#2000 words exactly because I have number issues

[decepti-thots]

in lieu of tf fanon, can we all just agree that the fanon around seekers is just WAY too pervasive???? genuinely. why is seeker fanon Like That. why are seekers sometimes treated as a whole exotic subspecies. i feel like people got too attached to starscream, looked at the silly color swapped jet models due to budget in the original 80's cartoon, and just decided to invent a new kind of weird robot racism. sorry that this is on the bitchery side of anons but weirdly set-in-stone fanon stuff like seekers is what turned me off from reading tf fanfic

The answer to this, that is 'why is seeker fanon Like That', is gonna by necessity involve some discussion of NSFW stuff so I will cut this. But it's kinda. Necessary for the topic, lmao, so. And I do think it's worth actually going through ig. I've seen a lot of folks recently express this exact irritation and confusion, so...

OK so the honest answer: a good chunk of it's just fetish porn tbqh. And people, they are horny for those jets, lmao, and Starscream, exactly. Kink with some worldbuilding scaffolded around it as setup. Which to be clear, when someone is straight up just like 'hi, here is some cheerfully self-aware kink about breeding and shit, do not read too hard into this fantasy nonsense as a coherent narrative- we are here for horny egg laying and the implications will not be expanded on beyond that' I am usually like 'yeah cool go for it!!', lmao. Not my thing, can still go places in execution I'm like 'uhhhh think this through better please' about ofc, but like. Kink's kink, and all. Pretend adult fun times engaged in with full self-awareness are fine, a lot of the time.

My irritation really comes with when this bleeds into stuff that is taking itself seriously and is uhhhh. Not that? Or when it's engaged in by people who clearly don't have a level of self awareness about the above. And the answer is... IMO it's just regular fandom racism tbh, with an extra layer of obfuscation over it because it's got the fantasy analogue thing disguising it. Some people enjoy a lot of tropes that derive from certain strands of commercial genre romance, and honestly a lot of classic SFF as well, that are based in things they do not fully realise are rooted in racism, or any number of -isms tbh. And there's also a lot of people who sort of do notice, but they still want to keep enjoying those things without guilt, so they try and take the underlying logics and apply them to fantasy constructs or whatever in the hopes this will make the thing they like Not Racist. (Spoiler alert: the issue is rarely who the tropes are applied to alone, and this basically never works, because humans have pattern recognition and know how analogies work.)

People like stories about Scary Barbarians, or Submissive Sexually Exotic Androgynes, or whatever. And then someone points out 'yeah but mate, those are racial stereotypes, have you heard of orientalism' or whatever, and people feel bad but they sort of. Want to keep enjoying those stories in a way that is not harmful! That strips out that element succesfully. So they try and write an alien fantasy version, but again. This doesn't actually work most of the time, tbh. Because humans have pattern recognition and the tropes, the logic underlying the ideas in the first place, are often the actual issue. Shrug.

And IMO, this is where you get 'biologically distinct races frametypes who are Just Naturally For Breeding' shit, or whatever other example I can pull out of the TF fanon hat, in ostensibly serious stories about geopolitical conflicts or serious personal drama, ones which expect you to engage with this as an actual framework for how a world could work and not just as a loose excuse for 2000 words of smut. It's not as though canon is totally immune to this to be clear- ask me sometime about how I feel about the mess that is functionism being an analogy for 48563 things, lmao- but fanon is more pervasive because you're contending with decades of this stuff being super pervasive in fandom spaces and it becoming standard for fic. We were having discussions about this exact stuff like. When I was 15 on LJ, lmao. And it wasn't new then! I don't think it's anything unique; it's just got those extra layers of abstraction to sort through in terms of 'why IS this happening with these fuckin planes'.

[the-firebird69]

They did this hear before and said they're going to do something and they said they're panicking and had to meet and all that crap they didn't do anything

No word for a son because you always leave them hanging and you don't do anything and we want to take you apart for what you're doing and saying your s*** is so lame I will probably do that pretty soon when the storm comes in we'll take your a****** son apart too. There was several developments since the storm stuff started when is the basin in the Gulf of Mexico is just about to drop and here at gurgling and it has been rumbling since the depressurized fully at 3:00 a.m. this morning it's been hours almost almost 12 hours at 3:00 p.m. and taking a while but it's going to be fast compared to others. It's moving around too and should be momentarily. There's a lot of people out there doing studies and they say that the soil is so loose and undense they didn't cook collapse and any second and send them flying what we say is it's true that dirt down there is so undance and it's so lightly packed it it should have class like hours ago so they're looking at what the hell is sitting there I thought of something it's not dense it's full of water it isn't leaching out it won't count as water cuz it doesn't move when it's sitting there draining a little it started a moments ago and several spots he was wondering about that too cuz these tunnels are different and not as permeable as others and it's going on now and it's going to pressurize it's way into the tunnels it's like nine tunnels answer the cameras a little bit really it's the tunnels. Now we can see the flow rate on tunnel and it's going up and the pressure within the soil is going down. The soil pressure was at 30 and that's pretty high for soil and it's going down rapidly and it has a pressurized the whole tunnel first. The sun says it is kind of a complicated problem because you have to calculate all sorts of things in physics so surface area it's a permeability it's what the water is comprised of it's the pressure head is created by the depression is the volume of water for each tunnel and it's also the pressure had created from the water it's held in the soil and it's different factors because it's not exactly clear water it's all these capillary and it's capillary action so it's just very complicated it can be off the country mile if you don't have one of the parameters right. Trump is forcing his symbol out here for terrorism so we are issuing tons of warrants to pull it in here get him the hell out. The countdown is beginning the pressure has already dropped about 2 miles into 20 and really it's only going to drop really it's only going to be your feet wide about 300 ft deep and we think it might be more now and that's the larger tidal wave the sun will still be fine after 25 ft but wow that's a huge pressure drop and it is typical of the whole cliff really the whole shore from shore out 2000 miles it went from 30 to 20 it was dropping now miles deep and the rest of the golf of Mexico is solid and it won't drop anymore we calculated the density of the remaining section and in total it should only drop a few hundred feet each terrace drops down and really it's like 300 ft deep and it works out to it if you go perpendicular to the effect of ocean bottom and disregard the terrorist effect they have 45° angle or something it's more like 30 and it only goes in 300 ft of soylent drops but I'm looking at the numbers I can't believe how much pressure is down deeper so might drop deeper like half mile or even a mile this would be a large side of wave out here to afford your 50 ft it's so outreach is there it's going to ruin some houses. ... Pressure is dropping and that's what a mile deep which makes no sense from 20 to about 10:00 and a half mile is dropping to five so really in just a moments it's going to go down

Thor Freya

[gmariam19]

This is no drabble - this is a one-shot! Here is my 2k Secret Santa fic for KrampusKink2020 Week Four featuring both prompts - toys and toys. 😇 I almost want to apologize as I feel like it’s one of the more ridiculous things I’ve written for these two, and it kind of goes on and on, and then there are some really bad lines at the end. . . but well. Maybe that’s the point? Utter ridiculousness? Enjoy and thank you for reading! 😊

Secret Santa

Beaumont Kin opens his gift first and finds the newest action figures from his favorite comic.  He guesses they’re from Jess, and she happily drinks her whiskey shot since he was right. Her gift is a model airplane to go with her growing collection, but it’s not from Rey, and Jess drinks again for being wrong. Maybe it’s a good thing they are all at home on Zoom this year; at this rate, someone is going to end up under their own table instead of under Finn and Poe’s. At least Jess has Jannah to make sure she gets to bed.

Rey received a large shipping box and pulls out a gift bag just as big—actually, it looks like a garbage bag with a red bow. She finds a large stuffed animal and squeals as she throws her arms around the life-sized wolf. “I think it’s from Jannah!” she says.

Jannah shakes her head and mimes taking a shot. They’ve all got them lined up and ready to go. Rey frowns. “But you know how much I love wolves! You got me one last year!”

“We all know how much you like wolves, Rey,” Finn tells her. “It’s why you’re living out in the middle of nowhere. Now drink.”

Rey shrugs and hugs her wolf again, completely nonplussed by the jab; solitary living out west suits her more than anyone Finn knows. Or maybe she’s still getting over the bad break-up with Ben Solo. She does her shot—probably tequila—and gasps at Jannah to go next.

Jannah opens a Nerf bow and arrow set. She tears into the packaging and starts shooting it around the room until there is a loud crash and a startled meow. Jess and Jannah dash out of view of the camera, laughing.

“She hit Ivee!” Jess tells them as she sits down again. “She’s mad, but okay.”

“So who do you think it’s from?” Rey calls. She’s cuddled up with her stuffed wolf and drinking a glass of wine now.

Jannah returns to the screen and studies them. “Well, I want to say Poe because he’s such a kid at heart, but that’s too easy. So I’m going to say Rose because she’s smart and sneaky like that.”

Rose shakes her head. “Wrong on both accounts!” Poe laughs. “Drink twice, my dear!”

Jannah pulls a face, but she does both her shots, choking them down as Jess claps her on the back.

Rose opens her gift next, a new strategy game that she’s been talking about for weeks. “I love it! And Beaumont can’t wait to play it with me!” Kin groans, and Rose bumps him off their sofa with a grin.

“Who’s it from?” Rey asks.

Rose leans closer to the screen, pretends to squint at them all. “Finn!” she announces. “Drink!” he tells her.

She does a shot of dark rum, and Finn is up next. He is sitting on the floor with the couch behind him. Poe is lounging next to him with a whiskey sour, and there are several vodka shots lined up on the coffee table. If they have shots left at the end of their Secret Santa exchange, they’ll make toasts to the terrible year that was 2020.

Finn’s box is wrapped in black and red paper with a beautiful gold bow— not particularly festive, but well-wrapped, elegant, and mysterious. Finn has a funny feeling about it and glances up at Poe, who is watching closely and clearly holding back an impish grin. Which means he either knows what it is and who it’s from, or he got it himself.

Finn rips the paper off and finds a fancy shirt box. The theme was toys, but this looks more like clothing. It would be just like Poe to break the rules. Poe has a bit of a clothing kink, Finn is starting to suspect, and if it’s clothes, he can be sure it’s from Poe.

He pulls apart the tissue paper inside and stops. Stares. Looks up at the computer, then at Poe, and back down at his box. He can feel the heat rising in his face.

“What is it?” asks Rey. “Finn! Show us!”

“It’s from Poe,” Finn says, without pause—and without taking it out of the box. “And that’s my final answer.”

“Show ‘em what it is!” Poe says, and he’s laughing as he leans in to kiss Finn on the cheek. He picks up a shot and winks. “Or I will.” Finn watches him swallow, looks down at his gift, thinks…what the hell. Maybe two can play this game.

He pulls out a long black vest…a red silk sash…a soft velvet eye patch. A miniature plastic sword with a small bottle of rum.

There is dead silence on the computer screen, until Rey falls over laughing, literally kicking her feet in the air. Rose covers her mouth as Kin snorts, while Jess and Jannah start asking a dozen questions at once. Finn lets them have their fun, then decides to have some of his own. At Poe’s expense.

He takes off his sweater and pulls the vest over his t-shirt. Ties the sash around his waist (even though he knows perfectly well that’s not what it intended for) and puts on the eye patch, then opens the bottle and takes a long swig while he brandishes the sword. He can feel Poe watching. Good.

His friends are screaming with laughter online. Finn feels utterly ridiculous, and he sort of hates it...until he looks at Poe, whose eyes are wide, his lips slightly parted, and is he breathing quicker? Finn knows that look, because he knows exactly what turns Poe on. And it seems Poe really likes pirates, so Poe can sit there and suffer just as much as Finn.

Finn winks, and Poe’s mouth falls open a little bit more. Totally worth it.

“I hate you,” Poe murmurs.

“You love it,” Finn whispers back.

“Pirates, Poe?” Jess asks. “Really?”

“Is it a Johnny Depp thing?” Rey asks. “I bet it’s a Johnny Depp thing.”

Poe shakes his head. “Fine, keep your secrets,” says Jess. “But open yours now, it’s the last one. Maybe you got matching outfits.”

Poe makes a rude gesture before reaching for his gift. It is a small box, and Finn has been trying to figure out what it could possibly be since it arrived in the mail. The agreement had been to exchange toys this year, because they were all feeling old and sorry for themselves after so many months at home. It seemed like it would be fun, and why not turn it into a drinking game too? They are all both young enough to play with toys and old enough to drink—perfect.

But Finn has that feeling again. There’s something about Rey…she’s focused on Poe, but also trying hard to look casual. Too casual. He watches her as much as he watches Poe open his gift.

It looks like a jewelry box. Poe opens it, slams it shut. Looks wide-eyed at Finn and then bursts into laughter and falls over, rolling on the floor. Everyone asks what it is…except Rey.  Poe tosses the box to Finn.

“Show ‘em,” he wheezes. Finn opens it and tosses it right back to Poe.

“No way,” he says. “I already got this hot mess.” He gestures at his pirate outfit, and Poe sits up, still laughing.

“Well, it’s from Rey, that’s for sure,” he says. Rey finally looks at the camera.

“How did you know that?” she demands.

He leans in. “Because you are not as innocent as you look, sweetheart.”

She grins, and it is that sly grin Finn loves about her, when she steps out of her comfort zone and surprises them all. She nods and takes her shot.  “We did say we were exchanging toys,” she points out.

“What is it?” Jess demands. “Come on, Poe. Show us!”

“You really don’t wanna know,” Finn tells her.

“Sure she does,” Rey says. “Go on, Poe. Show her.”

Poe shakes his head, but he’s laughing again. “I will get you back for this, you know. No matter how far out in the wilderness you decide to move!”

“You’ll have to find me,” she throws back. “Now show them!”

“I have a plane. Do another shot and I will.”

“Do one with me,” she counters.  So they both drink, and Poe picks up the box. Finn leaves the picture. Grabs a shot and downs it himself, earning a smile from Poe. And a wink.

“I saw that!” Rey exclaims. “You love it!”

“Well, I’ll find out soon, I hope,” Poe replies, and he holds up the cock ring Rey gifted him. Everyone dissolves into laughter again, and Finn joins them, because it is pretty damn funny. And it’s from Rey, of all people.

“Thank you,” Poe says. “And Finn thanks you as well.”

“Hey!” Finn calls. “I got my own weird sex gift, thank you very much.”

“Oh, that’s what the sash is for!” exclaims Jannah, and everyone falls apart again.

They reveal their Secret Santa identities to those who guessed wrong, then finish their shots making toasts and telling stories. Everyone pours a few more, and an hour later, they start to sign off, bleary-eyed but feeling warm and happy from the time spent together, even if it was onscreen.

