#algorithms are trash and should have never existed

[enigmatic-feral-being]

Anyone else getting overtly hateful ads across social media? Like I’m Jewish, Black, and Queer…why am I getting ads from the GDL, Conversion Camps and the NRA?

[alittlefrenchtree]

As a black girl it's indescribable to explain the constant pain of seeing all this racism online, it's like a stab in the heart every time and it hurts just as much to always have to read things like "ignore, if you see hate it's because you choose to interact with hate, It's up to you"

no, unfortunately it doesn't depend on me and it doesn't depend on any of us poc, because it is everywhere and constant and racism is not just the insult with the slur but it is in the way they talk about us, in the way they choose to mock us for everything, in the way that we are never considered on the same level as other people and we cannot ignore it. It's painful and exhausting.

I hug you and wish you a good day.

That's why i tagged the post you're talking about with my reblog.

As shown in the tags, I wasn’t denying what you said. Racism and fandom hate are two very different things even if it sometimes overlaps.

A large part of the hate and/or drama that happens in the RWRB are just patterns that happen in every fandom, even the very white ones. Putting the two leads up against each other, comparing them, comparing acting skills, careers, saying one is sold to hollywood and/or the other is talentless, saying fans aren’t supportive enough of this or that, that fans should move on from this or that, hate and bullying happens in every. fandom. ever.

And many times, the hate and/or drama is amplified by people trying to fight it. How many times did you scroll your timeline seeing people complaining about hateful messages but seeing none of the actual hate message unless you really look deep for it?

The idea is not to compare that to racism but to say that that unlike racism, this could be ignored. You don’t go on in life stopping people in the street asking for their opinions about your favorite actor or movie or book and insult them if they disagree and no one is doing that to you either. So I think that what the original post was about. The Internet expose us to too many opinions we shouldn’t have to deal with on a daily basis. The best answer to that specifically is to ignore.

As for hate messages rooted in either racism, queerphobia or misogyny or something equally revolting, I still think there are specific situations when the best way to fight is to ignore.

Let’s say I receive a queerphobic message in my inbox. 

What could feel right is to answer "fuck you, stop being queerphobic". But even if I’m calling out a queerphobic behavior I’m still amplifying that message by sharing it. I would expose 1,700+ (or more (or less if you count the bots)) people to a queerphobic message while trying to fight against it. I probably wouldn’t have changed the mind of the person writing this in the first place but I made several (maybe hundreds) people feel insulted.

If I ignore the message and put it in the trash where it belongs, I made a total of 0 person feeling insulted. The queerphobia hasn’t been amplified, the message doesn’t exist anymore. That what the original post was about in my opinion. Sometimes, the choice is up to us however we deal with it.

Instead, I’m sharing other messages. Yours. The stories of many actors and actresses of color starting their own producing companies because Hollywood doesn’t give them the same opportunities. Matthew’s voice talking about the rating of queer movies. Taylor’s accomplishments. Casey’s successes. Whoever.

On Twitter, it’s different. More difficult. We know algorithms. If 100 people answer to (or QRT) a racist post saying it’s racist and stupid, the algorithm doesn’t think it’s stupid, it thinks it’s relevant because 100 people interacted with it. If moderation and report and ban were efficient, it would be easier but Elon thinks it’s fun and social medias want more interactions not less so they’re built that way. So saying we should leave this hell hole isn’t actually a bad advice.

Long story short, it’s complicated. Ignoring things is not saying it doesn’t matter or that it’s unimportant. My personal belief is that we achieve more with pushing voices we want to make powerful and heard than by trying to convince people online we actually don’t know and we might never interact again with.

But ultimately it isn’t an easy topic and it’s unfair for too many people. 

[adiraofthetals]

@adelineiserman posted another prompt today!

So I wrote most of this morning then crashed for lets just say a while- Then I wanted to connect this is an actual scene in Discovery. You will know when you see it. So yeah. Also the object is laptop. The very thing I typed this fic on.

You know the drill, this for Discovery In Eureka because they are on earth and live in Eureka. Also this turned out a bit longer then the last two. Like 500 words more- Also shush its still day three. Just almost the 4th too.

Prompt 3: Write a sentence at least a sentence incorporating an object you can see from where you are right now.

Adira yawned and tried to wipe the sleep from their eyes, it was late but they had to finish this task before they could crash. They took a sip of coffee and wondered how much longer until Paul gets back from his meeting.

Since scientists are scientists they have some of the worst sleep schedules known to mankind. So that’s why Paul was having a meeting at whatever ungodly hour it currently was.

It wasn’t just Adira and Paul here, they’re pretty sure that a bunch of people are still working in their labs. They remembered that Hugh said he was working the nightshift today. So he was around Global somewhere.

They assumed he was busy checking people that were working whatever experiment went wrong. They haven’t heard anything yet but GD was massive enough to not hear anything.

Adira kept on typing on their laptop while taking occasional sips of coffee. The lab was empty apart from them. Everyone had already left for the night. It was them and them alone.

They looked over their code again and groaned. What was wrong with this damn code?

They put their head on the table and started repeatedly banging their head. “Come on brain work! It’s your job to work!”

Adira stopped and stared at the code for a minute before pushing their chair away from the desk.

They needed to figure out what was wrong but it appeared the code should work. What were they missing?

They need to get away from their laptop. If they keep on looking at it right now they're going to go crazy.

They snagged their coffee cup and pushed the chair to spin them around. They kept on spinning the chair by pushing off a table leg in the lab.

Adira finished up the coffee and tried to throw the cup into the trash while spinning.

Unsurprisingly they missed the trash can but they’ll pick it up later.

The lab was a mess of coffee cups and styrofoam food containers from Café Diem from dinner. Jett had thankfully made another run to the beloved café before leaving for the night. Grabbing more coffee for them and Paul and sneakily getting Adira some sweets.

They were so caught up in their code that they never actually checked to see what Jett had got them.

Adira pushed themselves and the chair in the direction of the Café Diem bag that supposedly had sugar in it. They snatched the bag off the counter to find some chocolate chip cookies.

They took the cookies back over to their laptop, still never leaving the office chair. They needed some sugar and then they will figure out what is wrong with their algorithm.

After snacking for a few minutes and existing with their thoughts, they looked over their code again. Almost instantly they realized their mistake.

Oh, they felt really stupid.

They corrected the code and tested it. Well. It works now and they would celebrate but they laid their head on the table instead. All they have to do now is wait.

They didn’t mean to but they did fall asleep at the uncomfortable desk. Good for working but not for sleeping.

After a long while they were awakened slightly by footsteps walking closer, “Burning the midnight oil.”

Paul responded, “Yeah. Just… wrapping up. There’s nothing more to do until their algorithm finishes.”

Hugh stopped him, “No, no, no, no, no. Let them sleep. At that age whatever they can get is golden.”

Adira felt someone put a lab coat over them. Probably Paul’s.

“Gray stopped speaking to them.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. But… Even so, their work has been nothing short of stellar. They’re really something.”

Adira spoke up, “They’re also awake.”

Hugh laughed and Paul apologized, “I’m sorry.”

Adira rubbed their eyes, “No. It’s ok.” They sat up and pulled Paul’s lab coat over them, “When I sleep like this, my back kills.”

“Well, you got to take better care of yourself.”

“You don’t need to fuss over them, Hugh. They’re not a child.”

“Technically, they are a child.”

Adira smiled at their banter, “Are we done for today?”

Paul reassured them, “We are.”

“Ok.” Adira got out of their seat and handed Paul’s lab coat back, “Now can we go home?”

Paul gave a small laugh, “Yes we can. Go to the car, we’ll be there in a moment.”

Adira nodded, folded their laptop, and shoved it in their bag. They swung the bag over their shoulder and walked out of the lab. When they were no longer facing the men they smiled. They were such dads. Sure they were only fostering them but they became their dads so quickly.

While they were walking out they heard Hugh, “Pride, it suits you.”

Living in Eureka takes a lot of time to adjust to but they wouldn’t have it any other way.

[cryptid-artha]

I saw some posts about Bluesky having block lists that automatically blocks tons of accounts with a click. And people sharing various lists of accounts to block.

And honestly? I don't agree with that. At all. I feel like it's harmful, and here's why.

The block function has a reason for existing. To block people who spread dangerous things or hate speech and harmful people that come across your feed. To stop people who are harassing or harming you from interacting with you. To curate your experience online and the people you interact with. If something or somebody harming you or hurting you or upsetting you, the block function is there so you don't see or interact with it anymore. That's the point of blocking. Stopping them from contacting you or interacting with you. Preventing harassment by barring their access to you.

But block lists? People can end up on those for any reason. This means people who are innocent will be isolated because maybe somebody decided they didn't like them so they got them on a block list. Or maybe something they posted offended somebody or maybe some context got left out. Or they got roped into some drama. Or they did something dumb in the past. If it's AI or an algorithm creating the list, maybe people who align with your beliefs and are speaking up against harmful stuff get roped in just because of a keyword. So you could get lumped in with the awful people you were speaking out against and suddenly find yourself blocked randomly by a bunch of people.

Block lists, that automatically block tons of accounts, can very much be harmful. It can isolate innocent people.

Instead of just blocking tons of random people you will likely never, ever encounter or interact with, you should just block the ones that effect you directly. Don't go out of your way to find people to block. Don't go looking. Just.... Enjoy your little corner of the internet and take out the trash if it ends up at your doorstep.

