#Experience the power of sustainable dredging

[acecentro]

[crystalherbalism]

The Right Dredging Machine Manufacturer

Choosing the right dredging machine manufacturer is essential for successful waterway maintenance, land reclamation, and other large-scale projects. The ideal manufacturer offers innovative, durable, and efficient machinery tailored to specific project needs. Key considerations include experience, technological advancements, environmental sustainability, and customer support. Partnering with a reliable manufacturer ensures smooth operations, cost efficiency, and long-term success, making the right choice critical for any dredging project.

Understanding the Role of a Dredging Machine Manufacturer  

When it comes to selecting a dredging machine manufacturer, understanding the role they play in the industry is crucial. These manufacturers are responsible for designing, producing, and providing the equipment necessary for various dredging applications. Their expertise directly affects the efficiency and performance of dredging projects, making it vital to choose a manufacturer with a proven track record.

Key Factors to Consider in a Dredging Machine Manufacturer  

When evaluating potential dredging machine manufacturers, several factors come into play. First, consider the manufacturer’s reputation within the industry. Look for companies with extensive experience and positive customer reviews. Additionally, assess the range of dredging machines they offer, ensuring they provide equipment suitable for your specific needs, whether for mining, construction, or environmental restoration.

Innovations by Leading Dredging Machine Manufacturers  

Innovation is a hallmark of a reputable dredging machine manufacturer. Leading companies invest in research and development to enhance the efficiency, durability, and environmental sustainability of their machines. From advanced hydraulic systems to energy-efficient designs, staying updated with the latest technological advancements can significantly improve your dredging operations and reduce overall costs.

Customization Options Offered by Dredging Machine Manufacturers  

Every dredging project is unique, and having a manufacturer that offers customization options can make a significant difference. A reliable dredging machine manufacturer should provide tailored solutions to meet specific project requirements. This may include modifications to machine size, power, or additional features that enhance functionality. Customization ensures that the equipment is perfectly suited for the tasks at hand, optimizing performance and efficiency.

After-Sales Support from Dredging Machine Manufacturers  

After-sales support is another critical aspect when selecting a dredging machine manufacturer. A trustworthy manufacturer will provide comprehensive support services, including maintenance, spare parts supply, and technical assistance. This support is essential to keep your dredging equipment in optimal working condition, minimizing downtime and ensuring that your projects stay on schedule.

Evaluating Cost-Effectiveness with Dredging Machine Manufacturers  

Cost-effectiveness is often a primary concern when selecting a dredging machine manufacturer. While it’s tempting to choose the cheapest option available, consider the long-term value. Investing in high-quality machinery from a reputable manufacturer may have a higher upfront cost but can lead to significant savings in maintenance and operational efficiency over time. Evaluating the total cost of ownership, including fuel efficiency and durability, can help you make a more informed decision.

Making the Right Choice in Dredging Machine Manufacturers  

The right dredging machine manufacturer is a pivotal decision that impacts the success of your dredging projects. By considering factors such as reputation, innovation, customization, and after-sales support, you can ensure that you select a manufacturer that aligns with your specific needs. Remember, investing in quality machinery is investing in the future of your operations, leading to more efficient, cost-effective, and successful dredging endeavors.

Conclusion

Choosing the right dredging machine manufacturer is crucial for the success of your project. By prioritizing quality, customization, and strong customer support, you can ensure that you invest in reliable equipment tailored to your specific needs. Additionally, considering manufacturers committed to sustainability can enhance your project's environmental responsibility. Ultimately, thorough research and informed decision-making will lead to effective dredging operations and long-term satisfaction with your machinery investment.

[mittensmorgul]

Can’t everyone use tumblr how they want?

YES!

This site is exactly what people make of it for themselves. That was the exact point of that post. The fact that people reacted negatively to it at all proves my point. Seriously.

I have a number of other anons that are clearly from people who don't actually follow me, and are only here in a reactionary fashion having seen it on someone else's reblog, or else heard about it in passing and decided the best reaction to an ultimately harmless and rather bumbling post was to take personal offense and bring anonymous hate to a stranger on the internet. (and at least one not-anonymous "go kill yourself" type comment on the post itself)

THAT was the point of making that post.

For people who might be new to this fandom or new to tumblr in general (or even for people who have been here for years), your experience here is exactly what you make of it. I haven't seen that sort of vitriolic kneejerk reaction to anything I've written or posted in years. That post touched nerves. So it was a bit of an experiment, and I'm sorry to everyone who experienced any of that negativity second-hand. NOBODY should be made to feel like shit when engaging with something that is supposed to be fun. But I've learned over the years that that's exactly what some people consider fun.

There are new people to this fandom since the absolute free for all of the weeks after November 5th. We all reveled in those weeks before the show collapsed in on itself two weeks later. It was like 15 years worth of Hiatus Blogging followed by... well... some of the worst genuine hurt and disillusionment I've ever experienced or witnessed inflicted on a fandom by a piece of media.

There have to be at least a few people who floated into this fandom during that emotional roller coaster who want to make sense of it all, who were at least curious enough about how a show could've brought the characters to that emotional moment in 15.18 before effectively ignoring it all and burning the entire 15 year narrative to nothing just two episodes later.

Some folks stuck around to dig through the ashes of fandom in search of carrion, and that's fine. Some have zero desire to ever engage with the show or the fandom beyond mocking it for ever having existed at all, and that is also fine! But some folks? They might be wondering why anyone ever saw anything in this narrative to begin with, and they might be interested in knowing that there is this vast collection of information available to them (funny that none of my self-righteous anons even mentioned those, outside of one pointing out that my phrasing introducing that section of links was easily interpreted as condescending... which... yeah... again that was the point, and no I will not edit that language. none of us are free from sin).

Tumblr hasn't "changed." It was always this way. This site is not a monolith. Fandom is not a monolith. Even smaller groups within fandom aren't monoliths. Things that are considered "tumblr standard etiquette" do not exist across this entire website. And even within the supernatural fandom, and even within the tumblr-destiel-portion of the fandom there aren't "rules" dictating how you interact with anyone. Well, the one specific rule we should all be able to agree on is that you don't bring hate to real actual human beings, and yet...

There has ALWAYS been the option to engage with fandom here on whatever level an individual chooses. And that hasn't really changed since the finale aired. Anyone who thinks that Tumblr or the fandom has "evolved" or "changed" has likely just fallen in with a different fandom bubble then they'd existed within before. None of the bubbles have actually popped or disappeared. But which one you experience is entirely your own choice. You curate your experience here.

That was the point, illustrated by the vast array of comments I actually got on that post, structured with a little bit of everything including "tumblr mom from 2014." Everything pisses some people off, you know? Even the perception that some stranger on the internet might dare to lay down an arbitrary "rule" that zero people actually have to follow. See what I mean?

Because if any of the people who kneejerked at it actually followed me, or knew me at all, they wouldn't have kneejerked. They would've seen the point.

So your experience is what you make of it here. There are resources for people actually interested in engaging with the narrative or the fandom or the history of it. People mock "tumblr moms" or "fandom moms" all the time, but there wouldn't ~be~ a fandom without the people who actually build those resources. I.e. adults with the time, money, and personal investment in actually sustaining the fandom, instead of running around with torches trying to burn it down at every new whiff of perceived ~drama~ to latch on to.

For example, all of the scripts we've been acquiring and sharing with the entire fandom free of charge. I know that the fandom bubbles who seize on those scripts like hungry vultures to cough back up out of context "gotcha" posts postulating whatever theory of the differences between script and screen will dredge up the most drama or outrage in their fandom bubble... they haven't even considered how those scripts were acquired and made available to them. To them, they are "leaks." They are gifts that fell out of the sky and landed in their laps. There isn't even the barest curiosity about their origins or relevance beyond whatever social nourishment they derive by making up stuff and spouting it out with unearned authority. It's sad. But if that's how they enjoy the fandom, it's nice to remind them that none of the fandom they cannibalize would exist without the rest of us, too.

Yes, even the people you disagree with. Even the people who ship the things you find disgusting or repulsive. Even people who have an entirely different experience to your own. Even the people who are only here for those gotcha posts.

Fandom is not by nature a nihilistic shitshow, or no fandom would survive the amount of drama the 1% try to bring to it. Here have a fanlore article about this phenomenon. Right now, in Supernatural fandom, it feels like more than 1%, but I promise it really is only 1%. They're just really loud. There's actually other avenues to participatory fandom available to anyone who chooses to find them. Parts of this vast fandom that aren't focused on that 1% of reactionary leg-chewing at every turn. None of them are (as the linked article confirms) truly 100% free of unnecessary drama or bad behavior (including ME, I mean I MADE THAT POST!), but on tumblr you can curate your own experience. Fandom actually can be fun without burning down the thing you claim to be a fan of, or attacking other real human people for having the audacity to exist on the internet in a way you might believe is out of touch or pathetic. Seriously, nobody deserves to experience that from anyone over a fucking television show. Like seriously, take a step back and examine your life and your choices at that point.

Tumblr was exactly the same as a fandom community when I joined as it is now. Throughout my entire time here, I've curated my own personal experience to exactly what I derive the most personal satisfaction from. During that time I have had numerous friends and mutuals lament that their personal experience had become so toxic, but they were afraid to trim those blogs from their dash for fear of having no content left to engage with at all. For years there have been follow lists and blog recs and people desperate to find a more "peaceful and fun" fandom experience. People grow exhausted and embittered when their entire experience of fandom is an emotionally draining drama train. It's like pandemic doom scrolling, but for the thing that should be a respite from that sort of mindset, something that's supposed to be entertainment. The show did enough to us all, we don't have to turn around and re-inflict it on each other day in and day out on tumblr dot com.

So if even one person saw my post and thought well shit maybe I actually want to engage with a wider swath of fandom and see what's there, after seven months of post-finale drama, this whole other region of fandom is still here, still being the curators of the archives, the creators of stories and art and meta and gifs and videos and actually caring about it all that will keep this fandom going long after the current round of exhausting drama inevitably plays itself out.

The amount of in-group language in the negative replies I got was unsurprising. It's like folks are living in an alternate universe that doesn't mesh at all with what I experience on this exact same hellsite. Almost like we exist in entirely different bubbles of fandom, with entirely different purposes for existing at all. Everyone on this hellsite gets to pick which bubble (or bubbles) to take up residence in. Some people simply forget that their personal bubble isn't the universal defining experience of this site. Unfortunately, I doubt my little disruption to their bubbles will actually make any of them see that, but you anon... I think you did.

You are highly encouraged to engage with fandom EXACTLY THE WAY YOU CHOOSE. You have the ultimate power in controlling your entire experience here. Tumblr and Supernatural Fandom on tumblr is not Just One Thing that everyone who wants to participate in must conform to one specific code of ethics or behavior to be part of. And that NOBODY has the right to tell anyone else they're doing it wrong (including ME! I am 100% including myself in this!).

It's not MY job to dictate how anyone else experiences this fandom, as much as it was not the job of the people who reblogged my post (which I did not personally shove into their eyeballs with a demand for compliance... how did any of those people even *find* my post?) solely to tell me how *I* need to change how I experience the fandom, you see? Don'tcha love hypocrisy!

But the point was made for those who care, and a lot of people got to update their block lists (I still don't block anyone, as I said I curated my fandom space here and generally don't follow folks that don't personally make me happy and enrich my life by engaging with their content. However other people choose to engage with *my* content (any of it, going back nearly 50k posts over the last decade) is their business entirely. Sometimes I just feel the need to draw out people who are all too eager to expose their own whole asses in public. Mission accomplished.

[ohwereusingourmadeupnames]

And the Land is Dark

Pairing: Peter Parker/Tony Stark (Starker) Rating: Mature (M)  Notes: This is my fic for @twokinkybeans‘s Jar of Dirt challenge. The kink was outdoor sex - so we got camping and nakedness!  Warnings: outdoor sex, NSFW stuff, & the inevitable softness that comes with my work. Summary: 

Tony and Peter alternate picking vacation destinations for the summer & it’s Peter’s turn. When he brought up camping, Tony had his reservations. It turns out that fresh air and Peter Parker are the perfect combination. 

Read it on AO3 here

The most important thing for Tony in his relationship with Peter, was equality.

When they first met on MIT’s campus, Tony had no idea that Peter worked in his R&D department – it’d been a long time since he graced the actual Stark Industries building and couldn’t have possibly known the well-rounded, extremely attractive man worked FOR him.

They were in one of the alumni buildings, gathered with the last 30 years’ worth of MIT graduates celebrating something or another. The conversation didn’t veer close to anything professional – everyone knew what Tony did; breaching the topic only led to shop talk that he didn’t want to stomach more than absolutely necessary.

Finding out that Peter got his checks from his company didn’t change anything between them – it simply made Tony much more conscious of the power imbalance that could easily be made into an issue (and not necessarily from Peter himself). The age gap between them didn’t make him bat an eye, Tony preferred the men he dated to be somewhat younger. For both of their sakes, Tony made Peter’s desires to be independent his first priority.

That included, much to his dismay, vacation picking duties. Over the past 3 years they’d been together, Tony and Peter alternated who picked the destinations for the entirety of the summer. It was one of the only times of the year Tony didn’t have many obligations – he could carelessly spend it with Peter without feeling an ounce of guilt. He simply wished this was his year to pick.

Peter brought up the idea of taking a camping trip to start off their extended vacation around March. He showed Tony pictures of the Great Smoky Mountains for a few weeks before he finally told Peter he was game and would love camping in a secluded site on the banks of one of the streams running through the trail. Tony loved to camp and did a ton of it after he graduated from college and tried to sow his wild oats.

It quickly became apparent that Peter had never gone, however. Peter walked into REI with a determined grin that immediately turned panicked. His eyes got comically wide – Tony picking up on the overwhelmed feeling almost instantly. “It’s alright, Pete. We’ll start with the simple stuff and go from there. I’ve got your back,” Tony said softly, his arm wrapping around wide shoulders that were pinched together tightly. “Sleeping bags first.”

The rest of the adventure around the outdoor store was filled with Tony giving Peter a rundown on all of the different equipment while they picked it out. They settled for two huge sleeping bags, a 6-person tent, some campfire cooking utensils and a stove, and the little trinkets that Tony convinced them both they needed (because who didn’t need a waterproof match container?) Footing the bill didn’t feel bad at all, the smile on Peter’s face was more than worth it.

To really enjoy the camping experience, Peter convinced him that driving would be the best way to get to their mountain excursion – so, he talked Happy into letting him drive the man’s SUV in exchange for a couple extra weeks of vacation for him and Pepper. It was the easiest deal he ever made – but, Happy didn’t need to know that. They packed and repacked the car way more times than necessary before Peter deemed them ready to set out on the 12-hour drive.

Tony took the first driving shift; they set off around 3 in the morning to make the most out of the empty roads and lack of traffic. The espresso Peter made him before they left kept him wired for 5 hours straight – they watched the sun come up and sang to the playlist Peter put together when their StarkPhones actually got reception.

Peter took over after the second bathroom stop – Tony filled up the car and their coffee cups before they set out again. This time, the music stayed off; Tony put on his reading glasses and pulled out Fire & Blood, the book he’d been reading to Peter every night before they passed out for the last couple of weeks. It seemed juvenile, but it was soothing for them both. The story was compelling and got them through another big chunk of the drive.

Their next pit stop took a while. The closer they got to the mountains and the park they were staying in, the narrower the selection on food stops and grocery stores became. Tony caught Peter eyeing the McDonald’s they passed when they took the exit, which just so happened to be located right across the way from a local supermarket. The big coolers they got during their shopping adventure were empty and waiting to be filled with junk food meant to sustain 2 grown men for three days.

The sheer amount of packaged chips and cookies Tony watched Peter put into the cart made him laugh, his boyfriend at 26 still ate like a 10-year-old. The idea of letting go of the reins of his diet for the next few days quickly became a reality with every new and intriguing sweet Peter claimed tasted amazing. The plan was to hike around and enjoy the surroundings, anyway – that would require extra sustenance.

Getting the supplies situated and binging on McDonald’s took them another hour, both of them more than satisfied when they got back on the road to finish off the drive and finally get to their destination. As Tony drove, he talked about some of his own camping trips – the two of them laughing when he described the poison ivy he’d accidentally wiped his ass with. The view got better the closer they got and by the time they were pulling in to claim their camping spot, the sky was lit with a gorgeous sun surrounded by the most beautiful clouds.

A look of wonder passed across Peter’s face the further into the park they got. For the first time since Peter planned the trip, Tony realized that this was probably Peter’s first time ever seeing anything like this. Queens didn’t have a good view of the sky most of the time, let alone beautiful mountain passes and cotton-ball clouds. Reaching across the center console, Tony gripped Peter’s hand tightly. They shared a smile before Peter turned his attention back to the view out the window.

As far as first days went, Tony didn’t have anything to complain about. Watching Peter attempt to put the tent up before realizing that a single pull would do it provided entertainment Tony didn’t count on. The rosiness of Peter’s cheeks when he caught Tony looking at him making it even better. “You knew how easy that was, didn’t you?” Peter questioned, affection and annoyance battling for dominance on his face.

“I sure did. I thought it would be better to let you figure it out. How are you going to learn if I do everything for you?” Tony looked at him pointedly, the man more than familiar with the fact that Peter put learning and knowledge above all else. The eye roll he got was totally fair, and all the more adorable because of it.

They unpacked the campfire stove and all the accessories for it and put them into the tent – Tony could tell that Peter was already ready to start exploring. After getting changed, the pair set out for a long hike – they caught the sunset standing on a flat summit of the mountain closest to them. The best part of it all was the look of awe still clearly etched on Peter’s face – there were colors reflecting in his eyes that didn’t even exist in the confines of New York’s city limits.

Hand-in-hand, Tony used the last dredges of light to get them back to their campsite. Peter held the lantern for him while he started a fire when they got back – the idea of having warm food one they both were looking forward to becoming an actuality. He talked through the entire process as he did it – Peter listened carefully; his eyes wide as he watched every one of Tony’s movements carefully. When they eventually got the hot dogs on the skewers, Tony was exhausted and lulled into a relaxed state by the sound of Peter’s voice and the open quiet surrounding them.

Sleep came easy, Tony passed out on his back with Peter curled up against his side, and when they woke up the next morning, neither seemed to have moved at all throughout the night. Peter kissed him fully awake and promised a naked dip in the water after getting food in his belly. Tony worked his culinary magic and put together a pretty decent bacon and egg combination.

The rest of the day was spent walking along the water ways that connected to each other throughout the trail. Peter looked insanely adorable splashing through some of the deeper water. A couple of times, the waded into a stream that was not meant for humans to be in and Tony had to drag himself and the koala bear clinging to him out of the faster currents. It was one of the best days Tony could remember having in a while – sunburn and blisters on his feet included.

----

The next two days followed the same pattern – Peter picked out a spot he wanted to go explore and they spent all day doing so. Tony kept them fed and alive when Peter slipped and dislocated a finger – it seemed like a life or death situation in the moment, at least. It was a blast, soaking in the sun and simply enjoying being together. Their nights were spent curled up around the fire, both too exhausted to do much more than talk about the day’s adventure and exchange lazy kisses.

As the end of the trip creeped up on them, Peter finally let them be lazy. They drank beer and floated in the small stream in front of their campsite. Getting drunk before 1 in the afternoon was an absolute treat and led to the most exquisite nap under the tree they tied their hammock to. The past few days of excitement compounded and created a wave of fatigue that brought them under until the edges of the day were creeping in.

“Pete, wake up, baby. Let’s have some dinner and enjoy the stars one more time,” Tony mumbled sleepily, his eyes blinking awake only moments before. The sky was starting to turn that hazy pink and orange color – if they moved quick enough, they could eat their dinner under a crimson sky waiting eagerly to give way to clarity and brightness.

It took a few minutes for Peter to come around, Tony spending all of them peppering Peter’s skin with soft kisses and caressing the parts of him he could reach in their tangled-up position in the hammock. The sleep-lines on Peter’s face pulled a chuckle from Tony’s chest, his fingers tracing over them without hesitation. “Sleepy Pete is one of my favorites.” Giving him a quick kiss on the lips, Tony did his best not to kick Peter in the face as he climbed out of the ENO.

Hamburgers and beans by the fire as the sun set couldn’t be beat – Peter woke up with a ton of energy and obliterated all the food Tony put in front of him, a wide smile on his face while he did it. Completely satisfied, Tony relaxed into the chair that’d been his main source of back support for the past few days. Peter’s wandering hands landed in his lap a few minutes later, a familiar heat in his eyes.

“Want to sleep under the stars tonight?” Peter asked, his voice low, the timber of it an invitation for more than just sleeping under the night sky.

Without hesitation, Tony nodded his head, his fingers running down the length of Peter’s arm. “Sounds romantic,” he mumbled in response, the two of them sharing a soft laugh at the sarcasm that Tony couldn’t always help. Leaning over the arm of his chair, Tony invaded Peter’s space, his lips pressing against his boyfriend’s cheek. “The big sleeping bag right by the fire is probably our best bet.”

There wasn’t any rush in their movements. Peter climbed out of his chair a few minutes later and went about getting their trash into the big bag they’d been putting everything in. He would not so casually meet Tony’s eye overtop the fire, his smile getting sultrier as the seconds passed.