“Enjoy your gifts, boys!” Jess calls before she and Jannah leave. Rose and Kin wave goodbye, no doubt to try out Rose’s new game. Rey is grinning like a cat at Finn and Poe.

“So,” she says. She finishes another glass of wine, and her nose is red.

“So,” Poe drawls. He puts his arm around Finn’s shoulder.

“Gonna try out your new gifts now?” Yes, she’s had more than a few.

“You think I haven’t been waiting all night for this?” Poe jerks his head toward Finn, who took off his pirate outfit a while ago. Poe frowns. “Where did my pirate go?”

“Your pirate is ready to board the ship,” Finn murmurs, then glances up when Rey bursts into laughter. “Sorry, Rey. But I think it’s time we turn in.”

“Have fun!” she sing-songs, humming a bit of a pirate song. Finn joins her as he reaches toward the computer; Poe’s hand is already roaming along his thigh.

“Merry Christmas!” he tells her. “We’ll talk to you in a day or two!”

“Merry Christmas,” she says. “Love you both!”

They tell her the same and log off. Finn picks up Poe’s gift box. “I can’t believe her, sometimes.”

“That was definitely an unexpected surprise,” Poe agrees.

“Yours, too. A pirate outfit? Seriously?”

Poe shrugs. “It was for fun. I got you something else for tomorrow.”

“I hope it’s not a wizard costume.”

“Space wizard, maybe.” Poe smiles and leans against Finn’s shoulder with a happy sigh. Finn teases his lips against Poe’s ear.

“You ready to head back to the ship and rock the boat? Because my peg leg isn’t the only hardwood around here.”

Poe smirks as he turns and starts trailing kisses down Finn’s neck. “That depends. You ready for me to shiver your timbers?”

“If you don’t, I might sentence you to walk my plank.”

Poe stops, sits up, and makes a face. “You know, pirate pick-up lines are not as sexy as I thought they would be.”

Finn grabs the red sash, wraps it loosely around Poe’s wrists. “You sure you don’t want to be my prisoner, mate?”

Poe’s lips curl up at that. “As long as you wear that eye patch, captain,” he murmurs.

“We’ll take turns,” Finn whispers. Because Poe would make an exceptionally handsome pirate as well, he thinks. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

“Oh, but I’m definitely trying out my gift first,” Poe replies, helping Finn to his feet. They share a leisurely kiss before making their way to the bedroom, where they spend hours exploring the new possibilities of cosplay and cock rings.

[rat-bisexual]

A lot of bisexual history has been erased so I figured I’d remind you all of some quotes and clear up any misunderstandings about bisexuality.

Bisexuality has been described as attraction regardless of gender for decades

"I am bisexual because I am drawn to people regardless of gender"

-‘The Bisexual Community: Are We Visible Yet?’, 1987

“In the midst of whatever hardships we [bisexuals] had encountered, this day we worked with each other to preserve our gift of loving people for who they are regardless of gender.”

-Elissa M., “Bi Conference,” Bi Women, 1985

“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.”

-Office Pink Publishing, “Introduction,” Bisexual Lives, 1988

“Being bisexual does not mean they have sexual relations with both sexes but that they are capable of meaningful and intimate involvement with a person regardless of gender.”

-Janet Bode, “The Pressure Cooker,” View From Another Closet, 1976

“Over the past fifteen years, however, [one Caucasian man] has realized that he is ‘attracted to people — not their sexual identity’ and no longer cares whether his partners are male or female. He has kept his Bi identity and now uses it to refer to his attraction to people regardless of their gender.”  

-Paula C. Rust, “Sexual Identity and Bisexual Identities,” Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, 1998

“In the midst of whatever hardships we [bisexuals] had encountered, this day we worked with each other to preserve our gift of loving people for who they are regardless of gender.”

-Elissa M., “Bi Conference,” Bi Women, 1985

“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.”

-Office Pink Publishing, “Introduction,” Bisexual Lives, 1988

Bisexuality doesn’t have to mean a person “sees gender”

“[S]ome bisexuals say they are blind to the gender of their potential lovers and that they love people as people… For the first group, a dichotomy of genders between which to choose doesn’t seem to exist”

-Kathleen Bennett, “Feminist Bisexuality, a Both/And Option for an Either/Or World,” Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism,1992

"Some bisexual respondents bypass the issue of 'degrees' of attraction to women and men by defining bisexuals as a humanistic, gender-blind way of relating to others. They see bisexuality as a way of loving the person, not their sex, or being nondiscrimintory in their attractions to others. For example, Ludwica wrote, 'I feel as if I'm open to respond to the person, not just the gender.' "

-"Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution" by Paula C Rust 1995

“I believe that people fall in love with individuals, not with a sex… I believe most of us will end up acknowledging that we love certain people or, perhaps, certain kinds of people, and that gender need not be a significant category, though for some of us it may be.”

Ruth Hubbard, ‘There Is No ‘Natural’ Human Sexuality, Bi Women’ ,1986

“Some women who call themselves ‘bisexual’ insist that the gender of their lover is irrelevant to them, that they do not choose lovers on the basis of gender.”

-Marilyn Murphy, “Thinking About Bisexuality,” Bi Women, 1991

“Some of us are bisexual because we do not pay much attention to the gender of our attractions.”

-Bisexual Politics, Quiries and Visions, 1995

Bisexuality is inclusive of all genders

“Who is this group for exactly? Anyone who identifies as bisexual or thinks they are attracted to or interested in all genders… This newly formed [support] group is to create a supportive, safe environment for people who are questioning their sexual orientation and think they may be bisexual.”

-“Coming Out as Bisexual,” Bi Women, 1994

“It’s easier, I believe, for exclusive heterosexuals to tolerate (and that’s the word) exclusive homosexuals than [bisexuals] who, rejecting exclusivity, sleep with people not genders…”

-Martin Duberman, 1974 “The bisexual community should be a place where lines are erased. Bisexuality dismisses, disproves, and defies dichotomies. It connotates a loss of rigidity and absolutes. It is an inclusive term.” -‘Essay for the Inclusion of Transsexuals’, Kory Martin-Damon, 1995

“Bisexual — being emotionally and physically attracted to all genders.”

-The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, “Out of the Past: Teacher’s Guide” 1999

"Bisexuality is much more than, and different from, the sensationalized 'third choice, best of both worlds' phenomena it's made out to be. Bisexuality is an inclusive term that defines immense possibilities avalable to us, whether we act on them or not."

-"Bi Any Other Name", Loraine Hutchens and Lani Ku'ahumany, 1991

"Bisexual consciousness, because of its amorphous quality and inclusive nature, posed a fundamental threat to the dualistic and exclusionary thought patterns which were- and still are- tenaciously held by both the gay liberation leadership and its enemies."

-"The Bisexual Movement's Beginnings in the 70s'', Bisexual politics, Naomi Tucker, 1995

Bisexuality historically and currently includes transgender and nonbinary people

“With respect to our integrity as bisexuals, it is our responsibility to include transgender people in our language, in our communities, in our politics, and in our lives”

-Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions by Naomi S Tucker, 1995

"Bisexuality is here defined as the capacity , regardless of the sexual identity label one chooses , to love and sexually desire both same - and other - gendered individuals . The term other-gendered is used here deliberately and is preferable to the term opposite - gendered , because other - gendered encompasses a recognition of the existence of transgendered and transsexual individuals , who may embrace gender identities other than [male and female]"

-"Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority" by Beth A. Firestein and Dallas Denny, 1996

“From the earliest years of the bi community, significant numbers of TV/TS [transvestite/transsexual] and transgender people have always been involved with it. The bi community served as a kind of refuge for people who felt excluded from the established gay and lesbian communities.”

-Kevin Lano, “Bisexuality and Transgenderism,” Anything That Moves, 1998

"Bisexuality means having the capacity to be attracted to people of both major genders ( don't forget: there are gender minorities, too) ." “As with the word Bisexual, they usually also imply that relations with gender minorities are possible.”

-‘Bisexuality: A Reader and a Sourcebook’, 1990

“There were a lot of transvestites and transsexuals who came to [the San Francisco Bisexual Center in the 1970s], because they were not going to be turned away because of the way they dressed.”

-David Lourea in “Bisexual Histories in San Francisco in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” Dworkin, 2000 Journal of Bisexuality

"The actual lived non-binary history of the bisexual community and movement and the inclusive culture and community spirit of bisexuals are eradicated when a binary interpretation of our name for ourselves is arbitrarily assumed."

-"Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out" by Lani Ka’ahumanu

"In the bisexual movement as a whole, transgendered individuals are celebrated not only as an aspect of the diversity of the bisexual community, but, because like bisexuals, they do not fit neatly into dichotomous categories."

-"Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics" by Paula C. Rust, 1995

[bananaofswifts]

Taylor Swift Turns on a Facsimile Machine for the Ingenious Recreations of ‘Fearless (Taylor’s Version)’: Album Review

Swift recreates her entire 2008 album literally down to the last note, then gives herself room for stylistic latitude on six never-before-recorded "vault" tracks.

By Chris Willman

Swift recreates her entire 2008 album literally down to the last note, then gives herself room for stylistic latitude on six never-before-recorded "vault" tracks.

There is no “best actress” award at the Grammys, perhaps for obvious reasons, but maybe there should be this coming year. And the Grammy would go to… Taylor Swift, for so persuasively playing her 18-year-old self in “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” her beyond-meticulous recreation of the 2008 recording that did win her her first album of the year trophy back in the day. It’s impossible to overstate just how thoroughly the new version is intended as an exact replica of the old — all the way down to her startling ability to recapture an untrained teen singing voice she’s long matured and moved on from. It’s a stunt, to be sure, but a stunt for the ages — mastering the guile it takes to go back to sounding this guileless.

There are two different, very solid reasons to pick up or stream “Taylor’s Version,” regardless of whether you share her ire for the Big Machine label, whose loose ways with her nine-figure catalog precipitated this, the first in a six-album series of remakes where she’ll be turning on the facsimile machine. One is to marvel at her gift for self-mimicry on the album’s original tracks, where she sounds as possessed by her younger self as Regan ever was by Pazuzu. The other reason is, of course, to check out the six “vault” numbers that Swift wrote during that time frame but has never released before in any form, which dispenses with stylistic fealty to the late 2000s and frames her “Fearless”-era discards in production and arrangements closer to “Folklore.” Those half-dozen (kind of) new tracks really do sound like modern Taylor Swift covering her old stuff.

But those original lucky 13? It’s the same damn record… which is kind of hilarious and marvelous and the kind of meta-ness that will inspire a thousand more think-pieces than it already has, along with possibly efforts at forensic analysis to figure out how she did it.

It would not be surprising if, as we speak, Big Machine was putting a combined team of scientists and lawyers on the case of the new album’s waveform readouts, to make sure it’s not just the original album, remixed. Honestly, it’s that close. The timings of the songs are all within a few seconds of the original tracks, if not coming in at exactly the same length. The duplication effort doesn’t allow any detours. If “Forever and Always” had a cold open then, it’s going to have a cold open now. If the 2008 “That’s the Way I Love You” had slamming rock guitars with an almost subliminal banjo being plucked beneath the racket, so will the 2021 “That’s the Way I Loved You.” A drum roll to end the old “Change”? A drum roll to end its body-snatcher doppelganger. And if she chuckled before the final chorus of “Hey Stephen” 13 years ago, so will that moment be cause for a delighted giggle now.

Of course, much analysis will be put into whether the new laugh is a more knowing-sounding laugh. And that will be part of the fun for a certain segment of audiophile Swifties who will go looking for the slightest change as evidence of something meaningful. When “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” first came out weeks back to preview the album, there were reviews written that swore she’d subtly changed up her phrasing to put a contemporary spin on the song. And maybe they were right, but, having done a fair amount of A/B testing of the two versions of the album, I found myself feeling like I do when vinyl buffs insist there are significant sonic differences between the first stamper version of an LP and one that was pressed a year later. If you can spot those very, very, very modest tweaks, go for it.

But my suspicion is that if Swift has decided to turn a phrase a little differently here or there on this album, or done anything too differently aside from brighten the sound, she’s doing it more as an Easter egg, for the people who are on that kind of hunt, than anything really designed as reinterpretation. Because the last thing Swift wants most of her fans doing is A/B-ing the two versions, the way I did. The whole point is to have folks retire the OG “Fearless” from their Spotify playlists, right? The Swift faithful were already threatening to rain down damnation on anyone caught sneaking an audio peek at the old version after midnight. What she intended was to come up with a rendering so faithful that you would never have a need to spin the vintage album again. In that, she has succeeded beyond what could have been imagined even in the dreams of the few self-forgers who’ve tried this before, like a Jeff Lynne.

Is there any reason to find value in the new versions if you couldn’t care less about the issues of masters and contracts and respect in business deals that made all this strangely possible? Yes, with the first one being that the new album just sounds like a terrific remastering of the old — the same notes, and you’d swear the same performances, but sounding brighter and punchier just on a surface level. But on a more philosophical one, it’s not just a case of Swift playing with her back catalog like Andy Warhol played with his soup can. It’s really a triumph of self-knowledge and self-awareness, in the way that Swift is so hyper-conscious of the ways she’s matured that she has the ability to un-mature before our very ears. With her vocals, it’s virtuosic, in a way, how she’s made herself return to her unvirtuosic upstart self.

On Swift’s earliest albums and in those seminal live shows — at the time when she was famously being told she “can’t sing,” to quote a song from the follow-up album — there was a slight shrillness around the edges of her voice that, if you lacked faith, you might’ve imaged would be there forever. It wasn’t. That was partly youth, and partly just the sheer earnestness with which she wanted to convey the honesty of the songs. She’s advanced so much since then — into one of pop’s most gifted modern singers, really — that the woman of “Folklore” and “Evermore” seems like a completely different human being than the one who made the self-titled debut and “Fearless,” never mind just a woman versus girl. It wouldn’t have seemed possible that she could go back to her old way of singing at the accomplished age of 31, but she found and recreated that nervous, sincere, pleading voice of yesteryear. And maybe it was just a technical feat, of temporarily unlearning what she’s learned since then, but you can sense that maybe she had to go there internally, too, to the place where she was counseling other girls to guard their sexual virtue in “Fifteen,” or wondering whether to believe the fairy tale of “Love Story” or the wakeup call of “White Horse,” or proving with “Forever & Always” that writing a song telling off Joe Jonas for his 27-second breakup call was better than revenge.

