#How To Purchase Power Tools?

[catmask]

How do you make interesting male character designs, male fashion is so fucking boring and bad, and you seem to have a good sense of fashion, please help im suffering

two important tools you must remember:

1) there is no such thing as 'mens clothing' and 'women's clothing' theres just clothing and if you see something a lady is wearing and it looks good you dont have to say 'aww but a guy can't where that' yuuuup buddy you can. draw whatever and wear whatever you want forever. my wardrobe is completely mixed in terms of 'men's' and 'women's' clothing bc it's just MY clothing not anyone else's

2) pinterest

almost went on this entire rant about 'women's fashion is more expansive in part due to misogynistic double standards of appearance and men's fashion is only bad/boring because of years of being funneled through capitalism patriachal expectations of power homo/transphobia and racism' but if i do that people will start throwing rocks at me with the intention to kill and if i write multiple paragraphs of reflection on the false gender divide within fashion and the patriarchy and someone only reads 2 sentences to get mad at ill start blowing things up gotham city style

anyway these are the secrets to good mens fashion there is no brand that will save you there is no purchase that will save you utilmately you must study what you like blind to gender and then mix and match what you believe looks good. because i cannot just tell anyone 'this is fashionable' it is about going and finding what you specifically feel reflects yourself (or a character in this instance)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[seat-safety-switch]

We're a species that loves us some tools. I firmly believe that even if you find the most useless, layabout, consumerist slob on the planet, and you asked them what kind of tool they dream about, they'd have an answer for you. Everyone has just that "one more tool" that would finally let them do even bigger projects.

For me, I wish it were just one more tool. It started innocently, as a desire to purchase a drill press. Often, things I was working on required a hole drilled and/or pressed into them. It made sense. There were hundreds of holes I needed to drill. And then, just as quickly as I opened the box, the desire for another tool grew. If only I had a table saw, I could saw some things, too. You can pretty much figure out how that went from there.

Now, I live atop a throne of tools so weird that they don't even have names in English, and I want even more. If only I had three-phase power to my garage, then I could finally get the six-axis CNC machine of my dreams. I'd make one hell of an adapter bracket with that apartment-sized machine, I'll tell you that much.

It's important not to lose sight of the bigger picture, though. Tools are meant to help people, not just to be hoarded. Many people around you – your neighbours, maybe even your friends – exist in a reality where they don't even know there are different kinds of screwdrivers. Frightening, I know. You can do a lot to help them out, by showing them all the cool new tools that you own, and making them want those tools for themselves.

[r0-boat]

MC naked & afraid featuring 7 idiots Headcannons

(What in hell is bad! survival Island headcannons)

Based off of my whb survival Island poll

Author's notes: I'm watching a documentary right now This shit made me laugh so hard imagining these demons becoming feral

It was supposed to be a cruise Mammon was testing out his new cruise ship but something horribly wrong happened where you and the seven kings were stranded on an island in the human world. Their powers unable to work for plot reasons.

They're not stuck forever They can go back home but a rescue team will take a month to arrive.

Satan

Satan somehow got a campfire running. He got so angry he lit the fire based off of pure anger. Because Leviathan was bullying him that he didn't know how to start a simple fire and asked him to hand over the sticks. Satan said "NO! FUCK YOU PUSSY BITCH I GOT IT!"

Satan is a really good hunter, like an exceptional hunter. And he quickly goes into his role. It's been 2 days and now He wears the pelt of his latest kill. Hey sharpens his own tools and he looks like a savage according to Leviathan.

Satan has gotten a thrill for the hunt and for some reason he keeps staring at you....

Mammon

For an hour he's been looking around this deserted island it is populated with native animals and foliage as well as fresh water. You know what he's thinking about... Turning this island into another one of his villas.

When he is not checking out this island as if he's trying to purchase real estate He's actually helping you with building a shelter. Tino's absolutely nothing about building shelters but he's glad to be your heavy muscles and tools for whenever you can't do something.

Following Satan His deconstruction of a civil man has begun but the only thing that really changed is his shirt came off that's it... Only because It got ripped when Satan and him had a fight.

Leviathan

He hates this he fucking hates this. Everyone's running around like headless chickens and he's the only competent devil (except for Lucifer)

He's been better... He was actually a lot worse when you first crashed on the island You had to actually calm him down from his panic attack and when he did finally calm down He has been clinging to you like his life depended on it. Using you as some kind of strange therapy. Becoming more possessive over you.

Anything you're doing he is doing with you no questions ask if anyone were to question it he will take a sharp rock and stab them right in the eye.

Beelzebub

As soon as you woke up in the sand Beelzebub. You wanted to search for him But the other kings we're not worried for him at all.

Before the sun goes down he does turn up with a stick sharpened into a spear and food. Beel is an exceptional hunter. He is the reason why All of you aren't starving. Beel can literally eat anything But that doesn't mean you and other devils can't. So if he tells you not to eat something don't need it.

Beel and Satan have some kind of dick measuring competition with killing and hunting prey. Satan comes back with a rabbit, Beel catches a wild boar, Satan comes back with a big fish, Beel comes back with a crocodile.

Lucifer

Oh my god finally a competent devil. Lucifer is the most important devil since he can heal injuries as well as sicknesses. Even though his magic isn't in effect he still knows a lot of natural plant remedies. He knows every plant species that God has made.

He looks at you with an odd look, while you follow his instructions closely on how to build a proper shelter.

He takes this chance to study you as if you were his science project every time you get a bump I scrape or scratch He studies you meticulously how your human body heals naturally slowly. His fingers delicately tracing each scar you've ever had.

Belphegor

Motherfucker is either asleep or jacking off while you guys do the work. He's so lucky to have all these hard workers working for him and with the shelter built he could finally... It's not comfortable...

He knows that you guys are doing your best and what not but damn sleeping on the ground sucks ass wipe. He wants to find natural soft moss or bedding just for a better sleep.

Because of Belphegor The shelter in looks more and more comfortable with his additions which he always adamantly reminds you. Every time you go in there's new shit added and it looks more like a nest then a shelter.

Asmodeus

Oh yeah the clothes are gone... Are you surprised? This demon has become full feral and he loves it. An island paradise for you and him and of the other 6 would like to join they're more than welcome to.

This uncivilized natural land spark something inside him that you don't want anything to do with.

After you literally threatened not to have sex with him for 2 months until he puts his clothes back on He decides to use leaves or vines instead now he just looks like PornHub Tarzan...

Bonus:

This devil is the king of lust, He has been eyeing this human potential mate for a while now...

The human bathing in the crystal pool catch a sight of him, They seem weary but content with his presence.

This is his chance The devil puffs out his chest showing off his horn it is a devil's way of showing strength and virility.

In his usual habitat He would be the undisputed king. But now his territory is shared. And another eyes his prey.

The human looks into the foliage before jumping back a splash of water fills his vision he hears warning hiss as his opponent comes in view a devil of envy, He has already laid claim to them and he will not back down.

Unlike his one horn this male has two, two against one is hardly fair but that doesn't mean he'll stand down without a fight.

Before these two demons can fight for this potential mate, the human screams "STOP FUCKING AROUND!! I'M TRYING TO BATHE GET OUT!!"

[majokkid]

An Introduction to Creating and Enchanting Magical Tools

Most, if not all, magical paradigms refer to the use of tools for certain tasks and the world of magical heroes is no different! Whether it’s a pen or brooch for a transformation sequence or a key to unlocking arcane magics, we can find many examples of magical items in mahō shōjo media that can be utilized in your own practice.

Please note that this is a non-exhaustive and non-canonical discussion of the creation and use of magical tools. If you’d like a deeper dive into a particular canon, feel free to send me a message and I’ll see what I can do!

It may seem obvious but the first step in creating a magical tool is determining what its use is. This not only contextualizes the tool within your practice but it can also help determine what is necessary for your needs. Ask yourself questions like:

What is this tool’s function?

Is this tool physical or purely aetheric?

What materials should it be made of?

Should this tool remain on my person at all times? If so, how do I carry it? If not, how should it be stored?

When working with mahō shōjo influences it is especially tempting to purchase detailed, manufactured replicas of your favorite characters’ items and while you can certainly go out and find something along those lines, I always recommend taking the time and energy to make your own tools. I find items that I have created myself are more powerful and reliable. (I’ve noticed this particularly so for objects that can be used for divination, such as cards and pendulums.)

And you do not need to be an experienced prop maker to create a potent magical object! While I do stress the importance of doing the creating yourself, don’t ever be ashamed to ask for help or assistance! As long as you have given it careful consideration and genuine energy, you’ll find that something that may look simple to others can carry immense power when you wield it.

Note: I would say the only caveats to creating your own magical tools outright would be if you were gifted a magical item or if you divined characteristics of an item and are yet to piece together all of its properties. If you were gifted a magical tool, or you are repurposing something that you already own, try to get as much information as you can about its creation and what energies it is imbued with (including any emotional or psychic attachments); if there are things about it that you do not deem necessary or appropriate for your work, I highly recommend cleansing it magically before use and find ways to reroot it to your practice or avoid using it all together.

After you have finished your creation, I recommend enchanting it to further connect it to you and your practice. This can be done in any number of ways but I think it is always best to do something that makes sense in context; for example:

Consecrate the item with water, oils, incense, etc. that is imbued with the energies you want it to carry. Consider associations such as celestial or elemental correspondences, if they apply. Just make sure it makes sense to you!

Is your work in dedication to a certain entity? Consider opening communication with it and get its input on how you should store and charge your new tool. They might also have opinions on how you should use it and if there are any voces magicae, or magic words, you might invoke.

If this is an item you associate with dreams or the astral, sleep with the tool placed under your pillow, under your bed, or somewhere close at hand like a nightstand. You can also consider charging it under moonlight after each use.

If you have an altar dedicated to this part of your practice, place your new tool on it and consecrate it as you see fit. By enchanting and/or storing it the proximity of other items that you have already associated with your work, you can easily establish it as part of your canon.

This post is part of my Magi Praxis series. If you have any suggestions for future topics, or you have attempted anything I have shared and want you share your experiences, please send me a message! I am always happy to go back and provide further explanation as well. ☆

[noira-l]

𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚝

𝚂𝚞𝚖𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚢: you are the person people turn to on exceptional situations. Your next target is a young and ambitious cult leader - Geto Suguru.

𝚙𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 — cult leader!geto suguru x assasin!reader

𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚍 𝚌��𝚞𝚗𝚝 — 11,8 k

𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜/𝚝𝚊𝚐𝚜 — mdni, dark themes (morally grey actions, violence, stalking, slight gore, attempt of assasination), power dynamic, sexual tension, knife play, slight body harm, death.

𝚊𝚞𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚛'𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚎 — I wanted to write something about Geto, hopefully however I came up with a good portrait of his character

𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚙𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚖𝚎 — valorant x 99 god x c103 - renegade

𝚖𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚝

Collector.

That's what you were called.

The title had stuck, a moniker that felt both accurate and hollow. You collected, yes - but it was never just about the objects. It was about something deeper, something rarer, something alive.

Unique cursed techniques.

Not the hereditary ones, from great clans or families. Just the ones that little is known about, the ones that were missing, or the ones that haven't heard of.

You had quite a reputation for it. Famous, or infamous, depending on who you asked. The kind of fame earned through the silent, systematic harvesting of cursed energy.

You possessed a gift - more acurate, a curse - one that allowed you to draw the essence of power from others, to make their strength your own.

But it came with a price.

To take, you must first destroy. To gain, you must leave only silence behind.

A simple equation, really. And yet, simplicity can be the sharpest cruelty of all.

The techniques you consumed left indelible marks upon your soul, faint echoes of those you had taken. Each one brought its own sensation - some surging through you like lightning striking an open sea, others no more than a trembling whisper in the depths of your being.

It wasn’t the power that consumed you, no - it was the experience. The unraveling of energy, the intimate weaving of foreign essence into your own. Each time, it was like savoring an exquisite, forbidden delicacy. You didn’t seek strength for survival or dominiation, you sought it for the artistry, the taste. Every technique was a rare vintage to be dissected, every pulse a note to be savored, every burst of energy a fleeting glimpse of something greater than yourself.

But, it depends.

Some of the weakest techniques lingered, unforgettable in their subtlety, while the most powerful often left you hollow, their promised grandeur dissolving into nothing. There was no pattern, no logic - only the maddening unpredictability that kept you chasing the next taste.

But the savoring came at a price.

The craving grew relentless.

You weren’t just a collector - you were an addict, devouring the essence of others with a hunger that no power could ever truly satisfy. The more you consumed, the deeper the void within you seemed to grow.

Sometimes, you wondered how far this obsession will take you.

Unlike other connoisseurs, you couldn’t simply purchase a rare wine from a distant province or savor cheese from some exceptional animal. Your desires were far more intimate, far more exacting. You craved something that could only be taken - not bought, made or gifted.

It wasn’t easy. Rarity never was. You had to find it, steal it, sometimes even fight for it. But occasionally, fate brought them to you -unwitting strangers carrying new and intoxicating flavors. Those moments felt like destiny itself indulging your hunger.

But somethimes... somethimes you starve. So you needed to find a soultion.

Being a hitman was a fine job - a convenient means to fund your obsessions. It paid for information, tools, and the rare whispers of knowledge you craved. Often, there were mutual benefits in death: someone perished for someone else's gain, and in the aftermath, you walked away richer - armed with their technique and a pocket full of blood-stained cash.

The rain drummed a steady rhythm against Tokyo’s rooftops, weaving a symphony that hummed in tune with the city’s underbelly. In a cramped, smoke-filled alley where streetlight struggled to pierce the gloom, you stood - a shadow among shadows. Your black cloak folded into the night, your face obscured beneath. Few ever saw it, and fewer lived to remember it.

In a world that thrived on the extraordinary, where human limits were tested and broken daily, you were something - a myth, collector of rare abilities torn from those, who no longer needed them.

The black market had become your haven, a twisted home where the forbidden was currency and secrecy the air you breathed. Here, you were an assasin - other times a patron, a quiet force in the labyrinth of curses, whispers, and deals that shaped lives and ended others. It was here you found everything: the tools, the knowledge, the edge you needed to maintain your addition in the shadowy game of death and power.

Tonight, the market’s pulse brought you to a low, dimly lit pub, thick with the scent of tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and forgotten stories. A place where past sins clung to the walls and silence that carried the weight of things better left unsaid.

It was here that you were to meet your new client.

Your client arrived in a suit that was far too fancy for the setting, his every movement betraying unease. He even hesitated in the doorway, eyes darting to corners where only killers and smugglers lingered, before making his way to the wooden table where you waited. His silhouette seemed smaller in the heavy gloom. When he sat, his hands trembled faintly, and you watched, silent and still, as if the darkness itself had come alive to greet him.

"Is that you?" he asked quietly, though a faint note of arrogance laced his voice.

"To the point." you replied, tone cold, dispassionate as your gaze lifted to meet his "I assume you have something worth my time."

"Geto Suguru." you think you heard this name before, but you are not sure. Was he a smuggler? Yakuza? Perhaps a pimp?

"Who?"

"The leader of the Time Vessel Association."

Ah, a cultist - the thought laced with faint amusement.

"Do you think he's worth adding to my collection?" Your eyes drilled into him, a piercing weight that seemed to drag the man deeper into the shadows of the room.

"He…" he faltered, gaze caught in the depths of your shrouded stare "He knows how to make curses obey."

