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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents"

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (TOMORROW, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology – alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins – would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers. Fears that key workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would leave for a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of the services they worked so hard to build:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

When those constraints melted away – thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce – the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.

The effects of this are all around us. In This Is Your Phone On Feminism, the great Maria Farrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones and mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a magnificent paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421

In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents. This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to figure out how to build a new digital space where technology served users.

A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, in which case, the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:

https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/

Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

Now – as Berjon points out – you might not know exactly what you want. Like, you know that you want the privacy guarantees of TLS (the difference between "http" and "https") but not really understand the internal cryptographic mysteries involved. Your user agent might detect evidence of shenanigans indicating that your session isn't secure, and choose not to show you the web-page you requested.

This is only superficially paradoxical. Yes, you asked your browser for a web-page. Yes, the browser defied your request and declined to show you that page. But you also asked your browser to protect you from security defects, and your browser made a judgment call and decided that security trumped delivery of the page. No paradox needed.

But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise. Like, maybe you're trying to access your own website, and you know that the security problem the browser has detected is the result of your own forgetful failure to renew your site's cryptographic certificate. At that point, you can tell your browser, "Thanks for having my back, pal, but actually this time it's fine. Stand down and show me that webpage."

That's your user agent serving you, too.

User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.

However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:

https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

Mobile phones assign persistent tracking IDs to their owners and transmit them without permission (to its credit, Apple recently switch to an opt-in system for transmitting these IDs) (but to its detriment, Apple offers no opt-out from its own tracking, and actively lies about the very existence of this tracking):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

An Android device running Chrome and sitting inert, with no user interaction, transmits location data to Google every five minutes. This is the "resting heartbeat" of surveillance for an Android device. Ask that device to do any work for you and its pulse quickens, until it is emitting a nearly continuous stream of information about your activities to Google:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

These faithless user agents both reflect and enable enshittification. The locked-down nature of the hardware and operating systems for Android and Ios devices means that manufacturers – and their business partners – have an arsenal of legal weapons they can use to block anyone who gives you a tool to modify the device's behavior. These weapons are generically referred to as "IP rights" which are, broadly speaking, the right to control the conduct of a company's critics, customers and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

This is – in Jay Freeman's memorable phrase – "felony contempt of business model." While more than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, thus overriding the manufacturer's defaults to make their browser a more loyal agent, no app users have modified their apps with ad-blockers.

The first step of making such a blocker, reverse-engineering the app, creates criminal liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in sufficient IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it (no wonder every company wants to coerce you into using its app, rather than its website).

If you know that increasing the invasiveness of the ads on your web-page could trigger mass installations of ad-blockers by your users, it becomes irrational and self-defeating to ramp up your ads' invasiveness. The possibility of interoperability acts as a constraint on tech bosses' impulse to enshittify their products.

The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

This has been tacitly understood by technologists since the web's earliest days and has been reaffirmed even as enshittification increased. Berjon quotes extensively from "The Internet Is For End-Users," AKA Internet Architecture Board RFC 8890:

Defining the user agent role in standards also creates a virtuous cycle; it allows multiple implementations, allowing end users to switch between them with relatively low costs (…). This creates an incentive for implementers to consider the users' needs carefully, which are often reflected into the defining standards. The resulting ecosystem has many remaining problems, but a distinguished user agent role provides an opportunity to improve it.

And the W3C's Technical Architecture Group echoes these sentiments in "Web Platform Design Principles," which articulates a "Priority of Constituencies" that is supposed to be central to the W3C's mission:

User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

But the W3C's commitment to faithful agents is contingent on its own members' commitment to these principles. In 2017, the W3C finalized "EME," a standard for blocking mods that interact with streaming videos. Nominally aimed at preventing copyright infringement, EME also prevents users from choosing to add accessibility add-ons that beyond the ones the streaming service permits. These services may support closed captioning and additional narration of visual elements, but they block tools that adapt video for color-blind users or prevent strobe effects that trigger seizures in users with photosensitive epilepsy.

The fight over EME was the most contentious struggle in the W3C's history, in which the organization's leadership had to decide whether to honor the "priority of constituencies" and make a standard that allowed users to override manufacturers, or whether to facilitate the creation of faithless agents specifically designed to thwart users' desires on behalf of manufacturers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This fight was settled in favor of a handful of extremely large and powerful companies, over the objections of a broad collection of smaller firms, nonprofits representing users, academics and other parties agitating for a web built on faithful agents. This coincided with the W3C's operating budget becoming entirely dependent on the very large sums its largest corporate members paid.

W3C membership is on a sliding scale, based on a member's size. Nominally, the W3C is a one-member, one-vote organization, but when a highly concentrated collection of very high-value members flex their muscles, W3C leadership seemingly perceived an existential risk to the organization, and opted to sacrifice the faithfulness of user agents in service to the anti-user priorities of its largest members.

For W3C's largest corporate members, the fight was absolutely worth it. The W3C's EME standard transformed the web, making it impossible to ship a fully featured web-browser without securing permission – and a paid license – from one of the cartel of companies that dominate the internet. In effect, Big Tech used the W3C to secure the right to decide who would compete with them in future, and how:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Enshittification arises when the everyday mediocre sociopaths who run tech companies are freed from the constraints that act against them. When the web – and its browsers – were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the W3C to secure even more dominance. As the web turned into Tom Eastman's "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four," that kind of collusion became much easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In arguing for faithful agents, Berjon associates himself with the group of scholars, regulators and activists who call for user agents to serve as "information fiduciaries." Mostly, information fiduciaries come up in the context of user privacy, with the idea that entities that hold a user's data would have the obligation to put the user's interests ahead of their own. Think of a lawyer's fiduciary duty in respect of their clients, to give advice that reflects the client's best interests, even when that conflicts with the lawyer's own self-interest. For example, a lawyer who believes that settling a case is the best course of action for a client is required to tell them so, even if keeping the case going would generate more billings for the lawyer and their firm.

For a user agent to be faithful, it must be your fiduciary. It must put your interests ahead of the interests of the entity that made it or operates it. Browsers, email clients, and other internet software that served as a fiduciary would do things like automatically blocking tracking (which most email clients don't do, especially webmail clients made by companies like Google, who also sell advertising and tracking).

Berjon contemplates a legally mandated fiduciary duty, citing Lindsey Barrett's "Confiding in Con Men":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3354129

He describes a fiduciary duty as a remedy for the enforcement failures of EU's GDPR, a solidly written, and dismally enforced, privacy law. A legally backstopped duty for agents to be fiduciaries would also help us distinguish good and bad forms of "innovation" – innovation in ways of thwarting a user's will are always bad.

Now, the tech giants insist that they are already fiduciaries, and that when they thwart a user's request, that's more like blocking access to a page where the encryption has been compromised than like HAL9000's "I can't let you do that, Dave." For example, when Louis Barclay created "Unfollow Everything," he (and his enthusiastic users) found that automating the process of unfollowing every account on Facebook made their use of the service significantly better:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html

When Facebook shut the service down with blood-curdling legal threats, they insisted that they were simply protecting users from themselves. Sure, this browser automation tool – which just automatically clicked links on Facebook's own settings pages – seemed to do what the users wanted. But what if the user interface changed? What if so many users added this feature to Facebook without Facebook's permission that they overwhelmed Facebook's (presumably tiny and fragile) servers and crashed the system?

These arguments have lately resurfaced with Ethan Zuckerman and Knight First Amendment Institute's lawsuit to clarify that "Unfollow Everything 2.0" is legal and doesn't violate any of those "felony contempt of business model" laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/

Sure, Zuckerman seems like a good guy, but what if he makes a mistake and his automation tool does something you don't want? You, the Facebook user, are also a nice guy, but let's face it, you're also a naive dolt and you can't be trusted to make decisions for yourself. Those decisions can only be made by Facebook, whom we can rely upon to exercise its authority wisely.

Other versions of this argument surfaced in the debate over the EU's decision to mandate interoperability for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would let you switch from, say, Whatsapp to Signal and still send messages to your Whatsapp contacts.

There are some good arguments that this could go horribly awry. If it is rushed, or internally sabotaged by the EU's state security services who loathe the privacy that comes from encrypted messaging, it could expose billions of people to serious risks.

But that's not the only argument that DMA opponents made: they also argued that even if interoperable messaging worked perfectly and had no security breaches, it would still be bad for users, because this would make it impossible for tech giants like Meta, Google and Apple to spy on message traffic (if not its content) and identify likely coordinated harassment campaigns. This is literally the identical argument the NSA made in support of its "metadata" mass-surveillance program: "Reading your messages might violate your privacy, but watching your messages doesn't."

This is obvious nonsense, so its proponents need an equally obviously intellectually dishonest way to defend it. When called on the absurdity of "protecting" users by spying on them against their will, they simply shake their heads and say, "You just can't understand the burdens of running a service with hundreds of millions or billions of users, and if I even tried to explain these issues to you, I would divulge secrets that I'm legally and ethically bound to keep. And even if I could tell you, you wouldn't understand, because anyone who doesn't work for a Big Tech company is a naive dolt who can't be trusted to understand how the world works (much like our users)."

Not coincidentally, this is also literally the same argument the NSA makes in support of mass surveillance, and there's a very useful name for it: scalesplaining.

Now, it's totally true that every one of us is capable of lapses in judgment that put us, and the people connected to us, at risk (my own parents gave their genome to the pseudoscience genetic surveillance company 23andme, which means they have my genome, too). A true information fiduciary shouldn't automatically deliver everything the user asks for. When the agent perceives that the user is about to put themselves in harm's way, it should throw up a roadblock and explain the risks to the user.

But the system should also let the user override it.

This is a contentious statement in information security circles. Users can be "socially engineered" (tricked), and even the most sophisticated users are vulnerable to this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

The only way to be certain a user won't be tricked into taking a course of action is to forbid that course of action under any circumstances. If there is any means by which a user can flip the "are you very sure?" circuit-breaker back on, then the user can be tricked into using that means.

This is absolutely true. As you read these words, all over the world, vulnerable people are being tricked into speaking the very specific set of directives that cause a suspicious bank-teller to authorize a transfer or cash withdrawal that will result in their life's savings being stolen by a scammer:

https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process.

Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.

This is broadly true of any system intended to control users at scale – beyond a certain point, additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

At this point, we've had a couple of decades' worth of experience with technological "walled gardens" in which corporate executives get to override their users' decisions about how the system should work, even when that means reaching into the users' own computer and compelling it to thwart the user's desire. The record is inarguable: while companies often use those walls to lock bad guys out of the system, they also use the walls to lock their users in, so that they'll be easy pickings for the tech company that owns the system:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

This is neatly predicted by enshittification's theory of constraints: when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.

