#America is so weird with death like I was suspended from work even though I said I was taking a leave of absence

[antiticketmaster]

.

[littleapocalypsekitten]

A follow up to what I posted below...  Just because there is so much virtue-signaling on this site, people who worry about everything being “problematic” and being very serious about what kinds of humor people can use:   If you don’t like dark humor, unfollow me now.   Seriously.  There are so many people who ask “what if you were a victim of this / adjacent to this?”  Let me tell you, sugar, I’m an old fart and I’ve lived through more bullshit than you would believe, both in terms of “my people” and myself personally.   Historical stuff:  I was alive for 9/11.  I was going to community college, in fact, right after failing to make the cut at being in the Air Force due to health issues. (Dodged a bullet there). My parents were shouting about stuff happening on TV when I was trying to sleep before having to drive to class.  When I heard “THEY HIT THE PENTAGON!” I was up like a bolt and watching on live TV as the Twin Towers burned and heard reports of people leaping out of the windows to catch themselves a hopefully better death through falling than to suffer one through burning.  I lived in Arizona at the time and did not know anyone, personally, in that area, although I was concerned for some online friends and checked a message board I was on, suffering through the dial up I was using.  The board leader / founder was a New Yorker and he wasn’t on for a long time, so I was worried about him.  My future fiance’ was Pennsylvanian, but was in the wrong part of the state to be affected by the plane that crashed there.  Anyway... the nation was shocked - to see a foreign terrorist attack succeed with mass casualties of civilians on our own soil.  And, of course, I lived through the pomp and patriotism that happened after that, the excuses the government used to curtail liberties that came from it.  The utterly assinine “Freedom Fries” thing because France criticized America’s foreign policy and President Bush.  NO ONE made fun of what had happened then.  GENERAL humor shows were suspended.  Old shows that showed the Twin Towers were taken out of circulation / reruns.  (There’s an episode of The Simpsons - a very funny one, that features the Towers as a plot-point that was done about 10 years before the event and wouldn’t run again in reruns / as part of collections until 10 years after).   But Time... has happened.  Even though there are survivors of the event today and people who get genuinely triggered by old images of the Twin Towers or any mention of the event... comedians will make fun of it.  Usually, it’s in relation to the reaction of it, and how it was used as a martyrbation point by the Republican Party, the “9/11″ invoked to get a critic to shut up or “terrorist win!” Family Guy had a joke about that.  I’ve probably told such jokes and don’t remember.  Pandemic.  Dudes, me and my household were making fun of that when it was still going on (and not how it’s still lingering now) but like, in the thick of it, before vaccines were a thing.  We kind of had to to keep our heads together.  My fiance’ / partner works retail, at an essential job and he has heart and lung problems.  He also had customers who’d cough in his face and he’d make fun of it like how “I totally must have it now!” - much to MY WORRY, PALE FACED AND WHITE KNUCKLED because I DON’T WANT YOU TO DIE, DAMMIT! - but it was his way of coping with his underpaid job and a deadly situation he was put in for our survival.  We didn’t catch Covid - when he usually catches everything that comes down the pike because he has to handle a lot of register-cash as a manager.  Makes me wonder if we have some sort of weird rare genetic glitch that kept us immune.    Personal stuff:  I’ve been to crayon-prison.  That’s what I call it. (mental health inpatient).  It was kind of like being in kindergarten, milk and cookies given out as snacks and such, only you’re around a lot of people with very serious problems, you’re there because you’re having a bad time and most of the staff care less about you than they would about zoo animals and make it very clear that they see you as subhuman.  I’m okay now.  Calling it Crayon-Prison helps me deal.  I also will readily accept cartoons that make fun of things like straight-jackets (even though I’ve never had to use one).  There is one episode of Disenchantment that I watched once but can never watch again due to being unsettled by it, but I could also appreciate the humor and won’t whine that people are “diminishing the experiences of people like me” because they like something funny.    Making fun of hospital stays for physical stuff.  Heart-attacks used as comedy.  Never gonna escape that.  Been witness to the real thing.  Not going to whine about it used in media or people making jokes and memes about “whoa, you almost gave me a heart-attack!” or jokes about an overage of bacon-consumption.   Life’s too short.   I’m really not going to worry about the “problematicness” of everything.  

[dwellordream]

“…Now, if people are taught anything at all about medieval history it often is English medieval history. People with absolutely no other frame of reference can often tell you when the Norman Conquest of England took place, or the date of the signing of Magna Carta even if they don’t know exactly why these things are important. (TBH Magna Carta isn’t important unless you were a very rich dude at the time, sooooo.) If you ask people to name a medieval book they’ll probably say Beowulf even if they’ve never read it.

Here’s the thing though – England was a total backwater in terms of the way medieval people thought and was not particularly important at the time. How much of a backwater? Well, when Anne of Bohemia, daughter of my man Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (RIP, mate. Mourn ya til I join ya.) married King Richard II of England in the fourteenth century there was uproar in Prague. How could a Bohemian imperial princess be sent to London? How would she survive in the hinterlands? The answer was she was sent along with an entire cadre of Bohemian ladies in waiting to give her people with whom she could have a sophisticated conversation.

This ended up completely changing fashion in England. Anne is the girl who introduced those sweet horned headdresses you think of when you think of medieval ladies, riding side-saddle, and the word “coach” to England, (from the Hungairan Kocs, where the cart she arrived at court the first time came from). Sweetening her transition to English life was the fact that she didn’t have to pay a dowry to get married. Instead, the English were allowed to trade freely with Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire and allowed to be around a Czech lady. That was reward enough as far as the Empire was concerned. That’s how much England was not a thing. (The English took this insult very badly, and hated Anne at first, but since she was a G they got over it. Don’t worry.)

If England was unimportant why do we know about English medieval history and nothing else? Same reason you’re reading this blog in English right now, homes. I’m not sure if you know this, but in the modern period, the English got super super good at going around the world an enslaving anyone they met. When you’re busy not thinking about German imperial atrocities in the nineteenth century it’s because you’re busy thinking about British imperial atrocities, you feel me? So we all speak English now and if we harken back to historical things it gives us a grandiose idea of English history.

Say, then, you are trying to establish a curriculum for schools that bigs up English history, as is our want. Ask yourself – are you gonna want to dwell on an era where England was so unimportant that Czechs were flexing on it? Answer: no. You gonna gloss right over that and skip to the early modern era and the Tudors who I am absolutely sure you know all the fuck about. The second colonial-imperialist reason for not learning about medieval history is that medieval history doesn’t exactly aggrandise the colonial-imperialist system.

Yes, there are empires in medieval Europe. In addition to the Holy Roman Empire there’s the Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire, whose downfall is often pointed to as one of several possible bookends to the medieval period. You also have opportunists like the Venetians who set up colonies around the Adriatic and Mediterranean, or the Normans who defo jump in boats and take over, well, anything they could get their hands on.

Notably, when these dudes got where they were going, they didn’t end up enslaving a bunch of people, committing genocide, and then funnelling all resources back to a theoretical homeland. The Normans settled down where they were eventually creating distinctive court cultures, and the Venetian colonies enjoyed a seriously high level of trade and quality of life without major disruption to local customs. Force was certainly used to take over at the outset, but it wasn’t something that resulted in the complete subjugation and deaths of millions halfway around the world from where the aggressors started.

No, the European middle ages are a lot more about local areas muddling along with smaller systems of rule. That’s why you have distinctive areas like say, Burgundy or Sicily calling their own shots and developing their own styles and fashions. Hell, even within imperial systems like the Holy Roman Empire Bavarians or Bohemians saw themselves as very much distinct peoples within an imperial system, not necessarily imperial subjects first and foremost.

You know where you would go to find some history that justifies huge imperial systems that require constant conquest and an army of slaves to keep them afloat? Ancient Rome. Remember how you got taught how great Rome was? How it was a democracy? How they had wonderful technology and underfloor heating, and oh isn’t that temple beautiful? Yeah, that’s because you were being inculcated to think that the ends of imperial violence justifies mass enslavement and disenfranchisement.

In reality, Rome wasn’t some sort of grand free democracy. Only a tiny percentage of Romans could actually vote. Women of any station certainly could not, and even men who were lucky enough to be free weren’t necessarily Roman citizens. Freedom here is particularly important because by the 1 century BCE 35 – 40% of the population of the Italian peninsula were slaves. Woo yeah democracy. I love it. And that’s not even taking into account all those times when an Emperor would suspend voting altogether.

Those slaves were busy building all the grand buildings your high school history teacher was dry jacking it about, stuffing the dormice that the rich people were reclining to eat, and basically keeping the joint running. Those slaves also necessitated the ridiculously huge army that Rome kept going because you had to get slaves from somewhere after all, so warfare had to be continuous. How uplifting.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this Roman nonsense is pretty much exactly what was going on during the modern colonial imperial age. You can say whatever the fuck you want about how free and revolutionary America was, for example. That doesn’t change the fact that only a handful of white property owning men could vote, and that the entire project required the mass enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans. That’s why you’ve been taught Rome is great. It helps you sleep well at night on stolen land because, really, haven’t all great societies done this? I mean without a forever war against anyone you can find, how will you keep a society going?