When Peter dragged the sleeping bag out and unzipped it, Tony couldn’t handle the waiting around anymore. He got up from his chair and took the handful of steps that separated him from the gorgeous man he got to call his own. Kicking off the moccasins he wore around their campsite, Tony grabbed Peter’s hand, pulling him down to the ground with him. Peter’s wide eyes had him laughing seconds before he pressed forward and captured slightly chapped lips in a warm kiss.

Despite it being June, the nights were a little chilly – so Tony took great care when stripping Peter down to nothing. Shoes came off first, then the first layer of shirts covering the naked skin of Peter’s chest. Tony took off a piece of his own clothing when something of Peter’s hit the ground. When they were shirtless and busy kissing each other breathless, Tony covered Peter with his upper body, the warmth between them more than enough to keep a chill at bay.

Tony took his time taking off Peter’s pants. His lips lingered on a delectably long neck; the skin still red from their time in the sun. Tracing his name with his tongue, Tony marked a path down, down, down until he was settling between the v of Peter’s legs. His fingers worked the button open, Tony blowing a warm gust of air against the front of bright blue boxer-briefs as the zipper of tight jeans came down. The bulge pressing up against the tight fabric pulsed, Peter obviously very interested in what was about to happen.

Bypassing the area Peter wanted him to touch the most, Tony continued his journey to get Peter completely naked. Slim hips came up off the ground when he started to peel the jeans down Peter’s legs, the boxer briefs coming down with them. Tony ran just the tips of his fingers down the inside of spread thighs, the goosebumps pebbling across Peter’s skin a tangible reaction that never ceased to make Tony harder than a rock.

Too interested in Peter’s skin in the moonlight to worry about his own pants, Tony palmed Peter’s bare erection, the length pulsing into his touch. Groaning, he tightened his grip and started to slowly pump down to the base and back up again, his thumb swiping across the already leaking head. “You’re absolutely stunning like this,” Tony admitted, his eyes moving from the show his hand was making to Peter’s, the normal hazel a little darker, pupils completely overtaking most of the iris.

“You drive me crazy,” Peter moaned out, his bottom lip being pulled between his teeth as he tossed his head back.

Tony let his lips trail over the weepy head, his tongue poking out for a taste.

Fingers fisting into Tony’s hair had him taking more of Peter’s length in his mouth – his boyfriend groaning each time his lips tightened during the upstroke. Tony pressed the back of his head into Peter’s hand, the contact there spurring him on just as much as the cock sliding deeply into his throat. His own erection pressed messily against the seam of his pants, everything about Peter in that moment fanning the fire in his belly. Thrusting a hand down, Tony adjusted himself, a moan being choked out around the cock in his mouth.

Moving quickly, Tony got up onto his knees, his mouth still firmly working Peter’s cock over as he did. Shaky fingers got the button of his pants open, the immediate rush of relief pulling a groan from him again. Tony forced his eyes shut, his fingers pulling the zipper down and shoving his pants down just enough to free up his cock. Only then did he pull up and off Peter’s erection, his eyes finding the other’s while he shimmied the rest of the way out of the intrusive pieces of clothing.

Tony wrapped a hand around himself, a tight fist stroking up and down a few times just to relieve a bit of tension. “Fuck –“ he gasped out, Tony letting his chin drop to his chest. A huge gust of air left his mouth – it felt like physical pain, pulling his hand away from himself. Peter looked at him intensely, the tip of his pink tongue peeking out to wet his bottom lip. Unable to resist, Tony leaned over him, pressing their lips together briefly.

He didn’t allow himself too much time to luxuriate in the feel of Peter’s tongue against his own, though. His boyfriend was thrusting up against him, the sticky wetness of his cock dragging along the skin of Tony’s stomach. Settling into the gap of Peter’s thighs again, Tony used both hands to push his thighs further apart, everything deliciously on display for him.

Fingers of his right hand wrapped around the base of Peter’s cock, while Tony used his left hand to pull Peter’s ass cheeks apart. He let his tongue graze along the already fluttering hole, the move pulling a shout from the man above him. “Fuck – keep doing that,” Peter muttered mindlessly, the words broken apart by gasps and moans. Tony didn’t need to be told twice.

Redoubling his efforts, Tony gripped Peter tightly and let the pace of his hand match the swipes and thrusts of his tongue. Peter’s hands pawed at him uselessly, the hitch of his hips and the frequency of his breathing telling him just how close he actually was. “Cum for me, Pete.” Tony forced his head up, his lips and chin glossy from his own spit and the messy way he went down on Peter with abandon. It took a singular nod from Tony before Peter was coming, thick pearls of cum coating Tony’s fingers and the supple skin of Peter’s abdomen.

Tony didn’t give him any time to recover, he simply ran his fingers through the warm cum and used two of them to press against Peter’s entrance. They slipped in without much resistance – his tongue and the orgasm did a decent job relaxing Peter and his usually wound up body. He set a fast pace, the second Peter let him in, Tony was thrusting and pulling back with efficiency – doing just enough to make sure there wouldn’t be any pain.

Face red and cock pulsing, Tony replaced two fingers with three, his arm tired from the ruthless way he was simply taking. Peter didn’t seem to mind, though – his cock was already starting to harden against his stomach, the pulse of it making him clench around Tony’s fingers.

“I’m ready, I’m ready. Fuck me, Tony,” Peter’s words cut through whatever rational braincells were left. Tony pulled his fingers out and spat in his hand, the leftover cum and spit the perfect lubricant for a coupling like this – wild and carefree. He didn’t let his hand linger as he spread the fluids over his length, the mere touch made him want to explode. Tony had just enough left in the tank to heft Peter’s legs around his hips as he lined the tip of his cock against Peter’s hole and pressed forward, bringing them together as one.

His hands pressed into the sleeping bag up by Peter’s head, his fingers just shy of being able to play with the hair that haloed out. Bringing his bottom lip between his teeth, Tony went through the periodical table in his head to give Peter a second to adjust and to stave off the orgasm that was quickly approaching.

Peter took his own erection in his hand and started to stroke, the darkness in his eye reflecting the moon above perfectly. Pale skin seemed to glow in the depth of the darkness surrounding them, the hand Tony watched becoming iridescent the longer he stared. The movement was a nice distraction, but not enough to stop his hips from swiveling and pulling back, the press inside the only thing he wanted in that moment. Tony let his head hang between his shoulders, the force of his thrusts easier now that he wasn’t trying to hold himself up as much.

The clench around him drove him towards the edge before Tony could stop it from happening. Dropping down to his elbows, Tony trapped Peter’s hand between them to stop the rhythmic jerking over smooth skin. Each tug caused Peter’s hole to clamp down around him and it was pulling Tony to the precipice a lot quicker than he wanted. “You’re going to make me cum. You feel so fucking good,” Tony babbled, his nose moving over Peter’s cheek with every back and forth thrust.

Hands grabbed his face, Peter tugging until Tony shifted his attention to him. He couldn’t stop the roll of his hips, so he didn’t try – staving off obviously wasn’t going to happen. Peter looked at him with his mouth wide open and pupils blown, the sight of it almost enough to pull him over, the tantalizing squeeze and tug of their physicality be damned. Their lips brushed and for a moment, they shared panted breaths.

“Flip me over,” Peter mumbled when Tony tore away from the kiss, his heart pounding from the anaerobic thrusts of his hips and the astounding lack of oxygen. Clenching his eyes shut, Tony nodded. A miracle stopped his hips and allowed him to pull out – the two of them fumbling around for a minute before Tony was on his back and Peter was settling over him, his tight hole already surrounding Tony’s cock.

“Shit – I’m not going to last much longer, baby.” Tony looked up helplessly, his fingers wrapping around Peter’s hips tightly. “I’m so close – “

Peter smirked down at him, his hand wrapping around his cock before he started a ruthless pace with his hips. The strain of his rise and fall could be seen so plainly in the clench of heavily muscled thighs and the ripple of abs that were so warm and tight – it was fucking beautiful.

Throwing his head back, Tony felt the heat in his stomach hit the boiling point, his orgasm sweeping over him like wildfire. He planted his feet and thrust his hips up, the throbbing tip of his cock pressing against Peter’s prostate – the move enough to pull him right over the edge with Tony. A satisfied moan left Tony’s lips at the feeling of Peter’s cum coating his skin.

The brightness of the stars made Peter glow – the post-orgasmic haze swirled around his limbs, making him look like one of the stars in the sky himself. Smiling widely, Tony let his hands trail over the pale skin, the moonlight not conceding under his fingertips, no matter where he touched. In that instant, he knew he’d never be able to look at Peter the same – the ethereal nature surrounding him right now would forever be engrained in the back of his mind; Peter was beautiful all the time, but this took it to a new level.

Not able to stand the distance between them any longer, Tony wrapped his arms around Peter’s middle and pulled him down. Their lips met, the kiss a steady reminder of the never-ending thrum of love and affection that pulsed between them. Three years later and they were still rocking each other’s worlds.

The coolness of the air broke them apart a while later, the cum cooling on Tony’s chest starting to get a little too sticky for his liking. Groping around, Tony found his t-shirt and wiped his and Peter’s chests. When Peter got up, the situation was beyond help. “We’re going to have to get in the water,” Tony said nodding towards the steadily running stream they’d been “bathing” in all week.

Chilly air drove them into the flow – the coolness was inescapable, though; Tony’s skin immediately lit up with goosebumps. He worked quickly to get himself clean, the water icy the longer he stood nude in the elements. Peter didn’t seem to be moving, so Tony splashed some water over at him, a laugh leaving his lips.

A wash of water hitting him wasn’t all that surprising, Peter was never one to back down from any sort of challenge laid down in front of him, especially where Tony was concerned. Shaking his head, Tony retaliated, the wave hitting Peter starting an all-out war. By the time they were panting for breath, neither man could remember what the cold seeping in felt like. Peter wrapped his arms around Tony’s neck, his wet and naked torso pressing in to share body heat

“This was fun,” Peter said, his expression open. “Really fun. I didn’t know being away from everything could be so – nice.”

Filling in the rest of the space, Tony let his arms wrap around Peter’s hips. He tilted his head and stole a quick kiss. “You just have to be open to appreciating it, Petey.” Tony brushed their noses together before pressing in for another kiss.

Later, wrapped up together in the sleeping bag, Tony pressed his face into the back of Peter’s neck. He snuggled into the warmth there and let out a soft sigh. “Where are we headed next, anyway?” Tony asked, his body completely relaxed.

Peter grabbed his hand and kissed the back of it, the spread of a smile evident on his lips still pressed against Tony’s skin. “How do you feel about white-water rafting?”  

[drwcn]

RE: [Post]

I’M SORRY TO HAVE CAUSED YOU PAIN (not really, not even a little bit sorry).

Once upon a time I had hopes of writing a sequel to “Begotten”, but I don’t know which decade that’s going to happen - maybe not at all - since I’ve got “Discordance” and “Before the Sun Falls” to tackle now before my schedule eats me up in September.

So, I’m here to bite the bullet and face the music. Here is the condensed one shot of what would’ve been the Begotten Sequel:

“Alone Stands the Quiet ” 

[AO3] 

Word Count: 4005

Summary: The story of the Yin Iron starts with a celestial war and ends with Lan Sizhui. 

The story of Lan Sizhui did not start at the fall of Jin Guangyao. It did not start when Hanguang-jun brought him to Cloud Recesses. It did not even start when Yiling Laozu led the remaining Wens to the Burial Mount.

The story of Lan Sizhui started eons ago, before the sects were sects, before man could vie for divinity through cultivation.

Lan Yi once told Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji that the Yin Iron was an item of the ancient, a 上古之物. It existed with the sky and the earth. She was not wrong.

Long ago, a terrible war had broken out between the six realms: shen (gods), xian (immortals), ren (man), yao, mo (demons), and ming (ghosts). It was said that the God of War led the front for gods and immortals, protecting humans who could not protect themselves. The God of War was fierce, was brave, was righteous, but the God of War was flawed. They met their match in a Demon General, their nemesis on the celestial battlefield, yet a kindred spirit in every other way.

The war dredged on. The earth cracked open; the sky splintered into pieces. Creatures died. Fire raged. Victory was not promised, but Death surely would come for them all. Both the God of War and the Demon General knew the war could not go on, though hesitant they were to put an end to the other as they’d been ordered to do so by their heavenly/demonic masters.

In the final battle, the two unfortunate beings perished. How exactly, no one knew. As their existence faded into the expanse, like stardust scattered by cosmic wind, a single drop of their blood, mixed together, fell to Earth into the iron quarries beneath the mountains of Yiling, forming what will one day be known as the Yin Iron.

The Yin Iron as Lan Yi knew it, had never been anything but an instrument for the wicked, though try as she did to purify it to its original state. She had believed that the Iron itself, however powerful it had been, was not inherently evil or good. She believed that it was only Xue Chonghai’s malice and greed that had corrupted such an ancient item through dark cultivation. 

Lan Yi, though unsuccessful, was right.

What Lan Yi didn’t know and what no one knew, not even Wei Wuxian, was that something of that magnitude, of that divinity, could not be destroyed by mortal means, cultivator or not.

Before his death, Wei Wuxian was beyond magnificent mostly due to the Stygian Amulet in his possession. It grew so powerful that he eventually lost control of it. Part of the blame could possibly be laid on Jin Guangyao, but his loss of control demonstrated an important truth that no one realized: The Yin Iron and its spiritual force - its essence - were beyond the capacity of man. Every time a piece was supposedly destroyed, the energy was transferred to the closest remaining pieces. By destroying Wen Ruohan’s three Yin Iron shards, Wei Wuxian had unknowingly absorbed additional dark energy in his own Stygian Amulet.

When Wei Wuxian obliterated the seal at the final confrontation before his first death, its spiritual energy had no solid matter to bind to. Most cultivators’ golden cores repelled or were incompatible with demonic energy. Xue Yang’s piece was hidden far away in Lanling. The only place that could sustain such a large quantity of yin energy was the Burial Mount, and there it found a receptive host, in the form of an unwitting coreless child. The Energy itself was partially sentient, and for self-preservation, it laid dormant in the child’s body, hidden and waiting for the day to come.

A dangerous near-death experience during a failed night hunt triggered the awakening of Sizhui’s powers when he was thirteen years old. For years, he nurtured it, kept it a secret with the help of his friends Lan Jingyi, Jin Ling and later on Ouyang Zizhen.

Some day, the Gods of the Nine Heavens will say that it was always meant to be Wen Yuan… that Fate had chosen him to bear the powers of the God and Demon who had fought and died for the middle ground.

 ~~~

 Following the incident at the Guanyin Temple, Lan Sizhui lived up to his promise to Jin Ling. He came back for Jin Guangyao’s soul sealed within the temple along with Nie Mingjue. His uncle, the kind and gentle Lan Xichen had gone into seclusion, unable to face the fact that his blindness had allowed Jin Guangyao to go unchecked or that he had been the one to kill him. Nie Huaisang’s vague answer had confirmed everything he needed to know.

Confident and naïve as youths often were, Lan Sizhui believed he could find a way to bring Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao back from the dead without using life sacrifice as Mo Xuanyu had done. Mo Xuangyu had barely been a cultivator, and Lan Sizhui had grown in leaps and bounds and was on the verge of surpassing even the great Yiling Laozu himself.

Sizhui stole Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao's souls and brought them to a place that he knew no one visited anymore: The Wen Sect’s ancestral seat of power, Wen Yuan’s birthright, Nevernight. There, over the chasm where Wen Ruohan had once cultivated three pieces of the Yin Iron, Lan Sizhui kept the souls of his uncle’s sworn brothers in protected suspension.

If he were to do this, he knew he could not just save Jin Guangyao alone, but Nie Mingjue as well. He did not understand the grievance and hatred between the men of the previous generation, but his family deserved happiness and closure, and if he could give it to them, he would without hesitation.

This, he kept as a closely guarded secret. Only Jingyi and Jin Ling were his confidants.

As a child, he did not tell Lan Wangji about his power out of fear, but now, Sizhui kept his silence for another reason entirely. Let him be selfish just this once. He did not want to answer to anyone, to explain himself, his motivations or his powers. A part of Sizhui instinctively knew that Xue Chonghai, Wen Ruohan, Wei Wuxian, Xue Yang - they were all just vessels, a long line of cultivators that the Iron used to get to him. With him was where the Iron’s power always belonged; it may have taken centuries in the making, but finally, the wrong had been righted.

Sizhui hid his secret it from his fathers, from his sect, from everyone. Meanwhile, his powers grew, both spiritual and demonic, to the point where Wei Wuxian's willful ignorance could no longer deny the fact that something was very different about this boy he saved. He hoped it was not true, hoped that Sizhui hadn't been doing exactly what he thought he was.

"A-Yuan," he said to Lan Sizhui one evening when they were taking a stroll through the back mountains of Cloud Recesses. Lan Wangji was busy with Chief Cultivator business and could not join them.

"Yes, a-die?" Responded Sizhui. He heard the change in Wei Wuxian's tone, but he pretended to be none the wiser.

Wei Wuxian paused in his step, turned, and placed a hand on the shoulder of his child. Sizhui had grown taller over the last couple of seasons. He was no longer a boy.

"Is there something you'd like to tell me?"

By then, Lan Sizhui was already in too deep. Since the early days of his resurrection endeavours, he had realized there was no way that he, as a mortal cultivator, could bring back a life from nothing. A sacrifice was always needed, and even if he were to give up his own, it would only revive one of the two souls. 

Both Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao’s souls had been damaged, though in different ways. The seals placed upon them would hinder their reincarnation for a hundred years, and after that, there was no telling where they would end up. Without resolving the hatred they both carried into their deaths, their next several lives would be fraught with perils and misfortune.

Jin Ling had by this point come to terms with the passing of his uncle, but Lan Xichen…

If he could not bring back Chifeng-zun and Lianfang-zun to be reunited with Zewu-jun, then at the very least, Sizhui would alleviate his Uncle’s guilt by offering peace to his sworn-brothers. With this in mind, Sizhui did not give up, and eventually he had found a way.

So when Wei Wuxian confronted him, there were so many things he wanted to tell him, but he knew he couldn't. Sizhui was so close to the end, so close to achieving what he needed to do, and he could not afford anyone standing in his way. He had learned from the past. He'd heard of Wei Wuxian's audacious suggestions spoken right here within the walls of Cloud Recesses. Even then, as a guest disciple, he had planted the idea in the minds of his peers and mentors that he, Wei Wuxian, was a divergent from The Path, that he was to be wary of, to be monitored and to be taken down before he could uproot their lives.

Lan Sizhui had no intentions of allowing the small-mindedness of his elders to hinder him. He also did not want his fathers blamed for his own doings, though being his fathers, perhaps they would be blamed no matter what he did. He knew it was unfilial of him to disregard that, but he had gone too far to turn back now.

Lan Sizhui had started out wishing to help Jin Ling, to help Lan Xichen, but now… now he wanted to do this for himself. He didn’t want to stop; he wanted to know if he could do it, if he could make this one thing come true. They say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They also say curiosity killed the cat, and Sizhui was willing to find out if satisfaction was really able to bring it back.

Thus, the secret of his power must be kept hidden until the spell was complete. Both Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji must have reasonable deniability. When all is said and done, Sizhui had made plans to disappear and save the cultivation world the trouble of removing him.

"A-Yuan, is there something you'd like to tell me?" Wei Wuxian repeated. The hand on Sizhui's shoulder tightened.

Lan Sizhui stared the man in the eye and lied, "No, a-die. There isn't."

 ~~~

 When Sizhui revealed the plans of his departure, that was when Jingyi finally broke.

"No, Sizhui, no! You were supposed to be Sect Master, it was supposed to be you!"

"I can't go back, Jingyi, if I do this, I can never go back."

"Sizhui, please, please don't - "

"You'll still have our friends when I’m gone. Zizhen is a good man, a trusted friend. He would stand by your side. And Jin Ling too, he would never leave you.” 

"J-Jin Ling?! Th- that brat, I - I don't know what you're -"

"It's okay. He likes you too." Sizhui smiled brightly at his friend's flushed cheeks.

"H-he does?"

"Yes, yes he does."

They didn’t know it then, but Sect Master Jin Rulan and Sect Master Lan Jingyi would one day become cultivation partners. Openly and without shame, they formed the Lan-Jin alliance their predecessors wished but could never achieve.

 ~~~

 The plan was this:

Sizhui had discovered that he could put souls into human bodies if he manipulated with their reincarnation cycle and transported them distantly enough in time. Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue were not destined to meet again in another life, but Sizhui had his ways.

Against Fate or not, he was going to do it.  

Somehow, Lan Xichen found out. After years in seclusion, he emerged one day and sought out his nephew at Nevernight where he couldn't deny what he'd been planning.

Sizhui had panicked, thinking his uncle would for sure admonish him for tampering with reincarnation and matters entirely too divine and out of his control.

But Lan Xichen simply stood there, gazing up at the two suspended souls above the pit of Sizhui's swirling demonic and spiritual energy. His sworn brothers. They had knelt before Heaven and Earth and promised that though they had not been born on the same day, in same month and in the same year, they would seek to die on the same day, in same month and in the same year.

And what became of them? Mingjue was beheaded, A-Yao stabbed. Both murdered. Yet, here he was, still alive.

Left behind.  

"I want to go with them." Lan Xichen said.

For the first time since his journey began, Lan Sizhui was truly horrified. 

"I - I can only transport souls, and yours -"

"Then transport mine."

Sizhui shook, sputtering, "But – but - you would have to die! I would have to kill you!"

"I know. Sizhui," Lan Xichen turned to the boy he helped raise into the fine young man he was now and bowed his head. "A-Yuan, please."

Sizhui floundered. What would Father say, if he knew his A-Yuan had been the one to take the life of his beloved brother?

"You can't ask this of me, you can't Zewu-jun, no - da'bofu… da'bofu don’t…"

But Sizhui knew, he knew, deep down, that he would do this for Lan Xichen. In the hallow abbey of Nevernight, his uncle held him as he cried, as if he was still that scared lonely little boy. 

"I am a selfish man. I'm sorry, child, forgive me."  