What's more, the mere possibility that you can override the way the system works acts as a disciplining force on corporate executives, forcing them to reckon with your priorities even when these are counter to their shareholders' interests. If Facebook is genuinely worried that an "Unfollow Everything" script will break its servers, it can solve that by giving users an unfollow everything button of its own design. But so long as Facebook can sue anyone who makes an "Unfollow Everything" tool, they have no reason to give their users such a button, because it would give them more control over their Facebook experience, including the controls needed to use Facebook less.

It's been more than 20 years since Seth Schoen and I got a demo of Microsoft's first "trusted computing" system, with its "remote attestations," which would let remote servers demand and receive accurate information about what kind of computer you were using and what software was running on it.

This could be beneficial to the user – you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?" Since the trusted computing system produced its report on your computer using a sealed, separate processor that the user couldn't directly interact with, any malicious code you were infected with would not be able to forge this attestation.

But this remote attestation feature could also be used to allow Microsoft to block you from opening a Word document with Libreoffice, Apple Pages, or Google Docs, or it could be used to allow a website to refuse to send you pages if you were running an ad-blocker. In other words, it could transform your information fiduciary into a faithless agent.

Seth proposed an answer to this: "owner override," a hardware switch that would allow you to force your computer to lie on your behalf, when that was beneficial to you, for example, by insisting that you were using Microsoft Word to open a document when you were really using Apple Pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html

Seth wasn't naive. He knew that such a system could be exploited by scammers and used to harm users. But Seth calculated – correctly! – that the risks of having a key to let yourself out of the walled garden were less than being stuck in a walled garden where some corporate executive got to decide whether and when you could leave.

Tech executives never stopped questing after a way to turn your user agent from a fiduciary into a traitor. Last year, Google toyed with the idea of adding remote attestation to web browsers, which would let services refuse to interact with you if they thought you were using an ad blocker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

The reasoning for this was incredible: by adding remote attestation to browsers, they'd be creating "feature parity" with apps – that is, they'd be making it as practical for your browser to betray you as it is for your apps to do so (note that this is the same justification that the W3C gave for creating EME, the treacherous user agent in your browser – "streaming services won't allow you to access movies with your browser unless your browser is as enshittifiable and authoritarian as an app").

Technologists who work for giant tech companies can come up with endless scalesplaining explanations for why their bosses, and not you, should decide how your computer works. They're wrong. Your computer should do what you tell it to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

These people can kid themselves that they're only taking away your power and handing it to their boss because they have your best interests at heart. As Upton Sinclair told us, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.

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/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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word2thawise · 1 month ago

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Peter wakes up to an alert from his bank app. "$25,000 has been deposited into your account." Which is weird, because Peter Parker does not have $25,000. He barely has $25.

His first thought? "Oh my god, did I get hacked?" His second thought? "Wait, who would hack me to give me money?" Then he sees the note attached: “For services rendered. Expect more next week.” Services? And that’s when it hits him.

Last week, Spider-Man took down every major crime ring in Queens. Now criminals are just leaving cash in places labeled “For The Spider” like he’s some urban legend crime lord.

The worst part? It’s working. Crime is at an all-time low. Even the cops are impressed. And then it gets worse.

Peter swings down to stop some guy shaking down a bodega owner, webs him to a lamppost, and the guy just nods at him like it’s a business transaction.

"Thanks, boss. Money's already in the usual spot." Peter stares. “I—NO. That’s not—You know you're still going to jail.” But now he just feels bad. Like. The guy thinks he did what he was supposed to.

Captain America is horrified. Tony is proud. Doctor Strange is taking bets on how long this lasts.

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dragoler · 2 months ago

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The Pale King's deal with Herrah was actually genius

I'm sure this question has crossed many people's minds when they've played Hollow Knight: why is Herrah a dreamer? Monomon and Lurien were both followers of the Pale King and probably volunteered eagerly for the position; Monomon to preserve the kingdom's diversity, and Lurien because he would do anything in service to his king, but Herrah? She is a foreign queen, furthermore, she did not volunteer willingly for the position, but had to be persuaded through a deal. Well to start with, let's look at Deepnest.

Deepnest is not a friendly place

The first sign of Hallownest's tumultuous relationship with Deepnest is the failed tramway. Granted, this project may have failed due to aggression from the region's wildlife and not the actions of the Distant Village, as we already know Hallownest had a deal in place with the Mantis village to keep those away:

The truce remains. Our vigil holds. The beasts are kept at bay.

- Mantis lore tablet

But it reflects well the attitude the Distant Village likely had about the expansionist empire at their door. To start with, those creepy puppets who tell you to rest on the bench in the Beast's Den. They look like upper-class Hallownest bugs, which is odd, because why would the denizens of Deepnest even know what they look like, given their isolation, and why would any bugs wearing these robes ever step foot in such a dangerous place? Here's my theory, they are the shells of real Hallownest bugs, as we can find the webbed remains of similar bugs who've been deceived by this ruse in the other building:

…Not friends…

Furthermore, they are the shells of diplomats sent by Hallownest to negotiate with the bugs of the Village, which would explain their upper-class fashion. That didn't turn out so well though, did it?

Even if they aren't the actual shells of Hallownest's representatives, the way they're used is already damning enough.

Ah, but the weavers are now infected, which is why they have become so aggressive. While it is true that the infection increases the aggression of its host, it isn't really known to make its hosts more clever, in fact, quite the opposite:

For quiet retreat did I climb up here, away from spitting creatures. Ormmph… Yes. High up. Away from simple minds, lost to light. Theirs is a different kind of unity. Rejection of the Wyrm's attempt at order. I resist the light's allure. Union it may offer, but also a mind bereft of thought… To instinct alone a bug is reduced…Hrrm…

- Bardoon

And that, was quite a clever trap. Probably too clever for an infected mind, especially given how clearly those puppets speak. Moreover, we do see an uninfected weaver in their hidden den, so we know not all of them have fallen to the infection.

If there needs to be more evidence that this is behavior we should expect from intelligent Deepnest bugs, we only need look to the Midwife. She is an uninfected servant of the Nest, who despite claiming to be a friend, will always try to eat the Knight at the end of her dialogue. This is probably how the Nest has acted for most of its existence, and again following Hallownest's fall, but something happened in-between…

Something changed

In the later months or years of Hallownest, bugs stopped using stone tablets:

In its declining age, this city switched from stone to parchment woven of spider's silk. It's a small tragedy, but the moisture in these towers has rendered most of those texts illegible.

- Relic Seeker Lemm

We can see spools of silk in the weaver's den, Deepnest stag station, and the hidden station at the palace grounds, so almost certainly this new silk came from the weavers.

Furthermore, we know the Nest worked alongside the Pale King with his vessel plan, as we can find a prototype of the seal that was used to bind the Hollow Knight within their hidden den.

So what changed? An acknowledgement of a shared threat, bringing both communities together? I don't think so. Before the Pale King arrived in what would become Hallownest, all tribes in the area seemed content to stay within their boundaries:

No bug has ever laid claim to this whole. Even the beasts knew their limits and bound their realm at Nest's edge.

And it is only upon pushing those boundaries that collapse becomes inevitable:

It is the ancient caste that made attempt at such vast rule. Hallownest's ruin reflects well those fared attempts.

- Both quotes from Mask Maker

The Radiance and the moth tribe coexisted with the other tribes and gods around them for an unknown period of time before Hallownest started expanding into their lands. Besides the Hive which shut its doors to the outside world, the Nest was the last frontier Hallownest really had left to conquer. Given their isolation from the kingdom, the Nest would have every reason to believe the Radiance was not their problem, and if she returned, Hallownest might fall but the Nest would keep going on all the same.

Although, if weavers were happening to become infected at this time, their general hostile and isolationist attitude would make it unlikely for them to seek or accept the aid of Hallownest of all places.

No, the reason Deepnest suddenly got friendly with Hallownest was because of The Bargain tm.

Why the bargain was genius

We don't have definitive proof of who came up with the deal. There is dialogue from Herrah which states that it was the Pale King, but because this dialogue is unused, it of course cannot be used as evidence:

Wyrm, your attempt may prove futile, but your offer I could not refuse.

That said, it was probably still the Pale King's idea. To start with, let's look at the Midwife's dialogue:

That village above here, home to a sad creature. Hers is a tale of tragic exchange. Cost her and her people greatly, though I suspect she bore no regret in making it.

This deal cost not only Herrah, but her people greatly as well. It was not a deal made lightly, but seemingly one she couldn't refuse. We know that she once had a husband, as the mushrooms mention him in one of their lore tablets:

This border bounds the twisting, scratching things. Their dead sire, once of honoured caste. Their sealed mother, but the common beast. No peace with them we make.

He was of "honoured caste", we don't know what this means, but as Herrah is a queen and yet still described as a "beast", he must have been a notable creature, likely a higher being of some sort.

Herrah it seems married well above her station, but as a now widowed mortal queen she was in need of an heir, and not just any heir, an heir of appropriate caste. In this deal she'd lose her autonomy, and never get to see her child grow up. What does the Pale King get?

He gets everything.

The Queen of the Nest is now out of action, and his own blood sits upon its throne, but as Hornet is too young to rule, the Nest is essentially leaderless. Furthermore his own queen is either raising Hornet, or at least has a strong influence on her, as she was close enough to the princess to develop a bond:

It faced the Gendered Child? She's a fierce foe, strong in mind and body, striking reflection of her mother, though the two were permitted little time together. I never begrudged the Wyrm's dalliance as bargain. In fact, I feel some affection for the creature birthed.

Hallownest now firmly has its claws in the Nest and its future, making the Nest a vassal of the kingdom, and this manifested in cooperation and trade.

So why did the Pale King chose Herrah and not one of his own subjects? Because it let him execute his plan to save Hallownest and conquer his final rival in a single move. Oh, and it would have been a perfect victory, if it wasn't for that dang impurity in the Vessel.

All images taken from hollowknight.wiki

#hollow knight #hollow knight lore #deepnest #herrah #pale king #hornet hollow knight

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elventhespian · 3 months ago

Text

So with the pandora's box of AI being released into the world, cybersecurity has become kind of insane for the average user in a way that's difficult to describe for those who aren't following along. Coding in unfamiliar languages is easier to do now, for better and worse. Purchasable hacking "kits" are a thing on the dark web that basically streamline the process of deploying ransomware. And generative AI is making it much easier for more and more people to obscure their intentions and identities, regardless of their tech proficiency.