I myself have been a victim of a block list. I think. A few times over the past few years, I have gone to favorite an art piece or comment on it to complement the artist or watch an artist who has awesome art I wanna follow. And realized that I was blocked. It confused me. Because I keep my head down and generally avoid drama. I haven't done anything or been involved in anything that warrants a random block. It made me feel confused and anxious as if I had somehow done something wrong. But it also stopped that artist, who probably just mindlessly used a list of accounts to block tons of people with no reason given, to miss out on favorites, comments, and even a potential commissioner. In the grand scheme of things, it was very minor. But it still harmed both of us in a small way.

So yeah... I don't agree with block lists. I don't like them. And I don't like that Bluesky has such an easy function built in to do that. It makes me a lot less likely to actually do much there and makes me think less of the platform as a whole. Which sucks. It had potential, but it seems to be falling to the same flavor of drama that dragged Twatter down. I am gonna stay far away from that, thank you very much.

[spacecat-studio]

Can we stop having the same reductive argument about women reading MM it’s fucking 2024 and there is a fifty percent chance that my government is going to get flushed into a fascist toilet of censorship and explicit oppression of minorities. People reading and writing what they want is not the problem.

You want to talk about the problems in the MM romance community? Great, let’s talk about how it’s just chock full of queerphobia. Let’s talk about how entitled fans stewing in a soup of internalized misogyny, or just outright misogyny, harass authors who step outside the MM genre to write queer MF, or sapphic or trans or nonbinary stories. Let’s talk about women and afab enbies who won’t touch stories about queer women with a ten foot pole. Let’s talk about the authors who profit from queer narratives under one pen name and cater to homophobic fans under another. Let’s talk about how a huge majority of MM authors are women or afab enbies but who can’t even imagine worlds where there are female and nonbinary characters in the background, much less as a part of the actual narrative. Let’s talk about acephobia and how even the ace authors can’t seem to imagine a world where ace characters exist except as side stories. Let’s talk about how deeply conservative many romance narratives are, about how they perpetrate a singular view of what love, romance, and sex should be. Let’s talk about how many readers treat MM as a kind of escapist tourist destination while ignoring the real life issues queer people face. Let’s talk about the authors who put ‘New York times best selling author’ in the bio for their gay romance pen name but won’t tell you that author name because they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Let’s talk about the defense ‘it’s just entertainment’ because it never is just entertainment. We are still dealing with the cultural fallout that the Hays code perpetuated about queer characters, in which the queer characters had to be portrayed as evil predators or tragic figures who die at the end. Trans women have been the butt of gross jokes in movies for decades. (Lindsey Ellis has a great breakdown of this on YouTube.) Big studios won’t make queer stories because they can’t market them to china. Amazon’s algorithmic doom spiral buries narratives that don’t conform to the narrow standard of comforting regressive escapism. The faceless corporate machine allows authors from marginalized groups to be silenced by bullies. Let’s talk about how it rewards the privileged authors who have the time and financial considerations to put out mediocre trash every other month. Let’s talk about how we sold our future out to the Amazon machine for the immediate profits of the now, and how that’s made the system unsustainable and hostile to our interests. Let’s talk about how authors will band together against legitimate criticism of their bad behavior to use that system to silence those critics. Authors who literally made their names writing MM narratives yet still espouse conservative ideals that get real queer men oppressed. Authors who file the serial numbers off their fan fiction and publish it as original work without bothering to flesh out the narrative or characters, for profit. The system that allows scammers to do this to fan works so easily and with little to no accountability. All in the name of entertainment.

Let’s talk about the real problems, because I’m fucking tired of the bullshit and the hypocrisy. I’m tired of having a checklist to vet authors so I don’t end up supporting yet another one who turns out to be an exploitive piece of shit. And I’m tired of seeing this argument use to justify misogyny and the persistent misgendering of nonbinary folks.

[chaotictempleknight]

I think AI is a good tool for assisting art. What I want to see is AI helping artists and writers make their work better. What I don't want to see is AI outright replacing Art and writing. I'll give AI art credit in that it can produce interesting results and it can be made to look passable. The latter requires effort on the part of the prompt writer.

What I will never take seriously is AI writing. We do not have AI, we have lines of code and algorithms that know how to talk like real people. Anything written by "AI" is just the program trying to guess what a book should look and sound like based on already existing works. It does not have the ability to handle nuance or philosophy. It accepts a prompt and provides a result it thinks will satisfy the request.

Also 200k words? Really? I write novels and when I write a 30 chapter book, I usually have around 2000 words per chapter, coming out to 60k words per book on average.

Having AI help you figure out how you should write certain aspects or elements of your book? I can accept that. Having the AI write the whole book with you just copying and pasting the results into Word or Docs? Get out and throw your AI slop in the trash where it belongs.

I have become intensely fascinated with this YouTuber who makes lots of acting shorts, all based on hypothetical dystopias ("everyone has a counter on their head and they die when it reaches 0")

I don't want to disparage a creative individual putting themselves out there, but these videos aren't great. They're easily mistaken for parodies at best, irritating algorithm pleasers at worst.

This content creator has written a whole book. It's on Amazon. I know it's the same person, because the book is referenced in a video.

Not to give a baseless accusation, but it's written using AI. The blurb is, at least, based on the wordy style with a total lack of clarity.

What has irritated me most about this, is this person posing as a writer in their most recent video, and in a flippant aside saying the book is 200k words long. While holding a copy of the book, which is barely a centimeter thick (ie closer to 40k words).

Word count is not a measure of success for a writer in any capacity, but most of us are aware, on some level, of how long our project is.

What this just screams to me is someone generating a book, cover, blurb and reviews using AI, and not even stopping to check how long it is. Probably haven't even read the fucking thing themselves. Thrusting machine-made drivel into the world without even trying themselves. Without even considering trying. Trying was never even an option.

[depressedhatakekakashi]

Have you also had the misfortune of looking at the Naruto meme subreddit, too? My word, like once a week, there's a "Sakura's useless" joke posted somewhere in there.

Oh! Another excuse I hate people tossing around is, "It's a shonen written specifically for boys, not a shojo for girls, what do you expect? 🙄". Or another "great" deflection from criticizing the sexism in shonen: "Well, shojo has poorly written MALE characters, and THEY'RE not called out for it! ✅♟️". (That's not the checkmate you think it is! Everyone finds poorly written characters in general very annoying, that person just isn't looking for them.)

No one even get me started on the people who bring up Fullmetal Alchemist either! They bring up FMA as their ONE example of an anime with well-written female characters; like that anime's existence alone completely negates the dozens upon dozens of terrible ones! Bad writing is bad writing, no matter the genre; and it's baffling to me how weird some folks are about gender...

I do not have reddit but i do have Facebook and dear GOD is it a shit show. Arguments over who’s more ‘useless’ between Sakura and Hinata. Comments about how Tsunade is trash because she didn’t return Jiraiya’s feelings (URGE I HATE IT), and then every single thing is about propping up character’s like Itachi and Minato and shitting on EVERY SINGLE OTHER CHARACTER.

I loath it but i check facebook for family and the f***ing algorithm got me because of one drawing i shared

And wholey crap, ya no. One anime with good female character’s does not at all negate the other bad ones. Like ya, talk about it so people watch it but people should still be calling out sexist (or racist homophobic transphobic or other terrible writing). Like, i love dragon ball. Grew up on it. Will NEVER shit up about how they did all the girls dirty except Bulma (who was always used as the ‘sexy girl’ joke in dragon ball for all the pervy guys. Especially master rochi). Like one girl choosing family over continuing her martial arts carrer is ok (and something i hate about naruto fandom is that they refuse to recognize that s sexist as the writing is not all the girls are housewives. Hinata is which makes sense for her character/arc, but the only other two we can assume are housewives are Karui and Temari which i think is BS. Nothing in their stories say’s ‘would be happy being a housewife’ to me. Sakura and Ino are both working mother’s, with Sakura (as much as people may hate her) seeving a sort of single mother role since sasuke is never home.) but when they made Videl do the same thing with her only fighting being as a team with gohan i got annoyed. She’s my fav dragon ball character alongside gohan and i think she deserved to be a top martial artist among regular ass people. Like krillian level.

Aa for ‘useless male characters in Shojo’ i only remmember a few anime’s but like… not really? Tuxedo mask could be maybe the best example but he’s also constantly showing up to help and support sailor moon. In card capture sakura i recall the main male character being quite useful and having a great character arc. So i’m calling bs on all Shojo having terrible male character’s

It’s Shonin that is by far worse with treating the ‘non dominent sex’ as a secondary thought instead of actual characters

[sazandorable]

About moderating and banning content on AO3!

Okay so! I haven’t had the spoons to do this for a while but I cracked and ranted about it on twitter which is... not... conducive to long rants, so!

This is a h u g e discussion part of the l o n g history that led to the creation of AO3, which older, more informed, and more articulate people have talked about at length and can be found around if you look (I reblog some of it in my AO3 and fandom history tags for the curious). So I won’t go into that here, nor into the practical reasons why it’s not even possible to put that system in place anyway.

Arbitrarily, or the purpose of this post, because it’s the biggest topic I’ve seen brought up lately, I’ll be talking about fic depicting underage characters in se*ual situations, but honestly I could hold the exact same conversation on literally any controversial content.

This is about why you, specifically, if you are a content creator and especially if you are marginalised and especially if you are queer and especially especially if you are sensitive to fiction depicting certain things... do not, actually, want a banning system on AO3.

