her best friend again. 

“You can’t do this!” Alya said, almost ashamed of how terrified her voice was but not being able to help it. “Please!”

“Silence, demon scum,” said the exorcist. “All your kind deserve this.” He began to chant, and Alya cried out in pain as she felt her essence being pulled towards the doll. She tried to fight it—

And then the door to the basement smashed open.

By the time Alya realized what was happening, she saw Rose—holding a flaming sword, wings spread to their full length, halo blazing such a righteous fire above her head that Alya could barely look at it—looming over the man, whom had been knocked into the wall and slid down. “YOU DON’T DO THIS!” screamed Rose in genuine rage. “EVER!”

The man stared at Rose in terrified shock. Rose glared at him, then turned to Alya and swung her sword at the sigils. They burst into a bright flash of light and vanished as soon as her holy blade touched them, and Alya was able to scrambled out of the former circle. A couple quick, careful strokes of Rose’s sword sliced the iron bindings from Alya’s back, and she sighed with relief as she stretched her wings.

“What are you doing?“ the man demanded. “Don’t free her! You are an angel, you must support our battles against demons. They are evil beasts who tempt others, so it is right that we hurt them! That we banish them and make them suffer all the pain they have inflicted—“

“IT IS NOT YOURS TO JUDGE!” screamed Rose loud enough that the man flinched back. She took an angry breath and said, “If a demon is doing something bad, then it is permissible to oppose that demon. I have opposed demons who were about to hurt or damn someone. But Alya was doing nothing, and even if she was, ‘opposing’ does not mean ‘torturing!’” She took a step closer and raised her sword. “The job of a holy warrior is never to inflict pain for the sake of doing so! To never do more damage than necessary to fight evil, to always show mercy where possible and encourage others to repent!” The fire on her blade blazed higher. “YOU ARE NO PALADIN!” she went on, tears starting to form in the corners of her eyes. “YOU ARE JUST A KILLER, AND—“

Alya hesitated, feeling on one hand that she really wanted to see this guy get absolutely thrashed by Rose, but knowing on the other she had an obligation to her friend. “Woah, woah, hold it,” said Alya as she quickly grabbed Rose’s hand to stop her from stabbing the exorcist. “He’s defeated, okay? You don’t need to kill him.”

“But he tried to kill you!” Rose said through teary-eyes. “You’re one of my best friends—“

“And I’m here to remind you that the stuff you said about you guys not being supposed to do more damage than needed applies to you too.” Alya bit her lip and looked at the exorcist who was now trembling with fear, his glee at his earlier successful tortures of Alya having seemingly already been forgotten. “Look, Rose, even if you can get away with killing the guy and not Fall or be stripped of your angelic status, you’ll still hate yourself for it tomorrow.”

The exorcist stared at Alya with bewildered eyes. “You are a demon!” he rasped. “You want her to Fall! I know it! All demons want angels to Fall!”

Alya frowned. “She’s my friend,” she snapped. “That’s more important the feud between our bosses.”

Rose was still standing with her blade raised. “But he hurt you,” she whispered. “You’re wonderful, and he hurt you, and I can’t just let that go.”

“Who said anything about letting it go?” Alya said. “Like, he tried to torture me to death. That’s really evil, so I’m pretty sure his soul’ll go to us when he dies, and that means we’ll have all eternity to get back at him.” Unless he repented and went to Heaven in the end, Alya thought, and if he did… well, that would be a bummer. She really wanted to get her claws at this guy. But she’d rather let this guy have that chance than have Rose kill him right there and suffer regret for it every day after for all her eternal life. “And even setting that aside, I can get the guy in jail with my Whisper powers. That way we know he can’t hurt anyone else.”

Rose was still hesitating, so Alya gently helped her lower the sword. “He’s not worth it,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Finally, still trembling with rage and sorrow, Rose let Alya escort her out of the basement.

###

It only took Alya about ten minutes to jail the guy. She was quite skilled with Whisper, the power of demons to, well, whisper evil or hurtful thoughts into the minds of unsuspecting mortals. During her training she had learned how to convince humans that everyone hated them and was only pretending to befriend them out of pity, or that their spouse was cheating on them, or that—whatever the priest at church said—they really had done something beyond forgiveness and so might as well go forth and sin some more.

Now, though, Alya used that power to Whisper into the fanatic’s head. “There are demons everywhere!” she whispered. “In that trash can! On that curb! On top of that police car! If you don’t fight them, they’ll destroy Paris!”

The fanatic raved and ran around, swinging his sword wildly at the demons his mind convinced him were all around him. That, of course, led to police officers swarming and tackling him. Alya smiled as she watched Roger Raincomprix bundle him into his police car and take him away, saying something about asylums and institutionalization. “He won’t be bothering anyone ever again,” she said. Then she turned to Rose. “How did you find me?”

“You didn’t show up for that thing you were doing with Juleka,” Rose said. Both girls were hiding their spiritual forms and looked fully human, but Alya got the sense that if Rose’s wings had been visible they would have been curling around her like a cocoon. “She got worried and used a spell from your library to track you down. I was closer so I got to your first, but she’ll probably be here soon too.”

“I should text her to let her know I’m alright,” Alya noted. She took her phone, which the fanatic had left in a corner of the basement and which Alya had reclaimed, and sent a message to Juleka. “Want to get home?”

Rose nodded weakly.

Alya frowned. “Don’t beat yourself up over losing your temper,” she said. “It happens to all of us.”

“Sure.” Rose shrugged. “Uh huh.”

Alya paused. Clearly, she thought, Rose needed more help. And now that Alya was out of her bonds and was back in action, she was just the girl to help her. “Anyways, I’m going back to my place, and you’re coming too,” she announced.

Rose blinked. “Wait, what?”

“I said, we’re going to my place,” Alya announced. “Come on, Rose. You saved my life and I owe you one. Let’s get going.”

Rose clearly didn’t know what was going on, but she smiled a little and let herself be dragged along.

###

When the pair got back to Alya’s apartment, they dropped their guises and Alya sighed as she flopped back in her bed. “I never thought I’d see this bed again,” she murmured. “I didn’t think I’d see you, or Juleka, or… or Marinette again either.” She shut her eyes, knowing how badly she would have been hurt to never see the adorable fashion designer, and also knowing how much pain Marinette would have been in if Alya had just vanished. “Thank you again, Rose.”

Rose nodded weakly.

Alya got Rose over to the couch and settled down with her. “Why are you still sad?” she asked.

Rose hesitated, and Alya said, “If you don’t want to share it with me, that’s fine. We can just rest here; I’ll put on some cartoons or something until we both feel better. But if you’re sad, you can talk to me.”

It took a few moments for Rose to say something, during which time she slumped over and snuggled against Alya. One of her wings tickled Alya’s nose and she sneezed, which made Rose giggle. Then Rose cuddled deeper against Alya and said, “Am I a bad angel?”

“No way!” Alya said. “You’re awesome at what you do, and I’m saying that even though what you do makes it harder to me to tempt souls a lot of the time.”

Rose smiled at that. “But I almost didn’t save you,” she said. “And I almost murdered that guy after he was already defeated.”

“You did save me in the end, which is what counts,” Alya said. “You did your job. And while you got mad at the fanatic, you didn’t kill him.” She paused. “We’ve never had an all-out fight, so I can’t say for sure what would have happened if you’d tried to break my grip and kill the guy, but based on what I know of you I think you could probably have thrown me aside and killed the fanatic if you really wanted to do so. You didn’t, so you knew on some level killing him was wrong.”

“Right, but I still want him to suffer for what he did to you,” said Rose. “And I’m not supposed to. Angels aren’t supposed to hate, even when we’re fighting evil.”

“I’m not exactly an expert on what you guys believe,” Alya said slowly. “Since we demons and devils have a different system. But I think I read somewhere that your boss is really big on forgiveness and understands that everyone screws up sometimes. I don’t think He’d want you beating yourself up like this, and I think He’d be satisfied with how you saved the victim—me—and didn’t do any more damage to the guy once he wasn’t a threat anymore.”

Rose mulled that over for a few moments. “You really think so?”