The impacts of this have been Really Bad in the last year or two in particular. For example:

(I'm about to link to sources, and you better be hovering and checking those links before clicking on them as a habit)

Ransomware attacks have become increasingly lucrative for private and state-sponsored hacking groups, with at least one hack recently reported to have resulted in a $75 MILLION payout from the victim. This in combination with the aforementioned factors has made it a bigger and bigger risk for companies and organizations holding your most sensitive data.

In the US, the Salt Typhoon hack over the past year or so has compromised virtually all major phone networks--meaning text and phone calls are no longer secure means of communication. While this won't affect most people in day-to-day, it does make basically all the information you share over traditional phone comms very vulnerable. You should avoid sharing sensitive information over the phone when you can.

CISA updated their security recommendations late last year in response to this compromise. One of the recommendations is to use a separate comms app with end-to-end encryption. I personally prefer Signal, since it's open source and not owned by Meta, but the challenge can be getting people you know on the same service. So... have fun with that.

2FA is no longer as secure as it was--because SMS itself is no longer secure, yeah, but even app-based 2FA has been rendered useless in certain circumstances. One reason for this is because...

A modern version of the early-2000's trick of gaining access to people's accounts via hijacked cookies has come back around for Chromium browsers, and hackers are gaining access to people's Google accounts via OAuth session hijacking. Meaning they can get into your already-logged-in accounts without passwords or 2FA even being needed to begin with. This has been achieved both through hackers compromising chrome browser extensions, and via a reinvigorated push to send out compromising links via email.

Thanks to AI, discerning compromised email is harder now. Cybercriminals are getting better at replicating legitimate email forms and website login screens etc., and coming up with ways to time the emails around times when you might legitimately expect them. (Some go so far as to hack into a person's phone to watch for when a text confirmation might indicate a recent purchase has been made via texted shipping alerts, for example)

If you go to a website that asks you to double-click a link or button--that is a major red flag. A potential method of clickjacking sessions is done via a script that has to be run with the end user's approval. Basically, to get around people who know enough to not authenticate scripts they don't recognize, hackers are concealing the related pop ups behind a "double-click" prompt instruction that places the "consent" prompt's button under the user's mouse in disguised UI, so that on the second click, the user will unwittingly elevate the script without realizing they are doing it.

Attachments are also a fresh concern, as hackers have figured out how to intentionally corrupt key areas of a file in a way that bypasses built-in virus check--for the email service's virus checker as well as many major anti-virus installed on endpoint systems

Hackers are also increasingly infiltrating trusted channels, like creating fake IT accounts in companies' Office 365 environment, allowing them to Teams employees instead of simply email them. Meaning when IT sends you a new PM in tools like Zoom, Slack, or Teams, you need to double-check what email address they are using before assuming it's the real IT person in question.

Spearphishing's growing sophistication has accelerated the theft of large, sensitive databases like the United/Change Healthcare hacks, the NHS hack & the recent Powerschool hack. Cybercriminals are not only gaining access to emails and accounts, but also using generative AI tools to clone the voices (written and spoken) of key individuals close to them, in order to more thoroughly fool targets into giving away sensitive data that compromises access to bigger accounts and databases.

This is mostly being used to target big-ticket targets, like company CSO's and other executives or security/IT personnel. But it also showcases the way scammers are likely to start trying to manipulate the average person more thoroughly as well. The amount of sensitive information--like the health databases being stolen and sold on the darkweb--means people's most personal details are up for sale and exploitation. So we're not too far off from grandparents being fooled by weaponized AI trained off a grandchild's scraped tiktok videos or other public-facing social media, for example. And who is vulnerable to believing these scams will expand, as scammers can potentially answer sensitive questions figured out from stolen databases, to be even more convincing.

And finally, Big Tech's interest in replacing their employees with AI to net higher profits has resulted in cybersecurity teams who are overworked, even more understaffed they already were before, and increasingly lacking the long-term industry experience useful to leading effective teams and finding good solutions. We're effectively in an arms race that is burning IT pros out faster and harder than before, resulting in the circumvention of crucial QA steps, and mistakes like the faulty release that created the Crowdstrike outage earlier last year.

Most of this won't impact the average person all at once or to the same degree big name targets with potential for big ransoms. But they are little things that have combined into major risks for people in ways that aren't entirely in our control. Password security has become virtually obsolete at this point. And 2FA's effectiveness is tenuous at best, assuming you can maintain vigilance.

The new and currently best advice to keeping your individual accounts secure is to switch to using Passkeys and FIDO keys like Yubikeys. However, the effectiveness of passkeys are held back somewhat as users are slow to adopt them, and therefore websites and services are required to continue to support passwords on people's accounts anyway--keeping password vulnerabilities there as a back door.

TLDR; it's pretty ugly out there right now, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. Because even with more sophisticated EDR and anti-virus tools, social engineering itself is getting more complex, which renders certain defensive technologies as somewhat obsolete.

Try to use a passkey when you can, as well as a password locker to create strong passwords you don't have to memorize and non-SMS 2FA as much as possible. FIDO keys are ideal if you can get one you won't lose.

Change your passwords for your most sensitive accounts often.

Don't give websites more personal info about yourself than is absolutely necessary.

Don't double-click links or buttons on websites/captchas.

Be careful what you click and download on piracy sources.

Try to treat your emails and PMs with a healthy dose of skepticism--double-check who is sending them etc for stealthily disguised typos or clever names. It's not going to be as obvious as it used to be that someone is phishing you.

It doesn't hurt to come up with an offline pass phrase to verify people you know IRL. Really.

And basically brace for more big hacks to happen that you cannot control to begin with. The employees at your insurance companies, your hospital, your telecomms company etc. are all likely targets for a breach.

#idk why I decided to write this but here you go #Watch this advice change drastically 6 months

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johannestevans · 5 months ago

Note

Do you have a list of your works that are cnc/nc? Asking for myself

I have almost no non-con out and very little blatant or more explict dub con because neither Patreon nor Amazon will allow it, and I unfortunately have a terrible complex about needing to make money from basically everything I produce in addition to an understandably blinding terror of losing my income for writing porn that's too good.

There's a bunch of works below that either feature CNC or some dubious consent, but are often undertagged on some sites, or in a few cases I just can't post on Patreon at all.

My Ao3 is often the best place for this sort of stuff - you can check my Consent Issues tag here.

Sorry for the lack of convenience here, but I'm nervous about Tumblr automatically flagging my posts as spam if I include too many links again, so below are a list of my works featuring consent stuff and where they're linked, and you can use CTRL+F or the Find in Page option in your mobile web browser to find the appropriate links from my Directory of Work.

Archival Management is not dubious in its consent in my opinion, but that didn't stop Amazon from blocking it from distribution. :/

Brothel Theatre — 2k, cis M/trans M, trans M voyeur, rated E. Yvis has never been to a brothel before, but he’s excited to see one of his heroes, the adventurer Amaethon, play a part in a local theatre production: a debauched one, at that. Featuring voyeurism, huge size difference, public sex, come inflation, CNC, spitroasting, stomach and throat bulging. On Medium / / On SubscribeStar / / On Ao3

Caught — Cis M/trans M/cis M, 3.2k. MB. A thief is caught in the treasury and his punishment is delivered by the guards on duty. Unadulterated porn without plot — dubious consent, anal, vaginal, and oral sex, spitroasting, size difference, rough sex, fingering, messy sex with a bit of squirting and also messy oral, double penetration (vaginal/oral and vaginal/anal), crying, mindbreak, pussy spanking, spanking, some nipple play. Unsafe sex, no prophylactics or contraceptives are used or mentioned. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

Running the Table — Rated E. Cis M/trans M/cis M. 4k. Featuring consent play with a prenegotiated rape roleplay, object insertion (not sanitary, not safe, just sexy), double penetration, begging, tears, size difference, age difference, lots of anal play, belly bulging. Jock and Phineas first appeared in Centre Pocket, where Jock initially makes the threat of the pool balls. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Coaxed — 4.6k, rated E, giant M spider/trans M half-elf. Amaethon is a half-elf who combines sex work with adventuring to create wonderful monsterfuckery — I think I might do more with him because this was great fun. This erotica is deeply weird, and I’m delighted to introduce it: featuring oviposition and inflation, cervical penetration, huge size difference, huge belly bulging, body horror (including threats of bursting/popping), banter between a predator and prey, overstimulation, venom/drugs, suspension bondage. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Early Birthday — Rated E, cis M/trans M, 3.5k. A boss is prompted to fuck his assistant. Age difference, size difference, boss/employee, rough sex, bareback, overstimulation, sex pollen. On Patreon / / On Medium.

Financial Security — 3.8k, MB. A trans man tending bar is asked to go up and wait personally on a local mob boss. M/M between a cis man and a trans man, rated E. Fingering, size difference, vaginal play and a bit of anal play, kissing, cigar kink, huge power imbalance, age difference. Big dubious consent in this situation — the trans guy is always into it, but it’s a very dangerous situation with a lot of financial coercion and implied violence, lots of banter, very insecure positions, with implied stalking. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Contract — Rated E, cis M/trans M. 5.8k. MB. A trans man lets a gangster fuck him raw in exchange for services to be rendered. Danny, a waiter, is offered a deal by a local gangster, Arne Seven: for letting Seven fuck him bareback, Seven will pay for his bottom surgery. A continuation of Financial Security. On Patreon / / On Medium.

Enhanced Parts — NB/NB, rated E, 2k. Commissioned by Bear Blue. Featuring cybernetic enhancements, breeding kink, dirty talk, size difference, large insertions, objectification, humiliation, mild dub con, rough sex, struggling, some tears, implied overstim. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

Fallen Dust — An erotic fantasy novella for the Shousetsu Bang Bang. Issue 103 for the Shousetsu Bang Bang: Off The Beaten Path! 14k, cis M/trans M. A young trans man fleeing an abusive home finds sanctuary at a strange temple buried in a mysterious valley. Featuring some Eldritch tentacles and mild horror, oviposition, breeding, some DP, and just the end of the world! CW for some threats of sexual coercion and pregnancy + transphobia and threatened detransitioning. On SBB / / On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

Fit for Purpose — 4.2k. MB. Supervillains and superheroes, but with stretchy bodies and massive cocks, between a huge cis male alien superhero and a trans man supervillain with whole-body elasticity. 4.2k. Silly and light in humour, but extreme on the porn! Featuring pheromones (mildly dubious consent for this, but both parties use pheromones to get their way, and are enthusiastically into it), come inflation, huge size difference, unrealistic sex, alien dicks, prodigious amounts of come, dom/sub, mild corporal punishment, undernegotiated kink, rough sex, objectification, dirty talk. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

Purpose-Built Toy — 3.2k, rated E. A stretchy supervillain goes up against five huge superheroes. Sequel to Fit For Purpose. Trans M/5 alien Ms with alien cocks. There is absolutely no redeeming plot features in this, it’s just horrible unrealistic porn with lots of come inflation, objectification, humiliation, and belly kink. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Fresh Bounty — 1.7k, rated E, cis M/trans M! A bounty hunter takes a young wizard to the king’s court. Power play with a lack of negotiation, but fully consensual enthusiasm for it, cockwarming, threatened overstimulation, D/s, implications of public use, and sex on horseback! On Medium / / On Patreon.