What? Of course we do. There’s a lot of p*do shit on AO3 and p*do shit is gross. No one should condone that, wtf? It would be easy to do — just periodically delete the entire Underage tag!

What will happen if that is done is that people will re-upload and continue to write it, they’ll just stop tagging and you will run into it with zero warning nor ability to filter it out. Again, this is not a theoretical — we know this is what happens. When I was a teen, adult content (all adult content) was not allowed on FF.NET; it was everywhere regardless, and without tags. The exact same thing happened on tumblr when adult content was banned as well. It’s not a matter of “staff not handling it well” — it just doesn’t work.

To keep safe the people who need to be able to exclude that tag, that tag needs to exist and be used.

Well, shucks. A reporting system then?

A reporting system would operate in one of two ways:

-an algorithm, which would delete a lot of stuff we wouldn’t want it to delete.

-humans, which is... the bigger problem.

An algorithm sounds great. We do want it to delete everything.

Okay. What about the daddy k*nk fics between consenting adult characters? What about the fics featuring characters that are children in the canon but are adults in the fic? What about the fics about teenagers exploring their se*uality together, written by adults about the experiences they remember having or wish they could have had? What about the thousands of SasuNaru and Drarry and other shounen and YA fics that will get written, by teens or by people who remember being teens? What about the se*ually explicit fic written by teens who are se*ually active in real life? What about the fics about CSA as trauma, about healing from it? What about the fics written by survivors of CSA to cope about their trauma? What about the fics that clearly show that it’s evil and traumatic? What about the super dark, harrowing, but beautiful and artistic that I’m glad I read even though it fucked me up for days? What about the ones that were really shitty but also horribly hot?

Well, some of these are still not okay, but maybe some might be. It depends on how it’s written. We’ll have humans moderating content and deciding, then.

Okay.

The thing is, I don’t know which of the things I just listed were okay for you to be depicted in fiction and which were too much. Odds are I don’t agree with you. Odds are if I asked 10 people randomly picked off the street, not everyone would agree.

Odds are, even if AO3 arbitrarily decided on which of those are allowed and which are not, you would not agree with their choice, and you would still be unhappy with the decision. (Or you would be happy, but your friends wouldn’t.)

Odds are, different AO3 content moderators might not agree on whether a given fic qualifies or not — is it artistic enough? Does it show enough that these actions are evil and wrong? Can the author prove they’re a teenager? Can the author prove they are a CSA victim? Can the author prove that this is to help them cope with their trauma? The author seem to be functioning alright, they mustn’t really be traumatised!

You know what I mean! There’s absolute, objectively gross shit out there that is not artistic and should not be published.

I agree that there’s vile stuff out there that makes me sick and that I think is very clearly just ped*philic trash. But there is no way to, 1) stop those from getting published anyway, 2) take those down and preserve the safety of everything else.

If we start forbidding some things, there’s two ways to go about it.

One single, clear, arbitrary rule — for instance, absolutely no adult content featuring characters under 18 (leaving aside the fact that this would not even work for the reason cited above). So we lose all the stuff from teenagers, all the coming of age stories about adolescence, all the stuff from CSA survivors; people who need to write it can’t publish it anymore, and people who need to read it can’t anymore either (and as a cool bonus, they’re told it’s wrong and made to feel bad about it). Depending on whether the rules applies to characters that are under 18 in the canon, we lose entire fandoms.

Or, subjective moderation by humans, according to what they estimate to be gross.

Let’s assume all moderators can agree on what’s gross or not.

If there is a system in place to ban some underage works because “gross shit”, then that means other gross stuff can be taken down on account of being gross and harmful.

Yeah! Gross stuff should be taken down! Come on, surely everyone agrees on what’s gross and harmful.

Ah.

But the problem is.

Here is a list of things I have seen — with my eyes seen — called harmful to be depicted in fiction:

Murder

Non-con

Inc*st

Cannibalism

Torture

Self-harm

Mental illness

Drugs

Racism

K*nk

Non-negotiated k*nk, but healthy k*nk is ok

Spanking k*nk

BDSM where the woman is a bottom, but woman top is ok

Healthy depictions of BDSM

Unhealthy depictions of BDSM

Queer people doing bad things

Abusive relationships

Rival/Enemies to lovers

Redemption stories

A happy relationship between a 17 yo and an 18 yo

A happy relationship between a 20 yo and a 60 yo

A happy relationship between a boss and their employee, or a college teacher and a student

A happy relationship between a 14 yo boy and an older teenage boy, because that’s reminiscent of older men preying on younger gay boys IRL

Se*ual content featuring a character whose age is unclear in canon and some people headcanon them as being underage, some as being a young adult

Loving, consensual fluff between characters that are evil villains, because it romanticises them and their actions

Dark content shipping female characters

Fluffy content shipping female characters, because it’s misogynistic to act like lesbians are only soft all the time

Consensual s*x featuring a canonically asexual character, because it implies that all aces can and should still have se*

Fics about the same canonically asexual character hating s*x, because that erases the experience of s*x-positive aces

Shipping a character who is perceived by some fans as queer-coded with a character of a different s*x

The tendency to ship a black character with white characters

Fluffy drunk s*x, because that’s not actually consensual

Sleep s*x, because that’s not actually consensual

Trans characters not experiencing dysphoria, because that idealises the trans experience

Consensual s*x between adults that are not married

LGBT+ content, because kids shouldn’t see that.

I guarantee you: you, I, and 10 random people plucked from the street will not agree on what, in that list, is and isn’t okay to publish and consume fiction of.

So why should your taste be the one followed? Why should it be the taste of mods you don’t know? Why should anyone get to dictate? What if the mods think your OTP is gross and your NOTP is fine?

This is the slippery slope argument.

Yes, it is the slippery slope argument. Because we know it happens. Because we’ve been there, because I’ve seen it happen myself twice already and I’m not even thirty. Because we know people do complain loudly about all of these things.

And because the second there is a banning system in place, assholes will use the system to abuse it and get stuff they just don’t like taken down using the “it is gross” argument, and one day you’ll wake up and the beautiful fic that helped you come to terms with your abuse/trauma/identity/orientation/k*nk for feet will be taken down and wonderful vulnerable creative people will have been harassed out of fandom because they argued with 1 person who didn’t like their foot k*nk fic that happened to also feature, for instance, a CSA trauma backstory.

Again: not exaggerating. Not theoretical. It happens, we know it happens, AO3 was created literally because it happens.

I still fucking hate that stuff.

That is completely fine and normal. No one likes everything. Me too! Most of the dark stuff is niche and the creators know only few people will like it the same way they do.

(For the record, I get grossed out and triggered by fics about an asexual character who does not like s*x having s*x with their partner to make them happy. Deep in my gut everything screams that that’s fucked up, terrifying and harmful, how can people write that. But I recognise that there are people who love and need that, and I leave those people and their content alone.

OTOH, I read a lot of otherwise dark shit and I enjoy it in the same way I enjoyed, say, Hannibal, in the same way some people enjoy true crime documentaries, horror movies or r*pe fantasy k*nk. It helps me explore stuff that I like to see in fiction, in a safe, controlled way. I’m also asexual, 90% s*x-repulsed IRL, and, obviously, I would never abuse a child. For that matter, I wouldn’t kill and eat people, either, nor would I do 90% of the tamer k*nky stuff I read.

Of course, Hannibal was fucked up and lots of people probably think Hannibal was gross and should not have been aired — but as exemplified by the fact that it was created, aired and watched, lots of people thought it was fine, interesting and even fun to watch.)

You can and should curate your experience and protect yourself. The AO3 website now allows you to exclude certain tags, and people have developed tools to help with that such as plugins that save your filters or hide fics that contain certain words.

But no, it isn’t going to, and it shouldn’t, get banned.

[miracvlovs]

✗✗✗   you see [ kaleb yıldırım ] around lately? yeah i heard that the [ cis male ] is up to no good. [ he / him ] has been here for [ five years ] now but they’re still pretty [ abrasive ] which is fine because they’re also [ debonair ] so it balances out. the [ twenty-eight ] year old [ hitman for hire ] actually looks like a lot like [ alperen duymaz ], don’t you think? it’s best to watch out, though, because it’s been said that they’re really into [ strong cigarettes & even stronger whiskey ].

hey, hello, hi, bonjour! s’up buttercups? ‘tis i, your friendly neighbourhood loser chrissie ( a.k.a an irish doofus who is utter plot trash and the actual WORST at keeping track with discord messages, oops ) and i’m super duper excited to be here among you fab human beings! anywho, this is my first kiddo kaleb and he is … how do you say … morally grey. basically his morals are very questionable in every aspect. but! on the plus side, he’s very talented and good at his job even if he is ruthless and callous, oop. he is … the worst and also lowkey messed up inside tbh so pls excuse his blunt and sarcastic nature. plot-wise i’m open to literally anything and everything so come at me with any ideas ya got! i’m always diggity down to spit ball ideas and form some dope connections so pls feel free to invade my ims or hmu on le cord ( chrissie.#9606 ) and we can brainstorm until our heart’s content! if ya wanna, go ahead and light that lil grey heart up red and i’ll shimmy my butt your way for all of the good stuff. anywho, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, shall we?

fundamentals.