Our imperialist ideas about history lead to some weird historical takes. People love to tell you that no one bathed in the medieval period when medieval people had pretty much exactly the same sort of bathing culture as Romans. People laugh at medieval people believing in medical humoral theory despite the fact that Romans believed exactly the same thing and get a total pass on that front. The Roman ban on dissection is often taught as a medieval ban, shifting Roman superstition onto the shoulders of medieval people.

On-going Roman warfare is reported in glowing terms with emphasis on the “brilliance” of Roman military technique, while inter-kingdom warfare in the medieval period is portrayed as barbaric and ignorant. The Roman people who were encouraged to worship emperors as literal gods are used as an example of theoretical religion-free logical thinking, while medieval Christians are cast as ignorant for believing in God even when they are studiously working on the same philosophical queries as their predecessors. None of this makes any fucking sense.

But here’s the thing – it doesn’t need to. In a colonial imperialist society we have positioned Rome as a guiding light no matter what it’s actual practices and that’s not a mistake. It’s a design that helps to justify our own society. Further, this mindset requires us to castigate the medieval period when rule was more localised and systems of slavery had taken a precipitous dive. If only there had been more slavery, you know? Things might have been so much better.

Historical narratives and who controls them are always in flux. That old adage “history is written by the winners” comes to mind here, but that’s not exactly true. What the winners do is decide which histories are promoted, taught, and broadcasted. You can write all the history you want and if no one reads it, then it doesn’t really matter. That’s the gap that medieval history has fallen into. Colonial imperialism hasn’t figured out how to weaponise it yet, so it’s ignored. You could write this off as a “so what”, of course. Sure, maybe teaching the Roman Empire as a goal is a negative, but is ignoring medieval history really that bad a thing? You will be unsurprised to learn that I definitely think it is a bad thing, yes.

Ignorance about the medieval period is one of the things that is allowing the current swelling ranks of fascists to claim medieval Europe as some sort of “pure” white ideal. Spoiler: it was not. However, if you don’t know anything about medieval society how are you gonna argue with some chinless douche with a fake viking rune tattoo?History is always political. We use it to understand our world, but more than that we also use it to justify our world. Ignoring it helps us prop up our worst impulses, so let’s not.”

- Eleanor Janega, “On colonialism, imperialism, and ignoring medieval history.”

[spidercakes]

ABO prompt if you will - Tony is an alpha but Peter is a beta. They can’t be together as laws prevent alphas from mating with betas so they pine in silence. Peter gets kidnapped by Ross who is trying to figure out how Peter got his Spider-Man powers and one experiment changes Peter into an omega. When he is rescued, he is in heat and throws Tony into rut and the alpha claims his omega.

This prompt: implies smut

Me: ok, angst.

I mean, its still technically what you asked for minus the smut but also there’s like many angst.

*

Its not, Tony has decided, that they don’t want to. Its more like they can’t, not really, not without a level of backlash at every level that would make a relationship impossible. Its not exactly reasonable to start a relationship with someone full well knowing that everyone, including the damn government, will do their damndest just to tear you apart. Tony has no idea why there are laws preventing alphas and betas from being together, there’s no reasonable explanation for it. Omegas might be more fertile and have an easier time with alphas reproducing but its not like betas are infertile. And also he and Peter wouldn’t be a reproductive couple anyway.

Beyond that the reasons get even more senseless given that betas are just as capable of dealing with heats as alphas, and its not like alphas can’t survive without omegas in heat- they make it through most of their lives without that. That particular set of laws are, Tony has gathered, little more than forcing people to fit into the hegemonic mold of acceptability and he’s never been fond of that, but he’s also not stupid. Generally speaking any alphas and betas who test that shit see betas in jail for an extended period of time, not alphas. And he can’t do that to Peter. If either of them should end up in jail its him- first of all he’s actually broken like a stupid amount of laws in his lifetime and Peter hasn’t, and also he’s the older one. He’d miss out on less in prison, but the laws are designed to punish betas for not falling in line, not alphas or omegas.

So he gets stuck watching Peter from afar, working with him in the lab, and trying his best to avoid him blowing up in the field. “You know we wouldn’t say anything, right?” Bruce asks softly, disrupting his line of thought. Across the lab Peter is trying and failing to teach Dummy to fetch.

“Wouldn’t need you to. Since when have I been known to do anything subtly?”

Bruce sighs because they both know he makes a point. Its not like he hasn’t thought of that either, and Peter absolutely has. Came to him a couple months ago insisting they could manage it and Peter he’s sure could. But Tony has never been known for his ability to keep secrets or keep anything from the public eye. He literally decided to throw out Pepper’s cue cards and proclaim himself Iron Man because that felt less difficult than playing like he wasn’t. There’s no way Peter wouldn’t end up in jail over his stupidity.

*

When Peter goes missing it takes them a day to notice. Its not entirely unusual for him to disappear from the public eye for a day or two thanks to school and its exam season so Tony hadn’t thought much of it until May showed up at his door. “So you haven’t talked to him either?” she asks, clearly on the edge of panic.

Tony is too but he’s also not totally stupid- Peter isn’t exactly easy to contain with his abilities and hurting someone with super healing permanently is difficult. He once tested out a few theories on Steve and the guy is next to immortal. He can be killed, Tony is sure, but not through any normal means and that includes aging. Peter’s genes share a lot in common with Steve’s now, so he suspects he has a lot of the same resistances not that he’d ever dream of testing that out on him.

“May, I once watched someone drop an entire building on him and he mostly crawled out pissed off. I’m sure he’s fine, we just need to figure out where he is.”

“Is that actually supposed to make me feel better?” she asks and Tony sighs.

“My point is that he’s durable, exceedingly so. Causing genuine, permanent damage is nearly impossible. Its why we tend to send him out with Steve and Bruce- the three of them are stupid strong, hard to kill, and their collective intelligence makes them hard to deal with strategically too. Trust me May, wherever he is it might not be pleasant, but he’ll more than likely be fine when we pick him up.” Psychologically? Probably not, but he doesn’t want to freak her out and they’ve all, in some way or another, been held captive and tortured. At this point its like an Avengers rite of passage. That’s at least half their hero origin stories.

“How are you going to find him?” May asks and Tony sighs.

“His suit has tracking in it partially to keep tabs on him but also to keep tabs on the suit itself- that kind of technology wouldn’t exactly be put to any good use in the wrong hands. If we’re lucky no one has turned the tracking off. If we aren’t we’ll see where it went before he disappeared and go from there.” There’s also the added benefit of seeing where Peter ends up the most, where all of them do. It tracks villain patterns well so Tony will cross reference the rest of their tracking against Peter’s too, see if any data points stick out.

*

Bruce looks at the screen in front of him while Tony paces. Bruce is more than capable of tracking a wayward spider suit, a literal child could do it if need be, but Tony is stressed. “Ping is coming back,” Bruce tells him. “In uh… Florida? He have anything going on there?” he asks.

Tony walks over to the computer and pulls up where, specifically, he is. “No. We’ve all heard him refer to Florida as the smelly armpit of America so I don’t see why he’d go there on his own either,” he points out.

Bruce sighs, “I maintain that the smelly armpit is Texas, but you make a point. The suit shows a pretty much direct travel path too, which is unusual. How the hell would someone manage to get someone with his abilities that far in a straight path? It doesn’t even look like Peter fought back.”

No, it doesn’t. He went from one spot to the other, no zipping around in between to indicate a sign of struggle. He pulls up Peter’s vitals around the time he went missing and frowns. “What the fuck?”

Bruce leans in and frowns too. “Stasis?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re telling me you think he was instantly frozen?” Tony asks, eyebrows drawing together.

“Not instantly, looks like he reacted but not in time. And the information is from his web shooters, not his suit. Don’t think he would have been in it at the time. Isn’t it pretty much frozen proof anyway?”

Not exactly, but for the purposes of this conversation yes so Tony nods. “Okay. Given the time of day he was probably about to patrol but why the fuck would anyone freeze him? Why the hell would that be a solution to how to kidnap Spiderman?” Seems kind of stupid, convoluted too. Yes he would be exceedingly difficult to get a hold of given that he’s flexible, strong, and not exactly lacking in intelligence and fighting ability but freezing him? That could go wrong in so many ways. The fact that it didn’t is probably a weird fluke.

Bruce frowns, looking over the information again before pulling up his location. “Tony. I could be wrong, and I’m probably not, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of Ross’ beach houses.”

Tony squints, “who the hell is stupid enough to take their victim to their house? Can’t be Ross.”

“The freezing would make sense if it was Ross,” Bruce says. Tony raises an eyebrow, unsure how Bruce figures that. “He has most of out data on our genes, he’s already tried to experiment on me like five times, and Steve was at his least dangerous when he was frozen. And he’d have enough information on Peter to know they work in really similar ways. Freezing makes sense if its Ross otherwise what kind of idiot would decide to try and freeze a super person with no guarantee that it would work? If not for the information that being frozen essentially stuck Steve in a suspended state of animation, which would make it a lot easier to run a few tests on him, then that makes no sense.”