God’s Word — Cis M/M, 3.1k. MB. An English teacher in a boarding school destresses with the head of maintenance. Barebacking, creampie, anal, rough sex, size kink, age difference, spanking, voyeurism. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Inescapable — An elf makes the poor decision of doing a magical escape room with a human he doesn’t know too well. They both fall into a trap, but at least it feels good. Featuring tentacle monsters, oviposition, belly bulging and inflation, overstimulation, multiple penetration, some body horror. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Knight Tactics — 3k, trans M/loads of cocks, assumed as cis M. Amaethon gets himself stuck in a wall so that the bandits will work out their stamina fucking him rather than fighting off the king’s guard. Stuck in wall, free use, fully (and gleefully) consensual whilst pretending he isn’t, mild belly bulging and come inflation, gaping, exhaustion, messy and come-spattered, etc. All the fun stuff. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

The Scholarship Lottery —4k, rated E, trans M/gangbanged by werewolf cocks. A magical university runs a scholarship lottery where entrants have to flee the werewolves in rut hunting them down. Charlie enters. Featuring the chase, oral, anal, and vaginal knotting, no birth control, rough sex, significant come inflation, implications of impregnation, wet and messy sex, gaping, and at the end some chaser-flavoured objectification of the trans man by one of the human senior staff. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Sleeping Beauty — 9.2k. A sailor takes something that doesn’t belong to him, and the captain punishes him. Cis M/trans M and cis M/M. A carpenter’s apprentice can’t resist the captain’s cabin boy while he’s meant to be performing maintenance, and afterwards, the captain and the cabin boy punish him between them — if the apprentice wants another chance at sex with the cabin boy, he has to let the captain bugger him first. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Slime Breeder — 3.5k. An elf is used as a distraction as his party fight a gigantic slime. A trans masc elf getting fucked from all ends by a giant slime creature, used as a seedbed by it, then played with by his variously gendered friends in the aftermath. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

The Stasis Box — 5k, rated E, trans M/cis M but hundreds of other people. A trans twink agrees to be involved in an experiment in lieu of his year-long prison sentence — he’s placed in a stasis box, frozen in time, with his holes still accessible for the crew of a mining vessel to make use of. Full consent is given throughout, the twink knows what he’s in for. Featuring medical kink, fingering, anal and vaginal fingering and sex, sensitivity, time stop, big overstimulation, mind-break and ahegao, objectification, huge come inflation, gaping, come vomiting, general degradation. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Stuck — 3k, rated E, trans man getting fucked by a bunch of cis guys. A guy gets stuck with his ass up in the air, and his roommates take gleeful advantage. Featuring predicament bondage, barebacking, anal and vaginal, mildly dubious consent (trans man is into it, but there’s not much negotiation or seeking out specific consent), multiple orgasms. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

Training Toy — 3k, rated E, trans M/many cis M. Continuing on from Stuck. A cheerleader trains up another student to be a good fucktoy, and shares him out to local football players — featuring D/s, multiple orgasms, mild bimboification vibes, training, multiple penetration, degradation, objectification, anal, vaginal, and oral, big penetrations. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Unethical Experimentation —2.3k. Rated E, cis M/trans M. An apothecary captures a fairy to… make use of. Silly and utterly horrible porn — a fairy is captured and used as a fucksleeve by an apothecary! He absolutely loves it! Featuring size difference with macro/micro, implied body transformation, stretchy skin, belly bulging, objectification, overstimulation, and predicament bondage. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Wants and Cravings — 4k, rated E, MB. A young man lusts after an unattainable gentleman until the gentleman’s valet steps in. Introducing Vincent Lucas Samuels, Ulysses Valentine, and Kit Sanders, with a new appearance from the illustrious Lawrence Kidd. Lots of teasing and flirtation, rough sex, bruising, hair-pulling, size difference, and some nasty men who like to take advantage. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Window Trap — Jean-Pierre makes an unwise decision, and gets caught amongst the wrong crowd. Rated E, 3.9k, trans M angel gangbanged by Greek gods, mostly by Hermes (Aetos Talaria). Doros is also here — Doros and Jean-Pierre both being characters in Powder and Feathers. Dubious to non consent here after some pure hubris, with a gangbang, large insertions, come inflation, deepthroating, spitroasting, predicament bondage with Jean-Pierre stuck in a wall, humiliation, degradation, dirty talk, masochism, stomach bulges. On Medium

Wine Barrel — The angel Jean-Pierre lets himself get caught by the all-too-friendly Dionysus. Rated E, trans M/everyone at a party. Featuring object insertion, inflation with a womb filled up with wine, unsafe alcohol consumption, lactation, milking, public humiliation, voyeurism, transformation, very drunk sex, sadomasochism, free use, objectification, begging, multiple orgasms, overstimulation. On Medium / / On Patreon.

Yes, Sir — 3.6k, cis M/trans M, rated E. A criminal accountant has his big bear muscle guy fuck him, and the bear does so until the accountant is a whimpering mess. Vaginal sex, size difference, rough sex, objectification, implied overstim, power dynamics and role reversal, age difference. On Patreon / / On Medium.

Cold Comfort — 14k, M/M, rated E for equally explicit sex and violence. Set in 1920s New Jersey. Nasty and violent. Alvis Hunter, boss of a significant crime operation, steals a captive out from under a rival — Naham, a rabbi’s son who immediately attempts to kill himself. In the aftermath, Alvis tries to keep him alive; Naham tries to find something worth living for. On Medium / / On Patreon / / On Ao3

#musings #original fiction #anonymous

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destinedofficial · 11 days ago

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My Commissions Are OPEN!!!

I accept Robux and Paypal, any other payments are NOT accepted. ---------------------------- !! VISIT MY CARRD OR READ THE INFORMATION BELOW LINK !!

For any further information you may click "KEEP READING"

To keep my audience informed, I will share some com info on Tumblr

RULES ABOUT COMMISSIONING ............................................. 1 - I will only accept payment from PayPal or Robux, anything else will not be taken as payment. ◊ 2 - Please do not keep asking for changes, as in any extensive changes of a large amount. I cannot keep changing things over and over again. ◊ 3 - If you can, don't ask for refunds if your not happy with a piece, yes I will give refunds but it would be better if you hadn't commissioned me in the first place. ◊ 4 - Scamming any artist is a strict NO. I am willing to do a service for you with my own time I'm spending. ◊ 5 - Please understand that I can't draw most things, if this is your issue please commission another artist. ◊ 6 - None of my work is for commercial use. I will be accepting personal use only. ............................................. How to commission? You can message me on Tumblr, Discord or through my google form. email: [email protected].

I WILL DRAW: Ship art Fanart OG characters Furries Gore Suggestive

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COMMISSION PRICING *I take paypal and or robux*

SKETCH Head shot: 5 AUD or 60 ROBUX Bust: 10 AUD or 20 7OBUX waist up: 15 AUD or 80 ROBUX knees up: 20 AUD or 90 ROBUX Full body: 25 AUD or 100 ROBUX

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NO BACKGROUND: FREE (transparent, flat, gradient) CUSTOM BACKGROUND: +10 AUD/+15 R$ (Depends on complexity) EXTRA CHARACTERS: +5 AUD/10 R$ (Depends on amount and detail) -------------------------------------- CHARACTER SHEETS SKETCH: 10 AUD/20 ROBUX FLAT/SHADE: 25 AUD/50 ROBUX RENDER: 40 AUD/90 ROBUX

HOW TO ORDER: You can order by filling out this link, it directs you to a google form which you can fill out (Character sheets aren't available in the form) OR If your paying with Robux, you can click this link, which leads you to my Commission experience OR You can message "[email protected]" or click this link, to message me via discord. Thank you for taking interest in my commissions!

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retroactivebakeries · 4 months ago

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Corinsael Ashina

��I am the gold, I am the grain, ne’er has an imperfection marred me: a pilgrim of the Wyrd.”

Corinsael Ashina is a Strategist dying of damnatio memoriae. He is always being written out of history — official histories, at first, spreading over to any attempt to describe him in the past, and eventually erasing his presence from the past itself. It is therefore his nature to live in the moment, to indulge in fleeting pleasures and give little thought to consequences. It’s really all he can do to keep going.

Some number of millennia ago — the precise count has been rendered unclear — the man who would become Corinsael found a hole in the world, a hole in his people’s history, and now, a hole in him. He told his people of it. He desecrated shrines to the gods of false histories. He was exiled, his name stricken from history, and as he fell into that hole he finally understood what it was: the world was wrong.

He spent the new few…decades? centuries? Doing…Magnum Bellum stuff? And on Earth, some history stuff? He can tell you about it, but it probably won’t stick. That’s why he’s out of the game, these days. Corinsael’s a vain one, and not getting the credit for any of his triumphs just finally got to him, one day. He still thinks the world is wrong and deserves to be destroyed, but the Host isn’t getting any help from him until they’ve apologized properly.

Over the centuries, Corinsael amassed the kind of wealth, political influence, and high-placed connections that an immortal can. Not all of it has been lost to his sickness: a ruined manor, a much put-upon valet, a half-dozen or so prominent figures in his contacts, of which some will still talk to him. Pride demands that he conceal his status as a perpetually embarrassed millionaire, putting on a lavish front despite being a teacher at a community college. (A temporary situation, of course).

Traits

Eide 3, Flore 3, Lore 1, Wyrd 4, Ability 0

Bane: Damnatio Memoriae.

Techniques: Shady Backrooms Dealings. Corinsael excels in matters of intrigue, politics, corrupt dealings, cover-ups, and general manipulation.

Treasures:

His ruined manor, which can vanish and reappear somewhere else, as if it had always been there.

His valet, who’s possessed of inhuman strength, speed, resilience, and sensory acuity when acting to protect Corinsael or to perform domestic tasks or uphold social obligations on his behalf.

A sniper rifle, forged from the metal of an ancient sword. It is precise enough to shoot and kill only part of a person: their memories, their cruelty, their hopes and dreams.

