#... like you sound kind of fascist. You sound like people to this day being mad about the Fountain

[honestlyvan]

Thinking about image model generated art and gifmaking is giving me some weird vibrations about how there really is some weird association of the virtuesvirtues of a medium with the virtues of the people working in it. Gifmaking being associated with KPop fans doesn't make the concept of frame interpolation racist, and someone marketing themselves as a cheaper alternative to some other artist doesn't make the concept of generative art inherently class antagonistic.

It's somehow reminiscent of CJ the X's distinction between "stupid art" and "evil art", how a medium that has a low skill floor can produce things that are very stupid and easy to perceive as low-effort but how that's not the same as them having something wrong with them. If you look at my animation tag, most of it is motion graphics done with AfterEffects, and while it's probably wrong to call it a low skill floor program the way an AI art generator is... there is still a world where instead of programmatically telling shapes to whizz by on a screen, a different Van would have drawn those same animations frame by frame, producing exactly the same animation.

And I don't think the fact that I did them programmatically somehow invalidates the artistic intent that went into them, y'know? I could open AE right now and produce a 250x250 looping gif of clouds and while I know how to do that quick, to make it look good and to make me like it, I would have to spend time considering how the various elements, colours, timings and whatever the particle system/noise generator I use spits out fit together. I would have to fiddle with seeds and levels and timings to make it look good. I would have to spend a long time just staring and thinking about what I'm making before I could make it good.

I don't know enough about generative art tools to know how much fiddling goes into them once they're taught and ready to go, but I do know enough about deep learning to know it's a haphazard, frustrating process that you as the artist have only limited control over, which is why it doesn't appeal to me. But I have made gifs in the past, and I know how that process requires an eye for consistency and composition, framing and colour that a lot of other visual artists don't have because they're not working with time as one of the creative dimensions.

And like... who am I, from my high horse as someone in possession of these skills, to tell someone who is still developing these skills or who has a different aesthetic concept of what is good than me, what they're making is low-effort. That's not my judgement to make. I didn't make it. Only the artist themselves can say if somehing was low-effort or not. I don't see why I should have so little faith in other artists to assume they have no interest in putting in any effort.

[coulsonlives]

ATLA spoilers/Azula stuff. Kinda big mad now, why does this fandom suck so hard.

I posted something in the ATLA fandom for the first time and was super excited about participating. Then I was immediately grossed out by how much ship hate and toxic discourse there is oml.

The ship wars surrounding Zutara are bad enough, especially when I ship all the things. But on top of that, apparently if you think Azula can be redeemed (not in the sense of being forgiven, but more like coming to terms w her past actions and sorting out her very, very obvious baggage), or are even ambivalent to the idea, you're a fascist sympathizer?!

I don't even care what happens to Azula. but some people really gotta chill with the attacks and tbh, totally reductive takes?

For starters, Azula was literally groomed to become a child soldier by her father. It doesn't excuse her actions at all, but there are so many signs in the show to explain why she is like she is, and why her finding some kind of closure wouldn't be out of the blue. The whole point of her and Zuko's backstories were to show how things came to be how they were. The writers and animators didn't put that stuff there for no reason.

That look on her face when Ty Lee was speaking during the campfire scene, for example? She was obviously sympathetic to Ty Lee, but as soon as Ty Lee looked at her, she snubbed her! She wanted to care, but she didn't want to show it. World's most obvious 'tough guy' act, and how much do we wanna bet it was because her father didn't let her show weakness, and she was just more receptive to indulging it than Zuko was, for whatever psychological reasons? She came off like she was hard-wired for self-interest, which probably predisposed her to all of Ozai's bs. But I also see people calling Azula a psychopath, and I'm like bruh, did we watch the same show?! A psychopath would feel no emotions about hurting people, Azula clearly does feel stuff, even if she takes pride in her war-related work, which does involve hurting/killing people. She's not a psychopath by definition, plain and simple, calling her that is reductive af.

I don't even think 'psychopath' is the right term to use in general for people like that, so there lol. Credibility points -1.

Then she apologized to Ty Lee during the party. Her apology could've just been a way to keep Ty Lee on her side, but then she went a step further and openly admitted to being jealous of Ty Lee. What purpose did that serve in the initial apology? None! She just did it because reasons, it had no functional or tactical purpose. Her interactions with all the party people screamed that she wanted relationships, too, but she didn't know how to communicate, and it obviously bugged her. She was upset about it.

She's shown she cares for Zuko at many different times, for example, she finds out he's been visiting Iroh, but she doesn't tell anyone even though she should. She's 'looking out for him'.

She also had a total breakdown at the end of the show. Again does it excuse her actions? Nah fam, not at all. But her emotional turmoil was super obvious. She'd built up an identity around being strong and winning at all costs, and she lost it, and she never got closure with her mom, so she didn't have anything left and she just.. cried. That doesn't sound irredeemable to me, that sounds like a scared fucking person who is wondering why the f everything they're doing, which they've been told to do from day one, is falling apart.

She's a 14-y/o child soldier, and I'm not about to say child soldiers are all irredeemable (again in the context of finding self acceptance and closure) in spite of the horrors they've done and the brainwashing. She's also a product of her environment and her abusive father, of generational trauma, and I'm not about to say people who grew up in abusive households can never get better from all the harm that was done to em! I've seen some really shitty people totally turn over a new leaf.

One of the best quotes from the show is something Aang says: 'Roku was just as much Fire Nation as Sozin was, right? If anything, their story proves anyone's capable of great good and great evil.'

So I'm not buying the narrative that Azula is pure distilled evil and has nothing going for her, not with what the show has given us. Ozai had virtually no redeeming qualities, but there are so many hints with Azula that it really pisses me off to see so much garbo talk around her.

Anyways that's my complaining for today.

I really don't wanna go near this fandom. I don't know what the tags are for discourse/harassment free stuff, where people can just ship what they want, and want what they want, without being heckled or shit on. If anyone knows a tag or some blogs like that, hmu.

(Inb4 all the people without nuance interpret this as 'I support Azula's war crimes', who are the main reason I sure as f won't be letting this loose with reblogs. I guess people can still screenshot this and take bits out of context, but idgaf. Their problem not mine!)

[mugasofer]

It seems like many, perhaps most, people historically believed in some immanent apocalypse.

Many philosophies claim that the world is passing into a degenerate age of chaos (Ages of Man, Kali Yuga, life-cycle of civilisation), or divine conflict will shortly spill over & destroy the Earth (Ragnorok, Revelations, Zoroastrian Frashokereti), or that the natural forces sustaining us must be transient.

Yet few panic or do anything. What anyone does "do about it" is often symbolic & self-admittedly unlikely to do much.

Maybe humans evolved not to care, to avoid being manipulated?

Many cults make similar claims, and do uproot their lives around them. Even very rarely committing mass suicide or terror attacks etc on occasion. But cults exist that don't make such claims, so it may not be the mechanism they use to control, or at most a minor one. "This is about the fate of the whole world, nothing can be more important than that, so shut up" may work as as a thought terminating cliche, but it doesn't seem to work that strongly, and there are many at least equally effective ones.

Some large scale orgs do exist that seem to take their eschatology "seriously". The Aztecs committed atrocities trying to hold off apocalypse, ISIS trying to cause it. Arguably some Communist or even fascist groups count, depending on your definition of apocalypse.

But even then, one can argue their actions are not radically different from non-apocalypse-motivated ones - e.g. the Aztecs mass-executed less per capita than the UK did at times & some historians view them as more about displaying authority.

I'm thinking about this because of two secular eschatologies - climate apocalypse and the Singularity.

My view on climate change, which as far as I can tell is the scientific consensus, is that it is real and bad but by no means apocalyptic. We're talking incremental increases in storms, droughts, floods etc, all of which are terrible, but none of which remotely threaten human civilisation. E.g. according to the first Google result, the sea is set to rise by 1 decimeter by 2100 in a "high emissions scenario", not to rise by tens or hundreds of meters and consume all coastal nations as I was taught as a child. Some more drastic projections suggest that the sea might rise by as much as two or three meters in the worst case scenario.

It really creeps me out when I hear people who confess to believe that human civilisation, the human species, or even all life on Earth is most likely going to be destroyed soon by climate change. The most recent example, which prompted this post, was the Call of Cthulhu podcast I was listening to casually suggesting that it might be a good idea to summon an Elder God of ice and snow to combat climate change as the "lesser existential risk", perhaps by sacrificing "climate skeptics" to it. It's incredibly jarring for me to realise that the guys I've been listening to casually chatting about RPGs think they live in a world that will shortly be ended by the greed of it's rulers. But this idea is everywhere. Discussions of existential risks from e.g. pandemics inevitably attract people arguing that the real existential risk is climate change. A major anti-global-warming protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, is literally named after the idea that they're fighting against their own extinction. Viral Tumblr posts talk about how the fear of knowing that the world is probably going to be destroyed soon by climate change and fascism is crippling their mental health, and they have no idea how to deal with it because it's all so real.

But it's not. It's not real.

Well, I can't claim that political science is accurate enough for me to definitively say that fascism isn't going to take over, but I can say that climate science is fairly accurate and it predicts that the world is definitely not about to end in fire or in flood.

(There are valid arguments that climate change or other environmental issues might precipitate wars, which could turn apocalyptic due to nuclear weapons; or that we might potentially encounter a black swan event due to our poor understanding of the ecosystem and climate-feedback systems. But these are very different, as they're self-admittedly "just" small risks to the world.)

And I get the impression that a lot of people with more realistic views about climate change deliberately pander to this, deliberately encouraging people to believe that they're going to die because it puts them on the "right side of the issue". The MCU's Loki, for instance, recently casually brought up a "climate apocalypse" in 2050, which many viewers took as meaning the world ending. Technically, the show uses a broad definition of "apocalypse" - Pompeii is given as another example - and it kind of seems like maybe all they meant was natural disasters encouraged by climate change, totally defensible. But I still felt kinda mad about it, that they're deliberately pandering to an idea which they hopefully know is false and which is causing incredible anxiety in people. I remember when Greta Thurnberg was a big deal, I read through her speeches to Extinction Rebellion, and if you parsed them closely it seemed like she actually did have a somewhat realistic understanding of what climate change is. But she would never come out and say it, it was all vague implications of doom, which she was happily giving to a rally called "Extinction Rebellion" filled with speakers who were explicitly stating, not just coyly implying, that this was a fight for humanity's survival against all the great powers of the world.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. I despise lying, but as I've been rambling about, this is a very common lie that most people somehow seem unaffected by. Maybe the viral tumblr posts are wrong about the source of their anxiety; maybe it's internal/neurochemical and they world just have picked some other topic to project their anxieties on if this particular apocalypse wasn't available. Maybe this isn't a particularly harmful lie, and it's hypocritical of me to be shocked by those who believe it.

Incidentally, I believe the world is probably going to end within the next fifty years.

Intellectually, I find the arguments that superhuman AI will destroy the world pretty undeniable. Sure, forecasting the path of future technology is inherently unreliable. But the existence of human brains, some of which are quite smart, proves pretty conclusively it's possible to get lumps of matter to think - and human brains are designed to run on the tiny amounts of energy they can get by scavenging plants and the occasional scraps of meat in the wilderness as fuel, with chemical signals that propagate at around the speed of sound (much slower than electronic ones), with only the data they can get from input devices they carry around with them, and which break down irrevocably after a few decades. And while we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the history of progress in both computer hardware and AI, that progress is incredibly impressive, and there's no particular reason to believe it will fortuitously stop right before we manufacture enough rope to hang ourselves.

Right now, at time of writing, we have neural nets that can write basic code, appear to scale linearly in effectiveness with the available hardware with no signs that we're reaching their limit, and have not yet been applied at the current limits of available hardware let alone what will be available in a few years. They absorb information like a sponge at a vastly superhuman speed and scale, allowing them to be trained in days or hours rather than the years or decades humans require. They are already human-level or massively superhuman at many tasks, and are capable of many things I would have confidently told you a few years ago were probably impossible without human-level intelligence, like the crazy shit AI dungeon is capable of. People are actively working on scaling them up so that they can work on and improve the sort of code they are made from. And we have no ability to tell what they're thinking or control them without a ton of trial and error.

If you follow this blog, you're probably familiar with all the above arguments for why we're probably very close to getting clobbered by superhuman AI, and many more, as well as all the standard counter-arguments and the counter-arguments to those counter arguments.

(Note: I do take some comfort in God, but even if my faith were so rock solid that I would cheerfully bet the world on it - which it's not - there's no real reason why our purpose in God's plan couldn't be to destroy ourselves or be destroyed as an object lesson to some other, more important civilization. There's ample precedent.)

Here's the thing: I'm not doing anything about it, unless you count occasionally, casually talking about it with people online. I'm not even donating to help any of the terrifyingly-few people who are trying to do something about it. Part of why I'm not contributing is, frankly, I don't have a clue what to do, nor do I have much confidence in any of the stuff people are currently doing (although I bloody well hope some of it works.)

And yet I don't actually feel that scared.

I feel more of a visceral chill reading about the nuclear close calls that almost destroyed the world in the recent past than thinking about the stuff that has a serious chance of doing so in a few decades. I'm a neurotic mess, and yet what is objectively the most terrifying thing on my radar does not actually seem to contribute to my neurosis.

[qqueenofhades]

I was already distressed about the political and social situation in the US, and then this happens. Are there any examples of societies that fought back against fascism and won, without civil or international war breaking out? Surely there must be some success stories in history. How did other societies overcome fascism, are there lessons to be applied to our current situation? Please tell me we're not doomed, because I have no hope for the future.

Sigh.

Okay.

I’ve been through... a lot of the stages of grief by now. That is, rageposting on tumblr, venting to my friends via text, drinking, crying while drinking, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of certainty that we’re all screwed and nothing matters, crying while talking to my sister, crying generally, lying in bed some more, and am currently still in bed while writing this, but am struggling to put on my internet historian aunt hat and offer some comfort to the stricken masses.

First off: This is bad. I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t bad. We all knew RBG had cancer again, but it was pretty fixed in our minds that she would somehow manage to hang on until after the election. 45 days before the biggest presidential election of all time, in the middle of this year, when names including Ted “Zodiac Killer” Cruz and Tom “Time for Roe vs. Wade to go, block federal funding from being used to teach about slavery, send in the military to crush the BLM protesters” Cotton have already been floated as some of her possible replacements? With Trump and McConnell determined to work as fast as possible to steal this seat as brazenly as they can, because they are literal fascists who don’t care about their own example (Merrick Garland was nominated in FEBRUARY of an election year and McConnell held it up for being “too close to the election?”)

Ugh. Anyone who doesn’t get that this is bad or acting like people are overreacting doesn’t get what’s at stake. And when, as we’ve said before and are saying again now, the future of everyone who isn’t a white straight rich Republican man in this country depends on an 87-year-old woman with cancer for the fourth time? Something’s wrong here. RBG’s death did not have to leave us in this total existential panic, and oh yeah, maybe this could have ALL BEEN AVOIDED AND WE COULD HAVE ALSO HAD THREE (3) NEW LIBERAL JUSTICES SECURING PROGRESSIVE LEGISLATION FOR A GENERATION IF SOME OF YOU HAD JUST FUCKING VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIXTEEN.

(Why yes I am still mad about that, I will be bitter until the end of time that we were consigned to four years and counting of this completely avoidable nightmare because of apathy, misogyny, and Leftist Moral Purity TM, but we’re talking about the future and what can still be done here, not what’s in the past.)

Anyway. Here’s the bright side, which admittedly sucks right now, but it’s been the answer all long:

VOTE.