If at first you’re not inclined to notice that Swift has re-adopted a completely different singing voice for the “Fearless” remakes, the realization may kick in when those “vault” tracks start appearing in the later stretch of this hour-and-50-minute album. The writing on the six songs that have been pulled up from the 2008 cutting room floor seems primitive, even a little bit by the standards of the “Fearless” album; there are great lines and couplets throughout the rescued tracks, but you can see why she left them as works-in-progress. But she doesn’t use her youthful voice on these resurrections, nor does she employ the actual style of “Fearless” very strictly. Of course, she feels more freedom on these, because there are no predecessors in the Big Machine catalog she’s asking you to leave behind. Her current collaborators of choice, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, divided the co-producing work on these fresher songs, as they did for the two all-new albums she released in the last year. (The “Fearless” recreations are co-produced by Swift with Christopher Rowe, someone who worked on remixes for Swift back in that era.) They co-produce the vault songs in a style that sounds somewhere between “Fearless” and Folklore”… a more spectral brand of country-pop, with flutes and synths and ringing 12-string guitars and a modicum of drum programming replacing some (but not all) of the acoustic stringed instruments you’d expect to be carried over from “Fearless” proper.

Of the previously unheard tracks, Swift was right — she’s always been her own best self-editor — in putting out “You All Over Me” first, in advance of the album. With its imagery of half-muddy stones being upturned on the road, this song has advanced lyrical conceits more of a piece with the level of writing she’s doing now than some of the slightly less precocious songs that follow. Still, there’s something to be said for the sheer zippiness with which Swift conveys teen heartbreak in “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” which has a lyric that shows Swift had long since absorbed the lessons Nashville had to offer about how to come up with a high-concept song — the concept, in this case, being just to stick the word “mister” in front of a lot of phrases relating to her shallow ex, as if they were honorary titles to be conferred for being a shit, while she employs the “miss” for herself more sparingly.

Some of the remaining outtake songs go back more toward the sedate side of “Fearless”-style material; she didn’t leave any real bangers in the can. “We Were Happy,” the first of two successive tracks to bring in Keith Urban (but only for backgrounds on this one), employs fake strings and real cello as Swift waxes nostalgic for a time when “you threw your arms around my neck, back when I deserved it.” It’s funny, in a good way, to hear Swift at 31 recreating a song she wrote at 17 or 18 that pined for long-past better times. The next song, “That’s When,” brings Urban in for a proper duet where he gets a whole second verse and featured status on half a chorus, and it’s lovely to hear them together. But, as a make-up song, it doesn’t feel as real or lived-in as the more personal things she was writing at the time — and the fact that its chords are pretty close to a slightly more balladic version of the superior “You Belong With Me” was probably a pretty good reason for dropping it at the time.

the 18-year-old Taylor Swift is a great place to visit, but “Folklore” and “Evermore” are the place you’ll want to return to and live, unless you have an especially strong sentimental attachment to “Fearless”… which, sure, half of young America does. It’s not irreconcilable to say that the two albums she issued in the last year represent a daring pinnacle of her career, but that “Fearless” deserved to win album of the year in 2008. Has there been a greater pop single in the 20th century than “You Belong With Me”? Probably not. Did the album also have lesser moments you probably haven’t thought about in a while, like the just-okay “Breathe”? Yes. (I looked up to see whether Swift had ever played that little remarked upon number in concert, and according to setlists.fm, she did, exactly once… in 2018. Because she’s Taylor Swift, and of course she did.) It’s not certain that her duet with Colbie Caillat really needed to be resurrected, except it’s fun, because hey, she even roped former duet partners back into her time warp. But there are so many number that have stood the test of time, like “The Way I Love You,” an early song that really got at the complicated feelings about passion and fidelity that she would come to explore more as she grew into her 20s… and just kind of a headbanger, too, on an album that does love its fiddles and mandolins.

It doesn’t take much to wonder why Swift put up “Fearless” first in this six-album exercise; it’s one of her two biggest albums, along with “1989,” and it’s 13 years old, which does mean something superstitious in the Taylor-verse. In a way, it’ll be more interesting to see what happens when she gets to more complicated productions, like “1989” or “Reputation.” But maybe “Fearless” did present the opportunity for the grandest experiment out of the gate: to recreate something that pure and heartfelt, with all the meticulousness a studio master like Swift can put to that process now, without having it seem like she’s faking sincerity. Let the think-pieces proceed — because this is about six hundred different shades of meta. But, all craftiness and calculation aside, there’s a sweetness to the regression that’s not inconsequential. It harks back to a time when she only wondered if she could be fearless, before she learned it the harder way for sure. What they say about actors “disappearing into the role”? That really applies to Taylor Swift, playing herself.

[nowoyas]

Rest (and Other Things You Force On Your Boyfriend)

A/N: So this is technically a sequel to Bunny Eyes but it can be read completely standalone. There’s no real reason for him to be a bunny in this other than I Wanted Him To Be, and honestly, what else do you even NEED?

man I just wanna snuggle with nearly every iteration of this bunny boi. send cuddles pls.

Summary: In which your bunny boyfriend catches your flu and now you’re taking care of him. (sick!bunny!Izuku x reader)

Warnings: issa sickfic, izu has the flu. no emetophobia, not even in passing, mostly just fever and discussion of taking meds

Word Count: 2000-ish

~

Oh, you wish you could find the strength within yourself to not feel guilty.

It's his fault! You told Izuku not to kiss you and tried to push him away and now he's got the flu and you're the one taking extra-good notes to teach him the information after class while he's pretending to rest all day!

And yet. And yet. You still feel guilty about letting him get sick.

"If I'd only been stronger," you wail dramatically as you walk back from shopping with Ochaco and Tsuyu. They'd gone with you to help you purchase proper boyfriend-doting supplies, which definitely didn't include proper soup ingredients or a cute new dress that happens to look like a fashionable version of scrubs so you could act as his nurse proper.

Ochaco pats your shoulder in solidarity. "You tried your best, [name]-chan. It was only a matter of time before Deku-kun got sick, too."

Tsuyu places a thoughtful finger to her chin. "He was pretty stubborn about taking care of you when you were still sick, kero. Did he even wear a mask when he was taking care of you?"

"No," you groan. "I insisted, but he's an idiot."

Ochaco rolls her eyes as she opens the door for your poor arms-full self. You smile and curtsy before walking through to enter the dorm's common area, where you promptly drop your shopping bags. "Izuku!"

"Oh no," comes the quiet response as green rabbit ears snap to attention, followed by a (thankfully muffled) sneeze. Izuku appears to have dragged himself downstairs to study, a medical mask over his mouth and nose as he pores over an open notebook. At his side, having just been lowered in defeat on sight of you, is a hand weight. "I-I thought you were going to be gone all day?" he tries sheepishly.

You stomp across the room to him, not coming to a stop when you reach him. Instead, you scoop him up off the couch, eliciting a surprised yelp as he clings to you. "[N-name!]" he whines. His drawn-out complaint is cut off by his own racking coughs, and you're careful to tighten your bridal carry until his body stops shaking.

"You're going to rest," you demand when his coughs have calmed. "Honestly, how did you even get down here? When I was still sick I could hardly make it to the bathroom in my room!"

"I'm on a lower floor than you?" he says, though it sounds more like a question than an answer. You raise an unimpressed eyebrow. "...fine. I came downstairs to take my trash out and couldn't make it back up myself, so I sent Shouji-kun up to my room with my key so I at least had something to do while I recovered."

"Unbelievable," you mutter. "You're supposed to be resting. I told you I'd do all that for you when I got back from shopping, didn't I?"

"B-but I'm tired of resting," he complains.

You turn and glance over your shoulder at your very amused girl friends. "Sorry, can I ask you girls to take my shopping up to my room for me? It looks like I've got some nurse duties to handle—"

"I-I can handle myself at least while you—" Izuku begins to protest weakly, struggling a bit in your arms.

You sigh and cut him off. "Izuku, I love you, but if you don't be quiet and let me carry you to bed so you can get some rest and then actually get some rest, I will literally call your mom."

He lets out a squeak, hiding his face in your chest. "Got your key with you?"

He nods. "In my pocket," he mumbles.

You bump the elevator button and carry him up to his room, humming gently as you approach his door. You're careful to fish out his room key and unlock his door, and then more careful not to break said door down when you wrench it open with one foot.

"Alright, health check, bunny boy," you say sweetly after dropping him on his bed. "Cooperate honestly and I'll reward you, alright?"

He nods, pulling his medical mask off to reveal his pout and twitchy nose. "What kind of reward?"

"Depends on how well you cooperate with me, Zu-kun," you chirp as you set about getting the stuff you need and shutting (and locking, just in case) his door. "When was the last time you ate?"

"Dunno."

"How's your appetite?"

"Bad."

"Can I convince you to eat a few crackers?" you ask. Izuku groans at the question, about to complain, but you don't give him the chance. "Reward, Zu-kun," you remind him gently.

"I-I might be able to stomach a few."

"Don't worry, I'll make it worth it," you hum, reaching for the sleeve of crackers and taking one between your teeth, careful not to bite down as you cross the room to him. You waggle your eyebrows at him suggestively as you sit down, leaning in close. It's hard not to laugh when his already surely fever-flushed face goes even redder when he realizes what you're suggesting, and even harder not to squeal when he takes the opposite corner of the cracker in his teeth and pulls it away from you.

It'd be seductive if only he didn't look so pathetic right now, which you mean in the most loving way possible. He's still your adorable muscly bunny boy, but he's also visibly ill and very carefully nibbling on a saltine cracker held in both hands.

When he's forced down the whole thing, you press a slow kiss to his forehead, frowning when you realize just how hot he feels. "Izu, honey, I'm going to take your temperature," you say, grabbing the thermometer from the kit.

Sure enough, his temperature reads feverish, at a concerning 100.6 degrees. You worry your lip, glancing between him and the thermometer.

"How is it?" he croaks. You shove a water bottle towards him with a meaningful look and reach for your phone. Luckily, you have Recovery Girl's number after you got sick, so calling her won't be an issue. 

"You're fine, honey," you say gently, ruffling his hair. "You should lay down. I'm going to get your medicine and your things from downstairs, okay?"

The absolute angel doesn't suspect a thing, letting you guide him to lay down. He refuses the blanket, which is fair.

"When I'm back, I'll have you take your meds and then we can cuddle for a bit, alright, 'Zu-kun?"

He nods.

"Okay, do you want the fan on?"

Another nod. You flip the switch for his ceiling fan on your way out, careful not to lock yourself out, and wait until you're out of the elevator on the bottom floor to make the call.

You tangle one hand through your hair as Recovery Girl answers with one of her trademark sighs. "Please tell me he hasn't broken something while he has the flu."

"He hasn't!" you say as you set about gathering his things. Bakugo glares at you (for some reason) as he pointedly drowns the room in disinfectant spray. "No, no broken bones. I'm calling because his fever's gotten worse."

"How bad is 'worse', exactly?" 

"You told me to call if he got above 100.4."

"And?"

You nervously thumb the thermometer in your pocket. "100.9. He's mostly acting calm and going along with treatment, but apparently he came downstairs earlier while I was out and couldn't make it back to the elevator, and honestly, he's so stubborn that actually listening to me is almost more concerning, and I—"

"Calm down, sweetheart. I'm on my way over. You know the drill, make sure he's not dehydrated and in bed, and give him a Tylenol."

"Yes ma'am. He hasn't taken his regular medication yet, I'm about to give it to him once I get back upstairs with his things. Thank you, I'll do all that right away."

"See you as soon as I've finished handling this student, dear," she says, and you're answered with a click as she hangs up. You pocket your phone, scoop up the last of his things, and scurry back up the stairs to your hopefully resting boyfriend.

When you return to him, he's laid down on his bed, facing the wall with his phone in his hand. You're not sure whether to be annoyed that he isn't asleep yet or glad you don't have to wake him to get him to choke down his own disgusting flu medicine.

A single ear turns in your direction when you enter, and you note with amusement that his tail also twitches at your arrival. "Recovery Girl is on her way over," you say gently. "I've got your regular medicine and some Tylenol to kick your fever down. I'm sorry I called her, but you're running a bit too high for comfort and I don't know what else I can do so..."

Izuku makes a noncommittal hum. You suppose he's only half awake, so you set down his things and lean over him, waggling both bottles of medicine within his line of sight. "Come on, up and at 'em for just a moment longer, okay?"

"I thought you wanted me to rest," he whines weakly, slowly sitting up with a pout.

You sit where he'd been laying. "Flu medicine and Tylenol first. We gotta deal with your fever, 'Zu-kun." 

He whines, but lets you give him the right doses of each and set the bottles of medicine aside. Before you can get up, though, he's laid back down, arms wrapped around your waist as he rests his head on your lap. "C-can I sleep here?" he mumbles, not looking up at you.

"I promised you a reward for cooperating with me, right?" you hum, winding fingers through his hair to gently scratch his scalp. "Rest as long as you need to, baby."

"Thank y'. Lo'you." His words turn to slurred speech as he snuggles up close, and as you play with his hair, you rest your head against the wall. It's not long before your eyes drift closed and your fingers still in his hair, resting at the base of his ears.

When you wake up next, you're still sat there with Izuku snuggled up to your stomach. He opens one eye to look up at you blearily before wordlessly yanking you down so you're lying next to him. Before you can respond, he's laid on top of you, his face buried in your chest as his ears tickle your face.

"'Zuzu—" you start, wriggling in his vice grip.

"You already had this flu strain, so you're safe," he mumbles back.

"Get your ears out of my face before I bite them." Despite your words, you press a kiss to the space between his ears.

"Mm, what if I'd like that? You should know by now that I—owww..."

You snort, releasing his ear from your teeth and pressing a kiss to the spot you'd just bit. "Love you~"

You can actively feel him pouting against your chest, grumbling something suspiciously similar to "I guess I love you too". You giggle, nuzzling the top of his head as he flattens his ears back.

"I'll make it up to you when you're feeling better, Izuku," you promise before the both of you fall back asleep. He doesn't respond, but his tail and ears both twitch at your words. You coax him back to sleep with soft kisses, noting out of the corner of your eye that there's a note tacked carefully on the headboard. You snatch it up, careful not to disturb the bunny as you read.

It's a note from Recovery Girl. Apparently, she came by while you were still asleep. She's just chiding you for both being asleep when she arrived, and left you a few instructions. You let the note fall , deciding it's best to address it later. For now, you've got a nap with your sick boyfriend to deal with, and if he rests better with you in his arms, well, who are you to deny him?

Taglist: @zylith-imagines-and-fics​ @tooloudarts​ @sapid-rose​ @xxangelpridexx​ @birds-have-teeth​ @icythotsenpai​ @hypercriticals @warmchoccymilk​ @wesparklebitch​ @izoodles​ @fujimoribaby​ @my-bnha-things​

[platypus-mcslothman]

‘Well, at least we’re not America’ is a common phrase said by most people when political/racism issues or crises occur in UK. A phrase I am coming to discover is telling of how well the propaganda machines in our country work. The UK is wayyy more dysfunctional than America and allow me to detail but the surface level of known issues in our political sphere.