The stone head of one of the idols he desecrated, which has devoted itself to seeking atonement for the falsehood it once stood for. Its stony gaze pierces through illusions, strikes a fear into the hearts of liars that prevents them from speaking untruly, and reveals when weird time stuff is having an effect on things.

Sphere: The deep, subtle forces of λ-time and the unkindled impossibilities of alternate λ-histories. Corinsael tames the spirits and creatures that partake of such forces, winning them over to his service. Their appearance tends toward the insectile, the crystalline, and the clockwork. His most frequently used Arcana-pets include:

Intercalary bees build their hives in the gaps where moments of time have been erased. Their honey is a potent hallucinogen that occasionally comes with prophetic foresight.

His stasis spider’s webs that slow down time.

Time flies feed on people’s free time.

His retroactive scorpion’s poison takes effect before its sting.

His parallax moth flickers from place to place without crossing the space in between by skipping through the flow of time, and is large enough to ride.

Destruction: Erase an action done in the recent past, undoing anything directly caused by it.

Eternal: You’re free from aging, hunger, thirst, needing to breathe, fatigue, and most other requirements of human life. You get significant Edge in most endurance contests. Very little requires actual perseverance or Greater Steel — running a marathon is no harder than running down the block.

Sanctum: A monumental memorial to Corinsael, dominated by a colossal statue that bears his visage, around which the statutes of faceless kings kneel in supplication. Megalithic steles record those parts of his history that have been erased, and he can draw them into himself to begin mending his tattered history. The gate that leads to it lies in the catacomb-like basement of his ruined manor.

Infection

Infection 0: Corinsael’s sickness resists being his being recorded in history, but has yet to become efficacious in doing so. Undergrads tend to skim through the pages in their textbooks that mention things he was involved in, even that time he taught a whole seminar on the assassination of JFK. Written accounts have more typos than usual in the parts about him. People discussing him occasionally blank on his name for a second. This doesn’t cover the very recent past — thing that happened within the last few months are safe.

Infection 1: It’s sometimes hard to describe Corinsael’s past. Word documents crash or get corrupted. Things written on paper seem to almost throw themselves into puddles or into the way of falling coffee cups. Undergrads display no motivation in discussing historical records about him.

Infection 2: Corinsael’s bane erases him from written and oral histories. His actions and their consequences are either ascribed to someone else, left as unexplained historical mysteries, or omitted altogether. This also includes transcripts of anything he says.

Infection 3: Corinsael’s bane erases him from any written description or recounting of him in the past. When people talk about it, they tend to stumble on him — can’t remember his name, mix him up with someone else, lose their train of thought. (This includes people who are currently having those conversations with Corinsael, which complicates dating). This now creeps up further in time, leaving only the last week or two safe.

Infection 4: It’s starting to become unclear whether Corinsael is just being erased from historical records, or being erased from history itself. This is more ambiguous than his erasure from the record — there’s never anything conclusive, but enough to call his entire past into question.

Infection 5: There are moments in Corinsael’s past in which he no longer exists. He vanishes from them in a wracking fits and spasms, as if suffering from consumption and spitting up droplets of his history. It’s hard to predict how exactly this will impact the present — each change to the past plays by its own rules, like episodes of Doctor Who. The only consistency is that they make Corinsael’s life hell.

Infection 6: Corinsael’s erasure from history is no longer spasmodic; he’s constantly bleeding away the moments of his life, slowly but steadily. The erasure also creeps up into his more recent history, hitting things that happened just yesterday. If he does not return to the void, there’ll eventually be nothing left of his past, and his present will crumble into nothing.

Infection 7: Corinsael’s bane now erases him from things that happened an hour ago, a few minutes. The moment he put on his seatbelt. The moment he looked both ways before crossing traffic. The moment his heart last beat. There’s practically nothing that he can do at all without his bane erasing a crucial moment, including surviving the day.

#glitchblogging #glitchrpg

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starqueensthings · 2 years ago

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The Influx

Summary: Wrecker is down bad for the fisherman’s daughter, though he hasn’t been able to summon the bravery to approach her… until tonight.

Rating/WC/POV: Teen because of kissing, I guess? 5700ish, 2nd.

A/N: not proof reading before posting because it’ll take me 726 years until I’m happy. Damn my perfectionism.

Divider by the lovely and talented @saradika

The din of Kamino’s waves crashing against the towering spindles of Tipoca city had always managed to mollify him. The rhythmic lullaby of that treacherous tide licking the belly of the building was amplified even further if the ever-shifting cold front overhead had crafted a storm; that booming thunder providing a near-perfect percussion for the music of the sea, and it was a song that saw him snoring within minutes of tucking his toes into bed. Yet the stillness of the ocean here on Pabu somehow also commanded the power to soothe his soul, and it was a calm that he hadn’t initially recognized; the lingering repose that dichotomously accompanied the constant ebb and flow of the Pabuan sea was as foreign to him as the warm embrace and unconditional welcome from the island’s citizens.

If you asked him what it was that kept him returning to the pier every morning, he’d hitch a quirky smile to that scarred face, and toss his hand in a wave of casual dismissal before launching into a myriad of superficial reasons: the smell of the salt in the air, and the way the sun baked the taste into his lips so that every word spoken between departing the dock and stepping into the refresher tasted like the remnants of a pleasant day. He’d remark that the radiant warmth of the beaming sun never had him itching against the unwanted beads of sweat that had a tendency form in the center of his back, the breeze off the water mercifully preventing the heat from becoming all-consuming and rendering him uncomfortable like so many of his previous missions on desert planets. He’d point upward to the sky where the flock of gulls swooping overhead never abeyed their cries of delight as the salty spray tickled their webbed toes. He would tell you that the hobby of fishing had anchored him in a way that nothing else ever had, as his years of enlisted service had never awarded him the luxury of leisure time, the chance for a hobby, or the opportunity for quiet, reflective solitude. And it was all so foreign… so foreign and so wonderful, and he’d happily spend eternity dangling his feet over the end of that old, sunburnt pier if the universe would allow it.

And while all of the aforementioned reasons were undoubtedly true, and while Pabu’s casual ethos had offered him a sense of comfort that Kamino’s oppressive rigidity never had, the true reason behind his continued return was something he would continue to keep close to his chest.

It was you.

The sight of you. The thought of you. The ringing music of your laughter and how it relentlessly raised the hair on his arms despite the breeze having carried it several dozen feet down the pier. How the dazzling sunlight danced across the surface of the water and set your eyes aglimmer. The way you never failed to lose your footing and stumble as you stepped into the hull of your father’s boat, the goading churn of the water momentarily robbing you of the innate poise that had Wrecker nearly certain you were an angel. The way your brows furrowed in exertion as you unwrapped that weather-worn rope from its elegant coil around the wooden post anchoring your vessel to the dock and looped it carefully over the intriguing slope of your shoulder. The sound of that elated sigh pouring from your lips as you departed the pier for the solace of open water, arms thrown wide to embrace the wind as your father engaged the throttle…

But mostly it was the way his chest seemed to hollow and ache as your figure retreated toward the horizon. That unexplainable feeling of missing you despite hardly knowing you. The longing that lingered beside his heart in the wake of your departure. The potent elation that ignited like a fire in his gut as the bow of your boat reappeared amongst the orange glow of the setting sun, and the twitter of anticipation in his gut that simply refused to subside until your features were near enough to exude the pleasant exhaustion mirrored by your father.

Today, however, had brought an unprecedented and unwelcome deviation to Wrecker’s routine, and something near a debilitating disappointment sat heavily in his chest as the sun neared the apex of its journey across the sky. Despite the spotless curtain of blue overhead intensifying the enamouring hue of the water, there was no sign of you. Every gentle swell of the sea below the solemn swings of his feet saw your empty boat knocking rhythmically against the legs of the pier like a tantalizing reminder of your absence. The bountiful schools of exotic fish drifting merrily in the current below his perch only intensified his disdain as they refused to offer even a moment of consideration for the sparkling lure he’d lowered into their depths some hours earlier.

It wasn’t until the perseverant pangs of hunger swelled to waves of nausea did he finally concede to that sad sense of defeat and pull his bait from the water, shouldering his rod and retreating to the familiar cool, ionized air of the Marauder.

“What’s up with you?” Hunter probed upon his arrival, cocking an eyebrow at the chagrin ghosting behind his brother’s heavily scarred features.

“Nuthin’,” Wrecker fibbed with a halfhearted shrug. “Just overdue for some grub.”

His teeth sunk eagerly into the tangy flesh of the meiloorun Lyanna had tossed him from behind a stall at the market yesterday, but the sweet nectar pooling around his lips and dribbling down his chin only managed to only partially lift his sodden, dour spirits despite placating the emptiness of his stomach.

“No sign of your girlfriend at the pier today?” the sergeant jeered, leaning casually against the backrest of the navicomputer chair, folding his arms across his broad chest and surveying his brother with a knowing smirk.

“She’s not my g— wait, how’d you know?” Wrecker wiped the stray juices from his lips with the back of his hand before tossing the pit of the fruit out the open door of the ship, and into the seemingly waiting beak of a white gull.

“We bore witness to her participation in a tree planting ceremony this morning, down in the lower hills,” Tech offered from the cockpit, his interjection muffled by the abrasive whirring of the condenser perched precariously on his knees, his beloved spanner clutched tightly in a hand smeared with dark, oily coolant.

“Looked awful purdy too,” Hunter added with an infuriating wink, jestingly punching his brother's elbow before clunking down the ramp and into the last of the afternoon sunshine. “Woulda chatted her up myself if I didn’t think you’d knock me out for it…”

Wrecker’s lips had barely parted to confirm that violent notion when the sound of a sharp gasp sent his shoulders jerking in alarm, and a tiny hand immediately encircled the crook of his elbow, drawing his attention downward to the blonde bundle of joy bouncing up and down on her toes.

“Wrecker!” Omega shrieked, her free hand balled into a fist of glee and hovering in front of the radiant smile that had crinkled her big, brown eyes. “You have a girlfriend?! Who? Where? Can I meet her? Let’s go!”

“I would surmise that based on Wrecker’s continued, futile attempts at secrecy and the lack of colloquial interaction between parties, the female in question is not yet aware of his affection.”

As if the strenuous task of prying the cover plate from its position over the condenser's maze of copper tubing hadn’t rendered his features utterly demented by the duress of his efforts, Tech spoke characteristically passively. “And Wrecker,” he continued as the cover plate clattered to the floor at his feet, “You may be interested to know: Pabu’s current obtuse positioning in relation to its moon, combined with the planet’s 11 degree axial tilt, is due to largely shift the dynamic of the sea’s undercurrents. It is an anomaly known as ‘The Influx’ and it only occurs once every 12.63 years. While the effects of this deviation are negligible on land, the change in current will present a paramount opportunity for—”

“Ugghhh,” Wrecker groaned audibly, growing increasingly embarrassed that he hadn’t managed to conceal his crush as well as he’d intended. “Tell me later, Tech. I’m hittin’ the refresher.”