You have to fucking vote, and you have to fucking vote for Biden/Harris. Everything that we’ve been talking about is no longer a hypothetical; it’s happening right now. This is not just some Awful Worst Case scenario, and it’s not somehow being spouted by privileged white liberals ignoring the struggles of the masses. (Viz: that awful fucking text post with its simpering self-righteousness: “are you punching nazis or just telling oppressed people to vote blue?” I hate that text post with a fiery passion and it’s the exact kind of morally holier than thou leftist propaganda that wouldn’t surprise me if it was generated by a troll farm in Krasnoyarsk.) My dad is disabled and lives on Social Security. Trump’s second-term plan to end the payroll tax takes SSID out by mid-2021, so... I guess that’s my dad fucked then. I’m a gay woman with long-term mental illness, no healthcare, no savings, no current job, and a lot of student debt. My sister has complex health problems and relies intensely on publicly funded healthcare programs. All my family have underlying conditions that would put them at worse risk for COVID (age, asthma, immune issues.) These are just the people IN MY HOUSEHOLD who would be at risk from a second Trump presidency. It says NOTHING about my friends, about all the people far less fortunate than us, and everyone else who IS ALREADY DYING as this nation lurches into full-blown fascism. That is real. It is happening.

Here’s the good news and what you can do:

Democrats are fired up and mad as hell, and they’ve already donated $31 million between the announcement of RBG’s death last night and today, and that number is climbing every second.

You can help by donating to Get Mitch or Die Trying, which splits your donation 13 ways between the Democrats challenging the most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate. That also has raised EIGHT MILLION BUCKS in the less-than-twenty-four hours.

You can donate RIGHT NOW to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, vote if your state offers early voting, request your mail-in ballot, or hound everyone you know to ensure that they’re registered.

You can call your US Senators (look up who they are for your state, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICAN OR YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE OR ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2020) and phone the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 to voice your insistence that they respect RBG’s last wishes and refuse to vote on any Trump nominee until after January 2021.

The other good-ish news is that I woke up to an email from the Biden campaign this morning about how they’re well aware of this and they’re already on it. BUT WE CANNOT COUNT ON EITHER THEM OR THE SENATE DEMOCRATS TO BE ABLE TO STOP IT. Because Joe Biden is not president and the Senate Democrats do not have a majority, if the Republicans manage to rush a nominee and a vote and all 52 GOP senators vote for that nominee, hey presto, tyranny by majority, a SECOND stolen Supreme Court seat, and a 6-3 hard conservative majority for the next generation. Even if Roberts or Gorsuch sometimes defect on procedural grounds, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (who is also 82 and thus ALSO might soon be replaceable, thus resulting in an EVEN WORSE ideological swing) would be outnumbered on everything. This is terrible. I’m not even gonna pretend it wouldn’t be.

BUT:

If Joe Biden is elected with a Democratic Senate and House, IT MATTERS. It gets us off the fascism track, it gives us the ability to make progressive law and have it enacted without going to die in Mitch McConnell’s Kill Stack, it gives Biden the executive authority to nominate liberal judges and change Trump’s worst outrages on day 1, it stands as a huge example of a nation managing to reject fascism by democratic process, and while yes, we’d still have a terribly rigged Supreme Court, Democrats would control all the other branches of government and be able to put safeguards in place. The other option is outright fascism and the end of American democracy for good. This may sound alarmist. It’s not. It’s literally what the situation has ended up as, as all of us who were begging people to vote for HRC in 2016 saw coming all along.

So yes. That’s what you need to do, and what WE need to do. We need to make as much goddamn noise as possible, protest, contact elected representatives, make sure everybody pulls their weight and ferociously fights the promised attempt to ram through a new justice before Election Day, all that. But even if that does happen, THEN WE NEED TO FUCKING DONATE, ORGANIZE, AND VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT. ALL OF US. NO EXCUSES. NO MORE TWITTER LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBERS. NO MORE. THEN, EVEN WITH A RIGGED SUPREME COURT, WE WILL ALL BE SAFER ON NOVEMBER 4TH AND CAN TRY TO FIX WHAT’S BROKEN.

The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

May her memory be a blessing, and a revolution.

[duhragonball]

For the Ask Game: Son Goku

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: Goku is the main character in Dragon Ball Z, an anime that I have enjoyed tremendously for over 20 years.  He kicks aliens really fast and hard, and he eats wolves and bugs and clouds, and he’s very cool and good.   

That may sound kind of basic, maybe even borderline sarcastic, but I’m not sure how else to put it.    I’ve gotten so used to liking Goku that it’s hard to articulate why.   

Like, okay, you know that one episode during the Cell Games, where he’s gonna pick apples from his favorite apple tree?   And he does the special karate punch that makes the apples all fall out of the branches without really hurting the tree?    In the dub, he says to the tree “Ready for one more round, old timer?”  Or something like that, and then after he hits it, he’s like “See?  That didn’t hurt a bit.”  I’m not getting the lines right, but you get the idea.    That’s some choice Goku right there.    He’s friends with that tree!   

Why I don’t: hE gAvE mOrO a SeNzU bEaN-- ha ha just kidding, but can you imagine not liking Goku?   Because of something he did in some horseshit fancomic that doesn’t even count?

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of guff from people about Goku showing mercy to his enemies.   This is humorous to me, because I’d bet you dollars to donuts that they’re fans of Vegeta and/or Piccolo, and that only happened because Goku decided to have mercy on their stank asses.    “Well I like Vegeta because he kills people.”  He only gets to do that because Goku allowed him to live.    Best Green Dad doesn’t happen without Goku, period, end of sentence, new paragraph.   

I’m not a lore expert like that guy on Twitter who only watched DBZ Abridged, but here’s some cool trivia for you: Cell could have self-destructed and destroyed the Earth at any time.    It literally does not matter that Goku gave Cell a senzu bean before Gohan fought him, because Cell would have done the same thing no matter who beat him or how.     If Gohan had wiped him out quickly, that nucleus would have survived and regenerated, and he would come back even stronger.   The senzu bean just delayed the inevitable outcome, and not even by that much, because Cell wasn’t that worn out in the first place.   The whole thing with the senzu bean was Goku playing headgames with Cell and no one seems to understand that but me.   

But what about Moro, you ask?   Hey, come here.  

Closer.    No, closer.   

Listen to me.   I love you, okay?    But the Dragon Ball Super manga isn’t canon.   Hating Goku over something he did in Super is like hating Superman for something he did in a Mad Magazine bit.      

“Blargle blargle he doesn’t kiss his wife bad father, tournament of power--” I super mega don’t care about any of these ice cold takes.      Every day I go on YouTube and it recommends me the dirt worst Star Wars commentary videos.   “Maybe the SITH were actually the GOOD GUYS and the JEDI were the BAD GUYS!  Huh?  Did I just BLOW your MIND?   Be sure to like and subscribe!”  Every dope with a keyboard seems to think they can flip the script and pretend they’re some kind of genius.    “Thanos was right!”  “Magneto was right!” “Dr. Doom was right!” “Antifa are the real fascists when you stop and think about it!”  “Masks and vaccines are bullshit, COVID-19 is a hoax, but if it were real, maybe it’s the good guy in this situation!”

I didn’t mean to go off on a rant here, but the whole point of Goku is that he’s a pretty cool guy, and the hero of his particular adventure, and you see all these people trying to outsmart that somehow, like it’s not the premise of the character.   It’s like all those fan theories about how every show is really one character having a coma dream in the hospital.    It’s fake-deep, like when Will Smith’s kid goes on the internet and says something like “Water isn’t wet when you stop and think about it.”  

I’m not saying everyone has to like Goku, but I don’t get the hate-boner people have for him.    I don’t like cole slaw, it’s soggy and insipid and I don’t understand it, but I don’t go around trying to convince people it’s not made out of cabbage.  

Anyway, Goku’s awesome. 

Favorite episode (scene if movie): It’s hard to choose, but DBZ #248 always fucks me up.   I looked it up in my liveblog archive to get the episode number right, and the first line of that post: This one always fucks me up.

Moving on.

Favorite season/movie: In Dragon Ball terms, I guess this refers to the sagas, so I’ll go with Cell Games.    Goku goes into the battle with this flawed, touch-and-go plan, and it works.    He defeats perfection with imperfection, and it’s glorious.  

Favorite line: “What I represent can never be destroyed,” is one of the most metal lines ever uttered, anywhere.   It’s a threat and a moral lesson all in one.   

Favorite outfit: Two answers for this one.  

Shu’s outfit in the Fortuneteller Baba Saga was awesome.    I used to wear yellow T-shirts to work, so when I put on my blue labcoat I would see myself in the restroom mirror and think: yeaaaaahhhhhh.

I’m also big into Goku’s look during the Cell Games, classic orange outfit, blue shirt, with the Super Saiyan form ready to go.    That may sound obvious, since this is kind of Goku’s default look, but it takes a while to get all of this together.  For me, it was a big deal to see Goku in action as a Super Saiyan in his standard fighting gear, because the whole time he was SSJ on Namek his shirt was ruined.   Against Gero and 19 he was sick, but starting with the Cell Games, we get him fresh as a daisy, and it’s worth the wait.   Harder to stealth cosplay, though.

OTP: Gochi.   Come on.    I don’t even care that much about ships, but they’re adorable on the show, and the internet backlash against Gochi only intensifies my defiance.   

Brotp: I wrote a fanfic with Goku and Yamcha just joyriding in the desert, and that seemed pretty awesome, so maybe we need more of that.   

I dunno, maybe I’m giving this to Bulma.   They don’t get a ton of screen time together after a certain point in the show, but the bond between them is this really sublime thing.    In the same fanfic, I wrote Bulma and Goku interacting, and that was just a pleasure to write.

Head Canon: I think Goku being an alien orphan matters more to him than he lets on.   Early on, he knew he had parents but he didn’t know why they left him in the woods.   Pretty much every interaction he has with the outside world is about him being different.   Then he finds out he’s a Saiyan and all the Saiyans hate him for being weak and sentimental and so on.   He can kick all their asses, but that doesn’t make him any less of an outcast.   

I think becoming a Super Saiyan is a bigger deal to him than he lets on.   That moment kind of serves as this unspoken proof that there’s more to being a “true” Saiyan than Vegeta, Nappa, and Raditz ever knew.   That maybe, if his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great granny could see him, she might approve.

Unpopular opinion:

Yukio Ebisawa is underrated. 

A wish: I always wanted to see Goku style on Broly ‘93.   It seemed unfair to me that they kept bringing Broly back, and even teased a rematch with Goku in Movie 11, only to not deliver on it.    I wanted Goku to turn Super Saiyan 2 and Broly’d be all “oh noes!” and Goku would look at him and be all “Yeah.   What now, bitch?    That green shit won’t cut it anymore.”

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I think my darkest fear about the Dragon Ball franchise is that it’ll get bastardized like Superman, where some giant multimedia corporation owns it, has no idea how to tell new stories with it, and refuses to let it lapse into the public domain.   I have no idea how public domain works in Japan, but “Disney Toei’s Dragon Ball KH” doesn’t sit well with me.    Hopefully I’ll be dead by the time that happens.  

Like, Rise of Skywalker wasn’t that bad.   But it did lead me to worry that they really have no idea how to make Star Wars work.    They got it right enough, but the part where Rose is going to stay and guard the base or whatever, it just made me realize they’re only guessing, and they just happen to guess right often enough to succeed.   And it’s not like you can jump over to some other studio and see how they handle a Star Wars movie.

5 words to best describe them: Ain’t nothin’ to fuck with.

My nickname for them: Geeko.    Ha ha, just kidding.  

[erhiem]

From left: Photo by Gi Naps/Getty Images; Photo by Rose Hartman/Archive Photos/Getty Images; Photo by Victor Virgil/Gamma-Rafo via Getty Images

Today, the House of Jean Paul Gaultier is relaunching its ready-to-wear line after a hiatus of six years. It comes 16 months after fashion’s “Maestro of Mehmed”, as journalist Georgina Howell dubbed her in the early ’90s, took her final bow as the brand’s designer, implying that this iteration of its namesake. will not be designed. Instead, the reins are taken over by a dedicated team from their atelier, with help crafted from the rotating doors of some of the most independent designers working today – Palomo Spain, Ottolinger, Nix Lecourt Mansion, Alan Crosetti and Marvin M’Tumo .

Since starting his own label in 1976, Jean Paul has been instrumental in turning underwear into acceptable outerwear, making sailor fashion sexy and, more generally, paving the way for designers to experiment with diverse and unexpected castings on the runway. have been responsible for. He also dedicated an entire collection – AW97 – to the fight against racism. The collection, titled ‘Fight Racism’, featured graphic prints of young anti-fascists with slogans printed on their chests.

In fact, with such a rich history behind it, and vintage JPGs becoming increasingly collectible since the recent renaissance—partly stemming from the Kardashians’ love of all things net—more thanks to the label’s revival. Couldn’t be the right time- the line to wear from now. Although it is a well-known fact that Jean Paul himself decided to step back from the category in 2014 after a somewhat tumultuous feud with Florence Tetier (graphic designer and co-founder). November MagazineNow serving as the brand’s creative and brand director, Ghar is poised to enter the field again. in an interview with WWDJPG’s general manager, Antón Gégy, described the relaunch as an opportunity to “celebrate Jean Paul Gaultier, its values, its archives and its history”. And what better way to raise the glass to the core of fashion? Horrible Instead look at seven of the most show-stopping moments from its most iconic era, the ’90s. Long live Gaultier!

Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

Madonna’s Conical Corset from the Blonde Ambition Tour, 1990

Back in 1989, when Jean-Paul Gaultier was told by an assistant that Madonna had told the audience, she was convinced that he was playing a trick with her. They knew how obsessed he was with her, just could not do be true But she soon found herself on the phone to the original queen of pop, making a match in ’90s fashion heaven. Naturally, Madonna already knew what she wanted: to create something for her that surrounded Jean Paul’s signature masculine-feminine crossover. Inspired by his love of the late ‘queen of Paris punk’ Edwij Belmore, Jean Paul conceived a pinstripe suit – the top of ’80s manhood – and a corset with the now famous conical bra, which he designed six years ago on AW84 had started for. /85.

Photo by Victor Virgil/Gamma-Rafo via Getty Images

Eva Herzigova’s cut-out dress, 1992

Thought harnesses were a new thing on the runway? Wrong! After all, you’re not known as a fashionista Horrible Without a sprinkling of kinks here and there, as this look proves well. Presented on JPG’s AW92 runway, this dress, so slick in its fit that clothes can even put on Eva’s body, exemplifies the powerful-yet-playful take on sexuality that serves as a throughline throughout the French designer’s body of work. runs as. Styled with bicep-clad opera gloves and proudly crafting the Czech-Italian supermodel’s bust, there’s a distinctive dome-y tone at play here, though no compromise on the beauty of the silhouette or the quality of the make. It speaks to an ideological throughline that runs through Jean Paul’s work – that no matter who a woman is or wants to be, she always has the right to be chic!

Photo by Pierre Guillaud/AFP via Getty Images

Houndstooth bodysuit inspired by Leigh Bowery, 1991

In an interview with iD in 2018, Jean Paul declared his love for the “London Way”, which means “just creating your own style, your own creativity and being free to do what you want to do”. When he took the idea back to Paris, it wasn’t very popular, but that didn’t stop him from creating his own trademark approach to design. He spent his youth in the 80s at famous London nightclubs such as Blitz and Heaven, where he met performance artist Leigh Bowery. In a nod to Bowery’s influence on fashion, Jean Paul sent down his interpretation of the Leigh Bowery Houndstooth bodysuit—which would later inspire Alexander McQueen for AW09 and Gareth Pugh for SS07.

Photo by Pierre Guillaud/AFP via Getty Images

‘Chic Rabbi’ Collection, 1993

For AW93/94, Jean Paul presented the ‘Chic Rabbi’ collection, inspired by the traditional dress of Hasidic Jews. Models in streamels and black suits danced to the sounds of a violinist who played live on the catwalk. The usual circle of supermodels was there, but Jean Paul also decided to cast someone who visually embodied the cultural context: a man with a big beard. During the ’80s and ’90s, designers were known for their casting choices, pioneering their diversity. “I’m fascinated by strong personalities, people who capture my imagination because they walk well down the street,” Gaultier explained in a 2014 interview. “Showing just one type of girl is a flaw,” he adds, “something I’ve always fought with. One kind of beauty – no. If I show a bigger girl, I’ll always show a younger girl.” will show.” It is now legend that Gaultier once posted an advertisement in a French daily newspaper release Looking for “atypical” models, saying that “facial distortions should not be avoided in application”.