Now that was interesting.

Could he manipulate cursed spirits? Or did he temporarily take control of them? You need to find out.

"The story?" you asked.

"Geto dismissed my sponsor." the man in the suit murmured, his tone icy with disapproval "My client offered to invest in his vision - generously, I might add - but that... boy, he spurned him, discarded him as if he were nothing. And now…" his lips curved into a hollow smile, devoid of warmth or life "Now, he’s adrift, searching for someone to make him pay. Who better than you?"

Flattery, how "charming" of him.

A curse technique like that... it whispers familiar to you.

Whispers shared by an assassin once entwined with your fate.

"What are the conditions?" your voice a low murmur, smooth as silk yet weighted with an unspoken gravity. You folded your hands slowly, as if the air around you thickened in anticipation of decision.

"Quiet work." the man replied "No witnesses. No threads to trace back." his trembling fingers knotted together, composure unraveling with every moment spent in your shadow. Beads of sweat glistened on his brow, breath hitched, a testament to the dread you conjured without a single raised hand.

"Only him?" you asked.

"Only." sharp and short answers.

"Damage?"

"None."

The last one.

"Price?"

Your gaze cut through him, dissecting him with an intensity that sought every fracture, every vulnerability. You never needed to raise your voice - he break so easily - the sheer weight of your presence was enough.

"Isn’t adding such a rare skill to the collection payment enough?" he stammered, lips quivering as he tried to weave confidence into his feeble argument. But it was clear - he lacked the conviction to sell even his own words.

You tilted your head ever so slightly, lifting your gaze from beneath your lowered lashes. It wasn’t a gesture of acknowledgment but of assessment, as if deciding whether he was worth the breath it took to entertain his proposition, or if boredom would claim you first. The man was a mere vessel for an order, unimportant.

The silence between you thickened like a fog, stifling and oppressive, until it felt as though even the air itself was conspiring against him.

"Forty million yen." you said finally, your voice steady and measured, each word slicing through the tension like a scalpel through flesh.

Merciless. Precise.

He flinched as though the figure itself had wounded him. His eyes widened in disbelief, a nervous chuckle spilling from his lips.

"B-but- " he began, protest tripping over itself as his hands clawed at the surface of the table, searching for support that wasn’t there.

"Minimaly." you interrupted, leaning forward just enough to bring the shadows closer to him, face still carved from stone. Your voice remained calm, but now it carried a chilling finality, a tone that snuffed out any notion of negotiation "If that’s too steep, feel free to find someone else. I won’t stop you."

He knew there was no other option. In the world he inhabited, your word had power. To seek another would be an admission of defeat before the game even began.

"My supervisor won’t be pleased with this." he muttered, gaze sinking into his trembling hands, as if the lines of his palms might offer some escape from the inevitable.

"Do I look like I care?" you mock, tone indifferent, as though the mention of his superior was nothing more than a passing breeze.

A sigh escaped him, laden with resignation. He had lost - though no words had been spoken to declare it so. The weight of your unflinching presence bore down on him until all resistance dissolved.

"Agreed." the bitterness in his voice curling like smoke in the still air "Forty million."

Your lips curved into the faintest smile, but it was a smile devoid of solace, colder than the void reflected in your eyes. Like a predator’s acknowledgment of its prey’s submission.

"Good." you said softly, smooth yet edged with finality "In that case, consider it done. What your boss desire is already set into motion."

The chill in your words lingered long after they were spoken, a reminder that the deal had been struck, and there would be no turning back.

𖤓

Was it really him?

Perched on the rooftop, you remained a shadow against the dying light, the late afternoon sun casting long fingers of shadow across the city below. From your vantage point, the world felt distant, but he stood in stark clarity - a figure pulled straight from some painting.

The photograph crumpled slightly in your hand, forgotten. You no longer needed it. The details of his face, once static and lifeless on paper, were now burned into your memory, vivid and breathing with a sight before you.

His face was a study in cold perfection, light cream, flawless, as if chiseled from marble by a sculptor who had glimpsed divinity. Elegant contours merged to create a visage that was both mysterious and alluring, commanding attention with an intensity that seemed to bend the world around his presence.

But his eyes - oh, those eyes - were a weapon all their own. Brilliant, sharp, fierce, they seemed to carry the weight of an unspoken sotfness. A calm before the storm. They cut through the air with the same razor-sharp precision. In the photograph, they had been striking. In person, they were alive, burning with enchantment no lens could capture.

A cascade of inky black hair fell over his shoulders, catching the dim light like polished obsidian. The strands shimmered faintly, shifting with his movements, a dark waterfall that framed the cold, otherworldly beauty of his face. Every motion he made was deliberate, as though the earth itself adjusted to accommodate his presence.

The robes he wore seemed born of another age, extravagant. Threads of gold and silver wove intricate patterns across the fabric, each stitch a testament to craftsmanship. The heavy folds moved with a regal weight, as if they were imbued with their own significance, the very essence of power. You could almost feel their texture through your gaze - rich, sumptuous, exuding a quiet opulence that demanded reverence.

It had to be him.

Even if you had doubts. You could feel it - a dense, oppressive aura that pulsed like a heartbeat, reverberating through the air and seeping into your very bones. His cursed energy was unmistakable, a force that didn’t linger, it could easily dominate.

The photograph had been inadequate, a mere fragment of the truth. It could never capture the reality. But now, watching him move, there was no room left for doubt.

Geto Suguru.

Cult leader. Special Grade Curse User. The man your client wanted erased from existence. The man whose cursed technique you hungered to claim for yourself.

A death wrapped in splendor.

Truly, a view to behold.

𖤓

For the next few months you followed Geto Suguru from obscurity, like a shadow that never disappeared, no matter how intense the light of day was. By the third week, his patterns were etched into your mind - when he woke up, when he slept, where he trained, who he trusted.

The first few weeks were standard.

You observed, cataloged, and analyzed, piecing together the mosaic of his life. Routines memorized, habits dissected, alliances noted. Safety measures scrutinized, his defenses silently tested.

One of your techniques allowed you to dissolve into the shadows, unnoticed and unseen. It was fitting, then, that you had become exactly that - a shadow in his world, always there, always watching, never revealing yourself.

You first started with something basic, like listening to his speeches and meeting at cult headquarters, drawn by the intensity with which he spoke about his purpose.

His views were radical, bizarre even, clashing with your own sensibilities. Yet, as unsettling as they were, you couldn’t help but acknowledge that in some ways, he might be right. Not in everything, admittedly, but in enough to make you question. Enough to make you wonder a little.

He was undeniably charismatic. People hung on his every word, their gazes fixed on him with a reverence that bordered on worship. To them, he wasn’t just a man - he was a savior, a budda - promising liberation from their struggles. There were always people desperate enough to believe anything, as long as it offered them hope.

People so lost, that they belive in everything someone can say.

Of course. A leader who can’t charm his flock won’t keep them for long. No one builds a cult with soft hands and kind eyes alone.

But something did surprised you.

His voice.

It didn’t align with the image you’d constructed from afar - the tall, imposing figure who moved with easyness, but carried himself like a general giving orders to an army. You’d expected something sharp, something commanding and edged with steel. Instead, his voice was a revelation.

Affable. Kind. Syrupy. A velvet thread weaving through, each word a gentle stroke that smoothed away any doubt. It had a warmth, a richness, that seemed to defy his calculated presence, flowing over his audience like a warm embrace. His voice didn’t need to force compliance - it invited surrender, disarming his listeners with its elegance and sinking his words deep into their minds like seeds waiting to bloom.

You even have the suspicion that it has almost bloomed inside you.

It was fleeting, of course. You were there to watch, not to be moved.

The longer you followed him, the more you saw beyond that facade.

The elegance, the smoothness, the alluring charm - it was a part of him, concealing something far darker. Beneath the polite smile and warm voice was a man who thrived on control, a man who could remain unnervingly composed as chaos erupted around him. It wasn’t indifference, but a thing more calculated, deeply unsettling.

You saw it with your own eyes.

It happened one night when a sponsor - a monkey, that's what he called him - who had promised unwavering support for Geto’s cause, fell short of his word. The punishment was swift, merciless, and horrifyingly precise. With a single motion, a curse has been summoned. It slithered into the room like living shadow, coiling itself around the hapless man. Its grotesque form began to devour him, inch by inch, savoring every agonized scream. The air grew thick, suffocating with the stench of fear and death, as the room filled with sounds too horrible to describe.

He did not flinch. He did not speak. His gaze never wavered.

That calm - so unshaken, so absolute - felt less like the composure of a man and more like the stillness of something far colder. His dark eyes followed the scene with the detachment of an observer watching the inevitable unfold, as if violence was nothing more than a variable in a long-played equation.

There was something beneath the stillness. Hatred. Not the loud, burning kind. No, this was quieter, older. The kind of hate that settles into your bones, too familiar to flare up, too constant to fade away.

That was the duality of Geto Suguru.

The benevolent leader, cloaked in silk and adoration, could shift in an instant, unfurling into the cold executioner who would let a man be devoured without so much as a blink. That kind of power could be called a silent declaration.

A will forged in iron. A blade wrapped in velvet.

In those moments, the full depth of the man you tracked became startlingly clear. He wasn’t simply charismatic - he was dangerous.

It was chilling to witness. And yet, you couldn’t deny the fascination. It was that balance - the seamless blend of charm and ruthlessness - that made him so difficult to pin down.

And perhaps harder to predict.

𖤓

When he returned from his meeting cradling his two children in his arms, everything about him shifted. His smile, so often reserved or calculating, softened into something genuine, warm, and deeply caring. The two girls, nestled against him, wore smiles that radiated the purest joy you’d ever seen, sincere in a way that disarmed you completely. And you understood why.

In those moments, Geto Suguru was neither a cult leader nor a powerful curse user.

He was simply… theirs.

A father figure - someone who loved them.

He cooked meals for them, simple and unpretentious. At dawn, he walked them to school, their small bags swinging from his shoulder as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He lingered at the gates longer than necessary, watching until they disappeared from view, as though the simple act of parting might unravel something within him. He helped with their studies, patiently guiding them through lessons with the same focus he applied to anything else in his life.

And he spoiled them - not with extravagance, but with relentless tenderness.

Candies slipped into their pockets as if conjured from thin air. Trinkets and dolls gathered like offerings, filling the shadows of their rooms. Shelves in thier room buckled beneath the weight of gifts. He indulged them as if to drown out the harsher truths that lingered just beyond their reach. It was clear that nothing was off-limits when it came to their happiness.

Sometimes, you’d watch him in the fading hours, spending entire afternoons with them - lost in play, their laughter spilling like fractured light through the cracks of the cult headquarters. It drifted through the corridors, haunting in its innocence, too bright for such a place. Yet, around them, it felt natural, right even. As if their presence alone softened the entire mood of the place. These moments seemed pulled from another life, a life that didn’t belong to a man of his power and position. In those hours, Geto wasn’t the man who summoned curses or commanded followers with radical ideals.

He was something smaller, quieter, just a father. A teacher sometimes. A man who found fleeting refuge in the fragile joy his daughters brought him.

It was a strange dichotomy, seeing this softer side of him. How could the same man, who watched a curse devour another human being with the stillness of stone, now hold such tenderness in his hands?

Yes, it was unsettling.

Even so, the truth lay bare before you. No matter the blood that stained his robes, his hands were steady when they braided his daughters’ hair.

Such a peacefull sight.

But peace is fragile.

And his daughters - so blissfully unaware - were so lucky. Lucky that the contract required clean hands and no unnecessary deaths. Because this softness, this visible chink in his armor, was something you would not hesitate to exploit.

If the order changed, you would shatter that tranquility without a second thought.

𖤓

You observed him daily, each training session a display of skill honed with painstaking precision. His training was not simply practice but a dance, each motion carved from relentless discipline, honed to the finest edge. Nothing in his movements suggested uncertainty. Every step, every flick of his wrist, whispered of mastery held in iron-clad restraint. Everything showed a mastery over both body and cursed energy that left little room for error. There was no wasted effort.

He always began with strength drills, moving as if every fiber of his being was bound by an iron discipline. The shirt itself was simple, practical, black with subtle markings along the seams, designed for ease of movement yet offering no distraction from the task at hand. However, it framed his physique, hugging the sharp edges of his lean, muscular frame.

His long, dark hair was often tied back. Yet, in the heat of exertion, rebellious strands would break free, clinging to the nape of his neck where beads of sweat gathered like liquid ink, glinting faintly against his skin. Each droplet traced a silent path over his pulse, as if the heat of effort carried with it was somthing shyly resembling a human.

Push-ups, pull-ups, lunges - he moved through each exercise with a sense of rhythm, his body cutting through the still air like a blade. There was no excess movement, no wasted energy. His core strength was visible in the way he balanced himself, the quiet strength of his legs when he transitioned from one position to another. Breathing was steady, controlled, as if he were channeling not only physical strength but mental focus into every motion.

All of it - every precise motion, every disciplined breath - was merely prelude to what held your gaze most intently. His control over curses.

Each curse, once summoned, was inspected with meticulous care. What unsettled you was his unwavering memory of them all, each dark fragment cataloged and recalled effortlessly, no matter how newly acquired. Their numbers never seemed to weigh on him. Not physically at least.

Often, he would stand in the middle of the square behind the base, surrounded by the dark entities he had summoned, and simply... think. You could sense his thoughts unraveling, weaving strategies that seemed to flow like water. Projectiles would slice through the still air without warning, curses folding and shifting around him in a silent ballet of violence and precision. Smaller curses danced at his will, colliding or converging as he tested their interplay, seeking the fractures in their power or the synergies that might strengthen them.

It was almost hypnotic to watch.

Well, watching him in that space of sweat and silence was not without reward. His every movement was a lesson, each flick of his wrist, each subtle shift of cursed energy unraveling the secrets of his technique before you ever laid a hand on it.

You became a shadowed student to an oblivious teacher.

By the time you are ready to embrace its power, you will have already unravelled its mysteries, piece by piece. There would be no frantic search for understanding, no nights spent wrestling with unfamiliar forces tearing at your veins. The sacrifice of learning would be a thing you already bypassed. His strength would bleed into yours seamlessly. And when the moment came to strip it from him, it would feel less like thef, and more like something that had always been meant for you.

Though he trained alone, there lingered a haunting sense that solitude never fully embraced him. His movements carried a quiet awareness, a subtle shift in the air that whispered of something just out of reach. It was as if he could feel the weight of your gaze pressing against him.

But he never searched and never sensed you presence.

In the rare moments when he paused - when the fire of his movements dimmed and stillness crept in - you could almost feel the shift in him. His breath slowed, shoulders easing under the weight of something unseen. His gaze, though fixed on nothing in particular, seemed to stretch far beyond. It was as if his mind drifted elsewhere, slipping free of the present and into darker, heavier places. Perhaps he was sifting through the weight of his purpose, or unraveling the threads of a future only he could see. Or maybe, just maybe, he was standing at the edge of the world he sought to remake, measuring the distance between what was and what could be.

And as you watched, you couldn't help but wonder, if even he feared the shape of the world he dreamed of building.

𖤓

There were days you trailed him through the mundanity of life - simple errands like shopping, where the weight of curses and ideology seemed to dissipate, replaced by the illusion of normalcy.

It was strange, really.

He moved among crowds like any other man, blending into the ebb and flow of the city as if there was nothing extraordinary lurking beneath the surface of his existence.