Ten minutes in the cool sonic and a mouth-wateringly fresh seafood dinner saw Wrecker nearly returned to the typical genial demeanor that had Pabu’s youth constantly prodding at his back. The intrinsic robbery of your absence that had simmered in his gut throughout the morning and mid-afternoon continued to dissipate the with diminishing daylight; the saturated hues of pink and orange sweeping across the sky as the sun began its nightly kiss atop the horizon felt like a divine reassurance that everything was precisely as it should be.

Barely an hour after their squad arrived in the courtyard for a much-discussed night of music and dancing, Shep and a handful of his closest friends emerged from behind the Tree of Life; their broad shoulders slumped under the weight of various musical instruments, and the smiles on their sun-kissed faces promised a evening of good tunes and wholesome merriment. A particularly mellow opening number saw Omega scooped into Wrecker’s large arms, her tiny hand enveloped in his as he waltzed them theatrically around in a circle, her giggles lost amid the obnoxious, off-key croon pouring shamelessly from his mouth.

“Wreck! 8 o’clock!”

Detecting the familiar urgency in his sergeant’s voice, Wrecker ceased his boisterous serenade and craned to peer over his left shoulder.

A tingle erupted underneath his skin upon seeing your figure retreat behind the tall, stone handrail of the grand staircase, and the serenity of which the sunset had endowed him was instantly swallowed by the ineffable desire to join you on whatever adventure had you bypassing a party and disappearing into the increasing darkness.

“Wrecker,” Omega whined, sending a sharp poke to his shoulder. “Why’d you stop?”

He shook the desire from his head and wrenched his unfocussed gaze away from the stone landing, and the contemplative hum pouring mindlessly from his lips as he hurried to redirect his thoughts into an excuse was, according to the blond bundle still perched on his arm, an inadequate replacement for his egregious singing.

“Because it’s my turn for a dance,” Hunter interposed, correctly recognizing the flummoxed expression on his brother’s features. “You can stand on my boots like last time. Wreck, why don’t you go down to the pier for a stroll?”

The implications of the wide-eyed, knowing glance that Hunter sent his way as he reached for Omega’s hands was not lost on the love-sick soldier, and Wrecker offered nothing more than an appreciative nod and a casual salute before lowering her to the ground and turning toward the stairs.

The pounding of his heart in his ears deafened him to the repeated clunks of his boots atop the stone, and the smattering of applause that succeeded the final ringing chord of the same song that had him unknowingly waltzing around the courtyard in front of your very eyes, offered a perfect distraction to slip, unseen, into the darkness.

But you were moving with intention, your purposeful strides hardly faltering in their cadence as you hopped down from the last step and headed along the same sandy pathway that Wrecker’s heavy boots traversed every morning. He stumbled slightly in his haste to catch you, adrenaline surging heavily through his veins as he recovered his footing and relaxed his grip on the handrail. “Cool it, Wreck,” he told himself, swallowing the lump in his throat and resuming his descent.

He, of course, knew your name, but he didn’t dare call for you; he wasn’t entirely sure what he would say if you acknowledged his summon and turned your beautiful eyes expectedly in his direction. Instead, he simply followed quietly in your wake, admiring the way the blossoming light of the full moon danced across your skin, and frantically trying to funnel the myriad of conversation starters whirling about his mind into one coherent salutation that he could offer when the time came.

“I thought that was you behind me, Wrecker.”

You spoke before he even had the chance, turning unexpectedly to face him when he’d reached a proximity near enough to hear you; the smile doming your freckled cheeks was a little too knowing to be effortless, though its unexpected emergence banished all hints of suspicion from his mind.

“Oh… uh…” he stammered, lifting to run a calloused hand along the back of his neck, his eyes darting away from yours and coming to rest upon the waistband of the cargo pants that hung just a little too nicely around your hips. “Yeah… I— I missed you this mornin’, and I saw you head down the stairs so I—”

“You missed me?” you interrupted.

He swallowed heavily again. Was it that tiny, innocent tip of your ear toward your shoulder that had his fingers fidgeting anxiously at his side? Or was it the gentle purse of those lips as you fought to repress that refulgent grin?

“Well… I didn’t miss you, miss you,” he digressed feebly, certain that the heat sending his cheeks aflame was also threatening to spout funnels of steam from his ears. “Well I did… but I didn’t see you this mornin’ is what I meant. I was here fishin’… and… and you were there… treein’.”

‘Way to be cool,’ he grumbled inwardly, only barely repressing a roll of his dark eyes as the music of your soft chuckle raised the hairs on his arms.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” you assured him with a shrug. “My father’s back was giving him grief this morning. I was hoping a little rest might get him back to normal for the influx tonight, but he’s still pretty sore so I’m just going to have to put on my Captain’s hat and hope for the best.”

“The influx?” Wrecker repeated curiously, watching you step clumsily down into the hull of your teetering boat.

“Yeah,” you agreed once you’d regained your balance, jabbing a thumb over your shoulder toward the open water. “The undercurrent’s shifted south for the first time in years. Apparently it’s going to bring in some big fish from beyond the bay, and if I can wrangle at least a couple of them, it’ll give my dad the break that he needs.”

The ghost of Tech’s image flitted across Wrecker’s memory; his brows furrowed behind his goggles while he simultaneously snipped a copper cooling line and launched into a seemingly unimportant info-dump about an anomaly brought on by Pabu’s moon, and Wrecker was flooded with the irksome notion that maybe he should pay better attention to his brother’s verbose rambling.

“Well I’m not doin’ anything,” Wrecker offered with what he hoped was a casual shrug. “I can give you a hand, if ya want?”

His breath hitched in his chest as you paused, slender hand poised halfway toward the rope wrapped expertly around the post on the dock, eyes alight and twinkling as if impervious to the deepening nightfall.

“I would love that, Wrecker,” you finally admitted with an encouraging smile that sent his heart somersaulting into his belly. “Hop in.”

The moment he left the security of the dock and stepped carefully onto the rolling floor of the boat, his hands darted outward to steady himself. The addition of his weight in the vessel sent a cascading series of large ripples atop the surface of the water, and that moment saw him eternally grateful that none of his brothers were there to guffaw behind their hands at the way his knees wobbled with every step.

“Actually, would you mind driving?” you proposed as he turned and headed for the stern of the boat. “It’ll be faster if I unload the perimeter rods and fill the Livewell, as long as you’re comfortable behind the wheel?”

“Uhhhh, I don't know if you want me drivin’ to be honest,” Wrecker chuckled through an apologetic grimace. “My brothers are always tellin’ me I’ve got the spatial awareness of a blind bantha.”

The laugh that stole through your chest as you ignited a small lantern and placed it on the Skipper’s seat damn-near hypnotized him; that small shimmy of your shoulders under the exertion of your joy, the way your eyes crinkled shut to permit the expanse of your smile to dominate your features, and that absentminded little slap of the knee that gave away the authenticity of your mirth.

“Never heard that one before,” you chortled, sticking the Captain's key into the ignition and kicking the engine into life. “But I think you’ll be alright. Inside the bay is a zero wake zone anyway, so we can’t do anything more than glide until we’re out on open water. Just make sure to avoid the Narrows and we’ll be fine.”

Wrecker followed your subtle gesture toward the horizon, his eyes quickly falling upon the mentioned pairing of dark, jagged rock walls only visible by their stark contrast to the beaming reflection of the moon atop the placid stillness of the water.

“I trust you,” you added with a smile and an encouraging nod. “Come here. I’ll give you the low-down on how it all works.”

Inflated by your seemingly unwavering confidence in him, he returned your smile and trod carefully toward your position behind the wheel. It was a simple set up really, nothing like the vast array of intimidating controls distributed across the entire cockpit of the Marauder, and your gratifying gaze felt drastically less oppressive than the burn of Tech’s narrowed eyes every time someone other than Echo reached for the copilot wheel.

The Captain’s seat perched behind you appeared both squashy and weathered, the leather seat cracking and peeling in several places as its integrity failed to match the powerful union of saltwater and hot sun. The steering wheel near-perfectly matched its seat counterpart, worn in the two places where your father’s practiced hands had undoubtedly spent decades navigating the vessel. Perched on the dashboard was a small, primitive compass, its needle timidly reorienting as every churn of the sea below them shifted the vessel. On the left was the throttle lever, and immediately adjacent to that, a sonar screen of-sorts was already depicting various subaquatic movements of which Wrecker could make very little sense.

“Give me your hand,” you requested kindly, reaching for his palm without even a breath of hesitation.

Your touch was mystifying; as mesmerizing and powerful as a bolt of Kaminoan lightning, setting his very nerves aprickle as if waves of electricity were coursing under his skin from the place your fingers had touched his.

“Right now we’re in idle—”

He could barely discern your words over the pounding in his ears, yet he hung on every syllable as you gently draped his palm over the handle on the throttle.

“—first gear is one notch down, second is down one more, and then reverse at the bottom—”

Surely you could hear his heart pumping so thunderously against his chest? And if that beaming moonlight wasn’t exposing just how flushed his cheeks had become, he’d eat his own boots. Yet you looked upward at him with that same adoring smile, as if there wasn’t a force anywhere on the planet that could deter you from keeping your hand atop his.

“—stay in first while we’re in the bay—”

Was his touch sending your stomach aflutter too? Were you as enamored with his eyes as he was with yours?

“—once we get past the rocks, change to second and we’ll head a few klicks west to get to where the rock shelf drops off—”

Was it painfully obvious just how much he was struggling to focus?

“—I’ll give you a thumbs up from the stern when we’re in the right spot. Sound good?”

“Glide while we’re in the bay,” he somehow repeated, his self confidence failing to reach the same degree of your implicit trust in him. “Second gear once we pass through the rocks, and then go until you give me the signal. Got it.”

With a level of concentration typically reserved for manning the tailgun amid a firefight, Wrecker furrowed his brow and steered the boat from the dock as you stumbled toward the starboard side of the boat and began unlatching several compartments.

Gliding across the still waters of the bay, where his reflection shone as clearly atop the surface of the water as it would in the refresher mirror, offered him a sense of glorious insignificance. The expanse of the sea felt nothing like the immensity of the sky where the utter lack of organic life often felt suffocating and restrictive. Below the tipping hull of this old boat was a world of its own, teeming with action and eternally unaffected by the ruination of war and destruction; a self-sustaining paradise for every ecosystem that resided amongst the currents, and he knew instantly this was a sensation that would have brought all of his brothers to their knees.