Photo by Arnal/Garcia/Gama-Rafo via Getty Images

Mesh Tattoo Top, 1993

Back in 1993, the trend Declared this prestigious collection as “a startling vision of cross-cultural harmony”. While we’d be inclined to cringe at the somewhat reasonable look now that Jean Paul drove down the runway for the SS94 (which can actually be read as another nod to Leigh Bowery) it certainly Historical perspective. It also marked the debut of Jean Paul’s iconic mesh tops, which were inspired by a tattoo convention he once found himself spinning around – today, they are some of his most sought-after designs. The collection also includes heavy notes of punk, grunge, and 18th century men’s frock coats made in Jodhpur and denim in the typical JPG style. How did he ever find the place for all this?!

Photo by Pierre Vuthe/Sigma/Sigma via Getty Images

Björk!, 1994

Jean Paul’s celebrity friends don’t start and end with Madonna. A year after Björk’s properly titled debut solo album, First entry, Taking the music and fashion worlds by storm, she appeared on the designer’s AW94/95 show, about a magical train that stopped in a small village somewhere high in some mountains. And what, duh?! As you’d expect from JPG, the show was a mish-mash this time in terms of different styles of traditional arctic costume. The models trotted down the snow-covered runway (which almost tripped Kate Moss), decked out in a hell of a lot of fur, silk, wool, and leather.

Photo by Pierre Verdi / AFP via Getty Images

Op-Art Inspired Catsuit, 1995

Two women riding a motorcycle hit them. One of them descends and climbs onto a loft at a DJ booth. Jean Paul’s AW95 ‘Mad Max’ Show Has Started. As he was in the middle of designing the costumes for Luc Besson’s famous film fifth element In which Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich fight a mysterious cosmic force, they had science-fiction in mind, which means it was technology and cyber-heavy. The bodysuit inspired by Viktor Vasarelli’s op-art paintings became the show’s most memorable aspect—now made super collectible by Kim K and Cardi B and partly responsible for the JPG-madness we’re seeing on Depop these days. Also on the show was Carmen Dell’Orefice, who walked with a live falcon on her arm and sported ornate football armor that lit up like a circuit board. Really prestigious.

Photo by Victor Virgil/Gamma-Rafo via Getty Images

trompe l’oeil torso top, 1995

The next season, Jean Paul took his quest for sci-fi polka dots further, this time translating it into menswear. This time, however, he brought his knack for trompe l’oeil print placement to the table—skills he had previously flexed in the aforementioned Les Tautouzes, and even as early as 1992, when he sculpted the enviable Presented Printed Mesh Top with Toros. The look sported here by Tanel Bedrossiantz is perhaps a little more figurative in its approach, though no less direct is its infrared-style suggestion of what might lie beneath the longtime house muse’s button-down shirt.

Photo by Danielle Simon/Gamma-Rafo via Getty Images

JPG Set Sale, 1998

In a promo video for JPG’s new ready-to-wear line, Bella Hadid is wearing a big red ship on her head. In case you didn’t already know, it debuted at the Haute Couture SS98 show, where it takes us back to the Age of Enlightenment. It was a time of scientific progress, the advent of modern capitalism and of course colonialism. The ‘explorers’ were sailing around the world from Europe, ‘discovering’ new lands for them – a ship serving as a nod to the continent’s shameful past. Some say, however, that it was during the Enlightenment that the fashion we know today – as a form of self-expression that can be accessed by the public – first began to emerge, making the historical period a fashion show. became an ideal subject. .

Photo by Rose Hartman / Archive Photos / Getty Images

Man Himself!, 1992

Sure enough, to write a list of Jean Paul Gaultier’s most iconic looks from his most iconic decade, and not for the man himself. Indeed, as Florence Tetier spoke to her before the label’s launch, “Everybody knows who she is!” whether it’s his striped Whether paired with a pleated black skirt or, as seen here, a denim vest and a punkish tartan kilt, JPG’s personal style has made her one of the most instantly recognizable designers of our time. Plus, there’s a direct connection between what she wore and what we then saw on the runway. While we may have never seen a proper, French Navy-standard Sailor From the designer, “he’s done a lot of stripes and nautical-inspired pieces,” notes Florence. “It’s really nice to see the link between the way he dresses and the way he designs.” we love you, Jean Paul! Follow iD on Instagram and TikTok for more fashion.

.

The post Jean Paul Gaultier’s most iconic 90s moments appeared first on Spicy Celebrity News.

[soranihimawari]

Based on this Oikawa art: ©️to the original artist credits via this link.

Tagging : @oikawa-obvs @m0nstergeneration20xx @smolbludandelions @oikawaandkuroostan

Word count: 2.2k

Playlist for reference:

The lullaby:

The song that helped me write:

Conmigo, tu corazón está a salvo.

(With me, your heart is safe)

A small part of you is a tad bit more curious these days since your building had received a new occupant. You had been studying for months abroad in Argentina, the place where your paternal grandparents had met during the Second World War. They were encaptured by the thrall of escaping their fascist home territory of a province in Italy as children; the two would eventually meet as young adults and with a promise of an apple and fine charcuterie select meats, it wasn’t long before they were busy tending to their own children.

One lucky son met the love of his life on an excursion to the library and had successfully flirted with a young florist who did not fall for the young man’s sharp features, but instead, with his kind heart. The younger couple chose to move abroad to the states for a few years in order to leave behind the pillars of their supportive past to sketch a dream for their future.

You were the first child who infamously stayed mute, observing a world that was meant for those who were much older and wiser than a child. You had been exposed to mainly three languages and until the age of four, you remained silent. You had been dragged to many doctors and learning centers yet the cause for the quiet loomed over your tiny demeanor, but growing up in a multicultural household did have its charm. You were five years old when you finally decided staying quiet was no longer an option; you strung along sentences in your father’s Argentine tongue, your mother’s native British English, & finally much to your grandparents’ surprise, Italian. The world was much more brilliant since that day.

Now, nineteen years later, here you were standing at the mailing center floor of your student lodging. The mid-July season was a time when the air brought about snow and sleet and the graying sunset surrounded the city of Buenos Aries in a phosphorescent hue. The new neighbor had just arrived from Japan earlier last month; he was a sight to behold. You couldn’t help falling for his charming smile or his determineds stare as you two walk up the stairs together. Suddenly, you think of yourself when you were nonverbal for the first five years on this planet. His actions and reactions to the new side world was at first marvelous; you could see his passion and drive everyday you would leave the apartment for various errands like heading to the market or a cafe for a light snack of coffee and pan de bono.

However, the thinning veil of homesickness loomed behind the closed door had become much too great. You didn’t mean to pry, but you could tell the man was clearly upset at something (or in this case someone) as you over heard his voice crack on the phone, which for whatever reason had been set to speaker:

“Lo siento Toto. No podemos encontrar un traductor para usted ahora mismo.”

You close the book you were reading in your room as soon as you heard the call end. It was only three weeks into his tenure, but you and him liked to play a game. You come up with it one afternoon after your online lecture at the university finished and he was home from a jog around the apartment block. You smile at him, waving shyly at first. He returns the gesture before you make a sign with your hands; this is when you point him and he glanced down at your kind eyes. You smile again and with your opposite hand, you tap his door once. You frown, and it’s two knocks. And so on. If there is an emergency, it’s a triangular placed knock; if it’s a health thing like a cold or your cycle showing up, a square. So now you wait patiently waiting by the wall of next to your bed and when you hear no knock from him, you raise your hand and knock twice. Your neighbor agrees with two knocks followed by a triangle.

Of all days to make a house call, you chose no time like the present. You grab your D-link key ring, bag, and a hoodie before you slip on your light blue high top sneakers. You lock your front door and slide to the left. Your heart suddenly beats a bit faster because you give a curtesy knock on the door. The deadbolt squeaks as your neighbor pulls the door open.

The apartment is dark save for the night light in the kitchen and the light in the bedroom. Looming above you, you noticed his pink tinged nose and tear stricken cheeks hidden by a broken smile. You think about your family stories about being lost and found. You apply it to him once the door behind you closes. His dark brown hair bounces on a whim as he instinctually reaches out for your hoodie sleeve; he tugs on the fabric causing you to turn to look down at his hands. He mutters something so quietly you thought it was the heating element being turned on by the timer.

You nod your head, kicking off your shoes; you see the small area next to the coat closet where his shoes were kept. This momentary delay caused enough of a buffer time before he moves his hand into your own to hold. You don’t mind the roughness of his fingers at all. Against yours, it feels like the sport he so heavily trains for everyday gave him these aesthetically pleasing grip. You squeeze his hand gently for reassurance, your eyes hide a certain storm of serenity & you decide that perhaps this is what he needs. You have to quell the uneasiness and betrayal he was emoting because you of all people understand.

Call it a sign of humanness since you both slowly start to see each other not as neighbors, but as equals in the solidarity of finding comfort in the other.Neither of you say anything as he leads you to his kitchen dining island where he sits on a singular barstool, his body facing you with his hand in yours still.

You raise an open palm to his face, his cheek is warmer than you expected when he closes his eyes and the tears fall again. He looks like a pouting child, much to your amusement. You say nothing as your other hand massages the ringlets (which felt like chocolatier mousse)that make up his hair before you feel his other arm snake around your waist and he pulls you closer; your hoodie becomes damp the more he lets out every thing that he kept locked away. The loneliness is not kind to those who fear it, yet the two of you persevered. After all, the dark is less scary when you have a friend and so you grasp a hold of him. It hurts; this hurts seeing him this way because somewhere along the way you and him forged a bond. And you hold the boy who is so far from home as much as you can; believe in me and I will come running to you. Your inner conscience conveys this until his crying subsides you stay there still cradling his hallowed frame. His sniffles are reduced to a breadth of a whisper as you hum the opening bars of a song you heard earlier on the classic radio XM station.

Your eyes notice the shirt he wears has been through better days with the faded title on its sleeve, you realize the word is the same no matter which language you spoke; you brush back his hair with your fingers before you pry his almond eyes upward to get a good look at your stoic face. You wipe his cheeks with both of your hands and when you are sure his eyes are truly focused on your promoninent features, your breath hitches in your throat for a moment. You intake a sharp breath and when you exhale rather slowly, your breath fans across his brow. His eyes are closed for a half a second and you decide to open your mouth when your mid-Atlantic voice finds its place.

“Captain,” is the first word you say with confidence you say with utmost clarity. You trace your fingers on the faded design, your neighbor’s emblem is a crown as well. Your voice cuts through his pride like a comet; it is surreal and bright. The shadows of sadness ceases to exist when you see how much the old title inspires the almost snuffed out embers to reignite. He doesn’t look anywhere but up at you stunned in a wild glimpse of surprise. You repeat the word, a brief smile dances across your features.

“Captain. Capitán. Capitano,” all three languages you know in succession drives his mind to rule the court again. You tell him this out loud until he kisses your lips closed; it is as honest as he feels and when the kiss breaks you tap his steadfast pursed lips with your left handed fingers. His arm is still on your waist with the other brushing back your your front layers of hair over your shoulders. You place your right hand in the middle of his chest which now regained its resting breathing rhythm. He asks you something and you nod. You stifle a yawn before you remove your hand from his lips and lean down again.

This time, this kiss is calculated and efficient; you guide the hand on your waist higher to your neck and when you tilt your head to the opposite side, he whines. Yet you smirk beneath the soft sound he makes you reply with. You remove your lips from his and kiss his jawline, the side of his neck driving his impulse points insane. His hair is a mess and so is yours, but neither of you are paying it any mind when his arms envelope your body; he lifts you with such ease you feel your head swimming and the kiss is becoming more deep. Your hands entwine around his shoulders for stability, and your legs wrap around his hips; and he breaks this moment to hold your body for the few minutes he needs to move you swiftly out of his kitchen and into his dimly lit room. He smiles into this kiss and finally the least bit of sorrow leaves for the time being.

There is an innate need of questions seeking answers. Desires of wanting to feel safe in the company you keep is a mad thought when your nightly clothed bodies are pressed in an innocent hold and the kisses exchanged are like tantalizing secrets you expose.

He knows he’s not in the right mind set to give you all of him, but this physical love language you both trade off are fine for now (on so many levels). He navigates the small apartment with ease calling you nicknames from his hometown like Watashinojinsei no joō & Hikari no ōjo.

You breathe in through your nose and out of your mouth as he lays you down, a tender sigh escapes your mouth in vague innocence remains. (It would be a name he affectionately still calls you years later, but neither of you are perturbed by the future you will create for each other.) You are on equal footing or lack there of as you both reach an sensual epiphany.

You let him hold you for as long as needs; your bold vitality is what motivates your contemporary lover in your arms, away from the fickleness of the world outside. Here in the bed draped in a sky blue tone, does the light he keeps on shine around you. Even Helios learns to drive the chariot, like your mythos books say, so you balance yourself, on your knees close to where he his hands rest on your thighs. He waits learning newer customs he was still adjusting to since he left his palace home behind.

You straighten your lower back as he observes the way you pull off your hoodie revealing a thermal turtleneck that has a designer’s mark stitched on the corner. The familiar western numbers stare at him through the well loved turtle neck. Your paternal grandmother and father’s favorite fútbol player and mother’s lucky number is exposed to him. The faded gold and white thread outlines the club from the late modernization of the sport (a club that has since been retired). Argentina’s famous #13 ranking legend is Oreste Omar Corbatta, commonly known in 1957 as “Angels with Dirty Faces,” but from where the soon to be Olympian watches you, he knows where this chance meeting would end once you trace your fingers along his face...

You crawl back toward him to rest your head against his neck as he presses his lips against your brow. You look up at him with a a stern gaze. He chuckles at the way your nose scrunches before he kisses you one final time, hope ever present when your bodies succumb to sleep. Somewhere along the twilight hours activities, the idea is seared into both your minds that no matter what happens afterwards, because falling in love with him would be the driving force for him to call you his everything.

[canchewread]

Editor's note: this journal is original content (written by myself, of course) and has not appeared elsewhere online before today. I should also note that because this is both an opinion piece and an informal journal, my level of commitment to providing citations for the disingenuous wasn't particularly high; if you're looking for formally documented evidence that we're currently in the middle of a fascist takeover, I encourage you to check out my academic writing about the subject on ninaillingworth.com instead.

Journal 09/09/2020: Looking the Beast in the Eye

When I originally sat down to pen this journal, my intention was to call it something along the lines of “advice to a young leftist” which is probably in no small part, the reason why it's taken me three days to write this piece. This is because unfortunately I do not have very much good advice for a young leftist today in two-thousand and twenty, or at least much advice that isn't going to sound rather a lot like “quit before what you believe destroys your entire life.”

As I've written (extensively) elsewhere, we're in the middle of a fascist takeover that is more or less succeeding across the entire Pig Empire, and what passes for the liberal (read: capitalist) establishment in our respective nations seem quite content to try and appease the beast by feeding them the entire left and any marginalized group “uppity” enough to demand justice, equality or representation. There is not a lot of upside to being an open leftist right now and understanding what I know about both the history of fascism and the history of reactionary crackdowns in America, it's awful hard for me in good conscience to advise any young person to willingly subject themselves to the tender mercies of an uncaring state and its fascist cutout vigilante groups.

Let's talk a little bit about what that history, including very recent history, can tell us and why what it tells us isn't very good for the American left. Here in particular, we as both a class in American society and a people that believe in a more equal, compassionate and humane way of life, stand at the intersection of state power, class oppression and the homicidal revenge fantasies of a fascist political order that has seized power throughout much of the United States. The fact that this is not understood by our milquetoast Dem Soc allies and the bougie “progressive left” is completely irrelevant; as any Ferguson activist (who is still breathing) can tell you COINTELPRO never ended, performative liberal anti-racism stops well short of opposing police repression, and genteel society will respond to violent reprisals against activists by the reactionary right with either dead silence or some mild clucks of disapproval at best.