But there was always something beneath the surface.

He sought out shops run by sorcerers, no matter how inconvenient, no matter how far. In those places, something in him softened, as if the burden he carried lightened just enough to let his guard slip. His smile came easily, not the polished mask you were accustomed to at this point. His posture loosened, his voice softened in casual conversation. He would speak with the shopkeepers, customers, owners, lingering longer than necessary, asking after their lives with a quiet sincerity that felt almost… paternal. As though the sorcerers he encountered were part of something sacred to him, a dwindling kindred that needed safeguarding.

However, when sorcerer-run shops weren’t an option, he would settle for regular stores, those run by non-sorcerers.

On the surface, nothing changed.

He remained polite, patient. The same soft-spoken man.

But you noticed a barrier hung between him and the rest of the world. It lingered in his eyes, in the faint pause before he spoke to non-sorcerers, as if reminding himself of the role he needed to play. His warmth was there, but muted, tempered by a detachment that felt as vast as the space between heaven and earth. His face held the same gentleness, but there was a quiet detachment beneath it, a sense that he was more than they could understand, and he made it clear in the smallest ways.

He was among them, but never with them. It was simply the quiet acknowledgment of something that could not be bridged.

And he made no effort to pretend otherwise.

𖤓

On occasion, you watched him as he sat at his desk in the dim light of his flat, practicing calligraphy. The black ink flowed across the paper with a precision that mirrored the discipline in every aspect of his life. Each brushstroke was planned, filled with a quiet sense of calm and inner balance. For him, this was not just art, it was a form of self-improvement, a meditative practice that demanded focus, patience, and reflection.

Every letter he wrote seemed to symbolize something deeper, every stroke a reflection of his life, carefully crafted but never without purpose. There was something poetic in the way he moved, the ink gliding like whispers of shadow against the ivory page.

You could sense the connection between his mind and the ink, as if the act of writing was a metaphor for the control he sought in all things.

At times, his hand would pause mid-stroke, his brush hovering just above the paper. His brows furrowed slightly as he studied the work before him, considering how best to proceed. His gaze darkened, studying the unfolding characters with the sharpness of someone contemplating the fragile balance between creation and destruction. He would tilt his head slightly, strands of dark hair falling loose over his shoulder, cascading like ink across silk.

When imperfection struck, a line too thin, a curve drawn an inch too far, he did not waver. There was no frustration. No flicker of impatience. He would simply set the paper aside with the same calm precision, letting it drift to the pile of discarded sheets as he began again. Entire pages were rewritten, entire passages abandoned until the work met his exacting standards.

You knew this ritual often stretched long into the night, the hours slipping away unnoticed as he worked beneath the watchful gaze of flickering candlelight.

The completed works that adorned his office walls spoke for themselves.

Sometimes, he would discard entire pages, whole phrases rewritten until they reached his exacting standards. You knew that many nights, he worked late into the hours of dawn, refusing to rest until the parchment was perfect, every line a testament to his dedication.

Watching him, you couldn’t deny the strange beauty in his work. There was something almost haunting in the way he gave himself entirely to the smallest details, his pursuit of perfection both admirable and unnervingly relentless.

𖤓

One night, you witnessed something that shattered the careful image you had constructed of him. Cloaked in the safety of shadows, your cursed technique rendered you invisible, allowing you to observe Geto Suguru as closely, as if you had stepped into his skin. But this

He sat alone in his study, his night robes hanging loosely on his frame, damp strands of his hair clinging to his shoulders. The dim lamplight painted the room in shades of quiet desolation, casting a long shadow that seemed to stretch endlessly, mirroring the weight in his posture.

In his hands, an old photograph trembled, though the details were too blurred by distance for you to discern. His shoulders, always squared in quiet authority, now slumped as if they bore a burden too great even for him. His eyes, fixed on the photograph, were unblinking, as though looking anywhere else might break something fragile within him.

And then, you saw it.

A tear.

It slid down his cheek, silent and glinting in the lamplight like a shard of glass. He wiped it away quickly, a futile attempt to claw back the stoicism that defined him. But something cracked, and more tears followed, unbidden and unrelenting, dripping onto the photograph.

It felt wrong, almost invasive, to witness this vulnerability, but curiosity gnawed at you. You stepped closer, using the cursed technique to remain hidden, desperate to understand what had broken the man you thought was unbreakable.

And then, you saw the photograph.

Three people stood side by side, radiating with youth and boldness. The photograph, worn and faded, captured a time untouched by the weight of the present.

On the left stood Geto, unmistakably younger, his hair neatly tied into a bun. His face bore the same calm detachment you had come to recognize, yet there was a rebellious spark in his eyes, a flicker of defiance that broke through his otherwise indifferent expression. His hand, flashing a middle finger to the camera, betrayed a streak of mischief that felt almost uncharacteristic now. But logical the more you know him.

In the middle, a figure with short, reddish-brown hair smiled brightly, their eyes shut in pure, unrestrained joy. They clutched a lollipop with the kind of innocent delight that seemed to radiate from the photograph, untouched by the shadows of the present.

And then your eyes shifted to the figure on the right.

You stopped.

Slightly taller. White hair that burned bright even in the aged photograph, framing sharp features and round sunglasses that had slipped just enough to reveal crystalline blue eyes. A grin stretched across his face, broad and unrestrained, as if the weight of the world had never once touched him. He flashed a peace sign with the kind of carefree energy that seemed almost dangerous in its sincerity.

You stared harder. Those eyes.

It was unmistakable. The description you’d heard in hushed circles, the warnings wrapped in rumors - he was standing there as if the world belonged to him, was the one person every sorcerer knew by reputation alone.

Your gaze flicked back to Geto, his face now buried in his hands, the photograph trembling in his grip.

So he knew him.

This job, already tangled in threads of secrecy, had just grown far more interesting.

You had been tasked with eliminating Geto Suguru. A simple directive, clean and unambiguous. Yet, as you stood there in the dim light, watching him quietly fall apart, something struck your mind.

Well, he slightly changed his purpose for you now. He was also a key now. A gateway to the answers you had long pursued, that were buried beneath layers of shadow and silence, hidden within the locked corridors of sorcerer society. Answers that no corpse could provide.

You knew the inevitable approached. The path ahead was carved in stone, and your task would reach its conclusion soon enough.

Were you in a position to find out the information you were looking for, before he expels his last breath?

𖤓

The night outside the cult’s headquarters was still, an undisturbed blanket of silence cloaking everything - a perfect contrast to the work that lay ahead. Each step melted into the night, slipping through the darkness with a kind of elegance born from experience, your presence vanishing into the shadows like ink on black velvet. The towering structure before you loomed in the moonlight, cold and imposing, its jagged edges softened by the dark.

This building was not made for defence, it was not prepared for you.

Time, as always, was a matter of precision. You didn’t rush. Instead, you let it flow on its own pace, watching from the edges, waiting with the steady patience of someone who understood the weight of missteps.

You slipped inside.

Then you watched, waited - motionless as the shadows around you, with the patience of someone who has walked this path more times than they could count. The secretary, motionless, too focused on her work, became aware of the passage of time, finally moved. Her chair creaked slightly as she stood up, and the sound was drowned out by the thick silence filling the room. Her footsteps, measured and loud from her high heels skipped down the corridor, each one fading away until they dissolved into the depths of the building.

Now.

You moved like breath escaping into the cold, an unseen ripple disturbing nothing. The air barely stirred in your wake.

The security system loomed ahead, blinking faintly in the dark, but it posed no threat. The dance of your hands across the control panel was effortless, each motion rehearsed to perfection. Button after button yielded beneath your fingertips, precise and quick, the sequence etched into memory long before tonight.

A soft clicks.

The sound, though almost imperceptible, echoed in your ears like a gunshot in the quiet. And then, nothing. Silence enveloped the space, deep and unbroken. The system lay dormant, unaware it had been dismantled. No alarms. No suspicions. Not until it was far too late. The building slept soundly beneath your touch, oblivious to the ghost moving through its veins.

Geto Suguru will soon be at his office again.

You knew he would be. His patterns were as familiar to you as your own heartbeat. Weeks of careful study had carved them into your mind, a map drawn in his habits, his footsteps, the soft rituals that unfolded in the long hours after everyone is gone. He lingered, always, alone with his thoughts long after the night should have claimed him.

Your steps were weightless, each one dissolving into the hush that stretched through the corridor. Ahead, Geto moved with measured grace, his robes catching faint ripples of light, their edges whispering against the floor. The hall swallowed him whole, the door to his office sealing behind him with the soft finality of a blade sliding back into its sheath.

The wooden doors closed with a quiet, almost reluctant click, sealing the space that now held only him - and soon, you.

This was it.

You slipped inside just as he lowered himself into his chair, the faint creak of worn leather breaking the silence. He did not notice. You waited a bit. The air shifted as you passed through it, but his eyes were already drawn to the papers sprawled across his desk, documents, raports and scheadule for tommorow. The lamplight draped golden shadows over his features. He sighed, a sound that conveyed the heavy burden of leadership as he leaned back, readying himself for the night’s work.

That’s when you struck - emerging from the shadows in one fluid motion, silent as a blade slipping free of its sheath. The air shifted, and in that fragile heartbeat between stillness and revelation, his eyes flickered up.

For a split second, he froze.

But the flicker of surprise was gone quickly, dissolving beneath the faint curve of his lips. There was no fear - only recognition, and something that almost resembled amusement. His laugh rolled out low and rich, curling through the space like smoke, as if the specter of death standing before him was an old companion.

"So, death pays me a visit tonight?" his voice slipped easily into the hush, smooth, unruffled, as if the weight of his life had long prepared him for this moment. His hands didn’t tremble. They rested lightly on the arm of his chair, fingers tapping out an idle rhythm "You’re not the first, you know."

Is he mocking you? Foolish.

He leaned back, head tilting "There have been others. All of them thought they could do what you’re here for."

His gaze was steady, dissecting you with quiet curiosity, as if you were no more than an unexpected guest at his table.

And just like that, the game began.

Both of you moved at once - arms cutting through the still air like mirrored blades. But you were faster.

The curse that had flickered into existence between you dissolved before it could take form, snuffed out as swiftly as a candle in the wind. Your hand twisted fast, severing his connection to his cursed technique in a single ruthless motion.

The shift was immediate.

You felt it, the faint tremor in the atmosphere, the absence where his power had thrived moments before. And so did he.

His eyes widened, flickering with disbelief as his hand flexed, searching for the familiar pull of cursed energy that no longer answered him. His breath caught, but no sound followed. Surprise folded into confusion, then into something colder as realization dawned, creeping across his face like frost.

He blinked once.

"Don’t bother." your voice sliced, sharp and steady "The katana under your desk and the dagger in your robes - neither will help you now."

His gaze snapping to you, searching for any sign of hesitation. But there was none.

The control is on your side.

"Pushing that button won’t do anything for you either." you remarked, eyes following the slight twitch of his fingers as they hovered beneath the desk. His hand stilled, resting just above the concealed emergency trigger.

A security feature - useless now. You had disabled it long before stepping foot inside his office.

"Efficient." he murmured, his voice smooth, edged with curiosity as he slowly withdrew his hand. His head tilted slightly, shadows cutting across the sharp lines of his face as he met your gaze. You could see it, the flicker of confusion behind his calm exterior, the subtle drag of his thoughts searching for loose ends to pull.

Like he was asking a question: why am I not dead yet?

"I suppose I should be flattered." he continued, his tone lighter than the weight of the situation warranted "You did your research." but even as uncertainty coiled beneath his skin, he held his composure with practiced ease.

His eyes lingered on yours, studying you as if peeling back the layers one by one. Even without his cursed technique, there was danger in his gaze, an intelligence that had not dimmed, even as the weapons in his arsenal fell away.

With slow, deliberate steps, you crossed the space between you, each movement intentional, a quiet declaration that there was no need to rush. The tension hung thick in the air, coiled tight like a serpent resting just beneath the surface, but neither of you moved to strike.

You lowered yourself into the chair opposite him, the leather creaking softly beneath your weight. This wasn’t a battle of blades. Not yet.

Will he reach for that katana? He should.

You had the advantage now, and that knowledge kept you calm, steady.

"Let’s talk." you offered, the words slipping into the silence with an almost disarming ease. There was no venom in your tone, no hint of malice, just the calm, measured cadence of someone who had already won but wasn’t in any hurry to collect their prize.

Geto's smiled, faint.

He leaned back slowly, arm draping over the chair’s edge, as if the weight of the moment didn’t press against his chest. But you saw it, the faint flicker of intrigue behind his dark eyes.

He hadn’t expected this.

"A conversation, is it?" he asked, as if tasting the idea for the first time. His tone was light, but the subtle shift in his expression betrayed him. Curiosity hummed beneath the surface, threading through his words "Interesting. You have me at a disadvantage, and yet here you are - talking first."

His gaze sharpened, assessing you carefully, as if trying to pull apart your intent thread by thread "You must want something, then. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be sitting here."

A faint smirk tugged at the corner of your lips as you met his stare without hesitation "Of course I do. If I wanted you dead right away, I wouldn’t have bothered with pleasantries."

There was no need for false pretenses. He knew it as well as you did - this wasn’t mercy. This was purpose.

The tension thickened, heavy but civil.

"Very well." he said at last, soft but steady, he folded his hands in front of him, eyes didn’t waver "Speak. But tell me - what do you hope to gain from this conversation?"

You leaned back in your chair, mirroring his posture with the same measured ease "Information." the word cut cleanly through the air "Corpses don’t talk."

A low chuckle escaped him, quiet but genuine, as if the response had peeled back the tension just slightly.

"No, I suppose they don’t."

The room settled into a fragile stillness, both of you like two predators at rest, waiting to see who would bare their teeth first.

"What is it you’re hoping to learn, exactly?" he began, tilting his head slightly, strand of dark hair falling over his face.

There was weight behind the question. He wasn’t humoring you. He was testing the boundaries of whatever fragile understanding was beginning to form.

He knew his options were narrowing - no techniques, no weapons, and certain no room to strike back.

So, you start.

"Years ago…" you began "You were part of the mission to protect Riko Amanai."

His smile faltered - not enough for most to notice, but you did. A flick of something behind his eyes. His gaze sharpened, narrowing as he weighed your words in silence, dissecting them for hidden edges. But he didn’t speak. Not yet.

He was waiting. Measuring. Calculating.

You didn’t leave him the space to start talking.

"Toji Fushiguro..." you pressed on, letting the name settle between you, watching for the slightest shift "He claimed he killed Gojo Satoru during that contract. But we both know that’s not an easy thing to do. So tell me…" you leaned forward just enough to close the distance, eyes locked onto his "…what did he use? What was the tool that allowed him to get that close?"

The air seemed to tighten even more.

Geto’s expression darkened.

The name Toji Fushiguro struck deeper than you expected, deeper than he could hide. Though his whole posture barely changed, the tension in his jaw spoke volumes.

Old ghosts had been summoned.

"Why assume he was telling the truth?" Geto’s voice was colder now, like ice stretched too thin over dark water.

"The Sorcerer Killer was a bastard and a fraud -" your voice certain "- but he’d never lie about killing Six Eyes. His pride wouldn’t allow it."