Yet nothing commanded his admiration quite like you did. He watched in pure adulation as you pulled half a dozen rods from a hidden storage container and laid them carefully on the floor. Horrified that whatever pitiful remnants of his composure might simply abandon him, he enthusiastically averted his eyes as you bent forward and disengaged the latch in the Livewell tank, filling it with the cool water needed to keep your bounty fresh and preserved until your return to shore. Once certain that your rear end was no longer pointed high in the sky, he risked another glance in your direction, only to have that devastating sense of longing surge through his chest. Framed by the dark outcrops of rock now flanking you on either side, your posture nearly stole his breath; arms thrown wide, head tipped back, and hair blowing wildly off your shoulders.

He stifled a grin and dropped his gaze to the throttle lever still casually anchoring his left hand. A little downward pressure had second gear activated, the engine roaring into life, and a genuine chuckle pouring from his salty lips.

The innocuous licks of the water tickling the sides of the vessel quickly turned deafening as each rolling wave saw the floor beneath his feet heaving and crashing onto the surface.

His arms were soon drenched in sea spray, yet he refused to shudder at the sensation as being on the open water, away from the shelter of shore and the stability of land was a feeling unlike anything else he’d ever experienced. It wasn’t isolating as he’d expected… he felt wonderfully small and truly free.

“You good back there?” you called to him, your voice almost entirely lost amid the power of the wind dancing across his ears and around his neck.

“I’m great!” he shouted back, savouring the way you beamed at him.

He’d never know if it was minutes or hours until he caught sight of your promised signal, the roar of the engine subsiding to nothing but a quiet hum as he returned the engine to idle.

“I think we’re in the right spot,” you sang, excitement triggering you to rub your palms together. “Can you help me toss the lines out?”

“Now that I can do,” he chuckled, cracking his knuckles before scooping the lantern from the skippers seat and departing the wheel.

“As far as you can,” you encouraged, taking the lantern from him and exchanging it with the nearest rod. “There’s holders every couple feet. We’ll cast out and then cross our fingers.”

The praise that you bestowed upon him after every broad toss of the line into the water swelled his chest and widened his shoulders. It wasn’t until each rod had been situated carefully in a holder, and the lantern placed delicately on the ground between your feet and his, did Wrecker’s gut begin to simmer with nerves once again.

“Where are you from?” you asked through the ringing quiet, the only discernible noises above the rhythmic licks of the water were the tiny clicks of each reel unspooling more and more line as the turbulent waves pulled the lures deeper below the surface. “I see you every morning at the pier but we don’t ever get to talk much.”

“I’m uh… from Kamino.” He tore his eyes from the nearest rod and glanced bashfully in your direction.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it,” you admitted with a snort, hands reaching delicately for the nearest rod and slowly cranking the reel to recoil the line. “But my father and I landed on the island when I was a little kid and we haven't left since, so… I’m a little bit sheltered. What’s Kamino like?”

Wrecker let a contemplative hum issue from his nose, his mind whirring as he tried to find words to properly describe the insufferable sterility of Tipoca City, and the complicated relationship he’d had with it before its obliteration. “It’s… Kamino,” he finally replied. “And most of it’s destroyed now. It used to storm almost every day. If we got even a splinter of sun, we’d all fight to get to the windows so we could look outside. It was a water planet, so the cities were built up on tall towers in the middle of the ocean. But it's weird… the sea there isn’t like here. It was rough and dangerous, and so cold that every time you got splashed, it felt like you were getting stung by somethin’...”

“Was there no land?” you asked incredulously, those enticing lips parting just enough to distract him. “How did you get your hands dirty as a kid?”

“Well… we found ways,” Wrecker shrugged, looking downward at his palms. “Me and my brothers were always gettin’ into somethin’ we shouldn’t have been. I’ll never forget the time Tech asked me to hang him upside down by the ankles so he could crawl into the garbage chute. He… uh… he likes researchin’ things, and there’s not much else to research on Kamino. I could hear him gibberin’ on about compost while he was hangin’ there, but Nala Se snuck up behind me and scared me so bad that I let go.”

“Let go?” you snorted, eyes wide and sparkling. “You dropped him into the trash?!”

“Not on purpose,” Wrecker defended with a reminiscent smirk. “But yeah. It’s alrigh’ though. He was only mad for a few hours, then he paid me back by lecturing me about fruit flies and their ‘growth cycles’ for a week.”

“I like him already,” you grinned, turning your attention back to the spool in your hands. “He sounds kinda… different.”

“He is,” Wrecker affirmed with a nod, failing to stop that smile that always peeled across his face when he spoke of his family. “All of us are in our own ways.”

“Well, can I meet them?” you queried, glancing back at him with your eyebrows raised.

“You— you want to?” he stammered back.

“I’d love to… if that’s alright with yo–?”

A loud gasp fractured your sentence, the rod in your hand having lurched nearly entirely from your clutches as something below the rippling surface of the water bit down on the lure and took off. Your body leaped into almost masterful action, your hands intensifying their grip around that graphite pole while your left leg lifted to brace yourself against the powerful tug toward the water. Wrecker froze in place, his mind still twirling happily with the notion of you wanting to meet the people he loved most, and it wasn’t until you muttered a string of undignified curse words did he reawaken to the challenge at hand.

“Maker,” you gasped as you lost your balance, your foot slipping from its position perched on the side of the boat and sending your hip crashing into the wall. “Wreck! Can— can you grab the net?”

Wrecker swallowed at the sight of the rod in your hands bent nearly in half under the duress of the unseen prize still desperately fighting for its freedom in the depths of the dark water. “Wrecker! Net!” you urged as you stumbled again.

“Net…” he repeated frantically. “Right.”

It must have only been seconds… fractions of seconds since he stooped to snatch the tool from the floor, but by the time he’d straightened up, the entirety of your torso had disappeared over the side of the boat, the muscles in your legs still seizing in an effort to keep you upright despite that unrelenting pull downward.

“This— this fish is… huge,” you managed to choke out.

The next several seconds played out in half time; each moment lasting two, each movement lagging as if the events were truly happening in slow motion. Your feet departed the floor, the soles of your shoes rising to waist height… then higher… as your body teetered over the edge of the boat, anchored in place only by the bend at your waist, and even that feeble grip began to diminish as the struggle to subdue your monstrous catch continued. Wrecker acted without coherent thought, darting forward and wrapping his arms around your waist to secure you, lest you tip any farther forward and disappear into that surging sea.

Your addition of your weight was nothing to him, even combined with the efforts of the still unseen aquatic beast, but now free of the risk of toppling overboard you seemed to funnel every ounce of energy into rigorously cranking the line back onto the reel. He took a step backward and away from the water, determined to keep you safe and dry, but a foreign object had found its way into the path of his retreating boots, and his heel knocked heavily against something before his ears were met with a deafening shatter. The boat was thrown into darkness, and the pair of you toppled with a thunderous crash to the floor.

There wasn’t the time or the wherewithal to relish in the feeling of your body against his. He saw his hands clutching tightly at your hips before he even felt them under his fingers. He could smell the pleasant aroma of your hair in his nose before he’d even realized he was sprawled onto the damp floor with your body perched awkwardly atop of his, and that musical laughter began pouring from your smiling lips before any semblance of understanding returned to him.

And when it finally did? Panic… erupting inside of him like a volcano. He was holding you. You were on top of him. He could feel every swell in your body, every subtle shake of your laughing shoulders. He could count the freckles on your back. He could feel your hand placed gently atop his. The rear end that he’d deliberately avoided ogling at was now nestled securely in his lap and it threatened to utterly destabilize him.

“Maker, we botched that one didn’t we?” you chortled as you shifted your hips and tumbled off of him, rolling onto your back beside him and nudging the now shattered lantern out of your space. “I think I lost the whole rod.”

He attempted to clear the shock from his throat, yet his lungs seemed to be completely void of the breath required to complete the task and nothing but a strangled choke left his lips. His skin was on fire. Spiked adrenaline was threatening to set his hands atremble. Surely this is how he would die… lovesick to the point of suffocation. Not falling from a towering height like his nightmares had always imbued him with, but laying side by side with someone who he cared for so deeply that even breathing felt like a challenge.

“Thanks for saving my ass, Wrecker,” you spoke, nestling your head against his arm.

You shifted your gaze to look upward at him, that beguiling twinkle in your eyes somehow even brighter now that the lantern had been extinguished; those stunning glassy orbs sending his mind spinning near-painfully as he fought to find the cognition to answer you.

“You’re… you’re ass—” he stammered, feeling his face burn red hot. “I mean, you’re welcome!”

A delicate snort was your knee jerk response, and the silence that ensued afterward was so stifling… so insufferable… that Wrecker was half a heartbeat away from clambering to his feet and pitching himself headfirst into the water to escape the embarrassment.

“Wrecker…” you mumbled suddenly, breaking into his panicked thoughts. “Why did you come find me tonight?”

“Because…” he started quietly after swallowing heavily. “Well because I— I wanted to see you.”

“Do you maybe want to see me more often?”

He snapped his head in your direction, brows furrowed together as the implications of your questions flitted into his brain. “I want to see you all the time,” he answered, his gaze betraying him by darting back and forth between your eyes and your smiling lips.

“Me too.”

His lips fell open as those freckled cheeks drew nearer, your sparkling eyes disappearing as your lids fluttered closed. He froze, his own sight disappearing as your hand reached forward and cupped around his jaw, your lips descending slowly and tenderly onto his. An explosion unlike anything he’d ever crafted went off in deep in the part of his stomach where only the deepest and most intense feelings emerged; euphoria had him utterly floating. There was simply nothing else. No one else. No fish in the sea. No stars in the sky. Nothing but the warmth of your hands on his skin, and the gentle swipe of your tongue along his lip. His hand found the curves of your body without coherent thought, pausing to linger at the curve of your hip for only a moment before trailing softly up your back until his fingers wove themselves into your hair.

But it was over before it began. You pulled from him abruptly, head snapping around as three more rods suddenly began to whir and noisily unravel their tightly coiled spools of line. “Oh, Maker,” you sighed. “How about you reel them in this time, and I’ll net and tank them?” you proposed.