1. U.K. media ecosystem is… corrupt. Seriously, the older I get the more realise how not too dissimilar our media is to North Korea’s, except our media doesn’t work for the state primarily and will turn on it if it benefits them. You can look at how our media recently attacked Boris Johnson and then started pushing out puff pieces when he won a landslide in our local election for perfect proof

We’ve had phone hacking scandals, invasions of privacy, been accused of Nazi like language by the UN, have a state owned media outlet with political leaders heading it, anti-vaccine and now anti-lockdown narratives being pushed forward, think tanks owned by prominent right wing politicians and advisors being treated as unbiased think tanks, and more.

Our media landscape is predominately owned by 5 people. Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News) being one of the most prominent and also the closest to government.

The media in the UK is basically an attack dog for politics. It’s often been said no government will ever get into power without Rupert Murdoch on side.

It gets significantly worse when you begin to discover many prominent journalists are friends, god parents, spouses, and family members to our political elite. Heck, Boris Johnson (our Prime Minister) was originally a journalist for the spectator and telegraph (and an appalling one at that).

2. our police are well… corrupt. They’ve been involved in murdering civilians, brutally killing protestors and lying about killing them, feeding lies to the press about officers being hurt by protestors, assaulting journalists, and are involved in numerous conspiracies, and coincidentally were the only public service that didn’t receive defunding during and after thatcher’s era.

The most recent conspiracy involves the media too. A private detective called Daniel Morgan was suspect to have been murdered by two police officers with axes, who were originally investigating the crime, after he started investigating corruption in the police force. This case happened in the 90s and is now resurging after renewed interest. Strangely enough, the case Morgan was investigating later became known as the Phone Hacking scandal in the early 2000s.

Essentially the phone hacking scandal was the reveal that newspapers were hacking phones, wiretapping houses, and paying or blackmailing police officers to give them information about criminal cases. During this scandal it was also revealed newspapers were hiring PIs. More specifically the firm that Morgan worked for and even more specifically the suspected murderers who were fired from the police forces and were hired by Morgan’s old PI firm. You couldn’t make this up.

3. this is gonna be a running theme, but our politicians… corrupt. In a slew of scandals over decades, our politicians have been revealed to spend their work expenses on personal expenses (one politician bought a draw bridge for their manor, and many used them to buy second homes in London before selling them off at a profit during a housing crises), they accept other ‘jobs’ for private businesses (essentially a politician is payed thousands for a couple hours in an ‘advisory’ position), they’ve used tax havens (David Cameron, one of our prior PMs, is the most prominent example), they’ve lobbied after leaving their post (essentially they’re paid a lot of money to push for legislation changes that will profit a company which is quite easy to do when you have political connections, yet again David Cameron is a prominent example), and in the most recent disgusting display I present to you: the ‘my little crony’ model. A model that visually shows you the corruption in our pandemic expenditure.

https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/post/my-little-crony/

During the pandemic, our government bypassed competition laws to directly award contracts for PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), and test and trace. 25% of these contracts at minimum have since been deemed as questionable. They were awarded to businesses owned by politicians, politician’s family members, neighbours, friends, and political donors. Dyson was even revealed to have directly messaged Boris Johnson to change how taxes work so he could provide profitable ventilators when we were desperately short (which is worse when you consider Dyson didn’t deliver a single ventilator despite these changes). That’s not even an isolated story. There is a backlog of stories of strange and not suited businesses not providing PPE, not providing useable PPE, and being payed to make PPE at inflated costs. We’ve had sweet wrapper makers, jewellers, pubs, and a finance company that was only set up weeks before the contract being given these essential jobs in making and delivering PPE. The amount of money spent on these contracts is not yet fully known because documentation hasn’t been published fully, which is unlawful according to our Supreme Court’s findings.

In the pandemic we spent 37 billion on our test and trace app. The app was a failure and still is. It doesn’t contact people, a lot of data was lost because they were using an outdated Excel program to store data (which it didn’t store because Excel is not designed for that amount of data and severely outdated), and a lot people haven’t downloaded it because of trust issues caused by poor communication and initially designing the app to store data in a centralised location instead of in a means where the data can’t be accessed at a later date (as almost every other country did for trust reasons).

Now, 37 billion pounds is a very abstract number. Many don’t fully understand how much money that really is. Well, it could nationalise our entire electric grid in the UK. It’s 10% of the amount needed to end world hunger. It could end our housing crisis in the UK. and it was spent on an app that doesn’t work! Not to mention, the leader of test and trace is now being rumoured to be appointed the head of our national health service…

Heck, our PM was paid by one of his political donors to refurbish his temporary flat in Number 10 (our version of the White House). He spent £200,000 whilst he claimed our entire country didn’t have enough money to feed poor children during the pandemic. And even after he lost two fights with a footballer over the issue (yes, you heard that right), our government contracted a private company that provided inadequate amounts of weekly food. Below isn’t even the worst example.

(Note this a contrast between the amount you could actually buy with money allocated by the government and the amount given by the private companies hired by the government. They took may as well have literally have took candy from a baby.)

Summary: the U.K. is worse than the US exactly because the people of our nation and kingdom don’t see the ridiculousness and corruption that takes place daily and historically.

We’ve had governments spying on trade unions and activists, we’ve had kids being brutalised by police officers because they attended or were thought to have attended a protest, we have a bill that now is trying to ban protest, we have a media ecosystem so disgustingly inadequate they don’t hold government to account, and we have politicians who claim they could live off minuscule amounts provided by the state to the poor and disabled whilst gourging on state paid meals at fancy restaurants where they spend more than that minuscule amount in a couple hours.

There’s so much wrong with my nation and kingdom, I honestly don’t have enough words nor the ability to accurately articulate how disgustingly corrupt it is. We are not the United Kingdom, we are the Corrupt Kingdom. I could go on and fucking on about how unjust, untruthful, and immoral my nation is. I don’t like that, but I also am not going to be patriotic about a nation that kills the poor and disabled by not providing support, allowing a virus to ravage our society by not putting the needs many before the needs of the few, and who claims we can’t spend money on society whilst spending lucrative amounts on idiotic selfish things.

Further reading/references:

(this is my blog, I haven’t posted here in a while)

[shamaliya]

What You Need to Understand About Patents and also Their Value

The number of patents released in the United States rose to 187,000 in 2003, up 22 percent from 1999. For innovators that comprehended the system or that were privileged, the benefits have been enough. Licensing fees from trademarked inventions currently earn $150 billion globally every year, a figure that is expected to climb almost 30 percent over the following some years.

At the same time, patent infringement lawsuits have been filling up headlines daily. The number of patent violation suits submitted each year in the United States. grew 64 percent in the duration 1991-2000.

Throughout 12 months finishing in September 2003, U.S. patent proprietors submitted 2,788 patent infringement lawsuits, a 13 percent increase over the same duration five years earlier, as well as more than double the 1,178 patent fits filed in the calendar year 1991.

However, lots of creators have not applied for their patents despite having legitimate insurance claims of violation. In some cases, they have been bewildered as well as intimidated by the expenses included.

Much of the time, these dissatisfactions can have been avoided if inventors had been armed with the expertise and also understanding of what patents are (as well as what they are not) and exactly how to determine their worth. Such understanding can make the difference between success and also a failure for an ambitious inventor.

Potentially the greatest misunderstanding issues what a patent is and also what civil liberties it offers to its owner. Numerous think a patent provides the inventor the right to produce or market the copyrighted invention. Absolutely nothing can be further from reality. Also check out https://kulturehub.com/inventhelp-support-inventors/

A Patent's Value

By statute, a patent is the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the trademarked invention. To put it simply, a patent is an exclusionary right as well as pays for no favorable legal rights whatsoever. A patent is just a certificate to demand infringement.

A patent is a state-sanctioned monopoly that is limited in 3 means. It is just active for twenty years from the filing day, it is just valid in the nation that gave it, and also it is restricted to what is specified in the patent's insurance claims.

Before applying for a patent, an inventor ought to ask concerns regarding its potential value. Is it much better to protect the technology by patenting it, or by keeping it as a profession secret?

To answer any one of these inquiries wisely, you require to evaluate the worth of the patent. The value of a patent ought to not be puzzled with the worth of the patented product. The two stand out and real-time separate lives.

To put it simply, a product without a patent has worth; so does a patent without a product.

Coca-Cola, for example, is a product without a patent. The product lives on, nonetheless, without the patent security, it when had.

An example of a patent without a product-- a supposed "paper" patent-- is a patent on an intermittent windshield wiper. The inventor, Dr. Kearns, never sold the product himself. He got $10.2 million from Ford, after taking legal action against the automaker, and also successfully imposed his patent versus a lot of other cars and truck manufacturers.

A lot more current instance is a patent on "Java" technology which came to be Kodaks as a result of a merger. Kodak, which had never marketed the modern technology, recently accepted a $92 million settlement of its violation of legal action against Sunlight Microsystems.

The worth of a patent is the difference between the worth of the product with a patent and also without it.

If the patent is certified, after that its value is the web present worth of future nobilities obtained from licensing, plus incremental profits earned from the market monopoly secured by the patent. You can also check https://midhudsonnews.com/2020/05/10/how-does-inventhelp-support-new-inventors/

Certainly, if the patent is not implemented, it is not worth very much at all.

How to Use a Patent

A patent can be utilized in two major ways. If you are making or marketing a patented product, the key use of the patent is to shield market share by keeping rivals at bay. If you are a scientist, you only intend to generate any kind of earnings may be by accrediting the patent.

There are 2 types of licenses: a carrot license and also a stick certificate. The carrot certificate is a volunteer license in which the prospective licensee, often a maker or marketing expert is not utilizing the patented modern technology and also is under no obsession to accredit the patent from you.

Patents safeguarding sophisticated innovations developed in the academic community normally lend themselves to carrot licensing. Stick licensing occurs when the potential licensee is currently generating as well as marketing your invention, consequently devoting patent violation.

The slogan of stick licensing is "License my patent otherwise ..." (Read: I will see you in court!). Most infringers will make the negative, however not unproven, a computation that they will possibly not be taken legal action against-- usually, they are right, as a lot of patent owners fall short to apply for their patents. Hence, stick licensing will work just if the hazard of litigation is legitimate. No hazard shows up to exist when it comes to carrot licensing. Or does it?

Allow's say you offer your most recent invention to a possible licensee and also persuade them of the overwhelming advantages of your innovation. What quits the other party from thanking you for enlightening them on the advantages of your invention and afterward proceeding and also marketing it without a permit from you?

A confidentiality arrangement, which most manufacturers reject to sign in the top place, even if carried out, will barely stop a business from using your technology. That's because the confidentiality agreement can not protect openly readily available details.

A patent is a public record, in which the invention is completely divulged, allowing anybody with sufficient manufacturing and advertising and marketing capabilities to produce and also disperse it. The only thing that stops a possible licensee from benefiting from your invention is the threat of a patent infringement legal action.

Thus, every carrot license is a stick license in disguise. Such words as infringement or litigation are never discussed in carrot license negotiations, they are in the back of everybody's mind. As well as, once more, unless the overlooked hazard of possible future lawsuits is qualified, why would anyone take a license?

You can trust the prospective licensee to ask their patent attorneys just how simple it would certainly be to prevent or "layout around" your patent. Only a well-written patent combined with the capacity and also the resolve to implement it may urge a prospective licensee to think about certifying it. Find out more advice https://www.techtimes.com/articles/249715/20200518/how-inventhelp-gets-new-inventors-onto-the-right-path.htm

Determining Just How to Apply for Your Patent

Every inventor submitting a patent application needs to stop briefly as well as ask a concern: Do we have the wherewithal to apply for the patent if it is infringed?

Several companies, particularly academic and research institutions, are litigation-averse. This undermines the value of their patent portfolios. If the message navigates that a particular organization hesitates to impose its licenses, why would certainly anybody license that company's licenses when the copyrighted invention could be infringed without major danger of legal effect?

Nevertheless, it is inadequate to have a proper perspective toward patent enforcement. This mindset requires to be supported by a healthy savings account. With the typical expense of patent violation litigation in the UNITED STATE exceeding $2 million, patent litigation is the sporting activity of the abundant. Unless you are used by a well-financed company that stands prepared to bankroll the litigation, you may not be in a setting to carry out your threat-- whether explicit or implied.

For tiny businesses and also specific developers, there are alternate approaches to financing patent violation litigation. One is to locate a law office that will represent you on a backup basis.

This means that as opposed to invoicing you by the hour, the law practice will certainly obtain a share in the monetary recuperation, which may be an award of damages to the winner of a suit or licensing charges worked out in a negotiation. A typical backup cost might be between one 3rd and one half of the recuperation.

[retro-scorpio]

Story Time

So, I’m sure a fair number of you are aware of the stereotype of girls/women not being medically diagnosed as autistic simply because they weren’t a man, even if they themselves knew that they were autistic. There are even YouTubers that have had this type of experience and have talked about it in their videos. These are valid experiences, and this story isn’t me disputing that fact. However, what I do want to do is to share my experience, because it would seem as though it occurred in a mirror universe to a lot of people.

Some context: I have what is called verbal apraxia, which in simple terms is a neurological disorder that prevents me from speaking properly at all times due to the nerves between my brain and my mouth not always wanting to fire correctly. Think of it as word vomit, only it’s something that I have to be on the lookout for constantly, rather that it being something that happens every once in a while.

Verbal apraxia has been a condition I’ve had my entire life, and it resulted in me not talking until I was about three/four years old, and even that wasn’t where it should have been during that time. Only, when I was a toddler, there really wasn’t a whole lot of information on verbal apraxia. What there was plenty of information on was autism, and my mom thought that maybe that was what I had due to me showing other markers for it in addition to the lack of verbal communication. Upon further research, however, she discovered that autism wasn’t exactly what I had. I may have had a few markers, but those markers were things that could also be contributed to other things. The key markers of autism weren’t really present. So, my mom went to one of the top psychologist focusing on autism in the nation at the time (it was the early 2000s) to get an official diagnosis. The doctor confirmed what my mom was thinking: that while I had some markers for autism, I didn’t have enough of them to be deemed autistic (and it didn’t have to do with the fact that I was a girl). As it turns out, what I had was verbal apraxia.

Fast forward about a year to when I was first starting US public school. The district psychologist at the time took a couple looks at me and said that I was autistic. My mom and step-dad told her no, I wasn’t autistic, but she was insistent, even going so far as to wanting to put that I was autistic in my school file. This is after the consultation with the other psychologist (who was one of the top in the nation in the field of autism) and my diagnosis of verbal apraxia. My parents told the school psychologist this, and she did eventually drop the issue, but I have a feeling that, if she was asked about this today (and if she even remembers me), she would still think that I’m autistic.