 ~~~

 Sizhui spun the spell for nine days and nine nights.

A barrier was formed from his mixture of demonic and spiritual energy, barring anyone passage into the palace. Lan Xichen’s disappearance from Cloud Recesses quickly alerted cultivators all round, and the strange energy coalescing around Qishan commanded the attention of Chief Cultivator Hanguang-jun and the other sect masters. Together, Sizhui’s fathers and the leaders of all major and minor sects marched on Nevernight for a third time, completely surrounding the place on day two of the nine-day spell. 

Lan Sizhui’s absence from Gusu Lan’s entourage drew speculations right away, as he was the unofficial Sect Heir.

Under immense pressure and terrified by the development of both political and spiritual tension, Jin Ling and Lan Jingyi caved and told their qianbeis the truth: that Sizhui was a practiced demonic cultivator from an early age, that he planned to release Chifeng'zun and Jin Guangyao's trapped spirits into reincarnation for a second chance, that Zewu-jun had begged him to send him as well, that Sizhui had agreed to it all.

The reveal shocked all, even the usually nonplussed Nie Huaisang.  “Is he really able to do it? To give my brother peace and absolution?”  Jingyi nodded. “If anyone can, Sizhui can.” 

For nine days the cultivators meditated, their collective cultivation keeping yet another barrier between the surrounding land and Nevernight’s epicenter.

As the only non-spiritual cultivator present Wei Wuxian knelt before the long stone steps, stained and darkened by the blood of countless lives that were ended upon it. 

Whose blood they were yet to spill he did not know and was too afraid to think on it further. Two live-times’ of memories flooded his thoughts, threatening to overtake him. Wen Ning knelt with him, silently by his side as always. 

When the spell ended, the spiritual and demonic powers in Lan Sizhui came to a culmination. The earth quaked, the sky darkened. For a minute, all was quiet.

Then, suddenly, four flashes of lightning cut across the sky, lighting up night as though it were day. Its thunderous echoes shook the cultivators down to their knees. Even the mighty Hanguang-jun, the Chief Cultivator himself, bowed to its strength. Men and women quivered and trembled, for they knew those were not your ordinary lightning.

Four, consecutive strikes, each hitting where Lan Sizhui would be within the main palace. Those were Omens, Heaven's Trial. It was clear to all of them what had happened.

Lan Yuan, Lan Sizhui, had ascended.

"That was...that was an ascension." Jiang Wanyin’s voice spoke out first.

Beside him, his nephew the young Sect Master Jin Ling bit back his sobs. He had hoped this wouldn't happen, though the signs were all there in the preceding days. Ascension was what all cultivators sought, though in this case, it was most definitely not a blessing.

He feared for his friend, and he blamed himself for ever posing that ridiculous request that day at the Guanyin Temple.

“Sizhui!!” Lan Jingyi was the first to break rank, dashing forward in a mad panic. He was stopped in his track by Jin Ling’s arms circling his waist from behind.  

“Jingyi, stop!! It’s too late, we can’t stop this!”

“Sizhui! Sizhui!”

“Jingyi! Jin Ling!”  Ouyang Zizhen rushed to their side and helped Jin Ling haul back their friend.  

“He’s ascended! He’s ascended, he’s ascended, it’s just an ascension, just an ascension,” chanted Jin Ling over and over to his friend as they crumbled to their knees.

"No, not 'an' ascension," corrected Lan Wangji, his voice rising over the deafening silence. He stood and helped Wei Wuxian to stand. His husband was white as sheet, for he too understood what four lightnings meant.

Historical records have always noted that one lightning was the sign of ascension from cultivator to di’xian (lesser immortal). Unlike popular belief, the lightning was not a sign of Heaven’s favour, but a Fated Trial. To be an immortal, a cultivator must survive the trial, and of the few who were ever graced with the lightning, even fewer survived. Aside from Baoshan, no cultivator had even reached anywhere close to this stage in over a hundred years.

Three lightnings, however, were the price to pay for the ascension from lesser to higher immortal (shang’xian). 

Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian clung to each other. To leap through two tiers and ascend twice consecutively...it was completely unheard of. Was their son still alive?

“We have to find him,” said Wei Wuxian when the lightning faded. Sizhui’s barrier had slowly melted away from Nevernight. Above them, the thick clouds parted, giving way for the soft morning light. 

“Mn.”

“Jiang Cheng –”

Jiang Wanyin stood up right, drawing Sandu from its sheath and nodded. “I’ll keep watch. Go.”

When Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian finally reached Sizhui, he was waiting for them. Well...a form of him was. 

Soaring around along the vaulted ceiling was a large fire bird, Qishan Wen’s symbol immortalized. Its feathers were as black and shiny as obsidian, and its belly as pale as pearls. Crimson flames trimmed the edge of its large wings and trailed behind in its wake. With a sharp piercing cry, the creature dived mid-flight and came sweeping down until it disappeared into fractals of bright lights and materialized the next instant into a young man. 

Half of Lan Sizhui’s hair had gone completely white. Mixed with black, it fluttered loose and wild in the waves of divine magic that now enshrouded his person.

His Gusu Lan robes once pristine were in tatters, and from where he stood several feet in front of them, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian could see the streaks of lightning scars running where his veins ought to be.

Then, he looked up, revealing a blood-red iris.

"A-die, fuqin.” Sizhui took a couple steps towards them and crumbled in their arms. Somewhere behind his shoulder, Lan Wangi saw his brother's body lying prone on a slab of rock. There was no doubt Lan Xichen was dead.

"I don't have long. They're coming for me." Sizhui hugged them close.  

Wei Wuxian was distraught, "Who's coming for you?! A-Yuan -"

"I've tampered with timelines, changed fates, the Gods are angry. The demons tell me so."

Lan Wangji cradled his child’s face in his hands and found it hard to imagine this was the little boy he saved from the Burial Mount early twenty years ago. "Sizhui, son, please let us help you -"

"You can't help me. This is my burden to carry."

But Lan Wangji refused to accept it. "We won't let you die -"

"I won't die, fuqin, a-die, but I will be going now."

"G-go? Where will you go? You’re not going anywhere! I won’t allow it!" Wei Wuxian held him tighter.

"A shangxian's place is with the Heavenly Court. That is where I must answer for my crimes."

“No…no, you won’t – A-Yuan, our little A-Yuan…”

Sizhui clasped all three of their hands together and whispered, "Qing-gugu once said that when there is too much to say, all one really need to say is thank you and I’m sorry. Fuqin, a-die, Sizhui has been unfilial. I hope you can forgive me.”

As he spoke those words, the entire hall was suddenly lit aglow. A figure appeared, too bright and blinding to discern its feature.

The voice that called out to him was calm but commanding, heavy with gravitas. "Lan Sizhui, your presence is requested." 

"I know."

"Do you admit your guilt?"

"I do."

"Then come."

A-Yuan stood, pulling his hands from his fathers' grasps. With one last gentle smile, half in pain half in love, he turned to face his future. He could no longer bear to see the devastation on his fathers’ faces, awash with tears.  

As he walked calmly into the light, his last words, spoken over his shoulder, were: “Tell, xiaomei that I would’ve loved to meet her." (xiaomei = little sister.)

“SIZHUI!!” 

“A-YUAN!!” 

 ~~~

 On their way back to Cloud Recesses from this eternal parting, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian happened upon an orphaned baby girl on the side of the road.

They brought her home and adopted her. Their daughter was named Wei Xiao, courtesy Lan Mengyuan.

To dream of a reunion...

Wei Xiao grew, happy and loved. Then, nearly a century later, at the end of a very long life, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian passed, peacefully and together.

 ~~~

 In front of a Starbucks in a modern metropolitan city, a young man holding a latte and talking quickly on the phone is attempting to cross the road without looking both ways.

"I'm honestly trying my best here! I have my thesis to finish and my PI is -"

He is struck by a car, which immediately took off. This is witnessed by a jogger coming from the opposite direction and a man in professional attires waiting by the bus station. The jogger and the bus taker both rush to the injured man at the same time, as many others crowd around to the scene.

The jogger introduces himself as "Nie Mingjue, a fireman", and the bus taker pulls out a stethoscope from his bag and replies with a polite smile and a quick handshake, "Lan Xichen, doctor – pediatrician specifically."

A student in the crowd exclaims, "Oh my god, that's Meng Yao, my finance TA. Please help him!"

“Do you have contact for his next of kin?” Nie Mingjue asks.

“N-no, but I-I can call his department. My prof should know, or HR, hold on.”

“Call the ambulance,” instructs Lan Xichen to another bystander, “Tell them we have a man, in his twenties, who’s been struck by a hit and run…”

…

Across the street, under the umbrella of Starbucks’ patio, a young man raises his head. His hair is cut short, though strangely dyed white on one side. The sunglasses on his nose slips a little, revealing a startling red iris. On the table beside his elbow, his phone pings, showing an email alert from lan.wangji@edugusu.org, bcc-ed to the entire class and cc-ed to wei.wuxian@edugusu.org.   

Midterm Tutorial Session: Updated Slides.

“Finally, I was starting to think it would never happen.” A young woman slides into the seat across from him, sipping on a freshly made frappuccino.

The young man picks up his own cup and smiles. “Good morning to you too, Mengyuan.”

“Satisfied now, my meddling rebellious brother?”

“Yes.” The god in mortal clothes sighs, content. “Yes in fact, I am.”

 FIN

 Note:  *Wei Xiao’s name Lan MengYuan isn’t the same Meng* as MengYao’s last name, and isn’t the same Yuan* as Wen Yuan. Completely different words and meaning. :) 

[heartate-a]

the nature of ahri.    //    part one.

my ahri is very much going to focus more on the darker aspects of her character and lore.  she absolutely was a killer,  let’s not forget that.  whatever her origins were,  whether you believe she’s just a vastaya and nothing more,  or a fox who ate the organs of humans and lived so long she became human  -  like,  she was a killer,  although it was not out of any malicious or sadistic nature and more so for her survival and the nurturing of the magic that was beginning to course within her.

i really enjoy part of the old lore,  where she found her beginnings as a simple fox and grew into a beautiful woman.  i will run with that to the extent that perhaps her line of vastaya was another shapeshifting line,  specifically that of nine  -  tailed foxes.  her lore changed to where she was simply a vastaya who was lost,  abandoned maybe,  and all she had left of them was a stone.  i like to think that since she was young,  it may have felt safer to take on the form of a fox and live more with nature rather than as a girl,  hence why she stuck with the pack of icefoxes referenced in her wiki.

she hunted other animals at first,  beasts.  she was always possessed of this innate and powerful magic,  which she used to aid her in her hunts.  although she had not yet developed a true sense of empathy as she does now in present days,  she was still not a hunter of malice and did not intentionally seek to inflict pain upon her prey.  she used her charm in its physical,  magical manifestations to soothe them like a tranquilizer to make sure that they felt no pain in their death and as she ate.

ahri is almost vampiric in this nature.  the passive of her orb of deception allows her to life steal and restore her missing health in game,  and realistically,  this is a restoration of energy,  a way to recharge energy and chase away any fatigue and aids in healing her wounds.  ahri feeds on both the life energy itself of her prey as well as the physical meat of their bones.  the life energy that she feeds on nurtures her magic and gives her physical and magical strength,  but of course,  she needs real sustenance.

she tries to not waste anything when she feasts,  even prior to the development of further complex empathy,  and this is an important thing to note later for the hunter that she encounters.

when ahri ran into humans for the first time,  she studied them out of curiosity.  she recognized that they were more similar to her than the foxes were that she lived with,  because she was more human than anything else despite the fox vastayan blood in her.  she didn’t know any other vastayans or humans  ----  she had been abandoned.  all she knew was the life she led with those foxes of the wild and the magic that rested within the marrow of her bones,  that trailed fire in her veins.

she met the hunter at this point,  a man shot with an arrow left for dead in the cold,  wintry snow.  ahri didn’t approach him with any need or desire to feed  ----  she did not mean to consume the essence of his life.  it came of a primal instinct,  an instinct rooted more deeply than simply just something she just did or something that she felt that she needed to do.  she felt it awaken her magic,  strengthen it.

just as it was when she fed upon the essence of beasts,  she felt the rush of the man’s emotions,  his memories,  everything that he felt.  she felt his pain,  of the wound from the arrow that had stricken him,  of the loss of the life he was leaving behind.  like with her animal prey,  she soothed him,  and this time instilled within him dreams and memories of better days and numbed his physical pain as well as his mental anguish.

with each time she fed,  she became almost exceedingly overwhelmed with their feelings,  all of the memories from the entirety of their lives.  all of their guilt,  all of their pain,  all of the happiness in their lives.  and each time she fed,  she gained a little bit more humanity.  she became more human.  she was euphoric in the bliss of feeling.  every time she fed off of a human being’s life essence,  she grew stronger,  more human,  and she still soothed them into the arms of death.

at first,  it began with the wounded soldiers she found straggling along the way as she ventured further into the world.  then,  it continued on with those weak and frail,  the ones whose lives clung to nothing else,  the ones who were ready to move on.  but all of these people would not sustain her.  they were too weak,  the essence of their lives was not enough.  she needed more.  with each life she consumed,  she felt her power grow.  in a desire to nurture and grow the magic bubbling inside of her,  she hungered for more,  she sought out more.

ahri does not simply just deliberately kill anyone.  those mentioned before were more or less mercy killings,  killings out of need,  really.  the more she learned,  both of the world and of her own emotions and of the emotions of others,  the more her vision of the world shifted,  and the more her beliefs,  feelings,  wants,  and needs shifted.  she began to intentionally seek out those who she thought were corrupt,  evil,  dangers to the world.  as shown in a short story,  ahri exhibits a bias against noxians,  but a few bad eggs shouldn’t speak for the whole of the nation.  my ahri will learn the truth of noxus.  yes,  there does exist evil amongst everyone,  but she learns that noxus’s reputation is undeserved  (  this is me inserting my noxus stan heart lol  ).  she is not for or against any one nation,  but she does have love for ionia above all,  for it and its creatures and woods are her home.

but anyways,  she’s killed as a means to punish others she considers corrupt.  in eating their life essence,  she,  naturally,  was able to experience their life and their emotions too.  it’s more so everything they are thinking and feeling in the present,  and if they happen to dredge up things from the past on their own and were thinking of it moments prior to their death or as they are dying,  they are things that ahri will become privy too.  

even from people such as this,  she has things to learn from.  she learns that some people are truly evil,  and others are not quite so evil so much as they felt they had no choice but to act in the manner they did due to a corrupt authority figure or other person in their life commanding them to act.  people who surface as truly corrupt and evil,  ahri toys with them,  sometimes even torments them if she felt they truly deserved it.  it’s something she enjoyed doing.

as time passed,  the more humanity she gained from each little bit of life essence she consumed,  the more she began to think on things and question what it was that she was doing.  getting to this point is a gradual process and something i probably won’t discuss in this particular post,  but i will refer back here in the future.

ahri’s reformation is tied heavily to her falling in love with that human man,  a painter,  a wonderful artist who drew vivid colors into her life and plunged her into emotions she had never thought herself capable of feeling or receiving.  she accidentally consumed his life and in her anguish,  she journeyed to a garden to forget it all.

there’s so much more to this that i would love to discuss,  and i haven’t even begun to mention vladimir’s role in her story,  because he becomes intertwined in all of this too.

anyway,  the point is,  ahri’s past is dark,  the nature of her character is darker beyond the surface,  and this is something i would love to explore,  whether it’s where your characters meet her prior to her full reformation,  if she even began to reform at all at that point,  and come to know her afterward,  or even if they only meet her afterward and learn of her past.  ahri starts to change in part due to her loneliness and at the horror of hearing the stories of the terrible,  vicious fox who devoured the hearts of runeterra’s people.  she did not want anyone to fear her.  she abhorred this feeling of loneliness and wants desperately for companionship.

[engineeringexperience]

Top 10 Infrastructure Ideas for Sint Maarten

Parking meters!

Installing parking meters at Philipsburg parking areas can allow the country to generate a lot of revenue which is a challenge for our government. It will encourage people to use more public transportation thus decreasing our carbon footprint and vehicle traffic. Modern parking meters allow you to control the rates per hour which allow you to not harm the economy by monitoring and lowering rates during low traffic times.

Building Codes!

Building codes are standards for how and what is being constructed in your country. Most buildings in Sint Maarten are built the same in regard to the use of concrete blocks, minimum reinforcement and lack of knowledge to foundations. Until this point, the traditional construction methods have been sufficient however this is changing due to climate change affect on natural disasters and the aging of structures. The best way to ensure our communities are resilient and adaptive is to incorporate structural, energy, material, construction connections, bonding and construction methods into a national building code.

Land Reclamation along our coasts

If you haven’t noticed by now, our coastlines are diminishing as sea levels continue to rise. On top of that, as storms become more frequent and stronger, the storm surge effect and wave energy will cause drastic flooding and depletion of our coast lines. One idea to combat this is to create a policy where excavated materials are strategically used and placed into prepared water basins especially starting with the airport’s landing location. This will create safety and more recreational space for tourists to enjoy also decrease our landfill average volume intake as 1/3 of most landfills are filled by excavated and demolished materials.

Solar Wind Hybrid Powered Street Lights

This has been experimented before in Sint Maarten with a few projects that I’m aware of. The challenge with these street lights were their inability to stand during heavy wind storms and the demand for maintenance. With the right management program and a small modification in the product, this can become a reality for the entire Sint Maarten. This will generate income even with the challenges mentioned, it is still cheaper than the traditional lights we use today. Based on the country’s (ministry of public housing and infra.) budget the math shows that the average annual costs for an existing Sint marten streetlight is $128.20 compared to 84.95 for a solar/ wind powered streetlight including maintenance costs.

Change the asphalt road installation standards

Between the airport, Dutch and French side of the island, we all use the same set of standards which is no longer practical due to new sustainable technologies. Using plastics, recycled tire rubber and even glass can create a much stronger durable and sustainable road however the current standards do not make this option price competitive for companies. The current standards have a minimum thickness for the top cover of asphalt however using recycled material in your asphalt can perform better under a smaller thickness which is cheaper for companies. Our current standards do not make it feasible to do so. This would allow us to not only create smoother, more durable and efficient roads but also diminish our landfill volume intake by recycling much of the materials to use in our roads.

Modernize GEBE’s underground electrical lines

One of the biggest unknown reasons GEBE can not incorporate renewable energy exchanges is because their current electrical lines are only built for one-way usage. Therefore, it is unable to buy extra generated energy from a household or incorporate micro-grids into our neighborhoods. I’m a strong advocate for micro-grids and energy sharing using block chain technology however this is not possible with the current national grid.

Remove the sand from the Great Salt Pond

During the dredging of our harbor, we thought it was a good idea to dump the sand in the salt pond and to eventually use this as a ring road once the sand has settled. The pond has always been a natural protector against flooding as most of the runoff water finds itself into the pond. With the increase of upcoming potential flooding, we need to give the pond back it’s capacity to store more water when needed. On top of that the sand should be replaced at our most sensitive coastlines and the pond itself should be dredged to allow boat taxis. If a ring road is still wanted more than water taxis then this ring road can be built on pillars to ensure the pond keep it’s storage capacity.

Strategic beatification for better traffic efficiency and implementation of bike lanes

Most of our traffic is not created by mere traffic population but rather network interference. The traffic flow on the main roads are always being interfered with by the many entrances, exits, parking along the road and other various forms of network interference. This causes the traffic wave affect in which it takes the car behind the car which stopped, twice as long to go again and thus creating a wave of traffic behind the stopping car. To diminish this, bollards can be used to eliminate unnecessary parking spots along the main roads.

Make Philipsburg a walk-able city

Just like the shopping centers in the Netherlands, studies show that if you want to increase economical activity in an area you need to convert the area into a pedestrian prioritized plan. This mean introducing more trees, benches and art while eliminating vehicle access.

Trash Tax

One of the biggest obstacles in which it is not feasible to create a waste to energy plant is due to the low amount of trash the country collects which is not enough to create a profit in a waste to energy plant. This is a very unique problem to Sint Maarten and we must admit that there may not be a sustainable approach for this solution; so rather a tax has to be implemented for the proper management of our future waste disposals.    