“Deal,” Wrecker answered, shaking his head in complete disbelief as you stood up and darted towards the farthest rod.

ragu list: @anxiouspineapple99 @sinfulsalutations @nobody-expects-the-inquisitorius @starrylothcat @secondaryrealm @dystopicjumpsuit @freesia-writes @sev-on-kamino @littlemissmanga @523rdrebel @wings-and-beskar @wolffegirlsunite @sunshinesdaydream @clonemedickix @echoqk @drafthorsemath @jediknightjana @moonlightwarriorqueen @starstofillmydream @trixie2023 @mooncommlink @multi-fan-dom-madness @wizardofrozz

#wrecker wednesday #except its Thursday and I suck #bad batch fanfic #Wrecker fanfic #Wrecker x reader #Wrecker x fem!reader #tbb fanfic #starqueenswrittenworks #queued

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weaselandfriends · 1 year ago

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Web Original, Recently Witnessed

In a previous post, I mentioned some web fiction I'd recently read. This time, I'll highlight some web original content outside of the literary sphere. While I have some experience with literature, I'm completely untalented in other mediums, so my assessment of this content is no better than a layman's. However, I still thought it worth highlighting.

1. Journey to EPCOT Center: A Symphonic History by Kevin Perjurer (Defunctland)

Perjurer has been putting out excellent documentary-style content on theme parks and their rides for years now, but while his production quality is consistently high, his videos often live or die based on the core level of interest his subject engenders. For instance, his video on notoriously awful ride Superstar Limo (with a general focus on notoriously awful theme park California Adventure) is an incredible watch, while his video on a random assortment of small, local Santa Claus theme parks across America isn't quite so compelling. He's no Jon Bois (of 17776 fame), a documentarian capable of rendering extraordinary seemingly the most banal of subjects.

Journey to EPCOT Center, however, is unlike anything Perjurer has ever put out before. It completely eschews Perjurer's typical voiceover narration style of documentary, instead stitching together music, audio of news reports and press releases, and dramatizations of Disney boardroom meetings to create a seamless narrative. Beyond the unique style and presentation of the piece, however, is the incredible artistry on display in several of the segments. Some of the biggest highlights:

12:00 to 16:14: A neon light animation detailing the vision and plan of EPCOT, which gradually transforms into a 3D map that the camera travels through

16:52 to 21:03: An impressively animated series of newspaper articles detailing Disney's struggles finding signatories for its world showcase; the video comments indicate some shots of the moving newspapers were created practically, with Lego conveyer belts

38:46 to 44:27: A puppet show dramatizing Disney's efforts to seek international sponsors

There are numerous other impressive, inventive, and creative segments as well, with unique animation and visual styles. The video rarely repeats the same trick twice.

The funniest part is that all of this is in service to a topic I would personally consider quite boring. EPCOT is such a Disney-buffs-only type of subject, neither Disney's greatest success nor its greatest failure. The incredible skill on display is all aimed toward depicting a fairly corporate, backroom-style story about men in suits trying to secure handshakes. There's an almost propagandistic feel to it, an extolling of capitalist bigwigs that feels completely at odds with Perjurer's visionary style.

In a way, it's reminiscent of United Passions, a FIFA propaganda film meant to make its executives look good in the wake of real-life controversy. On the other hand, though, Perjurer's exceedingly loving depiction is appropriate for Walt Disney's final passion project, Disney himself being a man who, for better or for worse, was as much of a dreamer and visionary as he was a cutthroat businessman. EPCOT, as the video tells you, was designed as an optimistic reaffirmation of the American free enterprise project, and as a complement to that vision Perjurer's video could not be more accurate. Unlike United Passions, this video was also made independently, not financed by Disney to make itself look good in the eyes of the public. Metatextually, it poses a fascinating question: Is there value to corporate art? Can a corporation create something of true beauty? Perjurer's video suggests it can.

2. The Mind Electric Animation - Lonely-Man's Lazarus by Daisy

Perjurer is probably familiar to many of my readers, so this next entry is more obscure, something I stumbled on almost by chance.

A friend of mine is big into animatics, which as far as YouTube is concerned is about setting music (usually Broadway or Disney musical numbers) to sketchy, storyboard-style art. I'm not a major Broadway fan in general, so these have never appealed to me much, although I've been shown several.

This one, though, rather generically titled "The Mind Electric Animation" (after the song it features), caught me entirely off guard. The first notable element is that the animation is monstrously more fluid than a typical animatic, though it retains the sketchy/storyboard art style and traditional animatic sensibilities toward character design (very "Tumblr," if I had to put a word on it). Secondly, the music, rather than being from Hamilton or Heathers or some other popular musical, is from the itself rather arcane album Hawaii: Part II by Joe Hawley (under the name ミラクルミュージカル). Hawaii: Part II is, as far as I can tell, a concept album detailing the story of a man who goes insane after his girlfriend is murdered (possibly by himself), with a strange secondary subtext of possibly being metaphorical for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The lyrics are certainly open to interpretation.

The animatic combines these elements with heavy inspiration from a different concept album, potentially the most famous one ever made: Pink Floyd's The Wall, with specific nods to the film adaptation's animations for The Trial and Empty Spaces. There is no skimping on detail, with some sequences absolutely bursting with bizarre visuals. The ultimate result is absolutely trippy, abstract, and surreal, which are some of my favorite things for something to be.

Regardless, it's an impressive work of animation for a single person to make; the video description states it took 15 months, which is more time than I've spent on any one of even my longest works. The creator themselves is somewhat enigmatic from what I could tell, despite having a whole host of social media platforms. They seem to be working on a web comic, but trying to find any concrete information on what it is actually about was difficult. Nonetheless, whoever made this certainly has an abundance of creative vision and talent. Though I've seen skilled artists sit down to create something narrative before and flub it utterly (an example that comes to mind is Ava's Demon), so who knows if what is on display in this animation will make it into that web comic. Even if it doesn't, the animation by itself is incredible, so check it out.

3. The Skibidi Toilet podcast guys are for real by Mikhail Klimentov / Built By Gamers in general

Built By Gamers has been on my radar for some time (ever since seeing this video) as an absolute masterclass of performance art. The voice, the emphasis, the little oddities here and there, the way the two hosts so often ignore direct questions posed by one another, it creates something inimitably uncanny. This interview by Mikhail Klimentov, who I am familiar with primarily through his esports journalism, only adds new layers to what was already a convoluted question of irony and sincerity.

There are a few concrete insights, most shockingly to me that the creators of Built By Gamers (Todd Searle and Peter Armendariz) got their start in esports. But despite the title that seems to clearly suggest their videos are sincere, the actual interview is far less conclusive. For instance, this exchange:

It's evident to me that you guys take this very seriously. You feel as though there's a lot of craft behind these videos. Tell me about the stuff that a viewer won't see: the behind-the-scenes stuff that you're thinking about as you're working on these videos. Armendariz: A lot of people think it's ChatGPT. That's a big thing that people think that we do. But a lot of it is actually well crafted, through hours — like we'll spend hours on one script and really thinking about how we can get someone to react. It doesn't matter if it's them laughing, if it's them feeling sad, or them hating on one of us, our main goal in our videos is to get someone to feel something. The hard truth is that people don't realize how many hours we spend on one video to get that one line. I think that's what people don't really understand. We’ll spend like two hours on one line. Searle: Our tone, like how we talk — it’s on purpose. I have to get into character for it. Armendariz: Todd has a voice, bro! He didn't think he'd be good at telling stories, and I have him tell every single story because he has this campfire story voice. And sometimes he'll hit a line and I'm like, “No, no, you’ve got to hit it harder.” And we'll spend like 30 minutes trying to hit the line, or hitting the hook just the right way.

Followed immediately by:

People really don't know what to make of you guys. They don't have a sense of whether you're serious, whether you're in on the joke, whether there's a joke at all. I'm curious if you can clear that up. Searle: We want it to be everything you just said. We want people to think we're serious. We want camps of people who don't think we're serious. People who think that we're A.I. We kind of want to keep it, I guess, vague in that regard. Like we want you to believe… what we are — and that's OK. Armendariz: I think sometimes we'll play into different communities. So, like, some people will say, ‘You guys sound like you got brain surgery.’ So then we’ll make the most cringey video that's like super brain-rot, you know? We just kind of mess around and have fun.

So are they just messing around and having fun, or are they spending hours trying to nail specific lines just right? Are they sincerely trying to tell a story that gets an emotional reaction or are they just trolling, which also gets an emotional reaction? The biggest troll of the interview, targeted specifically at me, was this response:

Can you tell me what those writing principles are? Armendariz: I think a big writing principle that everyone should follow is, it's really important to show, don't tell.

People who have talked to me elsewhere know I am a massive enthusiast of the ubiquitous Mr. Beast, not necessarily because I like his content (though I do think he puts together some strong game show/Wipeout-style videos), but because of the story behind him: That he is an extreme, almost insufferable perfectionist, who analyzes video success and failure to a scientific degree, doing experiments with thumbnails, video lengths, et cetera, all to take detailed assessments of the results and perfectly calibrate his videos in mathematical fashion. It's a type of rigor that flies in the face of the casual, wastefully generous persona he cultivates in his videos proper.

I think many people have this innate idea that a work of art's quality is somehow tied to the effort expended to produce it. (Even I have it. Notice how for both of the first two entries in this post I mention the effort or time or craftsmanship of the work in question.) This is the kind of sensibility that causes a layman, who knows nothing about painting, to prefer a Caravaggio to a Rothko. But this sensibility is both conceptually and often practically wrong; Rothko, for instance, engineered his own paints, creating custom blends of materials (including non-paint material, like egg) to form paints of a perfectly specific color or gloss or sheen, a process often completely unseen by a casual glance at the finished work.

Subsequently, there's a reason they're called writer's workshops, that writing is so often described as a craft: It's an attempt to imbue writing with a sense of effort that makes it more palatable. The stereotype extends to the artist who sneers at quote-unquote "low" art, thinking "If I was willing to lower myself, I could create that slop and make millions too." In my experience, though, the people creating this "low" art are often expending absurd amounts of effort and exhibiting incredible skill to create something perfectly engineered for success. I, certainly, have found zero success in attempting to broaden my own audience, even when I make attempts at it; it's not something that's easier to do if you're just willing to try.

I also increasingly fail to believe in the stereotype of the miserable cynic artist who creates something they think is garbage because they know that'll be most popular. Those people don't last long; those who succeed in the popular sphere are people who are genuinely passionate about what they create, even if it looks like dreck to everyone else (including the millions who consume it).

I've been kicking around an idea for a story about Mr. Beast for some time now, exploring these concepts in even greater depth. That won't happen in the immediate future, but it's something to look out for.

#defunctland #kevin perjurer #lonely-man's lazarus #hawaii part ii #built by gamers #mr beast #web original

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