Toji Fushiguro’s name carried its own gravity, one that twisted even the most confident sorcerers into knots. His reputation wasn’t built purly on rumors. It had been earned in blood. And for someone like him to touch the untouchable - to bring The Strongest to the edge of death - meant something big.

You needed to know how.

The curse user infront of you wore his indifference well, but behind the mask, something stirred. Loyalty, maybe. Or something deeper. He wasn’t going to betray Gojo’s secrets easily. Whatever had happened during that mission, whatever Toji had wielded, it was buried deep. And dragging it to the surface wouldn’t come without resistance.

He wasn’t going to give this away easily.

"You’re wasting your time." Geto said finally.

And then he moved.

It happened in a blink - the sharp cut of his arm through the space between you, fingers lashing out, reaching for head, your hair, while his other hand snapped forward, aiming to pin your wrists to the table. His precision was unsettling. No hesitation in his movements. No warning.

If you had you been anyone else, perhaps it would have worked.

But you weren’t.

His hand passed clean through you, slicing nothing but shadows and air. You dissolved like smoke before reforming just beyond his reach.

A faint smile tugged at your lips, laced with amusement as you watched him pause, his hand still outstretched - and useless.

Cute.

He didn’t speak right away, but the tension in his posture told you everything. The realization of his miscalculation was there, but composure didn’t falter. Not yet.

"Did you think it would be that easy?" you murmured, voice laced with mockery.

You could almost see the gears turning in his head.

"One last chance to respond." you warned.

For a moment, Geto held your gaze, his expression unreadable. Then, slowly, he placed one hand on the desk, his fingers curling against the wood with ease. The other hand drifted beneath the surface, deliberate but unhurried, inching toward the katana hidden beneath.

A chuckle. You let him.

You can play a little.

His grip tightened around the handle, the blade sliding free with a sound of steel against lacquer. His eyes never left yours, cold and steady as if daring you to make the next move.

And you did.

In the blink of an eye, the space between you collapsed. Shadows rippled as you reappeared behind him, the air still humming faintly from the teleportation.

Before he could turn, your hand shot out - fingers tangling in the dark strands of his hair. With a sharp tug, you wrenched him backward, forcing him off balance. His body twisted, struggling to catch himself, but the edge of the desk bit into his thigh and sent him crashing down into the chair behind him.

His grip on the katana never wavered. He swung, blade arcing in a clean, deadly strike toward your side-

But you were faster.

Your palm met his wrist, twisting sharply as the katana clattered to the floor with a hollow ring. His other hand shot up, aiming to grab you, but you pinned it down just as quickly, shackles of cursed energy snapping tight around his wrists. They burned faintly, locking his arms behind the chair in one fluid sweep.

Geto growled, testing the bonds with ferour, but they held firm. The weight of defeat settled over him fast. His eyes, burning fire of the battle, followed you carefully, noting every detail.

You grabbed the katana and pressed the blade to his throat, the cool edge biting against his skin as you yanked his head back by his hair. Geto's breath remained steady, but the tautness in his neck betrayed him.

Victory hung in the room, but you knew better than to celebrate.

"You should’ve taken my offer." you murmured, leaning closer until your lips nearly brushed his ear "Now we do this the hard way." the last part came out as a whisper.

The blade hovered just below his jawline, its cold kiss a silent reminder of how thin the line was. You pressed it gently, not enough to draw blood, but enough to remind him that it could. Leaning in, your breath ghosted against his neck as your tone dipped lower, quieter, and far more dangerous "Will you finally answer my question?"

His throat bobbed slightly as he swallowed, the edge of the katana rising with the motion. Silence.

Stubborn fool.

"This isn’t going to work." you said, the blade tilting slightly, catching the faint glint of lamplight "You can resist all you want, but we both know this conversation won’t end until I get what I need."

His body tensed beneath, muscles shifting under his robes as he tested the restraints once again. The chair creaked faintly, but the bondage held, biting into his wrists enough to remind him of their presence. You could feel his pride being hurt in each shallow breath laced with frustration.

Still, he refused to yield.

You exhaled softly through your nose, tilting your wrist to pull his head back further. His eyes met yours, forced to hold your gaze at the sharp, uncomfortable angle.

His expression hardened. He wasn’t naive. He understood the game you were playing.

He couldn’t kill you. Not like this, he lost, but he has a bargaining tool. You wouldn't kill him - not until you had what you came for.

The delicate balance of leverage hung between you. You need to act smart now.

"You’re not afraid to die." you murmured, studying the lines of his face "But that’s not the point, is it? Your death would make you useless to me… and we both know you’d hate to die useless."

His lips twitched, almost as if the corner of his mouth threatened to pull into something between amusement and disdain.

"You assume I care what you want." he replied, there was only intrigue in his voice. He wasn’t entirely sure how this would play out.

"No." you admitted, grip tightening slightly in his hair "But I think you care about what he would want."

For the briefest second, you caught it - that crack widening just enough to let the ghost of memory pass through his eyes.

You had found the thread. Now all you had to do was pull.

"I think he’d like to stay alive." you said, letting the blade tilt "So go ahead - resist. You'll surely save his life that way."

He wasn’t the type to break easily - no, Geto Suguru was carved from stone and pride, tempered by too many battles to fall apart under the weight of threats alone.

But this wasn’t about breaking him.

It was about making him choose.

You watched the thought ripple through him, subtle but telling. He was measuring the implications, trying to untangle the strings you had just laid at his feet.

"You can do that..." you continued, voice soft but edged with quiet finality "...or after some time… someone will repeat what Fushiguro did. And this time, they’ll succeed."

The faintest crease formed between his brows, and for the first time, uncertainty bled into his eyes.

"And I won’t be able to stop that someone."

For a brief moment, the weight of those words seemed to hang between you. His confusion was there. You gave him puzzle he hadn’t been prepared to solve.

"What are you talking about?" his voice was low, but there was no mistaking the undercurrent of suspicion now.

Good.

You need to play on his caring about a reason.

"I need to know what can hurt him. Where his limits lie." you said, the blade steady in your grip "Because someone else is searching for those answers. And when they find them, we both know what happens next."

Your voice hardened, words sank into the room like lead, heavy and inevitable "Sorcerers, fighting for power. Tearing each other apart. A new era of chaos, like the Heian period reborn. And we both know how dangerous that would be."

You could feel it, a doubt taking its root in his mind.

"Is that really the future you want?" now, you attack a personal cause. A question asked with softening words, just enough to slip beneath his defenses. The demand in your tone dulled, shifting into an appeal wrapped in a reason "The world you’re trying to create - will it survive if everyone is clawing for the title of 'the strongest'? When there’s nothing left but power struggles and bloodshed?"

You leaned in, just close enough that your next words felt like something shared in confidence.

"Gojo’s absence would unravel everything. Believe it or not." you murmured, dragging the flat of the blade gently across his throat in slow, deliberate motions "I’m not here to destroy. I just need him alive. That’s all."

The truth had been a dangerous luxury, one you rarely indulged in. But here, now, you allowed yourself that. After all, he was as good as dead. Whatever he learned in these final moments would fade with him, sealed beneath the weight of silence.

His ressistance that had carried him this far, was cracking, splintering beneath the truth you had laid bare between you. He knows you're not lying.

So you leaned closer.

Your lips hovered just beside his ear, you were so close you could smell white musk and orange.

"Is that really what you want?" the whisper slipped from your lips like silk, soft but deliberate, curling around him in the dark.

The room hung in a silence so thick it felt as if even the walls were holding their breath. The tension lingered stretched thin, like glass ready to shatter.

And then, finally - he exhaled.

His shoulders eased, the rigid lines of his posture softening enough to betray the weight that had settled over him. It was like acceptance, the grim kind that comes when there are no moves left to play.

His eyes lifted to meet yours, dark and heavy with the weight of ghosts you couldn’t see.

"Inverted Spear of Heaven." he said, his voice worn down to something that barely carried across the room "It’s the weapon that nullifies cursed techniques. That’s what that monkey used to kill him... if only for a moment."

You couldn’t help but find it amusing, the irony of it all. Even with cold steel pressed to his throat, the weight of death hanging by a thread, Geto Suguru’s disdain for non-sorcerers remained intact. That hatred. That unwavering belief.

"Where is the weapons now?" you asked, the blade tracing a slow, deliberate path just beneath his jawline.

Geto’s lips barely moved "I don’t know. The school doesn’t have it in its possession, that much is certain."

You searched his eyes for deceit, but there was none. He wasn’t lying, whether by choice or circumstance, he truly didn’t know.

That was enough.

But then, you noticed something.

It was subtle - so subtle that it almost escaped you, hidden beneath the layers of composure he wore like armour. It wasn’t in his words, nor in the tone of his voice.

No - it was in his eyes.

Now you see it.

That sharp gaze of his, piercing yet heavy-lidded, lingered a fraction too long on the blade. The faintest flicker of darkness swirled beneath the surface. A subtle dilation of his pupils, the way his breath caught not from fear, but something far more complicated.

His body language betrayed it in fragments, barely noticeable. In the way his head tilted back, exposing more of his throat even as the blade rested on it. His pulse, quick under the thin layer of skin, seemed to hum something other than fear. The slight parting of his lips as you tightened your grip on his hair, the way his shoulders seemed to tense rather than resist. The subtle flexing of his hands on the cursed shackles, not to escape but to feel their pull once again. The stiffness of his posture was not due to sheer defiance.

The realisation of this fact was slowly getting to you.

He wasn't just enduring it.

The power you exercised over him, the blade digging into his skin - was not just tolerated. When your eyes met again, there was no mistaking it. The subtle change in his breathing, the faint glint in his gaze - all of it.

He enjoyed it.

Oh.

You leaned in closer, the space between you evaporating until your lips hovered just above his ear, the blade at his throat as steady as the storm brewing in your eyes. Your voice, low and intimate, slipped through the charged silence like a blade drawn over silk - soft enough to tempt, sharp enough to warn, and beneath that velvet edge lay the same unyielding control that kept his wrists bound tightly behind the chair.

"I have to admit." you murmured, letting each word drip slowly into the charged space between you "..there's something satisfying about this - how utterly helpless you are in my hands. And I can’t help but wonder..." your lips brushed just faintly against his ear, a ghost of contact "...maybe you don’t hate it as much as you pretend to." your teeth grazed his earlobe and closed in just enough to bite, not cruelly, but with enough pressure to make a point.

His reaction was immediate yet subtle, slight, sharp gasp slipping through parted lips, barely audible, followed by the faintest shiver beneath your hands. The tension lingered for only a breath before smoothing out, his posture relaxed but carefully neutral. As if to suggest he’d expected this, or perhaps didn’t mind it as much as he should.

For a fleeting second, something unguarded sparked in Geto’s eye. A flash of molten heat seeping through the cracks of his composure, sharp and primal, like a predator catching the scent of blood. It simmered just below the surface, dangerous and alive, but never fully broke through the carefully constructed mask of his impassive gaze.

He didn’t speak.

But he didn’t need to.

The gaze he leveled at you was nothing short of a provocation, slow, deliberate, and laced with the kind of allure, that felt less like a dare, and more like a whispered promise. His eyes moved over you with an unspoken intensity, the weight of them lingering just long enough to feel like an invitation you hadn’t decided if you should accept or resist.

Intoxicating.

Does he even realize it?

Did he realize the way his gaze pulled at you - the way his throat bobs with a gulp?

Could he feel the way his golden eyes betrayed him, glowing with something raw and unspoken?

Is he aware, that here’s a fleeting moment where his gaze drops, and his teeth barely graze his bottom lip, as if he’s holding back the urge to bite down?

Like he’s daring you, urging you, to take what you want.

To press the blade deeper, to pull harder, to stretch the thin thread of tension until it frays and snaps, leaving nothing but breathless heat behind.

Your mind flooded with thoughts none of them professional. Every possible way to exploit the fact that he was tied up, flashed through your head, each more tempting than the last. You even considered delaying his execution, just long enough to explore a few of the scenarios that had begun to take shape.

But the contract still stood. An inconvenient truth.

And you weren’t exactly thrilled about it.

You must finish this. Focus.

But damn, he made it difficult.

"If this is my end, can I at least have a last wish?"

He must have seen your chain of thoughts. Your brow arched, amusement tugging at the corner of your lips. There was something almost charming in the way he said it - calm, composed, as if the blade at his throat was more of a mild inconvenience, rather than a death sentence.

And those eyes - fuck..

"I don’t usually grant such luxuries." you murmured, though the words felt like a half-hearted formality, an excuse, if nothing else.

His eyes caught the shift immediately, glinting with something knowing. The way his lips curled made it clear, he’d noticed your hesitation.

You sighned, tilting your head, the blade muscled his skin in a lazy motion "But I suppose… I’m feeling generous tonight."

His eyes changed, that dangerous glint returning as if he was already calculating how far he could stretch this moment - how much he could take before the blade cut too deep.

"How generous." he stated, tilting his head just enough for the blade to slide along his jawline, a move that spoke more of curiosity than fear "I suppose I should choose wisely, then."

"Choose quickly." you warned, though your hand remained steady in his hair, fingers tangled in the dark strands as if anchoring him there "Exceptions don’t last long."

His smirk came slow, thin and bitter, nothing warm behind it.

"Kill the one who sent you after me."

Oh, he was smart one - he knew exactly why you were here.

The audacity of it hit first, tilting the balance in the room. Then you laughed, soft and dark, the sound curling between you you like a whispered secret.

"Clever." you comment "I like that answer."

Lucky.

Lucky you’d developed a fondness for him.

You loosened your grip on his hair, letting the strands slip through your fingers as his head tilted back slightly, still bound by the cursed chains that anchored him to the chair. His posture remained rigid, but you could feel the subtle shift beneath your fingertips, the way his muscles coiled, tense but not in defiance.

"It’s a shame… really." you let your fingers drift along edges of his jawline, tracing the curve with a tenderness that had no place here "Such a waste to let that beautiful face wither." your touch remained, a whisper of intimacy that contradicted the deadly promise in your hand.

His breath hitched, barely noticeable, but enough for you to catch the fleeting moment of hesitation. He wasn’t afraid. No - his body responded to the softness, drawn to it like someone standing too close to the edge, knowing exactly how far the drop was… and not caring.

Geto exhaled slowly, his shoulders easing beneath the weight pressing down on him. A faint, almost wistful smile tugged at the corner of his lips "I didn’t think death would be so beautiful." he whispered, the words like silk unraveling between you.

You returned his smile, something sad and knowing in your eyes. His fate was sealed, and you both knew it - yet there was no fear in him, only acceptance.

𖤓

The alley slumbered in darkness, a realm abandoned by light’s timid reach, where even the dim pulse of distant streetlights faltered and died. Rain lingered in the air, its breath clinging to the slick stone and pooling in shallow reflections, glimmering faintly when passing headlights flickered like ghosts. The hum of the city whispered far away, a heartbeat muffled by the weight of silence, and in this narrow, forsaken artery of the night, time unraveled, slow and viscous as oil. Shadows unfurled their limbs, languid and watchful, draping the walls like ancient guardians as you leaned against the chill of the brick, waiting.

The night’s murmur sharpened your senses, each shift in the air a harbinger of movement. And then, he came. The man emerged from the shadow’s maw, his silhouette trembling against the void. His coat hung on him like a shroud. Each step was a betrayal of the tension that clung to him, he stopped before you.

Though the night’s air was cool, sweat glistened on his pallid skin, the glint of it unnerving under the scarce light that fractured over his face. When he spoke, his voice was thin "Is it done?"