Are the liberals aware that when the increasingly fascist American right says “the left” they mean liberals and suburbanite Democrats too? On some level I'm sure they are, but clearly the threat of increased taxation and social programs for the poor terrifies them far more than the possibility fascism will progress to the point that they're next in front of the firing squad – I've been told the liberals of Weimar Germany felt much the same way during Hitler's rise; which merely demonstrates that the liberal capacity for coddling fascism if it's profitable knows few limits. Furthermore the nauseating truth is that many of your misguided and misinformed liberal allies in the working class simply don't understand that the fascist right always seeks to eliminate the militant left first simply because those are the people who're going to fight back when you start loading Muslims, Latinos and lanyard Democrats onto cattle cars.

This historical process of fascism of course intertwines with the American establishment's history of ruthlessly repressing, criminalizing and even murdering the left. As I detailed extensively in a prior essay called “The Inversion Perversion” the state's war against Americans who want a more equal society (in any number of ways) predates the rise of Nazi Germany, the American Civil War and as those who've studied colonial America might argue, even the foundation of the country. Between the mass deportations of anarchists, suppression of left wing literature through the mail, two Red Scares, anticommunism, Hoover's COINTELPRO war against the civil rights movement, the black power movement and the American student left, or all the way up to the Obama Department of Justice's ruthless oppression of the Occupy, Ferguson and North Dakota Pipeline protests, I could easily spend this entire essay demonstrating that when it comes to persecuting, destroying and yes even murdering the left, there is a long and storied history of bipartisan consensus in America – I see no reason or evidence to suggest that has changed much in our modern times.

In other words history, even recent American history, says that this story ends in a jail cell or a shallow grave for some of the folks reading this journal right now and I don't know how to sugarcoat that for anyone, let alone a young person with their whole life (such as it is) ahead of them. The plain, god-awful truth is that the American right wants you dead, and the center-right American liberal establishment simply doesn't care, just as it has never cared, because they also want the left destroyed and fear sharing their ill-gotten wealth more than they fear fascism. Furthermore, this same elite “liberal” establishment is actively engaged in splitting the component parts of the current American uprising up into acceptable and non-acceptable targets; that's why Joe Biden keeps yammering about police funding, anarchists and “looters.” Democrats in particular are doing this even as fascist militia vigilantes are starting to execute antifascists and protesters in the street, might I add.

Did I mention that it's a really bad time to be an open leftist, or even just someone who passionately feels cracker murderpigs shouldn't get away with murder because some fascist gave them a badge? And yet of course therein also lies the rub; just as there is danger in resisting the imposition of a fascist order there is also danger in refusing to resist.

Turning once again to history, we know that the fascist creep isn't going to stop itself until well after it has killed millions of people and destroyed everything about our lives that contains any meaning whatsoever. The reactionary backlash will not stop with silencing, arresting and/or killing teenage anarchists, African Americans protesting against racialized police violence or Portland soccer moms who've had enough fascism for a lifetime. The fascist mindset and method of societal control dictates that there must always been more enemies both within and outside of the state who represent both an abomination that should be destroyed and a threat to everything good and pure in the national character. Right now, the waking dragon of American fascism has cast a laser-like focus on those brave few Americans who are willing to physically resist the transformation of the country from a corrupt Oligarchy to an overt fascist police-state with rigged elections. Once that enemy is crushed and defeated, the beast will turn its eye to others – unions, teachers, and yes even Democratic Party politicians who've always been friendly to the fascist capitalist billionaires running much of the reactionary American right today.

Whether you choose to fight, hide or run, it has become crystal-clear clear to me that we are all headed towards dark days in the very near future and the only variable left to be determined is which segments of the audience reading this will be thrown onto the pyre first. What we know today as “Western Society” is blindly crashing through the kinds of barriers people who desire peace, comfort and security simply don't breech without expecting violence, bloodshed and a whole lot of rain.

Perhaps in light of all this my advice to the young leftist should be to harden oneself for the torrential downpour of violence, repression and yes death that lies ahead, regardless of whether or not you choose to resist the fascist creep. Perhaps the best thing I can offer a young person staring directly into the eye of this beast is the assurance that it is not their fault, that nobody in history has ever asked to be born into the war against fascism and that ultimately the fascists cannot win because fascism is a death cult that will eventually eat itself and has done so every single time before this one. Perhaps all I really have to share with you is the hope that in the darkness and despair that lies ahead of us you will remember my words and know that no matter how much they repress, terrorize and torture us, fantasy cannot be reality, slavery cannot be freedom and life cannot be death.

And that I think is the handle and the comfort I can offer those of you reading this who’re young enough to have a future beyond the fascist order; I have no optimism to sell you but I can make one promise that may help carry you through the bowels of the hell we are all descending into after all. It might not amount to much yet, but I promise you there will always only be four lights; no matter how many of us they murder to try and “prove” otherwise. Do not give these maggots the satisfaction of seeing your fear; know that at least some of you reading this will eventually dance on their graves and take whatever comfort you are able to, in that inevitability.

Never forget - one way, or another, the future is left.

nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

[coolmarriagerecords]

On Chronophage

By Zachary Lipez

https://zacharylipez.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-mekons-chronophage-and

Chronophage are a band from Texas. They have been around for three years. Chronophage consists of Parker Allen (they/them) guitar and vox, Sarah Beames (she/her) bass and vox, and Cody Phifer (he/him) drums. For the new record, Parker’s brother, Casey Allen (he/him) plays synth. That’s all I know about Chronophage. The internet shows no interviews and, besides punk zines I don’t own (and presumably critics on Terminal-Boredom forums), the music press outside of Austin has ignored them. I first heard about the band from MaximumRnR, which listed their debut, Prolog for Tomorrow, released in December of 2018, as one of the best albums of 2019 (you can do stuff like that when you’re a revered punk zine). Because MRR is famously *cough* averse to cover any band that even flirts with problematicism, I don’t have to worry about my ignorance of Chronophage’s individual members potentially allowing me to big up fascists. Maybe it’ll turn out they’re Maoists (an ideology MRR is less worried about) but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when/if we come to it. Anyway, I had never even heard of Chronophage (a small miracle unto itself considering the underground’s ready access to publicists and music writers- such as myself- who love few things more than being the first to “discover” a band.). But, even while my sense of aural adventure is a bit rusty since the days of having to risk $8.99 on albums based solely on cover art and/or vibes in the air, I just knew Prolog for Tomorrow was going to scratch an itch. Maybe not an immediate itch but, when you keep as many itches on file as I do, you can afford to trust your instincts. Especially when those instincts have already been validated by some punk weirdo in Oakland who’s probably still mad at the Go-Go’s for firing Margot Olavarria fifteen years before they were born. My instincts served me well because that hypothetical punk weirdo was right! (About both things.)

I’m not sure how to describe Chronophage. I’m not a major fan of the comparisons, to Swell Maps or the Messthetics comps, that the punks made. I don’t dislike either point of reference but knowing Chronophage supposedly sounds like both doesn’t affect how I hear the band. Prolog for Tomorrow’s inner sleeve art has “Curse of Chronophage” scrawled, which may be a reference to The Curse of The Mekons. Or maybe not. I’m trying not to project my bullshit on the band. Matter of fact, Chronophage don’t sound anything like the honky-tonkin’-Mekons. Not because Chronophage aren’t honkys tonkin’ but because, historically speaking, American bands aren’t as hung up on sounding American as English bands are. The album art for Prolog is reminiscent of much of the (actually) cut and (actually) pasted Pavementisms of the ‘90s, which in turn was lifted directly from The Fall and all that band’s adherents. Like early Pavement and The Fall, Chronophage are full of hooks, some overt and many buried under transient skronk. But, unlike all the obscurist indie Chronophage shares a typewriter with, the basic template on the album, if there’s one at all, is “folk punk.” I suppose? At least the sense of that genre is present, if dependent on an expansive notion of both “folk” and “punk.” Minus any busking grotesqueries in the “Wagon Wheel” vein, there’s the strum and twang of barely distorted guitars, every string visible in the mind’s eye, maybe in need of tuning or maybe just playing those jazz chords I hear so much about at music critic parties. While only three musicians play on Prolog, horns and keys go in and out of the songs like a C Squat marching band showing up to support the potluck. Adding to the offhand spontaneity of the proceedings, there’s intermittent cowpoke yowlings, some very live sounding drums, and at least one poetry reading. There’s a real anarchist house party vibe but just when it feels like Chronophage are going to lose their train of thought or, worse, ask to borrow the touring band’s kick drum pedal, another fragile and plaintive power pop chorus arrives in time to keep me from retreating to the kitchen to bum beer off strangers.

If we’re going to (re)subscribe to my initial thesis that there are certain sounds made by certain bands that provide a messily alluring alternative to the pat and disingenuous cleanliness of overculture, therefore making a prickly honesty worth striving for (even if that striving lends itself to either self delusion or a romanticizing of failure), then Chronophage are what we’re talking about. Even if on their new album, The Pig Kiss’d (out on November 23), they kind of fuck a significant amount of my thesis over by showing that they do, in fact, know what they’re doing. Whatever. I deserve it. The whole mythology around The Mekons as a band finding dignity in the face of drunken ineptitude was a fib. While not having the chops of The Texas Playboys, and certainly often drunk, The Mekons, by the mid-’80s, were writing and performing songs as subtle and dynamic as any non-boring rock and roll, not to mention post-punk, band could aspire to. Because perfection is so oppressive, its absence will always be its own inherent virtue. But even better than not being able to play your instruments is being able to play them real pretty, but throwing some ugly in anyway. Just to show all the aesthetic bible thumpers that heaven isn’t always the hot shit it purports to be.  

The Pig Kiss’d is a sharper, more streamlined, proposition than Chronophages’s first record. The guitars, thankfully still mainly free of any distortion mush, ring out as cohesive riffs. Even while the lite-funk chunka-chunkas still occasionally approximate Desperate Bicycles covering Steely Dan (an under-appreciated subculture band influence… a lot of people don’t know that Big Black’s name was short for “Big Black Cow”), and the snare underpinning gives them a decidedly peace punk punchiness, the riffs now transform into razor-like, no wave leads instead of the decays into noise (or just silence) prevalent on Prolog. While the previous album positioned voices as hesitant souls in conversation, Chronophage’s dual singing is now consistently commanding. Not to say that either Allen or Beames are preoccupied with auditioning for American Idle anytime soon, but they both have cool, heavy-on-personality punk voices, ranging from conversating chill to accusatory growl, which the mix now accentuates. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t miss the feeling of a sinking ship, barely kept afloat by the bodies of oogles under the hull, but I’m also glad for a recording that doesn’t sound like the studio engineer is holding a personal grudge against the drummer. Of course, in no longer sounding a mess, Chronophage runs the risk of just sounding like, you know, a rock band. Of which there are plenty. Luckily this ain’t the case. The desperate, weird energy of Prolog for Tomorrow is still abundant. It’s just put in the service of songcraft more than ADD-infused mood. If there’s a newfound, almost psych, expansiveness in the songwriting, it’s a psych fueled by strychnine over any slouching towards bliss. And when the songwriting contracts, we get instant classics like the album closer, “Name Story,” which could be an undiscovered New Model Army a-side. So much does “Name Story” sound like a lost hit that I had to write the band and ask if it was a cover. (They responded that the aim was to sound like New Order… which is amazing.) Still, by contemporary indie standards, Chronophage sound like countrified First Wave of Black Metal-ers running through the American songbook. By contemporary post-punk standards, which can be applied now that New Order are on the table, Chronophage don’t sound contemporary at all. They sound out of the timeline; Richard Lloyd skipping post-punk entirely to jump headfirst into college rock, making that nerd rock hip, and vice versa. Lightning striking itself. In the face. Repeatedly. And by folk punk standards, if we’re bothering to still apply it, Chronophage continue to sound like the only true freaks in a field of future beer reps.Like I said, I don’t know much about Chronophage. While writing this, I exchanged emails with Parker but, preferring the mystery, I only asked about pronouns and whatnot. Maybe they’re apolitical. Maybe they are Maoists. Maybe they’re neither but still find my chronic naysaying abhorrent and dull. For all I know, they all campaigned hard for Pete Buttigieg and all the proceeds from The Pig Kiss’d are going towards having Chronophage Brand hostile architecture benches placed near the homeless encampments in Austin. Guess we won’t know for sure till the album comes out. But this feels like opposition music, and, more importantly (to me) it feels like music that speaks to a refusal to simply be grateful for the crumbs handed to us. Nit picking, as it were. If not exactly “dignity in the face of drunken ineptitude” then, in the face of endless war and empire and an oligarchal insistence to smile more, Chronophage make a sound that- equal parts sweet fury and sweaty sweetness and spilling over with a feisty, chaotic grace- approaches dignity. If the next few years are great, then great. We can play Chronophage at the cookout we’re all invited to. And if the next four years are instead a happy faced atrocity exhibition, at best a grinding exercise in defending cops, creeps, and landlords for the sole reason of the other side’s cops and creeps and landlords being so much worse? Then Chronophage’s sound will prove to be the kind of correct that’s too sloppy to be smug. Even under austerity, the anarcho-freak punx got bops. So even as COVID, the ice caps, or capital’s poptimist truncheon bear down on us, threatening to tickles our little chins, let us, at least, enjoy this thing.

https://zacharylipez.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-mekons-chronophage-and

* The cassette version of Th’Pig’Kiss’d Album will be available soon on Cool Marriage. Check this blog for updates. 

[stormtrprinstilettos]

Fun’s for Free: Chapter 1 - Roger x (fem)Reader

Summary: It’s 1978 and you’re a music journalist assigned to follow Queen on their North American tour. Only problem is the magazine you write for has not been kind to the band in the past, and someone has a hard time letting that go.

In this “episode”: We’re setting the tone here. Consider this a prologue of sorts.

Word Count: ~3.3K

Warnings: language is about all you’re going to encounter this time (wink wink)

Tagging: @sunshine112 @culturefiendtrashqueen (I think you asked to be permatagged! If it wasn’t you, I’m sorry!) If you want on the tag list, let me know!

[A/N: Being that this is fiction, the time of one particular critic quote being used in here is off, but all are verbatim quotes that have been made about both “News of the World” and “Jazz” in a certain publication. Also, this is the “Jazz” tour that happened 5 or 6 months after their European tour for “NOTW.”]

You’re starting to get impatient, tapping your fingers on the conference room table, listening to everyone else discuss their story proposals they’re throwing out to the editor, Mike, before he doles out the new assignments for the month. Working for a music magazine was your dream job, but you quickly realized that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. At least for you. You were always assigned the stories no one else wanted to touch – one of the “benefits” to being at the bottom of the proverbial totem pole. You almost felt like you were being taunted every month when you had to sit in on these staff meetings because you knew you’d never get assigned anything you actually wanted to do. Sure, every now and then you’d get a good one, but those were few and far between.

“Y/N,” Mike calls out. “I have a big one for you.” You start to groan inside, trying to figure out what ridiculous venture he was going to send you on this time. He walks behind you and puts his hands on your shoulders, something he always did before giving you bad news. “How does two months away from my bullshit sound?”

You turn and glare at him, dreading what he was going to tell you. “Jesus, Mike, if you want to get rid of me…”

He starts to howl in his laughter. “Never,” he says as he pats one hand on your shoulder. “Why do you always think the worst?”

“Because you always give me the worst,” you chuckle. “So what is it? Sending me to a war zone this time? Clearly it’s something nobody else wants to touch.”

“Well, it does have the potential to be one,” you hear Candice, the assistant editor laugh from across the room.

You glare at Mike with a profound sense of worry and see he’s still laughing. “Oh, it won’t be that bad.” After dismissing everyone else and clearing the room, he sits next to you and gives you a cheesy smile, which only makes your concern grow more. “Calm down. I’m not sending you to Guatemala.”

“Just spit it out, Mike,” you groan as you drop your head into your hands, anticipating the dread he was about to bestow on you.

“England. You have your passport, right?” His stupid smile never left his face, and you start to glare.

“Two months in England?” you ask suspiciously. It sounded almost too good to be true. “What’s the catch?”

“No, just a week in England,” he informs you. “You’re going on a tour.”

“A tour of what?”

“Not a tour of anything. You’re going on tour. You’re writing about a certain big name rock group on their North American tour.”