[miloqnzh925]

The Only Guide for How Does Aeration Clean Water

How To Clean Natural Pond for Dummies

The majority of facilities possess on palm urgent electric energy, in case there is actually an energy breakdown. dredge pond cleaning. Additionally, many likewise produce provisions to have an extra aerator or pair of as backup just in case of mechanical failure. In season fish eliminates are actually another important reason to see to it aerators exist in your waters.

Examine This Report on Demucking Pond

When this takes place, the chilly water dropping on the garden pond surface may trigger an abrupt destratification which may carry deeper dead water to the area, producing it unfit for maintaining water life. The end result may be actually a costly as well as quick fish kill. Utilizing our aerators can avoid quick thermal surprise by consistently destratifying the pool.

Surface aeration conducts the multi-purposes of raising the D.O. level, decreases the temp degree as well as helps stabilize health conditions throughout the garden pond. In examinations along with area oygenation, the temperature level of a physical body of water has actually been actually reduced as high as 10F, hing on relative humidity. However, if the water gets also cool it can easily certainly not preserve sufficient oxygen - pond dredging equipment.

An Unbiased View of How To Get Rid Of Duckweed In A Lake

We have actually had the capacity to make aerators along with several of the highest possible air transactions prices every horsepower/hr accessible on the marketplace. aeration in water treatment. Our systems help sustain cleaner water, provide mild circulation, and also avoid thermic stratification. Fringe benefits include the ability to use the units as circulation power generators as well as to avoid winter months fish gets rid of.

Our experts experience that upright lift, drifting area aerators are actually the most sensible as well as reliable procedure of oygenation. By perturbing the water's surface, these devices may expose higher quantities of air reduced water to https://www.instapaper.com/read/1473433025 fresh sky and drive it throughout a body system of water.

Surface area disturbance is actually a fantastic conveniences as well as can be increased by area oygenation. It is actually vital to consider the price of the oygenation in association to the market rate of the plant being actually elevated.

All About Do Faucet Aerators Save Water

When sized properly according to pond type as well as application, they are extremely cost successful. Roughly a -hp is actually needed to have to freshen acre pond, but this can vary a little relying on the depth as well as form of your waterways.

Air is needed to have by the germs to permit biodegradation to happen. The offered oxygen is utilised through micro-organisms in the wastewater to break the raw material including carbon dioxide to develop co2 and water. Without the existence of adequate oxygen, microorganisms are actually not able to biodegrade the incoming raw material in an acceptable opportunity.

Under septic ailments, several of the organic process turn hydrogen as well as sulphur to create hydrogen sulphide and also change carbon into methane. Various other carbon will be actually converted to all natural acids that produce low p, H health conditions in the basin as well as help make the water a lot more hard to handle and promote smell accumulation.

Our Do Faucet Aerators Save Water Statements

The smart Trick of Why Is Water Aerated In The Treatment Process That Nobody is Talking About

Aeration is the most essential element of a therapy system making use of the activated sediment process. A well made oygenation device has a straight influence on the amount of wastewater procedure it accomplishes (aerator tank for well water).

Water Garden enthusiasts, whether they are actually amateur enthusiasts or even veteran experts, are commonly confused between water 'circulation' as well as water 'oygenation'. Many people think if the water is actually moving that it makes enough oxygen throughout. They have actually been actually persuaded effective oygenation could be attained along with a falls, a skimmer filter, as well as a pump.

These elements simply 'spread' the leading few inches of water in your pond. For a healthy eco-system, all of the water needs to have exposure to the environment at some moment. Aeration has actually been recently discovered as a key component to any sort of yard, commercial or even huge acre garden pond. It gives a beneficial amount of air that a lot of pond water lacks.

Why Is Water Aerated In The Treatment Process for Dummies

The majority of garden pond managers perform certainly not recognize exactly how valuable this is actually. Below at Harper's we strongly suggest utilizing these devices. Folks have been provided the inappropriate tip concerning aquatic oxygenating plants. While they perform supply plenty of advantages to a garden ponds eco-system, there is something little communicated of along with these organic aerators. dredging a pond by hand.

The majority of aeration devices will equal a really small fraction of the prices people place into chemicals and also other pool upkeep tools. A normal smaller aeration system can rollick 6 watts of electrical power, a portion of a lightweight bulb. Oygenation systems are actually very easy to install to brand new or existing garden ponds, and also require incredibly little bit of upkeep throughout the season.

Undoubtedly! Aeration is actually crucial considering that it guarantees that water performs certainly not end up being stationary which a lot of algae and various other development will certainly not form. There are a wide range of choices readily available to each industrial and also domestic users of water oygenation bodies. Improving air amounts in a body system of water could be as easy as opting for the appropriate sort of oygenation body.

Fascination About Clearing Ponds Of Weeds

Usually, most subsurface aerators make use of compressors along with a variety of hoses as well as sky diffusers to generate the preferred effect. Air amounts in ponds, ponds and also shallows are actually controlled in a positive way by utilizing this kind of oygenation tool. For the most part, a piston style sky converter goes to the center of the subsurface aerator.

Economical water management is one of the finest methods to regulate water top quality year-round. Garden ponds, lakes and also many various other physical bodies of water may quickly come to be infected through poor aeration.

[shirlleycoyle]

An Incredibly Toxic Lake Will Become One of the US’s First Lithium Mines

One of the United States' first major forays into lithium mining seems like it's going to be in the Salton Sea—one of the most polluted places in the country—after General Motors struck a deal with a mining company called Controlled Thermal Resources.

This is a big, and potentially very complicated, deal for anyone who cares about the planet. Many experts believe that in order to have any hope of staving off climate change, we have to electrify cars and essentially everything else as soon as possible (ideally, yesterday). 

Lithium-ion batteries are key to this process, and global demand is expected to increase between 5 and 18 times over the next several years. Put simply, we will need a lot of lithium, and the overwhelming majority of lithium in today's batteries comes from Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina. But the American southwest has huge stores of lithium as well. 

General Motors is hoping that a CTR mine in the Salton Sea can supply “a significant portion” of the lithium needed for its electric cars. It’s a step toward GM’s first-in-the-nation commitment to phasing gasoline-powered cars out of its production line by 2035—CTR is slated to start delivering lithium to the company by 2024, at which point the company will be well-poised to achieve this goal. 

This is, potentially, a very good thing. But it's also complicated: Mining, broadly speaking, is environmentally destructive. Lithium mining is usually—but not always—less destructive than, say, strip mining. And the Salton Sea, an accidental reservoir near California vacation mainstays like Joshua Tree and Palm Springs, is one of the most polluted places on the planet due to decades of agricultural runoff. Environmentalists there worry that if the lake continues to dry up, toxic dust on its floor could go airborne and pollute the air between Phoenix and Los Angeles. The lake is understood to hold one of the nation’s largest lithium brine stores, capable of supplying up to 40 percent of global demand for the mineral, according to the California Energy Commission (CEC). 

Legislators in California are aiming to position the region as a leader in the race for the mineral, which is widely viewed as essential to the transition away from fossil fuels. California has its own set electric vehicle targets to achieve: All new car sales must be zero-emissions by 2035. Being home to a store of minerals for batteries could make this easier, and this so-called soon-to-be “lithium valley” is leading the way.

“Right here in Southern California, we have the enormous opportunity to be a competitive player in the world lithium market,” said California Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, who represents Imperial County, where the Salton Sea is located, in a May committee hearing on the resource. 

CTR claims its production process is self-contained and environmentally sound. It plans to use renewable energy to extract the mineral, which can be found in rocks, clays and underground reservoirs of brine. The Salton Sea is already home to a complex of 10 geothermal power stations, which pump steam from underground into generators and create a saline brine byproduct that is rich in lithium and send it back into the earth. CTR’s proposal would instead send that brine into open pits, where it would evaporate, eliminating water and leaving minerals for processing behind. 

The proposal takes advantage of existing energy production processes without requiring much additional land. Proponents say this method would cut down on the industry’s environmental footprint. 

But to community members around the proposed mines, ramping up lithium extraction feels complicated. The Salton Sea was created accidentally in 1905 after a portion of the Colorado River spilled out of its irrigation system—at 200 feet below sea level, it’s what’s called a “terminal” or “endorheic” lake, one lacking an outlet, that water from the Colorado River and runoff from nearby agricultural irrigation drains into, but not out of. The only way water in the lake can depart it is through evaporation, a process that leaves behind a fair amount of salt. Multiplied by the salinity of runoff it receives, the Salton Sea has become very salty—50 percent moreso than the Pacific ocean. 

Image: David McNew/Getty Images​

The Salton Sea was once a resort area, with a series of small towns and vacation spots on its coasts. It is now so toxic that few creatures can live in its waters, though it is still an ecologically important area for migratory birds. Some of the towns, such as Bombay Beach, have essentially become ghost towns over the past few decades.

Chemicals like arsenic, selenium, and pesticides are rampant in the lake’s waters, and their particles have been released into the atmosphere as it dries, which is happening at an increasing rate as drought grips the west coast. Communities around the sea have long felt the burden of pollutant exposure; asthma-related emergency room visits are more than double the state average and nearly a third of children experience respiratory symptoms like wheezing, allergies, and dry cough, medical surveys have found.

So, ramping up mining in one of the state’s most polluted counties—where 85 percent of residents are Hispanic or Latino and 22 percent live under the poverty line—feels risky to environmental justice organizers like Miguel Hernandez, communications coordinator at Comité Cívico del Valle. Hernandez hopes to see producers and local legislators make an effort to inform residents about the possible, yet-mostly-unknown health effects of lithium mining, which is water-intensive and produces a fair amount of mineral waste. The concerns pollution researchers like Katie Burnworth, who monitors the Salton Sea for the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District. 

“It’s a dangerous, dirty process, with a lot of unknown material,” Burnworth told the California Desert Sun in February.

So far, Hernandez says, this educational effort has yet to happen. 

“We actually go out there and knock on doors,” Hernandez said. “For those families that I've been able to talk to, it's either little to no information has been shared to them, or they just have what's out there by the media.”  

Beyond California, lithium mining across the country has garnered widespread controversy in recent months. A proposed mine in Nevada, called Thacker Pass, was the site of protest in the Spring from local Indigenous communities and environmentalists who feared mining could deplete the already-dry region’s water stores, generate waste and emit thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. 

All of that said, absent a massive degrowth movement that significantly reduces the amount of energy society uses, many experts believe we need lithium to decarbonize. Proponents of lithium mining say it is less environmentally destructive than mining for oil and coal, but it's also not good for the environment, and, broadly speaking, lithium mining uses a lot of water. The American southwest is already facing intense water shortages and drought, though the lithium in the Salton Sea is already in brine form. 

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, a technology repair company that seeks to extend the life of electronics, believes mining of any kind is inherently harmful, and “one of the worst things that we do as a species.” 

“There is incredible environmental destruction that comes from it,” Wiens said. 

But few extraction projects have Wiens—who says he devotes much of his time at iFixit to thinking about the depletion of nonrenewable resources—as optimistic as this one. The idea of using existing energy production to create something that would otherwise be shot back into the ground feels “pretty darn promising,” he says, noting that putting that effort toward a resource that would fuel the transition away from oil and gas is worthwhile. 

“This to me seems like a perfectly common sense win-win situation,” Wiens says. “We don't have to dredge the desert … it's already in this liquid that we're circulating [for geothermal energy] anyway.”

Indeed, this argument is at the center of what’s splintered environmentalists about the hunt for lithium, among other minerals required to create solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Some believe mining is a necessary evil and a requisite in the transition to renewables; others fear this is a bandaid for the broader issue of overconsumption, and say maintaining an extraction-based economy will not do enough to curb climate change. (Wiens, for his part, takes solace in seeing a broadening cohort of startups recycling lithium in batteries, which only became lucrative at scale recently, as the number of electric vehicles on the roads has shot up). 

In a press release, CTR said that “The integration of direct lithium extraction with renewable geothermal energy offers the highest sustainability credentials available today. CTR’s closed-loop, direct lithium extraction process utilizes renewable power and steam – significantly reducing the time to produce battery-grade lithium products and eliminating the need for overseas processing. CTR’s operations will have a minimal physical footprint and a near-zero carbon footprint. The brine, after lithium extraction, is returned to the geothermal reservoir deep within the earth.” CTR provided the press release in response to a Motherboard request for comment.

Bringing job opportunities to a region with unemployment rates that have historically hovered around 20 percent could also flush cash into projects that need it badly, like pollution mitigation, education, infrastructure and healthcare, Wiens notes. Rodriguez echoes that belief, but isn't ready to get too excited. A recent solar buildout in Imperial County saw massive land use with little economic gains for the region because of tax exemptions and a slew of jobs handed to outsiders, he says. 

Rodriguez would like to see local jobs and training programs come out of the CTR contract—an ask that’s still up in the air as the producer undergoes permitting processes. Ryan Kelly, representative of the district that’s home to the Salton Sea on the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, says this is a concern, one that he’s yet to broach with GM. 

But as vice chair of the Lithium Valley Commission (a governing board Gov. Gavin Newsom created last September devoted to guiding the buildout of mining opportunities in the region), Kelly is currently fighting to pass an ordinance that would place a levy on the mineral, securing income from the mines for local projects like schooling and infrastructure. 

Made up of representatives from industry, government, environmental groups, and community advocacy organizations like Hernandez’s, the commission’s goal is to facilitate conversation around economic and environmental concerns, and to draft a set of recommendations for the sector as it emerges in southern California. 

“What community-based organizations want to know is how are these large companies going to play a part in our community?” Kelly said. “What are they going to give back for what they take?” 

Indeed, Hernandez says having a seat at the table is heartening for Comité Cívico del Valle. “I think this is the first, or one of the first opportunities that the community is able to be represented in these situations,” he notes. 

But the commission’s framework is non-binding, meaning, once they pass an environmental impact review, companies like CTR do not have to follow the recommendations. Kelly is hopeful that this won’t be an issue (“Maybe I'm being a little too optimistic, but so far we haven't had any arguments,” he said, of the commission, with a laugh.) 

Hernandez is hopeful, too—but he believes the next stages of approval in GM’s contract will be telling. 

“I'm not against the industry, or any industry, but I'm a huge advocate for doing things right,” Rodriguez says. “Let's assume it's gonna be part of our communities. Then, let's make lithium a good neighbor.” 

Motherboard reached out to representatives at General Motors but we did not hear back.

An Incredibly Toxic Lake Will Become One of the US’s First Lithium Mines syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[bluewatsons]

Gianluca Chimenti, Conceptual controversies at the boundaries between markets: the case of ridesharing, 23 Consumption, Markets & Cult 130 (2019)

Abstract

The drawing of boundaries has been deemed crucial for the shaping of markets. One type of such boundary is the boundary between markets to distinguish alternative market versions in all their heterogeneity. The so-called sharing economy – largely enabled by the current wave of digitalisation – represents a domain comprising many overlapping and contested market boundaries. This article explores how different conceptualisations of the sharing economy prompt strategic efforts to establish alternative market boundaries for the purpose of legitimising specific practices and to advance political and ideological ambitions. It also shows how this “boundary work” reinforces controversies when different processes of drawing boundaries interfere with and potentially threaten each other. Drawing on constructivist market studies, particularly the notions of framing and performation struggles, this article compares three dominating ridesharing platforms in Sweden: Uber, Skjutsgruppen and Heetch.

Introduction

There is great diversity among activities as well as baffling boundaries drawn by participants. TaskRabbit, an “errands” site, is often included, but Mechanical Turk (Amazon’s online labor market) is not. Airbnb is practically synonymous with the sharing economy, but traditional bed and breakfasts are left out. Lyft, a ride service company, claims to be in, but Uber, another ride service company, does not. Shouldn’t public libraries and parks count? (Schor, October 2014)

This quote by Schor about the sharing economy exemplifies the more general observation that nascent markets are often ambiguous, not least in terms of their boundaries (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). The so-called sharing economy is widely considered to be such a nascent market whose lack of clarity has generated conflicting practices and “matters of concern” (Geiger et al. 2014). For example critics have lamented how the adoption of feel-good rhetoric by commercial actors disguises an organisational spirit of predatory avarice (Sundararajan 2016). This “sharewashing” (Belk 2016) has produced several partially overlapping market concepts that nonetheless suggest quite different market boundaries: collaborative consumption (Botsman and Rogers 2010), commons-based peer production (Benkler 2004), access-based economy (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012) or the gift economy (Mauss 2002), to name a few. In fact, there is burgeoning literature vividly contesting various attempts to demarcate what the sharing economy represents and how it is organised (Dredge and Gyimóthy 2015).

While the existence of multiple viewpoints on a single polysemic concept is often inevitable in emerging and therefore ambiguous environments, it also raises questions about the practical incompatibilities that may result from such unclear market boundaries (Frankel 2018). There is a widespread belief among social scientists that without a commonsensical understanding of the sharing economy, market actors will experience difficulties in sharing goods and services (Frenken and Schor 2017). Prominent marketing pundits have similarly highlighted the importance of market boundaries as a “basic foundation” for the analysis of competition (Buzzell 1999, 61). The issue of market boundaries is also central to any regulatory ambitions that governments may have concerning markets (Christophers 2015). A case in point is the recent report by the European Commission (Codagnone, Biagi, and Abadie 2016) stressing the need for a joint policy initiative concerning the sharing economy due to fragmented national regulations.1

While the sharing of goods and services is likely as old as mankind (Sahlins 1972), ICT-enabled sharing has triggered the recent rapid growth of the sharing economy. These technologies have afforded increased use of underutilised resources and widened the potential circle of sharers beyond kinship. Internet and smartphone technologies today allow for unprecedented matching of supply and demand without the use of traditional intermediaries, thereby reducing information asymmetries and other transaction costs (Rifkin 2001).

Questions of controversies in digitalised markets are thus inseparable from questions of market boundaries and the discussions arising when they coincide, yet the former has received much more scholarly attention than the latter. This study investigates how controversies concerning how to conceptualise a certain type of market – in this case “ridesharing” – contribute to the shape of that market. More specifically, it examines how different conceptualisations of the sharing economy prompt strategic efforts to establish market boundaries and how these boundaries may interfere with one another.

To follow this boundary work, one specific sharing market will be examined, namely the market for ridesharing in Sweden. By locating the inquiry in the Swedish context, this article studies a market that has been controversial from its early stages, not least due to the lack of regulatory frameworks. The Swedish ridesharing market further represents a suitable case due to the simultaneous presence of several more or less controversial platforms. A comparative study of three ridesharing ventures – Uber, Skjutsgruppen and Heetch – reveals the heterogeneity of ridesharing actors and also their efforts to reach consensus (or not) concerning the boundaries of this controversial market.

This complex state of affairs closely links to Callon and Muniesa’s (2005) characterisation of markets as calculative collective spaces that represent sites of confrontation and power struggles. Following Callon and Muniesa, this article conceptualises the sharing economy as a space in which multiple actors with diverse interests advance different political and economic agendas. The polysemic character of the “sharing economy” is explicitly used (and abused) by the actors, thereby perpetuating dialectic processes of bargaining over alternative designations. Given the heterogeneity of actors involved in framing the ridesharing market, including policy makers, entrepreneurs, investors, and incumbent transport operators, it is hardly surprising that they express radically opposing views concerning what this market “should be”. This is directly linked to the “pragmatic ambiguity” of the term (cf. Giroux 2006), in that a set of diverse phenomena is subsumed under a common sharing fiction, allowing a high degree of pluralism while sustaining a semblance of unity.

A small number of previous studies have theorised the consequences of controversies pertaining to market shaping (Giesler 2008; Venturini 2010; Caprotti 2012; Chakrabarti and Mason 2014; Blanchet and Depeyre 2016). For example, Chakrabarti and Mason (2014) demonstrate how different actors in a BoP community (farmers, villagers, researchers, trade collectives) negotiate consensus to create a market through contested and iterative framing processes. Caprotti (2012) discusses how definitional debates around the market of cleantech are pertinent to its emergence. More recent contributions discuss the multifaceted roles of boundaries and their political contingency across empirical phenomena (Fernandez and Figueiredo 2018). However, there is an unexpected dearth of research examining the role of controversies in shaping and challenging market boundaries. Moreover, how and for what purposes market boundaries are drawn in light of the ongoing digitalisation of markets merits further attention.

Based on the argument that markets are continuously re-emerging rather than merely expanding (Callon 1998), the focus of this study is directed towards the practical implications of realising and maintaining a “unified identity” in a field of disagreement (Giroux 2006). Drawing on previous work in constructivist market studies (Rinallo and Golfetto 2006; Araujo, Finch, and Kjellberg 2010; Christophers 2015; Onyas and Ryan 2015), particularly the concepts of framing (Callon 1998) and performation struggles (Callon 2007), the aim of the article is to extend our understanding of how conceptual controversies contribute to market shaping (Blanchet and Depeyre 2016). By employing a socio-material view on markets as plastic entities (Nenonen et al. 2014), the key theoretical contribution opens up a “space of debate and critique on both the appropriate scope of markets as well as the role of marketing in making and operating markets” (Araujo and Pels 2015, 451). The analysis complements prior research focused on marketisation (Çalışkan and Callon 2010) by following the construction of market boundaries and the work required to maintain their often mutually conflicting qualities.