“Sure,” said Alya. “Besides, any God who would get mad at you over—what, yelling a bit after stopping a torturer?—wouldn’t be a God worth worshipping.”

“Don’t say that about God,” murmured Rose, but she sounded a lot calmer. “That makes sense, though. Thanks, Alya.”

“Happy to help.” Alya gingerly scratched at the base of Rose’s wings, and she sighed in contentment.

“You know,” said Rose after a few moments of that, “You’d make a good angel.”

Alya jolted in shock at that, and Rose laughed. “Don’t say that!” Alya feebly protested. “Seriously, I—I would not want that job. I don’t like the idea that I’d have to be nice all the time because my boss demanded it. I like what I am, where I have the freedom to be how I want.” She realized she was blushing and tried to make herself stop. “Besides, I’m not that nice in general,” she went on. “You’re an exception.”

“Nah,” said Rose. “You’re nice. If you wanted to be an angel you’d be great at it.” She chuckled, and then she asked, “But I’m curious about one thing. That guy said that demons want angels to Fall, but you worked really hard to stop me from Falling today. Was that just because we’re friends, or do you oppose angels falling in general?”

Alya didn’t know why, but she was blushing again. “Uh,” she began. “Look, I’m all about freedom. That’s why I like my side of things in the first place. I think you should have freedom too, and if I thought you really, truly wanted to Fall, then I would offer my help to you—you know, finding some sin for you to commit that wouldn’t do anything too bad or hurt anyone you didn’t want to suffer—so you could live as you wished. But I know you, and I know that in your heart you don’t want to do anything so bad that you Fall. You like being a holy angel warrior for God. You love being able to spread blessings and help usher souls into eternal bliss. And if that’s your choice, I want to help you maintain it. Because we’re friends.”

The idea of friendship was still a new one to Alya, who of course came from a place where there was no such thing as friendship, where everyone was out for themselves and anyone dumb enough to admit to weakness would find that weakness mercilessly exploited by classmates, neighbors, and random strangers. But now that she was in the human world, she had friends, and she found that she liked it. (Granted, she had to keep her friendships hidden from her bosses—especially her friendship with Rose—but she was a demon and deceit came naturally to her, so that wasn’t too hard.)

Rose smiled gently. “I’m glad we’re friends,” she said.

The two stayed still for a few moments before Rose reluctantly raised herself up. “I guess I should go,” she said. “I’m sure you and Juleka need to do whatever you were planning on doing before you got abducted.”

“We were just planning on watching some fun anime and having some snacks,” said Alya. Then, as if on cue, she heard a knock on the door and grinned. “It’s open!” she called. Then she turned to Rose and said, “When I texted her earlier, I told her to get back to my place so we could resume our plans. That must be her now.”

Rose tried to get up, but Alya wrapped her tail around Rose and tugged her back down. “I don’t want to get in the way,” Rose said quickly. “I’ll leave.”

“No, you’ll join us,” corrected Alya. “Because this is my room, so I can invite who I want, and I want you here. Because this is my cult, so Juleka has to do what I say, and I say you get to stay.” Her eyes twinkled. “And because I know you and Juleka love spending time together, and so since you also had kind of a rough day, a little time with your favorite paladin and my favorite priestess is just what Dr. Alya ordered.”

Rose grinned at that. 

Then Juleka entered the room carrying a bag.  As soon as her gaze fell upon Rose she smiled brightly, and Rose returned that smile. “Alright,” Juleka said. “I’ve got the DVD for that anime you told me to find, ‘Kill La Kill,’ and your snacks.” She took some cups out of the bag. “Three hot chocolates—one with cinnamon, because I know that’s your favorite, Rose—some microwave popcorn, and pastries from the Dupain-Cheng bakery.” She paused. “Marinette told me she’ll be free in an hour or so. Would you want me to invite her?”

“Sure!” said Alya at once. She’d have to hide her demon form once Marinette arrived, of course, but it would be worth it to hang out with the fashion designer. Marinette always seemed to brighten up any room. “And thanks for helping Rose save me with the tracking spell. I owe you one.”

Juleka waved that off. “It’s a friend thing,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Such a sentence was something Alya would never, ever have heard in the demon world. Debts there were jealously maintained. But she liked this way, she found… even if she did intend on finding some way to reward Juleka for saving her life. “Sure,” she said to change the subject. “But I still appreciate it. Anyway, what kind of pastries did you get?”

“Angel food cake for Rose, lemon cake for me, and chili-chocolate cake for you,” said Juleka as she passed out the treats. Rose sniffed her cake and sighed at how wonderful it smelled. “I’ll pop in the DVD and then we can start the show.”

Juleka did so and then sat on Rose’s other side. Rose grinned and spread her wings wide enough to give partial hugs to both Alya and Juleka, and Alya’s tail flicked a bit before running against the other two girls’ backs. Rose giggled. “That tickles!” she said.

“Sorry,” drawled Alya. She bit into the delicious cake and grinned. Chili and chocolate was a hard combination to get right, but the Dupain-Cheng family were masters, and the cake was absolutely perfect. “My bad.”

“You’re not sorry,” said Juleka lightly. “That’s a lie.”

“Well, lying’s a sin,” chirped Alya. “And as a demon, that’s kind of my thing.”

Both of the other girls laughed, and then Rose draped her arms as well as her wings around the other two. Juleka hit the button on the remote and the show started.

Alya sighed, her pains from earlier almost completely forgotten as she relaxed with her friends. The human world was good, she thought. She was very glad she hadn’t been kicked out of it. And she’d try to stay in it—and be with the people she cared about, including the wonderful angel and the amazing human currently sitting on her couch—for as long as she could.

———

AW THAT WAS WONDERFUL

GO ROSE

I like how its been decided that between Rose and Alya theres a bad cop and good cop dynamic going on

Alya is the good cop

[lavander-aavaros]

You: Adam is a villain so it's valid to write him doing any depraved thing. Yes, okay, so you agree he is not redeemed and an abuser in canon then? There are the words you're using.

You only took two hours, do you have my notifications on?

[post in question]

“Depraved thing” This is so funny. Does seducing and killing someone count as depraved?

I called him a disaster villain, inspired by one of my mutuals who tags him as disaster villain. It’s light hearted. The man is a lovable, chaotic, disastrous bastard.

Villain is a role in a story that a character plays. Adam is an antagonist, because he directly opposes our main characters. This is a sports anime, after all. But Adam doesn’t do things out of malice or greed (*cough* unlike his aunts), instead the show portrays him as misguided and in need of help, giving him a hand up in the end. Just because you think “hitting a man with a skateboard” is bad, doesn’t mean the show does. Once again, S in an “anything goes” race and everyone there willingly engages with him. The cast knows this, so why don’t you? That is not what a villain is

One thing I can agree on is that he’s not “”redeemed””, because he hasn’t done anything bad enough to be redeemed from. The man doesn’t use his wealth/status to give himself an unfair advantage over the other contestants, much less the main cast. He is fair in his beefs and respects his rivals, even rejecting people he feels disrespected by. Do unto others as you would unto yourself, as the saying goes. A malicious villain would not respect that, because respecting others isn’t a villainous trait. Think of any magical girl villain, for example. They don’t ask “hey can I destroy your planet and kill all your friends? No? Oh cool, goodbye then :(“

You’re allowed to be angry over how the show ended, the problem is that you come to piss in my inbox. If you made your own posts, on your own account, no one would have a problem with it

Anyways come back when you’ve opened a dictionary and know what “irredeemable” and “abusive” mean. That’s why you’re getting called a clown. I would love a well thought out essay that actually explains his “patterns of abuse” or whatever you claim

Once again I want to encourage everyone to have a blast unapologetically making this man the worstTM. Same goes for any of the sk8 characters, I hope people have fun if they create anything that bastardizes them

[unrighteousbooks]