Your mind starts to race as you look at his cheesy grin, trying to remember what bands are going to be touring here soon, then your mouth drops with dread. “No, Mike. You can’t do this to me.”

“A dream come true, yeah?” he snickers.

“No!” you yell. “After the reviews Barry gave them? Are you fucking kidding me? Send Barry!”

“Barry turned it down,” Candice says. “So did…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mike interrupts and turns back to you. “I think you’d be perfect for it.”

“Why? Because you’re some sadist who gets off knowing you’re throwing me to a pack of wolves?” You keep trying to protest, but he just sits there with that stupid smile you want to slap right off of him. “How much do you think we’re even going to get out of them? This magazine has been brutal to them.”

“That’s why I want you to go,” he tells you. “Because I think you hate us more than they do.”

“This is going to be a disaster,” you mumble. “But, fine, I’ll do it. I have no choice. I need to pay rent.”

“Great!” Candice exclaims. “You leave in three days. I’ll have your plane ticket for you tomorrow.”

“When is this ‘journalist’ supposed to get here?” Roger grumbles. “I don’t want to be here.”

“You’ll have to face him at some point,” John chuffs. “He’ll be with us the whole tour.”

“She,” Miami corrects. “They’re sending a girl. Y/N something. I never heard of her before”

“Perfect. They can’t even send someone who knows what they’re doing,” Roger groans. “Not that I expect anything less from a magazine that said Genesis was better than us. Fucking Genesis. ‘More listenable and far superior’ is what they said.”

Freddie starts laughing loudly. “You take things too personally. When have any critics liked us?”

“I believe they once called you a Robert Plant knock off, Fred,” Roger reminds him.

Freddie’s laughter just gets louder. “I’ll knock off Robert Plant any day as long as I keep getting the money I do.”

“You can all play nice with whoever she is but I intend to…” Roger is cut off before he can finish.

“If she’s pretty we all know what you intend to do,” John quips.

“Oh fuck off,” Roger groans as he walks away, but not without continuing to yell. “Fascists! They called us a fascist rock band! That was this week!” He keeps yelling but no one is paying him attention anymore.

You’re standing in the doorway, hearing all of this going on, feeling like you’ve just witnessed your death. There is no way you can muster the strength to walk in there and introduce yourself now. “This is going to be a fucking nightmare,” you mumble under your breath.

“Ah, Rog must have read the new review,” you hear someone say behind you. Startled, you quickly turn around and your face is eye level with a chest, which you realize belongs to Brian May once you look up. “You’d think after all this time he wouldn’t get so mad about critics. The rest of us find them funny.” He looks down to you and smiles. “I’m assuming you’re our shadow for the next couple of months,” he says as he holds out his hand. “Brian May, nice to meet you.”

You smile and shake his hand, thankful to know there’s at least one person who won’t want to grind you into mulch. “Y/N Y/L/N, and yes. I’m the shadow.” You turn your head and peek back into the rehearsal room. “Maybe I should come back tomorrow,” you mumble.

“Today’s just fine,” he tells you with his soft, calming voice. “Come on,” he puts his hand on your shoulder and walks you in. All eyes in the room immediately dart to you, and you’ve suddenly been overwhelmed with a great sense of intimidation. “This is Miss Y/L/N. She’s…”

“Ah, the writer,” Miami interjects as he scampers over to to shake your hand. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Jim…”

“Call him ‘Miami,’” you hear Freddie say with a laugh. “He prefers that. What are we supposed to call you?”

“Y/N,” you reply. “Please no ‘Miss’ anything. I hate formalities.”

John walks over to you with a smile on his face and a quiet giggle. “He’ll have a new name for you in a few days.” You give him a smile and shake his hand.

“Come sit, darling. I need to know all about you,” Freddie says as he pats the floor next to him. You glance back at Brian who is giving you an encouraging grin and join Freddie on the floor of the mock stage that’s set up.

For the next 20 minutes you happily answer their questions, and they yours, of course. None of this was on the record, more of an introductory chat with the people you are going to practically be living, eating and sleeping with for the next two months. To say you’re relieved is an understatement. No matter their status in the music world, they were all extremely down to earth and quite charming, so much so that you completely forgot about the scene you witnessed earlier, until…

“You must be the journalist,” you hear Roger hiss with an emphasis on the “t.” No one even noticed him walk over.

You start to stand up and introduce yourself. “Yeah, I’m…” But he stops you.

“Yeah, okay,” he mumbles and walks over to his drum kit. You press your lips together and sit back down, attempting to start your conversation up again, when Roger starts to beat his drums with an obnoxious and incessant pace, seeming to be doing so purposely to annoy you, at least that’s what you gather from the smug look he’s giving you. “Are we here to rehearse or chat up the broad?” he yells.

You roll your eyes and chuckle at his juvenile behavior, as do the others, and walk to the other side of the room to talk to Miami. “Do they ever take a break?” you ask. “They just finished Europe a few months ago.”

All he can do is laugh. “No, they don’t. And it’s exhausting.”

“I saw them in New York last year. They’re phenomenal.” His eyes grow wide with shock. “Just because one of our critics is rough doesn’t mean we all hate them,” you giggle. “I happen to be a fan.”

After three hours – and a lot of wondering as to how they manage to go for hours without passing out – they finish for the day and everyone heads for the door. You’re standing outside, your suitcases at your feet, watching everyone pile into their cars and have no idea what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to be going. The first to leave is Roger, and he does so just as obnoxiously as he beat on his drums earlier, tearing out of the parking lot like he was in a hurry. “You can ride with me,” Brian says from behind. You turn and give him a curious look and he starts to laugh. “We’re going to the house.”

“Oh, I thought I was supposed to go…”

“No, you’re stuck with us,” he smiles and shrugs. “Sorry.”

When he pulls up to the house, you see everyone else walking inside, feeling intimidated all over again for reasons you don’t know. “I can go to a hotel if I’ll be in the way,” you tell him. “I don’t want to intrude or anything.”

“You’re not intruding. We’ll go inside, I’ll help you get your things to your room, then you’re joining us for dinner.” He takes note of your raised eyebrow and right lips and tries to be more reassuring. “And after dinner, Roger and Deaky will probably go to the pub, Fred will do whatever it is he does, Jim will go to bed and…” He stops and laughs. “You’re not intruding.”

You start to rub your eyes with your fingers and join in the laughter. “This is just too much,” you say with a sigh. “I just got thrown into this 4 days ago. Never had the chance to mentally prepare for any of it.” You drop your hands in your lap and give a shy smile. “And it’s not like everyone is exactly happy that I’m here.”

He throws his head back and laughs quietly. You quickly picked up that everything he does is done quietly (even when he was arguing during rehearsal earlier) and that’s why you felt comfortable around him. He wasn’t intimidating at all. “Ignore him,” he tells you. “He isn’t fond of people calling him a fascist.”

“No one called him a fascist,” you laugh. “I surely didn’t call him one. He needs to grow up. I didn’t write any of that crap.”

After getting settled in your room and freshening up, you head out the door to join everyone for dinner. “What are you doing here?” you immediately hear Roger grunt. “Are you going to be everywhere we go? We get no privacy at all?”

“Nice to see you, too,” you groan as you roll your eyes. “And don’t worry, I won’t be everywhere. You’ll have all the privacy you need in the bathroom.”

You start to walk away, but he isn’t done snipping. “That’s a shame. You’d probably have the thrill of your life if you got to watch me shower.”

“Don’t count on it. I’ve seen John Bonham naked. That was a thrill.” You turn and walk away, smirking to yourself. If he wanted to keep being testy with you, you were going to dish it back. You didn’t have the desire or the patience to deal with some arrogant asshole.

You walk into the dining room where you hear everyone talking and wave. “There she is!” Freddie calls out. “Come sit.” You take your seat next to him and exchange your pleasantries with everyone. “We were just discussing where we’re going to put you on the bus.”

“Fuck’s sake, put her with the equipment,” Roger groans as he sits down. “She doesn’t need to be with us every second.”

You slam your hands on the table, finally having had enough of his bullshit. “Look, I don’t know what your problem is, but…”

“She’s riding with us,” John snaps. “If you have a problem with it, you can ride with the equipment.”

Roger’s eyes glare at you, ignoring what John just told him. “My problem is that out of all the so-called journalists we can possibly have with us, they let someone from your piece of shit magazine come along. And you…”

“Stop it, Rog,” Freddie snaps, but he doesn’t.

“… waltz in here like …”

“Ignore him,” Freddie leans over and whispers. “He’s a bitter old hag sometimes.” You can help but giggle, and when Roger sees that, he becomes even more enraged.

But you take Freddie’s advice and ignore him, instead of baiting him like you want to, and decide to focus on Freddie. “What city are you most looking forward to?”

“New Orleans!” he exclaims. “We have a ridiculous party planned for the album release. It’s going to be absolutely salacious.”

The rest of dinner was spent talking to everyone except Roger, who was sitting at the end of the table, silently seething over the fact that everyone was getting along with you, which only encouraged you to be even more chipper than usual. You normally give everyone a chance after meeting them even when you don’t take to them immediately. You’ve dealt with this before – many times in fact – on your other assignments, and those that you got off on the wrong foot with usually always ended up being pretty cool, but you decided hours ago that you didn’t like Roger. You weren’t being fooled into thinking the feeling wasn’t mutual. You don’t know why you weren’t going to give him a chance. It’s not like he was being terrible – you’ve dealt with worse. And his attitude wasn’t nearly the worst you’ve encountered. There was just something about him that grated your nerves and you can’t quite pinpoint what it is. What you do know is that you’re taking great pleasure in knowing your mere presence is bothering him.

“Come to the pub,” John insists as everyone is standing up from the table. You can hear Roger groaning in the background, which, of course, makes you want to go, but you’re insanely tired and just want to go to bed.

“Thanks for the invite, but I’m really tired,” you reply with a smile, before hearing Roger start to mock you. “I had a long trip,” you explain, and his mocking gets louder as he walks to the door to leave. You’re trying hard to ignore him, but it’s hard to do. “You know what? Let’s go,” you tell John. “I could use a drink.” John smiles and throws an arm around your shoulder, walking you out the door.

You made sure you didn’t drink too much, just enough to relax and get a slight buzz. Drinking didn’t make Roger relax, at all, having the opposite effect in fact. It seemed like all he wanted to do was argue with you, and you happily obliged.

“‘More of the same dull pastiche,’ you idiots said,” he spit out. “If you hate our album so much why are you here?” he asked you.

You roll your eyes and grunt. “I didn’t write that. I never even heard the new album.” He starts to sarcastically chuff and tries to say something but you don’t give him the chance. “He hated your last album too, but I…”

“What’s your name anyway?” he asks with slightly furrowed brows. “Wait, are you the one who did that interview with Zeppelin back in…”

You start to laugh. “How do you think I got to see Bonham naked?” You raise your eyebrow and give him a smirk as you take a sip of your drink. John is finding the whole scene amusing and can’t stop laughing.

“Do you make it a habit to see drummers naked? I need to know so I can make sure I’m covered at all times.”

“Nah,” you say before you take a slow drag on your cigarette. “Only those I find impressive, so you don’t have anything to worry about.” You give him a sarcastic wink and take another sip of your drink, making a mental note of the narrowed eyes he’s shooting in your direction.

John starts to choke in his laughing fit and quickly finishes his beer. “I think it’s time to go now,” he says and grabs your arm, pulling you out of your seat and out the door before Roger has the chance to say anything back.

“I have a feeling this is going to be terrible,” you moan to Mike on the phone. “Everyone is lovely, but that fucking drummer…”

He starts to roar with laughter. “You always have issues with the drummers, Y/N. Why?”

“Because they’re all so cocky and carry a grudge against the world,” you sigh. “This one, though. Can you believe he can sit there and rattle off every negative thing that Barry ever wrote? And he’s blaming me for it.” You’re starting to get annoyed just thinking about it. “I’m sure it’ll get better. It’s just not exactly a great first impression. I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Just get us a good article out of all of this and I’ll see you when you’re in New York next month,” Mike chuckles before hanging up the phone. You roll your eyes as you do the same and when you turn around, Roger starts fussing.

“I will have you know that I absolutely carry a grudge. I am very proud of what we’ve done and…”

You hold a hand up telling him to stop. “For someone so worried about privacy, you don’t care about invading the privacy of others,” you snap. “And how many times to I have to tell you that I didn’t write anything negative about you or the band?” He opens his mouth to talk, but you hold your hand up again. “I’m tired. I’m cranky. And your ridiculous whining is now starting to bore me.” His eyes follow you as you walk away, wanting so bad to snip at you, but he can’t. “And stop looking at my ass,” you yell out as you head down the hallway.

When you disappear, and as Roger is standing there speechless, John and Freddie walk up to him, chuckling. “Don’t say a fucking word,” he fusses them. “She’s beautiful, yes, but she’s a nightmare.”

[wak-after-dark]

Still not able to come up with an argument about the Epilogue treating Gamzee (the murderous corpse molester) better than Jade (sat around for 3 years with depression only to have a dog dick and then be abandoned by her friends) huh? Guess you're just an idiot and willingly sucking Hussie's dick for a job at Whatpumpkin down the line. Maybe write some incest porn like IPDG and you'll get hired.

Wow get a load of this guy.

Okay I should probably just delete your comments and not give you the time of day, but you’ve been periodically sending me this kind of ask, and I really have to ask, do you really, really believe you’re someone with some sort of Moral High Ground right now? Like I’m not even defending the Epilogues as masterpieces or trying to shove them down people’s throats. I am literally just enjoying the content the WP Team put out and talking about it, and you come to my Inbox, to spew this accusatory nonsense and flinging insults. If you can’t read the Epilogues in a positive manner, and think they’re dogshit, sure, go ahead, but you’re like, trying to act like I’m some sort of brainwashed sheep and you’re trying to make me see the light. Also “Still not able to come up with an argument“ very passive-aggressive there, I have talked about the Epilogues, my opinions and takes on them, and how I feel about the way they deal with characters at LARGE here, if you haven’t bothered to look for the info, and the several responses to some of your asks, then don’t blame me for it. But sure. Let me talk about every single point you JUST mentioned here like some sort of big Masterpost, and when you don’t agree with my point either way, stop fucking harassing me on Anon, seriously you alone have been making me consider turning anon off entirely, which all things considered may just be the healthiest option I could consider, but here I am!

Still not able to come up with an argument about the Epilogue treating Gamzee (the murderous corpse molester) better than Jade (sat around for 3 years with depression only to have a dog dick and then be abandoned by her friends) huh?

Okay let’s begin with Homestuck proper. Gamzee is a Villain. He’s framed as such, people have constantly shown backlash against his character because he’s got fans that would like to see him redeemed, since a good chunk of his story happens with him brainwashed or mind-altered in some sort, but every time he’s shown to go back to doing awful things and killing people. He abuses Terezi, kills Karkat, and gets killed by Kanaya in return in one Timeline, and in another he gets locked up in a fridge, ends up in Caliborn’s planet, and trying to serve his Lord just gets beaten up, shot, left half-dead, until his final appearance in which he gets cut in half and absorbed into Lord English. Then, the Epilogues happen, and he becomes the butt of a joke about undeserved redemption arcs. His very existence in Candy is a joke that he’s not worth redeeming, actually, but tries to force himself to ‘seem’ like he has, despite ruining Dirk’s funeral, making Jake and Tavros’ lives miserable, supporting a Fascist ruler, taking advantage of a potential minor, and it all ends up with him being choked, killed, and his corpse being used as a Weekend at Bernie’s joke. Like... Is that really what you consider ‘good treatment of a character’? He gets away with a lot of bullshit, but he’s like. Constantly, and consistently, shown to be unpleasant, gross and awful. Like. He’s an awful person, and a comic relief, that does fucked up shit for most of his appearance, and I am not sure how any of this can be read in any sort of positive light. I’ve seen Gamzee fans MAD at how much he gets shat on.