The article proceeds as follows: First, I review the literature on the roles of market boundaries and relate this to performation struggles in low-consensus environments. Second, I flesh out the methodological approach by outlining how the empirical enquiry was conducted. Third, I account for the three dominant sharing economy concepts before describing each of the three studied ridesharing ventures in detail. Fourth, I discuss various struggles that have emerged in response to the ongoing boundary work concerning ridesharing in order to theorise the role of conceptual controversies in markets. Finally, I offer three conclusions and make two specific suggestions for further research.

Framing market boundaries

There are no such things as “natural” market boundaries (Dumez and Jeunemaitre 2010). Instead, markets are constantly subject to boundary work by a host of different actors, including, but not limited to, buyers and sellers, regulators, market analysts, and civil society organisations (Abbott 1995; Fligstein 1996; Ellis et al. 2010; Finch and Geiger 2010). While it is well known that there is no correct way to delimit a market (Day 1981), these actors’ efforts may occasionally result in market boundaries that for all practical purposes appear to be naturally given, at least for a time. Such periods of relative stability and agreement, however, should not distract observers from the fact that the work of maintaining market boundaries is never really over (Callon 1998).

In many contemporary markets, market boundaries are repeatedly and overtly “challenged, crossed and even transgressed” (Fernandez and Figueiredo 2018, 295). The resulting blurry and shifting market boundaries present challenges to both marketers and academics. For marketers, they complicate decisions concerning how and where to draw boundaries between more or less similar offerings to identify the competition (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002). Previous research highlights this complexity in the context of product categories (Rosa et al. 1999), market categories (Navis and Glynn 2010), music genres (Anand and Peterson 2000) and geographical boundaries (Clark 1994). As discussed by Stigzelius et al. (2018) the conceptual blurriness also affects academic discussions, where conceptions of markets vary significantly across different traditions and in some cases make meaningful discussions on the topic difficult. Moreover, practical and academic conceptions of markets and market boundaries are to some extent communicating vessels. The resulting confluence of interpretations, concerns and conceptualisations creates an ambiguous space, “where the delimitation-bifurcation between the economy and politics is constantly being debated and played out” (Callon 2010, 165).

This socio-political dimension of market boundaries as sites of differences and commonalities hints at the malleability of markets. Once established, market boundaries remain debatable and when controversies emerge, “strategies aiming at changing the boundaries develop, and strategies at maintaining them develop in response” (Dumez and Jeunemaitre 2010, 153). Continuous boundary work is thus crucial in the making and unmaking of markets, and contributes to temporarily establishing which parameters are relevant for market exchange (Callon and Muniesa 2005). Given the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors that engage in such work, Callon and Muniesa (2005) consider markets as multifaceted, value-laden “spaces of calculability” in which actors constantly seek to de-stabilise existing boundaries in “a game of strategic interaction” (Dumez and Jeunemaitre 2010, 156).

Drawing on Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis, Callon (1998) proposed the concepts of framing and overflowing to address this continuous process of defining and redefining markets. While framing reflects the process of stabilising market boundaries by temporarily putting the outside world in brackets to render economic exchange possible, overflowing represents its necessary corollary, namely that all entities included in such framing efforts at the same time constitute potential conduits to the outside world. Strathern (1996) similarly highlights the role of framing to “cut the network” to temporarily locate elements considered irrelevant to a particular market exchange outside the frame – and vice versa. Framing thus creates a paradox; it acts both as a divider and a connector between markets, creating the conditions for things to interfere. Nevertheless, Callon (1998, 17) argues that “it is owing to this framing that the market can exist and that distinct agents and distinct goods can be brought into play.” This process of framing and overflowing suggests that the boundaries between different (versions of) markets – such as between the sharing economy, the collaborative economy, the gig economy, etc. – cannot be entirely clear cut. A central implication for marketers is that there is neither a single nor a permanent way to frame a market. Moreover, since market boundaries per definition are leaky, framing is often a contested activity (Holm and Nielsen 2007), as is illustrated by debates concerning commercial organisations operating under the guise of the sharing economy (Sundararajan 2016).

The implied state of flux regarding market boundaries raises questions concerning what to make of legal market boundaries. Instead of merely “setting the legal stage”, Christophers (2015, 137) stresses that the drawing of legal boundaries, “can be highly and visibly material to market outcomes.” Araujo and Kjellberg (2015) illustrate this potential import of legal boundaries by showing how the US Airline Deregulation on the one hand opened the market to entrants and on the other triggered incumbents to reframe exchanges in the market by introducing Frequent Flyer Programs. Hence, while conceptual market boundaries may appear to be abstract and fluid, they can also be turned into concrete realities.

It seems clear that framing efforts can generate multiplicity in markets. Different concepts prompt actors to employ different framing strategies to stabilise particular boundaries. Such theory-induced change efforts may intentionally or unintentionally produce partially overlapping market boundaries (Araujo, Finch, and Kjellberg 2010). Such overlaps may, however, result in delicate situations if the boundaries are based on mutually incompatible concepts, which in turn can bring about controversies (Frankel 2018). To better understand the roles of boundaries in controversial market contexts, it is important to examine how different market boundaries may co-exist and co-evolve. This raises further questions about how specific framing efforts can be brought to bear in the presence of competing efforts. In order to address this, I use the notion of performation struggles (Callon 2007) to introduce controversies and disagreements in processes of continuous market framing. Combining the notions of framing and overflowing with performation struggles highlights the precariousness of redrawing established boundaries within a highly contested environment.

Performation struggles at the boundaries between markets

Ellis et al. (2010) show how market boundaries are shaped by the complex interplay of theory and practice when practitioners (wittingly or not) perform particular concepts. The sharing economy and its related concepts provide great examples of the practical relevance of market concepts. Depending on which conception is used to frame the sharing market a practice may pass as either altruistic sharing or “sharewashing,” second-hand flea markets may be included or excluded, and gifting, commodity exchange and sharing may or may not be used interchangeably (Belk 2010, 2014; Frenken and Schor 2017). Market concepts also provide guidelines and inspiration for practitioners on how to act when operating under the umbrella of “collaborative economy”, for instance (see Botsman and Rogers 2010). In this sense, specific market concepts carry statements about markets in that they suggest alternative ways of acting in relation to particular sharing practices.

Callon (2007) argues that the successful interplay between a market concept and market practice requires a specific environment, or conditions of felicity (cf. Austin 1962). This required environment cannot be entirely known in advance and differs across situations, and is thus revealed once a concept is employed as part of a framing effort. MacKenzie’s (2003) seminal study of the relation between the Black–Scholes model and actual option markets, for example, showed how the “required environment” was crucial in realising a market aligned with the model. The creation of such environments, however, is often disturbed by the existence of competing ideas about markets, which may lead to “dynamic confrontations” among actors (D’adderio and Pollock 2014, 1837).

In light of the tensions over competing sharing concepts and their inherent statements about markets, the development of the sharing economy represents what Callon (2007, 330) calls a performation struggle involving conflicting processes of adjustments of statements and their associated environments. Performation struggles arise when processes to establish alternative market boundaries interfere with and potentially threaten each other. They render visible the overflowing, the “misfires” and the political stakes inevitably generated by market framing (Callon 2010). An example of this is a recent debate centred around Uber’s framing efforts to position itself as digital tech-company in 2017. Uber has long operated as an “information society service” which classifies the platform as a digital match-maker between drivers and passengers. This subtle, self-proclaimed classification has allowed Uber to temporarily circumvent national transport regulations with little responsibilities for worker protection and other related issues. This attempt to adjust the (legal) boundaries was eventually rejected due to conflicting conceptions of “ridesharing” between Uber and the regulators. The highest court in Europe considered Uber’s practices to have more in common with taxi operators than tech-companies, and thus decided that Uber must fall under the legislation for transportation companies (The New York Times, December 20, 2017).

Kjellberg and Helgesson (2006) conceive of these processes of adjustments as chains of translations by which ideas about markets are both reified (made concrete in practice) and abstracted (transformed into theoretical concepts). This double-edged character of boundary work can be highly relevant for some actors, such as regulators and competition authorities when they assess legality. It can also be relevant for businesses when attempting to capitalise on the vagueness of boundaries by operating as free-riders under a popular sharing concept. Performation struggles thus provide a suitable vantage point to examine the productive and political contingency of boundaries in “really existing markets”, as they make visible the efforts to realise various versions of market concepts in parallel.

It should be clear that the concept of framing concerns efforts to enact boundaries that allow particular economised exchanges to occur, while performation struggles highlight the political complexities arising in situations where market concepts are put to productive use (Callon 2007; Ellis et al. 2010). Combining the two allows us to move away from the often-unrewarding discussions about the truthfulness of market concepts (e.g. “is it really sharing?”) and instead attend to their concrete effects on mundane markets. Based on these starting points, I seek to explore how multiple boundary arrangements and struggles to perform the sharing economy arise in the presence of competing market concepts. So, how can such an exploration be conducted? The next section outlines the chosen methodological approach – an Actor-Network Theory inspired framework for the study of controversies (Venturini 2010).

Following the shaping of market boundaries, notes on methods

In order to generate a thick description of the Swedish ridesharing market, two primary methods were utilised: First, I compiled a mixed-source database comprising a wide range of texts (promotion materials, news articles, legal documents, etc). Second, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation and interviews with representatives of three selected ridesharing ventures.

By focusing on a single market “in the making” – ridesharing in Sweden – I was able to follow the actors (Latour 1987) and their relationships beyond the selected case organisations (e.g. to local transportation authorities and tax agencies). My attention was initially caught by several instances of contestation in ridesharing markets across Europe, which prompted me to investigate this further in the Swedish context. To assess the empirical suitability for a controversy study in the Swedish ridesharing market, I used Latour’s cartography of controversies and employed three principles: “hotness”, multiplicity and topicality (medialab.sciences-po.fr).

First, I sought out empirical accounts of “hot” situations, in which, “everything becomes controversial: the identification of intermediaries and overflows, the distribution of source and target agents, the way effects are measured” (Callon 1998, 260). Typical traits of hot markets are the complex web of issues being raised, the vivid disagreements between stakeholders, and the lack of accepted demarcations between matters of science, law, economy and society. Second, I mapped out a range of diverse initiatives aiming to establish or challenge a ridesharing market in Sweden. This revealed the multiplicity of actors and concerns involved in ongoing controversies (Latour 2004), including regulators, users, platform providers, journalists, activist groups, consultancies and various public authorities (i.e. city councils, municipalities and county councils). Third, Venturini (2010) encourages focusing on controversies in contemporary discourses. To assess the topicality of the Swedish debate, I consulted a database retrieved from Dow Jones Factiva comprised of press releases, academic journals, blog posts, web news and newspapers. Table 1 clearly illustrates the rising attention to and growing debate intensity concerning sharing economy concepts since 2013. This topicality allowed me to trace disputes in detail as they unfolded across various outlets.

Table 1. Summary Factiva search results, number of texts per year.

The research followed an abductive process of systematically combining information about the selected cases with conceptual insights concerning framing and performation struggles (Dubois and Gadde 2002). The case selection was theoretically driven (Davies 2012). Specifically, I looked for cases that: (a) were explicitly positioned within the Swedish ridesharing market, (b) had generated a reasonably-sized user base in Sweden and, (c) had diverging operational approaches. This resulted in a comparative design to study three ridesharing ventures – Uber, Heetch and Skjutsgruppen. The selected cases are the largest ridesharing platforms in Sweden and vary in terms of their respective approach to ridesharing.

The fieldwork stretched over a period of five months (June–October, 2017). Echoing the literature on framing and performation, I sought to identify various activities geared towards shaping the market’s boundaries (Ellis et al. 2010). Participant observations, which are inherently multimethod, provided numerous opportunities for interviews and shadowing. Most interviews were semi-structured, transcribed verbatim and subsequently coded using the NVivo qualitative analysis software. Interviews included 8 informants across the three cases and took place in person, while a few follow-up interviews were arranged via email, Skype or phone. The initial phase of formal interviews was followed by active participation across a variety of activities such as meetings, promotion campaigns and business events. For example, as part of a marketing campaign I volunteered as “brand ambassador” for one of the organisations at a local event. A central task was to provide information about the services to potential ride-sharers, while raising brand awareness through games and merchandising. The resulting conversations were captured in shorthand jottings using a smart phone. First-hand observations moreover provided insights into how the employees themselves discussed different sharing concepts in situ. To better understand the different approaches of each case, I have tested all services myself by sharing rides to various places in Sweden.

This rather non-linear process was eventually complemented with secondary data sources retrieved from online platforms and in-house documents. The online fieldwork was conducted across a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In addition, local podcasts, radio shows, blogs, company websites and mobile applications offered detailed insights into their differences and commonalities. Lastly, by following the debates in news outlets and public position papers, I noted several cases of resentment among platform owners, regulators and journalists. For example, as we will see in the following sections, platform owners published debate articles in national newspapers to take an explicit stance against one another. Similarly, since Heetch capitalises on an ill-defined legal system for Swedish ridesharing, incumbent taxi operators publicly admit their desperation over vestigial regulatory frameworks. The resulting debates provided additional leads to conduct interviews with other involved stakeholders, including representatives from the city of Stockholm and regulators (see Table 2 attached for more details). The final dataset is therefore comprised of various formats: downloaded texts, field notes, pictures, audio files and social media communications.

Table 2. Description of empirical sources.

The analysis proceeded as follows: based on the insights from the literature on framing and performation, a theoretical understanding of boundary work was derived to guide the initial round of data assessment. This was followed by an in-depth study of each case generating visual graphs, timelines and maps to identify parallels and emerging patterns. By combining insights from observations, interviews and selected documents, I first fleshed out the most apparent efforts to establish alternative market boundaries across the cases. The individual boundary work was then categorised into clusters by iteratively revisiting collected information and by following ongoing initiatives as they unfolded. Given the topicality, occasional follow-up meetings with informants played a central role in the abductive process, particularly due to continuing changes in the market. The empirical accounts were subsequently compared with dominating sharing economy concepts in extant literature to identify links between theory and practice. Discrepancies and confirmations were noted in a spreadsheet to guide me in writing case narratives and conceptual conclusions.

Multiple attempts to draw conceptual boundaries around the sharing economy

The sharing economy represents a low consensus paradigm encompassing a great wealth of concepts hybridising different practices and ideals. While these hybrid forms of economic organising are certainly not unprecedented – markets in early stages of formation are often “impure” – the blurring of conceptual market boundaries and the confusion they engender, is arguably more intense in the sharing economy than in mature markets (Arvidsson 2018). Disciplines as diverse as cultural theory, environmental economics, social anthropology and consumer behaviour attempt to frame the sharing economy on the basis of their respective understanding, turning the sharing economy literature into a conceptual maze (Dredge and Gyimóthy 2015). In the words of Frenken and Schor (2017, 4), “the confusion about the definition of the sharing economy is self-propelling due to the performativity of the term itself.” Central to this confusion is the engagement of many different types of actors in defining the sharing economy, including competitors, authorities, public press and academics. While the resulting bricolage of boundary work is quite bewildering at first, it is possible to discern three major alternative market conceptions (see Table 3).

Table 3. Alternative conceptions of the sharing economy.

First, while the concept of collaborative consumption was initially coined to describe mundane consumption practices (Felson and Spaeth 1978), it has been popularised as a concept that advocates tapping into idle capacity of underutilised assets. Responding to the digitalisation of markets and the rapid change of consumer attributes (e.g. informed, connected, purpose-driven), collaborative consumption represents, “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities” (Botsman and Rogers 2010; xv). This concept thus closely links to Tönnies’ (1887) notion of Gemeinschaft (as opposed to Gesellschaft), advocating the idea of joint governance and communal co-creation, wherein organisational hierarchies are malleable and changed according to degree of expertise (cf. Ostrom 2015). According to Benkler (2004), decision-making processes in the collaborative economy are based on the principles of meritocratic ideals, decentralised governance and self-organisation. There is no formal assessment of knowledge and skills by a single authority since the community collectively validates suitability along the formation process.

Second, the rise of online streaming platforms such as Netflix and Spotify diffused the concept of access economy, which has been adopted by a variety of industries, ranging from car sharing (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012) to art collection (Chen 2008). In “the Age of Access” Rifkin (2001) refers to this new form of economic exchange as market transactions wherein no transfer of ownership occurs, while platforms allow individuals to receive temporary rights to use on – or offline commodities at their convenience. This usage-based approach is characterised by a servitisation of markets and the desire to live without the “burden” of ownership. It also aims at emancipating consumers from the old tradition to express social status through assets. Empirically, due to the low utilisation rate of cars, it is hardly surprising that the automobile industry has been particularly proactive in experimenting with access-based business models (e.g. BMW’s car sharing DriveNow).

Finally, and closely related, is the concept of on-demand or gig-economy, which designates pure service platforms that leverage the spare time, knowledge and skills of peers. Here, short-term labour is matched through decentralised networks of workers on specific platforms in order to supply local and temporary demand for menial tasks, such as furniture assembly, household chores, or fast urban courier services. Individuals provide these so-called gigs to attain additional income or simply find joy in altruistic work (Hamari, Sjöklint, and Ukkonen 2015). Essentially, services are provided by freelance workers or “micro-entrepreneurs” in exchange for remuneration. Herein, the gigs can be reciprocated either monetarily or through other comparable services. Workers can then add gigs to their portfolio and build their reputations (Schor 2014). Thus, central to the gig-economy is the role of rating systems that help facilitate trust for unprofessional workers.

In line with Schor’s introductory statement, the fine lines between these conceptions are unclear to many, and they are often used interchangeably across sharing markets. As we will see in the next section, these conceptions are also consequential for the boundary work that practitioners engage in to demarcate their sharing initiatives from others.

Boundaries at work – market concepts in action

How are these different market concepts employed as part of and in response to ongoing controversies? Each of the following cases highlights efforts to establish specific market boundaries for ridesharing in Sweden that challenge the boundaries drawn by competitors.

Uber – attempts to realise a purist marketplace

Uber entered the Swedish ridesharing market in 2014 with the intention of become the leading platform for professional ridesharing. It has launched services in Sweden’s two largest cities, Gothenburg and Stockholm. Profit and growth are central in Uber’s mission to become the market leader: Uber charges a 25% commission for each ride – the highest in the market – and the company has received multiple rounds of venture capital over the last five years (crunchbase.com).

The Uber case offers interesting insights into framing, overflowing and the shaping of market boundaries, especially due to the company’s repeated infringements on (explicit and implicit) regulatory boundaries, e.g. the case of UberPop. The business model is designed to match peers that either seek commercial work as chauffeurs or seek to hail professional rides. As such, Uber is akin to gig-economy platforms in other markets such as UrbanSitter (nanny service), Postmates (logistics platform) and Instacart (grocery delivery), which all operate on the basis of short term “gigs”. On its website, Uber constructs a professional image to portray the platform as a qualified ridesharing service provider. Promissory statements are used to signal efficiency, reliability and professionalism:

Your ride, On demand. Whether you’re headed to work […] or out of town, Uber connects you with a reliable ride in minutes. One tap, and a car comes directly to you. Your driver knows exactly where to go. (uber.com)

The strategy to build a reputation as a reliable taxi alternative has borne fruit. While the Swedish ridesharing market is still in its infancy, Uber clearly dominates urban ridesharing by any economic measure. For example, according to the country manager, Uber Sweden has circa 1500 drivers and 600,000 registered users of which 100,000 travel at least once per month. Interestingly, its success can be largely attributed to the recruitment of former taxi drivers, as monetary incentives represent the foremost reason to switch operator:

Forget about the high commission. The Uber app matches supply and demand much more efficiently than the Taxi app, or actually any other ridesharing competitor. This allows me to always keep rolling and make more money per shift than elsewhere. (Uber driver, interview October 2017)

By all appearances, Uber performs a version of the on-demand conception discussed above, which includes algorithmic surge pricing and the employment of cutting-edge technology (Uber’s legal name is in fact Uber Technologies Inc.). This is inter alia evident in the mobile app, which is very well-developed for both users and drivers. Drivers can track weekly and daily earnings at a glance, while users receive real-time information on the whereabouts of the drivers. To further resemble a marketplace for serious business, Uber seeks to attract service-minded drivers with a “commercial libido” prone to economic avarice:

Got a car? Turn it into a money machine. The city is buzzing and Uber makes it easy for you to cash in on the action. […] Earn money on your own terms. Drive full-or part-time, Uber gives you the flexibility to work as much or as little you want. (uber.com)

This reminds of Pollock and Williams’s (2010) postulate that markets are “made durable” by promissory work and convincing framing. A market studies reading of this promissory framing foregrounds the rhetorical work undertaken to “cut the network” to alternative ridesharing initiatives. The discursive positioning thus highlights a perlocutionary effect, i.e. the effect of persuading and convincing the reader of Uber’s differences.