The Divine Hunting Accident of Dante Allegory This is the fourth and final part of a very long story, one that I began months ago. It has taken me a long time to collect my thoughts, and I am aware that they are still not entirely clear. Having begun the story, however, I have resolved to see it through to completion. So: * * * * * I needed to visit Graceland. Graceland is a beautiful name. To be received in Graceland. That is what we all want, isn't it? I believe there is a song about it, something about human trampolines and bouncing into Graceland, which I mention only because my resolution to tell this story began with a discussion of music. Graceland Cemetery is on the north side of the notoriously sinful city of Chicago. Perhaps that makes sense: Sinners need grace more desperately than saints. I wanted to stand in front of a grave at Graceland because it seemed like a good place to think about sins and redemption. Before I discuss that particular grave, however, I need to say this: In another grave, in a cemetery not so far away, the remains of a boy named Bobby Franks lie in a cold coffin. He was murdered at the age of 14. The murder took place on May 21, 1924, on a quiet side street on the south side of Chicago. Bobby Franks was murdered by Nathan Leopold Jr., who was 19, and Richard Loeb, who was 18. The story of the murder, then, is the story of three young men, but it is only Bobby Franks who will forever retain that adjective: Young. Young Bobby Franks, young then, young now, young forever because of the callous cruelty of two other young men. They murdered him for fun. They murdered him because they wanted to know how it felt to take someone's life. They wanted the thrill of the experience. What kind of person does such a thing? What kind of person imagines that it would be thrilling to kill someone, and what kind of person can fail to understand the moral implications of murder? The facts of the case are this: The killers, both highly intelligent, had been born to wealth and privilege. They believed that they were a superior breed of men. Convinced that they were examples of Nietzsche's ubermen, they felt unburdened by conventional morality. Leopold and Loeb committed a series of petty crimes, but wanted more: they wanted to shock the world. They formed a plan to kidnap and murder a random victim. Driving a rented car on streets in their own neighborhood, they happened upon Bobby Franks. They lured him into the car and murdered him with a chisel. They drove to a secluded area southeast of the city, mutilated the boy's body, and concealed it in a culvert. Their "perfect crime" fell apart within days: the body was found the next morning, and nearby, police found a distinctive pair of glasses which were quickly traced back to Leopold. The two confessed and pleaded guilty to the charge of murder. At their sentencing, their attorney -- the venerable Clarence Darrow -- delivered a lengthy, eloquent appeal for mercy, asking only that his clients be spared the death penalty. And so it was: On September 10, 1924, Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life in prison, plus 99 years. They were sent to Joliet Prison, some 30 miles from Chicago, then transferred to the nearby Stateville Prison. It is hard to imagine how men who had fancied themselves as superior to their peers would have regarded their surroundings. It is certain that they would have felt despair; but surely their despair was no greater than that of the family of their victim. It is tempting to judge Leopold and Loeb's parents harshly. When we regard someone as a monster, we wonder about the source of such depravity, and we look for someone or something to blame. Yet whatever the failings of Nathan Leopold's father, we must grant him this: He did not abandon his son. With friends in high places, he employed his power to make his son's life in prison as bearable as possible. He kept him well-supplied with books, and Leopold spent his days reading. Reading, thinking, and learning. If there is a path to salvation -- a path to grace -- for those who have committed atrocious crimes, the first step on that path must involve learning. Moreover, when we learn, we want to share our knowledge. This, in fact, is why I am now attempting to tell this story. I say "attempting" because it may not be clear what this is about. Is it about Nathan Leopold and Loeb? Partly, but it is also a story about a story: This is about a graphic novel called The Hunting Accident, written by David L. Carlson and illustrated by Landis Blair. The Hunting Accident tells the true story of a man named Matt Rizzo. Like Leopold and Loeb, Rizzo grew up in Chicago. His Chicago, however was vastly different. In the Kenwood area, where Leopold and Loeb were raised, crime was an aberration. In Rizzo's neighborhood, it was a daily fact of life. A man who is subjected to poverty and crime might imagine that they are forces which pull in opposite directions. He might believe that crime is the means by which one escapes poverty. This was the case for Matt Rizzo. Whatever the causes -- and surely they are complicated -- Rizzo turned to crime. One night he stole his father's shotgun and, with two companions, held up a liquor store. The robbery did not go as planned: The owner, also armed with a shotgun, escaped through the back of the store and opened fire on the robbers. Matt Rizzo was struck in the face, and was blinded. * * * * * There are times in life when we make bad decisions. That statement, however, does not necessarily convey the gravity of the situation and its consequences. Describing something as a "bad decision" implies nothing more than a poor choice, the regret we feel when we selected beef instead of chicken. The question we need to examine is this: What are the consequences of deciding to do something bad? Suppose a man does a wrong thing, with intent to harm -- or at least, a willingness to harm -- and the end result is not what he expects. Instead, he is one who is harmed. Is that justice? Do we call it karma, and pretend that his debt has been paid? We cannot, because if we do, we have to explain why there are times when men and women do horrible things and suffer no consequences. If we strive for justice, we must do what we can to remove the whims of fate from the equation. In other words, justice must be blind. Blind. Justice, blind, decreed that the man whose bad decision had left him without sight still had a debt to pay. In January 1936, Matt Rizzo was sentenced to prison. He was sent to Stateville. Stateville, where Leopold and Loeb were still serving life sentences. Life, plus 99 years. For Richard Loeb, the life sentence was about to end. On the 28th of January, Loeb was murdered by another inmate. Fearing that Leopold would be targeted as well, the authorities confined him to the prison infirmary. There, he met Rizzo, still recovering from his wounds. There was a time when arrogant, aloof Nathan Leopold would have paid no mind to an embittered blind man whose formal education had ended in the fourth grade. But with age and knowledge, Leopold had begun to change. The two men became friends. One never knows what is in a man's heart. Did Nathan Leopold truly regret his crime? Did he regret the suffering that he had caused, and not simply regret the personal consequences of his crime? We do not his motivation, but we do know that his behavior changed. In prison, Leopold began to help others. He began to help Matt Rizzo. His family's wealth and privilege, previously used be his own benefit, was now employed for different means. Leopold obtained books written in braille. He taught himself to read braille, and then he taught Matt Rizzo. Tutored by a murderer, locked away in Illinois' most notorious prison, Matt Rizzo read the classics: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. When he left prison in 1941, Rizzo was blind but no longer hopeless. He had learned to love literature. He turned away from crime. He got a job selling insurance. He married, and his wife gave birth to a son. The marriage, however, did not last, and his wife left for Los Angeles, taking the young child with her. When she died in 1959, the boy was sent back to Chicago to live with his father. This is where The Hunting Accident begins: with a young boy in a strange city, with a blind father in a dark and dingy apartment. The boy grew up believing that his father had lost his sight in a hunting accident. When he learned otherwise, there would be a reckoning. The Hunting Accident is a story of blindness, but not simply the blindness of one who has lost his sight. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, it is about those of us who lose our way: "Into that sightless world, let us descend." The world, Dante tells us, is blind, "And you in very truth have come from it!" Our blindness leads us astray. What leads us back to redemption? Knowledge. Knowledge made Matt Rizzo a better person. There is comfort in understanding the world, and thus it is tempting to see the world in simple terms. We take complex human beings, and simplify them in ways that make them easy to understand. This person is good, that person is bad. We want to be able to say, without qualification, that Nathan Leopold was evil. I would prefer a world where things are simple, but I cannot make myself believe what I do not believe, just because it would be comforting. I cannot be blind to this fact: Matt Rizzo became a better person because of the influence of Nathan Leopold. This fact forces us to ask: What can we forgive, and what should we forgive? When Clarence Darrow was pleading to spare the lives of Leopold and Loeb, he was appealing to our better nature. "Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation. To hear young men talk glibly of justice... Is there any human machinery for finding it out? Is there any man can weigh me and say what I deserve?" Justice will not appear from nowhere, so we must do our best to bring it into existence through our own efforts. But we must be aware that we may judge wrongly, and that the result of such an error -- injustice, cloaked in sanctimony -- is as grave an error as one can possibly make. Leopold and Loeb were guilty. This is very clear. But what made them, in their youth, callous and cruel? Darrow was not naive. Compassion and kindness do not cure all ills. But perhaps they are still better than the alternative. "You may here and there cure hatred with love and understanding," Darrow said, "but you can only add fuel to the flames by cruelty and hate." Nathan Leopold was an easy man to hate. Darrow understood as much. "I have stood here for three months as one might stand at the ocean trying to sweep back the tide. I hope the seas are subsiding and the wind is falling, and I believe they are, but I wish to make no false pretense to this court. The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. I know it. Men and women who do not think will applaud. The cruel and the thoughtless will approve. It will be easy today; but in Chicago, and reaching out over the length and breadth of the land, more and more fathers and mothers, the humane, the kind, and the hopeful, who are gaining an understanding and asking questions not only about these poor boys but about their own, these will join in no acclaim at the death of my clients. But, Your Honor, what they shall ask may not count. I know the easy way. I know Your Honor stands between the future and the past. I know the future is with me, and what I stand for here; not merely for the lives of these two unfortunate lads, but for all boys and all girls; for all of the young, and as far as possible, for all of the old. I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all. I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love." More than 95 years have passed since Clarence Darrow spoke these words. They were addressed not only to the judge. They were meant for us. "I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn, by reason and judgment and understanding and faith, that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man." And yet, this is still not simple. We cannot read Darrow's words, and pretend that all is clear, and that everything is forgiven. When we stand in front of Matt Rizzo's grave, we must not forget the grave that we did not visit: The grave of Bobby Franks. Chaos lurks at the fringes of every true story, forcing us to wonder: What if? There are always unseen forces at work. But what we can see suggests that Matt Rizzo became a better man because of the influence of Nathan Leopold. If Nathan Leopold had been put to death in 1924, Bobby Franks' grave would be no different. But what would Matt Rizzo's grave be like? * * * * * I am a poor storyteller. I talk too much and say too little, and I know this story is already far too long. I must, however, add a coda. In 1958, poet Carl Sandburg testified at Nathan Leopold's parole hearing. "Those who perhaps won't like it are those who believe in revenge. They are the human stuff of which mobs are made. They are the passion ridden." Twenty-three years later, another renowned writer asked for mercy for another violent criminal. The novelist Norman Mailer, impressed by the writing of a convict named Jack Henry Abbott, argued in favor of his release. Within weeks of leaving prison, Abbott stabbed a young man to death outside a Manhattan restaurant. "Culture is worth a little risk," Mailer had said. What do we weigh when we try to define justice? Who deserves mercy? Sandburg had argued that Leopold deserved freedom, because he had shown compassion. Mailer had argued that Abbott deserved freedom because he had shown skill. Which carries more weight? * * * * * Now, having arrived at the end of this long, convoluted story, I can only tell you this: I have stood in a cold cemetery, holding a beautiful book, staring at the tombstone of a man named Matt Rizzo. There is braille carved in stone, and the monument has other names apart from Rizzo's own: Dante, Homer, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare. Shakespeare, who understood the beauty of mercy: "The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes." What would have become of Matt Rizzo, without the quality of mercy? That is simply one more question, in a story which already has more questions than answers. If you ask me for answers, I can only tell you this: I am not Virgil, guiding the lost to salvation. I have my opinions, but I do not claim any divine insights. To do so would be comedy.