Meanwhile, let’s take Jade. A huge theme of her character, sadly, is loneliness and isolation. I dislike that, like many Jade fans. She’s forced into depressingly helpless situations where she lacks agency or control over her own body, or the situation she’s in, and it’s shown affecting her greatly. I want my girl to be happy as well. So when the Epilogues came, and had her getting Callie-possessed, that was bad, it was like, AGAIN she gets the shaft. I want her to be happy and do what she wants to do and be badass with her powers! But- Oh wait, none of that is what you’re complaining about!!! You keep insisting on the Dog Dick instead of any of the genuinely heartbreaking things that happen to her. Jade has a dog dick. It is mentioned once in the entire Epilogues. It mildly affects her desire to have a child with Dave, but she doesn’t even shown herself that broken up about it, and had been looking about potential alternatives, even having Rose as a surrogate. There’s not a single joke made in the Epilogues about her HAVING a dog dick, nor any sort of isolation that happens as a product of her genitalia. Is it a weird choice to canonize that headcanon? Yeah! It kind of is! But this is also a reality where Obama and Dirk make out. And if someone is uncomfortable about Jade having a dog dick, or doesn’t like her being more openly sexual, then that’s fine!!! If they have a transphobic read on Jade, that’s fine!!! You can dislike it, and Homestuck, and the Epilogues, and the writers! But I, as a trans woman myself, and one who’s horny on main a lot of the time, liked the freedom Jade expressed to just do whatever she wanted with new partners on Earth C, and her seeming acceptance and lack of conflict at just, having junk. She does fuck up with Dave and Karkat, because she pushes them a bit too hard, specially Karkat, trying to use the Quadrant System to insert herself in a Black relationship. In Candy, this culminates with political tensions breaking Karkat away from the triad, which is bad for everyone involved. But in Meat, Jade states that they can tell her to just stop and she will, because she genuinely likes both Karkat and Dave, but their feelings are too deeply bottled and complex to just come to light. Does this put some tension in her relationship with them? Yeah! Does this ISOLATE her from her friends? No! Karkat and Dave DO still wanna hang out with her even if she’s a bit too much. John and Jade apparently chat online a bunch, and Jake seemed to have a good relationship with Jade before the whole Jane thing. She is close enough with Rose and Kanaya that Rose considered the surrogate mother thing. She has friends and ties! The major things that happen to isolate her is, Karkat leaving- Caused by Jane’s rise to power- Dave dying- Caused by Ultimate Self Timeline Shenanigans- And being possessed by Callie- All things outside of her control. I want her to get her agency back, but beyond that, her, as a person on Earth C, was not abandoned by her friends, and your obsession over her dog dick as a root of her issues and the bad stuff that happens to her says more about you than about the Epilogues in my opinion.

Guess you're just an idiot and willingly sucking Hussie's dick for a job at Whatpumpkin down the line. Maybe write some incest porn like IPDG and you'll get hired.

You know what? Yeah I would love to have a role at WhatPumpkin. Because I’ve seen the people working at it do other things, and I’ve seen their passion for Homestuck. The people currently doing Homestuck love Homestuck, and this is not up for fucking debate. As for the incest porn thing? Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, and a thousand fucking times fuck you. Once again, trying to get some stupid moral high ground mentioning incest. “Oh look at me, I am criticizing someone for something they wrote years ago”, is how you actually sound, and that’s only on the surface. V from Homestuck was never confirmed to be ipgd. V got harassed, and ‘doxxed’ by dubious sources and, I believe, Kiwifarms shit was going on at that time, so that was extremely shady and shitty. And the result of them being equated ended with ipgd being told to kill themself because of old fic they’d written, which, GUESS WHAT, was actually a critic to the way Incest was extremely popular in Fanfic back then, written by ipgd themself, a god damn survivor of that same bullshit they wrote about!!! Congratulations! THAT is the kind of bullshit people like you pull. You just cling to some idea of what’s right and wrong, and end up hurting real people that’ve gone through real shit, instead of considering nuance to your actions and thinking that, HMM, PERHAPS I SHOULD NOT HARASS SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET BECAUSE THEY DID SOMETHING I DON’T LIKE OR HAVE AN OPINION I DON’T AGREE WITH! But nah, let’s go send death threats to people we don’t like, riiiiiiight????

My fandom wish for homestuck 2 is the characters are treated with respect but since every single one of the new authors hate women and only want dirk and jake as well as Dave and Karkat to fuck on screen while Vriska gets comphet child raped by gamzee why bother lol.

Like, I don’t even know what to say. Have you seen like... The rest of the work the WP Team is doing with Homestuck stuff? Addressing actual issues? Doing right by the characters? Acknowledging their fucked up stuff while also showing them in positive lights? A good chunk of the Team, too, is queer? Like if they were all cis straight dudes I could see your complaint but they just. Aren’t??? At all???? Even Taz, who’s probably the biggest Dirk-Jake fan around, absolutely wants the best for other characters, yes, Jade and Rose included, you are just too jaded and blinded by your perception of the Epilogues. Vriska and Gamzee... Yeah that’s iffy. I am not going to defend that, whether it was a mistake with the ages or it was just Gamzee being more awful, that was extremely nasty. There’s also like, suicide and abuse and dictatorship in the Epilogues though. All of this shit that happens is awful, but also it’s not PROMOTING it or saying it’s a good thing? It’s... Fucked up. Comphet though, I dooooooooo want to elaborate on that, because, while I do like the reading of Vriska as being more into women, she does show a near-consistent fascination for Nic Cage and, then, ARquius as someone with a similar aesthetic? Like don’t get me wrong, Vris-Rezi is absolutely the way to go and the healthy thing for Vriska, but also I am not 100% sure if you can gloss over every single one of her relationships with guys as Comphet? (Compbi? Since it’s Trolls) Not to say it justifies anything with Gamzee, that was just nasty. But I feel there’s nuance to talk about Vriska’s sexuality.

Hussie doesn't like his fans or care about Homestuck, how you can read the Epilogue and say the opposite it honestly insane and a complete bold faced lie. Any author that cares about their work would read someone demanding a character be given a dog dick and say no. Any author who cares about their work and their fans wouldn't have released such a purposely bad and painful epilogue and then demand payment for a resolution. Just give up. That's the moral of Homestuck. Give up. It's pointless.

Nah man, you’re just jaded and hurt and projecting. Hussie and the WP Team love Homestuck. It would’ve been so fucking easy to just stop doing Homestuck and move onto something, not even release an Epilogue. It’s like when Homestuck ended. People accused Hussie of a rushed ending with Act 7 back in the day, of disliking Homestuck and the Fans, of having just wrapped it up quickly, but like... If you want to wrap Homestuck up quickly... There were a million fan theories and endings out around that would’ve been so much simpler, easier and basic than what we got. The fact we got Act 7 and all it entailed, the shit the characters go through the Epilogues, of course a lot of awful shit happens, but like... Precisely? If you’re tired of doing something, you just wrap things up. You don’t set up new plot points and mess with the characters and push a new narrative outlook on something. This is the work of an experimental team that still do love the content and characters. Again, you return to the fucking Dog Cock like it’s the biggest sin the Epilogues commit. You haven’t even mentioned Jane’s fascism a single time, but you’ve mentioned Jade’s Dog Fucking Cock like fucking twenty times. Who the fuck cares about what sort of junk Jade has, the Epilogues themselves barely even care, it’s mentioned in the passing and it hardly affects a THING at all. You ask me how I can ‘read the Epilogues and see the opposite of what they say’, and I ask you the exact same thing, because despite all the awful things that happen, Rose and Kanaya keep fighting against tyranny in Candy. Kanaya realizes she’s been brainwashed and chases after Rose because she’s NOT giving up on her wife. Roxy explores their gender identity and finds new things about themself. Karkat gets to live his rebel leader dreams in one Timeline, although with a bitter split from Dave, but ends up together in a proper relationship in Meat. John’s arc in Candy about feeling isolated from a world that seems fake, before realizing his nihilism has hurt the people he cares about and wanting to fix it. Jake’s morale of ‘better late than never’, working up the courage to take Tavros away from Jane- And in HS^2, working as a double-agent trying to sabotage Jane from within? Jane’s been shown at her worst in candy, but in Meat she’s shown to still be redeemable, and that’s exactly what the team’s aiming to do, too.

Like... I can see all the bad stuff that happens. And I find the reactions of the characters to these awful situations are interesting, and the political conflict among friends and the pushing forward in such a dark situation, resonates with me, personally, and some of my own experiences? Not to say, the Epilogues are a Game Over scenario? They are a low point. HS^2 sets up to be the high point. Like... When Game Over happened, a lot of people were like “Welp, Hussie just killed everyone, lol, guess he just got tired of Homestuck”, despite the Retcon Powers being there as the obvious solution. Epilogues, lots of shit happen, and similarly there’s still like a hundred ways to build up from there to a satisfactory resolution? Storytelling can have low points you know. It hurts when it’s characters you care about, duh, specially when it plays into the weaknesses they already acknowledged but fell into again despite themselves. I see why so many people would dislike them and take a more negative vibe from them than they actually convey. But I am still baffled as to why people like you feel entitled to shit on the WP Team and send harassment and insults to people who do enjoy them. You’re not helping anything. You’re not doing anything good. You’re just being a dick.

As for the “demand a payment for a resolution”, they didn’t demand anything? I will be the first one to say that I don’t like the Extra Bonus for 5 bucks, and think it would be better if the Bonus got released like, a month or two after it has for Patrons, an ‘early access’ scenario like I do with my Patreon. And I hope they change this. But aside from that??? The Patreon is optional to support the creators because, it’s not just Hussie, it’s a big team, and they’re also using the Patreon to help them with other projects like Pesterquest and Hiveswap, because we live in a capitalistic hell world and need money to be able to pursue passion projects. The main updates every month- And twice a month starting February- Are completely free for people to read, still, the paywalled content still circulates around the community despite being paywalled, and other paid projects like, Pesterchum, for their scope and the amount of fun they’ve given me, they’re super cheap and worth it.

You ask me how I can ‘see the opposite the Epilogues say’, you tell me that I am an ‘idiot sucking Hussie’s dick for a job at WP’, you act like I am scum and brainwashed and there’s literally no reason why I should ever like something you don’t.

You know what I am though? I am happy and excited about the things I’ve been given! I am happy with the representation I’ve seen the Team push lately. I’m happy with the way the characters have been treated in Pesterquest and have high hopes for HS^2. And I am interested in the events of the Epilogues, while acknowledging that of course a lot of fucked up shit happened in them.

Back when the Epilogues happening and I was reading them, I was reading Candy at like 4 AM and was LOVING the fucked up-ness of the Timeline and wondering what may happen in Meat. I got a PM from a friend asking me to make a channel in a server I’m in, to quarantine Epilogues Discourse, and was genuinely confused as to why there was Discourse going on. I went through the rest of Candy and Meat with some dread waiting for some ball to drop and something to turn really controversial, and I finished them still enjoying them? Obviously there was a lot of awful shit. Obviously there was a lot of things people wouldn’t like. Obviously they were tales that likely alienated a chunk of the Fandom that was looking for a happy ending. But honestly, the unbridled fury and subsequent harassment of people over them is just plain embarrassing. It was confusing then, and it’s even more confusing now, well over half a year since their release, and still sending random Tumblr Blogs this kind of bullshit.

So there you go! All of your questions and your bullshit, answered! Now let’s get this out of the way: You’re not going to like my answer, you’re not going to agree with a majority of what I just said, you’re not going to CARE about any of what I just said. Spare me the fucking asks and anon hate. Just move on and do something productive with your time.

[schmirius]

obviously I lied, here are all my Doctor Who spoilers

I’m enjoying watching this show without being emotionally involved enough to get my feelings hurt or be Truly Mad about what happens; this is a good level of investment I’m at where I mostly roll with the punches because it’s not profound enough for me to be properly invested.

Which of course also means it’s not profound enough to make me feel deeply moved, either; it’s just kind of some random tropey sci-fi show I watch that stars more than one lady every week. Which -- score.

why on earth would blowing up the Cyber Lords kill them? THEY CAN REGENERATE ok ok that’s dumb questions I was not supposed to question that bit

obviously the Master is going to show up with no explanation again after this, which is Great, but I’m disappointed the Doctor/Master showdown didn’t end in her either blowing them both up OR her blowing up the Cyber Lords and last minute escaping / dragging him along with her to escape. Like. Particularly if we’re going to open the next episode IN PRISON, it would be the easiest thing in the world to jail them both and have another episode with Dhawan where she leaves him to rot in prison a la Delgado at the very end

why did we end in prison, lol, I guess so the companions can come and rescue her in their cool new Tardis.

ummmm but for real, what else happened.

I’m pro-ideational Master.  Not necessarily planning for it, you know, just aware that all the stupid bullshit he does could and will likely end in him blowing himself up one of these days. It’s a shame we didn’t explicitly mention that about the Doctor too in this episode, because you know, they’re the same, but I’ll live with it

it’s really Koschei the Deathless ascended fanon that the line he went with was “become me. become Death.” This was about par for the course for the boring Gallifrey choices we made though, like -- oh man, mention how you were friends at the Academy explicitly AGAIN, man, I don’t think I heard that incredibly bland detail about how you skipped class together the first three times

In general I’m against going to and actually showing Gallifrey for any reason other than to detail how much what the Doctor does is a reaction against what the authority figures around her taught her to do when she was growing up.  So in a lot of ways this Gallifrey story succeeds for me, because sure, yeah, they used and lied to her, sounds about right; you’d want to live your life with more moral courage than those kinds of people, and what a wonderful story it is to be like “I’ve always acted with moral courage and I have nothing to be ashamed of based on who raised me and how.”

On the other hand, the details of her being at the center of the society, with exceptional foundational biology, being uniquely a shapechanger (thus giving her tricksterhood some sort of deterministic origins?) -- this made me roll my eyes quite a lot.  In general I dislike when canons do this to and for their protagonists, make them as Unique or Mythical as fans like to consider them, fannishly, instead of merely random individuals from a random SFF setting behaving as best as they can under weird circumstances. It’s understandable for it to happen after years of canon, and after characters reach certain levels of Doylist popularity!

But man I am not one of those fans who wants canon to write Watsonian explananations for why the narrative would, Doylistly, be centered on this extraordinary individual. You’re robbing ME of the pleasure of figuring out what they’re doing in the context of their universe that makes them interesting to focus on.  Let it be enough that she yells at fascists and oligarchs and colonizers, and the shortcuts she uses to win these battles are her magic wand and magic box and cheekiness.  Let us continue to handwave her moderate immortality in-universe, giving us another chance out-of-universe to celebrate this virtue of changibility -- “well, we’re going to renew this show again, and how cool we can reset the tone by resetting the actor.”

having said that, since we chose this story and this thing being a property of the Doctor the biological entity: lol at the Master completely losing it at being literally made from the Doctor.  lol at the Master needing to prove himself her equal by also biologically Frankensteining together a race. lol, once again, at the race he chose to put together:

Dhawan is clearly having the time of his life chewing all this scenery and I wouldn’t deny him the pleasure for anything; much as I can never deny how much fun Ainley clearly has every time he oozes up behind another Doctor in his velour.  Dhawan’s playing the Master as somehow more on edge but less emotionally intense than Simm did? I guess part of it is because, like cowards, they did not write him to match Thirteen, as Simm was written to match Ten; the Ainley comparison is apt, because Dhawan is just kind of being generically evil (read: bonkers) in the background, as Ainley was for so many stories in the 80s. Except they built Dhawan on Simm’s manic model, not on Delgado’s devilish one.  

So really my complaint is that Thirteen should be more fleshed out as a character, I guess.  But then as I said, probably it is just fine for me to not be very emotionally invested in the characters of this era, the stories of this season have been pretty solid and the tropes have been fun and THERE HAVE BEEN EVEN FOUR LADIES IN A WEEK. 

the Master literally narrated the evil backstory against a white backdrop for like. thirty minutes. he held the Doctor hostage in the Matrix for half an hour and there was no overly symbolic dreamscape shit, :(.  Needs moar cheetahs and volcanoes.

on the other hand, as I say. There’s like. FOUR LADIES, and a ton of them aren’t white. ty Gallifrey continuity fairy!