The semblance of professionalism is further evident in the diversity of services, such as UberX, UberBlack, UberXL and UberLux. This diversification positions the platform as a professional mediator between supply and demand, and allows it to cater to a larger share of potential customers. This is closely linked to Uber’s efforts to position the platform vis-à-vis incumbent taxi operators, which also hints at the slipperiness of drawing precise market boundaries (Finch and Geiger 2010). In my dialogues with Uber drivers, I identified a degree of “porosity” in the boundaries between ridesharing and taxi, as Uber strongly mimics best practices found in established taxi schemes. Most pointedly, all of the interviewed Uber drivers used the term “taxi” interchangeably for both established taxi services and novel ridesharing platforms, even when referring to Uber itself. Uber drivers also adopt a certain “street behaviour” from incumbents; like taxis, Uber drivers circulate busy blocks and wait near crowded events to “snatch” customers without being hailed via the app. This might derive from the fact that many Uber drivers previously worked for one of the local taxi companies. In fact, Uber drivers explained to me how convenient it is to use apps from various platforms in parallel (ridesharing and taxi) to increase the number of gigs per shift. I also noticed a degree of detachment between drivers and the Uber brand, in that the drivers do not relate to Uber as much as they do to the benefits of working via Uber. Their motivation to use Uber is typically profit, thus mirroring the official Uber position.

The informants adopt business lingo loaded with market rhetoric when they stress the importance of “liquidity”. This represents arguably the most important KPI to measure whether the number of drivers available can meet the demand for rides at any given time (liquidity is here referred to as critical mass, rather than financial liquidity). Uber thus invests heavily to recruit drivers when entering a new Swedish city in order to sustain a high level of liquidity. Hence, new market entries typically come at a high cost for Uber to provide a strong presence on the streets (and in the app).

Lastly, and contrasting the other two cases in this study, it is hard to identify any effort to foster a (digital) community through, for instance, participatory practices or social events. However, responding to negative portrayals of Uber as “pseudo-sharing” (Belk 2014), Uber recently launched UberPool in an attempt to legitimise its positioning within the ridesharing market. UberPool matches passengers with already existing rides in a given direction (similar to Skjutsgruppen, below). While the on-demand conception still dominates the Uber-version of ridesharing, alternative conceptions are being tested.

Skjutsgruppen – attempts to realise a collaborative approach

Skjutsgruppen was founded in 2007 as a self-organising initiative through Facebook. Once a side project, it has turned into a non-profit organisation that operates across Sweden. The main intention is to make daily commutes affordable and long-distance travel more sustainable and fun. Skjutsgruppen is largely funded by participants and volunteers who collectively run the platform. Via the free membership, individual consumers can either find already scheduled journeys to join or advertise trips and share the cost of travel. This clearly contrasts on-demand services that (intentionally) operate akin to established taxi services. Rides are not hailed in the traditional sense but rather carefully planned and booked in advance to match travellers with the same destination.

The collaborative concept is fostered by a deep-rooted culture of civil activism. In conjunction with campaigns and official “Ride Sharing Days”,2 Skjutsgruppen’s founder travels across the nation to educate potential ride sharers and local authorities about the collaborative concept Skjutsgruppen stands for. The campaigns also aim to discourage single-occupancy car rides by explaining how ridesharing initiatives can be built in a self-organising manner. Campaigning venues are manifold and include sharing workshops (e.g. Ouishare3), political congresses (e.g. Almedalen4), hackathons (e.g. Civictech-Sweden5) and local radio channels (e.g. Sveriges Radio P4 Göteborg6). Most media appearances result from invitations by media platforms that support the collaborative concept that Skjutsgruppen stand for – an “earned” attention for Skjutsgruppen so to speak.

As such, Skjutsgruppen has evolved into Sweden’s largest ridesharing movement counting 70,000 members, while explicitly rejecting any association with profit-driven marketplaces:

We are a movement, which for us is both a wordplay, in that we are moving forward, but also an ideological framework. Everyone in the community has exactly the same freedom and opportunity to contribute. (skjutsgruppen.nu)

According to the founder, the driving force behind this movement stems from a culturally entrenched belief in the potential of collaborative and civil societies. In Sweden, the first major wave of popular movements emerged at the end of the twentieth century, ultimately paving the way for strong trade unions and consumer cooperatives (Wijkström 2007). Inspired by the temperance movement, the free church movement, and the labour movement, Skjutsgruppen advocates democratic values such as participatory governance, solidarity and reciprocal partnership. In fact, the founder himself provided me with a historical outline on this subject and appeared very well informed about Swedish activist movements. Combing this idealistic stance with ridesharing has resulted in several awards for his civil engagement, including the Civil Society Award in 2013.

This commitment to preserve the Swedish civil movement tradition hints at the boundary work necessary to dissociate other versions of ridesharing such as Uber’s for-profit platform. The efforts to demarcate Skjutsgruppen from other ridesharing platforms become even clearer in its dialectical stance towards competitors, as in this excerpt from an op-ed piece:

Imagine the public press would constantly refer to grilled steak as banana, it would probably not be accepted by the reader. Likewise, you should not mix up taxi with ridesharing. […] The municipalities we work with know what true ridesharing means. The tax agency knows it as well. (Göteborgs-Posten, May 14, 2016)

This statement clearly aims to convey Skjutsgruppen’s “otherness” and to highlight the lack of semantic sensibility among other ridesharing actors when relating to different sharing economy concepts.

Another dimension illustrating Skjutsgruppen’s otherness pertains to trust. As pointed out by Belk (2010, 717) “Sharing, whether with our parents, children, siblings, life partners, friends, co-workers, or neighbours, goes hand in hand with trust and bonding.” Here, Skjutsgruppen’s founder has sought to redesign the platform to shift from contemporary trust conceptions such as “trust-in-institutions” (cf. Fligstein 1996), towards new forms of decentralised “trust-in-peers”. That is, rather than creating a strong institutional brand that vouches for the trustworthiness of individuals, Skjutsgruppen encourages the formation of a lateral trust network among its members through which performance is assessed collectively. For example, unlike Uber, Skjutsgruppen does not use a review function to assess drivers’ performances, since “reviews commodify humans,” as the founder asserts (Interview, June 2017). Instead, Skjutsgruppen relies on radical transparency across all types of interactions occurring via the online platform. It is thus not possible to communicate privately when arranging a ride; all conversations on the website are visible to all members. Members of the platform are also required to link their profiles with social media sites, such as Facebook, to identify whether driver and passenger have “common friends” that can be contacted in case of doubt. Terms such as “member”, “participant” or “friend” are deliberately chosen to avoid the perceived negative and anonymous connotation of “user”.

This collaborative approach is further revealed by Skjutsgruppen’s priority to open innovation and dynamic organisational structures (Ostrom 2015). For example, I participated in an online meeting via Facebook in which we discussed how to collect the remaining sum required to build a mobile app (something the community has been planning for years but always postponed due to lacking financial means). During the meeting any participant (including myself) could suggest potential financial sources and, if the idea resonated with the participants, anyone could realise that idea individually or as part of a team. Such online meetings are typically organised via the Skjutsgruppen Facebook group so that meetings can be scheduled democratically at members’ convenience (using Facebook’s poll function). In addition, decision-making is approached in a self-organising manner according to the competencies and expertise of the volunteers. Participants who are motivated and knowledgeable in a particular subject area can take the lead in an initiative without the anaesthetising consequences of bureaucracy often found in corporations. In a way, this relates to the notion of equipotentiality put forward in the collaborative economy – the idea that everyone has equal chances to contribute in decision-making processes (Benkler 2004).

Lastly, in light of increasing digitalisation of the ridesharing market, efforts to realise the access-economy (Rifkin 2001) have surfaced, particularly in the provisioning of free travel data. To fully leverage ICT developments, Skjutsgruppen offers access to their Application Programming Interface (API), allowing other stakeholders to use their ridesharing data to develop other transportation platforms. Public transportation providers, such as bus operators, could combine their own travel data with the data from Skjutsgruppen to create a meta-platform for intermodal mobility solutions (also known as Mobility-as-a-Service). Such open source solutions thus enable collaboration on a technical level among those enthusiastic about sustainable travel. Representative statements of the founder such as “we don’t have anything to hide,” aptly echoes the overall passion for a collaborative approach to ridesharing.

Heetch – attempts to hybridise sharing economy concepts

Heetch was launched in Paris and entered the Swedish ridesharing market in 2016 with the aim of providing Millennials with a fun and safe alternative to established taxi services. The organisation is funded by venture capitalists and has launched its services only in Stockholm (crunchbase.com). Uniquely for Sweden, Heetch provides a platform for unprofessional drivers to convey passengers by utilising privately-owned cars. This case is interesting because it attempts to form a hybrid based on two conceptions outlined in the previous section, namely the on-demand economy and the collaborative economy.

Attempts to realise the on-demand economy

First, Heetch has a rather professional appeal akin to on-demand services such as Uber, especially in the way the platform is designed for drivers to obtain several gigs per shift. For example, Heetch provides a mobile application to hail drivers at their convenience, while (unlicensed) drivers in turn pay a 15% commission per ride. Interestingly, it has recently launched an additional “pro service”, which allows more qualified professional (licensed) drivers to operate at a higher price point, aiming to stretch the ridesharing boundaries towards professional incumbent taxi operators. As part of this add-on, Heetch recently introduced a technical makeover of the app, adding an interactive map providing customers the option to seek suitable drivers nearby and to choose between pro or classic services.

Second, in its quest to outperform competitors and establish a strong presence in Sweden, Heetch campaigns pro-actively to recruit new drivers and customers. For example, I identified multiple staffing efforts on local job portals, the Heetch website, LinkedIn and even through external recruitment agencies. Once accepted as a driver, individuals attend a series of training sessions to ensure a certain quality standard. While this closely parallels recruitment processes at Uber, it differs significantly from Skjutsgruppen’s membership-based approach.

Third, the political element in shaping markets advanced by Fligstein (1996), highlights the importance of social relations with authorities and other actors in the field. In line with Fligstein’s argument, Heetch has sought to establish a dialogue with politicians to foster a close relation based on trust and knowledge exchange. In addition, the country manger co-founded a think tank called Shared Economy Sweden to engage in conversations with stakeholders across administrative bodies and private actors. Specifically, the think tank focuses on three key issues: changing regulatory frameworks, improving tax systems, and disseminating knowledge about sharing (sharedeconomy.se). Correspondingly, Heetch has spent a significant amount of effort on lobbying and legal matters to defend its unique approach of combining professional and unprofessional drivers in ridesharing (see next section).

Thus in many respects, Heetch is oriented towards on-demand service for profit rather than “fun” and collaboration. However, in addition to the commercial practices illustrated so far, Heetch also engages in efforts that are more reminiscent of the collaborative economy.

Attempts to realise the collaborative economy

Consider the juxtaposed images in Figure 1, below, which illustrate how Heetch seeks to create an impression of difference from Uber. By highlighting ostensible differences Heetch attempts to position itself as different from Uber and the associated connotation of professionalism.

Figure 1. Heetch’s framing efforts to demarcate its otherness vis-à-vis Uber (source: company presentation, June 2017).

This juxtaposition is also emblematic for Heetch’s efforts to situate itself in the realm of “mobility as entertainment”, as stated on the website. It is clear that Heetch aims to be perceived as a platform for the people, or more pointedly, for young party-goers. The service operates only at night targeting young individuals who cannot afford regular taxis. In contrast to its main competitor, Uber, drivers stretch out to remote areas in order to make the city’s nightlife “more inclusive for young suburban residents” (Internal company presentation, June 2017). Relatedly, consider the following statement that frames Heetch as a complementary source of urban travel, rather than a substitute for established modes of transportation:

We are not a competitor to regular taxi services, instead we are a supplement to public transportation. After a trip is accomplished, the passenger gives a donation to the driver which allows to cover the costs for the drivers’ car […] (Internal company presentation, June 2017)

This statement is interesting for two reasons. First, it brings up the question of how Heetch manages to realise the two worlds it envisions. On one hand Heetch operates akin to incumbent taxi operators and is thereby de facto a competitor. On the other hand, it portrays itself as a collaborative ridesharing platform vis-à-vis public transport. Second, the statement reveals that Heetch uses a compensation model that is very different from regular transportation. Formally, a Heetch driver suggests a fare (price) in the form of a donation and passengers can opt out or alter the amount at their convenience. After each ride, passengers receive an automated notification on their mobile device with a suggested donation, which in effect works similar to a regular price.

It seems central for Heetch to have virtuous organisational characteristics in order for the commercial appropriation to succeed. In a variety of published debate articles with national coverage, Heetch assertively repeats its non-profit intention:

We provide a model for car owners to cover their costs through ridesharing, we do not provide a traditional [profit seeking] job as such. This becomes particularly clear through our implementation of the income ceiling. (Internal company presentation, June 2017)

The mentioned income ceiling means that Heetch inhibits drivers from generating excessive profits by stipulating a yearly income limit of 40,000 SEK (circa USD 4400). According to the country manager, this amount corresponds to the annual fixed costs related to maintaining a private car in Sweden. Note that this clearly reveals a different conceptualisation of the sharing economy compared to both Uber and Skjutsgruppen. For Heetch “ridesharing” is about “sharing the driver’s cost” as opposed to “sharing the cost of a trip” (Skjutsgruppen).

The official mission of Heetch reads: “to make sure that people can enjoy their night out”. But since the provision of rides by unlicensed drivers is not well-accepted yet in Sweden, Heetch launched few initiatives to address this. For example, to make customer rides safer at night, feedback functions such as performance rankings assess drivers’ “trustworthiness”. The performance ranking works similar to the system implemented at Uber (rating scale from 1 to 5), but also allows comments about the overall experience. Furthermore, Heetch makes it a priority to make rides interactive and comfortable for teenagers, creating a social atmosphere through an assortment of snacks, refreshments and “good vibes” (country manager, interview July 2017). These efforts seem to pay off. A user survey of 15,841 Heetch users suggested that, “Only 2% of Heetch users have ever felt in danger during a Heetch ride, versus 38% in public transportation services, 30% walking, 16% by (own) car and 14% on two-wheelers” (internal company documents).

Lastly, to foster a community ambience between driver and passenger, so-called brand ambassadors regularly represent Heetch at festivals to educate potential users about the platform and to provide opportunities to ask questions concerning prices and safety. For example, in my volunteering experience as ambassador during a festival, I noticed how playfully Heetch workers approached potential users in order to meet them at eye level and respond to their questions. Various games and a photo booth were set up to create a reliable but informal brand relation. It seems clear that Heetch tries to reconcile ideas drawn from two different sharing economy concepts, namely the on-demand economy and the collaborative economy. While Heetch provides professional services akin to incumbent taxi drivers (e.g. quick hailing on demand), it also attempts to build a reputation as taxi-for-Millennials, focusing on safety, entertainment and fair prices.

Summary

To briefly summarise, we can observe diverging approaches to ridesharing across the cases based on different conceptualisations of “ridesharing” as such and as driven by the actors’ interests in popularising their particular platform. We can also observe that each approach requires heavy investments in boundary work, which is done in different ways, e.g. through professional Apps, official Ride Sharing Days, and donation-based services. These observations beg the question: given the presence of multiple approaches to ridesharing, how do different boundaries co-exist and what happens when they coincide or conflict? The following section discusses this question to highlight the precariousness of multiple market boundaries, particularly when other stakeholders beyond the ridesharing platforms become involved, intentionally or not.

Performation struggles around ridesharing

Multiple efforts to frame the Swedish ridesharing market have heated up the climate among transport providers and intensified the controversies concerning the “right” market framing. In a public debate article, Skjutsgruppen suggested, “restaurants are no picnic – taxis are no ridesharing,” because “friends don’t make money off of friends” (Göteborgs-Posten, May 14, 2016). Following its activist approach, Skjutsgruppen takes a clear stance against on-demand platforms that adopt the ridesharing-label for the purpose of legitimising taxi-like services (e.g. Uber and Heetch). Ridesharing, according to Skjutsgruppen, is not about making profits.

Another obvious performation struggle involves the incumbent taxi operators. As noted above, Uber and Heetch drivers often use multiple apps simultaneously to increase the number of gigs per shift. Interviews with drivers revealed that many incumbent actors, such as Taxi Stockholm, strictly prohibit Heetch and Uber drivers from acquiring customers through both ridesharing and taxi companies at the same time. This means that drivers need to be aware of contractual agreements that deliberately exclude ridesharing platforms from the taxi market. The rising number of license-free drivers and the lax regulations for ridesharing in Sweden led the local taxi association to publicly announce their frustration concerning current regulatory frameworks: “Yes, we are desperate!” (Dagens Industry, June 16, 2016).

A recent report issued by the European Commission highlights the multiplicity related to these performation struggles, as the controversies enrol actors other than transport providers (Codagnone, Biagi, and Abadie 2016, 7), “rhetorical discourses, public controversies, and more tangible battles, as it occurs in any kind of polarisation process, fail to consider that sharing platforms cover a wide range of different activities.” Regulators, for example, are particularly concerned with ambiguous market boundaries. Following a series of court rulings, Uber subsidiary UberPop eventually had to terminate its operations in Sweden in 2016. This was largely due to inconsistencies between local authorities and Uber in framing the ridesharing market. Despite the absence of explicit legal definitions for ridesharing in Sweden, UberPop was regarded as an illegal taxi service because drivers were unlicensed and used privately owned cars with no official taxi metre. A Swedish appeals court moreover convicted dozens of UberPop drivers which led to the suspension of driving licences and in turn numerous missed job opportunities for previous Uber drivers (Reuters, May 11, 2016). Similarly, Heetch was found to operate illegally in France and was forced to shut down its services for a few months in 2017 (mainly due to unlicensed drivers). In line with this, Swedish journalists have expressed harsh critique against the platform, arguing that it is “illegal according to both the police and the transport agency, and those who are driving can now face the same fate as the drivers of the abandoned UberPop” (Sveriges Radio P4 Stockholm, October 21, 2016).

But the growing controversy around ridesharing has not been without merit: Swedish regulators have long disregarded the vestigial state of current transport jurisdictions. A point in case is the absence of a legal definition for ridesharing. To address this, in 2016 a year-long government inquiry set out to explore the necessary steps to establish a legal framework for new platforms (“Taxi and ridesharing – today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow,” 2016). The inquiry proposed three key improvements. First, it was deemed crucial to create a legal category for ridesharing, including an official definition: “trips where two or more individuals travel together to the same destination or in the same direction, in order to share the costs incurred” (307). Second, it was suggested that drivers should be required to obtain a taxi license to guarantee professionalism and safety. Third, Swedish regulators were urged to improve the taxation system for sharing economy related income (e.g. for Uber-drivers). That is, drivers may use private cars but are required to use some form of digital taximeter that tracks each ride for tax purposes. Such regulatory adjustments are likely to intensify performation struggles. While the suggested definition for ridesharing is clearly in line with Skjutsgruppen, if this proposal will at any time become effective (which is highly probable given the ongoing controversy), Uber and Heetch could encounter legal difficulties due to their taxi-like practices.

Lastly, the conceptual controversies perpetuate a degree of vagueness that fuels performation struggles in the context of (mainly public) financing. In particular, professional service firms often strategically seek vague ways of framing the sharing economy in order to avoid personal scrutiny in their reporting. Consider this highly-cited report issued by PricewaterhouseCoopers in its Consumer Intelligence Series (2015):

For the purposes of consistency in our reporting and research, we used the label ‘the sharing economy’ to broadly define the emergent ecosystem that is upending mature business models across the globe.

However, the spread of such extremely vague definitions has implications for market developments because they act as mediators between “industry experts” and interested stakeholders when moving across spaces. As this vagueness lends itself to various interpretations, it produces confusing images of the sharing economy among public and private investors, which often rely on such reports when forming an understanding of new sharing platforms. For example, when Uber adopted the term “ridesharing” in the same way as other ridesharing platforms in Sweden, public investors (i.e. municipalities) became very hesitant to discuss financial backing with other non-profit ridesharing platforms. This hesitation was largely due to the repeated vagueness of the sharing economy reflected in whitepapers, consultancy reports and other media outlets.

Discussion

This paper has addressed two main questions. The first question concerns how controversies concerning how to conceptualise a certain market – in this case the market for “ridesharing” – contribute to shape that market. The second concerns what role(s) market boundaries play in putting market concepts into productive use. While the presence of multiple market conceptualisations may seem intangible and abstract, it should be clear that, in the Swedish ridesharing market, the opposite is true. The conceptual confusion renders visible how market boundaries, in all their heterogeneity and hybridity, are deliberately drawn and redrawn as a result of theoretical and political tensions. This redrawing concerns the boundaries between what is and is not “real” ridesharing, between what is and is not legal and between how the different market concepts – collaborative, on-demand and access economy – are brought to bear in daily practices.

Three interrelated themes from the digitalisation of ridesharing and the related conceptual controversies merit further discussion: (1) the roles of market boundaries in the shaping of markets; (2) the multiplicity of markets and the interference of individual versions; and lastly (3) the role of digitalisation in prompting parallel market strategies.

The roles of boundaries in shaping practices and space

Fernandez and Figueiredo (2018) recently argued that boundaries, in the more general sense of the word, are often being stretched and transgressed. My analysis of ridesharing suggests that market boundaries are no exception. This stretching and transgressing of boundaries involves different activities, such as efforts to hybridise previously separate markets (e.g. Heetch), engaging in (unfair) competition (e.g. UberPop), and efforts to create a ridesharing movement (e.g. Skjutsgruppen). Several noticeable attempts illustrate that boundaries are, as Dumez and Jeunemaitre (2010) suggest, not given from the outset but constantly drawn and redrawn.