KALEB EMER YILDIRIM     —     twenty-eight, hitman for hire,   +   one snarky son of a gun   /   troubled dude with daddy issues   /   all issues tbh ! 

aesthetics   ➤   dried blood caked into the grooves of cut knuckles, the lingering scent of smoke and gasoline, silver slivers of past scarring, five o’clock shadow peppering a blunt jawline, discolourations of blue and purple decorating battered hands, a subtle smirk etched upon a devious countenance, calloused fingertips riddled with small paper cuts, dark circles under almost-black eyes, the noise of screeching tires in the middle of the night, a tall stature adorned in all-black attire, ghosts of bruises staining calloused skin green, a scuffed zippo lighter in a pack of marlboros containing only one cigarette, white shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a sly grin under stormy dark eyes, a sniper on the roof of a deserted building, the roar of a car engine, & clenched, white-knuckled fists.

nicknames. kal.

date of birth. november third.

gender. cis male.

pronouns. he + him.

birthplace. manhattan, nyc.

orientation. bisexual + aromantic.

education. bachelor of music degree obtained from manhattan school of music.

spoken languages. can speak fluent english, turkish, spanish, & french.

negative traits. haughty, abrasive, enigmatic, cynical, temperamental, calculating, hedonistic, distant, sarcastic, & volatile.

positive traits. adept, diligent, charming, resilient, candid, adept, charming, audacious, determined, & resourceful.

strengths. efficient, energetic, self-confident, strong-willed, strategic thinker, charismatic, & inspiring.

weaknesses. stubborn, dominant, intolerant, impatient, arrogant, poor handling of emotions, cold, & ruthless.

talents. piano, retaining information, memory recall, lock-picking, carjacking, hand-to-hand combat, automobile knowledge, tracking people down, & excellent problem-solving abilities. 

physiology. dark brown eyes. dark brown hair. six feet, one inch tall. of a lean, broad stature with a straight posture and evident height. has a few silvery scars littered across his skin. has a few tattoos in a few less visible places. is ambidextrous.

psychology. scorpio zodiac. water element. slytherin house. entj-a. chaotic neutral. type eight enneagram. choleric temperament. interpersonal intelligence type. addicted to alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, cocaine, and cannabis. suffers from addiction and insomnia. his vices are lust, wrath and pride. his virtues are ... honestly, probably just diligence tbh.

background.

possible triggers   :   infidelity, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, cancer, death, car crash, funeral, blood, murder, suicide mention, gun mention, & various references to death and murder. 

a synopsis.   ah, here he is—my tol, troubled, grouchy son : ' ) don't u just adore ur resident trashy, snarky, but precious and sad fuckboi muse? bc i know I DO! anyways, before i digress, i'll cut to the chase. so, waaay before he blessed the universe with his presence, his mother ( who was originally from turkey ) moved to the states where she met one alexander hale. you can probably guess the rest: the pair married, they had children, everything seemed to be going swimmingly, yada yada. here’s a lil background: the hale family—a line of manhattan-born businessmen / lawyers / diplomats etc. they're dripping in wealth, not always as squeaky clean as they portray themselves as to be. kaleb’s dad was a douche, expected both of his sons to follow in his shadow and become lawyers, ran around behind his wife's back: the whole shoot and shebang of a classic a-hole. he always kind of ignored kaleb in favour of his eldest son joshua so kaleb kinda became hard-hearted and resentful due to the lack of his father's attention. skip a few years and he spied his dad cheating on his mother with his secretary though he refused to tell another soul for fear of any potential backlash. soon enough, his mother found this out for herself, their argument ruined his thirteenth birthday party then they divorced soon after. his mother fell off the wagon, became terminally ill—all while his father was remarrying and expecting a daughter with his secretary. it was a hella rough two years for kaleb. it got even worse. eventually, his mother passed away and his step-mother divorced his father to breeze off into the sunset with her new lover; leaving her daughter with her piss-poor excuse of a dad. at this point, kaleb was lonely and angry but adopted the role of his step-sister's protector, shielding her from their father's increasing substance abuse induced violence. just before his seventeenth birthday, his father died in a car crash. of course, he didn't entirely mourn the loss. almost immediately, he and his younger sister moved in with their elder brother who helped kaleb get into university. with dear ole dad out of the picture, he could finally pursue his interest and flair for music. after he graduated, he moved to santa ysabel with his brother and brother's family. in the beginning, things were going fine. yeah, sure, he was struggling for work and felt bad that his brother had to keep him afloat. normal stuff. then, one day, things quickly turned sour in his world. [ TRIGGER FOR GORE, BLOOD, SUICIDE MENTION, GUN MENTION, MURDER, DEATH ] he’d came home to find the locks on the doors busted, advancing into the house carefully only to find his brother’s lifeless corpse crumbled on the kitchen tiles: his throat and wrists slashed, posed as a suicide. of course, kaleb knew better. he knew his brother; knew he would never leave him or his family. upon further inspection of the house, he’d discovered the body of his wife upstairs: a bullet hole between her eyes. [ TRIGGER OVER ] the whole ordeal was enough to turn his stomach but once the sickness had subsided, all kaleb felt was a strong thirst for blood. sure, it was pretty damn stupid to try and seek revenge or whatnot ... but kaleb had always been one to let his heart guide his brain. anyways, time skip now to the moment he’d uncovered his brother’s entanglement with some dodgy loan shark, drug dealing criminals who were responsible for his murder. in the end, he’d hunted them down and eradicated them one by one, over a span of weeks. at first, he hated himself and what his desire for vengeance had turned him into but he kept going until he’d got them all: until he’d grown numb. truthfully, how he wound up taking lives for a living is beyond him. he woke up one day, found himself hired by some big-wig businessman who wanted rid of his business partner and et voilà, he was tangled up in the dark side of existence. i mean, was he blackmailed into doing his first paid hit? yes. but who can blame him? especially when they claimed to have intel regarding the sudden demise of a prominent figure in the criminal underbelly of the city, a.k.a his brother’s killer. it was a risk kaleb simply couldn’t take. he prefers to keep himself anonymous, hidden behind shadows, unsuspecting. death has become a job. nothing more. nothing less. it’s simply the algorithm of his existence: receive a dossier, take care of the target, get paid a hefty lump sum. and all just for enacting a stranger’s revenge in the blood of another. he moves like a deadly phantom, his footsteps light as a feather, whipping through the night like a bullet through a target’s skull. sartre claims that hell is other people. and if you were to stare into kaleb’s eyes—eyes eerily similar to having been cut from coal—you might just see hell and everyone in it staring right back at you. as nietzsche wrote: “ he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. ”

random extras.

he has a lot of small scars over his body, most of which he can’t account for or has forgotten about.

owns and drives a black 1969 boss 429 mustang which he loves arguably more than he loves himself.

speaking of, he actually is full of self-hatred so don’t let the haughtiness fool you.

trusts nobody but himself and is loyal to nobody but himself.

has a lot of anger issues so often ends up taking part in underground fights.

he rates around a solid three on the kinsey scale.

is a distant person; closed-off emotionally and prefers to keep himself to himself.

when it comes to whether or not he is morally decent or an extremely bad person, he is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

he isn’t heartless but he isn’t exactly compassionate either.

kind of shady but knows how to pass himself as charming. 

has been thru sum shit n seen sum shit so he’s v messed up inside.

though he does have a soft spot for animals and children.

his marksmanship is impeccable.

he’s naturally gifted with firearms and his shot is always on point.

dark eyes and bruised knuckles are his ultimate aesthetic tbh.

actually really appreciates classical music, though he’ll never tell. blame it on his piano lessons from childhood.

speaking of piano, he’s low key gifted at playing although he rarely does these days.

has a very short fuse and can lose his temper quite easily.

he has a good heart and good intentions when it comes to those he actually cares about although he’ll never let this show.

favourite coping mechanism? isolation.

a bit of a lone wolf. he keeps people at arm’s length but acts in a way where people are under the illusion he’s their friend.

basically the tall, dark and handsome trope: ( most of the tall, dark and handsome men display aloof, cold and distant personality but they do have a gentle and caring side. )

is a little snarky and grumpy but if you manage to break this exterior, you’ll find he’s quite witty and easy going.

he got into fighting at a young age. it was the only way to try and learn how to defend himself against his father.

sleep?? he doesn’t know her.

tends to repress his emotions until he explodes.

healthy coping mechanisms?? he doesn’t know them either.

is prone to pushing the self destruct button.

you can find a pinterest board for him by clicking anywhere here.

[dukeofriven]

From An Old Internet Veteran: Go, and Sin No More

I wish I could explain to young people how wild the internet was as it went from the ‘weird niche thing for lame nerds’ irrelevancy of the early 90s and the “Boy This World Wide Web Thing Sure Is Nifty”-style painful optimism that describes 97% of Western Culture between 1994 and 2002 to the ‘Mad Max But Statistically Less Australian” culture that was the internet from 2002 to around 2010. I come neither to praise this era of internet nor condemn it. I merely want understanding. I cannot polish a lumpen pile of rape jokes, Chuck Norris glorification, “ironic” racism, and numa numa fat shaming and say that it’s misunderstood comedic genius. Trash is still trash even if it wins a bunch of Emmys. But at the same time I cannot take you with me back to the 90s and get you to feel, on a visceral level, what it was like to live in a place where Bart Simpson was both promoted as a real and present danger to the moral upbringing of the world’s children and was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential icons of the 20th century. And because I cannot do that I cannot get you to understand how freeing it felt to be on the internet in that Mad Max era. Ten years before a yellow boy shouting “Don’t have a cow” while doing a pathetic kick-flip on a chunky skateboard was considered the potential downfall of humanity’s children, but now you could make something so risqué that the old-guard stuffed-shirt in 1994 would have died on the spot, his brain unable to consider anything so outside his moral world view. I cannot easily make you understand a time when nobody just said whatever it was they wanted, not just because they had no platform to do so but because the rigidity of social convention was so strong. Nobody ever had hardcore lesbian sex on Northern Exposure on prime time television. Nobody on the X-Files ever died by having their head smashed in a car door repeatedly like a melon until viscera spilled all over the pavement. You could not have made Game of Thrones or Steven Universe in 1995. Forget the graphics, forget the budget, you simply couldn’t do or say any of that on television for either kids or adults. The Mad Max internet changed that - changed the very firmament of what was acceptable in media for every genre and for every demographic.  Is this a good thing? Not particularly. Is this a bad thing? Not particularly. If this sound frustratingly ambivalent that’s because it is: were we to go back and do it all again, knowing all that we know now, would we do it the same way? No. But then, we would not know all that we know now had we not learned it by making the attempt in the first place.