[workersolidarity]

So...

kinda bothered by all the Red Baiting I see online by the so-called "Left" when it comes to the criticisms of Trump and the GOP

I though this garbage would die out when it became clear after the Mueller Investigations that Trump, nor anyone else in the GOP were Manchurian Candidates secretly working for Russian Government, but just rather your typical, run-of-the-mill Corrupt rich guy.

Clearly I was way off and the Red Baiting bullshit isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Looking at the first ten responses to a recent Tweet by Trump, I found 6 of them were just Red Baiting Right-Wing Reactionary Propaganda, and the other four were just snark and non-Red Baiting memes.

None of the responses involved the slightest but of critical analysis, not even mixed within the snark and memes.

I immediately found something upon my own critical analysis of the Tweet worth pointing out, as Trump was equating fear with respect and Unity, which he assumes will help him to succeed.

I was quick to point out that fear=respect=unity=success was the same formula previous Fascists like Hitler and Moussillini both used. Which of course didn't end well for them since Hitler committed suicide when his defeat was imminent, and Moussillini was publicly hanged and dismembered.

My point is to show how simple it is to criticize Trump and the GOP in legitimate, non-reactionary ways, and it's just as simple to come up with something more clever and humorous.

But instead, 60% of the people I saw on Twitter, most of whom are Petite Bourgeois Liberals in the media world, but many aren't in that world, but are clearly being influenced by Reactionary Herd Mentality, just copying the Right-Wing commentary and social media snark they're accustomed to hearing on MSNBC and CNN.

This isn't a mistake, it's not accidental that this is the thoughtless direction the Trump/GOP Critic crowd has taken when responding on TV and Social Media.

The fact is that Democrats, having lost the 2016 election by letting Trump get to their Left on Economic issues while simultaneously stoking outrage and Nationalism, have no legitimate path to taking down Trump from a Progressive position. Not that they want to either. They don't seem to want to risk helping a "Socialist" get elected in 2020.

Instead the media crowd can only criticise Trump from the Right. Even when they make a serious attempt at criticizing Trump/GOP policies, they fall flat, sounding unconvincing and forced. All they're left with is snarky Red Baiting memes, innuendo about Manchurian Candidates, sounding just as deranged and conspiracy minded as Republicans.

Liberal media figures are only capable of attacking Trump's Immigration Policies from the Left. But because of affects of decades of Neoliberal Free Market Fundamentalism, and successful Fascist Propaganda blaming the poverty inducing results of these policies on Hispanic and Islamic Immigrant Communities, the masses have become highly skeptical of Immigration Policies mostly tailored specifically to keep deflationary pressures on wages domestically. You can't really blame people for seeing through this facade and then falling for the Nationalist Propaganda of the GOP.

So once you realize this, it becomes clear that the Liberal critics are left with two choices. Either they move Left into Social Democratic territory and attempt a more honest if unconvincing line of attack against the Right, or they can dive headlong down a rabbit-hole of continued conspiracies and Reactionary attacks from Trump's Right, continuing to defend the Free Market dogmatism and Corporate Free Trade Policies of the last half-century.

Of course we all know the Neoliberal Paradigm is highly unpopular with most people and become more unpopular by the day, and so they've instead gone whole-hog on the Red Baiting and Conspiracy theories.

Now we seem to have large sections of the White Working Class convinced by the Nationalist Propaganda out of sensation of frustration and a realization of false choice Bourgeois Democracy offers them.

Without any kind of United Socialist Movement in the US, or even a coherent Center-Left Social Democratic outlet for the people's frustrations, this has left them susceptible to calls of Nationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia coming from the GOP Right, as well as the Red Baiting and Conspiracy theories coming from Democrats and the Liberal media ecosystem. Of course this led us to the Trump Era, and inevitably leaves us open to a far more competent, dangerous Fascism in the future.

The only option we have is work harder and faster than ever before to educate Workers and Organize ourselves into a coherent Revolutionary Movement based on the Principles of Marxism-Leninism.

The descent into madness isn't going to get better on its own. The two-Party dichotomy of Bourgeois Liberals and Bourgeois Fascists leave us with a Political System that will see the Fascist gain control 9 times out of 10.

Under the twin threats of Fascism and Climate Disaster, we have no choice but to stop fighting amongst ourselves for scraps of media attention and instead build up a serious, Militant, Vanguard Party capable of defending the Working Class, raising the consciousness of the Proletariat, and challenging Bourgeois Rule.

Failure isn't an option anymore. There are countless Marxist Leninist Organizations out there doing fantastic work. Some are small and unknown, others have a reputation with the Labor Movement, and still others have done great work on analyzing the History of Revisionism and have been working on strategies for years on how to combat it.

From the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Party For Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the American Labor Party (ALP), all the way down to working groups within the Marxist Center, as well as local Organizations like the one I joined the New Orleans Worker's Group.

Of course there are even more I haven't mentioned but that's my point. All these groups and more are working Independently and separate without any common Goals, Strategies, Tactics or even basic coalitions or basic communication channels.

That's Not a Winning Strategy!

This is too important a time in History, just as importantly it's too great an opportunity to miss just because of individual egos and ideas of turf.

We must begin conversations across Organizations to begin the work and process of consolidating our various organizations into a Vanguard Party of the Proletariat. Fuck the name or where it's headquarters are. It's more important that we do the work of fighting for the Workers and Uniting the Proletariat under a common Marxist-Leninist Movement! We have the greatest opportunity to build a Socialist Movement capable of challenging Capitalist right here in the Imperialist core! People are rediscovering Socialism and we're allowing the Revisionists, Anarchists and Social Democrats of the DSA define Socialism in the 21st Century!

We cannot allow these Right Opportunists to define our Movement for us just so they can hand it over to the Democratic Party betraying the Working Class again as they always inevitably do!

This is our moment, and we have little choice but to seize on it by the very nature of the external forces acting on Imperialist Society.

This is the first time in nearly a Century when the Socialist Movement is growing instead of shrinking. To fail the Workers now would be an unforgivable mistake. All Marxist Leninists have more in common worth fighting for than differences that can be worked out better through inter-Party Dialectics.

The Bolsheviks didn't begin by rejecting everyone they disagreed with. Instead they built up a Socialist Movement within the RSDP and alongside the Socialist Revolutionaries and even the Liberal Cadets until the Left had become a force in Russian Politics. They didn't begin by splitting with the Mensheviks and fighting the SRs and Cadets.

Once they had sufficient strength, then they broke with the Mensheviks. Then they were capable of proving themselves the legitimate Party of the Proletariat through their constant work Organizing, fighting Tsarism and Capitalism, and by showing through their actions why they were the true representatives of the Russian masses and not the Opportunists, the Liberals and the Anarchists.

And it wasn't until after they became the Venguard Party leading the October Revolution to victory that they could afford truly battling the Reactionary Bourgeois Capitalist pretenders during the Civil War.

When the dust had finally settled, they finally had the strength to consolidate their power, and it wasn't until all this was completed that the Bolsheviks now had the strength to purge the Opportunists and Revisionists within their own ranks.

We cannot expect to start a Socialist Movement by rejecting people before we've even begun. We have to educate first, argue internally second, and only when that process has failed does it make sense to reject a member from a Vanguard Party.

Yes, we also cannot afford to allow Social Democrats to corrupt the meaning of Socialism and confuse the Workers. That's obviously unacceptable and cannot be allowed in the Party. But a bit of Pragmatism and restraint within an organization of dedicated Marxist-Leninists would be wise.

As long as a Comrade or Cadre doesn't violate the rules and principles of Democratic Centralism post-debate, as long they don't actively contribute to disunity, then some level of dissent isn't just acceptable, it's preferable. We have to be a Movement capable of self-reflection, self-criticism, and accepting outside criticism and reflecting on that. Lenin and Stalin understood these points of pragmatic reflection very well. They were constantly critical of one another and the Party and yet always fought to preserve unity within. Nothing says these two principles are mutually exclusive and in fact it's brought up repeatedly in the writings of all the most historic figures within the Movement.

So I'm trying to make an appeal to all the disparate Parties and Organizations currently working Independently towards the same goal without a common line, a common strategy or even basic communication.

We all know it makes no sense and yet we've done nothing to bridge the gaps in decades.

Well, within our current time and place, with a revival of Socialist interest, it's incumbent upon Revolutionaries to immediately begin the hard work of unifying Marxist Leninists Organizations into a Vanguard of the Proletariat.

We have no choice! Our actions as Communists today, may very well shape the History of tommorow, and the survival of people across the world, at a time when the Imperialists have made it undeniably clear their willing to destroy the entire planet to continue their rule, may come down to our ability to Organize ourselves.

Just something to keep in mind as my Comrades consider their contributions to the Movement.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

Which Pathfinder deity should you be a paladin of?

Abadar:

Knows how to calculate compound interest

Teacher’s pet

An Alexander Hamilton fan before the musical got popular

Finds Javert more sympathetically tragic than Victor Hugo probably intended

Always has exact change

The “sounds fun, but how are you going to pay for this?” killjoy

Andoletta:

Aspiring Discworld witch

Good with kids

Full of interesting corvid facts

Spends a disproportionate amount of time and energy correcting misinformation in viral tumblr posts

Big fan of abrasive but highly moral and competent older women and wishes they could be the protagonist for once

Wears lots of black but not a goth

Arshea:

Queer as hell

Sex-positive

Glam rock fan

Above-average tolerance for Special Snowflakeism

Doesn’t believe in apologizing for liking things

Erastil:

Wears a lot of flannel

Doesn’t care whether same-sex marriage and adoption are assimilationist

The Grandpa Friend, regardless of age or gender

Gets twitchy when they can’t have a garden

Thinks all these kids getting themselves worked up discoursing would be happier and more useful to everyone if they’d just go outside and do some real work in the fresh air for once.

Iomedae:

Sword Lesbian

Obsessed with Joan of Arc as a teenager

Wants more butch representation in canon f/f

Strong opinions about Arthurian adaptations

Tears up listening to “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha

Lady and Knight kink that can be seen from space, but may be in denial about the kink aspect

Irori:

Fitness blogger

Big believer in meditation

Would rather approach situations from a “what can we learn from this?” perspective than outright approval or condemnation

Self-disciplined but chill about it

Great abs

Kurgess:

Softbro

Gives great hugs

Never stopped loving “become the best (x) ever!” tropey shonen series

Eats lots of protein

Hopes warriormale responds to one of their posts someday

Ragathiel:

In principle, knows that the lack of overt fascist activity in their immediate vicinity is a very good thing, but part of them is still disappointed that they have not yet had the chance to punch a Nazi.

Should probably stay away from callout culture, since it brings out all their worst qualities

Overidentifies with characters who are bundles of emotional conflict and rage but manage to be heroes and help people anyway.

Daddy issues

Takes promises very seriously

Sarenrae: 

Forgives but doesn’t forget

Loves redemption arcs

More scarves than Stevie Nicks

Supports hijabi cosplayers

Owns too many candles

Favorite season is summer

Doesn’t drink alcohol, but has an entire cupboard dedicated to different kinds of tea

Shelyn:

So nice cynical onlookers assume it’s an act, but is actually completely sincere

Doesn’t enjoy being mad at people, and consequently feels out of place in many activist and social justice communities

Multishipper

High femme

Encourages novice artists

Makes their own skincare products

Torag:

Strategy wargames enthusiast

Beer snob

Goes to the hardware store for fun

Never half-asses anything

Gets very cranky about impractical and inaccurate armor designs in historical and fantasy media

Holds grudges

Vildeis:

Forgives no-one, including themself

Treading the line between scruples and scrupulosity ever damn day

May have been an anti at some point before turning their attention to larger issues

Refuses to chill as a matter of moral principle

Poorly closeted masochist

Zohls:

Regardless of neurotype, identifies heavily with autistic-coded characters

Strong opinions about Sherlock Holmes adaptations

Plays a lot of text adventures

At least one intensely geeky special interest/hyperfixation that’s hard to share with people who aren’t already into it

Kvetches about bad forensic science on crime shows; watches them anyway

[professional-anti]

Chapter Nine: The Circle and the Brotherhood

Okay, we start out a little stressful bc Jace says they’re gonna take the subway back to the Institute and Simon jokes around like “you guys take the subway but you’re demon hunters haha” and this happens:

Jace was scary-calm. His face was expressionless, but something burned at the backs of his eyes.

Um, are we not supposed to be worried about this? Jace should be working on this problem!! Why is he so mad at Simon? Oh, that’s right, he thinks that Simon is competition for Clary. And that’s enough for him to get this angry at Simon. I’m sure everyone can tell why this is unhealthy.

Simon proves to be an actual idiot when they get to the Institute. The Institute is housed in an old church, and for some reason Simon can’t comprehend that old buildings can be used for something else.

“It’s the Institute,” Clary said . . . “I thought it ws a church.” “It’s inside a church.” “Because that’s not confusing.”

This is New York City!! The home of remodeling!!! My aunt’s apartment used to be a house! My brother’s camp used to be an apartment! Things can be other things!! Oh my god!!!

They meet Isabelle in the kitchen, where she’s stress cooking. Oh, I remember this! She sucks at cooking but does it when she’s stressed. It’s actually really cute. I stress cook too! Once I made soup from scratch at 3 AM. (My psychiatrist said, verbatin, “That’s worrisome.”)

But then of course we get the typical annoying thing, where Simon stares at Isabelle “rapt and openmouthed”. I think I speak for most people when I say that someone staring at you with their mouth open is creepy. And weird. When was the last time you looked at someone like that? Hopefully never! Blergh, it’s like the way creepy men stare at you on the street. And then Clary gets jealous of Isabelle. So, that’s fun. Love that girl-on-girl hate. I’ve never felt the urge in my life to hurt a girl bc she was prettier than I am. I can’t imagine feeling that way. Sometimes I’ll say jokingly “she’s so pretty, I’m mad”, but I’ve been trying to cut back on that bc I don’t mean it, it’s something that’s been programmed into me to say. But Clary literally wants to throw the soup over Isabelle’s head. Okay.

There’s a tiny bit of worldbuilding that’s also kind of cute, which is that Isabelle “got the recipe from a water sprite at the Chelsea Market.” Well, most people would just say “Chelsea Market” without that article in front of it, but I still like it. Idk, maybe I’m just a sucker for magical New York. Vampires on the Upper East Side? Give me. Werewolves taking advantage of Central Park? Hell yes! Magicians in Greenwich Village? Duh, sign me up. So, little mentions like this make me happy. The worldbuilding is still shit, but this is some nice stuff.

Jace snarks at Clary for eating all the sandwiches at Dorothea’s, and it’s maddening. Those sandwhiches were the first thing she ate for a whole day! Let women eat their fill without judging them!! Arggghhhh!!!!

For some reason, Jace isn’t sure if they should tell Hodge that the men with Luke were the ones that killed his father. I guess bc he thinks that Hodge won’t let them go out and investigate? Idk. Like, we all know that Hodge is Evil Giles, but Jace doesn’t know that. He tells Isabelle that they’re going to Hodge, but they might not tell him about the men being his father’s killers, and this exchange happens:

[Isabelle] shrugged. “All right. Are you going to come back? Do you want any soup?” “No,” said Jace. “Do you think Hodge will want any soup?” “No one wants any soup.” “I want some soup,” Simon said. “No, you don’t,” said Jace. “You just want to sleep with Isabelle.” Simon was appalled. “That is not true.” “How flattering,” Isabelle murmured into the soup, but she was smirking. “Oh, yes it is,” said Jace. “Go ahead and ask her—then she can turn you down and the rest of us can get on with our lives while you fester in miserable humiliation.” He snapped his fingers. “Hurry up, mundie boy, we’ve got work to do.”

So much. So much. I’m short-circuiting. First of all, it’s so incredibly disrespectful to Isabelle for Jace to talk this way. If I were her, I’d be so uncomfortable. And I know that Jace knows her and her comfort limits, but it’s still disrespectful. Secondly, Jace is so mean. And Clary does call him out for it, but who even knows what she sees in him. He’s so fucking mean. And mean characters are fine. They’re great. But I’m just confused why everybody is falling the fuck in love with Jace. It makes zero sense to me. Jace is set up as this paradigm of a romantic partner and it’s like,,, what??? This Jace???