And that’s the story about how the school system I was going to wanted to treat me like I was autistic, even though I was not. Thank goodness for my parents being in my corner. I have a few more strange school stories if anyone would like to hear them.

[againstshame]

A small interview with autistic author Sarah Kurchak

She’s celebrating the release of her memoir, I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder, this week (actually a while ago but has anything this year happened on schedule? Better late than never, right?) I offered to interview her for this blog, and she agreed!

I wanted to talk about her book on this blog because one of the big topics this book deals with is the self-annihilating impulse that we talked about in this post, the shame-related desire to remake yourself into a fundamentally different (non-disabled) person. Kurchak describes her book as a cautionary tale about how harmful putting on an act like that can be.

[ID: cover of the book, a photo of Sarah Kurchak, with pink-dyed hair and a black shirt.]

Please give a brief summary of the book.

I Overcame My Autism And All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder is a collection of moderately connected essays that use moments from my life as a minimally successful late diagnosed autistic person to highlight bigger issues that face many autistic people. Basically, I didn’t want to write my own story and leave it at that. Nor did I think my life was interesting enough to merit an entire book. But I seem to have a facility for writing about autism in a way that intrigues non-autistic people, so I wanted to see if I could use that talent for the greater good in book form.

My basic and slightly muddied thesis is that my life is decent enough, but it hasn’t been without hardships, and that some of those hardships could have been remedied with better services for autistic people, and greater acceptance and understanding. And if someone like me, who has had a number of advantages in life, is struggling as much as I am, how much harder is it for so many other autistic people? And how much more are we currently failing them?

What's this book's origin story? How did you end up writing this memoir rather than some other book, and how did you find your publisher?

“It’s in the book!” feels like such a dick answer to me. But if anyone is interested in a longer (or, arguably, too long) explanation for how I wound up getting an agent, writing this book, and finding a publisher for it, you can find it in the introduction. Along with references to Cronenberg’s The Brood and Balloon Okada.

The short version is that an agent liked a story that I’d published in a literary outlet, and asked if I wanted to write a book. I tried to talk her into repping a novella about slash fiction and pro wrestling that I wrote in my early twenties. Somehow that did not put her off and she gently guided me toward non-fiction ideas. I’d had the title in mind for years at that point, so I threw that out. Then I started to flesh out what kind of book I’d put under it. I still don’t think it’s a proper memoir, but that word’s on the cover, so I guess it is?

(I realize how lucky I am to have found myself in this unlikely situation. But I always feel the need to point out that it took me 18 years of professional writing to find this “overnight” “success.”)

What's one thing you wish you had known about or had access to when you were younger and undiagnosed?

I wish that I could have grown up with a more wholistic idea of myself. When I excelled in school but struggled on the playground, a lot of well-meaning adults who were just trying to help a suffering child get through the day started to tell me that the other kids were jealous of me because I was smart, and that’s why I was being bullied and couldn’t make friends. And that’s a very easy narrative to cling to when you’re a scared and lonely child who is desperate for any sense of self-worth.

It helped me survive school, but I don’t think it benefitted me at all in the long run. It took me a long time to come to terms with how ableist and racist the very concept of intelligence is. I’d grown up thinking it was the only thing I had going for me! I didn’t want to give it up! I wish I could have figured out how harmful the concept was much earlier in life and established a sense of self that was more aware of — and cool with — my strengths and weakness. And more rooted in the idea that my worth came from the fact that I was a human being, and not because I was ostensibly “special” in some way.

A while ago I did an event on this blog where people sent in examples of fiction that helped them feel better about being neurodivergent or disabled, stories that showed them what their future could look like or made them feel less alone. Was there a story that did that for you?

Community premiered a few months after I was diagnosed and I can’t even begin to put into words how much Abed helped me during those early years. And how meaningful Abed and Troy’s friendship was.

Strangely, even though there is nothing at all autistic coded about her, and not a lot I’d consider neurodivergent about her, George in Dead Like Me really spoke to me, too. I think I was just really into the idea of someone getting a late start in life where they could make up for what they hadn’t done before, even if they could never really go back to what their original life was. (This is the only way in which I’d ever view my diagnosis as analogous to death, by the way. It was really quite a positive and helpful experience!)

And a bonus special interest question: Was there a specific match, storyline, or wrestler that made you into a wrestling fan instead of a casual viewer? What was it that caught your attention?

It was Chris Jericho.

In late 2000, I decided to try watching wrestling. I had always hated it, but my new boyfriend (now my husband) was really into it. And he seemed to have good taste otherwise, so I figured I should at least try to understand what the hell had gone wrong with him on this one thing. So I tuned into Raw, and there was this little lippy Canadian causing all sorts of shit. And that was it! All I wanted to do was watch this bratty asshole with a sharp tongue and a hair trigger crying reflex antagonize his opponents and then get flustered if and when things didn’t work out properly. And that’s exactly what I did for about 18 years. Even when I lost interest in wrestling in general, I still loved Jericho.

But it ended as suddenly as it began. Jericho attacked Tetsuya Naito in New Japan in 2018. Other members of LIJ jumped in to protect him. There was a split second where I thought Jericho was going to hit Hiromu Takahashi. And I involuntarily squealed “DON’T YOU TOUCH HIM” at my laptop screen. Friendship ended with Jericho. Hiromu Takahashi is my best wrestler now. (Well, one of the best, at least. Tetsuya Endo forever.)

[lightsintheskye]

Ahhh I have a lot of messages in my inbox right now (over like ...2000; ) but this one just jumped out at me from yesterday and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m sorry if this is a long long response (l’ll screenshot it as a textpost so it doesn’t clog someones feed) but I just, with how hypercritical social media makes us about ourselves and others its important to acknowledge bullying and how exposed we are to it. If anyone reading this is also struggling with this topic right now please read below. Remember I’m not a licensed therapist but I’ve had a lot of experience with bullying so read below if you like-

For the most part, the big two are finding a positive support network and focusing on things that make me happy. I’m not unscathed, I have clinically diagnosed MDD, Anxiety, and PSTD, but I’ve learned to manage these things. If you need to take a break from social media, do it- do your best to be your own curator of positivity. If social media is one of your few solaces, create a special account for yourself that just follows what you love. Remember that YOU are the one in control of your social media feed and are responsible for what you see.

1. Support Network:

Find a group that you can trust, and do you best to talk about your feelings and experiences in a constructive way(see no 5). That being said respect your support network, always ask if it’s ok to vent to them and don’t treat others as emotional dumping grounds. I know trusting people is incredibly hard, I still struggle with it (my own support network is literally two people but I also practice a lot of behavioral therapy since a lot of medications unfortunately don’t work for me) but you can not go through life second guessing every action (fuck you, anxiety). If your situation is such that you don’t think you have friends you can talk to, your college might have a therapist you can talk to for free. There are also online sites and hotlines that offer the same free services. Sometimes it takes a few therapists to find one that works for you, but sometimes its easier to talk to a friend rather a stranger- and therapy might not always be available to everyone. Google is your friend for finding constructive options.I know it’s hypocritical since this is a tumblr post, but do research on your own from reputable sites and sources for healthy coping.

2. Don’t bottle it up: I used to be incredibly quiet about any sort of stress or bullying I received in the past. I used to lie about never being bullied or harassed after middle school, but the only person that ended up hurting is myself. I don’t think I’ll ever be perfectly fine, but talking about it helps more than you think. I’m not saying to blast it out to everyone exactly how you’re feeling 24/7 but take time to trade woes with a close friend every week or so. Just don’t forget to celebrate the good when and where you can- this world has so much that makes it suck, but there’s also a lot that we can enjoy- too.

3. Bullies seriously suck, but don’t become one:

In my experience, very few bullies ‘grow up’ if they’re still bullying people in college, they just kinda get better at hiding it. This usually manifests behind passive aggressive comments, and or just talking behind someones back and hiding behind a screen to say things. Even in grad school I’ve witnessed "adults” being shitty to each other twitter, on insta, on discord, on tumblr, on A03- you name it. Bullies can come from anywhere, and be anyone, and bully for any reason. People who were bullied sometimes become bullies themselves in a way to gain back sense of power- but their own abuse doesn’t make abusing others right. In the past I’ve had comments and emails telling me everything from childish bullying to literally telling me to kill myself. Negative comments about my appearance, the way I talk, the way I draw, my hobbies,my choice of schooling (which ??????),  harassment about my choice of friends and the people I associate myself with. People who seek negativity will find any reason to slight another. But know that harassment is harassment regardless of why, so even if you’re angry bullying someone back really wont change much. I can think of nothing more toxic than willingly engaging with your bullies in order to find ways to ‘get back’ at them. The beauty of being online is that you can just leave a site, hit a block button, and even make a new name for yourself. Do your best to limit interaction with them. Do not put yourself in situations that involve them. Do not cyber stalk them (yes, repeatedly checking their tumblr/fb/instagram to criticize and mock their every post, or find every person they talk to “whistle-blow” on them is a form of defamation of character and cyber-stalking). Doing this will only invite negative emotions and make you start to hyper fixate. It’s an easy two way street that will invite people to do the same to you- and unless you’re the next coming of Christ someone will inevitably find out something negative about you. Do not hold people to standards that you yourself cannot achieve. You may be more morally inclined than your bully but no one one is perfect. You will never be able to please everyone. It is not your job to do so. 

4. Report, Put Away, Ignore: If these people are saying things to you that can be documented and reported to your school (assuming these are classmates that you can prove have done things) then take a screenshot if possible and report it. It’s a gamble to have anything done about it, some schools are shit about bullying, but some schools aren’t. Recently in my case, in grad school there was a bullying incident and we were incredibly afraid of what the bullies would do if they found out who exactly reported them, but thankfully I had friends help us report it- so multiple reports from anonymous sources made it hard for them to pin point it was someone finally standing up. Some colleges will take defamation of character (which, as an adult, is really what a lot of bullying is) very seriously and amazingly- that bully completely changed. I would not call them a friend, but for now their apology seems sincere and they’ve worked towards being a better person. So, if you choose to report it, after reporting, put that shit away and don’t keep looking at it, find a way to make it really hard to look at over and over. Put it in a folder within a folder within seven folders if you have to BECAUSE- 5. You HAVE to work towards moving ON or it will consume you.

Way, way easier said than done. I’m not saying so much ‘be the better person’ as to just ...seriously remove yourself from that shit as fast as you can. You owe nothing to the people that hurt you, but giving them more of your time over and over if you have the option not to is only going to end in you getting angrier or more upset yourself. The first time something hurts you, put a warning label on it, if it continues to hurt you, do not engage.

The internet can be so toxic- a lot of bullying is masked as “call-out culture” from minor things that happened years ago, it validates the worst forms of “coping” possible. It creates such a bad system of alarm fatigue for when real issues are happening, and creates a hive mind of abuse and hyper criticism where everyone is looking for the next target. There’s an extreme difference if a “bully” disagrees with your favorite ship or show and harasses you about it, or if someone is literally harassing you as an individual by telling you to self harm or worse. Treat your emotional scars like an actual wound; if you keep picking at it and ripping off the band aid to see if its still there its never going to heal. The scars might still be there and will still be visible on some days, but you’ll no longer be bleeding at the slightest brush. Learn to grow, learn to let others grow. Learn to trust again, and learn to try and be happy with who you are and who your friends are as you know them.  A big reason why I stepped away form the internet is that I found myself looking to validation in terms of popularity. And when i finally had it- I realized how toxic it ended up being for my health. I’d spend hours just to make a comic even at the cost of sleep or food, and 100 positive comments couldn’t stop my brain from fixating on ten that were negative or downright harassment. Even as I step back on the internet, I’m doing it from a much better place internally. It’s so so important not to get lost in numbers and online “validation.” Please just know eventually things will get better, and those that matter will stick around to be there to see your growth. People will always find something to give you shit about, but only you can determine how much it affects you. Recognize your emotions, process them, and take responsibility for them. Let your self-worth be determined by your own actions and words, not the actions or words of others.

[starrybethany]

Clayton Keller: Part 6

Word count: 2252

I groan, stirring against whatever hard surface I’m laying on. Wait, why am I laying on a hard surface and not my bed? My eyes open and I recognize the legs of my dining room chairs before anything else. Did I really sleep on my kitchen floor last night? Why would I do that?

My muscles cry as I lift myself into a sitting position and my head throbs as I rise to my feet. Oh, I passed out while drunk. That’s why.

There’s already a bottle of Tylenol and a glass of water sitting on my kitchen counter, along with a note from Tyler wishing me luck after getting as blacked out drunk as I did. I guess all of the stress got to me last night with the cherry on top being the fight with Clayton that I figured the only way to make it better for a little while would be alcohol.

My muscles and my headache relax significantly as I shower, pulling on some leggings and a baggy sweatshirt, letting my wet hair fall over my shoulders as I gag over some crackers in the kitchen.

My phone is nowhere to be found in this room and I didn’t see it in the bathroom or my bedroom, so I head to the living room to find it. It takes ten minutes but I finally find it in between the pages of a book, which I should have noticed immediately since the width increased immensely.

All I want to do today is sleep and watch movies from the early 2000s, but I grab my backpack and head towards the library knowing I should study for these midterms so I don’t flunk out of this college that I’m oh so desperately trying to afford. It’s not as hard with a paycheck from Clayton, though.

I’m two units deep into my early American literature class when someone slides into the booth across from me. I finish the line I’m reading before looking up, smiling when my eyes meet Paige’s eyes.

I feel bad for leaving her last night, especially just to have a shitty interaction with Clayton. Instead of that I could’ve been comforting my old friend and shoving some more Oreos down her throat.

“I wanted to thank you for being there for me last night. I know we’ve kind of drifted apart, but I’m glad to know that I can always turn to you,” she tells me in a hushed voice.

My chest gets warm at her words. I was feeling so guilty for ditching her but all along she just cherished that I was there in the first place. “You’re welcome, Paige. Andrew’s a douchebag, you know that, right?”

She shrugs. “I’m getting there.”

I turn back to my laptop while she pulls out a notebook, scanning along the pages with her finger. An hour passes before she speaks again.

“So what are you doing Wednesday night?”

I bite my lip in thought. “Probably the same thing I’m doing right now.”

“Well, if you’d like to take a break for a couple of hours, let me know. I got tickets for the Coyotes game against the Blues and I was supposed to take Andrew but-”she shakes her head. “Just let me know by tomorrow if you’d like to go.”