[haywire4]

As short stories go, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is very short. At 2,378 words it would qualify as a decently economical Jamboroo installment, and can be neatly summed up in a sentence. During a time of plague, a prince and his royal buddies repair to a well-provisioned castle, weld the iron gates shut, and throw themselves a heedless, non-stop party in defiance of the sickness ravaging the world outside, until such time as that party becomes immediately and entirely untenable. It’s a perfect story, but it’s not a subtle one.

If there’s any aspect of the presidency in which Donald Trump has come close to flourishing during his first term, it is the ceremonial one. To the extent that anything in his plummy, anxious, relentlessly public life prepared him for the job ahead, it was this. Trump has bobbed and leered through gaudy ballrooms all his life, blithely cutting the line at one buffet after another and demanding one more ashen flap of beef than any other guest is permitted, rising to Make Some Remarks at some point in the evening, and otherwise circling and circulating to receive the thanks and praise that are his due as host. He may enjoy all of that, but it’s just as likely that he doesn’t. Trump is not at these parties to have fun, anyway. He’s there because it’s the only place he can be.

The thing for him is to move, to collect whatever adulation there is and then to float on, leaving behind the absolute minimum of his own small self. The tribute he receives from these supplicants—the habitually divorced, the serial franchisees, the plump pink yachters and the reckless sunburned boaters alike—is fulsome but reflexive. It’s thin and vague and it doesn’t sustain him so much as it propels him ahead; it’s the continual rush of water through a shark’s gills that allows it to breathe. The other guests, the schools of smaller Trumps that push him around the room, are all mostly there because he is, but the party doesn’t really start until he leaves. It’s then, lit up with the memories of the moment when they saw some perfected and untouchable version of themselves in Donald Trump and were acknowledged by him in turn, that the celebrating starts.

“Staff and guests lingered after the president was there,” the Minnesota political consultant Blois Olson said of Trump’s private fundraiser at the home of a countertop company’s CEO in the state on Wednesday. “They sang karaoke, they had their arms around each other.” The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was one of the celebrants, but between that fundraiser and a rally in Duluth and flights around the state with various Republican officials and Members of Congress, Trump saw a lot of people during his visit. Some percentage of them may now have picked up the coronavirus that Trump himself and numerous members of his executive entourage confirmed they had on Thursday night.

Again, the story is concise and perfect and not really remotely a metaphor. When Trump called Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Thursday night, shortly before the public announcement that he and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19, he made clear that none of this was really anyone’s fault. “You know, it is very very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement,” Trump said, “and they want to hug you and they want to kiss you, because we really have done a good job for ’em. You get close, and things happen.”

Like every story that Trump tells, this is both one he tells often and always to the same end. People just can’t help themselves around him, they come up to him with tears in their eyes—the big people, the tough and even rough people, the successful people and the real workers—and they need to be near him. Who could tell them to keep their distance, or to wear a mask, or take any of the precautions that some other citizens have taken because they are the only way to stop the spread of the pandemic that Trump has effectively chosen to ignore? Who would? “There are some who would have thought him mad,” Poe wrote of Prince Prospero, the decadent party’s decadent host. “His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure he was not.”

The basic premise of Trumpism and the fundamental promise that Trump has made during his political career is that those who are with him will be treated one way, and those who are not will be treated in another, much worse way. Because of how Trump is—because of how avaricious and joyless he is, and because of how fearful and paranoid he is, and because of how unrelentingly aggrieved he is—this promise is fundamentally negative. Only the most powerful of the people that fell into formation behind him will receive any positive benefit from anything that he does; this is axiomatic, as Trump doesn’t do anything for anyone other than himself. Everyone that follows him understands and accepts this to some extent, and the less influential of those who lined up behind him either out of perceived interest or some rote and sour habit or pure servile instinct surely know as much. They also know that they will receive a more diffuse but still quite valuable dividend for their service, which is the certainty that they will never be treated as badly as the people on the other side.

That certainty is false, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Trump has lived his life inside a curdled and childish belief that he can do and take and keep whatever he wants, without consequence, forever. As a sort of tabloid cartoon of a rich person, an adult Richie Rich that had somehow figured out how to use a smartphone and commit adultery, this delusion has served him decently well; the realities of his wealth and the structural forces that the country has built to protect people of similar fecklessness and similar means conspired to sustain it for decades. The version of this impunity that Trump sells to his audience is a cheaper reproduction, not sold in any store and available exclusively through this limited-time television offer, in which they can feel as invulnerable and unaccountable as him, and be just as lazy and just as cruel, without actually being anywhere near as well-insulated from the consequences of their actions. “I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump “writes” in the ghostwritten Art Of The Deal. “People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do.”

“That,” Trump continues, “is why a little hyperbole never hurts.” When it comes to building a brand or a public image, the utility of this sort of theatrical dishonesty is at least debatable. But the open secret with Trump is that there is nothing underneath all of this—not just no actual values beneath the pretend ones or actual product behind the pitch, but nothing at all. There is just bottomless idiotic appetite and unstinting demand, the urgency and endlessness of which makes any number of outlandish cruelties not just possible but inevitable. Trump is not the only person who is like this, but it may be that no one is more like this than him. Discernment isn’t on the menu, but it also fundamentally isn’t an option—admitting any kind of error or demonstrating any kind of vulnerability would mean not just defeat but a sort of death. The nature of this country and its economic and political depravities guarantee that such a person—someone rich enough and determined enough, stupid enough and frightened enough and selfish enough—can go a very long way. The idea of being that way is something that can be sold, because the shiny false certainty of it is something that people want to display, and feel themselves. It is a poisonous lie, but an aspirational one.