This poor comfort for someone who dives into some 2006 webcomic with a reputation of a Legacy Touchstone and finds it full of ‘jokes’ about their gender, or sexual preference, or the liberal use of the r-slur, or a kind of hyper-suburban comedic racial ignorance. I am not here to argue that that had any value merely because it was transgressive. But the same space that opened-up to let such ugly things out also opened-up places for marginalized groups to made themselves known, groups who never before had such public voices.

Imagine an apocalypse. Imagine society rebuilding in the ashes. Imagine how many false starts and missteps there would be and you begin to understand just a little of what that period was like. It was embarrassing. It was cruel. It was childish and stupid. But in living through it we grew up. Or, at least, those of us capable of growing up grew up, and learned, and learned to be better - learned what better was. And then we built new places where other people could learn too - and spread the gospel of being better. One of the things that always irritates me when it comes to young people talking about the past is the unexamined privilege of knowledge being at your fingertips. It’s more than just everyone carrying a wireless-internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. It’s more than just a Wikipedia with hundreds of millions of articles and a reputation for fact sourcing. It’s more than just a Google that works. If you never experienced it you cannot imagine what using WebCrawler was like in 1995 against Ask Jeeves in 2005 against Google in 2015 - or even Google between 2005 and 2015. Most people don’t go around thinking about SEO and search engine algorithms but maybe we should because anyone who wants to go “this info’s been on the internet since day one so people have no excuse not to know it” disingenuously argues that information search and retrieval has been consistent across the decades. There was a time - not all that long ago - when to look something up on-line involved getting the tacit agreement of everyone in your household to lose the use of the sole telephone for as long as you were web browsing. There was a time - not all that long ago - when ‘looking something up’ was to burden everyone around you with inconveniences, and while you were doing your web searches there was no guarantee what you wanted could be found with the primitive technology of the day. Do you know how much I’ve learned since joining Tumblr in 2011? On a fundamental level, both about myself and the make-up of our species in terms of social conception? I recently went through a bunch of old posts, removing those with broken links and meaningless content, but also shit that just embarrasses me now - mostly opinions from a period where I hadn’t yet had a chance to learn because the spaces in which to learn it did not yet exist. It’s not just things like communities for [demographic X] - it’s things like “communities for [demographic X] with an ability to broadcast their voices and have platforms able to network their ideas and audience halls able to receive them and a search engine to guide people to that community and a basic understanding that the community even exists in the first place.” And this does not even begin to touch on internet access, something that even now is not a universal thing, and for which getting angry about people’s ignorance reflects a bias all its own. I say all this because I think that a core tenant of cringe culture is a myth of universal access to knowledge and universal awareness of one’s own ignorance. I look back on old posts of things I said and I cringe with self-hatred - cringe enough to rip them down and stuff them in the trash. “HOW DID I THINK THAT?” and “HOW DID I NOT KNOW?” But why should I have known - what, in my life, would ever have put better ideas across my desk? That I can meaningfully speak now about privilege and intersectionality and historiography is because between then and now I was put in a place to learn these things. I was exposed to ideas that I had never before been exposed to, and was given the grace to learn. I am tired of the expectation that every aspect of our past selves should be held to the same standard as the present. (Yes, to all the disingenuous bad-faith trolls out there, I obviously and of course am advocating for complete and total uncritical pardon for everything in the past ever. Were you a neo-Nazi ten years ago? Water under the bridge without question because that’s obviously, obviously, obviously the sort of extreme outlier case I am talking about good on you for being clever enough to notice.) But for the non-dipshits out there who understand how to read without injecting insincere hyperbole into every argument, I want us to be kinder to our past selves when we have learned to be better. It’s okay that you used to like Sherlock - there were genuinely fun things about it, and it’s okay that you didn’t possess an expert grasp of post-graduate feminist critical theory when you were 21. Or 31. Or 41. More concepts of academia have filtered into mainstream consciousness than ever before - and in saying that we should remember the corollary that ten, twenty, thirty years ago that was not the case. We knew less, had access to less, and were exposed to narrower viewpoints than we are today. It is unfortunate - but it was not our fault, and we cannot easily blame ourselves for it any longer. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing people taking umbrage that... oh, Farmer Joe McSmithHead of Buttnut, Alabama in 1963 was ignorant of internal Chinese politics and said some untrue things about Chinese Communism. But the only thing Farmer Joe had to tell him of the outside world was a radio that played country music, a TV with four channels and strict content guidelines to only show pleasant, moral, and god-fearing content, and the three books in the Buttnut library, two of which were the Bible. There have, and will always be, certain moral lines so obvious that people of any era should always be held accountable to them. But above that, in the more trivial space of media consumption, absorption, and critique, we have to learn to be more forgiving - to ourselves and to others, so long as in the present we have changed. Did you use the r-slur a lot because it was practically a form of punctuation on 4chan and that’s where you learned the ways of the internet? Did you learn the harmfulness of this practice and cease to do it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Did you and your friends used to make jokes about how Mexicans smelled because you saw Seinfeld do that in his standup and the whole TV laughed as though it was funny? Did you realize one day ‘wait a minute that’s actually super gross’ and stop repeating it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Have you gone back to a beloved childhood property and found it’s full of woman-beating and weird views on homosexuality? Did you find yourself able to critique this beloved thing and did not defensively double-down on shielding it from all harsh words? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. I will not allow us to dismiss the cruelty and hurt of Mad Max Internet Culture with a flippant ‘well that’s just how it was back then” but nor will I allow anyone to condemn us all as being consciously unfeeling, willfully ignorant, purposefully hateful. Some of us were. But some of us did not know, could not have known, needed to learn - and we were lucky enough to live in a time before cringe culture and cancel culture where we were allowed to have that opportunity to learn and grow. We need that today, for all young people who think themselves as woke as can be and ten years from now will look back and blush with shame for things they said and did in total ignorance. The sin is choosing to never change, not failing to change sooner.

[haulix]

Advice All Music Writers Should Follow in 2019

The music business in 2019 would be virtually unrecognizable to the music business of 2000. In less than two decades the industry we all love has undergone an extensive transformation that has emphasized access rather than ownership, created a glut of festivals, and brought into question the necessity of quote/unquote ‘music journalists.’ When algorithms can predict success better than even the most gifted ears, and everyone with an opinion can share their thoughts on social media do we have a need for full-time music writers?

The answer, as always, is yes. There may be more people talking about music than ever before, as well as more way to access music, but that does not mean the quality of conversation around the art form is at its peak. As long as great artists are creating impossibly catchy songs that ultimately never receive the praise or support they deserve there is still work to be done on the part of music journalists. There is and will always be a need for people to amplify the voice of artists on the rise, as well as a need for experienced listeners to help those short on time make useful discoveries.

While there is a lot to be said for how music blogs and publications can better themselves in 2019, there is also quite a bit you should be taking it upon yourself to do to get ahead. What follows are three tips to keep in mind as we begin to navigate the uncertain months ahead. The future is always unpredictable, but there is a lot you can do right now to increase your chances of a better tomorrow. If you have any questions, email me: james@haulix.com.

Storytelling matters now more than ever

There was time not long ago when the vast majority of music blogs created just two pieces of content: Reviews and news. The reviews were written hurriedly by young critics trying to make their name by praising or trashing talent, while the news often amounted to little more than copy/pasted press releases tweaked just enough not to be outright plagiarism. Some of this content was good, but most was immediately disposable.

Some of those sites still exist today, but most have died due to an inability to grow their audience. If the content your creating is immediately disposable then the same can be said for your site. If, however, you can find a way to create unique content that no one else can offer then you may be able to set yourself apart.

To do this, we suggest telling more stories. Find an artist you believe in, regardless of popularity, and tell their story. Tell your story about telling their story. Tell the story of their fans and why they choose to care about this artist instead of the other million-plus in existence. Find an angle that interests you and shares it with the world. Take chances. Maybe what you uncover isn’t necessarily new or groundbreaking information, but as long as it is honest and well-written, it will entertain.

Maintain your archives, both public and private

Here’s a nightmare scenario most writers never consider: What happens to your content in the event a hacker attacks the site(s) where you contribute? What happens if the owner of that site suddenly loses interest in the publication and deletes it? What happens if for whatever reason your content disappears before you or anyone else thinks to save a copy elsewhere?

The answer is always the same: Your content is gone forever.