The silence stretched, thick as mist of the city, curling around him while you watched. His unease pooled at his feet, bleeding into the cracks of the alley. You let it fester, tasting it, before breaking the stillness with a single, flat nod "Think carefully. No one’s seen Geto Suguru for a week."

His breath hitched - a brief, fleeting sound before relief consumed him, unraveling his composure. His shoulders slumped, as if surrendering to some unseen weight that no longer pressed down. His hands, trembling and clumsy, gave you a worn bag. He shoved it into your palm with the urgency of someone desperate escape the situation as soon as possible.

A telling sign.

"Thank you… for your services." he mumbled, the words hurried. He turned before the exchange fully settled, his back already folding into the dark.

But you remained still, the bag in your grasp unnerving in its absence. It felt wrong. Off. Lighter - too light.

Your fingers ghosted over the clasp, and the soft click echoed like the shot of a distant gun. The faint sheen of crumpled bills stared back at you, pale under the alley’s fragile light. But there wasn’t enough. Only half.

A shadow crept across your expression, dark as the alley itself.

"Wait."

The word wasn’t loud, but it landed like a stone, heavy and unrelenting. He turned, sudden, nervous smile wavered, cracking at the edges like old porcelain "Is there a problem?"

"It's wrong." you said short.

"I don’t know what you mean." he lied. A deadly mistake.

You turned the bag in your hand, feeling the emptiness between the bills. It whispered of short cuts and misplaced arrogance, a quiet betrayal dressed in crumpled fabric.

"This is only half." you repeated, voice calm but cold enough to draw breath from the alley’s air.

The man’s expression twisted, a flash of irritation masked by a thin veil of justification "My supervisor said it was fair." he insisted, the words tumbling out too "I mean… Geto’s gone. His power’s yours. After all, that’s worth more than money."

He was blabbering. The words left his lips with the bravado of a gambler betting on a losing hand, a facade of confidence too thin to hold under the moment’s weight. His chest rose slightly, puffed with defiance, but it was a hollow gesture. His eyes told the truth - nervous, skittering, unable to land anywhere for too long.

You sighed, heavy and unhurried. It carried no malice, only inevitability.

"He said you’d do something like this."

Before the man could retreat into another excuse, his body betrayed him. A violent convulsion seized his frame, legs crumbling beneath him as though the weight of the air had doubled. His throat shimmered faintly - thin, nearly imperceptible - until a single brush of your finger coaxed it to tighten. The thread buried deeper, kissing his skin with a cruel intimacy.

You snapped your fingers.

The thread obeyed, sinking through, parting his neck with seamless precision. No cry escaped him, only the muted gurgle of breath that never fully formed. He crumpled where he stood, folding into the damp concrete with a thud too soft to echo. His eyes grey and hollow.

The alley drank in the quiet.

From the dark, a figure slipped forward, his presence unfurling from the shadows as if he had merely paused within them. His steps were unhurried, the soft scuff of worn shoes against wet pavement was only sound that followed him. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance - no flowing robes, no grand entrance. Just casual clothes, rumpled as if he’d been living in them, the faint trace of a week spent lurking out of sight.

Geto Suguru.

His smile appeared before his words, small and polite, curving his lips with a quiet sense of understanding. His gaze fell lazily on the lifeless shape at your feet, though there was no concern in his eyes, only the shadow of amusement.

"I told you he’d cause trouble." he said, tone smooth, as if you stood over spilled drink rather than a corpse.

You didn’t respond - not immediately. Silence settled between you, taut and thin, stretched like wire waiting to snap.

With measured ease, you shifted the weight of the bag over your shoulder. It hung light, barely enough to register. The job had been quick, clean, efficient, and ultimately forgettable.

Your gaze met his, steady, unbothered, the calm of someone who had long since made peace with this kind of work.

"Two weeks." you said, voice edged with finality "You’ve got two weeks to pay the rest."

Geto’s chuckle curled through the alley "And how do you know I don’t have that money now?" his voice carried playful lilt, the tone of a man who savored the game more than the outcome.

You didn’t flinch.

A slow tilt of your head, an eyebrow arched in quiet defiance "I know more than you think." you replied, each word sharp and deliberate "Your funds aren’t what they used to be."

The flicker behind his eyes sharpened, though his smile didn’t waver.

"Two weeks, then?" he repeated, as if rolling the thought over on his tongue, testing the weight of your patience.

"Two weeks." the repetition hung in the air. Your gaze never wavered from his, unrelenting "And if you try to cheat me, I’ll finish what I started."

The alley seemed to contract around you, the silence pressing close, as if the world itself leaned in to listen. Geto’s grin remained in acknowledgment.

He tilted his head back, just slightly, with a gesture as subtle as if the blade was still on his throat "Fair enough." he said.

And just like that, you dissolved into a swirl of black smoke and mist, melting seamlessly into the shadows of the alley until nothing remained but the faint whisper of your presence. One breath, and you were gone - no footsteps, no lingering presence.

The alley exhaled in your absence, settling into stillness once more.

Only the distant hum of the city remained, as if the world had never paused to begin with.

© noira-l | all rights reserved. do not copy, translate, modify, or redistirbute my work without permission

[a-d-nox]

economic advice and timely buying tips: 2025 transits

as of late, social media has many discussions about what to buy - or avoid buying - over the next few years, largely in response to the political climate in the united states. across europe, many regions are actively preparing their populations for potential crises (sweden's seems to be the most popularly discussed - link). due to the urgency and pressure to act, as if the world might change tomorrow (and it could though i believe we still have time in many places), i’ve decided to analyze the astrological transits for 2025. in this post i provide practical economic advice and guidance on how much time astrology suggests you have to make these purchases everyone is urging you to prioritize. if it seems to intrigue people i’ll explore future years as well.

things the world needs to prepare for in 2025 in my opinion and why my advice is what it is: the rise of ai / automation of jobs, job loss, geopolitical tensions, war, extreme weather, inflation, tariffs - a potential trade war, a movement of using digital currency, the outbreak of another illness, etc.

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uranus goes direct in taurus (jan 30, 2025)

advice

diversify investments: avoid putting all your money in one asset type. mix stocks, bonds, index funds, and, if you feel comfortable, look into sustainable investments or new technologies.

digital finance: familiarize yourself with digital currencies/platforms or blockchain technology.

build an emergency fund: extra savings can shield you from sudden economic instability. aim for 3-6 months’ worth of expenses.

reevaluate subscriptions and spending: find creative ways to reduce spending or repurpose what you have. cancel subscriptions that don't align with needs/beliefs, cook at home, or diy where possible.

invest in skills / side hustles: take a course/invest in tools that can help you create multiple income streams.

by this date stock up on

non-perishable food items like canned goods, grains, and dried beans. household essentials like soap, toothpaste, and cleaning supplies. basic medical supplies. multi-tools. durable, high-quality items over disposable ones (the economy is changing, buy something that will last because prices will go up). LED bulbs, solar-powered chargers, or energy-efficient appliances. stock up on sustainable products, like reusable bags and water bottles. blankets. teas. quality skincare.

jupiter goes direct in gemini (feb 4, 2025)

advice

invest in knowledge: take courses, buy books (potential bans?), and/or attend workshops to expand your skill set. focus on topics like communication, writing, marketing, and/or technology. online certifications could boost your career prospects during this time.

leverage your network: attending professional events, joining forums, and/or expanding your LinkedIn presence.

diversify income streams: explore side hustles, freelance gigs, and/or monetize hobbies.

beware of overspending on small pleasures: overspending on gadgets, books, or entertainment will not be good at this point in time (tariffs already heavy hitting?).

by this date stock up on

books / journals. subscriptions to learning platforms like Skillshare, MasterClass, or Coursera. good-quality laptop, smartphone, and/or noise-canceling headphones. travel bags - get your bug out bag in order. portable chargers. language-learning apps. professional attire. teas. aromatherapy.

neptune enters aries (march 30, 2025)

advice

invest: look into industries poised for breakthrough developments, such as renewable energy, space exploration, and/or tech.

save for risks: build a financial cushion to balance your adventurous pursuits with practical security.

diversify your income: consider side hustles or freelancing in fields aligned with your passions and talents.

"scam likely": avoid “get-rich-quick” schemes or ventures that seem too good to be true.

adopt sustainable habits: focus on sustainability in your spending, like buying high-quality, long-lasting items instead of cheap, disposable ones.

by this date stock up on

emergency kits with essentials like water, food, and first-aid supplies. multi-tools, solar chargers, or portable power banks. art supplies. tarot or astrology books (bans?). workout gear, resistance bands, or weights. nutritional supplements. high-quality clothing or shoes.

saturn conjunct nn in pisces (april 14, 2025)

advice

save for the long term: create a savings plan or revisit your budget to ensure stability.

avoid escapism spending: avoid unnecessary debt.

watch for financial scams: be cautious with contracts, investments, or loans. research thoroughly and avoid “too good to be true” offers.

focus on debt management: saturn demands accountability. work toward paying down debts to free yourself from unnecessary burdens.

build a career plan: seek roles / opportunities that balance financial security with fulfillment, such as careers in wellness, education, creative arts, or nonprofits.

by this date stock up on

invest in durable, sustainable items for your home or wardrobe that offer long-term value. vitamins or supplements. herbal teas or whole grains. blankets. candles. non-perishable food. first-aid kits. water. energy-efficient devices.

pluto rx in aquarius (may 4, 2025 - oct 13, 2025)

advice

preform an audit: reflect on how your money habits and your long-term goals.

make sustainable investments: support industries tied to innovation, like renewable energy, ethical tech, or sustainable goods.

expect changes: could disrupt collective systems, so build an emergency fund. plan for potential shifts in tech-based industries or automation. AI is going to take over the workforce...

reevaluate subscriptions and digital spending: cut unnecessary costs and ensure your money supports productivity. netflix is not necessary, your groceries are.

diversify income streams: brainstorm side hustles or entrepreneurial ideas.

by this date stock up on

external hard drives. cybersecurity software. portable chargers. solar panels. energy-efficient gadgets. non-perishable food. clean water supplies. basic first-aid kits and medications. portable generators. books on technology and coding. reusable items like water bottles, bags, and food storage. gardening supplies to grow your own food. VPN subscriptions or identity theft protection.

saturn enters aries (may 24, 2025)

advice

prioritize self-reliance: build financial independence. create a budget, eliminate debt, and establish a safety net to support personal ambitions. avoid over-reliance on others for financial stability/decision-making.

entrepreneurship: consider starting a side hustle / investing in yourself.

save for big goals: plan for major life changes, such as buying property, starting a business, etc. make a high yield saving account for these long-term goals.

by this date stock up on

ergonomic office equipment. home gym equipment. non-perishable foods and water supplies for potential unexpected disruptions. self-protection; consider basic tools or training for safety. high-protein snacks, energy bars, or hydration supplies. supplements like magnesium, B-complex vitamins, etc. stock up on materials for DIY projects, hobbies, or entrepreneurial ventures.

jupiter enters cancer (june 9, 2025)

advice

invest in your home: renovating what needs renovating. saving for a down payment on a house.

focus on security: start or increase your emergency savings. consider life insurance or estate planning to ensure long-term security for your family/loved ones.

embrace conservative financial growth: cancer prefers security over risk. opt for conservative investments, like bonds, real estate, and/or mutual funds with steady returns.

focus on food and comfort: spend wisely on food, cooking tools, or skills that promote a healthier, more fulfilling lifestyle (maybe this an RFK thing for my fellow american readers or this could be about the fast food industry suffering from inflation).

by this date stock up on

furniture upgrades if you need them. high-quality cookware or tools. stockpile your pantry staples. first-aid kits, fire extinguishers, and home security systems. water and canned goods for emergencies. paint, tools, or materials for DIY projects. energy-efficient appliances or upgrades to reduce utility costs.

neptune rx in aries/pisces (july 4, 2025 - dec 10, 2025)

advice

avoid financial conflicts: be mindful of shared finances or joint ventures during this time.

avoid escapist spending: stick to a budget.

by this date stock up on

first-aid kits, tools, and essentials for unforeseen events. water filter / waterproof containers. non-perishables and emergency water supplies.

uranus rx in gemini/taurus (july 7, 2025 - feb 3, 2026)

advice

evaluate technology investments: make sure you’re spending money wisely on tech tools, gadgets, or subscriptions. avoid impulsively purchasing the latest gadgets; instead, upgrade only what’s necessary.

diversify streams of income: explore side hustles or gig work to expand your income sources. focus on digital platforms or innovative fields for additional opportunities.

reassess contracts and agreements: take time to revisit financial contracts or business partnerships. ensure all terms are clear and aligned with your goals.

prioritize financial stability: uranus often brings surprises, so focus on strengthening your savings and emergency fund.

avoid major financial risks: uranus retrograde can disrupt markets. avoid speculative ventures and focus on stable, low-risk options.

by this date stock up on

lightweight travel gear or items for local trips. radios, power banks, or portable hotspots in case of disruptions in digital connectivity. stockpile food, water, and household goods to maintain stability during potential disruptions. invest in high-quality, long-lasting items like tools, clothing, or cookware.

saturn rx in aries/pisces (july 13, 2025 - nov 27, 2025)

advice

review career: assess whether your current job or entrepreneurial efforts align with your long-term aspirations (especially considering the state of the world). adjust plans if needed.

strengthen emergency funds: aries energy thrives on readiness. use this time to build/bolster a financial safety net for unforeseen events.

prepare for uncertainty: build a cushion for unexpected financial changes, especially if you work in creative, spiritual, or service-oriented fields.

by this date stock up on

health products that support long-term well-being. essential supplies like first-aid kits, multi-tools, or non-perishables. bath products. teas. art supplies. drinking water or water filtration tools.

jupiter rx in cancer (nov 11, 2025 - march 10, 2026)

advice

strengthen financial foundations: building an emergency fund or reassessing your savings strategy. ensure everything is well-organized and sustainable.

by this date stock up on

quality kitchenware, tools, or cleaning supplies. pantry staples and emergency food supplies.

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return to nox's guide to metaphysics

return to the masterlist of transits

© a-d-nox 2024 all rights reserved

[probablyasocialecologist]

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complex technological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide, manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offer you back an appealing share in its spoils. What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. Sure, that shiny new thing is keeping tabs on you (and feeding all of that information back to the larger technological system), but it also lets you do things you genuinely could not do before. For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.”  For Mumford, the bribe was not primarily about getting people into the habit of buying new gadgets and machines. Rather it was about incorporating people into a world that complex technological systems were remaking in their own image. Anticipating resistance, the bribe meets people not with the boot heel, but with the gift subscription. The bribe is a discomforting concept. It asks us to consider the ways the things we purchase wind up buying us off, it asks us to see how taking that first bribe makes it easier to take the next one, and, even as it pushes us to reflect on our own complicity, it reminds us of the ways technological systems eliminate their alternatives. Writing about the bribe decades ago, Mumford was trying to sound the alarm, as he put it: “This is not a prediction of what will happen, but a warning against what may happen.” As with all of his glum predictions, it was one that Mumford hoped to be proven wrong about. Yet as one scrolls between reviews of the latest smartphone, revelations about the latest misdeeds of some massive tech company, and commentary about the way we have become so reliant on these systems that we cannot seriously speak about simply turning them off — it seems clear that what Mumford warned “may happen” has indeed happened.  The bribe can be a useful tool for understanding how we got where we are, and can be useful to keep in mind as we think about where we want to go next.