It is true that, from a public health perspective and a political one, Trump could have done any number of things to fight the pandemic that’s still spreading unchecked across the United States. But the reason he did basically none of them is that Trump is incapable of thinking of this challenge—of any challenge, really—from a public health perspective or a political one. These are abstractions to him, and as such much less interesting or important than his own comfort. Trump would and could not wear a mask because to do so would signal that he could get sick like anyone else; he could not tell the truth about what needed to be done to fight the pandemic, let alone actually do those things, because it would interrupt the story he prefers to tell about his own success. He could not follow or even accept the advice of scientists and epidemiologists because it would be a tacit admission that they knew more about this than he did. Most importantly, though, Trump could not care about what the pandemic does, about the communities it hurts and people it kills, because none of that is him; their deaths just don’t rate relative to his own discomfort.

And so the move, the only move, was to go on in denial, to push irritably and impatiently through the unrelenting fact of the disease behind the fantasy that none of it could ever have any consequences for him. His people followed on behind, not so much in denial as in defiance of the thought that any of this could possibly apply to them. The people that fly into rages upon being asked to wear a mask to protect other people and stop the spread of the disease would, paradoxically or not, also fly into a rage if the people serving them were not wearing masks themselves. This is because these people are fucking unwell, but it is also because that facile distinction between themselves and other people is a load-bearing one. It holds up the whole gilded edifice, until it doesn’t.

It was probably inevitable that Trump would get the virus, because the country is still awash in it and because he has refused to protect himself or others from it. It is, again, not really much of a metaphor that he himself seems to have become something of a vector for its spread in his own gilded circles. This is not a complicated story, or a long one. It’s the nature of a virus to spread, to move blindly from one person to the next, absolutely and always as illimitable as it is permitted to become.

Another excellent piece from David J. Roth, who has moved from analysis of the highly paid mediocrities of sports to the highly paid mediocrities of the current administration with great ease.

[perkwunos]

Silvia Federici has pointed out that alongside the rise of “capitalist technological innovation” there has been “the disaccumulation of our precapitalist knowledges and capacities”:

The capacity to read the elements, to discover the medical properties of plants and flowers, to gain sustenance from the earth, to live in woods and forests, to be guided by the stars and winds on the roads and the seas was and remains a source of ‘autonomy’ that had to be destroyed. The development of capitalist industrial technology has been built on that loss and has amplified it. (191)

This disaccumulation has had strong effects in our very relation to what knowledge is. There is no longer a living knowledge, something directly known. “Life” and “knowledge” become opposed elements: knowledge is value-free and objective where life is valuative and subjective. This is not just the inevitable result of further specialization, but is carried to its extreme limits by the disconnection at all times between the creation of our world and the means by which we do so. Knowledge about how to practice things outside of specific rote mechanical skills is a power and “autonomy” not suitable for the typical wage laborer. Because of this, the modern worldview has approached its knowledge in an alienated and fetishizing way. It accords special status to the end-product of the experiment detached from the purposive, creative activity of the experimenter: its theories and formulae are seen as insights into a value-free, objective nature, while experience, lived time, intentionality etc. are seen as illusory. The essential contradiction that reveals the perversity is that this “value-free” knowledge is acquired by valuing the types of life-activity that will produce it. As A.N. Whitehead put it, “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” His point here is literally true: the role of knowledge under capitalist conditions is an anthropological subject that will increasingly attract attention, as an example of these capitalist conditions’ depraved effects.

The American pragmatists, alongside Whitehead, argued against this dualism. The experimental method and the science that it produces is continuous with the rest of nature, having evolved out of it: it is an organic, meaningful process. The way the modern scientist learns is the same way that all lifeforms learn. Eduardo Kohn, following C.S. Peirce, proposed that all living things have a “scientific intelligence”, in that they are capable of learning by experience (77). The forest is teeming with this intelligence in its diverse manifestations, organisms interpreting their environment and producing further signs. It’s in signs that we think and gain knowledge, in the uncertain meanings by which we “read the elements”--and this is always done with some purpose: meanings are means to an end, expressions of an intentionality. As Kohn put it, “it is appropriate to consider telos—that future for the sake of which something in the present exists—as a real causal modality wherever there is life” (37). A living thing acts to achieve an aim, and in the course of doing so it not only conceptualizes and valuates its object of desire but interprets its environment, working according to meaning-structures through which it can interact with the potential future: this potential future is, after all, the location for the possible achievement of its desires. Insofar as the meaning-structures work, they reveal some knowledge: in this way all life produces its science.

There’s no nonarbitrary point at which we can claim a stop to the evolutionary continuity of this valuative activity, even if we find grades of complexity and various distinctions in its modes of being. Just as the boundary at which point one organism stops being one species and evolves into another cannot be given a fixed delineation, the point at which “life” itself begins cannot be defined, so that an absolute outside to it is not rationally conceivable. “Telos,” purpose, must be found everywhere. All becoming occurs according to what the interiority of the becoming thing conceptualizes or intends. However, this interiority in its becoming must relate to its given environment, take on material constraints and direct its intentions to what can be achieved in the given world. The material constraints in their determining capacity habituate desires to flow specific ways. Our technology is dependent not on any eternal laws or corresponding brute mechanisms, but on the habits strongly ingrained in the intentionality of various entities: most especially the entities most typically considered lifeless who seem to show a minimum of will-power, interpretation, or novelty. Modern scientific understanding approaches from the outside in its description of these processes and thus misses the fundamental concept of habit, of a general aim socially pursued in desire. As a consequence these notions--intentionality, desire, generality, value etc.--are rediscovered on the purely human level and given misleading form.

The 21st century has already seen a wealth of thinkers criticizing and attempting to move past this human exceptionalism and dualism, as evidenced in the “posthuman” focus of many thinkers in anthropology and related social sciences, from Eduardo Kohn to Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. As Federici put it, there is “the emergence of another rationality not only opposed to social and economic injustice but reconnecting us with nature and reinventing what it means to be a human being” (196). But this will not just come about through academics creating new terminology and concepts. Rather, like the shift towards modern thought that accompanied capitalism’s onset, it will be happening within and through movements that change our material basis, i.e. the change in property relations and how they define our ability to work with one another and with our environment. That is to say, these philosophical and anthropological concepts concerning the supersedence of dualism, new understandings of subjectivity and meaning, etc. must be approached historically: their existence is not sustained by an individual consciousness interacting with a book but by the functioning of whole societies. Federici points to one important site for the further emergence of new modes of consciousness in “women’s struggles over reproductive work”:

… there is something unique about this work—whether it is subsistence farming, education, or childrearing—that makes it particularly apt to generate more cooperative social relations. Producing human beings or crops for our tables is in fact a qualitatively different experience than producing cars, as it requires a constant interaction with natural process whose modalities and timing we do not control. (195)

The reproductive labor that has been gendered as “women’s work” may indeed reveal a different logic from the typical view of industrial production that sees it as an instance of what Philippe Descola termed the “heroic model of creation”:

The idea of production as the imposition of form upon inert matter is simply an attenuated expression of the schema of action that rests upon two interdependent premises: the preponderance of an individualized intentional agent as the cause of the coming-tobe of beings and things, and the radical difference between the ontological status of the creator and that of whatever he produces. (323)

Under capitalist conditions the value of reproductive labor is often hidden from being socially recognized, isolated into the domestic sphere, while the dominant mode of socially recognizing the value of our activity occurs through wage-labor and commodification, i.e. through the value-form. The shift away from this bifurcating ordering of production could also mark a shift away from our bifurcation of reality into intentional subjects and brute objects--instead rediscovering a thoroughly intersubjective (and, indeed, interobjective) process.