In 2019, there are no longer any acceptable excuses for failing to maintain a personal archive. Too many sites have gone under, and too many people have complained over social media about now permanently lost work for you to fall in line with those who the easily avoidable mistake of not keeping track of your work. After all, who else do you expect to do it? No one cares more about your career in writing than you, so you must be the one to look after and ensure its legacy.

In addition to saving your work offline, we also suggest you maintain a catalog of links to the currently active content you consider to be your ‘best’ work. Services like Contently make this easy and cost-effective. Again, there is no excuse for your archives being a mess. Get it together!

You need a website

Every time we create a post offering advice to individual professionals we make it a point to emphasize the need for a personal site. It doesn’t matter if you own a blog with a hundred contributors or you contribute to a hundred blogs, every single person trying to make it in the music business should have their website. The reasons why are as endless as your imagination, but the main reason is that you need a place where you and your work can be the focus of everyone’s attention. You need a place where your absolute best work is displayed, as well as a place where people can learn more about you and whether or not you are available for freelance work. A personal website can be anything you want it to be. Just make sure you have one.

[ocean-of-junk]

You are witnessing curated spaces, by people that probably lived steady straight forward mostly stress-free lives. that were allowed to develop their spaces/personality in their own rooms they never had to share with siblings, probably. It's like when people at work tell me about their normal lame moms/dads/family, and I'm like wait you didn't endure horrific child abuse and didn't have to spend a decade+ rebuilding yourself from the ground up???? And they're like well I got yelled at one time because I took the car without permission. Lower/ Middle-class American 1990s TV families really do/did exist, and it's so weird.

But yeah also the algorithm and also why would anyone want to watch vids of prolonged torture of poor people. i should really use ticktok to share my knowledge of how to pick out edible food from the trash. or which is better dog food or cat food? its dog food. 90% corn with bone meal and other bits. Cat food is just straight gross. I can't eat Turkey bacon because It's almost exactly like the dog treats begging strips. I learned that because my older sister would rather let food rot than share with the rest of the family. Her dogs were her babies. And then when they contracted mange, she abandoned them in the middle of nowhere, never to seen again... Which would you rather watch?

People on TikTok are too pretty. It genuinely creeps me out.

[hoe-for-daddywise]

The fiction that was never released.

As you are all aware I have been vacant and doubt I will be back. And I miss you all entirely. And to apologise for my disappearance I bestow upon you a fiction I wrote but never posted. It is unfinished, yes. But I spent ages writing it and I hope you would all enjoy it. Think of it this way, you can make up your own ending in your head. Like British films that break against the American conventions of happy endings in every film and leave you to decide how something ends. So here it is. The fiction that was never released. For this I’m tagging those who always made me feel happy to be in this fandom.

@smileysam13579 @penny-trash @pennydaddywise @robindanielle @randomcatgirl1 @trinsghost @take-a-penny-leave-a-penny @ohhh-pennywise @princess-pennywise @peenwise @pimmelwise @pennys-drool @pennywises-cum-dumpster @astrotheclown @sewer-party @sheeit-pennywise @dancing-sewer-daddy @dick-me-down-sewer-clown @desallinhada @fuckin-boiis @floatpenny @fallenchrysalis @gothguitargal @hauntedneibolt @hellodaddywise @literalslutforpennywise @capicornoo @nychowise-hl @silent-world-of-a-deaf-boi

/ /

The early bird gets the worm. This being a singular proverb used to galvanise the spectator or humour the tentative other, as what is perceived as normal for the spider would become chaos for the fly. Horror has always had its way of lurking in all times and in every corner of the world, and you, a soul drunk with isolation, were certain of this. And as the rain threw itself violently against the window of your plaintive flat in the small town of Derry, you tugged at your bottom lip, daring yourself to go outside into the misery the early morning had brought, to see, Indeed, if today would be prosperous.

Darkness had plagued itself across your room, threatening to swallow it whole like a cancer; the only light discernible was from a street light adjacent from your room and a small, dull lamp placed within it. Every slight movement you made caused your shadow to follow you like a lost boy glued to you, or like sin hiding itself from the light of God. However, you failed to make out all the shadows, as some appeared as mix matched shapes perplexing to your eyes. Yet the next thing that happened not only confused your senses but made you question your very own sanity. Upon further analysis of the shapes around your room, you had discovered your own shadow had manifested; into what, was still uncertain. Initially it started off as your own, until it started dancing and twirling, spinning randomly in a rhythmic pattern, it was almost hypnotic. And when you moved the shadow wobbled with you, you was bound by the shadow and the shadow bound by you. But this wasn’t your shadow. It was attached to you but it wasn’t yours. Then you heard it. The sweet sound of laughter followed by the gentle call of your name.

“Wh-who’s there?” Croakily you managed through disbelief still doubting your senses. A small but prominent sound rang out, the jingling of bells. Hastily you shuffled backwards, not once taking your eyes off the black mass which still moved in sync with you despite the fact it was evolving. Both you and it were slaves to each other like a demon at night, destined to do as the other does, creating the question of were your movements even yours any more or were they caused by the mass?

The black abyss before you had conjured into a full bodied apparition before your very eyes, no longer being a darkened reflection of yourself. “I’m Pennywise, the dancing clown.” The words he had spoken were mirrored by that of his actions as he jumped and swayed around, bells clattering against each other as he did so. You analysed the clowns every move, like you were trying to figure out an algorithm as you and the clown had seldom met before. Pennywise, in turn, stood before you as if waiting to gain some sort of a response from your parted cracking lips. There was almost a silence of some sort if it had not been for the ticking of the small plastic clock tucked away behind a pile of dusty books on your bedside table. Yet this ticking, no matter how quiet, didn’t go a miss, for any more silent it would have caused your ear drums to ring with the upmost discomfort.

“What’s the matter, Y/N? Never seen a shadow change before?” Pennywise cackled at you, taunting you; you proceeded to walk backwards until you felt your hand come into contact with the cold condensed glass on the window. “Come join the clown, Y/N. We all float down here. Yes we do.” It was difficult to make out his figure in the darkness and lack of light your lamp emitted, however, you were still able to register the heavy Victorian clown attire he wore and the intricate makeup he had so carefully stained on his chubby face.

“Leave me alone!” You challenged yourself to shout, astonished you were able to retain your voice from cracking yet again.

Adamant to appear unfazed by the clown, you propelled yourself off the window you had used for support and started forward; the clowns laughter increasing ever more mocking your pathetic effort of standing your ground. The next set of events, which followed after this, provoked the up most discomfort through your body; disturbing you relentlessly as the clown dissolved back into the shadows for a brief second. Instantaneously, Pennywise leaped back out at you generating supplementary shadows in the room to ricochet; they ambushed you, vaulting themselves from individual directions with edges like knives, all fleeting at you. You forced your eyes shut.

Like necromancy, the shadows were being conjured, launching a heap of black liquid on top of you. What this liquid was is still a mystery to you. It entered your mouth with force, leaving a bitter taste on your tongue and seeping down your throat. You tried to scream but found yourself gagging as it made its way up your nose, you couldn’t breathe. You had come to the inescapable conclusion that right here and now your life would come to a tragic end and your death would remain a mystery to all those who pretended to be dear to you. Panic seeped within you, tensing your fists until your knuckles were white and the bone threatened to pierce your delicate skin. Suddenly, it stopped, but at what price? Spluttering out as much of the black liquid as you were able you regained your breath and wiped your eyes free from the goo; opening them slightly the clown was gone and for this justice you, the tentative other, were thankful. However, one thing you noticed was how the shadows were no more. The mix matching shapes around your room were now gone, leaving each object unbound. Even yours, was gone.

The majority of your day, after this series of events, was spent stood in the same spot the clown had left you, eyes fixated on the wall of where your shadow once lived. Day light had spread it’s way across the room and had left once again, indicating you must have been unchanging for 12 hours. So you showered and plonked yourself on the sofa downstairs and where you would make your bed for the night as your room was uninhabitable thanks to the black goo. You hadn’t even eaten that day but your appetite was non existent. And as you laid down, ready for your slumber, you thought about the clown. You thought about Pennywise, and replayed his words over and over in your head. “We all float down here.” What was that even supposed to mean? Was it a riddle? Everything was uncertain and you hated that. Would he be back? What did he want? So many questions and no answers. But you couldn’t tell anyone as some memories are meant to stay secret and some secrets do not allow themselves to be told; if this one was, people would think you were surly mad. So you hoped, that when you woke, you room would be back to normal and that this will have all been a dream.

Morning came, as it always does, accompanied by the gentle sound of birds, tweeting as they always do. Subsequently, you almost had to question why you had slept downstairs until memories, secrets, came flooding back to you. Yet, these were memories you had hoped to have dreamed, thus, you ventured to your room to collect the evidence. As suspected the goo was unmoved. The full extent of damage your room held was remarkable with not a single item within left untouched; still you couldn’t help but listen to the nagging sensation in your mind that you had lost all sanity that was left in you, so you set about getting a second opinion. There, out of the window, a man in his 20’s walked so smoothly he could have been floating. Running as quick as your feet could take you, grabbing the door handle to reveal the outside world. “Excuse me!” The man glanced around to see who else you could be shouting at, noticed no one else was there and then pointed at himself. “Yes, you.” Laughing you motioned for him to come over. “This is going to sound ridiculous and I’m sorry, but something remarkable happened last night and I need to know if you can see it too.”

The gentleman laughed as he reached your doorstep, and it was at this instant you recognised how handsome he was. He partially opened his mouth to lick his plump lips, which were so damn gorgeous, and his ebony hair perfectly combed. And then you realised you were staring when his piercing blue eyes connected with yours causing your heart to flip. You had only just met this man. What’s the matter with you?