First, platforms try to build and maintain boundaries through specific practices. For instance, Skjutsgruppen deliberately employs practices aligned with their underlying conceptualisation of the ridesharing market as collaborative economy. This includes the organising of official Ridesharing Days and the provision of free education in municipalities across the country. To make its position clear, Skjutsgruppen deliberately avoids, indeed actively resists, practices employed by other ridesharing platforms, such as Uber’s above-average commission for drivers. The boundaries it attempts to draw is also reflected in and reinforced by its use of specific terms such as “member” and “friend” rather than “user”. All the studied ridesharing platforms seek to shape the boundaries within which they wish to operate through rhetorical strategies and promissory work (Pollock and Williams 2010). In this sense the market boundaries they attempt to create and enforce work as “symbolic boundaries” (Lamont and Molnár 2002); they function as tools through which practices are legitimised and recognised.

This competition around boundary drawing hints at the marketing efforts required by platforms to put their ideas into productive use. As mentioned above, some actors engage in “sharewashing” strategies to disguise their profit motives and make them more similar to other sharing initiatives, whereas other actors employ narratives that instead distinguish them from (potential) competitors. The competition around boundary drawing thus illustrates how each actor tries to stretch and contort the boundaries of the market for their own benefit through specific practices, products and services. As a consequence, this has created an ongoing performation struggle concerning how to “properly” frame ridesharing. This struggle has become increasingly heated not least because Uber, for example, persistently employs practices akin to taxi firms, while positioning itself as a ridesharing platform. Unsurprisingly, borrowing a metaphor from Orwell’s “1984,” Skjutsgruppen confronted Uber with the statement that “Newspeak does not change the facts,” hinting at the misleading use of “ridesharing” in Uber’s on-demand practices (Göteborgs-Posten, May 14, 2016).

Second, and in line with Christophers’ (2014) claim that it is practically impossible to examine “really existing markets” without invoking their geographical dimension, there is a clear spatial dimension to the market boundaries being drawn. Skjutsgruppen employs a geographically wide definition of their market – a nationwide movement – which has led them to engage in activities across the country. In contrast, Heetch employs a much narrower definition of their market, offering rides only in the greater Stockholm area. Such territorial qualities reveal the spatial constitution of markets as “material particulars” (Berndt 2015). By “territorialising” the ridesharing market, i.e. linking it to a physical location, platforms render market boundaries more visible than without the associations to specific cities or regions. In this respect, Buzzell (1999) reminded us that marketing scholars have tended to overemphasise the idea of markets as abstract signifiers, i.e. marketspaces rather than marketplaces. Here, the contemporary ridesharing market offers an important insight: Despite the abstract and often de-territorialised character of its conceptual discussion (Sundararajan 2016), the spatiality of the ridesharing market remains an essential puzzle piece in its practical realisation. Especially marketers are confronted with the challenging task to orchestrate the range of digital devices (apps, websites, digital keys, social media, etc.) and simultaneously adapt these to local preferences and concerns.

This encourages us to rethink the dominant view of digitalised markets as geographically dis-embedded abstractions (cf. Alvarez León, Yu, and Christophers 2018). As the findings illustrate, the spatial dimension of digitalised markets directs attention to the situatedness of boundaries which do not seem reducible to a single homogeneous frame, but are instead linked to practical issues, regulations, local discourse, etc. In fact, economic geographers have recently highlighted the socio-political tension arising when digitalised markets become territorially contingent (Alvarez León, Yu, and Christophers 2018). Spatial boundaries are based on the proximity of potential customers (e.g. urban vs nationwide) but also depend on a complex infrastructure of digital devices, which leads to a balancing act of capturing opportunities and considering the available technology. Moreover, in foregrounding the dependency of urban agglomeration for Uber and Heetch, the Swedish ridesharing market once more renders visible the intertwinement of spatial and digital concerns in seeking a critical mass to gain momentum on digital platforms.

Continuous framing and market multiplicity

The three cases contain many examples of how individual efforts to frame the ridesharing market in Sweden come to produce multiple market versions. This multiplicity largely stems from actors entertaining and promoting different conceptions of the sharing economy, leading them to actively engage in constituting the reality they envision (Callon 2007). Consider the cases of Skjutsgruppen and Uber. Skjutsgruppen attempts to re-organise the ridesharing market as a collaborative economy driven by a strong belief in a governance model resembling the commons à la Ostrom (2015). Uber, on the other hand, bases its operations on a conceptualisation of the sharing economy in which economic avarice plays a key role, reflected in organisational forms and processes aiming at efficient matchmaking between drivers and customers. Even though Skjutsgruppen and Uber seek to perform different concepts, and thus employ different practices, both enact particular ideas discussed in the wider sharing economy literature. Given the generic performativity of market concepts (Callon 2007) and the volume and variety of contributions proffering ideas about sharing markets, the observed multiplicity of ridesharing versions in Sweden is hardly surprising.

The multiplicity of markets can be understood as the fluid manifestation of concepts enacted in the continuous process of market framing. Heetch started as a pure peer-to-peer platform without professional drivers, but morphed into a hybrid platform combining features of the collaborative and gig-economy to prevent further public turmoil. Rather than a single correct way of framing, markets are framed for different and multiple reasons, including risk reduction and ideology. But the boundary work required to maintain and challenge boundaries is neither entirely transparent nor always successful. Consider the controversial case of UberPop: For this on-demand concept to succeed, it required an adjustment of the environment within which it operated (i.e. changing fragmented and obsolete regulatory frameworks). Interestingly, the UberPop initiative did not just fail to produce the reality it envisioned, it also produced overflows in that public investors became hesitant towards other Swedish ridesharing platforms. In other words, a particular framing can lead to negative overflows that force other actors to actively dissociate themselves from a stigmatised or unsuccessful actor. One way of doing this is to present and reinforce an alternative market conception through active boundary work, as Skjutsgruppen does.

Such adjustments and reactions to ineffective market framings are obvious modalities of performation struggles (Callon 2010). As illustrated earlier, struggles arise when the presence of theoretical and political tensions interfere with the efforts to realise different versions of ridesharing (e.g. UberPop). This interference suggests that controversies are productive in that they enrol various actors and their concerns until market boundaries are temporarily stabilised. This also suggest that in controversial environments, such as ridesharing in Sweden, the complexity of market realities is increased through regulatory, geographical and historical contingencies as more actors become involved. Multiple market versions thus not merely co-exist, but bring to bear and render visible various historical and vested interests. A straightforward translation of market concepts into the “wilderness of the ‘real world’” is therefore hardly ever achieved (Berndt 2015, 1866). This wilderness is amplified by the ongoing processes of digitalisation, which already have affected how we travel and share rides. New payment systems, the Internet of Things, and soon self-driving cars will create further opportunities to disrupt traditional ridesharing and taxi services. Remember the time we used to say “never get into a stranger’s car?” For many of us, sharing rides with strangers has become the norm. Fuelled by the advent of ICT and the penetration of smartphones the potential circle of sharers has expanded far beyond immediate kinship.

Digitalisation prompting specific market responses

How does the digitalisation of markets concretely influence ridesharing in Sweden? Most obviously, it changes the elements of markets or “the stuff markets are made of” (cf. Hagberg and Fuentes 2018). This includes the development of new products (e.g. mobile apps, websites, blogs), the altering of market practices (e.g. riding with absolute strangers, hailing via digital platforms), the assessment of drivers and their behaviours (e.g. peer to peer reputation systems) and the democratisation of planning a trip through convenient digital platforms (e.g. Facebook groups). In short, the resulting sharing markets are very different from previous versions of such markets.

Conscious that the shaping of markets occurs on the basis of already existing markets (Nenonen and Storbacka 2018), this raises questions about how the digitalisation of ridesharing impacts established incumbents and their practices. Interestingly, this turned out to be a double-edged sword: On one hand, new technologies allow strangers to connect in unprecedented ways, while providing more (cost) efficient means to tap into the idle capacity of cars. On the other hand, digitalisation leads to increased competition with incumbent taxi operators, given that actors such as Uber mimic established taxis to learn from their best practices. In a way, this double bind hints at how indiscriminate digitalisation can be in combination with ambiguous sharing concepts. Both taxi operators and ridesharing organisations have digitalised their products, which resulted in a convergence of previously distinct markets/spheres of economic activity (taxi and ridesharing). This consequence of digitalisation has been largely achieved by leveraging bits and pieces from the wider sharing economy discourse. How do actors respond, one might ask, to this convergence of markets and the partial adoption of sharing economy concepts?

For one thing, the legal responses to vague market concepts are clear; how markets are defined and depicted does palpably matter to regulators and public authorities (such as in the case of UberPop). Thus, efforts to construct a shared understanding of the sharing economy, in all its heterogeneity, have drastically intensified over the past years. For example, recent government inquiries into creating legal categories for ridesharing illustrate the interest and importance in mitigating the ambiguity. The rise of so-called “sharing cities” is another point in case hinting at public efforts to understand the sharing economy in the context of local governance. As for the ridesharing platforms, I have identified three distinct responses to the vagueness and convergence of the sharing economy: an imperialist approach (Uber), a dialectic approach (Skjutsgruppen), and an opportunistic approach (Heetch).

Uber seems to operate in Sweden just as it does anywhere else in the world. Its activities follow a geographically and historically unbounded blueprint of best practices, while seemingly ignoring local circumstances such as competition, transport regulations and customer demand. Paradoxically, Uber leverages precisely these local circumstances, most pointedly the lack of regulations and the density of Stockholm’s urban agglomeration. But at the same time, Uber leverages its global position and the expertise to implement digital devices locally, such as the mobile app or the firm website. The knowledge gained from building digital infrastructures elsewhere thus provides a competitive advantage over its local competitors in Sweden. In this sense, Uber employs an imperialist approach largely by deriving economic value from (1) capitalising on ample (digital) resources and (2) circumventing regulatory constraints that apply to local competitors. “Imperialist”, also because Uber attempts to extend dominion over competitors to create a position of monopoly by gaining economic control of a specific territory and thereby deliberately risking performation struggles.

Predictably, this leads to tensions with actors holding conflicting views on ridesharing. Skjutsgruppen, for instance, takes a clear stance against Uber, e.g. via confrontative public op-eds. The conceptual vagueness of the sharing economy threatens its collaborative approach to ridesharing by making it difficult to cut the network and avoid the overflows emerging from Uber’s imperialistic approach. Skjutsgruppen has had a strong conceptual grounding even before the surge of ridesharing in Sweden (the platform was founded in 2007), which is problematic to convey in light of the current confusion. One way in which Skjutsgruppen seeks to mitigate this generalisation of platforms is through its dialectic approach of confronting competitors and educating the public at large. However, the digitalisation of ridesharing forces Skjutsgruppen to also invest in mobile apps, which in turn contributes to a homogenisation across platforms with respect to their digital infrastructure.

Lastly, as a hybrid case Heetch seems to operate “under the radar” by opportunistically changing trajectory depending on the situational climate. For example, in “hot” situations, such as when Heetch was increasingly pressed by both journalists and public authorities to cease the recruitment of unlicensed drivers, an additional “professional” service was launched to signal trustworthiness (Sveriges Radio P4 Stockholm, October 21, 2016). Here, the mobile app has again been instrumental in facilitating the additional service, as it allows to choose between licensed and unlicensed drivers at the touch of a button. Acknowledging the legal uncertainties, the opportunistic behaviour seems further evident in its efforts to keep public promotion at a minimum (e.g. advertisements, billboards), thereby avoiding struggles with competitors or regulators.

Conclusions

In this study I have sought to unpack how multiple market conceptualisations contribute to shape the market for “ridesharing” in Sweden. By attending to framing efforts and performation struggles involving multiple stakeholders, I explored how controversial market concepts can be put to productive use in shaping markets. Empirically, the shaping of the Swedish ridesharing market is also a case of market digitalisation – the three organisations on which I chose to focus all leverage new information and communication technologies in their versions of the ridesharing market.

I conclude that digitalisation clearly acts as a driver for change in the Swedish ridesharing market, offering new prospects, practices and attempts at regulatory adjustment. Digitalisation also leads to sharing markets that are very different from previous versions in terms of how supply meets demand, associated transaction costs, information asymmetries, opportunities to build trust among peers, etc. Still, my analysis also shows that this digitalisation of markets does not unfold very differently from other types of market change processes. Market change is often characterised by chaotic phases of ambiguity, the enrolment of new actors, and rivalry between various stakeholders attempting to capture opportunities (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009).

In parallel to such change processes, there is considerable controversy around different conceptualisations of sharing markets and their boundaries. Yet, as Christophers (2015) asserted, it is rarely asked how we might distinguish between similar markets and how multiple versions of the sharing economy can prevail in one and the same market, such as in the case of ridesharing in Sweden. The Swedish ridesharing market proved a fertile context in which to explore these questions, owing partly to its early digitalisation. Moreover, the market for ridesharing is a societally and environmentally important, yet complex market context. Disruptive entrepreneurs are facing the challenge of simultaneously reshaping established markets and navigating (or circumventing) multiple boundaries and barriers. Incumbents and other stakeholders, on the other hand, face the challenge of either trying to adapt to new business practices or combat such practices by exploiting or changing existing institutions. I have shown that this complexity is closely linked to the contestable nature of market boundaries and the multiple roles they play in “hot” market situations (Callon 1998).

Ridesharing is certainly not the only market subject to conceptual confusion. Indeed, as Schor’s introductory quote demonstrates, multiple takes can be found across most sharing economy markets. Rather than a straightforward dichotomy consisting of sharing and non-sharing markets, we witness a wide range of economic behaviours across the sharing economy. Thus, future research needs to, “systematically investigate market concepts as part of advancing the agenda of adding a plural ‘s’” (Frankel 2018, 459). Market researchers need to ascertain how the pluralism associated with market concepts contributes to the shaping of other sharing markets, in which disruptors are likely to encounter pre-emptive actions by incumbents. This becomes particularly important in the case of digitalised markets, where modern technologies act as amplifiers for change and thus may be adopted by actors without considering possible overflows. Lastly, in light of the spatial constitution of markets, further research is also needed regarding both the concrete places of friction and the abstract spaces of harmony between market concepts to better understand the commonalities and differences between seemingly similar markets.

Notes

Controversies are understood as shared uncertainty in circumstances of low consensus, or “every bit of science and technology which is not yet stabilized, closed or ‘black boxed’” (Macospol in Venturini 2010, 3). MACOSPOL: Acronym for Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics (EU-funded project initiated by Bruno Latour). mappingcontroversies.net.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAnaM41th9c.

https://www.facebook.com/events/211059056302177/.

http://socialinnovation.se/den-kollaborativa-ekonomin-bubblar-i-goteborg/.

https://civictech.se/en/.

https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=104&artikel=6845919.

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best 2020 electric beds

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[webcricket]

Catch a Falling Star

Characters: CastielXReader

Word Count: 2264 (Part 2)

A/N: Part 2 of a Soulmate AU mini-series. I’m uncertain how many “parts” will make up this mini-series – the original outline is for 5, but my muse has a sordid history of adding more plot twists, turns, and verbs than I initially anticipate and/or know what to do with. Thank you ALL for the overwhelmingly KIND and POSITIVE feedback thus far! I hope/strive not to disappoint. Enjoy the ride. (P.S. Still on vacation mode and taking advantage of a quaint coffee shop with wifi on this rainy afternoon – will respond personally when I have normal internet access.)

Summary: What if angels didn’t end up just anywhere when they are banished by sigils…what if sometimes they end up exactly where they need to be? Turns out you are Castiel’s grounding stone, and it’s more complicated than either of you realizes. Cue the hurt/comfort and mandatory associate angst (be warned, it gets heavy). Angels are a damned stubborn lot, and in this regard Castiel is no different from his kin.

Completed series Masterlist:

webcricket.tumblr.com/post/165166387163/catch-a-falling-star-masterlist

Man seemingly drops out of the sky. With an absolute disregard for common sense given your lakeside isolation, you invite the peculiar stranger into your home. You convince him to disrobe and shower. Obviously his common sense could also do with some fine tuning – what sensible person follows a random stranger home and immediately consents to getting naked? Alright, it wasn’t immediate, he put up a gallant protest and you routed his muddied multi-layer modesty at every turn until he acquiesced and passed his trench coat, suit, and shoes through the barely cracked door of the bathroom. Perhaps you’ve underestimated your powers of persuasive speech all these years. Perhaps you should consider a new career revolving around this superpower. Lawyer? Lobbyist? Nah.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

You serve him tea in a proper porcelain cup and saucer because it seems like the civilized thing to do, and also because it gives you something to do and him something to do because right now you’re wordlessly stealing furtive glances of one another and questioning every life choice you’ve ever made that led you to this awkwardly silent fête. He did look awfully good in those borrowed pants. And what was it about those vivid blue eyes of his that fascinated you so? Was it the way they reflected and refracted the star light? One look into them and you were certain you could chart the infinite depths of those luminescent blue cosmos forever and not stumble twice upon the same breathtaking hue. Man proceeds to vanish, stealing your car and taking it on a joy ride into town, ditching it there in such a manner as to ensure you won’t receive a parking ticket. How…polite? Must have been the tea.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

It’s the kind of unbelievable zany tale you share with friends over drinks so they can laugh at your expense and reproach you for being a total nincompoop with zero regard for personal safety – classic fodder for them to dredge up out of the blue at a party years later to embarrass you in front of your date. There it is again, the inescapable blue. Shake it off, move on. He’s long gone. Where were you? Right, being hypothetically painted a fool in front of your date. You laugh. If you’re being completely realistic, it’s to embarrass you in front of their date. “Let me tell you about this time Y/N invited some strange guy…” Not that you’re sharing.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

At this point, despite the clerk at the bus depot informing you a man fitting your exact description purchased a one-way ticket to Lebanon, Kansas this morning, you’ve persuaded yourself the whole experience was the result of a bit of indigestion and an over-active imagination. Kansas! It practically reeked of Oz. Blue gingham dress, blue post office logo, clear blue skies – everywhere your thoughts tread twisted into a titanic blue distraction. Throwing your head back, dallying outside the car door, you lost yourself in the uniform cozy blanket of blue atmosphere stretching overhead. Somewhere someone sat behind a curtain having a grand old belly-jiggling guffaw about your life while you sang your off-tune songs on cue and skipped down a yellow-brick road. Brakes squealed. A horn blared. A delicate ivory patina teacup embossed with a pattern of blue periwinkle shattered upon the floor.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

The sage green curtain hung around the bed meant to instill an ambiance of warmth in the otherwise icy cold hospital room swooshed aside. Castiel’s steely gaze roamed over the myriad of tubes and wires trailing into and out of your stone-still form, frowning regard settling on the white tape crudely clamping your eyelids shut. Like everything else he touched, he defaulted to the presumption this, too, was his fault. As it so happened in this particular set of circumstances, he wasn’t necessarily absolved of all blame.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

The ventilator bellowed another gush of life sustaining oxygen into your lungs. He shouldn’t have fled. The angel was no coward, but when your skin touched his you shocked him, literally and figuratively, to the very core of his existence. He felt the spark in the deepest part of his being, in the pure angelic heart created especially by his father to fiercely love humanity above all else and without limits that set him so starkly apart from his kin, the unique element of his creation that doubt and regret had not yet sullied no matter how unforgivable his past actions or how epically he failed in the skewed summation he maintained regarding himself. Nothing and no one had affected an influence there, until you – and he yearned for more.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

As a steadfast rule, Castiel wanted nothing for himself. Averting the apocalypse, the multiple falls, the grabs for power, the sacrifices, each and every enterprise set in motion in the name of helping others – humanity, his kin, and above all the Winchester brothers who redefined his notion of family. He viewed himself as useful, but ultimately expendable – the tinder wood to ignite larger fires. Auspiciously, someone sympathetic above his pay grade viewed him in a far more indispensable light, resurrecting him from the ashes time and again. Unsurprisingly, when threatened with the prospect of selfish desire kindling in his own heart – a great and terrible unknown burning want of something solely for himself, the need presenting as utterly foreign, abhorrent even, to his abstaining nature – he ran for the hills.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

At the bus station in Cleveland, he disembarked – the action not so much born of a cognizant plan to buy a return ticket to Seneca Lake to see you again, but more out of a precipitous and overwhelming need for breathing space to lessen the tightness seizing his chest. He found the acute need for oxygen bizarre since he didn’t need to breath in the first place – the involuntary rise and fall of his chest thus far a mere remnant of muscle memory tickling at the neurons of his vessel. Entertaining and committing to the act of boarding a bus back to New York seemed to ease the unrelenting vice grip on his ribcage.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

Now that he stood at your bedside and saw the machines keeping you alive, now that he had time to objectively examine and interpret his impressions – now, it all made sense. As an angel, with his abject history of imperfect and pitiable glory, he never ventured to hope in all of his father’s creation there existed a heart cast expressly for him, least of all a human heart. Even amongst humans a match such as this was so exceedingly rare as to be the stuff of legend. He daren’t think the word for fear his suspicions were wrong…or right.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

“Friend or family?”

Castiel angled his neck to acknowledge the young woman in the sterile white coat with a black stethoscope slung around her neck positioned at his elbow. “Neither,” he answered, focus gliding again to your frame. His frown deepened at observing your limp fingers jammed uncomfortably through the side rail of the bed, the result of a nurse’s haste in changing a dressing. He badly wanted to reach out, move them, wake you, apologize. A combination of apprehension and wonder incapacitated him.