25 October 2021

[inthelittlewood]

Hi Martyn! Merch question here. I think you guys said the current merch is limited edition, but how limited is it? Do you know how long you’ll have it for? I’m trying to decide if I should buy it myself or if I can put it on my wishlist before it’s too late.

So I was able to shed a little more light on this question today on stream, it's definitely worth echoing here

The merch is a one time drop. It will definitely be available for as long as Secret Life is actively releasing but won't be much longer afterwards (if at all)

If the series is short, it may stick around post-finale. If the series is long, it's more likely to conclude when the last episodes drop. So you really do have to nab it now to ensure you don't miss out!

I promise we're not trying to be vague on purpose, it's moreso we don't have a concrete date decided and we're playing it by ear.

Hopefully this gives a clearer gauge of things and I've seen lots of people saying they hope to purchase stuff with money they'll get at Christmas, it's looking very unlikely that that is a possibility for you. Sorry

(btw just a side note, THANK YOU to everybody that has purchased things, it's an unbelievably powerful support tool for every creator in the series and very humbling that people want to wear the brand!)

[goddessinnerglow]

Become Your Best Version Before 2025 - Day 13

Financial Planning and Budgeting

Hello Goddesses! I know that talking about money, can feel scary or boring, but after working on our stress management tools yesterday, it's perfect timing to address something that's often a huge source of stress for many of us: finances.

First things first: if thinking about money makes you want to hide under your blanket, you're not alone. But taking control of your finances isn't about becoming a math genius or never buying another coffee again. It's about making friends with your money so it can help you live your best life.

Let's break this down into bite-sized pieces that won't give you a headache:

Start Where You Are

Remember when you first learned to ride a bike? You didn't start by doing tricks, you started with training wheels. Money management is the same way! First step: just look at your current situation. Open those banking apps you've been avoiding. Take a deep breath and look at your statements. Knowledge is power, even if it's a bit scary at first.

The Money Map Exercise

Grab a piece of paper (or open your notes app) and let's do something simple:

Write down all your income sources

List your regular monthly expenses (yes, including those sneaky subscriptions!)

Don't forget those irregular expenses like annual fees or seasonal costs

Look at what's left (or what's missing)

Congratulations! You've just created your first basic budget outline.

The 50/30/20 Guideline

Here's a popular way to think about your money:

50% for needs (rent, groceries, utilities)

30% for wants (fun stuff, shopping, entertainment)

20% for future you (savings, debt payment, investments)

These numbers might not work for everyone, especially depending on where you live. The important thing is to have some kind of plan that works for YOU.

Smart Money Habits You Can Start Today

The 24-Hour Rule: For non-essential purchases over a certain amount (you decide the number!), wait 24 hours before buying. You'd be surprised how many "must-haves" become "maybe nots" overnight!

Bill Calendar: Set up a simple calendar with all your bill due dates. Future you will be so grateful!

Automate Your Savings: Even if it's just $5 a week, set up automatic transfers to a savings account. It's like hiding money from yourself!

Track Your Spending: For just one week, write down every single purchase. No judging, just observing. You might find some surprising patterns!

The Emergency Fund Challenge

Let's start building that safety net! Even $500 in savings can make a huge difference in an emergency. Start with a goal of saving just $25 this week. Too much? Start with $10. Too little? Make it $50. The amount isn't as important as getting started.

Money Goals That Make Sense

Instead of vague goals like "save more," try specific ones like:

Save enough for three months of basic expenses by December 2025

Pay off one credit card by summer

Create a "fun fund" for that hobby you've been wanting to try

Your financial journey is exactly that, YOURS. You don't need to compare yourself to anyone else. The person on Instagram showing off their investment portfolio might still be paying off massive debt. Focus on your own path!

Your mission for today:

Look at your bank statement (I know, scary, but you can do it!)

Pick ONE money habit from this post to try this week

Set ONE specific financial goal for 2025

See you tomorrow for Day 14! Remember, every financial decision you make today is a gift to your future self.

[justabrick]

"Say you bring this whole place down, waltz outta the rubble with all these precious brains... Nothing changes. All the guys in charge are long gone. And we've got offices 'round the world."

I'm in an analytical mood again, so bear with me.

All the guys in charge are long gone.

Isn't it curious that Sundowner is implicitly excluding himself from 'those in charge'?

How much power over what's happening does he actually have?

It's all speculation, naturally, but I think it's possible to fill the gaps based on some other topics explained in decent detail in CODEC calls. Namely: Desperado, World Marshal and operation Tecumseh. And a little general cyborg info. So, operation Tecumseh – a false-flag operation planned by Steven Armstrong to ensure the revitalization of the war economy and his subsequent election, giving him free rein to reorganize America as a "survival of the fittest" society. Raiden and Maverick deduced that it involved President Hamilton's visit to the Shabhazabad region of Pakistan, and assassinating the President while making it seem as though Pakistani rebels were responsible for the assassination. And Desperado existed only to become the perfect scapegoat in this plan. Why I think that? First, reputation. It's as if Desperado LLC is purposefully trying to present itself as overtly evil to the public, it's aknowledged several times throughout the game.

What a name it is indeed. Quoting a dictinary: "A desperado is someone who does illegal, violent things without worrying about the danger." And the listed synonyms are: criminal, thug, outlaw, villain. Lovely. It's like writing "I'M EVIL" across your forehead. And speaking of exactly that. Agressive branding. We get to see three PMC's in action throughout the course of MGR's plot: Maverick, World Marshal, Desperado. Of all three of them Desperado marks their property the loudest. Raiden doesn't have Maverick's logo anywhere on his body, believe me, I've scoured all of his shiny metal ass for it. Regular Maverick soldiers from the prologue don't have the horse head anywhere on them either, neither do their vehicles. Only Gemini have these cute, easily missable pins on their jackets.

And I don't think I've seen World Marshal's logo on any of the enemies we fight, both their soldiers and and their UG's seem very "default" in that regard. Meanwhile Desperado:

(render by Yare-Yare-Dong) Especially prominent on Excelsus, a humongous advertisement for Desperado's involvement in the assassination, a good half of the final fight takes place on a giant Desperado logo.

Even the Winds themselves are branded like cattle, right on their chassis loud and clear.

All this to say is that they're advertising themselves as thugs and seem to be actively chasing publicity for it. No wonder, such reputation would make them a very convenient and believable target to pin the blame on. Why look deeper into it and try to find a potential secret third party behind them if this PMC already has an established history of extreme behavior? You'd think it would be pretty difficult to start out and grow with such presentation and their preferred clients being... fringe groups to say the least. That brings me to the idea that Desperado was never truly independent, and was always nothing but Armstrong's tool. Just a couple highlights to suggest how much money they must be getting from him. Quoting Kevin: "Of all registered PMC troops, we're still talkin', what, 3% have enhancements? Maybe 5%, tops? (...) Plus the surgery is highly specialized -- expensive as hell. Not to mention maintenance costs after that." Desperado is majority cyborgs. Imagine the costs. And the cherry on top - EXSELSUS. Boris: "I know Desperado makes good money, but this is not a thing thugs like that could purchase."

But even if they did start out independent it doesn't really matter, since with the amount of money Armstrong invested in them, his fist is so deep up Desperado's ass that he can use it like a Muppet. Seems Kev thinks the same: "Probably, given Desperado and World Marshal are basically one and the same. Careful down there..." There is no way Desperado could have continued to exist after Tecumseh. They're an american organization involved in an attempt on POTUS's life, they'd be torn apart immediately at the very beginning of the "war on terror" that Armstrong planned. The only possible excuse they could have used, as Raiden told Courtney, is to claim that their client set them up. But... That would never work with their track record of international terrorism and a history of assassinating high ranking politicians like N'Mani. And after all this exposition, let's circle back to the original question.

How much power over what's happening does Sundowner actually have? Chief Operating Officer of Desperado Enforcement LLC... sounds pretty nice if you don't think about it too much. Now let me put it more... idk, truthfully. De facto leader of a terrorist group that tried to kill the President. Scapegoat to end all scapegoats, eh? Especially with his colorful history of investigations for atrocities like torture and desecration of remains.

And Armstrong absolutely did intend for him to die as a result of Tecumseh. Don't believe me? Look.

What is Desperado? Lawless gang. And Sundowner - an extremist and a madman. Yeah. And when I'm calling him a scapegoat I'm not implying that he's innocent at all, dude's a monster. However! However. The real force behind the entire plan is undeniably Armstrong and World Marshal, NOT Sundowner and Desperado. Sundowner doesn't even believe in Armstrong's dream to be honest. None of the Desperado bosses we fight do, for that matter, but it's a topic I'll elaborate on in some other obnoxiously wordy post. Senator wants a future where everyone is free to fight their own wars, to fight for what they believe in. Does Sundowner personally fight for some kind of grand ideal? Well I guess he wants to see the return of war economy, but not to bring his country prosperity or anything, no no no. He wants war for the sake of war, just because that's what he loves, and what he thrives in. Sundowner is consumed by bloodlust, and the specifics of the cause that allow him to feed it don't matter all that much. Another proof is that he doesn't really care about the cause is that he yaps about Tecumseh to Raiden. First time in the server room can be chalked up to overconfidence (though I doubt it), but he actually answers Raiden's question on what's gonna happen in his last CODEC call, essentially sabotaging the entire mission by giving Jack a lead to follow. Could have kept his trap shut and Senator would have gotten what he wanted. But what about the quote "Even at mach two you wouldn't make it!" tho? Well I have a couple thoughts, they have to do with Sam.

So, Monsoon sent him to go "report to the chief." Safe to assume he went up to the server room, and him and Sundowner discussed what to do next. Ever wondered how Sam got to the spot his duel with Raiden takes place? Well there's this one easy to miss CODEC with Wolf in file 6: "Raiden: A World Marshal helicopter crashed in this vicinity earlier. It was en route to deliver a cache of cyborg repair materials. Should you locate any conspicuous crates, cut them open. See what is inside." Obviously his bike is still parked in Denver and I sincerely doubt Jetstream rawdogged it almost all the way to Solis on his own two legs, so that crashed helicopter is likely to have been his transport.

Server room is directly connected to the roof and helipad, Sundowner must have been the one who specifically sent him off to Solis. He is Sam's direct superior, let's not forget that. One of CODECs once you arrive at Pakistan: "Still, they've got to know I'm here. Sam was smart enough to figure out I'd take that launch vehicle." Idk if it's just Sam himself who figured it out, to be honest. Sundowner is shown to know a whole lot about Raiden, child soldier training, his experience with VR, the Patriots – it's reasonable to think he'd know of his connections in Solis as well.

So yes, I believe Sundowner purposely sabotaged Armstrong there. He's a lot of things, but he ain't stupid.

On the topic of sabotage, the way he was "defending" the HQ as Raiden advanced up the building is quite something. Not feeling like booting up the game to get the screenshots, but if you look up at HQ in the beginning of file 5, the building is utterly shagged. The only structural damage Jack himself caused I can think of is slicing up the helipad and everything else is basically Sundowner ordering the security to bomb the hell out of their own skyscraper.

And I see why he'd do that. It's logical to grow resentful of the company and the man that's setting you up to either get thrown in prison or killed as part of their plan. He can't not know that it's the fate that awaits him, he's aware what Tecumseh entails and he knows that all the blame will be pinned on him. So he might as well make his swan song as bombastic and destructive as possible.

There's also a big chance that he's actually indentured to World Marshal much like a lot of it's contractors, and that tie is likely to be stronger than the average cyborg's, because custom chassis are EXPENSIVE. I personally interpret the way he became involved with Desperado and by extension World Marshal as Armstrong plucking him out of some metaphorical ditch and offering him a way to escape the crippled potato life he was forced into after his run-in with an IED. It's not a charity though, and the price is what I was talking about above.

That would also explain why he's such a good sport about losing to Raiden. He must have lived with the knowledge of the exact date his life would end, either literally or by being dragged into court, so he's already made his peace with it. The other Winds seem to have done so too, judging by resignation in their last words. Not Khamsin though, that dumbass was definitely in the dark and it shows.

So in conclusion, does Sundower have power? Over day to day operations of Desperado – yes, over his own fate – ha. Haha. No. In the grand scheme of things his death does not matter. All actual strategic decisions are made by Armstrong and other "guys in charge" whoever they may be, meanwhile Sundowner is just a figurehead to pin their actions on.

At least Raiden gave him the death he would have wanted. It is flattering to fall to the state of the art cyborg who suplexed a Metal Gear. But that's just my speculation. I hope there are some interesting thoughts to find here even if you don't agree with the overall picture.

[thewitcheslibrary]

Types of divination

Please note: Not all of them are going to be here. I will be covering ones that Beginner witches can use and learn as a starting point! This also isnt a guide on how to do it, its is just some ideas and what they are.

Tarot and cards-

People who are unfamiliar with divination may believe that reading Tarot cards means "predicting the future." However, most Tarot card readers will tell you that the cards are only a guideline, and the reader is simply interpreting the likely outcome based on the forces at work right now. Consider Tarot as a tool for self-awareness and contemplation, rather than "fortune telling." Here are some simple steps to get you started reading and utilising Tarot cards in your divinatory practice.

Norse Runes-

According to Norse epic sagas, Odin created the Runes as a gift to humanity a long time ago. These sacred and holy symbols were originally etched in stone. Over time, they grew into a collection of sixteen letters, each with a metaphorical and divinatory significance. Learn how to create your own set of Runes and read what they say.

Reading tea leaves-

People have utilised many different ways of divination from the beginning of time. One of the most recognised is the practice of reading tea leaves, often known as tasseography or tasseomancy. This divination method, while not as ancient as some of the other famous and well-known methods, appears to have originated in the 17th century.

Pendulum reading-

A pendulum is one of the most basic and easy types of divination. It's as simple as asking and answering yes/no questions. Although pendulums may be purchased commercially for between $15 and $60, they are simple to create on your own. Most people use crystals or stones, but you may use any object with some weight to it. There are various methods to utilise a pendulum for divination, and you'd be amazed what you may learn from "yes" and "no" replies. The secret is to learn to ask the appropriate questions.

Osteomancy-

For thousands of years, tribes throughout the world have used bones for divination, a practice known as osteomancy. While there are several approaches, the goal is usually the same: to predict the future using the signals revealed in the bones.

Numerology-

Numerology is a discipline that many Pagan spiritual groups utilise. According to the basic concepts of numerology, numbers have a tremendous degree of spiritual and magical importance. Some numbers are more strong and powerful than others, and combinations of numbers can be created for magical purposes. In addition to magical correspondences, numerals have planetary importance.

Intuition-

Intuition is the capacity to know things without being told. Many intuitives make outstanding Tarot card readers because their ability offers them an advantage when reading cards for clients. This is sometimes known as clairsentience. Of all psychic talents, intuition may be the most frequent.

[reigningqueenofwords]

Hardware Store

Word count: 4,014

Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d moved to town just weeks before after buying a small farm, and quickly got hired at the hardware store. Seemed a simple enough job for the small town, but would be a paycheck (which most of would likely go towards fixing up the farm). What he hadn’t anticipated was the influx of women coming in. Who really didn’t seem to need a damn thing, or even knew what to pretend to want so it wasn’t obvious what they were there for. Him . 