He says that like villains make any sense at all. The last couple Tony has personally dealt with rode his ass because his father was a dick and because he was kind of mean and didn’t talk to the guy on a roof. Villains are people too, and people make no god damn sense. But he does make a point about the freezing thing, with knowledge of Steve’s suspended animation it would make sense to try and recreate those conditions and hope for the best. It might be common knowledge that he was found frozen in the ice and lived, but its not common knowledge how that happened. There are whole fan theories about it that proper everything from the correct assumption that the serum made him able to withstand extreme cold with a lowered heart rate and slowed brain activity to conserve energy to aliens. And clearly whoever took Peter wanted him alive otherwise what kind of dipshit tries to freeze their victim to death, then panics and takes them to Florida? Though, Tony supposes, that does seem like a Florida man thing to do.

“Do you really think Ross is that bad at strategy? What if it failed? What if Peter didn’t react to freezing the same way Steve had? What if he chose a different route that day for patrol? Ross might be a dumbass, but is he really that stupid?”

Bruce laughs a little. “Sometimes I forget how often you and Steve run every available option through your heads before you do something. Ross isn’t stupid by any means, but he has Peter’s patrol schedule and around this time of year he doesn’t break pattern, can’t because of exams. Strategically its a good time to move on a plan that requires him to be in a certain spot when you know he’s far less likely to deviate from his normal plans. And Peter might be super, but he’s not going to not have a reaction to being flash frozen. If Ross’ goal is to experiment on him if he managed to escape the freezing he still learned something. Its unethical science, but its not exactly bad science.”

Yeah, he’ll agree to disagree there. Tony knows a thing or two about winging it when it comes to experiments and it never goes well. Okay, it never goes well for him. Everyone else seems to not have problems with it but he’s got bad luck. Still makes him weary of that kind of thing and also Bruce has a vested interest in pointing the finger at Ross. Tony doesn’t think he’d do something like that on purpose on account of unlike Ross he’s not a shitty person but still. its worth it to verify Bruce’s suspicions. He runs the address and turns back to Bruce, “you seriously think Ross would be dumb enough to drag Peter’s ass back to his house? Come on, even Ross can’t be that stupid.”

“Its under his mother’s name, I think. Its still not smart, but its close to a secret army base in the area. Peter might be there, not the house.”

“But they left his suit in the house?”

“Ross might not be dumb enough to do that but a tactical team might be,” Bruce points out.

Yeah, alright. Address results return and sure shit Bruce isn’t wrong, including the bit about the house being under Ross’ mother’s name. Except the woman is dead so it shouldn’t be but that’s a whole other bag of shit Tony doesn’t give a damn about.

“Is he really this stupid?” he asks Bruce.

He shrugs, “he tried to shoot me with a gun he knew wouldn’t work given that I’d survived being bombed at that point so yes, I think he’s that stupid.”

Tony sighs. “I guess I should be grateful for it but something about this feels too easy.” Nothing these days is ever this easy for him, usually its Steve that gets all the luck so something is going to go wrong, he knows it.

*

Steve lets Bruce take the lead because he knows Ross the best but it doesn’t work well when he keeps deferring to Tony. Probably because he knows Peter’s suit’s information best, and the information they got from the web shooters, but still. That and he probably has the most vested interest in getting Peter back. But Bruce’s suspicions are right in that he’s not in the house- his suit was, and one of his web shooters, but Peter was nowhere to be found.

“Are you sure your scans are accurate?” Steve asks him and he knows he can’t see his face in the suit but he glares at him anyway. Steve’s cheeks turn a little red. “For a mask that thing has a surprising amount of judgement on it,” he mumbles.

“We’ve found him,” Natasha says over the comms. “Bruce was right about that army base- Clint, don’t you dare piss on- oh my god, someone get here and deal with this,” she mumbles.

Steve frowns and Bruce sighs, concentrating for a moment before he turns green and gets considerably larger. Tony’s mostly glad that the pants he made to accommodate worked and no one has to risk being exposed to Hulk dick ever again. And if Natasha isn’t concerned he assumes Peter is okay, if likely shaken. Or still in stasis. That’s probably the most preferable option, all things considered.

*

“He’s loopy,” Natasha tells him, leaning against the door frame and Tony frowns.

“Can you smell that?” he asks Steve, who looks red enough for Tony to assume that’s a yes.

“Smell what?” Nat asks, looking between the two of them and Steve sighs.

“Shit. Neither her or Clint have a strong sense of smell. Budapest,” he says in way of explanation not that Tony believes it. They say that to everything and fuck sakes he knows, he knows that’s Peter.

He pushes past Nat into the room they’ve found Peter in and his brain is already fuzzy but he forces himself to focus through the smell and attraction. Peter has bigger shit to worry about than Tony’s biology to react to his. Shit. Peter notices him fast too, perking up as he sees him and when Tony gets to him he reaches out, circling his arms around Tony and pressing his face into his neck. Tony swears for a moment he sees white and he doesn’t mean to let out a small, strangled moan in response but its almost impossible not to all things considered.

“Hey, Tony,” Peter murmurs, voice at his ear and Tony counts to ten to try and refocus.

“Hey, baby. Lets get you out of here, hmm?” He pulls away, or tries to, but Peter pulls him back fast.

“No, don’t go. Please,” he asks, voice small and eyes wide.

Jesus Christ.

*

Bruce looks over at Tony, who looks half lost himself let alone Peter, who is happily curled into his lap, face at his neck smiling away deliriously. Every time he sees some poor omega in heat he’s a little happier he’s a beta because it looks awful. “Do… do you think you can reverse that?” Steve asks.

His self control is remarkable, Bruce will give him that. His senses have to be going haywire at the moment and Tony is having a hell of a time holding back. Granted out of the two of them Bruce supposes he expects Steve to have the better self control anyway. He looks over at Peter though and winces. “I… don’t think I can,” he says not because he can’t, he’s sure he could figure it out eventually. But after so long of watching him and Tony dance around each other  it seems cruel to pull them apart when they can actually be together now.

“How the hell does that happen?” Steve murmurs.

Bruce shrugs, “no idea. Presumably some type of gene therapy but it looks like the rest of his biology is the same, including the altered bits. I don’t see why Ross would want to turn a beta into an omega, there’s no real use for that.” And of all the eugenicist ideas that have stuck around the idea that betas are useless and should be either eliminated or turned into omegas or alphas isn’t one of them. Now the assumption is mostly that they should just stick to being with each other because omegas and alphas belong together and betas don’t fit into that binary at all. There’s no real reason Ross would have done this except by accident and that’s one hell of an accident. The Nazis spent years on it and they never figured that out either, and god knows his own experiments went terribly.

“What did he want with him to begin with?” Steve asks.

Good question but they don’t have all the answers at the moment. Right now there’s like five different police agencies crawling all over that army base looking for motive and evidence. “As far as we were able to tell he wanted to know how Peter’s powers worked, and yours. But I suspect he chose to capture Peter because he’s the easier target. You’re well versed in military strategy and Peter is a stressed twenty two year old- he’d be my choice too.”

“And off the record?” Steve asks, correctly assuming that Bruce has his own theories.

He sighs, “off the record I assume he picked up my research where it left off. We found one of those spiders Oscorp had, the one that turned Peter into what he is. It looked different from the one Peter drew out for us.”

Steve snorts, “are you sure that’s not because Peter isn’t exactly a good artist?”

Bruce smiles too, looking over to Peter, who’s still curled up in Tony’s lap looking content. Tony looks like he’s given into his urges to actually react to Peter and he’s got his arms curled tightly around him, face tucked into his hair as he gently runs his fingers up and down one of Peter’s arms. “Could be that, but I doubt he got the colors wrong. They look cute together.”

He looks over at Tony and Peter but something looks off in his expression. “Yeah, I guess they do,” he murmurs.

*

Tony knows he should leave Peter be, stick him in a warm bath to cool his skin some and leave him alone but he can’t. Peter doesn’t want him to either and its hard to say no to him when he’s wanted him for so long. Peter has had an interest in him for longer, probably since before they met given that he wasn’t exactly unknown to Peter before then. He’d been so gangly and adorable and green, but full of promise and someone had to get the damn kid out of crime fighting pajamas. May might have lost her shit when she found out but Peter was Spiderman before Tony and he’d be Spiderman without him though he suspects Peter would have grown a brain cell or two and made himself a suit.

And then he got better, seemed to learn from everyone else’s mistakes and he grew up too. He stopped being so gangly and filled out, and his voice started to sound more like an actual person’s and not a squeak toy and he’s smart. He’s always had a thing for intelligence but with Peter its different than the way he usually is. Normally he likes the showy types, not unlike himself though usually they don’t present that showiness in the same way. Pepper was brilliant and had no problem showing off, but she never actually stated that’s what she was doing. She’d just do something better than everyone else and give them a look. Rhodey was the same way, except he had no problem rubbing someone’s nose in it if he felt like they didn’t get the point enough. Even Christine Everhart fell into that given that she’s tenacious and kind of an asshole, but genuinely better at reporting than most.

Then there’s Peter, who’s so quiet about his intelligence, who mostly just uses it to help people and make other people’s lives easier. Its a soft show of the way his mind works but its just… hard for him to get out of his head, the way Peter consistently manages to find easier and faster ways to evacuate people out of cities, or respond to whatever calls for their help they get, or new features for his suit that help him do his job better. People like to think of Steve as the golden boy but the truth is that he’s jaded and stubborn and sometimes that makes him mean and hard to work with. Peter is the one everyone should look toward but he’d never say so himself, even if Tony is sure he knows its true.