“I’d love to go,” I smile at her. I might not know how hockey works despite the WAGs trying to explain it to me, but I am a woman who loves to see a bunch of hot, grown men sweaty and beating each other up. Plus, Clayton will be playing, and I want to watch and partially understand this time to see what he does that makes him so rich.

“Okay, cool, I’ll pick you up at six. You still live in the same apartment, right?” She asks, packing up her stuff. Some people give her looks as her volume has risen out of excitement, but I ignore them, nodding to her question. “See you then.”

“Bye.”

I watch her leave, pulling out my phone and beginning a text to the hockey player himself.

Hey, sorry for how things went the other night. Just wanted to let you know that a friend and I will be coming to watch your game against the Blues on Wednesday. Score a goal for me.

I hesitate before sending the message. I don’t like to apologize, deep down I know when I should apologize but I tend to not do it because of the issues I have buried within. It isn’t fair for the other person, especially for someone who might as well be putting his name on the check for Debbie, and I identify that it’s an issue that I need to work on.

I click send before I chicken out. I’m afraid of the response- I don’t know if he’ll still be angry with me, or perhaps even more angry- angry enough to cancel our contract or lower my pay.

He responds right away, just asking me where the seats are. I’m a little annoyed at the question, feeling like he should at least acknowledge the apology, but let him know that I have no clue where we’re sitting.

He leaves it at that and I go back to studying.

When Paige texts me details about our hangout on Wednesday night I tell Clayton where our seats are. Section 205, the middle section of the rink on the home side. He gives me a one word answer so I’m still left in the dark of how he feels.

Paige doesn’t own a jersey and neither do I so we just wear nice sweaters and jeans to the rink, unsure of how you exactly should dress for a hockey game. We find our seats and sit down, making small talk as we wait for warmups to begin.

When the players skate onto the ice, everybody cheers in excitement and my eyes find Clayton almost immediately.

It’s electrifying to watch him doing what he loves. He skates with a passion and a purpose, like every step and every move he’s going to make will be better than the last. He lifts his head towards the two hundred section and I lean in to talk into Paige’s ear. “Um, I should probably tell you something.”

She looks at me curiously. “What is it?”

“You see number nine? On the Coyotes?” I try my best to point at him. She nods. “He’s actually my uh, sugar daddy.”

She laughs, raising her eyebrows at me. “Are you kidding?”

I shake my head.

“You have a sugar daddy?”

“I have to pay the tuition somehow,” I defend, surveying her expression.

“I’m not judging,” she quickly reassures me, “That’s very progressive of you. Get that coin, girl.”

I grin at her, returning my attention to the ice. Almost as soon as I do my eyes meet familiar green ones. Green ones that I was looking at the other night while he was telling me that I’m not spending enough time with him.

I see him smile behind his helmet and the pressure from my heart lifts with the action. Thank god he’s not still mad at me. I don’t know why I cared so much anyways- I know he wouldn’t break the contract or pay me less, that’s not the type of guy that he is.

Maybe it’s because I had just a little bit of fear that he would leave. If he left I wouldn’t get to hear his crappy jokes anymore or listen to him talk about Fortnite or ignore Christian’s smirks in the morning as I leave their house.

Clayton maintains eye contact with me, lifting his hand to his ear in a phone motion. My eyebrows furrow in confusion.

“He wants me to call him? Right now? But he’s on the ice right now,” I ask Paige.

He must sense my confusion because he puts his hand in front of him, pointing at it with his finger like he’s pressing different ‘buttons.’

“Oh, he wants me to text him?” I inquire.

“I think he just wants you to watch your phone for when he texts you,” Paige clarifies.

“He’s not good at this whole charades thing,” I giggle, watching all of the players skate around the rink, stretch, and shoot pucks at the net.

They leave the ice and I pull out my phone, waiting patiently for it to ring or vibrate or do whatever the hell Clayton’s going to do.

It vibrates with a text and I open it, immediately rolling my eyes.

Clayton: Stay after the game.

Of course he wants to instantly get back into the argument as soon as I think we’re done. The game starts and hockey is a lot more confusing without help than I thought it would be. I would ask Paige a question and she’d give me an answer of what she thinks the answer is, and when she has a question I return the favor. When we definitely don’t know the answer, we use Professor Google.

The Coyotes win in the end, that much I know, and Paige and I remain in our seats searching up the answers to our questions while we wait for some more communication from Clayton.

A woman appears after a while, leading us downstairs to wait outside the locker room. Some of the players leave the locker room in their suits, giving us curious glances on their way towards their cars.

Christian grins like a cheshire cat as soon as he lands his eyes on me and I roll my eyes, giving his shoulder a shove.

“Oh hey, Y/N. Are you coming over tonight?” He questions, wiggling his eyebrows in a suggestive way. Paige giggles at that and I see Christian’s eyes sparkle at the sound.

“I don’t even know anymore, Christian,” I answer.

“Who’s your friend?” He asks, eyeing Paige with a flirty smile.

She looks shy and I grab her hand, feeling overprotective since she just had a traumatic and recent breakup.

“Out of your league, dude. Get out of here.”

He rolls his eyes but gives us a wave, heading down the hall. “See you at home, Y/N!”

“Sorry about that, Paige,” I apologize to her.

“No, it’s fine, um,” she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, “He’s actually kind of cute.”

I give her a soft smile. “Just let me know when you’re ready. I can give him your number.”

She nods. The intimate moment is broken as Clayton leaves the locker room, heading our way as soon as he sees us. I introduce the two to each other and the brunette turns to me.

“Are you coming home with me tonight? I won’t be playing Fortnite, don’t worry,” he adds a snarky comment.

I raise my eyebrows at that. “I apologized, okay? Remember when I apologized on Monday and you completely ignored it?”

“Remember how you completely ignored the fact that you’re in a contract to spend time with me?” He retorts.

“I don’t have to spend every second of every day with you, Clay-””Hey, uh, guys? People are starting to stare,” Paige interrupts us worriedly.

I look around. It’s true. Some of the workers and lingering people are so clearly eavesdropping on our argument- well, now they know that Clayton has a sugar baby. Even though I’m shameless, I know better than to continue this argument in a public place.

“Let’s go back to my place,” Clayton nods towards the hallway towards the parking garage.

I turn to look at Paige but she nods at the tall man. “Go, I’ll be fine. Work out whatever you need to work out.”

I give her a gracious smile, falling into step beside Clayton as we head down the hall. “Go to my place, I have some studying to do tonight after this conversation.”

~

Clayton and I sit down after getting back to my apartment, having a conversation where we’re both completely honest with each other and laying out all of our thoughts and emotions. I think we’ve both come to the realization that although we both lead busy lives, we need to make time for each other. However, that doesn’t mean dropping everything at the other’s beck and call.

“Say it,” Clayton gives me a toothy grin.

“I promise to make time for you.” I stick out my pinky finger. “Now you say it.”

“I promise to respect it when you can’t make time for me.” He attaches his pinky finger to mine and we shake on it.

“Okay, now I need to study before we do anything else,” I inform him, grabbing the textbook from the coffee table and pulling it into my lap.

He pulls me across the table into his lap, looking over my shoulder. “What is this?”

“Anatomy,” I answer, trying to find the place I left off at when we left for the game.

“Gross.” He says that but I can feel him reading over my shoulder, even resting his chin on my shoulder to get a better view.

A half an hour passes before Clayton gets antsy, shifting below me and turning his head.

“Okay, time to pay attention to me now,” he declares, pushing the book off of my lap and onto the floor.

“Clayton!” My protests fall on deaf ears as he yanks me below him, hovering over me and pressing his lips onto mine.

I can’t even help but to laugh.

[wot-tidbits]

Live Signing Session—Dragonmount Patreon Stream

SOURCE

SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE SERIES!

QUESTION:

It has been 13 years since you were selected by Harriet to finish the Wheel of Time. After 13 years have passed, like, has the shock worn off yet?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

Yes and no. There are times when I look back and I just I’m like that was really a surreal event in my life. Nothing quite can ever compare to getting a phone call being asked to finish the Wheel of Time. I look back and I’m like how did that even happen?

For those who don’t know, I didn’t apply for it. Harriet just called me and it’s really, really strange. At the same time the fact that I am a best-selling author has kind of settled in because I have to deal with it every day and I’m very used to it at this point. And so the public’s attention being on me, I have gotten used to that. The fact that I got that random phone call still is really weird when you look back at. I don’t know if you have things in your life like that, where you’re like: “Man, that really happened!” That is really strange, like winning the lottery, right? I always describe it as winning the lottery that you didn’t know you’d entered. It’s more like actually getting an inheritance you didn’t know you were getting, but someone you loved of course had to die for you to get the inheritance. So it’s still wrapped up in weird emotions for me.

QUESTION:

The way that Harriet became aware of you was because her friend Elise Matheson was printing out blog posts and other news clippings that were online where there was a news report or tribute to Robert Jordan and yours was on that list and Harriet read that and ran with it from there. So it almost seems to me that you’ve written some amazing things, but maybe that blog post might have been the most important of your career in some ways.

BRANDON SANDERSON:

The single most significant three paragraphs in my entire career are probably that little blog post. […] The weird thing is that I was late. I spent about a week thinking about, “What do I write?” and everybody had tributes come out like the day after and I didn’t jump on that. You see me posting things later when I do blog post reactions. I often am like, “I want to think about this.” And so if I hadn’t waited who knows if that would have come up in the search results.  First, because it was brand new when Elise was looking for things. Who knows, if I’d waited one more day it wouldn’t have popped up? If I’d written it the week before, maybe it wouldn’t have either. That’s just one of those things, right?

QUESTION:

What would you say to 2007 Brandon?  

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I have read this book where you go back in time, and it never turns out well. I would not go back in time and say anything to myself because I would end up as my own grandfather somehow. And then I would need, like, Christopher Lloyd to show up and help me fix all the problems in my life.

But if I take it non-jokingly, I don’t know. I’ve never been asked this one before. It’s usually your young writer self, what would you say? I honestly have no idea. Maybe I would say it’s gonna be alright. You’re gonna do a good job. Don’t stress this as much as you are. But maybe it’s stressing it that made me do a good job? And I haven’t stressed over a book as much as those books ever. Except maybe my very first release with Elantris. But I am not high stress person, so even that level of stress is nothing compared to what I know a lot of other people stress about.

The nice thing is that by 2007 I was confident in my writing. There were things I needed to learn. There were going to be some hard things I needed to learn and I learned them over the next five years. And it was a tough growing period of writing.

I might say take another stab at Mat once you think you got him. Listen to Jason (Denzel) when he says Mat’s off. Because you (Jason) were the first to point that out to me. I might say Padan Fain. A lot of people are going to think there needs to be a little more. Can you write like 2000 more words on the Padan Fain narrative arc for a Memory of Light? Remember to do that. Brandon, they’re gonna split into three books anyway. Stop stressing about trying to get them all into one book. They are not gonna let that happen. Tor’s not gonna throw that money away. They are going to insist on three books. So plan it that way from the beginning and maybe the timeline issues and Towers of Midnight would have been solved. I’m mostly looking at warning myself to prepare things for the future.

QUESTION:

You and I have talked about that in the past. Rand had a very climactic moment at the end of The Gathering Storm. And then you had some moments but it largely became Perrin and Mat’s book in Towers of Midnight. And then we got back to Rand again…                    

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I actually like that breakdown. I don’t think I’d change that. I think that Rand in Towers of Midnight being a little bit like Rand in the Dragon Reborn where you’re getting some distance from Rand, because he’s gone through a major change and you’re seeing him externally for a little while.

Actually, I think that’s a selling point of the Dragon Reborn and I like having echoed that in my three, where you know that distance [is there] and then you get back in his head and you’re like: “No, this is the Rand I still love”. This is the same person, he’s just developed. He’s changed a little bit. And that distance, that time with distance, it just gives you a different perspective on the character.

Like I said you are in Rand’s head in the Dragon Reborn, but he feels like a different character, and then we get our Rand back in book 4. I really like how Jim pulled that off. I wasn’t doing that intentionally, but in hindsight looking back, it feels like the right way to do that.

I would try to fix the timeline issues though.  I did a lot of work in the Gathering Storm when it was one book to overlap Perrin’s climax and Rand’s climax at the kind of center point of the story which became the two endings of Towers of Midnight and the Gathering Storm. And because those originally had been overlapping back and forth timelines and were split into two books—which again I kind of like how it went—it was clunky since it wasn’t designed that way from the get-go.

QUESTION:

About the deleted chapters you did for the charity novels and are there anymore that might appear?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

No, the only other scene I think I’ve mentioned before; I have like that brief like two-page scene where ladies weave the bridal wreath for Rand. I’ve talked about that before. That’s the only significant chunk they got cut that’s left and it’s only like two pages. The ones were like full things, so someday we’ll find a place for that. I don’t think we have yet, but someday we’ll find a place for that, but it’s only two pages. It is real short.

Did I tell you why that got cut? I should mention it. So it was actually really cool. I wanted to get Rand engaged, have the bridal wreath and have all three of them like weave it together and kind of use some Aiel tradition there and whatnot. And it was a really great scene. I enjoyed it. Everybody liked it.

Then we put the book together. Because often I will write—when I have a large number of viewpoints, I will write a chunk of viewpoints from a character’s viewpoint, and then at the end is when I really start putting things together and then I have to smooth between these things and make sure that the pacing is right. Because you don’t want all sorts of dry scenes together. You don’t want too many action scenes together, unless it’s at the end where you do want a lot of action scenes, and you want to kind of be bouncing back and forth. There’s just a rhythm and feel to it that usually I have a pretty good instinct [for] while I’m writing knowing how they’re going to fold together.

But once in a while you get something that just sticks out like a sore thumb and this was one. Because it was opposite the Talmanes’ scenes going in Caemlyn and like dramatic scenes of people getting stabbed by myrddraal and nearly dying and all this stuff. And it was more powerful stuff. It was really nice tense stuff and then you jump back and the girls were like “Tee-hee, I am like this branch that I’m weaving into the bridal wreath. It has thorns!” And it just did not work!

I’m making it sounds sillier than it was. It wasn’t that silly, but it did not fit thematically. Harriet was like “Oh, this does not match at all.” I’m like “Yeah, you are totally right.” So we cut that one up, which made me feel sad because I did want to get them engaged. I know a lot of people have been waiting for that, but it had to go just for the strength of the opening narrative. That one’s around. It’s fun. You can imagine [it] exactly as what it is. All three go out and gather different things to put into the thing and you don’t seem them gathering, they just come together and say “Here, I brought this. It’s a good match for us because of this” and they kind of weave it all together. Maybe someday we’ll get that but there’s not a whole lot left.