“Erm, should I take a look?” Thankfully he broke the awkwardness as he pointed inside your flat with a smirk on his face, biting his lower lip.

“It’s this way.” Ushering him inside you hear him shut the front door behind you and continue down the hall, leading him to your room. “I’m Y/N, by the way.” You acquaint yourself with a small smile.

“Roman.” He replied gently still smirking.

“Okay, well, here we are.” You gestured towards the closed door to your bedroom. Daintily he stalked to the door and groped for the handle in the dull corridor. With a push he was staring into your room.

“Oh my.” He glanced around.

“You...you see it too?” Hope probably too prominent in your voice.

“See it?” Silence. “Some just dripped on me.” He turned towards you, and, indeed, some had dropped onto his beautifully sculptured face. You glared at each other for a moment until you both burst out laughing at the exact same time.

“Let me get you something for that.” The bathroom was just across the hall in your apartment, rushing, you grabbed for a packet of makeup wipes and headed back to him. You held one of the moist wipes between your forefinger and thumb and held it out towards Roman. But instead of taking the wipe he presented his hands before you which, much like his face, were coated in the black liquid.

“That just sort of...happened.” He laughed. “Would you mind?” He gestured towards the wipes and then his face. “It’s just I would end up with more on me if I try to wipe it.”

The concept of touching Romans face sent butterflies scurrying round your stomach but you didn’t want to appear too eager so you replied with an unpretentious, “Erm, sure.”

“So, what exactly happened?” Roman interrogated as you cleared his face free from the goo.

“You wouldn’t believe me.” You shook your head and sighed, to this, Roman raised an eyebrow.

“Try me.” Is all he said.

Withdrawing your hand from his face, you began to explicate the details of last nights revulsion to the stranger, whom, you had just acquainted. During intervals of unsurety, Roman would nod his head when he perceived necessary, for this, you were grateful and for more than one reason. The first being that he had not absquatulated in fear of his own safety. And, the later being, he was listening and attempting to make sense of the narrative you had abruptly situated before him.

“So this clown, Pennywise, I think you named him...”

“Yes.”

“Pennywise came out of your shadow on your wall?”

“Yes.”

Romans face appeared as if it was swallowing itself, his features getting smaller. It was as if he had been sucking a Lemmon for the past year.

“You think I’m mad don’t you?” All hope you once attained was now failing.

“Mad? No, not mad. Insane? Yes. But I believe you. And I guess that also makes me insane.” He laughed at his own comment. However, you wasn’t certain what to make of this or how Roman, knowing of your situation, would benefit you in any way. One thing, however, you now had the knowledge that your senses did not deceive you and Pennywise had in fact conjured shadows to assault you last night.

SNAP

Your train of thought was interrupted from the simple click of fingers in front of your face.

“Hmmm, sorry?”

“I said, do you need help cleaning up?” He indicated towards your room. You sincerely had not contemplated the cleaning process as your mind had been otherwise occupied with a certain clown.

“Oh, I couldn’t allow you to help. That’s far too much to expect.” Thanking him, you refused him even though you knew help would be most welcome.

“I insist.” Roman disputed with you as he knew this was all talk much for you to take on by yourself.

[rancim]

2/21/22

theme randomizer: renovation 

The kids grown, the house empty, the job retired. The past few months, without work, without something to attend to, manifested itself into a restlessness that he should be doing something, anything with his time. It was not as if he didn’t have hobbies. However, in the vast context of having all of this free time, and furthermore, of all this dwindling time, his likes and interests felt insubstantial. Down the street, retired fathers were investing in deferred passion projects, pitching deals, attaining investments, gaining accolades, actualizing themselves into emergent talents in the world of creatives. Or, they were bouncing grandchildren on their still strong knees, fat happy babies born from their own successful, happy progeny. 

He knew in the twilight of his old age that he could rely neither on himself or his own children to give his time meaning and direction, let alone happiness. “An aimless man can only rear aimless children,” he would catch himself thinking now, during the times of silence between episodes loading of whatever it was he was binging. He had thought that rearing children would be something of an honorable duty, but the work simply felt menial, a kind of commitment to drag oneself through until they were old enough to drag themselves on their own. He was unable to escape himself, his monotonous thoughts, his inability to approach anything with a passion, or with any sense of enthusiasm. 

Am I not someone entirely unfit for this world? he had always thought to himself. Could this finally be time to be something? He looked at his hands, now gnarled with age, and tried to imagine what he could place in them that would give him a goal to work towards. 

The following day, he went to a gym. It was a solace, to be surrounded by other young people, confused and unsure about the trajectory of their own lives, instead of staying in the predictable suburbs, with all the other fathers that had it so figured out that they had the humility to insist that they didn’t, despite the mountain of accomplishments achieved and forthcoming. 

In the gym he deadlifted. Not nearly enough to be considered exceptional, but with enough invested effort for young people passing by to say things like good job and you’re doing great and you’re an inspiration gramps. He smiled at them. He felt emboldened. He appreciated the cheeriness of these young people, so unlike his own son, who rather than invested in pushing a bar or a boulder or something, fought the futility of life through solitude, and sinking into the comforts of his room, never going outside. The father still wasn't entirely sure how or why his son left his room, but one day he did. Maybe the son thought he would do better in an environment without his father. And the father began to entertain the same train of thought, that maybe he could become a better person without his son. 

When the father comes home, he hollows out his son’s room of all the displaced possessions, all of the things he wasn’t able to fit into the back of his car. The anime figurines, into the trash. The self help books, donated towards a library. The vast collection of games and consoles, sold to a retro gamer collector who surely got the better end of the deal. Who cares, the father thought. He looked at his son’s empty room and felt a swell in a chest, at the idea of actuating himself into existence, at the notion of having taken the very first step. 

First, a power cage. A treadmill. Olympic weights. A sturdy, reliable bar to put them on. A bench. Speakers. A spotify premium account, and an inspirational playlist of which the algorithm gave endless recommendations towards. A blender, first placed in the kitchen, then into his son’s renovated room, because who cares if the ants get in here, and then an assurance that the ants won’t get in here. He would keep this place clean, like a temple. This room of his would now be his sanctum. And in it, he would sacrifice his body to the cause of the god of self-improvement. 

[asleepinawell]

Stop Trying To Make Fetch Happen

(First of all, let me offer my deepest apologies for the title. It was just too good to pass up on. Second, if you haven’t seen the video of Boston Dynamics robot, SpotMini, you should, especially since the robot in this is a direct ripoff of it. Third, set very loosely in the au of my fic sliding towards chaos, but absolutely no context is needed…it’s really just because of the bits with the Machine). Last, did I say sorry about the title yet?)

Reese turned around from getting a beer out of the fridge in the subway to find himself face to face with pure nightmare fuel in the form of 65lbs of robotics. The robot…dog (for lack of a better term) might only have come up to just below his waist, but it’s extendable neck allowed it to raise its mechanical head and “stare” him right in the eyes.

“Root,” he called softly but urgently. “Root, it’s staring at me again.”

While the mechanical monstrosity didn’t technically have eyes, Root had drawn some on with a sharpie. It did, however, very much have a mouth, or rather a jaw, with which it could pick things up or possibly rip someone’s arm off.

“Don’t be silly, John.” Root watched him from the table across the room, a slightly sadistic smile on her lips. “It’s just being playful.”

The robot tilted its head back and forth as if examining him and all he could think of were the creepy, death dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. What were the called again? Oh right, raptors. Root had built a giant robot dog-raptor probably with the sole purpose of terrorizing him.

He could easily imagine a pack of the things hunting him down and ripping him to pieces in the most painful way possible.

Reese wasn’t sure what exactly set off Root’s obsession with building the damn thing. Shaw kept claiming it was her latest attempt to get out of doing chores since the first thing Root had done was teach it to do the dishes.

(Taking out the trash was still off limits since even New Yorkers might get a bit worried if a giant robot burst out of a basement carrying a trash bag).

“Good robot,” he said and cautiously ducked past it. It turned to watch him go, but didn’t follow.

Shaw watched it with narrowed eyes from where she sat on the floor next to Bear’s bed. Bear had spent the first few days of the robot’s existence barking at it and howling in distress from a safe distance. Shaw had been furious and Root had attempted to make peace by programming the thing to exhibit playful dog behavior.

Or what she thought was playful dog behavior. The robot was now capable of swaying back and forth an bouncing up and down while its head remained in the exact same location in space. It looked completely unnatural to Reese and sent a shiver down his spine every time.

Bear must have agreed because he now wouldn’t approach it at all and sometimes hid when it was bouncing around on its alarmingly mobile legs.

Shaw had retaliated by leaving things in the middle of the floor for it to trip on which had only prompted Root to improve its sensors and give it the capability to right itself after a fall.

Shaw had not been amused.

Reese came over to sit next to Shaw on the floor.

“She hasn’t given it any offensive capabilities, has she? Like attack protocols?” he asked.

Shaw didn’t look up from scratching Bear’s head. “Not that I know of, but this is Root we’re talking about. Only a matter of time.”

A sudden horrifying thought occurred to him. “Can the Machine control it?”

Shaw shrugged. “Probably. Seems like something Root would do, though I think it’s supposed to be autonomous.”

“This is how the robot apocalypse starts, Shaw.”

Shaw snorted. “I actually trust the Machine more than Root’s programming on this one. Only one of them hates most people and it’s not the AI.”