Clary calls Jace an asshat. An asshat. In our year of the Lord (checks copyright date) 2007. Actually, makes sense. Fandom was Like That. Everyone being vaguely British. I wasn’t technically on the fandom scene for anything back then, but in my fanfiction phase, I did some serious digging into the past. And all this fandom dialect makes sense when you remember that CoB is repurposed HP fanfiction.

Jace claims that he was trying to save Simon from heartbreak bc “Isabelle will cut out his heart and walk all over ti in high-heeled boots. That’s what she does to boys like that.”

Clary APOLOGIZES to Jace for snapping at him. Like, the Jace who was so brutally mean to Simon just now? The Jace who is constantly rude to her? The Jace who talks down to her and is so freaking patronizing? Is she apologizing to that Jace? Mmmmmkay.

Ugh, apparently Maryse, Isabelle’s mom, is usually the cook. So it’s the women who like cooking in this book. Got it. Usually 7 people live here, right? Isabelle, Alec, their brother, their parents, Hodge, and Jace. Two women. Five men. And the only people who cook? The women. Cool, cool, cool. Okay. Got it. Thanks.

Wait, this is weird. Apparently Maryse never taught Isabelle how to cook because, according to Jace:

“Isabelle never wanted to learn. She’s always been first and foremost interested in being a fighter. She comes from a long line of women warriors,” he said, and there was a tinge of pride in his voice. “She’s one of the best Shadowhunters I’ve ever known.”

So, huh. A lot to unpack. Isabelle likes to cook, right? So why wouldn’t she want to learn? And why are cooking and fighting mutually exclusive? There’s so much weird stuff going on here. Clare writes the women as the only ones who cook. I don’t like that because she’s basically saying, “Cooking is something that women do, not men.” And now, because it’s a traditionally feminine thing (which it doesn’t have to be anymore now that most men aren’t out hunting all day), Isabelle doesn’t want to do it. And the narrative accepts that as normal, that women should want to divorce themselves from traditionally feminine things, which in my opinion is still sexism. Except that Isabelle likes to cook. So why wouldn’t she let her mom teach her? Does any of this make sense, you guys?

I AM CONFUSION

For some reason, Clary desperately wants to know if Alec is a better Shadowhunter than Isabelle. Not sure why. Jace replies that Alec has never killed a demon. Interesting. Not sure how that’s possible, but okay. They meet Hodge in the greenhouse, and the prose is truly awful:

Clary exhaled. “It smells like . . .” Springtime, she thought, before the heat comes and crushes the leaves into pulp and withers the petals off the flowers.

Slow down there, Emily Dickinson. Anyhow, Jace tells Hodge about their adventures, except for the fact that the warlocks were the ones who killed his dad. Still not sure why, still don’t really care.

“And [the warlock’s] names were . . .” “Pangborn,” said Jace. “And Blackwell.” Hodge had gone very pale. Against his gray skin the scar along his cheek stood out like a twist of red wire. “It is as I feared,” he said, half to himself. “The Circle is rising again.”

There are so many other quotes like that from HP, but I’m not about to reread all 7 books to find them.

Neither Jace nor Clary knows what the circle is, and Hodge ominously leads them to the library. There’s some annoying, edgy description about the libary. Then Hodge pulls out the Death Eaters’, I mean the Circle’s, manifesto. He reads some creepy stuff from it about swearing his life to the Circle “in order to preserve the purity of the bloodlines of [Elba]”. So, you know, creepy. He explains that he used to be part of a group of Shadowhunters that followed Valentine. They wanted to kill all muggles, ahem, Downworlders when the Downworlders arrived in Elba to sign the Accords. For some worldbuilding reason, they have to be signed every fifteen years.

I’m going to cry. I just can’t. A group of magical supremacists who follow a leader whose name starts with the letter V. Please, someone set me free from this hell. Jace recognizes this story; apparently, this was the Uprising. Somehow the Clave managed to wipe out every mention of the Circle, though. Not sure how. Sounds a little bit like a scary place to live, if the government can just wipe out information like that. A healthy government would say, “This was something terrible that our country did. Nobody forget. We must do better.” But apparently Elba is some sort of fascist hothouse. Also, I’m confused what the point of erasing the Circle was if everyone still remembers the Uprising. Whatever.

Hodge finally admits that he used to be part of the Death Eaters, and even helped write the manifesto. Double bombshell, Clary’s mom used to be in it to.

“My mother would never have belonged to something like that. Some kind of—some kind of hate group.” “It wasn’t—,” Jace began, but Hodge cut him off.”

Okay, tell me what it wasn’t, Jace? It wasn’t a hate group? They wanted to kill all the Downworlders bc they were just so full of love? No, tell me. I’m interested.

Anyway, Hodge triple-bombshells Clary by telling her that Jocie wouldn’t have much choice in the matter bc she was Valentine’s wife. Let’s just ignore the fact that Jocie still is on the hook for being part of a suprmacist organization and end part one. That’s right, guys! Part one is finished, finito, finis. See you on the flip side.

[veryangryhedgehog]

“Good, Old-Fashioned Snooping,” an Ede Valley story by Hedgehog.

Mike’s first few weeks at St. Adelaide’s had been a little hectic, to say the least. First, there was the fact that he had to abruptly adjust to an entirely different lifestyle. Then there were the classes, which were much more difficult than their public school equivalents; he’d just coasted through those with solid Bs. But most taxing of all were the numerous mysteries of the school.

At first, he’d just done some casual research, looked some stuff up on the internet, asked teachers for info, that kinda thing. But as he learned more, more and more questions began to appear in the inner folds of his brain. So then he’d moved to “real research”. He’d actually convinced Jilli to go to the library with him, survived an encounter with Abigail “four-eyes” Hodge, and gathered several old, dusty tomes to peruse.

He’d learned a lot of interesting things from those books. St. Adelaide’s had been a mental ward back in the 1800s, before finally being shut down for good in the ‘40s, he’d known that much already. The official story was that it had been abandoned for years afterward, but Mike had found several sources—only one of which had been a shitty site that hadn’t been updated since 2002—that pointed to the buildings being used as a government research facility of some kind in the ‘50s, presumably to combat the Soviets. He read some crazy ramblings by a conspiracy theorist about creating “Paragons of the Future,” but that seemed way too farfetched, whatever it even meant.

Regardless, the land was finally reopened as a school for Gifted Youth in the ‘70s, and had remained so to this day. Unfortunately, every source he’d found had failed to mention the founder of the school beyond a few off-handed references, which wouldn’t have seemed odd except that every article, website, and book avoided the subject like clockwork. Searching for the Director directly did nothing either, and this only made his thirst for knowledge worse.

And then, one afternoon, Doug stumbled into the room without warning practically carrying Jilli. Something was clearly wrong. She looked just like Doug did when he returned from his sessions. But of course Doug didn’t tell him anything, just shut them both in his room and locked the door. Though Mike couldn’t hear any specifics, he couldn’t miss the sound of sobs that reached his ear through the thin wall.

Mike had known for a while that he had no shot at Jilli. That had been made abundantly clear the morning he opened his door to use the sink only to see Jilli brushing her hair with only a striped bra to cover her thin waist. And she certainly hadn’t spent the night in his room. He was pretty sure he would have noticed. But still, he cared about her, as a friend, as a person. And so he worried.

That worry quickly turned into obsession. There was something going on at this school, and now it had been made personal. It wasn’t just about solving a mystery now, it was about saving his friend. Correction: friends. Doug was neck-deep in it too, whatever it was, and Mike was the only one who could save them. He was the only one that they didn’t expect.

Doug later confirmed that Jilli had indeed been subjected to a session, but he refused to say more. “It doesn’t matter, Mike.”

“But it does!” he argued. “We can help her!”

“I said, it doesn’t matter!” Doug nearly shook with anger, or was it fear? “I hate it just as much as you, but there’s nothing we can do, okay? Nothing unless you want to end up dead, or worse.”

But Mike found himself increasingly undisturbed by that idea. He hardly slept, staring at his computer screen until the wee hours of the morning as he ventured into increasingly sketchy parts of the internet to find anything at all that could help him. It was difficult work. Many sites were just mad ramblings by unstable individuals, or conspiracies about Atlantis and the lizardmen who had taken over the government. But gradually, a bigger picture began to emerge.

The more he looked, the more plausible it seemed that St. Adelaide’s had in fact, actually been a government facility all those years ago, at the height of the Cold War. Info on what really went on in there was thin, most of the recovered documents had been highly redacted. The facility had been dedicated to something called “Project Paragon”. There had been many experiments, but it seemed as if only one had been successful: a singular flower, a Buttercup, and had received the codename “Paragon Alpha”. Why they were experimenting on flowers of all things, Mike had no idea.

He thought that maybe he’d understand more if he had any knowledge about the Cold War. So he wandered out of Dunsany and down to the library, which he was surprised to find was locked. The problem was that Mike was so distracted by his thoughts that he didn’t actually realize this fact until about two minutes of pulling at it.

Just when he was about to turn around and go back to the dorm, the handle turned and the door creaked open. Abigail peeked her head out, and blinked at him, glasses eschew.

“Mike?” she asked. “What are you doing here? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

Mike blinked. He hadn’t even realized it was dark out. “Is it?”

Abigail nodded hesitantly. “Are you alright? You... don’t look so good.”

Running a hand through his tangled hair, Mike couldn’t answer. He had no idea how alright he was on a scale of alrightness. The world seemed like a big confusing box with a bunch of colored squares. What in the world were they called? “I... I’m fine,” he answered instead. “I need-n-need a book.”

“A book?” she raised an eyebrow. “At this time of night?”

Rubix cube! That’s what it was. Wait, no, Mike, focus. “Wait,” he realized a second later. “What are you doing here at this ti—“ but he was cut off as she opened the door.

Victor was standing in front of Abigail’s desk, cheeks flushed, hair disheveled, tie undone. “Oh,” he said. “Hello, Mike.”

Though he opened his mouth to question this whole situation, Mike decided that he didn’t really want to know the answer. “Hi.”

“Now, you’ll forgive me for getting you on your way as quickly as possible,” she sighed, before turning from Mike to Victor and then winking. “Duty calls. What sort of book are you looking for?”

Mike had to force himself to not just keep looking back and forth between the two like a bobblehead. Man, was he the only one who wasn’t getting any? No, focus, whoa he was tired. “Uh... the Cold War,” he finally got out. “Scientific advances during the Cold War.”

Thinking for a moment, Abigail nodded. A strange look crossed her face for a moment, but was gone before Mike even knew if it had actually been there at all. “Yes, that’ll be in the history section, over here.” She began leading him by the arm to the back side of one of the looming shelves. “That’s a very specific topic, you know.”

“It’s for class,” he said, a little too quickly. “It’s due tomorrow.”

“Hence the all-nighter,” Abigail nodded. “Well, let me know when you find what you’re looking—”

Again, she was interrupted by a pounding at the door. “Goodness gracious, it’s like no one ever sleeps around here. Please forgive me.”

She meandered off through the shelves, and Mike began to skim the titles of the books, trying to find something that might help him, something that wasn’t written by a conspiracy theorist nutcase. No, he didn’t want communist or capitalist propaganda either. A vein in his temple was beginning to pulse from lack of sleep, but sleep would just get in his way.

“Jilli?” Abigail’s voice reached him. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you about something.”

Mike froze. What was Jilli doing here? She should be asleep. He peeked around the corner of the bookshelf, and there she was in the doorway, her multi-colored hair was unmistakable. Oddly enough, she looked fine, composed even, even though she had just undergone a session less than forty-eight hours ago. He thought he saw her head turning towards him, and Mike skittered back behind the bookcase. If she saw him like this she’d ask a lot of questions.

“I need your help,” she continued. “Yours and Vic—oh that’s convenient.”

“Hello,” said Victor sheepishly.

Jilli looked back and forth across the cluttered room. “We’re alone, right?”

His heart clenched, Mike didn’t breathe.

“Well—” Victor began before Abigail quickly cut him off.

“Yep. It is 2 AM, after all.”

Mike relaxed, though now he was confused. Why would Abigail lie about that? She had no motive for doing so, unless she... wanted him to hear this?

"Alright,” Jilli began, breathing deeply. “This is going to sound crazy, but bear with me.”

The silence in the room was almost palpable.

“I’m going to overthrow the Director.”

No one spoke for a moment, and Mike had to stop himself from interjecting. Finally, Victor did it for him. “What?” he asked. “What do you mean ‘Overthrow the Director?’ She’s not a dictator, she’s a principle!”

“You of all people know that this isn’t a simple school,” Jilli scoffed. “Why do you keep that project of yours under a sheet? Because she and her lackeys are always watching you. We’re constantly overworked with classes and made to maintain a strict regimen so we can’t stop to think, and we all know someone who’d gotten fucked up by one of her psychotic sessions. We all live in fear that we might be next. This is the very definition of a fascist dictatorship.”

“But... but this is a school,” Victor replied weakly. “We chose to be here.”

Again, the room was quiet, and the others looked at each other warily. “I didn’t choose to be here.” Jilli broke the silence. “My agent forced me on a plane here and I haven’t heard a word since. Did you?”

“My parents found my projects and almost sent me to a mental ward before St. Adelaide’s contacted them,” Victor admitted.

“It’s the same for me,” Abigail whispered.

Jilli nodded. “So none of us are here of our own freewill, but we just assumed everyone else was.” She turned to Victor. “Still convinced this is just a school?”

“I...” he began, before hanging his head. “No.”

“We’ve been abandoned, but we don’t need to continue living in this hell.” Jilli gritted her teeth. “Se we’ve gotta fight back. But I can’t do it alone. I need your help, both of you. Are you with me?”

“This is insane.” Victor shook his head. “But alright.”

“I’m with you too,” Abigail smiled. “Oh, this will be fun. I’ve never been part of a revolution before.”

Behind the bookshelf, Mike was near panicking. What had the Director done to Jilli? This wasn’t like her at all! This plan was absolutely ludicrous! It could never work. But most of all: what would convince her to even try?”

But one question sat the heaviest in his mind: what was he going to do about it?

~~ o ~~

In the cold night air, just beyond the boundary of St. Adelaide’s, someone else was watching. Or rather, two someones, on the back of a flying motorbike.

“You know,” Lilith said, frowning as she watched Buttercup’s intense stare, “this is the fourth night we’ve done this. What exactly are you looking for?”

“I’m not looking,” Buttercup replied simply. “I’m waiting.”

“Okay, what are you waiting for, then?” And if you say Christmas, I swear to god...”

“I’m waiting for her to make a move.”

Lilith sighed. “I’m tired of waiting. Why don’t we just go trash the place now?”

“Because our goal isn’t just to ‘trash the place’,” Buttercup rolled her eyes. “We have a very specific target. And besides, the utter destruction of a school without provocation would draw unnecessary attention to us. And there’s a lot of kids in there. I’d rather not waste life unless I have to. You must admit, the school is the perfect cover.”

Once again, the small, pigtailed child juxtaposed with her grim war general speech momentarily weirded Lilith the fuck out, and she wondered for the umpteenth time just what this kid could have gone through to make her like this. The Talons, much to her chagrin, had been kept on a strictly need-to-know basis.

She hadn’t ever been told why exactly they had been undertaking these “reconnaissance” missions for the last four nights.

“She’s going to do it soon,” Buttercup muttered. “She’ll use a distraction to disappear, complete the experiment. She’s so close, I can feel it.”

“And that’s when we strike!”

“No, then we keep waiting.”

The motorbike dropped a centimeter in Lilith’s confusion. “What? Why?’

“Because that’s when our allies will emerge.”

“But we don’t need allies. Let’s just go destroy the place now.”

“No.” Buttercup put her foot down. Metaphorically. Because they were in the air. “The three of you couldn’t beat me. You won’t stand a chance against what’s in there. And it’s not all about strength. So we wait.”

“But waiting’s boooorrring.”

“I know, my friend.” Buttercup nodded. “I know.”