Getting the Perrin through the Ways out—like, I had wanted to find a place for that for a while because I really liked that sequence. I’ve mentioned before that when I look back at it, I’m like, “it needs a lot of revision,” so I actually had to spend a lot more time revising that sequence for the charity anthology than I did the other one, which I just kind of chopped up and it was good to go. Because that had lasted all the way until the last edit, but the Perrin scenes got cut out earlier after we did a bunch of just timeline rejiggering and things like that. Harriet had not been pleased with my depiction of the Ways, and looking back—I think I mentioned this in the Forward—she was right. And that took a lot of revision to make feel right, which I wasn’t planning on spending, like I spent two weeks revising that little sequence for the charity anthology, but I wanted it to be good.

It was fun because when I sent it to Maria to look through to make sure I hadn’t broken anything too big continuity-wise even though it’s not canon, she wrote back. She’s like “This was so nice, being able to actually read Wheel of Time and edit it again.” It was like a bright spot. And that’s kind of how I had felt on it. So it was nice to work on but it was way more work than I expected. The bridal scene will not get similar treatment if we find a place for it in a future Unfettered or something like that.

QUESTION:

Aside from that do you have other scenes still remaining, deleted scenes that could potentially see the light of day?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I don’t think there is anything else at all. I don’t think there are even any scraps or fragments. Everything that Jim wrote I put in the book in some way. There is maybe some Q&A stuff that didn’t get in the book. In one of his Q&A’s with Maria in the notes he was talking about … No, no, this wasn’t from the Q&A. It was just notes from books back that they found dug in there that they were having Rand use the Choedan Kal. Jim had in the notes Rand using the male one at the end of the series but that one was destroyed. It was the access key that was destroyed. I’m like so do we find another access key or was this just old information contradicted other things? Because this was like he was writing book eight or something, he was thinking about doing that and they found a little note file for it. They’re like maybe we use these things, maybe we find another access key or whatnot.

There is stuff like that in the notes that would be fun to release. The fans could like imagine the what if because it’s entirely possible that rather than going with the Callandor solution, Jim would have gone with the Choedan Kal that he would have decided: “No, no, the right thing to do is to find another access key” or something like that or whatnot. And then you have a different twist on the ending using that. There are things like that that could be fun to see from the notes. I don’t know how much has been dug up, how much of it Harriet put in the library.

QUESTION:

Mat and Tuon are my favorite characters. Is there anything little or unknown about them that you can share with us?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

Everything I had from Jim that was in the notes I was given—now, remember, I had people look through the notes and give me the stuff that they thought was relevant, Maria and Alan did. So there’s entirely possibly like a lot of the things that are notes that I didn’t see were drafts of appendices that Robert Jordan added things to, and then taken out from like book 7 and 6 and 8 and stuff like that. And there might be things in there.

Everything I had either was in the books—or because that last scene was written by him, the one with Mat and Tuon in the epilogue—he had done a draft on that scene so I was pointing everything toward that scene to just get it in. So that I could drop it in as close as how he’d done it as possible. The only thing that I know is that Mat does go to Seanchan and that eventually he’s found in a gutter without his hat having gambled it all away. And he’s muttering “I lost it all” or “I gambled a lot away” or something like that. That’s in the notes for the outriggers.

The notes for the outriggers are three sentences and one of them is about Mat having lost it all. We can guess he goes to Seanchan. We can guess that he ruins, messes things up and then spends several books fixing them again which is how Mat basically rolls. That would be my guess.

We can guess that Perrin has to go. We think Perrin thinks he has to go to kill Mat. We don’t know but one of those sentences is Perrin is going travelling on a boat thinking about how he’s got to go kill a friend. So there’s got to be some tensions between the continents and things like that, and I would assume that hijinks ensued, but your imagination has got to go on this one. That is literally all I know about Mat and Tuon going forward.

Fun fact is that this was somewhere in the notes but they hadn’t shown it to me, I came up with a new name for Tuon and then Maria’s like: “Oh, Jim came up with one of these” and it was two letters off. We’d both come up with the like exact same new longer name for her. And that was cool, that I had been enough on the same wavelength. And we of course used his. But that’s kind of fun because I think we were both looking at the list of Old Tongue words and found something that worked together and came together and it sounds like fortune and that’s the same direction I’d gone.

Maybe he’d written something that had told me that I should go that direction but either way, that’s a fun thing. There is a little email from Maria saying: “Hey, we should use Jim’s name for this!” And then it was almost exactly the same. I felt  very cool on that day. I can’t remember what mine is because Fortuona ended up in the book but mine also started with f, o, r and then I think I had an extra syllable in there and I had Tuon in there as well but maybe my ending letters to it were different or something, I can’t remember.

QUESTION:

I know you’ve spoken a lot about that you’ve read some of these early scripts and…

BRANDON SANDERSON:

Yeah, I’ve read the first six. Still haven’t seen seven or eight.

QUESTION:

I know you’ve had a chance to talk to Rafe (Judkins). I am really curious what your take is going to be and how you’re going to be involved or how, if I can use the word “possessive” of it, that you’ll be when they hopefully get to the end of this saga. When they’re in their season seven or eight and it’s covering your books and to see how much they keep and change. And how much they’ll have to change because their previous changes will lead to, you know, have ripple effects.

BRANDON SANDERSON:

This is uncharted territory for me. And I have no idea. It could be like Game of Thrones where despite the changes they stay pretty much according to what are the big events, so what I wrote ends up there. But it could go completely different.

As I’ve said to people, I envision this as a new turning of the Wheel. It’s the same souls but in a different actual turning of the Wheel. It’s not the one that Jim and I worked on. It’s a different version of it. And so some of the same events are happening, others are different and being rearranged and so. I don’t know. Like my experience has been fantastic working with Rafe (Judkins) so far. But the sum total of my involvement is: I talked to Rafe and tell him what I felt about various scripts and things. I went on set one time and I was mostly there so they could interview me for b-roll to use in their “making of” and to actually let me meet the actors and things like that.

I am not a significant player in the series. I don’t know, maybe they will want me to be more of [one] when it gets to my books. My instincts say that I will become less and less needed. And I am not even sure how much I was needed right now because Rafe knows, has a vision, and is doing a good job with it.

I’ve been in his shoes before but it’s almost like the handoff, at least the way it’s supposed to work, between past presidents where they like leave a letter and are there for a phone call if you have a question for them, but mostly you find your own way. And that’s kind of how it is with me.

QUESTION:

Did you ask them about having a cameo?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I didn’t ask them about having a cameo, no. Maybe eventually in my own things I want to have a cameo but in the back of my mind I was like if I do a cameo I should do it when they get to the material I wrote. That’s more appropriate and so I haven’t asked for one yet. I hope the series takes off and then they get to mine and then we stick in a Brandon cameo.

For those who haven’t heard one of the things I want to do for my books when they get made is I want to die in various different—like I show up, I’m like the Kenny from South Park of the Cosmere or whatever. In every season there’s a version of me that dies in some horrible way, you know, just like a redshirt [from Star Trek] or something like that. I think that would be a lot of fun. You need people falling off the wall, getting eaten by koloss. I’m one of those people. Stuff like that. It just feels like revenge the characters could have on me and it could be this fun little thing. Stan Lee covered the cute cameo. I could cover the gruesome death cameo role.

QUESTION:

Having been through a full three books and years of working on it, what sort of high level general advice would you offer to the people, the writers in the writing room working on the series?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I actually talked to Rafe about some of this stuff. Number one was of course, Mat’s harder to write than he looks. I actually did say ask Jason (Denzel). Mat is harder to write than he looks.

I talked about the kind of soul of the Wheel of Time. What makes the Wheel of Time work. I remember talking to him about the interview that I heard with Jim where someone asked him summarize the Wheel of Time and he hummed and he didn’t want to do it but he eventually said what it’s like to be the normal person and be told you need to save the world. They put that burden upon you that you’ve got to save the world and you’ll probably die doing it and it’s not a burden you wanted. What do you do with that? If there’s a core theme of the Wheel of Time it is either that, or the core theme of old things become new and new things become old, used in interesting and different ways both with the characters and the world building and things like that.

I talked about some of that stuff. But really what worked for me and what anyone has to do who’s in this situation is read through the books, feel the books and then try to have that in mind when you’re working on it. Anytime I started to get lost, I just went back to the books and read what Jim had written and it pulled me back in. When I was working on—and I reread the Eye of the World when I was working on the deleted scene we talked about—it threatened to do that to me again. I was pulled in I’m like “Ooh, this and that!” and the books are just so descriptive, with lush use of language in a way that never feels like it bogs down. You just have to go to the books. He won’t do it the way I did it and that’s all right as long as he’s going to the books and he’s like feeling the soul of those books.

-------

Huge thank you to @highladyluck for being my editor.

[asafespotontheweb]

this post is a repost from <imgaybitheway.tumblr.com>, mainly because that blog seems to have since disappeared. this is really only for my personal keeping, as a reminder to the self. many of the typing errors have been fixed.

post begins below:

A lot of bisexual history has been erased so I figured I’d remind you all of some quotes and clear up any misunderstandings about bisexuality.

Bisexuality has been described as attraction regardless of gender for decades.

“I am bisexual because I am drawn to people regardless of gender.” - ‘The Bisexual Community: Are We Visible Yet?’, 1987

“In the midst of whatever hardships we [bisexuals] had encountered, this day we worked with each other to preserve our gift of loving people for who they are regardless of gender.” - Elissa M., “Bi Conference,” Bi Women, 1985

“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.” - Office Pink Publishing, “Introduction,” Bisexual Lives, 1988

“Being bisexual does not mean they have sexual relations with both sexes but that they are capable of meaningful and intimate involvement with a person regardless of gender.” - Janet Bode, “The Pressure Cooker,” View From Another Closet, 1976

“Over the past fifteen years, however, [one Caucasian man] has realized that he is ‘attracted to people -- not their sexual identity’ and no longer cares whether his partners are male or female. He has kept his Bi identity and now uses it to refer to his attraction to people regardless of their gender.” - Paula C. Rust, “Sexual Identity and Bisexual Identities,” Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, 1998

“To be bisexual is to have the potential to be open emotionally and sexually to people as people, regardless of their gender.” - Sex and Sexuality: A Thematic Dictionary of Quotations, 1993

Bisexuality doesn’t have to mean a person “sees gender”.

“[S]ome bisexuals say they are blind to the gender of their potential lovers and that they love people as people... For the first group, a dichotomy of genders between which to choose doesn’t seem to exist.” - Kathleen Bennett, “Feminist Bisexuality, a Both/And Option for an Either/Or World,” Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism, 1992

“Some bisexual respondents bypass the issue of ‘degrees’ of attraction to women and men by defining bisexuals as a humanistic, gender-blind way of relating to others. They see bisexuality as a way of loving the person, not their sex, or being nondiscriminatory in their attractions to others. For example, Ludwica wrote, ‘I feel as if I’m open to respond to the person, not just the gender.’ ” - “Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty, and Revolution” by Paula C Rust, 1995

“I believe that people fall in love with individuals, not with a sex... I believe most of us will end up acknowledging that we love certain people or, perhaps, certain kinds of people, and that gender need not be a significant category, though for some of us it may be.” - Ruth Hubbard, ‘There Is No ‘Natural’ Human Sexuality, Bi Women’ , 1986

“Some women who call themselves ‘bisexual’ insist that the gender of their lover is irrelevant to them, that they do not choose lovers on the basis of gender.” - Marilyn Murphy, “Thinking About Bisexuality,” Bi Women, 1991

“Some of us are bisexual because we do not pay much attention to the gender of our attractions.” - Bisexual Politics, Quiries and Visions, 1995

Bisexuality is inclusive of all genders.

“Who is this group for exactly? Anyone who identifies as bisexual or thinks they are attracted to or interested in all genders... This newly formed [support] group is to create a supportive, safe environment for people who are questioning their sexual orientation and think they may be bisexual.” - “Coming Out as Bisexual,” Bi Women, 1994

“It’s easier, I believe, for exclusive heterosexuals to tolerate (and that’s the word) exclusive homosexuals than [bisexuals] who, rejecting exclusivity, sleep with people not genders...” - Martin Duberman, 1974

“The bisexual community should be a place where lines are erased. Bisexuality dismisses, disproves, and defies dichotomies. It connotates a loss of rigidity and absolutes. It is an inclusive term.” - ‘Essay for the Inclusion of Transsexuals’, Kory Martin-Damon, 1995

“Bisexual - being emotionally and physically attracted to all genders.” - The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, “Out of the Past: Teacher’s Guide” 199?

“Bisexuality is much more than, and different from, the sensationalized ‘third choice, best of both worlds’ phenomena it’s made out to be. Bisexuality is an inclusive term that defines immense possibilities avalable to us, whether we act on them or not.” - “Bi Any Other Name”, Loraine Hutchens and Lani Ku'ahumany, 1991

“Bisexual consciousness, because of its amorphous quality and inclusive nature, posed a fundamental threat to the dualistic and exclusionary thought patterns which were -- and still are -- tenaciously held by both the gay liberation leadership and its enemies.” - “The Bisexual Movement’s Beginnings in the 70s”, Bisexual politics, Naomi Tucker, 1995

Bisexuality historically and currently includes transgender and nonbinary people.

“With respect to our integrity as bisexuals, it is our responsibility to include transgender people in our language, in our communities, in our politics, and in our lives.” - Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions by Naomi S Tucker, 1995

“Bisexuality is here defined as the capacity, regardless of the sexual identity label one chooses, to love and sexually desire both same -- and other -- gendered individuals. The term other-gendered is used here deliberately and is preferable to the term opposite -- gendered, because other -- gendered encompasses a recognition of the existence of transgendered and transsexual individuals, who may embrace gender identities other than [male and female.]” - “Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority” by Beth A. Firestein and Dallas Denny, 1996

“From the earliest years of the bi community, significant numbers of TV/TS [transvestite/transsexual] and transgender people have always been involved with it. The bi community served as a kind of refuge for people who felt excluded from the established gay and lesbian communities.” - Kevin Lano, “Bisexuality and Transgenderism,” Anything That Moves, 1998

“Bisexuality means having the capacity to be attracted to people of both major genders (don’t forget: there are gender minorities, too).” “As with the word Bisexual, they usually also imply that relations with gender minorities are possible.” - ‘Bisexuality: A Reader and a Sourcebook’, 1990

“There were a lot of transvestites and transsexuals who came to [the San Francisco Bisexual Center in the 1970s], because they were not going to be turned away because of the way they dressed.” - David Lourea in “Bisexual Histories in San Francisco in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” Dworkin, 2000 Journal of Bisexuality

“The actual lived non-binary history of the bisexual community and movement and the inclusive culture and community spirit of bisexuals are eradicated when a binary interpretation of our name for ourselves is arbitrarily assumed.” - “Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out” by Lani Ka’ahumanu, ????