It was nearing closing, and he was close to snapping. He looked forward to locking those doors, clocking out, and hiding out in his house for two days. 

Pulling on the door to the hardware store, you inhaled deeply. You loved the hardware store. While you weren’t the type to use the power tools or anything, you did love their paints, superglue, and any number of metal pieces you used in your crafting. Not only that, but it reminded you of your father and grandfather. Both men were avid woodworkers and the smell of cut wood reminded you of them. 

“Oliver?” You called out, hoping to catch up with the older man before getting what you came for. 

“Not Oliver.” Dean grumbled from the register, making you look over. “And he’s not here. So, unless you want something, get out.” 

Your eyebrows shot up. “Well, excuse me.” You sassed back. “So rude.” You mumbled to yourself, moving to get some superglue. Your daughter wanted matching bows, and you didn’t want to disappoint her. While you moved to the isle, you wondered who the grumpy- yet attractive- man was. Oliver hadn’t mentioned hiring anyone, but you hadn’t been in the past couple weeks, and his wife did like business talk at Sunday dinners.

Once you had what you needed, you went to the register, grabbing a couple lollipops from the endcap. A little after dinner treat. Dean quietly rang you up, rolling his eyes at the simple purchase. 

“Do you judge all the customers that come through?” You asked. 

“Just the ones that clearly only came through because they heard about the new guy. Been a shit show all day.” 

That shocked you. “For your information, I actually come in here a great deal. I didn’t know about any new guy. And I actually did need super glue to make me and my daughter matching bows. Have a good night, and tell Oliver I’ll be in with Poppy and Charlie to see him soon.” Grabbing your small bag, you rushed out, cheeks on fire. 

Watching you go, Dean groaned. He shouldn’t have taken it out on you, and before he could go after you to apologize, he saw you get into a car. “Damn it.” He ran a hand down his face. Clearly you were close to Oliver, so he decided to call him. Give him a heads up that he’d snapped at you. Whoever you were. 

Five minutes later, the ‘open’ sign was flipped to ‘closed’, the lights were shut off, and Dean was in the back calling Oliver. “Hello?” 

“Hi, Oliver. It’s Dean.” He sighed. 

“Rough day at the store? We’re not set for a busy day for a couple weeks. Blueberry fest is coming up.” 

Dean quickly explained how the entire day went. “And then this woman came in, looking nothing like I’d expect someone walking into a hardware store who actually used this stuff to look. She was wearing a pink sundress and a bow in her hair!” He thought back to how pretty you were. “I, uh…was rude.” He groaned. “I snapped that I’m not Oliver and if she didn’t need anything to get out. Then when I rang her out she asked if I judged all the customers. I told her only the ones that come through because they heard about the new guy.” The tone of his voice made it clear that he felt bad. 

Shockingly, Oliver chuckled. “Oh, I have a feeling I know who that was. And I have a feeling she didn’t take that quietly.” 

A confused look crossed his face. “You’re not mad? You’re amused ?” He asked. “I expected to get fired.” 

“Tell me, did she buy two lollipops?” 

“Uh, yeah. Told me to tell you she would be in with Poppy and Charlie soon to see you.” He assumed Poppy was the daughter you mentioned, and Charlie was possibly a boyfriend? Husband?

“That would be Y/N. Known her since she was knee high on her daddy.” He was clearly fond of you, his voice gave it away. “She’s a feisty one, that’s for sure. Charlie is 13, Poppy is 9.” He explained. “Y/N comes in for crafting supplies. She sells them to pay for the Poppy’s dance class and soccer, then Charlie plays football.” 

Dean furrowed his brows. “What about their dad?” Why wasn’t he helping?

Oliver sighed. “Y/N and Danny were high school sweethearts. Got pregnant with Charlie young. Y/N was just 16, and Danny was 17. But, they both finished school, and got married. Danny enlisted in the military. Y/N stayed in town, not wanting to leave everyone. There was a training accident when she was pregnant with Poppy.” 

He didn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that. “Does she have a store or something? I should go apologize one of my days off.” 

“No, nothing that fancy. Usually just by word of mouth, but at this point everyone in town knows where to go for homemade bows and jewelry. Sometimes I’ll have some at the store, too.” Oliver explained. “You’d be amazed how many men who come through snag one for a daughter, a niece, or a granddaughter.” He went on. “Listen, come to Sunday dinner. The Mrs. always makes more than enough. Y/N comes by with the kids. I can introduce the two of you and you can apologize.”

Dean chewed on his lip for a minute. “Only if I can bring something.” He was raised to never show up empty handed. 

“Grab some cherry pie pops from the store. The kids love them. Y/N makes them from scratch now and then, but she’s been busy lately. It’ll be a nice surprise.” 

“I think I can do that.” Dean nodded to himself, making a mental note to also buy you and Oliver’s wife some flowers. 

Come Sunday, you had pushed your interaction with Dean to the back of your mind. “Alright guys, we’re here!” You smiled as they got excited, jumping out of the car as soon as you’d parked it. Charlie was wearing his football jersey, excited for the new season. It had just started the past week, and Poppy was wearing her favorite dress. It was nearing too small, and it was bittersweet. You watched them from the car for a moment before getting out of the car yourself. 

As you approached the door, the sound of the kids excitedly talking to Oliver and Peggy was drowned out by the sound of a loud engine. Confused, you turned to see Dean parking next to your car. 

“Hi, sweetheart.” He smiled shyly as he slid out. 

“That’s a big jump from the grumpy attitude you had last time I saw you.” You raised an eyebrow at him. 

He leaned in the car to grab something, and you were surprised to see two bouquets of flowers and a bag from the grocery store. “These are for you. I’m sorry. I had a long day and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.” 

Biting your lip, you took the flowers. “Thank you. I think I can accept your apology.” You could understand long days. 

“Mommy? Who’s that?” Came the voice of Poppy. “Is he your boyfriend? Hannah says her mommy’s new boyfriend likes to give her flowers because it makes her smile.” She tilted her head as Charlie stepped out on the porch behind her. 

Your cheeks felt hot at that, turning pink. “No, Pops.” You shook your head. “Grandpa Oliver hired him at the hardware store. He was grumpy with me when I went in the other day to get superglue to make our bows. He’s just saying he’s sorry.” You explained. “His name is Dean…”

“Winchester.” He offered when you glanced at him. 

“Ooooh. Okay.” Poppy nodded. “Want to see my bow? Mommy’s matches!” She asked as she ran over to Dean, not giving him a chance to answer. She spun around and pointed to it. It was pink and blue with a lollipop charm in the middle. 

“Oh, that’s pretty.” Dean grinned down at her. 

“Are you the guy that just bought that old farm?” Charlie finally spoke up. “Tyler said anyone who bought that place had to be crazy. It’s haunted.” 

Dean chucked. “That would be me.” His father had passed and left him and Sam the family home and a life insurance policy. Sam and Jess and the kids, so he asked Dean if he could just take the house, and Dean could take all the money. It had been just enough to buy the farm, get him out there, and have a month or so for bills. Now he just wanted to fix it up, and start running it like a real farm. 

Poppy’s eyes were wide as she looked at Dean. “Aren’t you scared of the ghosts?! What if they’re cowboy ghosts?!” She gasped. 

He crouched so that he could be eye to eye to her. “Good thing I like cowboys!” He assured her. “And I guess I’ll have to just learn to deal with the ghosts if they are there.” 

You watched, a bit surprised at how well he dealt with Poppy. “What if you scare them away and they come to our house?” She asked, clearly worried. 

He furrowed his brows. “Why would they go to your house?” He asked, confused. 

“We’re your neighbors. That yellow house on the way to your farm? That’s us.” You told him. 

“Are y’all gonna stay out here all evening, or come eat?” Peggy teased, poking her head out of the door.

“You can sit next to me, Mr. Dean!” Poppy took his hand to tug him towards the house. 

“Well, I just got the best seat in the house.” He let himself be led. “Hi, Peggy. Thank you for having me.” He offered her the flowers he’d gotten her. 

Dinner had gone well, and you’d seen Dean a handful of times at the hardware store over the following month. It was nearing the end of September when you had to work late one day. You’d told Charlie to watch Poppy after the two of them got off the bus, and you’d be home just an hour later. 

That led to Charlie and Poppy playing hide and seek. Poppy was always finding new places to hide, surprising both you and Charlie. Charlie had been looking for Poppy for a few minutes when he heard her crying. “Pops?” He called out, panicked. 

“Charlie!” Her voice was muffled. “I can’t get out.” 

“Where are you?!” He was standing in your room, looking around. He knew she wasn’t in your standing wardrobe, as they both knew it had belonged to your Grandmother. It wasn’t something to play in. 

“Mommy’s closet!” 

He ran towards it, moving clothes around. His eyes landed on a little door. He tried to pull on the little handle and it came off in his hand. His heart rate skyrocketed at that. “I’m going to run to get Mr. Dean!” He called to her. “I can’t get it open. I’ll be RIGHT back.” 

“Please hurry.” She sniffled. 

Dean wiped some sweat off his brow as he rested on his ankles. He was repairing the stairs on the front porch, as he’d fallen through one the day before. “Mr. Dean!” He heard Charlie call out. Standing quickly, he turned and rushed towards the teenager. He knew that voice. The scared big brother voice. 

“Charlie? What’s going on?!” He asked, putting his hands on Charlie’s shoulders. “Breathe.” He kept his voice calm, not wanting to make things worse. 

“Mom asked me to watch Pops for an hour after school. We were playing hide and seek as usual, but Pops found somewhere new to hide. A little room in the back of mom’s closet. She can’t get out, and when I tried to open it…the handle came off in my hand.” He was tearing up. “She sounds so scared.” 

“Let me get a crowbar.” He ran to grab it before the two of them ran back to your house. “Show me where.” He told Charlie, following him to your room. “Poppy? Sweetheart, I’m gonna pry the door open, okay?” 

“Please hurry! I’m scared.” She told him, breaking his heart. 

Dean worked quickly, Charlie watching from just outside the closest. As soon as the door popped open, he dropped the crowbar and opened his arms for her. Poppy scrambled out, scraping her arm on the tip of a nail that was sticking out. She ignored it, hugging Dean and crying. “I got you.” He rubbed her back, standing up. “Come on, let’s go clean up your arm, princess.” He told her. “Charlie, do you have a first aid kit?” 

“Yeah, of course.” He nodded. 

“Can you get it and meet me in the kitchen?” 

Walking in your front door, you kicked off your shoes and froze. “Charlie?! Poppy?!” You called out, wondering why you smelt food cooking. 

Charlie came out, wearing an apron. “Hi, mom!” 

You crossed your arms. “Charles Daniel.” You said sternly. “What is the rule about cooking when I’m not home?” He knew that for the time being he was only supposed to use the microwave.

“Sorry, mom.” Dean said playfully as he stepped out, Poppy on his back. “They wanted to help me.” 

“I’m lost. Why are you here?” You blinked. 

“Me and Pops were playing hide and seek. Pops got stuck in the little room thing in your closet. I ran to get Mr. Dean.” Charlie explained. “He bandaged up her arm because she got a scratch, too.” 

You looked from your son to where Dean was. “Thank you so much.” You were thankful that he’d been home. “For saving Poppy and starting dinner. I really appreciate it.” 

“No problem.” He grinned. “Charlie started his homework, too. He’s been working on it when Poppy helps me.” 

It was hard not to swoon at Dean acting so fatherly with them. “Wow, next you’ll tell me you hung up the painting in the living room I’ve been meaning to hang up for two months.” You said playfully. When he winked, your eyebrows shot up. Dean made his way back to the kitchen as you rushed to look and saw that he did in fact hang up your painting. “Oh wow.” You were so used to doing everything yourself, and had for years now. “Do you like cake? Or pie?” You asked as you stepped into the kitchen. “I’d like to bake you something as thanks.” 

“Love me some pie.” He chuckled, keeping an eye on Poppy as she stirred the sauce. “Hope spaghetti and meatballs is okay. I just put garlic bread in the oven, too.” He took the spoon from Poppy before setting her on the ground. “Thanks for your help, squirt.” 

“Mr. Dean said he’d come to my winter dance recital this year!” She told you, clearly excited for that. “I told him I really hope to be Clara this year, but I’d be okay if I’m not.” She’d been dancing since she was three, and had her eye on that role since she was five. You told her she would get there one day. 

“That’s so sweet. The proceeds from the tickets go towards the dance studio. Any surprise repairs, or little parties here and there.” You explained. “Another local mom helps with the costumes, and I help with the accessories. It helps keep costs down for the actual dance classes.” And you really loved being able to help.

“Well, let them know I’m good with my hands.” He offered, looking in the cabinets for the plates. “I can help with any repairs that are needed. I’ve rebuilt my car from the ground up a couple times.” He was clearly proud of that. Taking the plates out, he handed them to Charlie to set the table. “Let me get this to the table and then I’ll get out of your hair.” He smiled at you, knowing you likely wanted time to relax with the kids. 

You smiled softly at him. “Stay. You made something that smells amazing, got Pops out of the little cubby, and cleaned up her arm. Please. Stay. Or I’ll get this one to bat her eyelashes at you.” You said playfully, motioning to Poppy, who was clearly ready to do so. 

Laughing, Dean nodded. “Okay, okay, I’ll stay.” He caved easily. 

A few weeks later it was storming really badly. Thankfully it was a Saturday morning, so the kids were home and you didn’t have to work. You couldn’t even see your car from the front windows. “Guys, let’s find our storm supplies to make sure they’re easily accessible.” Every time it got this bad, you’d put everything on the kitchen table to be safe. After that, the three of you built a fort in the living room. 

You had just gotten the fort finished when there was a very loud knock on your door. The kids poked their heads out of the fort to see you open the door to a soaking wet Dean. “Mr. Dean!” Poppy gasped. 

“Uh, hi.” He chuckled. “So, a tree fell on my house.” He said awkwardly. “I was wondering if maybe I could hang out here until the storm lets up and I can access the damage?” He ran a hand over his wet hair. 

It took a moment for his question to register. You had been too busy trying not to oogle him. “Oh, uh. Yeah. Of course. Let me get you a towel.” You stepped aside to let him in. 

“I appreciate it.” He didn’t move too far in, just enough for you to shut the door. “Cool, a fort. My little brother used to love making forts when it stormed.” He turned his attention to the kids. 

While he chatted with them, you went to your hall closet to grab him a towel. Chewing on your lip, you made your way into your room and crouched by your standing wardrobe. In the bottom drawer there was some of your late husband’s clothes. You just couldn’t bring yourself to get rid of all of them when he died. It had been eight years since you’d opened that drawer, but you couldn’t let Dean stay in wet jeans. Opening the drawer was bitter sweet. There were a couple pairs of his favorite pajama pants, a couple t-shirts, and a coat. Grabbing a pair of flannel pajama pants and a black t-shirt, you quickly shut the drawer and went back to the living room. “Here. So you don’t have to stay in those wet clothes. I can toss those up on the line I have in the basement.” You handed him the towel and clothes. “These were Danny’s, my late husband.” You told him when he looked a bit confused that you had men’s clothing. 

His eyes shot to yours. “Are you sure?” 

“Yeah, I'm sure. They’ve been sitting in a drawer for years. This way they’re getting some use.” You assured him. 

Dean went to change in the bathroom and came out with his wet clothes wrapped in the towel. 