“Missed you,” Peter murmurs, curled right into his side, one leg thrown over Tony’s hip and his arms curled tightly around him. Every time Tony moves a little Peter clings harder and that’s adorable even if he’s sure that’ll leave bruises in the morning.

“I missed you too,” he says, running his hand up and down Peter’s back. Poor thing starts to get fussy if Tony stops, irritated that he’s no longer being scented. “Are you okay?” he asks. Its the first time he’s gotten the opportunity to ask and he can feel Peter smile.

“I can finally be with you, so yeah.” Fuck, doesn’t that just break his heart. He curls his arms tighter around Peter, earning a soft noise of happiness for it and Tony feels his heart squeeze. He’s wanted this for so long and he can finally have it so he huffs out a laugh and releases Peter from his grip. He gets a dirty look for it but Tony quickly tilts Peter’s head up and kisses him to remove the frown. Peter lets out a surprised noise and presses himself into Tony, shifting fast so he’s straddling him and Tony has no idea how they ever managed to go this long without doing this anyway.

*

When he wakes up Peter isn’t there and something doesn’t smell right. He frowns, wrinkling his nose and getting up. He feels hungover, which he knows is stupid but taking care of omegas in heat takes a lot out of someone and more out of the omega, so he has no idea where Peter has gotten off to. Can’t be far but he’s not in the bathroom so Tony decides to check the kitchen only to find him absent of that space too. He does find Steve though and he looks weirdly guilty.

“What’s up with you?” Tony asks, somewhat irritable.

Steve looks away for a moment and sighs, “whatever… whatever Ross did didn’t stick,” he murmurs and no. No. This can’t possibly- he just got Peter, he can’t give him up now.

He turns and walks out of the room fast, hoping he’ll manage to find Peter in the lab.

*

Bruce looks pained and Peter doesn’t have the patience for it because he felt his fucking heart break this morning and he has no time for Bruce’s pain too. “Please, you have to be able to do something,” he says, voice cracking.

He shakes his head though, taking a small step back. “Peter, the last time I did anything like this I turned into, as Tony not so delicately put it, a giant green rage monster. Do you seriously want to take that risk?”

Peter throws his hands up, “well I might as well!” he yells. “Because I’m tired of living like this, always skirting around my feelings because I’m a beta and I can’t date anyone who isn’t! Its bullshit Bruce and you should know that!” He’s the only other beta in the Avengers, he figures if anyone can relate is has to be Bruce. No one else has to deal with all the stupid weird laws that they have to follow to properly fulfill their role in never shaking up the alpha/omega binary that people think makes some type or equilibrium or something- he doesn’t fucking know. But he does know its all a bunch of garbage and all because people don’t like betas dating alphas or omegas, there’s no other reason to act like that.

“Peter,” a soft voice says from behind him and he turns to find Tony there. He turns back around immediately and squeezes his eyes shut because he can’t deal with this right now. “Hey,” Tony murmurs and Peter can feel his arms circle around him. He wants so badly to hug him back but he won’t, not when he knows Tony will just leave him and he can’t do it, he can’t deal with that. “Peter,” Tony says, “baby, I love you.”

He feels his breathing slow a little as he sinks into Tony’s arms but he doesn’t turn, doesn’t respond. He can’t because Tony is telling him that to make him feel better, not because he’s actually going to stick around in their barely even was a relationship. Bruce, on the other hand, looks uncomfortable and Peter wants him to leave as much as he wants him to stay.

“You’re just going to go,” he tells Tony, “so do it.”

Tony’s arms tighten around him some and he hears Tony let out a shaky breath. “I should,” Tony says, voice cracking a little, “because you’ll be the one punished for this if anyone found out but-” his words cut out for a moment and he takes another deep breath. “But I can’t, I can’t leave you.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 17 Mar 2020 (Punch Brothers and Masque of the Red Death, 2020 Census (ACT NOW!), Disaster Socialism, Scalzi's canceled tour, my Twitter account was (briefly) nuked, writing advice, Our Plague Year, Inception-level patent troll covid fuckery, tips for parenting kids stuck at home, Brave files GDPR complaint against Google)

Today's links

The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch: My latest podcast is Poe/Twain bathos crossover.

Fill in your census online: Otherwise you and people you care about literally won't count.

Naomi Klein: this disaster has no room for disaster capitalism: It's our moment to seize.

Scalzi's canceled bookstore: Support your local indie bookseller, especially now.

My Twitter account was suspended: I got in trouble for putting trolls on a list called "Colossal Assholes."

Talking digital writing careers with the Writing Excuses podcast: Covering a lot of ground in 15 minutes.

A new anxiety podcast from Nightvale's Joseph Fink: Proud to be in the debut episode.

Patent trolls try to shut down covid testing: Monkey-selfies, Theranos, Softbank – it's a garbage matrioshke!

How to live with your kids: "Working and Learning from Home with Young Children."

Brave files GDPR complaint against Google: Sharing data between Google services is a no-no.

This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch (permalink)

My last podcast featured the Macmillan audiobook of my novella "The Masque of the Red Death."

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/

For this week's podcast, I decided to read Poe's original 1842 story, "The Masque of the Red Death. It's some next-level gothic stuff. Neil Gaiman is right: Poe must be read aloud!

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

As a chaser, I close this week's podcast with a reading of Twain's classic, gothic, comedic "Literary Nightmare," better known as "Punch, Brothers, Punch," easily the best story ever written about an earworm.

Warning: earworms.

https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/punch-brothers-punch

The two pieces work incredibly well together, making a bathetic cocktail!

Here's where to get the podcast:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/16/the-masque-of-the-red-death-and-punch-brothers-punch/

Direct MP3 link:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_333/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_333_-_The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death_Punch_Brothers_Punch.mp3

Here's the RSS for my podcasts:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Fill in your census online (permalink)

Guess what's happening on April 1, whether or not the nation is on virus lockdown? The 2020 edition of the decennial census, arguably the most consequential administrative task in the US government.

https://my2020census.gov/

You don't have to wait until April 1. Here's that URL again. Whether or not you've gotten a census card with a code, you can and should fill it in.

https://my2020census.gov/

From danah boyd: "Everyone who lives in the US (regardless of nationality or visa status) is required to fill this out. Children under 5 are often forgotten. Same with long-term house guests. Immigrants, black men, and indigenous communities are often undercounted too. If you want to make sure that your community gets its fair share of funding and political power, make sure to get everyone in your community to fill this out. The more people missing, the more you lose out."

If digital isn't your thing, call:

English 844-330-2020 Español 844-468-2020 普通话 844-391-2020 粤语 844-398-2020 tiếng Việt 844-461-2020 한국어 844-392-2020 pусский 844-417-2020 العربية:844-416-2020 Tagalog 844-478-2020 Polish 844-479-2020 Français 844-494-2020 Kreyòl Ayisyen 844-477-2020 Português 844-474-2020 日本語 844-460-2020

If you're reading this, you're on a device that can be used to fill it out.

Naomi Klein: this disaster has no room for disaster capitalism (permalink)

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined "disaster capitalism" to describe how, during a crisis, "ideas lying around" about how to enrich the few and take away our rights come to the fore.

In this short doc, she applies the theory to coronavirus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niwNTI9Nqd8

The shock doctrine is well underway: privatizing social security, closing borders, maybe canceling elections.

But as Klein points out, disasters don't always precipitate oligarchy. The Great Depression catalyzed the New Deal and transformative change.

This is moment to seize. We have "ideas lying around" that are better than exploitation and oligarchy: ideas like a $15 minimum wage, an inclusive government, evidence-based policy free from corporate influence, Medicare for All, and, most of all, the Green New Deal.

Scalzi's canceled bookstore (permalink)

John Scalzi has had to cancel his tour for for The Last Emperox, a book in The Collapsing Empire series. It was the right call for him (and Tor Books to make).

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/03/16/important-news-about-the-last-emperox-tour/

Even though it was the right call, it comes at a cost – to John, to Tor, and, especially, to the indie bookstores that rely on author events to keep the lights on. That's why John has urged his readers to "Keep your pre-order at your local bookstore, or make that pre-order at your local bookstore. Your local bookstore needs you right now."

He also suggests that you consider ordering a signed limited edition hardcover from Subterranean:

https://subterraneanpress.com/last-emperox

And John will be going into his local indie to sign books for mail order for so long as it's permitted:

http://www.jayandmarysbooks.com/

Indie booksellers aren't the most endangered or hardest-hit among those who will be devastated by the virus, by official incompetence and indifference, and by monopolism and corruption, but they will still be VERY endangered and VERY hard-hit. They need your support.

My Twitter account was suspended (permalink)

My Twitter account is back!

Here's what happened:

I woke up yesterday morning and discovered that my account was locked. There was no explanation, either in the app, the site or my email for this. I contacted everyone I knew at Twitter, and everyone who knew anyone at Twitter. At 830AM Pacific – about 5h after the suspension – I got an email from support – saying I'd been suspended for having a list to which I add trolls called "colossal assholes."