There’s no question that where we are attempting to reinvent such fundamental categories, we are caught up in a metaphysical and speculative pursuit--and thoroughly metaphysical figures like Whitehead and Peirce have gained new life among recent thinkers--but we also shouldn’t take “metaphysical” thinking to mean an airy detachment. Following Whitehead, I see metaphysics and speculative philosophy as an historical endeavour: as he put it, it is like an airplane that must lift off from a specific moment, spend some time in imaginative construction and reconstruction, and touch back down. I would historicize Whitehead’s thought even further; not to fundamentally alter his methodology nor his scheme of thought, but to point to some differences in the location and situation it is in response to. For instance, Whitehead often overemphasizes the responsibility of Aristotelian philosophy and its notion of substance for modern philosophy’s focus on atomized individuals. We may instead see this as not some development occurring just in the world of philosophy, but rather as a reflection in these modern philosophers’ thoughts of the material development of capitalism, its alienation and atomization. Whitehead offered a radical and deep critique of this alienation in its higher-level ideological expressions, and in doing so passed on a crucial tool for our existential understanding, clearing blockages of long-accumulated modes of thought and shifting the momentum in our perspectives away from those reflecting bourgeois categories. But we must also recognize that these errors in thought are part and parcel of a wider social problem that has to be faced in more than reformulating categories, that the direction of our consciousness towards such reformulations find their drive in the wider struggles of our life.

Works cited:

Descola, Philippe. Beyond nature and culture. University of Chicago Press, 2013

Federici, Silvia. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. PM Press, 2019.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.

[drakonics]

<DIR> // HC DUMP: GENERIC.

/under the cut for potentially disturbing/mature mentions. you’ve been warned.

<o1> contrary to annoyingly popular and recurring belief  seto is/was the furthest thing from spoiled given his seemingly polished upbringing and generally standoffish person as a whole. after a watered down past at the orphanage his new life he intended to give mokuba was the very furthest from anything he ever wanted. everything and anything gozaburo ever ‘gave’ him was double edged and even though seto could truly have cared less about the abusive fool inflicting on him he broke his stubborn streak when the bastard truly surpassed all unthinkable lows and began using mokuba as leverage to ensure seto did whatever he wanted. that being said any accomplishments made by seto are strictly his own. he has built his own network of success from the very ground up fully eliminating any and all traces of his ‘father’ over the years ensuring kaiba corporation became something all his own without the stain of adoptive ties to reflect on the company when mokuba someday succeeds him.

<o2> despite being unable to recall the exact events leading up to the untimely deaths of his real parents seto suffers from vivid recurring dreams/chronic nightmares centering around the scattered cause. born to a japanese father and a mother with egyptian roots dating as far back as the ancient days, the two met during an expedition in giza where seto’s father was conducting research on the first pyramids and his mother doubled as a tour guide at the time and was later revealed ( due to extensive research conducted by seto himself ) to be the successor of ancient tomb guardians with blood of the medjay hailing from the old kingdom. fittingly enough seto inherited her striking blue eyes and sinfully soft brown hair with his father’s more stern personality as an opposing trait, whereas mokuba took after their father in terms of looks but maintained their mother’s immovably caring personality. the kaiba brother’s pendants although made by mokuba also contain a second digitally reconstructed and salvaged image of their deceased parents, courtesy of seto’s personal additions alongside the intricate self destruct mechanism integrated in conjunction to the duel tower.

<o3> for all of his top of the line prowess and upkeep with personal/public appearance the greatly esteemed president of kaiba corporation is in fact not in the prime of health. the true meaning of rest is simply lost him and not an option given he is expected to be anywhere at any time whenever the occasion calls for it day or night. seto wages around 3-5 hours of sleep within a 24 period and never manages them consecutively resulting in consistent sleep depravation, chronic insomnia and bouts of sickness. in effort to counter balance the tolls taken on his health seto maintains a strict self-training regimen, a particular diet and coffee in dangerous dependability. when confronted about his overall decline of health seto merely states he will sleep when he is dead and the path he shapes known as his life will never stop regardless if he sleeps or not.

<o4> courtesy of kaiba corporation and his personal profits, seto has officially deemed a select percent of his entire generated revenue in donations to orphanages worldwide. to better the future and generations to come seto believes giving children like him and mokuba a chance to reclaim and successfully live their lives will make the most lasting impact. depending on their schooling success kaiba corporation also offers free admission to the duel academy upon graduating base grade school or fully paid tuition up front for college. as per seto’s endless pursuits in bettering his own technological finesse continue to evolve he is constantly adjusting the prices of all other kaiba related entertainment: kaiba land officially has multiple locations set up worldwide which operate strictly on their own real time via the intricate crystal cloud network. a handful of nature reserves are also in continued production as well as personal cruise lines that offer travel to and from all forms of attraction or personal getaways. all parks and attractions are operated at significantly cut costs to make them more easily accessible and affordable to the people with mandatory pre-release periods, however mainly focal on children in general.

<o5> it is excruciatingly important to note that a bout of sudden ‘kindness’ from seto is hardly true kindness at all up front if at all strictly due to him believing ( and being forcibly taught by ) that kindness is an immediate show of weakness. at many points seto was beaten by gozaboru whenever he cried due to the afflictions gozaboru made on mokuba. as such was just proclaimed another weakness gozaboru refused in a heir, seto grew to resent tears and emotions as a whole, effectively crushing his own as a detrimental drawback. lack of proper upbringing paired with a stunt in social growth since childhood effectively cut him off from normal development one would have according to generation and therefore seto suffers from severe social impairment and is unable to make emotional connections. many defining factors of his tyrannical business front and hellbent on remaining top-of-the-world persona were injected by gozaboru himself and forcibly imprinted ( to the point of both physical and mental ) abuse that carried into and ultimately tarnished his adulthood. seto has been put through more forced consumation attempts than he cares to count in one lifetime, compliments of gozaboru wishing to extend his own corporate clutches and influence via other rich or corporate owned families worldwide. attempts that have scarred seto to such a degree he is wary of women in general and utilizes sex in itself as a power play and tool and inherited gozaboru’s manipulation in the form of trauma ( as if unwanted sexual occurrences and attempted assassination efforts were not enough. ) adding to his already fiercely independent and withdrawn personality, seto firmly believes others will never simply approach him but that they all have an underlying motive and purely intend to use him because of his position, wealth and grand success; a defining paranoia that has sadly been proven time and again throughout the course of his arranged future successes which only further contributed to his inability and overall unwillingness to trust, forging the cold settlement that most if not everyone is out to hurt him so he fully intends to shut them down and hurt them first.  while even but a fraction of his trust is ten times hard earned and rarely given, seto is loyal to a fault and would staunchly go to the very ends of this world and the next if it means protecting anything ( or anyone ) he cares about.

<o6> although official records state seto dropped out of high school by choice, gozaboru withdrew his son seeing his intellect was years beyond what modern day education was capable of on the falsified notion that seto himself was above normal schooling and destined for much greater. in reality, gozaboru already knew seto surpassed him in every way possible and despite having groomed him as the perfect heir to someday succeed him, implemented a planned attempt to murder his own son in fear of losing his company and having everything taken from him. gozaboru attempted a number of recurring set ups in attempt to separate mokuba from his older brother and kill him off long before deciding seto was a liability, attempts that Seto was not only fully aware of in entirety but also planning a counter measure in turn. while it is known seto effectively manipulated the big five against gozaboru in conjunction with his inhumane treatment towards his own subordinates, official records state gozaboru was driven to suicide and took his own life by jumping out of the window of kaiba corporation’s presidential office on the top floor. the unpublished truth remains undiscovered to this day: seto turned gozaboru’s own murderous machinations against him and killed the man himself solely based on the belief that he was merely giving back everything that bastard ever gave him and his little brother.  thanks for nothing, gozaburo.