“In the bisexual movement as a whole, transgendered individuals are celebrated not only as an aspect of the diversity of the bisexual community, but, because like bisexuals, they do not fit neatly into dichotomous categories.” - “Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics” by Paula C. Rust, 1995

[arda-tourism-board]

My writing (part 1)

I know nobody wants to hear about it, but I've been writing the same stories but slightly to the left each time since 2013 so I may as well share them. I haven't published anything, but i’m hoping to one day.

Also every time i do “quotes” it’s not a quote it’s just words to that effect.

Lillith (part 1)

Lillith (More/many) and Lucian (either enchantment or indebted) (the names were a joke about chosen ones that got out of hand), twin descendants of Arwen and Aragorn, recieve a Silmaril in their parent's will and they now have to hide it. An accident throws them back to the year 2000, before they've even been born, and they suddenly have to navigate the year in a new country, discovering the truth behind their long lost heritage while dodging the unawakened reborn Fëanorions and their "father", Kane Fey.

They start this by almost being run over by Nimrodel, who takes them in for some reason without question.

They don’t recognise them at first in the slightest, and Lucian (now Lukas) strikes up a friendship with “Tyler” before Nimrodel strikes it down.

They manage to befriend them, but things get more complicated when the eldest, "Russell," begins to remember who he was, and seems to recognise Lillith and her real name.

Without the binding of the oath, the Fëanorions are friendlier, less rageful, but their past life haunts them.

Lillith is apparently almost identical to someone they knew in Aman, who had a long affair and children with Caranthir, and disappeared with them around three years before the death of Finwë.

Lillith, who remembers nothing of this, and is most definitely human, is confused to say the least, but they just chalk it down to coincidence.

She and Caranthir - Matt - get closer anyway, but it doesn't work out because she feels he's trying to replace her with her apparent double.

Lucian gets involved with Idrillien - explain later - and begins getting involved with rediscovering their heritage even more. Lillith avoids them due to the political issues surrounding the Silmaril, opting to hide it instead.

Cut to 2020. Lillith has the Silmaril, and an accident occurs where she, her younger self, and her brother, are thrown back in time. This completes the 2020-2000 loop, and starts an 80,000 year loop.

Lillith (part 2) girl falls into middle earth is like, my brand.

Lillith is under a land with only starlight, the desert surrounding her and the only thing in her possession being the Silmaril.

In a fit of madness she eats it (yes I know the plot point is weird but stick with me). This connects her to the two trees, and gives her youth.

She eventually finds her way out of the desert and reaches the path of Eldar heading to Aman.

She joins them, learning the language with them and realising that she's in Arda. This is confirmed when they encounter Oromë, and he points at her and goes "wtf you're not an elf."

She ends up living in Alqualondë, but when she meets a young Morifinwë, she realises that the person she'd been jealous of and thought he was trying to replace her with was herself.

They have three children. Lillith refuses marriage. Marriage would bind her to stay by his side, and she knows what's coming next.

She steals her daughters away to Ennor, and spend the rest of her days in Rhûn, avoiding watching the inevitable.

In the end she falls in love with a Lindi (Nandorin) elleth, Ovranen (abound). Together they travel the world, visiting the most Eastern and Southern continents, eventually returning to Arda and Lillith finally meets Arwen and Aragorn, and finds out the fate of her daughters.

The first, named Helleneth (Sky Maiden), went to Doriath, and met and married Thranduil, a Sindarin Lord. She met her fate to grief from the loss of her fourth child, stolen from the crib (plot point for later on). At this, she confessed her heritage and was banished from Eryn Lasgalen, but an incident meant that everyone thought she was dead. She travelled to the Grey Havens under a new name, Lalyanon (traveller), and sailed home.

The second, named Kemeninya (Earth maiden), stayed in the North, living in Gondolin for a time, but when it fell, ran Northwards, eventually joining with the rangers of the North.

The third, named Rúnanen (freer), eventually rejoined with her father, and joined the Ñoldorin cause. She met the same fate as her father, run through with a sword, but instead dying at the gates of Sirion.

Lillith visits Kemeninya, now going by Dolenath (hidden), and they reconnect.

Lillith and Ovranen then recount their travels for archive, and then continue to travel, never settling down.

80,000 years old, Lillith calls on Nimrodel, and asks her for a favour. Take care of her brother.

Lost

I know crossovers are literally the worst thing in the world but I don't care so you can pry this one from my cold, dead, hands. There’s some romance in this one, but it doesn’t come until much, much, later.

Haruka, a Jedi master, on the run from the Empire, discovers a backwater world where she can disguise herself perfectly. Almost too perfectly. The customs throw her at first but she’s trained to adapt to anything.

She clips a translator to her ear, and she gets a job as a servant in Imladris.

Everyone thinks she's really young, and they're right. She's 32, and elves aren't fully matured until they're 50, but nobody told her that. She wasn't even aware she shared a species with them. Or anyone.

She's more concerned about the fact she needs to hide her left leg because it's made of metal and could rat her out to one of the very criminal merchants that could know about the Empire’s very large bounty on her head.

She does manage to evade the merchants, but when she leaves her leg on her bed at some point she has to explain that,,, maybe she isn’t local.

A diplomatic visit from Eryn Lasgalen in the form of the Crown Prince does change things though. Celeberyn points straight at Haruka and goes “you look exactly like my little brother. That’s weird.”

She’s panicking now because she actually has no idea where she came from, and just nods, and goes, “cool.”

Internally she’s freaking out because he mentioned that said brother had a missing identical twin (yes, you heard me, identical) and now she’s trying to figure out if she’s ok to exist here, cause she’s come across a lot of cultures and there isn’t a 100% track record with that.

After a long day of asking people random questions, she figures out that she’s fine here.

Her translator chip finally breaks (one of the twins stepped on it) and she just doesn’t talk to anyone for a month straight.

She turns 50, and offhandedly mentions it to someone because she’s kinda surprised she hasn’t aged yet and they just go what

Turns out she’s meant to go to school and stuff. And learn to write. That isn’t a class thing here, so they’re super concerned because this is a baby and she only has one leg and can’t write who did this to her

Turns out going “oh yeah I was a general in this war” when prompted to explain the situation has so many questions raised.

Everything is pieced together between her and Lisbeth, the youngest after her, in a clearing.

Turns out Haruka is the long lost twin “prince” of Eryn Lasgalen, stolen by someone looking to make a quick buck by selling her to the Jedi because of her hypersensitivity to the force. (elves are born very far and few between)

She swears Lisbeth to secrecy, but it all comes out when Legolas visits Imladris and demands to speak to her.

Turns out they’re linked, even across galaxies, and whenever she went through great physical or emotional trauma, he felt it, but Haruka learned to block out her emotions a long time ago, so never felt any of his. (Turns out that’s why her phantom pains are so realistic, because she was feeling the sensations on his leg to compensate.)

She is unable to deny the fact of her identity now, but she (rightly) refuses to go by her birth name, mainly because Haruka has been her name from the start anyway (it’s gender neutral).

She decides instead of facing her family, she’ll go back into space (because flat earth arda for elves is a mindset and she’s never even heard of it).

She manages (somehow) to find a merchant, and doesn’t realise she’s been followed by Elrohir until she’s dropped off on Lothal and he taps her on the shoulder like “hey where are we and what are all these creatures i’m scared”

She drags him with her to meet with the new Republic, and she gets a new translator chip, leg, and dyes her hair for fun (this is stressful she deserves the dark blue hair).

They eat lunch at a street café, and have a long conversation about Haruka’s torrid backstory. They don’t bond, but they do become friends.

Before, their dynamic was “random servant number 5″ and “lord” but now it’s “jedi master” and her “friend who only knows three words.”

She offers to take him home, but he declines on the basis that home will be there a lot longer than this will.

They start working together at the new republic. Turns out Elrohir makes an excellent fake body guard (he can fight but that’s not the point), and Haruka helps bring some of the old Jedi practices into the new order.

When the new jedi order falls, Haruka steals as many of the students away and takes them and Elrohir back to Arda.

They chill out in Imladris, hiding out for a few years before Haruka remembers that she left because she was avoiding the whole family situation, and has to confront the fact that she is royalty, and finally meets her dad (her mother’s fate is discussed above).

It goes a lot better than expected. The first thing he asks about is why she’s a woman, and it’s awkward, but they eventually fall into a good conversation.

Haruka thinks, “hey, maybe I can exist here in a family.”

But at the same time she’s got her found family in Imladris (cause you know she basically got adopted the minute she, a child, mentioned that she’d been in a war) (have i read too many salvage fics? yes. will i now compare elrond to hakoda? yes. you saw it here first folks only in this story she’s adopted by the entire serving staff.)

Haruka doesn’t venture to the stars for another for hundred years. For now, she’s just content on Arda. She takes to the stars again sometime after the end of the third age, now bored and eager to explore again. Elrohir comes with her. Together they build a new found family and crew, exploring the galaxy.

Part 2 coming soon

[szintalikedthat]

Hello! I saw your post about playlists and I have a request for a vibe!

🎵 + When you're feeling really disconnected from yourself but also sort of angry at everything and then your cat comes and loves up to you and you're still angry and sad but you're also filled with so much love for this teeny tiny animal

Hell yes!!!!

What makes this ask so awesome, is that not only it is a really interesting vibe that I just felt in my heart on 6 different cosmic levels, but it comes with a full blown 5 act structure, which I will be more than happy to indulge... especially because telling a narrative arc with strategically ordered songs is my favourite thing about building a playlist.

When I was thinking about where to begin, I felt like the only genre that can truly encompass the range of emotions contained herein AND even the cuteness of a cat, was none other than emo. Am I right or am I right? But I have to confess, I'm not super familiar with the emo scene, cause when it happened, I went through a phase of listening to very little to no music. And like I said, I cannot accurately pinpoint musical genres because I just sort them in my head completely differently, so... this playlist has maybe like one or two songs that are actually emo, I think(?) and is not so much emo overall as much as "Songs that made me feel like what I thought emo should feel like". However I do know that some emo bands like to have one foot in metal and the other in electronic music, so this is what created the backbone of this playlist that holds it all together - an electronic and/or industrial metal streak. Fingers crossed that this will be up your alley.

I made a spotify compilation of it all but I also linked the individual songs thru youtube in case someone doesn’t use it.

Enjoy! 🎵

1. Dissociation Every Day is Exactly The Same - Elektrik People

I consider this kind of a blatant choice in my neck of the musical woods but if there has ever been a better song written about that very emotion that you were talking about, I haven't heard it. I offer it to you now like a special gift directly from the playlist of a very personal OC who himself has some issues and dissociative tendencies. Yes, I'm talking about my OCs I'm projecting onto of whom nobody fucking asked, because I don't want to make this too personal, what about it. Don't we all? And yes, this IS the Nine Inch Nails song, but I chose this version - and tbh I like this one better than the original, with all due respect to Mr. Reznor - because the soft, slightly slurring vocals and reverberating instruments really make it sound as if I myself were hearing it through a disconcerted haze.

2. Realization X - Hatari

I put this song in as a kind of segway between the previous song and the next; it's like a moment of coming-to, a realization of one's true pain that was blocked before, and includes all the disillusionment, hatred, and grief that it entails, but is also still kind of... catchy, in a way? If you will. Song translation

3. Fragmentation Buried Alive - Otep

And there we are, the true, unfiltered cacophony of negative emotions, spoken in their full and direct brutality. What really gets me about Otep every time, is that besides some of her lyrics just being genuinely great poetry, she can speak the most simple, emo, generic words with such incredible cadence that you quake as you feel the emotion in your veins right there where she's at.

4. Spiral Victimized- KoRn

Look, I might be a little bit biased, but when you're asking me for trauma induced, frothing dissociative rage, I'm definitely thinking of Jonathan Davis, because let's be honest, no one brings it to the table like he does. That's just objectively true. There is no shortage of such musical numbers in KoRn's repertoire but as opposed to some of their maddening, blunt and grunge-like earlier sounds, I decided to bring something from their newer catalog, which encases the madness in a cleanly yet jagged, cutting-edge electronic shell, and thus will fit in with this playlist very nicely.

5. Contact Teardrop - Massive Attack

So I asked myself, "Is there a song that makes me feel the emotion of touching extremely soft fur and would fit into this playlist" and I immediately knew that this song would be THE perfect answer. I wanted the shift to be as sudden as possible, but at the same time still a little bit organic, which is a high expectation but this song has an almost KoRn-like chord progression just in major instead of minor. I couldn't have invented a better one if I tried.

6. Decision Neon Gravestones - Twenty One Pilots

Okay, I'm not even going to make any jokes about this or anything. I think this song is a really brutal confrontation about a very heavy topic, and the biggest takeaway that I want you to have from it is that, I think, there is a point at the bottom of your hopelessness where you HAVE to make a conscious decision to move upward even if you don't feel like you can do it or whether it's even possible, before the healing can start. And sometimes it really be like that.

7. Clarity Bring Me The Horizon - Can You Feel My Heart

Note that after the Soft Cat neither of the songs are really as unhinged as we started, and that is for a reason. I think that this song must have been insanely popular at a time, sorry about that. I swear, I'm trying to make choices that are not too obvious but it felt like it would just hit the right emotional beat. I think you can read a lot into these rhetorical questions, in the song I mean, but the cord progressions always make me feel a certain opening up to hope through teary eyes.

8. Power Suffering You - 16 Volt

At the end of it all, by any means I wanted to end this playlist on a positive note, so here we are. There's just something about this song that gets me every time. It leans into its own early 2000s proto-emo roots with such a sweeping, unapologetic confidence. This song be like "You're goddamn right I'm a fucking whiney little bitch with my depression and unprocessed negative emotions, you wanna fight about it? You wanna take it outside?" What else could I have for it than respect? The rhythm is mercilessly pumping, the riffs are almost bizarrely catchy. I wouldn't necessarily call this song positive on a surface level, but it always makes me feel weirdly upbeat. Once you read into it a bit metatextually, this song is the pinnacle of depressed but reclaimed power, an almost fashionably earworm-like rallying cry of healthily channeled righteous anger. I actually almost put it at the beginning because I think playlists should begin strong - I like to make playlists that either sweep you or slap you on the face with the very first chord lol - and I think this song, almost literally slaps. However I immediately realized that no, this cannot happen, not this time. This song cannot be at the start because this is exactly the goal where I want you to mentally arrive at.

Okay, enough of the playlist infused therapy session. I hope you had some kind of positive takeaway and maybe even some songs you didn't know before. Now go and stick it to the man!