I'm not sure that this qualifies as a ToS violation (I gave up reporting trolls who called me much worse, because Twitter inevitably replied that these epithets were not prohibited), but it's super-weird that they suspended me without warning or explanation. Also weird: I could not rename the list while suspended, only delete it (I tried to rename it "thoroughly unpleasant individuals").

Weirder: "Colossal assholes" got me suspended, but not its companion list, "Toe-faced shitweasels"

Thanks to everyone who contacted Twitter on my behalf, and for the Twitter folks who lit a fire to get that suspension explanation email sent my way.

All of my followers were deleted. Twitter tells me they'll reappear over 24h or so, but more than 100k are still missing. If you're interested in seeing my future tweets, please double-check that you're subscribed.

Also, in response to Twitter's sensitivity about "colossal assholes" as a listname, I've renamed and expanded my lists.

Potent emetics

Tissue-thin bad faith

Foolish timewasters

Beneath contempt

Odious nonsense-spewers

Confederate gravy-eaters

Toe-faced stenchweasels

Hilariously inept lackwits

Probably bots

Thick as two short planks

Raving conspiracists

Sociopath climate deniers

Dim bulb centrists

Inept MAGA trolls

Red scare bedwetters

Talking digital writing careers with the Writing Excuses podcast (permalink)

Back when cruise ships were a thing, I went out on the Writing Excuses Cruise as an instructor with Mary Robinette Kowal and friends. While there, we recorded an episode of the Writing Excuses podcast.

https://podplayer.net/?id=99014840

In a mere 25 minutes, we pack in a lot of material: how to break into the field, what a publisher's job is, how "digital is different," self-promotion, not being an unlikable weirdo when you're self-promoting, technology's role in shaping artistic success, and more.

Here's an MP3:

https://writingexcuses.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/WX15_11_digital_is_different.mp3

And here's the RSS to subscribe to the podcast:

https://writingexcuses.com/feed/podcast/

A new anxiety podcast from Nightvale's Joseph Fink (permalink)

Our Plague Year is a new podcast from Joseph Fink of Welcome to Nightvale fame. It features short spoken-word essays about this extraordinary, scary, uncertain time.

https://ourplagueyear.libsyn.com/

The debut installment just went live and I was proud to contribute a piece to it, "Don't Look for the Helpers," which PM Press will be publishing in text form shortly.

https://ourplagueyear.libsyn.com/the-lesson-of-a-plague

Also in this episode: "Social Distances" by Nisi Shawl.

MP3 here:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/ourplagueyear/The_Lesson_of_a_Plague.mp3

Patent trolls try to shut down covid testing (permalink)

It's nearly impossible to sum up all the terrible in this story about a patent troll who is attacking America's ability to make and distribute coronovirus test-kits.

Labrador Diagnostics LLC is a patent troll (💩) that bought two of Theranos's patents (💩💩). They're a shell company spun up by Fortress Investment Group, Softbank's (💩💩💩) giant patent troll (💩💩💩💩). They're suing Biofire, a company that actually makes things (as opposed to Labrador, which only makes lawsuits). Which things are Biofire making? Covid-19 tests (💩💩💩💩💩).

They're represented by Irell & Manella, a lawfirm that previously claimed to represent a monkey. No, really. (💩💩💩💩💩💩)

It's inception-level terrible, a grifty shit burrito encased in a shit-flour tortilla, wrapped in a layer of shit-foil, and served in a go-bag of shitty, shitty, shit.

This is the kind of shit-matrioshke that could wipe out our species.

How to live with your kids (permalink)

I'm really impressed with Erin Kissane's "Working and Learning from Home with Young Children" – an important sanity check for anyone ramping up a new way of relating to our kids.

http://incisive.nu/2020/working-and-learning-from-home/

"Don't be Captain Homeschool on day one" is definitely a lesson we've already learned the hard way, and I'm excited to try out its antidote, "Rhythms > schedules":

"A simple rhythm is resilient, so when something goes sideways, recovery is much simpler."

Also impressed by the accompanying "rhythm chart" (something something "rhythm method" something something "parenting").

"Hold a morning household meeting" is something we're definitely doing, albeit awkwardly because we're taking advantage of the school break to let our kid do the sleeping in she never gets to do otherwise, so we're already up and about by the time she's ready for this.

Also impressed by the recco for the Raising Free People podcast, for unschoolers, free schoolers, Adlerians and democratic parents.

https://www.raisingfreepeople.com/podcast/

Brave files GDPR complaint against Google (permalink)

It's long been obvious that US Big Tech companies are unserious about their GDPR compliance, taking cosmetic, pro-forma measures that don't really engage with the substance of the rules (those rules demand nothing less than a top-to-bottom industry restructure).

EU regulators have been slow to punish them for this, but the GDRP affords standing to many private actors to demand action for noncompliance, which is how it is that Brave has filed GDPR action against Google.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/brave-browser-delivers-on-promise-files-gdpr-complaint-against-google

The complaint's substance is that Google is collecting data through its many products, divisions and services and merging that data on the back-end, which the GDPR expressly prohibits without meaningful, opt-in consent (and you can't deny service those who don't consent).

Brave published a study that analyzed Google's communications with users, partners, regulators and customers and showed that these are effectively an admission of the kind of "data-tying" that the GDPR bans.

https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Inside-the-Black-Box.pdf

I continue to use Brave and Firefox as my daily-driver browsers; I'm impressed with the quality of both, and how much better they make the web.

This action by Brave might trigger the kind of reckoning that the GDPR was meant to provoke — at long last.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live! (Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann) https://craphound.com/etech2005-lifehacks.txt

#15yrago Sterling and Steffen's SXSW keynote https://web.archive.org/web/20050318074350/http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002353.html

#5yrsago The Glorkian Warrior Eats Adventure Pie https://boingboing.net/2015/03/17/the-glorkian-warrior-eats-adve.html

#1yrago China's "pawn shops" have loaned $43B, mostly secured by real-estate https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/china-is-said-to-scrutinize-43-billion-pawn-shop-lending-boom

#1yrago Chinese enthusiasts are serving global Thinkpad fans by making modern motherboards that fit in classic chassis from the Golden Age of the Thinkpad https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/

#1yrago Majority of London's newly built luxury flats are unsold, raising the spectre of "posh ghost towers" https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/ghost-towers-half-of-new-build-luxury-london-flats-fail-to-sell

#1yrago Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015 https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7uiv8b/myspace_player_wont_play_songs_and_i_want_to/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Kottke (https://kottke.org), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: The Masque of the Red Death and Punch Brothers Punch https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/16/the-masque-of-the-red-death-and-punch-brothers-punch/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

[youarenotthewalrus]

this article is dumb, i shouldn’t be hate-reading and you shouldn’t either but here we are so let’s do this:

We begin with a description of a platformer doing something clever and metatextual at the end. Followed by;

What this means is that the game stands in stark contrast to an industry whose products, historically speaking, rely on hijacking the reptile brains of hormone-crazed teenaged boys. In short, the history of videogames is the history of the glorification of violence.

Ah yes, who can forget such bloodthirsty products of the military-industrial complex as Pong, Tetris, Pacman or Zork?

We can debate what constitutes the first videogame, and whether it’s fair to attribute the invention of videogames to the military,

Given the contentiousness of that assertion, I should certainly hope so!

but what’s undeniable is that military engineers—ever ready to coopt, conspire with, or commission innovation from the private sector (e.g., the splitting of the atom, the invention of I.Q.)—more or less immediately recognized that videogames could be employed as a cheap substitute for teaching soldiers how to do everything from fly a plane to take out a sniper.

Kinda reductive to reduce the history of video games to FPSes in general and America’s Army in particular, doncha think?

Anyway, then we get some more waffle about how first-person shooters video games are training us to kill, before we get to the real question: given that this platformer he just finished playing did something a little artsy, can video games be art even despite the fact that were originally works of military propaganda intended to inure potential military recruits to violence? And more importantly, given that this guy seems to think the history of video games began with first person shooters, is he really qualified to answer this question?

Then we get some pointless side chatter over the claim that games are good for your brain, followed by the charge that games are addictive--despite the explicit comparison made to gambling (at “your local Native American casino,” no less), there is no discussion of lootboxes or microtransactions whatsoever, suggesting the author is not aware of specific steps which are taken to make games addictive and is just invoking vague notions of all games being addictive. None of this ever comes up again, and we promptly move back to talking about the actual game.

More specifically, Inside is what’s known as a “2D side-scroller”—meaning that you observe your figure mostly in profile in the center of your screen while a background landscape scrolling right-to-left gives the illusion of left-to-right forward motion.

Somehow, the use of the term “2D side-scroller” in quotes does not make me feel that this fellow is sufficiently familiar with video games to assess whether or not they can be art, as does the fact that he reckons that the platformer he is playing hearkens back to a 1981 shoot-em-up he remembers from his teens, which makes his apparent conviction that video games originated as first person shooters all the more baffling.

And while the world of videogames has already become a “spectator sport,” I’m unaware of any instance of the record of a videogame player’s performance becoming intellectual property, as it has in the world of chess, and in a whole array of sports. True, gamers go “professional” by attracting followers on the internet and earning ad revenue, but their play itself is not copyrighted. Games might wind up in museums (worldwide, there are at least seventeen museums dedicated to videogames), but bracketed moments of the play of particular games have not yet become value-able as art.