The power went out about an hour after Dean showed up, and you went to get the lanterns for the fort. Thankfully it was getting closer to bedtime, so you hoped that by the time the morning came…the storm would be over. And hopefully his house wasn’t too badly damaged. Once Poppy and Charlie fell asleep, you made your way out of the fort, Dean right behind you. “I’ll show you to the guest room.” You told him as you handed him a flashlight. 

“I really appreciate this.” He couldn’t tell you that enough. 

“If your house isn’t safe to live in you can use our guest room.” You told him. “This way you don’t have to stay at the motel in town.” Who would want to live in a motel? 

“I won’t be in the way?” 

You shook your head. “I work full time, they both have school, then Charlie has football practice weekly, then his games, Poppy has dance twice a week. So there might be days we’re really not here much.” Your weeks were usually pretty busy, but you wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Dean was surprised you weren’t asleep on your feet all the time. “Do you get any time for yourself?” 

Stopping in front of the guest room, you nodded. “Yeah. I’ll take a bubble bath now and then, I’ll read while they do their stuff, things like that.” It wasn’t anything major, but that was your life. 

The next morning, you were slowly waking up when the smell of bacon reached you. You sat up, panicked, when you remembered that Dean was there. That relaxed you a bit. Slipping out of bed, you made your way downstairs. You could hear the radio and Poppy’s laughter. You couldn’t help but smile. Hearing your kids laugh was your favorite sound in the world. 

Dean was dancing around the kitchen, which was what was making Poppy laugh so much. Charlie wasn’t in the room, so you assumed he was up in his room until breakfast was done cooking. “Mommy!” Poppy ran over to hug you. “Mr. Dean is making breakfast! Bacon, eggs, and pancakes!” 

“We had bacon?” You chuckled, trying to remember if maybe you bought some and forgot. 

“I ran over to my place first thing this morning.” Dean explained, flipping a pancake. “I figured if I was gonna make breakfast I could use my bacon and eggs.” You were a single mom who sold bows to help pay for Poppy’s dance, why not use his own food instead of yours? 

You smiled at that. “Well, thank you.” It was sweet. “How’d your house look?” 

He shook his head. “I didn’t get that much of a look, but I may need to take you up on your offer to use your guest room.” He hated to put you out, but he did look forward to seeing you more. “Hey, Poppy, can you go get Charlie?” He glanced at her. 

“Sure!” She took off, running to get him. 

“She likes you.” You leaned against the doorframe. 

“Well, I happen to like her, too. She’s cute.” He plated the last pancake. “I happen to think her mom is pretty, too.” He glanced at you, hoping he hadn’t read things wrong. 

Blushing, you smiled and looked down. “Her mom thinks you’re pretty cute.” You flirted back, feeling like a teenager again. It had been some time since you’d flirted with anyone. 

Dean grinned at that. “Would her mom like to go on a date with me some time?” His tone was hopeful. 

“She would.” You answered right before you heard the kids coming back. “Wash your hands, guys.” 

They went to do that, and you helped Dean get the food on the table. It felt so natural to move around the kitchen and dining room like that with him. Part of you wondered if this is what it would have felt like with Danny if he were alive, but you pushed that down. “This smells so good!” Poppy wiggled in her seat. “Thank you, Mr. Dean!” 

“You’re welcome, kiddo.” He told her happily. 

Each of you filled your plates, chatting about anything that came to mind. It was by far one of the best Sunday mornings you could remember having in a long time, and you found yourself hoping that it wouldn’t be the last one.

[echojulietfoxtrot]

Okay, everyone's had a few days to be sad. But the world didn't end, so there is stuff to be done. Mid terms are in 2 years.

This post isn't going to tell you anything other people haven't done better or in more detail, and I'm not even American, so what the fuck are you listening to me for, but I think it might be useful to somebody as a place to start, and I think it's useful to keep in mind that none of us are helpless - no matter how much it might benefit somebody else to let you think so.

I'll add to it as and when I can.

NOW

Check your ballot. Tell everyone you know to check on their ballots. Spread the word to everyone you can possibly tell to check their ballots. The Presidential election is absolutely not going to be reversed, but local races and initiatives can be decided by twenty, a dozen, two votes. The window's closing on this by now, so check into this immediately if you haven't already. And if there is any possibility for a recount where it might achieve something, make noise for one.

You would be absolutely amazed how much harm can be spared and how much good can be done at the Parks & Rec level, no matter what's happening up top. Do not waste the chance to make friction for bad guys later on, or lay down some tools for the good guys in advance.

Then, if you have a Dem Senator, call their office and urge them to confirm all Biden's judicial nominees now, right now, ASAP. Here's a rough call script.

Btw mid terms are in two years.

NEXT

Spend the next two months -

Buying a little extra boring ass shelf stable food and water on your grocery runs, and build up as much food security as you can. You're probably not gonna need it, but it's good to have, even only as a hedge against inflation or unreliable weather/disaster relief responses.

Stock up on medication you might need if you can. Organize whatever procedures you might need done if you can, including contraceptive measures. And find a reason to need a Morning After Pill or two in the next few weeks, somebody you care about might be real glad you did.

Consider making any big ticket purchases that will be affected by proposed tariffs (electronics etc), or any... slightly less conventional things you want to buy, now - but otherwise it would be a good time to lay some money aside if you can.

Get in the habit of paying for things in cash, and limiting how much information on your habits are out there. Stash a little cash somewhere, for if you want to buy something less visibly in future, too.

Do your homework about your digital footprint. Accounts, posts, doxxable clues, data, behavioral info, browsers, wifi links, cookies, consumer history, always-on "Smart" speakers and devices, think about all of it. Your phone is telling everyone where you are at all times whether the Location stuff is on or not - get in the habit of leaving it at home, so that suddenly not having it is not, in itself, a sign of anything. Your fitness wearables are mapping your entire lifestyle - it is effectively recording where you work, what time you finish, what routes you take, what stores you go to, where your friends live, where you go for recreation, where your family lives and what your relationship is like with them (where's your fitbit at Thanksgiving, Christmas etc?). Don't use fingerprint or facial recognition for anything, ever, if you can help it - apart from cataloguing your biometrics, it is much easier for a third party, police included, to use these to access your stuff than a password. It probably goes without saying, do not digitally document your menstrual cycle in any way.

Figure out what channels you can use in future to retain access to as much as possible if someone decides you shouldn't have it, or wants to know if you look for it. VPNs are a starting point, but not the end point. Do your homework on this now, before you need to know it.

Look into securing documentation that might be of use in future, this includes property, legal stuff like Power of Attorney, passports etc. (Though that doesn't necessarily mean carrying it at all times to everything, just sayin'.)

What's your ACA status? Are you currently availing of absolutely everything you're currently entitled to? If not, work on it. Government resources are always harder to take away from you once you're getting them than to deny you outright.

If there's any gay shit you like or want preserved, it would be a good time to buy/download/back it up. This includes movies, fics, books. It would also be a good time to seek out and subscribe to independent and non-digital gay media, zines, etc, and get to know your in-person scenes. You might be surprised how much stuff still exists and happens in ways that are invisible to the internet, gay and otherwise.

Don't forget that mid terms are in 2 years.

THEN

The mid terms are in 2 years.

Mid terms are 2 years away. Which means the campaigns for them start in a year, which means the work for them starts now.

All else aside, Democrat flips elsewhere in the government structure at that point would make it way, way harder for them to keep smashing everything, and there is work that you can do towards making that happen. For better and sometimes worse, the American political system is a very big and very awkward machine, and King Dipshit and his cronies cannot wave a magic wand to get their way everywhere all the time as a result. Look into your immediate local political scene, and figure out what you can do for it.

You might be getting sick of everyone talking about "building community". What this usually means in practice is firstly, seeking out local or neighboring orgs and groups that are doing what you want done, and joining them; or else, starting them yourself.

That might sound daunting, but it's not hard to start an interest group, just very annoying early on. You'll have to do a lot more printing than you might expect. You're going to have to deal with some deeply irritating people who are, nonetheless, very good at getting good shit done, and you're going to have to learn that's a You problem to deal with.

I'm involved in a couple of local groups in my country and it is WILD how much even one person can get done purely because nobody else gives enough of a shit about boring small potatoes stuff to notice or oppose it. That can be a blessing and a curse, so make it the first one.

Apart from this stuff being generally good, it will stop you losing your fucking mind. No, you're not going to community garden your way out of this one, sure, but that community garden might stop you letting the bullshit beat you into the ground before you can do something more important down the line. And it might introduce you to the girl who knows somebody with the thing that can do the shit you need around then too; it might teach you a lot of practical and psychological stuff you'll be glad of sometime.

It might even teach you how to get much more important things done in your local political infrastructure, who is on your side, who isn't, how to get the best from either - some of the most valuable shit I've learned about my little universe was picked up in the course of volunteering for a haunted house.

I am as guilty as everyone else as looking at the outlook and saying fuck it, bad guys won, but that is legitimately irrational no matter where you live. They never win, not outside of stories, because real life doesn't end like a story does. There is stuff to be done to make life more bearable than it would be otherwise, more bearable until it's possible to make it even better. There is so much stuff to get doing, instead of just feeling bad.

[pansy-placebo]

This is your sign to get That Thing that you've thought would be useful for a long time, but didn't think you should get it for whatever reason. This is the sign to get that thing.

I bought a shower chair, a phone holder for the shower, and a powered scrubber. And my life is forever changed.

Context: I've been pretty open about how, for the past year or so, I've been increasingly struggling with bathing. I used to shower roughly every other day, and gradually that became about once a week, and then further, and then to the point where I genuinely don't know how often I've been bathing. It's just been deodorant and dry shampoo for a long, long time.

This is because I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and dissociative issues. Everything way is way more mentally and physically taxing with CFS, and the dissociation makes it doubly hard to focus. My phone would be blasting some video outside the shower to keep me present, but afterwards I'd still be exhausted for at least the rest of the day.

I got around the problem a little by taking "spit baths" or "bird baths", basically washing the important parts in the sink. Then I'd use deodorant for the rest (which, as long as I semi-regularly changed my clothes, went well /gen). I went a long time using primarily these methods, as it uses overall less energy than a full shower.

But smelling good and being basically hygienic ≠ feeling clean. I was getting the important parts, but I only ever feel clean when I've thoroughly showered.

So. After a great deal of consideration, I decided to get a shower chair and a water-resistant phone holder, and while I was on the webpage, I saw a neat powered body scrubber thingy I've always wanted, and ordered it in the spur of the moment. The phone holder arrived yesterday, the chair and scrubber today.

I've included some reference pictures for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about

And today, I finally took a shower with all the little things I've wanted. The phone holder and the shower chair and the electric scrubber thingy and. Holy shit. I feel better after this shower than any shower I've had in well over a year. Maybe even two years at this point.

It was a little awkward at first, I'm not used to sitting in the shower, but once I got used to everything it was an overall amazing experience.

I actually started laughing at some point, because all those things I've wanted, but for some reason had been afraid of getting, made it so much easier that it felt absurd and delightful and I enjoyed bathing for once!!

Once the shower was over, I grabbed the towel and sat on the shower chair to dry, something new for me. And, once I got out, I immediately got changed into fresh clothes instead of spending hours laying in bed recuperating.

I went and made myself dinner just now!!! Granted, it was just microwave baked beans, but I can never cook after bathing!!!

Anyway I'm sitting here drying and cozy in my usual Warm Things and feeling very, very happy about my purchases.

The moral of this story is that if you have the ability to get something that you suspect will make your life easier, get it.

It doesn't matter whether you're sick or not, it doesn't matter if you're diagnosed, it doesn't matter if you can technically get by without it. It doesn't matter if the thing is for "old people" and you're young, it doesn't matter if it's for disabled people and you're not sure if you "count" because you "only have" [the mental or physical issue that's affecting you].

Get the fucking thing. If it will make your life better, you should get it. It won't be a waste of money if it makes you less miserable, whatever it is.

Do not deny yourself the tools you need to live comfortably and happily.

You have my permission and my endorsement, if that means anything to you.

Xxx. Pansy

P.s. stay tuned because I'll be getting a powered wheelchair or scooter in the coming months. The moment I figure out how to do it, I will. I should have gotten one when I was first diagnosed but I didn't. I will not be repeating my past mistakes and denying myself the tools I need to live comfortably and happily.

[mushroomates]

the fellowship at a hardware store, from someone who works at a hardware store:

sam: is in the nursery!! goes straight to the discount/dying plants and piles his cart full of wilted and sad plants. likes to rescue the houseplants first, has a soft spot for perennials and citrus trees. is a nightmare to check out but is very sweet about it. dirt and leaves everywhere. like, everywhere. they have to sweep after he’s gone. surprisingly strong and hauls big bags of dirt.

frodo: enjoys home improvement!! likes to wander carpeting and organization, hunts for good deals and keeps tabs on the sales weekends. he likes to peruse the shower curtains and closet accessories. likes to refurbish old furniture he finds off the side of the road- currently fixing up an antique dresser to put in the master bedroom.

merry: doorknobs, handles, dresser nobs. he likes to pick out the interesting and antique ones and customize his home with them. he really likes the oddly shaped ones, he has one starfish and one pickle on his nightstand table. likes to joke about touching all the knobs and fiddling with the knockers.

pippin: is lost in the lighting department. he’s staring up at all the pretty lights and hypnotizing fans. likes the remote controlled lights, enjoys messing with the demos. also likes collecting paint chips. (pippins also the kind of person to get really high and shit in the display toilets.) does not buy anything, maybe some beef jerky and skittles at the check outs.

boromir: this man has like 80 projects going on and is remarkably proficient in every conceivable area featured in the store. he’s here so much people think he works here. he kinda does. he’s happy to advise you, lead you to products, and lifts heavy things for little old ladies and swooning maidens. he’s happy to grab the things on the highest shelf as well as carry those bigs bags of dirt out to your care. he is just a naturally pure and helpful soul. <3

aragorn: has lost himself in scrap wood. straight to the lumber yard, straight to the pile of damaged and recycled wood. once a month, he comes and loads up as much as it will fit in a pickup truck. no one knows what he does with it but he keeps coming back. there are several theories around the store. either he’s building a bunker, has a side hustle by reselling it, makes massive fires or he does wood work. alternatively, he’s a homeless man building his own cabin in the woods so he can live away from society. that’s one’s probably the closest.

gandalf: mixes his own paint. he doesn’t work there but somehow he keeps getting back there and making his own custom colors. was known to pull a miracle and turn gray paint back into white. no one knows how he did this. likes to camp out in the seasonal section. enjoys lounging on couches and swings for long periods of time.

gimli: is so excited to walk into the tools section. wants all the toys. likes power tools in a way that’s both funny and scary. really likes chainsaws and leaf blowers, possibly because they pose the biggest threat to legolas. often gets flagged out the door because no one person needs that many tools and he must be up to something. he always beeps out the door because inevitably someone forgot to take off one of the sensors of his many, many tools. he used to be nicer about this but lately has lost patience with always being stopped out the door, and often will make a show of waving his receipt before leaving.

legolas: spends a good amount of time in the garden. i imagine he gets enamored with the fountains and ponds rather quickly, also likes the statues and fun pots. also, wanders through the garden and samples the plants. by samples i mean eat small bites of it, and if he finds the quality satisfactory he will purchase it. this is rarely the case and he often just goes around eating small bites of houseplants.