“Oh…well, such a shame,” the doctor followed the target of his furrowed brow to your crumpled hand, taking it upon herself to gently reposition it to lay flat, “hit and run in front of the post office this morning. Witnesses said Y/N just stopped in the middle of the street to stare up at something in the sky. Massive head trauma. Terrible tragedy.”

Hissssssssss. Beep!

“Y/N,” your name spilled from his lips as a reverent whisper. It dawned on him he hadn’t learned your name until now. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask you – he knew you by the dazzling glow of your soul in a universe beyond names and that was enough.

“I was hoping you might know the next of kin. We’re having difficulty locating anyone. You’re the first visitor.”

“She has an uncle,” Cas murmured, disbelieving the insinuation you could possibly be alone in the world, “he has a place on the lake.”

“He passed years ago.”

Hissssssssss. Beep!

“Do you mind if I spend a few minutes?” Cas spoke hoarsely, collapsing into the chair beside the bed, knees feeling weak.

“Of course, take all the time you need,” the doctor strode over to the door, pausing to look back pensively. If Castiel had the inclination to read her mind just then, he would have heard her musing as to whether or not he was one of those angel of death characters she’d been hearing about in the news lately. Privately, she thought in your hopeless case it would be a mercy – if no next of kin emerged, it was only a matter of days before they pulled the plug anyway.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

Cas enviously watched the last rays of the setting sun reach through the window to warmly caress your cheek. You might be on life support, but your soul still outshone anything in his recollection including the sun itself.

Other souls in your quandary would have accepted the open summons to escape their physical pain and soar to the blissful embrace of Heaven. You obstinately clung to your shattered body, reliving the night and day on endless loop, floundering in a sea of blue. Your eternal happiness wasn’t in Heaven – he was no longer welcome there.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

Cas meditated on the large calloused fists resting uselessly upon his lap, determining his grace still too drained from the banishment by sigil to fully heal you at present. He reached out, palm hesitantly hovering over your pale hand. The strain of resisting the longing to twine his fingers through yours to comfort you trembled every muscle in his suspended arm. He desperately wanted to lose himself in your electric touch. He flinched, afraid that once he submitted to the desire, he’d never be able to let you go. He blockaded his objecting heart inescapably behind all the reasons why he must not be in your life. He wasn’t safe for you, beholding your languishing body that much was clear. He couldn’t protect you, not from himself. He was a storm from which you would find no shelter. He would destroy you. He resolved to touch your skin only once more when the time came to heal you.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

He stoically waited for his grace to rally, wincing through a thousand plus a thousand whirring actuations of the ventilator accosting his ears, avoiding the anxious stares and well-meaning inquiries of the nurses and doctors on rounds – wasn’t he thirsty? Hungry? Tired? Despite their best efforts, your condition was rapidly worsening. Was he certain he didn’t know a next of kin? Your kidneys were failing, fluid regurgitating into your lungs, he should think about saying goodbye. Would he like to speak to a grief counselor? There is a chapel on the second floor if he is a praying man. A priest offers last rites as the angel numbly waits.

Hissssssssss. Beep!

On the third morning, his silent vigil concluded. He rose purposefully to his feet. Without looking at you – for he’d ceased being able to look at you the night before without weakening his resolve, unable to bear the agony of observing the flickering ebb of your soul as you clawed to hang on against forces grown insistent upon tearing you asunder – he closed his wetly glinting blue eyes and pressed two fingers to your forehead. “I’m sorry Y/N,” the golden glow of his grace flashed bright, bouncing off the glossy white finish of the walls, surging throughout your body, repairing, soothing, rectifying the mortal injury indirectly resulting from his fateful plunge into your peaceful world, “forgive me.” His fingers lingered, heart thrashing wildly against the self-imposed barriers he’d erected, a shaky sigh rattling from his throat, “And please…forget me.”

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…

The hospital staff tittered amongst themselves, giddy with the miracle of your complete recovery. Congratulatory backslaps and fist bumps resounded here and there in the halls. Miracles have a way of generating a shockwave of infectious hope in their wake.

A lone nursing assistant remembered to ask you in passing during your discharge about the dark-haired man in the tan trench coat who stayed by your side for three days without leaving. Handsome. Hardly said a word. In possession of the saddest blue eyes she ever saw. With a show of such selfless devotion, surely you know him?

No name for this remarkable man stirred in your memory, your tongue poised immobile between your teeth.

“Must have been your guardian angel,” she smiled, ferrying your wheelchair down the hall toward freedom.

“Must have been,” you mimed, chasing a fleeting indigo shadow of memory just out of grasp of your awareness.

Safely home, leaning over the sink, your fingers attached to a favorite ivory colored teacup left to dry in the dish rack. You twirled the cup around and around, mesmerized by the repeating pattern of blue flowers adorning the rim. You thought tonight you would devote a few hours to stargazing – the idea sent a quiver of exhilaration coursing to your limbs.

Castiel failed to eradicate himself from your mind as he intended. After all, how could he erase the cosmic void in your heart which came into existence on the day of your birth – an emptiness prevailing long before you met him, and that he alone was equipped to fill? Even an angel can’t purge something that was never there.

Part 3:

webcricket.tumblr.com/post/163231161990/catch-a-falling-star

[phynxrizng]

INFINATE POSSIBILITIES, FULL MOON IN SAGITTARIUS HOROSCOPES

Infinite Possibilities: Full Moon in Sagittarius Horoscopes

See what June's Full Moon in Sagittarius means for your sign

Source, By Rick Levine

The cosmic energy is quite powerful as the Full Moon in adventurous Sagittarius on June 9, 2017, urges us to stretch beyond our limits. We are reminded that we don't need to settle for less, even when circumstances are difficult, because there is something more than what meets the eye. Confident Jupiter ends its retrograde period within an hour of this Full Moon, widening our horizons even further. Since Jupiter is the ruling planet of Sagittarius, this direct turn brings a powerful message of encouragement as we reactivate ideas that have been stalled for one reason or another.

Although the Sagittarius Full Moon offers an uplifting message, it's not just about fun and games. Luna's conjunction with taskmaster Saturn can rain on our parade of pleasure unless we're willing to do the hard work required to achieve our goals. Meanwhile, the cosmic lovers, Venus and Mars, tempt us with the possibilities of romance and lure us into the dance of relationships. Attractive Venus in sensual Taurus is a reliable magnet for sweet experiences. Her cooperative sextile to red-hot Mars can fire up passions, but Mars in nurturing Cancer is more protective than assertive. The potential for love looms large as long as we aren't tricked into taking any shortcuts.

Aries Horoscope (March 21 - April 19)

Although your optimistic approach to relationships makes your day brighter, you are still practical enough to meet reality head on. The Sagittarius Full Moon magnifies your 9th House of Big Ideas, but current circumstances make it tricky to hold onto your ideals. Unfortunately, life seems to be more complicated than you wish, even with a solid plan in place. Remain open to the likelihood of shifting desires. However, your heightened determination and perseverance prevents others from raining on your parade.

Taurus Horoscope (April 20 - May 20)

Oddly enough, you're longing to experience the depth of your feelings. The Sagittarius Full Moon falls in your 8th House of Intimacy, inspiring you to seek out sensual delights without worrying about how others perceive you. Your normal discomfort with emotional intensity stems from your desire for simplicity. Sometimes the only way to recreate a less complicated existence is to resign yourself to the process and go through a phase of increased complexity. Never underestimate the power of persistence.

Gemini Horoscope May 21 - June 20)

You're fascinated by a plethora of interests and you love to jump from one clever thought to another. But the expansive Sagittarius Full Moon illuminates your 7th House of Relationships, amplifying the emotions of those people closest to you. But you still might resist the flow of feelings or even question your desirability when it comes to intimacy. Stop looking for more data and start acting on what you already know to be true. Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.

Cancer Horoscope (June 21 - July 22)

You often leave your strongest desires unspoken without even telling your secrets to those you love and trust. Unfortunately, this cautious strategy reduces the likelihood of being fully satisfied in a relationship. Much to your chagrin, your belief that people should just intuitively know what you need isn't based on reality. The extroverted Sagittarius Full Moon lights up your 6th House of Habits, inspiring you to step out of your comfort zone. Improve your chances for emotional fulfillment by putting your feelings out in the open. A good relationship starts with good communication.

Leo Horoscope (July 23 - Aug. 22)

You are ready for a little romance, but you must meet your previous commitments first if you really want to pursue love. The Sagittarius Full Moon casts its light in your 5th House of Play, revealing your current desire to open up your heart and let someone special in. Be sure you know what you're getting yourself into before taking things to the next level. Creating a list of all the potential risks and rewards can help you decide whether or not to move forward in the game of love. Ben Franklin wrote, "If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins."

Virgo Horoscope (Aug. 23 - Sept. 22)

A little extra tension can push you into some very dynamic situations. You may not be as relaxed as you wish while the Sagittarius Full Moon activates your 4th House of Security, prompting you to seek the utmost clarity in professional and personal relationships. Worries about your uncertain career path could dredge up old fears and emotional insecurities. Thankfully, your negativity has less power once your concerns are seen in the light of day. Poet Ryunosuke Satoro wrote, "Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations."

Libra Horoscope (Sept. 23 - Oct. 22)

There's no reason to worry about what you might be missing, even if you feel like harmonious relationships are hard to find. The Sagittarius Full Moon energizes your 3rd House of Communication, empowering you to express what you want from others. However, don't attempt to transform dark into light too fast or you could prevent the most transformational magic from coming to fruition. Channel your passions into creating a viable plan for the future. Controlled growth is naturally more sustainable than a sudden breakthrough. Moliere wrote, "The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit."

Scorpio Horoscope (Oct. 23 - Nov. 21)

Staring down your fears could lead to questioning your basic beliefs. The truth is you can't expect others to love you if you don't fully love yourself. Thankfully, the inspirational Sagittarius Full Moon brightens your 2nd House of Self-Esteem, encouraging you to see yourself in a different light. You possess the undeniable power to eliminate old tapes that are playing outmoded songs. But don't wait for a better time to dance to your music; create a new soundtrack for your life while the planets are singing along.

Sagittarius Horoscope (Nov. 22 - Dec. 21)

Your emotional intensity can be too much to handle and people might tiptoe around you because they don't want to trigger your temper. The exuberant Sagittarius Full Moon lands in your 1st House of Personality, prompting you to go as far as you can when making your point. But you're not interested in being placated; instead, you want everyone to understand your truth. Consider this as a gentle reminder that the world does not revolve around you, and that others are entitled to their own opinions. Turn off the rhetoric and turn on your love light.

Capricorn Horoscope (Dec. 22 - Jan. 19)

You may be relatively satisfied with your daily routine, but you grow less certain about your path in life when the Sagittarius Full Moon falls in your 12th House of Destiny. Give yourself permission to go through a process of self-doubt while recognizing this is just a temporary phase. Your primary job is to gain an objective perspective on your current habits so that you can begin to eliminate the ones keeping you from achieving your highest potential. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam said, "You have to dream before your dreams can come true."

Aquarius Horoscope (Jan. 20 - Feb. 18)

You can play your knowledge to your advantage by relying on your deep understanding of the power of the collective. The Sagittarius Full Moon graces your 11th House of Social Networking, motivating you to discover what the group needs to thrive. Using your innate charm helps you get what you want, but be careful about stirring up emotionally charged material. Ironically, you might not even be aware of the psychological buttons you are pushing. Don't go looking for trouble when there isn't any or you might just find it.

Pisces Horoscope (Feb. 19 - March 20)

You can't decide whether you want to be in the spotlight or not. The free-spirited Sagittarius Full Moon shines in your 10th House of Status, enabling you to be comfortable on stage or in a public arena. But Luna's opposition to the Sun in your 4th House of Home and Family encourages you to maintain a lower profile. Although you might prefer to work behind the scenes, it's still time to claim the power that you have rightfully earned. Author S. Kelley Harrell wrote, "We don't heal in isolation, but in community."

Source, @Tarot.com

Part of the Daily Insight Group ©2017

Found in Witches of the Craft.com

Reposted by, PHYNXRIZNG

[dorcasrempel]

3 Questions: Harnessing wave power to rebuild islands

Many island nations, including the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, are facing an existential threat as a result of a rising sea level induced by global climate change. A group of MIT researchers led by Skylar Tibbits, an associate professor of design research in the Department of Architecture, is testing ways of harnessing nature’s own forces to help maintain and rebuild threatened islands and coastlines.

Some 40 percent of the world’s population lives in coastal areas that are threated by sea level rise over the coming decades, yet there are few proven measures for countering the threat. Some suggest building barrier walls, dredging coastlines to rebuild beaches, or building floating cities to escape the inevitable, but the search for better approaches continues.

The MIT group was invited by Invena, a group in the Maldives who had seen the researchers’ work on self-assembly and self-organization and wanted to collaborate on solutions to address sea-level rise. The resulting project has now shown promising initial results, with a foot and a half of localized sand accumulation deposited in just four months. MIT News asked Tibbits to describe the new approach and its potential.

Q: People have been trying to modify and control the movement of sand for centuries. What was the inspiration for this new and different approach to rebuilding beaches and shorelines?

A: When we first visited the Maldives, we were taken to a local sandbar that had just formed. It was incredible to see the size of the sandbar, about 100 meters long and 20 meters wide, and the quantity of sand, over 1 meter deep, that was built completely on its own, in just a matter of months. We came to understand that these sandbars appear and disappear at different times of the year based on the forces of the ocean and underwater bathymetry. Local historians told us about how they would collaborate with the ocean, growing vegetation to expand their islands or morph their shape. These natural and collaborative approaches to growing land mass through sand self-organization came in stark contrast to the human dredging of sand from the deep ocean, which is also used for island reclamation. In the same amount of time that it takes to dredge an island, which takes months, we watched three different sandbars form themselves, through satellite imagery.

We started to realize that the amount of energy, time, money, labor, and destruction of the marine environment that is caused by dredging could likely be stopped if we could understand why sandbars form naturally and tap into this natural phenomenon of self-organization. The goal of our lab and field experiments is to test hypotheses on why sandbars form, and translate those into mechanisms for promoting their accumulation in strategic locations.

By collaborating with the natural forces of the ocean we believe we can promote the self-organization of sand structures to grow islands and rebuild beaches. We believe this is a sustainable approach to the problem that can eventually be scaled to many coastal areas around the world, just as forest management is used to help strengthen and protect forests from uncontrolled fires or overgrowth.

Q: Can you describe how this system works, and how it harnesses the energy of the waves to build up the sand in the places where it’s needed?

A: Together with our collaborators in the Maldives, we are designing, testing, building, and deploying submersible devices that, based simply on their geometry in relationship to the ocean waves and currents, promote sand accumulation in specific areas. In our first field experiment we built bladders out of heavy-duty canvas, sewn together into the precise ramp geometries. With our second field experiment, we took the best designs from hundreds of lab experiments and had them fabricated from a geotextile membrane. In both experiments we filled the bladders with sand to weigh them down and then submerged them underwater. For our next field experiment we are building bladders that have internal chambers that act like a ballast in a submarine, allowing the bladder to sink or float and to be quickly moved or deployed. Each experiment is attempting to make the fabrication and installation process as simple and scalable as possible.

The simplest mechanism that we are testing is a ramp-like geometry that sits on the ocean floor and rises vertically to the surface of the water. To the best of our understanding, what we are seeing is that as the water flows over the top of the ramp it creates turbulence on the other side, mixing the sand and water and then creating sediment transport. The sand begins to accumulate on the backside of the ramp, continually piling on top of itself. We have tested many other geometries that attempt to minimize wrap-around effects, or focus the accumulation in specific areas, and we are continuing to search for optimal geometries. In many ways, these behave like natural depth variations, reef structures, or volcanic formations and may function similarly in promoting sand accumulation. Our goal is to create adaptable versions of these geometries which can be easily moved, reoriented, or deployed whenever seasons change or storms are increasing.

Since 2018 we have been conducting experiments in our lab at MIT in collaboration with Taylor Perron in [the Department of] Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. We have built two wave tanks where we are testing a variety of wave conditions, sand behaviors, and geometries to promote accumulation. The goal is to align our lab experiments and models with real-world conditions specific to the two predominant seasons in the Maldives. We have done hundreds of tank experiments so far and are using these studies to gain intuition and insight into what mechanisms result in the greatest sand accumulation. The best of these lab experiments is then translated to field experiments twice a year.

Q: How were you able to detect and quantify the effects of your experiment, and what are your plans for continuing and expanding this project?

A: We have collected satellite imagery, drone footage, and physical measurements ever since installing our first field experiment in February 2019 and our second field experiment in October / November 2019. The satellite images and drone footage give us a visual indication of sand accumulation; however, it is challenging to quantify the amount of sand from those images. So we rely heavily on physical depth measurements. We have a series of coordinates that we send to our collaborators in the Maldives who then take a boat or jet ski out to those coordinates and take depth measurements. We then compare these measurements with our previous measurements, considering the day/time and relationship to the tide height.

With our latest field experiment, we have been collecting imagery and physical measurements to analyze the sand accumulation. We are now seeing roughly a half meter (about 20 inches) of new sand accumulation over an area of approximately 20 meters by 30 meters, since November. That is about 300 cubic meters of sand accumulation, in roughly four months. We see these as promising early results that are part of a much longer-term initiative where we aim to continue to test these approaches in the Maldives and various other locations around the world.

We have recently been awarded a National Geographic Exploration grant and plan to go back to the Maldives for two more field installations later this year and in 2021. Our long-term goal is to create a system of submersible structures that can adapt to the dynamic weather conditions to naturally grow and rebuild coastlines. We aim to scale this approach and tailor it to many locations around the world to help rebuild and stabilize heavily populated coastlines and vulnerable island nations.

3 Questions: Harnessing wave power to rebuild islands syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[kathleenseiber]

Maps and community are key to flood management

Community collaboration and high-resolution maps are key to effective flood risk management, according to a new study.

Researchers report a new process called “collaborative flood modeling” can successfully address the increasing threat of rising waters due to climate change, aging infrastructure, and rapid urban development.

“The impacts of flooding continue to escalate in the US and around the world, and the main culprit is urban growth in harm’s way, with communities underprepared to deal with extreme events that are getting more intense in a warming climate,” says Brett Sanders, professor of civil & environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author of the paper in the journal Earth’s Future.

“Our approach rests on making modern flood simulation technologies accessible and useful to everyone within at-risk communities.”

Collaborative flood management

Researchers put the method into practice during the Flood-Resilient Infrastructure & Sustainable Environments project. Beginning in 2013, FloodRISE teams worked in two Southern California coastal areas at risk of flooding—Newport Bay and the Tijuana River Valley—gathering data, conducting surveys, and holding face-to-face meetings with residents.

The technique showed considerable traction in the two regions. For example, following focus group meetings, Newport Beach managers asked FloodRISE engineers for flood elevation datasets to integrate into the geographic information systems the planning department uses.

And after joint sessions in the Tijuana River Valley, San Diego County officials called for additional flood hazard modeling related to proposed dredging, and Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve authorities requested flood hazard information related to a planned road realignment and marsh restoration project.

Collaborative flood modeling combines the experiences and concerns of residents, landowners, government officials, and business leaders with the knowledge and technological capabilities of academic researchers to foster a shared understanding of flood risk.

A crucial element of any such effort is the iterative development of high-resolution flood maps, or visualizations, based on hydrologic models and the insights of people who have lived through past floods.

“When we integrate what people in vulnerable communities have learned with the expertise of civil engineers and social scientists, we create more accurate and more functional flood maps customized for the specific needs of a community,” says Richard Matthew, professor of urban planning & public policy and faculty director of the Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation.

“This takes us away from the one-size-fits-all approach to flood mapping that’s widely in use today. We also found that residents gain a much deeper and more shared awareness of flooding through these highly detailed maps. This is critical for stimulating productive dialogue and deliberation about how to manage risks.”

Skip the technical jargon

Collaborative flood modeling exercises such as those conducted through FloodRISE open flood-related decision-making to diverse groups of constituents, giving them helpful insights into the spatial extent, intensity, timing, chance, and consequences of flooding, Sanders says.

Researchers designed the approach to complement the flood insurance program administered the Federal Emergency Management Agency administers so that a wide range of planning, land use, and behavioral choices come from the best available science in the form of intuitive and accurate flood simulations.

“We have tried to focus on eliminating much of the technical terminology from our discussions with community members,” Sanders says. “We advocate a bottom-up alternative to what has become a top-down process of flood hazard mapping filled with technical jargon that’s short-circuiting important contemplation and dialogue about flooding.”

Communities have embraced the new process, Sanders says. “Existing maps that depict flood risks are difficult to interpret, with cryptic classifications such as ‘Zone X’ and ‘Zone VE.’ We found that communities were eager to have access to this more intuitive and useful information and were quick to adopt it, especially for planning and land management purposes.”

“Our next step is to combine these powerful visualization tools with socioeconomic data to anticipate how different types of severe flooding are likely to affect poor communities in California and then co-develop with them risk management strategies,” Matthew adds. “This is critical if we want to try to avoid the enormous and long-term devastation we’ve seen when large flood events affect poorer communities on the East Coast.”

The National Science Foundation funded the FloodRISE project.

Source: UC Irvine

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