I invite the author to start selling unauthorized DVDs of clips from popular Twitch streamers and gaming YouTubers and see how long their lawyers allow him to entertain the notion that Let’s Plays do not constitute intellectual property.

the 2D side-scroller and its pitbull of a cousin, the first-person shooter,

???

The rest of the section is pretty unremarkable, so we move onto him complaining about lousy movie critique, then lousy video game critique, then explaining the concept of Easter eggs, then video game puzzles:

The puzzles of Limbo and Inside are more ambitious than the puzzles of most games in that their solutions often require the player to wait, or to exhibit what in psychology and education circles is known as divergent thought—for example, a corpse is a corpse, but it is also potentially a deadweight that can be used to spring a boobytrap.

Making the player wait or use an unusual object as a weight doesn’t strike me as particularly devilishly clever.

Then we get this jewel of a paragraph:

Nevertheless, puzzles themselves stand as an obstacle blocking the path of videogames’ journey from game to art. For while I might willingly suspend my disbelief long enough to accept that a boy has been tasked with jogging exhaustedly through a factory that churns out invincible blob creatures, I will find that willingness strained when I am also confronted with confounding puzzles placed in my path for no good reason. Videogames, in other words, ignore the basic tenets of internal consistency—in order to keep playing, you must suspend your disbelief, and then suspend it again, and again, and again, which means that in order to play and enjoy videogames you must also suspend the kind of critical judgment that is normally associated with art.

You heard it here, folks, accepting weird gameplay conceits means you can’t critically analyze a game.

Similarly, Easter eggs appeal only on the level of geek fetish—which is more or less the opposite of critical appreciation—and it is for this reason that I won’t address the puzzles and Easter eggs in Inside, even though they eventually lead to what some have concluded is the game’s “hidden meaning.” And this is the problem of videogames in a nutshell, because meaning in work of art is no more hidden from its beholder than the summit of a mountain is hidden from the mountain climber.

Sounds to me more like the problem is that he’s ignoring what the game itself is telling him about its plot and themes because it’s doing it in a way he finds aesthetically displeasing. I don’t know much about critical analysis but I feel like that’s not really how you should be doing it.

We then get a description of the plots of Limbo and Inside, including a decent bit of analysis marred by a bit of “murder simulator”-ism.

This is worth noting because prior to this moment the violence the boy has inflicted, either in Limbo or Inside, has been indirect—really an act of self-defense—but now the game is threatening to creep back into the usual videogame mode of affectless murder. You are given a choice: slip backward toward the wantonly horrific likes of Grand Theft Auto (1997) and Postal 2 (2003) [3] , or pause a moment and then continue on in a macabre but not morally bankrupt pursuit narrative. In this way, the player is implicated in a wryly disjointed bit of commentary on the history of gaming itself.

I mean this entirely sincerely: someone should get this guy a copy of Undertale. I think he’d enjoy it, if he could get past the idea of having to accept JRPG conventions.

Sadly, video game still aren’t art because he can list a bunch of movies that had vaguely similar elements:

From there, it’s not hard to find antecedents for Inside in both literature and film—it’s a little bit Soylent Green, a little bit Logan’s Run, a little bit The Island of Dr. Moreau, and more than a little bit Frankenstein. The imagery starts to seem familiar, too, with milieus lifted from E.T., Alien, and The Poseidon Adventure. But all this allusive flotsam becomes a bit of a disappointment, as eventually you become hard pressed to find anything in Inside that you haven’t seen inside something else.

Ezra Pound demanded that artists “make it new,” and Marcel Proust insisted that a writer is someone who invents a voice as unique as his or her fingerprint, but Inside isn’t even really trying to tell a story that hasn’t been told before. That’s a problem. Art cannot be made up wholly of references to other art. Star Wars, for example, does not come close to art because at its core it is nothing more than a pre-fab mash-up of archetypes mail-ordered from the IKEA superstore of Joseph Campbell.

I mean... why can’t art be composed solely of references to other art? Why can the whole not be more than the sum of its parts? If I take a picture of the Mona Lisa and photoshop a photo of a can of soup over her head, the resulting work is distinct from either of the originals, even though I provided no original content except the idea of sticking the two together.

Put another way, Inside could only have been designed by someone who hasn’t read Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” and hasn’t read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and hasn’t read T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—someone who hasn’t, in other words, engaged theoretically with what art is. And that, in turn, leads to the simple conclusion that on the level of its plot Inside is not trying to do what art does.

Good god this guy is snobbish.

Second, there’s still the meta-twist to consider: perhaps Inside is a game with both a text and a subtext. And perhaps a subtext can help the videogame industry evolve beyond the hyperviolence that is its womb and its crutch.

“Hyperviolent” is not exactly how I would describe Breakout or Super Mario Bros. Anyway, he then ponders the potential meaning of the evil scientists at the end of the game being stand-ins for the developers, and comes to the conclusion that...

The problem of games today is that their creators have not imagined any purpose for them greater than fun. There are exceptions to this, of course, but for the most part games equate escape with distraction—to be distracted is to be entertained, and it is good to be entertained.

Unlike the rest of popular media, of course.

The obligation of art, as Henry James described it, is to be interesting, and if you’re paying attention, that is to say, if you’re trying for more than distraction, then Inside begins to be interesting with its name, which stands in stark contrast to games like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

I too enjoy criticizing games for being superficial based on their titles.

Then we get some final analysis, a quote from a Raymond Carver short story I read in high school and remember mostly as something my friends in English class found homoerotic subtext in, and the claim that the goal of art is a feeling of transcendental bliss:

The much remarked-upon narrator of Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “Cathedral,” experiences such a moment as the story climaxes with a blind man helping him draw a church. “My eyes were still closed,” the narrator says. “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.”

At its most ambitious, Inside aspires to a similar feeling. Escape in art that is not transcendence is cheap, and if you can climb beyond the foolish puzzles and the Easter eggs and the hidden meanings, you can feel, for a moment, that you are not alone on your sofa with your phone, playing a game; rather, you are somewhere else—somewhere grassy, bathed in warmth by a ray of sunlight falling from above.

And that’s nice and all but it feels like he didn’t really lead up to it.

Anyway, I spent way too much time picking through this but here we go. Final rating: 2/10, the next time you want to know if video games are art yet ask someone who actually plays them.

[fandomscollective]

Works in Progress

This is very long so it’s all under a cut, there are several original fiction stories and a couple fanfiction. I’m trying to decide what to write next so I finally made decent descriptions instead of trying to verbally explain them to people. I might be able to write but I can’t talk in a coherent, linear, concise way to save my life.

Opinions on what to work on next are greatly appreciated. 

Original Fiction

     AER 9833(AER): A sort of Dystopian Future. A.E.R. were created as tools. Toys for the rich and powerful. AER are beautiful, elegant, and capable of tapping in to the background radiation of the universe to preform amazing feats. After an AER goes rouge they are determined to be sentient and therefore responsible for their own actions. Suddenly no one feels safe having these Artificially Intelligent beings around and so they are placed in The City, where a special device suppresses their power. Some time later the world is beset by an unknown force that destroys most life leaving the remnants to flounder. Humans begin to seek shelter in The City, which survived the Apocalypse. Things get complected with AER and humans living side by side. One AER breaks the field that suppresses their power and starts a chain of events that lead to a startling truth: we are not alone. This story has a mad max/cloud atlas thing going on. A hyper futuristic society falls to an outside attack that destroys most of the world, leaving wastelands interspersed with pockets where nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of civilization. A few scattered cities survive and humans struggle for security. In this bleak landscape a single AER possesses the power to save the world from a horrific fate, but the cost might be more than they can pay.

     Beyond the Stars(BTS): Sci-fi/Fantasy epic. In a distant future humans and Martic share a world cut off from both civilizations. What began as a short lived and devastating war between the two has settled into a strange and unbalanced power dynamic. The Martic king rules with a pleasant public facade that hides a dark and devious plot. Soon he will have the power to contact his home world and take the humans as slaves into their great empire. But not everyone is fooled, the Maquiya, a group of guerrilla resistance fighters, know the truth. The story follows the members of this resistance movement and other key players as the fight to save this small pocket of humanity from a terrible fate draws to a startling close. Prophetic dreams, confusing nightmares, double agents, and a century old secret come to light. And there is more than the fate of this world in the balance.

     Descendant Effect(DE): Magical Realism. Davin Khaye and his husband Eric Douglas just adopted a baby girl with a mysterious past. They thought they were leaving that whole occult investigation thing behind when they settled on Staten Island but when and old flame develops a magical illness Davin and Eric find themselves, and their new friends, pulled into a fight for the fate of the world.           Descendant Effect Book One: Sins of the Father, Complete (Looking for Beta and Sensitivity Readers and Editors) Davin, a magical historical fiction writer and former occult investigator,  gets a call from his first boyfriend’s sister saying that Gary is deathly ill. When Davin visits out of sympathy for Sarah he discovers that not all is what it seems. A virulent Wrong Magic has infected Gary and it’s contagious. Davin gathers his Chemist husband, the newly minted Descendant, Kaila, and the not JUST a vampire Jeb, along with Davin’s own personal guardian demon to unravel the mystery. Things get ever more complicated with mysterious Hunter Rex, Angels, demons, and Rex’s erstwhile sorcerer adviser Ambrose getting involved. By the end there are more questions than answers and long road to travel before Davin can finally let go of his terrible past.