<o7> officially unreleased to the public and deemed solely for his own personal use, seto’s next generation of neurons links him to an encrypted network constructed with any and all depictions of ancient egyptian lore he has personally salvaged in effort to hopefully someday fully piece together the ongoing mysteries shrouding his past life and any ongoing connection he clearly has to the departed pharaoh. utilizing the original state of the art bleeding technology seto has successfully constructed a subconscious research vein dubbed the STEM, allowing it not only to connect with and create images solely based on the user’s brainwave activity but fully reconstruct scenarios based on their dreams and fleeting visions. In its final stages the STEM places the user in a catatonic state by integrating itself directly into their central nervous system and works in perfect conjunction with the nervous system to provide real time feedback, lifelike sensations and produce results generated directly from either. by diving his subconscious, seto has been able to place himself at the heart of many scattered memories pertaining to his past, effectively allowing him to ‘re live’ or experience certain occurrences as his past self, courtesy of obtaining DNA sequences in unorthodox means. ground breaking as it is the STEM is it hardly comes without its immediate faults and dangers as it forcibly dives into genetic memory and imprints at an alarming and often much too realistic rate. as the centered drawback of reproducing a near immaculate 3D world and structure at will, due to the overall strain placed on the user’s body their vitals are continually monitored and the system is set to cease immediate operations should they fall beneath the natural threshold of safety. 

<o8> prolonged use of the STEM has adverse and potentially life threatening side effects, one such that seto has deemed the ‘bleeding edge effect’ where the user will experience severe bouts of hallucinations caused by the user’s past life memories ‘bleeding’ into the present and can cause permanent mental disorientation or push the user to insanity if proper rest between sequences and extended safety protocol is not met during use and after. unbeknownst to seto himself by linking to his ancestor and diving his subconscious to the egyptian afterlife he has unwillingly attached the soul of his past incarnation to himself, effectively transcending the plane of digital space and dimensions alike. by utilizing this alongside his breakthrough with the quantum cube, seto has ultimately forced his own soul and that of his priest side to exist as one in present day.

[h4xx0r666]

Mozilla Firefox Addon Review: SingleFile | Save a page as a single HTML file by gildas

So I keep writing shit like this instead of doing anything conventionally useful. Maybe it’s just what is meant to be right now. 

enjoy... i guess. . . .

I was saving a webpage last year, and I thought,  “this hasn’t seen an upgrade since they added to save as complete that puts all the assets in a directory, what am i gonna do with a file and a directory? Put them in another directory?  Why don't they have it just run all the pictures through ttnypng/jpeg, base64 encode them, compress the styles, and idk what to do with the javascrtpt, but I'm gonna go see if it had been done as an extension.” And when I could not find such an program, did I go read mdn and try to figure out how to write addons? Nope, but gildas here seized the opportunity to write perhaps the most significant piece of software this decade. Our great-grandchildren, if they have a habitable world will read the internet of the past, displayed in near perfect representation of the web we see today.

Centuries from now when the aliens arrive to find the charred ashes of our civilization. They might also find data crystals containing our web archive. And these pages, with their simplicity, are much more likely to be deciphered allowing our legacy to live on. And when our descendants, if they were lucky enough to find shelter from the coming inevitable extinction level environmental changes. the unrelenting drall of capitalism, having torn through every resource capable of sustaining life and turned it into money for jeff bezos, the koch brothers, elon musk, rick scott, and the rest of those depraved billionaires. all frantically grabbing at everything they can. Inexplicably driven to take whatever is left, and willing to snuff out all life save the chosen few to do it.

Their nouveau-eugenics standards, though completely without basis in reality, are backed by the controlling interest in reality bought and paid for by the harvest of their death machines and OUR collective toil. Legitimized by the unquestioned fairy tale of the "man who took all the risk" , we will see our scientific progress slow to a crawl while the rich divert more and more into their plans to launch themselves into space before another generation is able to usurp their social status.

And when our descendents crawl up from their subterranean shelters, will they have continued to learn about the once living world above? Or will they be driven by superstition and other simple operants? Now that I've seen SingleFile | Save a page as a single HTML fileby gildas I have hope for the former. This is, all seriousness - really, one of the most important pieces of software written, ever. Like a scribe in the library of alexandria, writing, storing and sorting the collective knowledge of humanity while the machines of death encroach. Knowing it’s just a matter of time before it all catches up, that the most they can hope for is that  something other than the lust for wealth will be remembered of our people.  

Will we just sit back and think to ourselves how nice it is that there is something like that, or will we take an active role. Will we work together to use these tools to ensure copies are made and cataloged properly? Will we take a few dollars and send them to developes like gildas, so they might dedicate more of their time to creating the tools of our salvation, or will we send them to jeff bezos because we wanted that new phone that has a 200MHz slower processor than the one from last year, but they put a new skin on the homescreen and added some "security" feature we don't really understand, but it sounds cool. 

[fear-god-shun-evil]

The Warning of the Last Days From the Noah’s Ark Story

By Chenhui, Singapore

As Christians, I believe, we are all very impressed by the story of Noah building the ark, and deeply admire Noah. Meanwhile we cannot help but feel sorry for those who did not get on the ark. Why had they seen the ark but not gotten on it? Why did they not feel regret until the flood came? Sometimes we also ask ourselves, “If I had lived in the time of Noah, would I really have got on the ark?”

Think about the background when God destroyed the mankind of Noah’s time. In Genesis 6:11–13 it records, “The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked on the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way on the earth. And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” When I read these verses in the past, I just knew that it was because the people at that time were too evil and corrupt, so they were punished and destroyed by God, but I was not clear about God’s will in this thing. Not until I read a passage of words in a book, did I understand a little.

The words say, “There is another revelation of God’s disposition here: In God’s eyes, there is a limit to His patience toward man’s corruption, toward the filthiness, violence, and disobedience of all flesh. What is His limit? It’s as God said: ‘God looked on the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way on the earth.’ What does the phrase ‘for all flesh had corrupted his way on the earth’ mean? It means any living thing, including those who followed God, those who called on the name of God, those who once sacrificed burnt offerings to God, those who verbally acknowledged God and even praised God—once their behavior was full of corruption and reached God’s eyes, He would have to destroy them. That was God’s limit. So to what extent did God remain patient to man and the corruption of all flesh? To the extent that all people, whether followers of God or unbelievers, were not walking the right path. To the extent that man was not just morally corrupt and full of evil, but where there was no one who believed in God’s existence, let alone anyone who believed that the world is ruled by God and that God can bring people light and the right path. To the extent that man despised God’s existence and did not permit God to exist. Once man’s corruption reached this point, God would no longer have patience. What would replace it instead? The coming of God’s wrath and God’s punishment.”

From this passage I understood that there is God’s disposition in His destruction of the people at that time. It was not merely because those who did not believe in God were morally corrupt, evil and licentious, but also because even those who believed in God, who once sacrificed burnt offerings to God and worshiped God did not fear God. They had no place for God in their heart, their actions were completely in opposition to God’s will, and they followed along with the evil trends of the world. The whole world had become evil and depraved to the extent that it was unbearable for God to witness. But even so, people were without the slightest shred of contrition. When they saw Noah obeyed God’s instructions to build the ark and convey the message that God would destroy the world with a flood, they treated what Noah did as a joke and what Noah said as a fabrication. No one believed, no one sought and investigated, nor, moreover, anyone admitted that his evil deeds had long ago angered God to the extent that he should be destroyed. Instead, they all lived entirely in their own notions and imaginations, thinking nothing of it. Until afterward, when they saw the gate of the ark was closed and the flood came, it was too late. Eventually, they were all swallowed up by the flood and drowned in the ocean. Rather than saying they died in the flood, it would be better to say they died in their own notions.

Then, how was Noah saved? The following passage of words explains the reason quite clearly.

“When Noah did as God instructed he didn’t know what God’s intentions were. He didn’t know what God wanted to accomplish. God had only given him a command, instructed him to do something, but without much explanation, and he went ahead and did it. He didn’t try to figure out God’s intentions in private, nor did he resist God or have a double heart. He just went and did it accordingly with a pure and simple heart. Whatever God let him do he did, and obeying and listening to God’s word were his conviction for doing things. That was how straightforwardly and simply he dealt with what God entrusted. His essence—the essence of his actions was obedience, not second-guessing, not resisting, and moreover, not thinking of his own personal interests and his gains and losses. Further, when God said He would destroy the world with a flood, he did not ask when or try to get to the bottom of it, and he certainly did not ask God just how He was going to destroy the world. He simply did as God instructed. However God wanted it to be made and made with what, he did exactly as God asked and also commenced action immediately thereafter. He did it with an attitude of wanting to satisfy God. Was he doing it to help himself avoid the disaster? No. Did he ask God how much longer before the world would be destroyed? He didn’t. Did he ask God or did he know how long it would take to build the ark? He didn’t know that either. He simply just obeyed, listened, and did it accordingly.”