     Dirty Deeds(DD): Magical Realism. Lady Luck gifted Clay with Power, now he’s fallen out of favor. Can a Demon with a moral compass guide him back into the limelight or will Clay be forced to watch as tragedy dogs his every step. When a goddess tells you to use your probability power for the good of mankind, taking a trip to Vegas is probably the last thing you should do. Clay learns that the hard way when he ignores his duties and a favorite of the Lady dies in a tragic accident. Lady Luck is no mans fool and she curses Clay to a terrible fate. With his powers severely effected he must still try to help, try being the operative word. After Clay is connected to a series of terrible deaths the FBI steps in. The lead detective is more than she seems and when she figures out clay’s secret she has to make a choice, her career or the man she’s starting to fall in love with. Considering her kind aren’t supposed to be able to fall in love it’s not that hard a choice. But Clay doesn’t seem to feel the same, until he does, and the curse is completed, leaving Clay in a sorry state. Kaezon won’t give up easily though and fights to make sure Clay comes back, but Clay isn’t so sure that’s a good idea. (some inspiration for this came from American Gods by Neil Gaiman)

     Nowhere Places(NP): Sci-fi/ Fantasy, Magical Realism. The history of Earth is secretly intertwined with an alien war thousands of years in the making, and so is it’s fate. To save his people the King of the Fay brought them to earth 15,000 years ago, but something went wrong. From a base on the moon the king directs a war in The Nowhere Places, overlaps in this dimension and another barren dimension. The Fay and the Phaedron have been at war for fifteen centuries and the people have had enough. Two of the Fay princes hatch separate rebellions while a Phaedron warrior, having crashed his vessel near a human school, discovers that humans aren’t the stupid cattle he’d always been told they were. Things take a dramatic turn when an archaeologist finds a massive structure several hundred feet below the exactly center of the Sahara desert and learns that this war, which threatens to take the earth out any time now, was never meant to happen because the Fay king… has been in suspended animation in the Cityship for 15 thousand years. This is one of the least fleshed out stories I currently have. Several scenes popped in my head that inspired the story and they almost all look like anime/mange scenes, the one where the archaeologist discovers the king reminds me of the scene where Integra discovers Alucard in Van Hellsing for instance.

     Prince of Darkness(PoD): Superhero, Magical Realism. Jamie was five when she first met the mysterious white haired boy. He didn’t have a name but Jamie could tell he was smart and creative so she called him Donny after her favorite ninja turtle. When she’s 32  her best friend Donny and his ‘boys’ Raziel and Gadreel are back after a ten year absence. Things are going great for the up and coming journalist and then she hits the big time, the very first real life superhero! Henry, her detective little brother, isn’t so thrilled and Donny and the boys seem strangely reluctant to talk about The Prince of Darkness. Soon things start getting even stranger when three people with white hair begin to try to capture The Prince. Tensions run high and weird people keep popping up at Donny’s lounge club. As Jamie searches for answers Donny searches for a connection. Lost and isolated from his ‘true’ family he begins to forge a new one through his Club, The Nine Circles. But the sort of people that hang out in Hell bring their own kinds of trouble. As Donny’s checkered past starts to come to light, the mysterious man finds that his heart wants more than it can have. Starting a relationship with his sister’s best friend was never Henry’s plan, especially since he knows they both love each other, but when Jamie rejects Donny’s advances what’s a guy supposed to do? Comforting his friend leads to something more but the more that Henry gets to know Donny the more concerned his is that he’s sleeping with the ‘enemy.’             PoD: Raising Cain: The story of Cain. Yes, that Cain. After an accident leads to a terrible curse Cain walks the earth searching for meaning. When he learns of ‘Lucifer’s’ fall and those that walk the earth destroying in his name, Cain finds his purpose, because he knows something is wrong. Hêlêl was the kindest of all angels and he would never have turned on the others. But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and Cain finds that much of the time his attempts to help only cause more problems. After thousands of years traveling the world Cain encounters a spirited young man who calls him Red and falls in love, then one day, he vanishes. It’s the beginning of the end for Cain’s optimism and he spirals into a place so dark he thinks even his long lost friend would forsake him, but he can’t manage to care. Then Cyd and Nancy come along and drag the grouchy old man out of the depths of his despair. And just in time to find that maybe some friends aren’t as lost as previously thought.          PoD: Cyd's Story. Cyd grew up in the sixties. His little hometown was the picture of middle America. On the outside at least. In truth the town is made up of Hunter’s and their families. People who have dedicated their lives to taking out every last Tecum on earth. Unfortunately for Cyd, his mother had tried to get out of the lifestyle and ended up returning home a single mother. Most of the town whispered that she had fallen in with a ‘bad crowd’ and believed Cyd was a Tecum half breed. Only respect for his mother’s family kept them from doing anything, until it didn’t anymore. After ‘The Incident’ Cyd withdrew ever further from those around him and when his mother died when he was 17 he fled the town and never looked back, until Red and Nancy insist on following a Tecum on the run from Red’s brand of justice straight back to the town.                                       PoD: Saints and Sinners: The story of Casper and friends. Casper has never been one to run from his problems so when his team goes missing on a mission he doesn’t hesitate to comply with their captor’s demand. Of course it helps that he knows the guy. Really really well. After liberating his friends from his long time antagonist Ray, Cas find that, this time, he can’t seem to get rid of the man. That’s OK though, because he’s ready to mend the rift between them. Shadow isn’t happy about sharing his closest friend but when a supernatural threat looms they are happy to have an angel on their side. (this is like leverage if it was set in a world were the supernatural exists)                                                       PoD: Charlemagne Song: The story of Charlemagne. When she was in high school, Elle went by Elliot, and had a best friend named Jessica. Back then Elle was head over heels for the tiny blond girl but that was years ago. After a chance encounter with the famous musician Charlemagne Song leaves Elle single and depressed she discoverers that Jess might still be her best friend even though they haven’t talked in years. Suddenly Elle finds herself in a world of pure imagination as she navigates life with one of the most famous musicians of the day, who just happens to be half angel.                                                               PoD: R.E.D.: Story about a band, few details but some characters and lots of song titles and album titles, two of the band members are part of Donny’s ‘family’

     Sad Story(SS): Lucifer’s punishment wasn’t just banishment and when Michael finds out, all Hell breaks loose. Michael wants to let his brother live out his last days on earth instead of locked in a dark cage so he kidnaps him and with lawyer-angel Raziel and his twin brother Gadreel, find a place to hide the erstwhile devil. But Michael’s absence from heaven does not go unnoticed and while the other angels search for him strange murders have been happening in the city. The few witnesses give a description that strangely matches Michael. Can he prove he didn’t do it, or will he be parted from Lucifer before the Brightest of god’s angels fades away completely. (some cross over potential, very sad but with a happy ending cause I like that)

     Sonnets(Son): Inspired by ‘The Good Place.’ Lucifer misses heaven so he tries to recreate it, but to recreate perfection you have to recreate imperfection. (minimal work, the newest of things that have popped into my head)

     Twilight on the Moon(TotM): A Space Epic. Originally conceived of as a graphic novel, this story follows the exploits of the first human intergalactic journey. Humans reach a point in their development where they attract attention from the Galactic Coalition, a group comprised of advanced races from throughout the universe. These races band together to form a peace keeping force and have strict rules and regulations that they expect all members to adhere to, and if a race refuses to follow the guidelines then they are banned from involvement in the larger community of space faring civilizations. Of course, humans, being humans, don’t much care for the Coalition’s ultimatum. A stealth ship arrives on earth and informs the governing bodies that the Coalition isn’t the only group out there and that humanity can find out how other races live by constructing a ship, from plans provided by the individual in the stealth ship, that can travel to all non member systems and pick up ambassadors to have a conference on what humanity should do. The ship they construct is christened La Luna as it was made on a moon base. The captain of the ship is a short delicate looking man by the name of Rane Laforge. He hand picks a complement of characters for the mission that include his ex-girlfriend, Dr. Sandra Fisk as his CMO, Lt. Cmdr. Lars Tavic, Security Chief Anton Talon, Specialist Translator Rendell Hartford, and many others. They pick up several ambassadors including the accidentally acquired Ares LacTon of the La Mer Ray, who falls in love with Lars. It quickly becomes clear that the mission is going to be stranger than expected when we discover that very few of the people on board are actually human! (a sort of comedy of errors in space with the occasional serious moment, the world this is set in is my most elaborate and most complete but the story itself has no coherence yet. There is significant possibility that it will cross over with BTS as two-three of the characters from that likely served aboard La Luna at some point.)

     Unnamed Prince and Regent Story(PR): Fantasy. A princess gets kidnapped but it’s not what you think! She escapes her captors and flees on foot. She stumbles across a caravan and is taken under the wing of their guard who helps her disguise herself as a man. On the trip back to her home she realizes that she’s never been happier and that she is actually a he and he has fallen in love with the guard who seems to feel the same. After getting back to his home however, his love mysteriously vanishes. The now Prince throws the kingdom into chaos and becomes despondent. Spiraling into a drunken haze until a visiting royal entourage brings an unexpected guest and a wild revelation.(another where I have a fairly thought out world but only a sketch of the plot)

FanFiction

     Sherlock Fan Fiction(Sher): A Ghost From the Past. Someone from Sherlock's past shows up and John finds out how little he truly knows of his best friend. Basically Sherlock’s best friend from childhood shows up and it turns out that she was more than a friend and part of the reason Mycroft and Sherlock don’t get along is that Mycroft had asked her to marry him and she had said yes and Sherlock believed(for actual reasons) that Mycroft purposely stole her from him. That’s only the first big revaluation about Sherlock.

     Strange Sounds Supernatural Fan Fiction(SSFF): A Ghost From the Future. The boys are transported to the future where the supernatural is no longer hidden and some major event created a post apocalyptic fallout, but this time it was humans who did it. The result is that massive creatures are roaming the planet destroying any pockets of civilization they can find. Thanks to a few not so dead and reformed archangels there is a part of the US that’s a ‘safe’ zone. When Past Sam and Dean show up around the time that safe zone begins to come under attack both versions of the boys and the future archangels join forces with Occultist John Constantine, Alien Technology Specialist Mickey Smith and his wife Dr. Martha Smith, and the secret organization known as Torchwood as they travel the world looking for clues to put this new threat to rest at last. Features several original characters and many crossover characters from similar worlds with cameo appearances by characters like Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens. (Only about Half plotted but the most written of any FanFiction I have so far.)

     Supernatural/Batman Beyond Fusion(SPN/BB): This plot bunny may not make it, basically just replacing the cast of Batman Beyond with the cast of Supernatural but tweaking the plot for supernatural stuff.

     Ultimate CrossOver Fic(C/O): This fic started out in my head with a few comic panels showing Jack Harness falling comet style out of the sky over the impala. The boys investigate and find a very naked Jack in the crater. He of course starts flirting. At the same time that that is happening, the TARDIS bumps into the hull of the USS Enterprise, manifests on a landing deck, and then they both get sucked into some kind of time distortion. Meanwhile, Gabriel, trapped in a spell that Metatron set up to siphon his power to keep the wards on heaven set, uses the last of his strength to send a dream message to Sam. This story would include Supernatural, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Harry Potter, Good Omens, Marvel, Pushing Daises, and basically anything else I can find a way to add and every conceivable mlm ship. (I can’t write sex that involves women because of dysphoria but feel free to believe those ships happen too)

[morelovemoreadventure]

Cambodia was a treasure. From the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat to the pristine Sunset beach to the fresh crab in Kep, Cambodia has shown us calm beauty, delicious food and a deep appreciation of history (good and bad).

We arrived on Christmas Day in Siem Reap and wandered around Pub Street until we found a great little restaurant where we had beef lok lak and chicken amok – the two most popular national dishes.  

After Skyping with both of our families the following day, we headed off to the National Museum to learn about the history of Cambodia, including the history of the Angkor temples. We are really glad we went to the museum first because seeing the temples made more sense after learning about them…

The next day we took a tuk-tuk to watch the (uneventful) sunrise at Angkor Wat with a million of our closest friends and then toured around the bigger temples. 

It was an incredible day – these temples are unreal. 

There is beauty around every corner – though I have to say that we both enjoyed the smaller temples without the hoards of people much better. The temples always seem a bit more magical without people.

The following day we took a bicycle ride around the temples stopping at many of the smaller temples. Again, it was an amazing day. They are just wonders. 

After we had a delicious Cambodian BBQ, we were then off to Battambang. 

We rang in the new year riding the bamboo train and watching thousands upon thousands of bats come out of a cave at twilight. What a sight! We also hiked up some stairs to a temple on the hill where our guide fed the monkeys…

Battambang was a quiet little town and we enjoyed our downtime. We also took a cooking class, which included shopping in the local market. 

Battambang was a funky little town with outdoor ellipticals and iced coffee double bagged. We ordered iced coffee and iced thai green tea from a local cart... he gave it to us in plastic bags with a straw in it and that was inside a paper bag.... we laughed pretty hard. We also loved eating fresh fruit everywhere... I think we ate pineapple every day. 

We then took the night bus to Sihanoukville, which was a trip because we got on after seemingly everyone else was already on board, and they were sleeper beds instead of seats (2 people per bed) and in our “bed” there was already someone sleeping there… so after having the bus man make the other guy find his actual bed, we snuggled into some already warm sheets. Delightful. We considered ourselves pretty fortunate because at least we like each other and, well, know each other. A guy we met at our hotel who was also traveling on this bus was lucky enough to snuggle next to a stranger… he said it was awful. The picture quality is terrible but you get the point....

 But then we were in beautiful Sihanoukville where everything was beautiful except for the trash that filled the beach. This is a pretty typical party area and the beer bottles in the ocean proved it. But it was a stopping point for us to go to Koh Rong Samloem island on the west side where we were treated to virtually no people, blue ocean, fruit salads with passionfruit and perfect, perfect sand.  

 We slept in a tent suspended from trees… which sounded so exciting and romantic when we booked it. Turns out Jared weighs more than I do so it was like a giant hammock. He kept telling me to move over… but every time I moved up, I just fell back down. Ha! And on the last night, we found out that the tent wasn’t waterproof! 

 It was an adventure to say the least… But with sunset views like this, we can’t even begin to complain.

After an awesome week filled with kayak trips, snorkeling, and no wifi, we headed back to Sihanoukville in order to do some laundry and then headed to our next destination, Kep. 

Kep was probably our favorite town in Cambodia - just a sleepy, little coastal fishing village.

We stayed at the most lovely guesthouse with views of the coast. We had a little bungalow and it was perfect. The owner was an amazing Cambodian woman – we drank Khmer tea every morning and evening before we went to bed and as we were leaving she gave us a bag of the tea because she didn’t know what we would do without it. And I loved her passion fruit smoothies – made with passion fruits from her tree – so she gave us passion fruits as we left too. Such a kind, kind woman and we absolutely loved our stay. If you ever find yourself in Cambodia, make a visit to Kep and sleep at the Treetop Bungalows. (and stay for more than 1 night!!)

In Kep, we ate crab – because that is what you do in Kep. The first night, we had the traditional Green Pepper Crab made with Kampot Pepper – pepper grown right in the area. It was incredible.

 The next night, we decided to do the market crab adventure. We got 1kg (2.2 lbs) of crab (pulled directly from the ocean) for $6! (and I think we got ripped off… crazy!) Then we had it boiled for $.50 and bought some sauce for $1. Then we found a place to sit, bought some beer and a pineapple smoothie, and sat down to eat our boiling hot crab. Again, I had really romantic notions of this but it turns out that the shit is still inside of them. So after getting past the weird green gook, the eyes and the literal shit, the crab was really yummy… ha! It was still an awesome experience and pretty hysterical as well.

After Kep, we headed to Kampot where we went rock climbing. It was a lot of fun! It was my first time climbing outside and it was the perfect first-time experience.

 We then headed to Phnom Penh where we visited the Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum. If you haven’t read about the Khmer Rouge and what they did to their own people, please Google it. It’s a horrible part of the world’s history and the marks of the damage their reign and the genocide had on the Cambodian people are evident even today.

 From 1975-1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime took people from the city and forced them into labor camps all around Cambodia. Anyone associated with the old government, specifically men, was murdered. They killed anyone who was deemed intellectual (even people who wore glasses), the disabled, people who weren’t “full” Cambodian, etc. Most often, they murdered the entire family so that no one would take revenge on the new regime. From what we learned at the Killing Fields site, bullets were often expensive so they would line people up and kill them with farm tools, knives, etc.

While starving their own people, giving them only a bowl of rice and water where you could literally count the grains of rice within it, they worked them literally to death. Children as young as 5 were made to work, or arguably worse, forced to train as a Khmer Rouge soldier. Life was somewhat better off for the rural farm workers but as Pol Pot became increasingly paranoid, he began targeting everyone.  

 I read two books on the genocide while I was there, “First They Killed My Father” and a book with short stories written by survivors. In the short stories book, the author’s bio was included for each experience told. Most of them were living in America having been accepted as refugees after their families had been torn apart, many of them the sole survivors of their entire family. Their country had been ripped apart by violence and death surrounded them on a daily basis. All of the bios included their current occupation, many of them social workers helping rebuild their country, others having worked for the US Postal Service and other parts of the government – all of the stories were of productive members of society – grateful for the chance to rebuild their lives free of violence and free of starvation.  

Why do we build these museums? Why do we build memorials?

So that history won’t be repeated.

 Over the last 9 months, I have realized my greatest fear. Will I hide behind my privilege and comfort when people are in need? 

From our standpoint, it’s time to remember that violence and hatred can be stopped by activism and by paying attention to what is happening around us. Democracies are not permanent structures and I know most of the people reading this blog are grateful for the stable and fortunate lives they currently possess. I urge you to look around at the people who are not feeling so stable or fortunate right now. What can we do to reach out and offer that helping hand?

This isn’t a post about being Anti-Trump or Anti-Republican. For anyone who knows us, we can’t live in Wyoming for 4-6 years and be an extreme liberal. We get the differences between the parties, between the disagreements, but what we see more are the similarities and the biggest similarity is that we are all human.

Let us not forget that.