Inherently Noah was an honest man and worshiped God. From this passage we can see more clearly that Noah could be saved stemmed from his obedience to God. He would do anything God instructed him to do. He did not ask why God let him build an ark, nor thought what if the flood did not come after he finished the ark, much less did he live in all kinds of difficulties in building the ark. Instead, He could purely accept and obey, without any notions and imaginations, though he did not completely understand God’s will. I could not help but sigh with emotion: Can we achieve such faith in and obedience to God as Noah did? At that time, it never rained, let alone flooded. Thus when God told Noah that He would destroy the world with a flood, and instructed Noah to build an ark and preach the gospel for people to get on the ark, the people at that time not only did not believe, but even judged and condemned Noah by saying that he was crazy. But even so, Noah was not passive and weak; he still obeyed God, listened to God’s instructions, and persisted in building the ark and preaching the gospel without hesitation. Today, when we think back on the time when the world was destroyed by the flood, will we feel sorry and regret for those people who were destroyed in that epoch? At the same time, will we not feel deeply ashamed and abashed when compared with Noah who could, without being restrained by any person, occurrence, or thing, submit to God and follow God’s instructions to build the ark?

The Bible has such two verses, “And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all” (Luke 17:26–27). These are prophecies about the Lord Jesus’ reappearance in the last days, in which the Lord compared the days He returns to the days of Noah. Now they have come true. In the present day, the whole society is becoming more and more evil and degenerate. For the sake of personal interests, people fight with each other, and even kill each other. Meanwhile, even many brothers and sisters in the Lord also follow the evil trends of the world, covet the glory and wealth, and pursue fame and gain. They believe in God in name, but in actuality, they do not walk in the way of the Lord. Nowadays, the extent to which people have been corrupted is far and beyond what it was back in the time of Noah. This shows that prophecies about the last days have long since come true, and that the Lord Jesus has already returned.

Now, there is a group of people who are bearing witness to the return of Lord Jesus. They say that Christ the Savior in the last days has already descended to the East of the world; He is expressing the truth and carrying out the work of judgment of the last days. As the Lord prophesied, “And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom comes; go you out to meet him” (Matthew 25:6). “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20). When we hear the witness that the Lord Jesus has returned, we should seek and investigate actively. Only thus can we welcome the bridegroom and go to the wedding feast of the Lamb. If we do not listen, nor do we seek or investigate, but we deny and reject it blindly, then we would easily miss the Lord’s return and lose His salvation of the last days. The Lord is faithful. He prophesied that He would come to take us in the last days, so He will. But when He returns to express the truth and knock at the door to our hearts, if we do not listen to the Lord’s voice with full attention, nor go forth and welcome Him, then we will miss the chance to go with the Lord to the wedding feast. If so, when the Lord openly comes with clouds, we will be filled with boundless regret. Just as the prophecy in Revelation says, “Behold, he comes with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen” (Revelation 1:7). God does the work of salvation in the last days when He is incarnated and descends secretly among men to express the truth. The time when God openly comes with clouds is precisely the time when His work of salvation will come to an end. Just as God instructed Noah to enter into the ark, and as soon as the gate of the ark was closed, the flood poured down and the work of salvation came to an end. At that time, no matter how people regretted it or called out to God, there was no chance for them to be saved anymore.

God’s word says, “In the time of Noah, men had been eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage to such a point that it was unbearable for God to witness, so He sent down a great flood to destroy mankind and left behind only Noah’s family of eight and all kinds of birds and beasts. In the last days, however, those kept by God are all those who have been loyal to Him until the end. Though both were times of great corruption unbearable for God to witness, and mankind in both ages was so corrupt that he denied God as the Lord, all men in the time of Noah were destroyed by God. Mankind in both ages has grieved God greatly, yet God has remained patient with men in the last days until now. Why is this? Have you never given thought to this? If you truly do not know, then let Me tell you. The reason that God can deal graciously with men in the last days is not that they are less corrupt than men in the time of Noah or that they have shown repentance to God, much less is it that God cannot bear to destroy men in the last days where technology has advanced. Rather, it is that God has work to do in a group of men in the last days and this will be done by God incarnate Himself. Furthermore, God shall choose a part of this group as His objects of salvation, the fruit of His management plan, and bring such men with Him into the next age.”

After reading God’s words, I understand that it turns out that God will save and obtain a group of men who are of the same mind with Him in the last days. Regardless of what God says and what He does, this group of men can absolutely submit to Him without the slightest complaint; they not only do not talk about their own reasons, but also can cooperate in God’s work in a positive way. Only such men are the ones who truly believe in and follow God, who can practice God’s words, and who can be saved and perfected by God. Eventually, God will bring such a group of men into His kingdom—this is the will of God’s work in the last days.

When God’s salvation in the last days comes upon us, can we learn lessons from the failures of people of the past, repent toward God, and get on the ark which God prepares for us? These questions are really worthy of our contemplating and seeking.

[harrowbleak]

I feel like posting a WIP, so behold. I really like the fate/series, although it has many, many warts. Many, many warts. I’ve been especially interested in the whole Gilles de Rais and Jeanne d’Arc situation, because if I don’t consume garbage, I will almost certainly die. But really what I’m interested in is how the show decided to handle Gilles de Rais as being split between Saber Gilles, who is rational and believes in justice, and Caster Gilles who literally murders children. And so it’s especially interesting to make that virtuous past look directly into its hideous future and know that it’s not just a possibility, but what actually happens. And that he loves the shit out of Jeanne is also of interest, given what he becomes. Fate/Apocrypha kind of got into it, but they didn’t quite get elbows deep into it, and so I’m writing a fic. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall. [WIP tag] [Fic Portfolio] Gilles isn’t sure where he is. Asleep? No, something deeper than that. They’d hanged him in 1440. A beautiful morning in October. He’d been the first to die, although the rope had been just a little short. He remembers the horrible moment when the line went taut, and he began to strangle. Poor Poitou, poor Henriet. They’d have to watch him choke, and realize their necks would not be broken by the fall. In the end, they’d been too afraid to defy him. As much as he could have disdained their tacit compliance in all of his grotesque evil, he knows they were powerless; his victims, too, just as much as all those innocent children.

Was Prelati here? Was he watching? His dear, treacherous Prelati, who had found him in his grief and asked that eminently lethal question:

If Jeanne d’Arc was the holiest of maidens, why did the Lord let her burn?

Much later, that question would lead to others, and pondering them would distort Gilles utterly from what he had been as a man of 26. How much depravity was enough? Why did God, who loved them, allow such heinous evil to be committed against those most faithful? Why was no one punished? Dimly, he remembers. He’d hanged, after nearly a decade of killing, and burned, burned, burned, if only because the boundless greed of his detractors surpassed his desire to fritter his wealth away. Nothing mattered, after the war, and mattered even less after Jeanne, whose name would ring out in his heart forever.

Under threat of torture, Gilles had confessed the grisly account of a hundred, two hundred, six hundred dead children. He’d tormented his own victims just the same, after all, and so he knew how awful, how beautiful such agony could be, and his frail heart feared what an inquisitor would subject him to in order to extract those hideous stories. The little one he’d smothered with his hands after extracting every small scream she could make. The little one he’d dressed in a page’s fine clothes before he ran a knife over their sweet young throat. How he had laughed at the profound ineptitude of God, failing over and over to protect those he should have guarded most jealously. He was sure he could feel Jeanne burning, the heat of her pyre all around him. Her last breath was on the lips of every dying child. Why hadn’t he been there when they set her ablaze? Why can’t he remember that, but remembers kissing every cold brow of every cold child? O Gilles de Montmorency-Laval,

O bloodstained Baron de Rais, Wouldst see again that holy maid? Wouldst speak again her blesséd name? And whatever he is now, it answers. Every fragment of who he was, who he is in this abyss, who the world has imagined him to be now that he has left it, every shattered piece of him calls out in unison. Where must I go?