A fair point, Reese conceded.

He joined Root at the table a few minutes later. It was weirdly uncomfortable here with both of them lately. The weren’t fighting, per se, but the robot was a point of contention and Shaw pointedly avoided Root when she was working on its programming.

“What are you doing this time?” he asked as he sat down.

Root was busy at her laptop as always, no doubt upgrading the thing with new, creepy powers.

“Hmmm, I’m trying to find the best way to teach it the general concept of a refrigerator.”

“How about ‘human food box’?”

Root’s smile was deeply patronizing. “It’s cute that you’re trying to help, John, but that’s the worst suggestion you’ve ever given me. You’re thinking like a human.”

Not the first time she’d accused him of that, but the intended insult was one he was proud to claim.

He refocused on the important matters.

“You haven’t taught it to…attack or anything right?”

Root’s wide, toothy smile made his blood run cold.

“We’re working on “fetch” at the moment,” Root said. “Things like “attack” and “kill” can come later.”

Reese laughed weakly. She was joking right? Right?

“Root.”

They both turned at Shaw’s tense voice. The robot had gone over to Bear’s bed and had its front legs bent, the back of it shaking back and forth. It bounced playfully on its front legs as if asking to play.

Shaw had her gun pointed at it and Bear was hiding behind her.

“It’s just being friendly,” Root protested.

“It’s about to get real friendly with a bullet.”

Root sighed and called the robot back over to her. Not an improvement in Reese’s opinion since that put it right near him again.

“It’s okay,” Root told the robot, patting it on the head in a reassuring manner. “She’ll come around eventually.”

But eventually didn’t seem like it was going to come any time soon.

The entire mess came to a head while Reese was out on a mission one day. The subway was empty when he returned, but the robot dog was lying, inactive, in the middle of the floor. Several pieces of it had been ripped off, and one of its legs was broken.

Reese examined it for a few minutes and then headed to consult the only one besides Root or Shaw who was likely to know what had gone down.

“Hello?” he said as he entered the subway car.

One of the monitors was already on and words appeared in the screen almost at once.

Hello, John Reese.

He was proud of the fact she finally called him by his name.

“What, uh, what happened out there? With the robot.”

You are aware that Root has been teaching her creation to fetch?

“Yeah, she said she thought she finally had it down.”

She attempted to have it fetch Shaw. Shaw did not wish to be fetched. A brief struggle ensued and it would be accurate to say that Shaw emerged the victor.

“Oh god.” He could imagine that almost too well. “Why fetch Shaw?”

Root was in bed and wished Shaw to join her. She sent the robot to gently encourage her to hurry up. Unfortunately the fetch protocol is still a little buggy and the robot got overenthusiastic.

“Bad idea.”

It was perhaps not Root’s best plan.

Reese looked out at the pitiful remains of Root’s pet project. “I can’t imagine Root was pleased.”

She was very distraught, though slightly distracted by Shaw’s display of upper body strength during the struggle.

Neither of these things surprised him in the slightest.

Shaw was unapologetic, but did take Root home after. Presumably to cheer her up.

Reese had a good idea what that entailed and no desire for details. He decided to change the subject slightly to head that off.

“Do you know why Root never named it?” He’d been shocked she hadn’t.

She wished me to select a name for it. I did not.

“Why you? And why not?”

Her original intent in building it was a misguided notion that I might like a pet. I did not name it because it’s not truly self-aware. It is a fancy toy.

Reese wondered if the Machine could get jealous. Probably best not to think about that for too long.

“Sort of a shame, though,” he said. “I hate the thing, but I’d kind of gotten used to seeing it around here. And Root seemed to really enjoy working on it.”

Perhaps you are correct. Would you like to help me remedy the situation?

“Uh, I don’t know the first thing about robotics.”

Unnecessary for this task. Several pieces were badly damaged by Shaw’s impressive attacks against it. You can help me acquire replacement parts.

He decided not to notice the fact that the Machine seemed kinda…into Shaw beating up the robot.

“Does it require breaking and entering?”

Not necessarily, but I’m sure I could arrange it to.

Reese nodded in satisfaction. Now they were talking.

It took Root two weeks to fully rebuild the robot, partly because she kept getting very upset about its broken state and Shaw kept having to ‘cheer her up’. Reese started spending more time hanging out with Fusco until the repairs were complete.

“I think he’s starting to like it,” Root said, watching Bear cautiously sniff Spot.

The Machine had finally agreed to name the robot, though he suspected that was mostly to humour Root.

And Bear was doing a little better with it now that Root had taught it another way to play fetch: throwing Bear’s chew toy for him.

“Hmph.” Shaw kept an eye on Bear and Spot as she cleaned her weapon at the table. She was sitting next to Root now and Reese was working hard not to notice the way Shaw twitched every so often and Root looked smug. But it was nice to see they’d made up.

Shaw hadn’t warmed up to Spot much, but since its resurrection the robot seemed very nervous around her and went out of its way to avoid her. Reese wasn’t sure if this was something Root had added to its programming or if one of the fancy learning algorithms it ran on had concluded that she was a threat. Shaw seemed quite pleased with the situation.

“I think it’s almost ready to try out in our apartment,” Root said.

“Oh, hell no.” Shaw looked indignant. “No evil robot dogs in the house. That’s Bear’s territory.”

“But Sameen, think of all the dishes it could do.”

“Think of all the dishes you could do it you put in one tenth of the effort you spent on that thing.”

He tuned out their friendly squabbling to watch Spot attempt to chase the robot tail Root had given it. It was almost endearing.

Especially with the little top hat on that he’d bought for it. Root had been absolutely delighted about that.

Later, after Root and Shaw had left for the night, he found Spot in rest mode, folded up in the dog bed Root had insisted on buying and placing next to the Machine’s servers.

“How’s pet ownership treating you?” he asked the monitors.

It is not really a pet.

“True, but pretending it is isn’t the worst thing ever.”

That is possible, I suppose.

“If you really dislike it that much I’m sure Root will deactivate it for you.” Probably, anyway. There’d be a lot of sulking.

I am not deactivating Spot.

Reese’s lips twitched as he held back a smile. “You like it, don’t you? Something in your code thinks it’s cute.” Probably the wagging tail. Even an AI couldn’t resist that.

I believe you have plans tonight, Primary Asset Reese. You will be late if you do not leave soon.

A dismissal and he was back to being ‘Primary Asset’. He must have struck a nerve. Or circuit.

In the dark of the subway later that night, Spot switched back on and unfolded itself. It trotted over to the monitor display and cocked its head to one side, focused on one of the little computer speakers on the desk.

“Good Dog.”

Spot wagged its tail.

[aittiadf]

chapter 2

My eyes felt like screws after the seventh hour of manning the reception desk at New Ocean Hotel. My shift was almost over and every minute dragged itself over the slow blue sky. I went into the back bathroom, sat on the toilet and took a few hits from my vape pen. The high smoothed me over. I looked down at the checkered tiles of the bathroom floor and pulled out my phone. Samantha had texted me saying there was  someone she wanted me to meet. This guy from her church who drank with her had just seen the lights for the first time. She described him as a sheepless shepherd who wandered around praying to a higher power. Aren’t we all sheepless shepherds I thought but then I realized maybe people had more meaningful ways of understanding their life. 

She told me this guy was looking for a job and needed a place to stay. I didn’t really know how much I should care. Nothing really happened here and if some person wanted to be by the beach alone with an easy job then sure, he should come and stay for a while. If he had seen the lights at the very least it might give him some space to calm down. For me though it was boring. I’d worked here for over a year and only stayed because it gave me time to work on the free coding academy I had recently enrolled in. What I really wanted was to get out of this hotel and work for one of the startups in the bigger town to the south. 

The only time the hotel got busy was during the summer. But even then, when tourist season was in full force, none of the rooms would be filled. But there was always a two-four week span when the fires forced people out from the valleys or the mountains and the rates would spike higher than they were the rest of the year. We would be filled to the brim during that time, having to deny people and everything. It was cruel to raise rates during an environmental crisis. Supposedly there was an algorithm that decided the prices for all the hotels in a thirty mile radius so the rates were always the same and there wasn’t any real competition. So it was all blameless. The mechanized blasphemous rate spiking that occurred when people’s houses were burning to the ground could be attributed to the cloud or some other unknowable piece of technology whose existence could only be hinted at and never named. 

    I walked back to the front desk and sat at the computer trying to decipher an error in the coding assignment I was working on. It was useless. My brain was fried and I wanted to walk out the door and go home. I couldn’t, so I booted up youtube instead. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my fourth video of this guy who had a hydraulic press. The niche of the channel was that he exclusively pressed food. Lately it seemed he’d been going to a lot of fast food restaurants. I stood there transfixed as I watched the steel metal cylinder pulverize doritos locos tacos, double doubles, fish filets and atomic chicken wings. 

    My manager walked in from checking on some of the rooms in the hotel and I told her to come and take a look. She sat there dazed for a while as well, occasionally offering some commentary. 

“It's crazy to see food transform into such unrecognizable shapes” 

“This is making me hungry”

“That actually looks kind of good”

I liked her. She wasn’t sympathetic to the owners. They directed most of their nastiness onto her and she remained nice to the employees. Sometimes though the stress from the owners overflowed onto us. But there was this mutual understanding we seemed to have of the hotel’s emotional economy. Which is to say that we were aware the owners were some real cretinous fiends who cared about nothing but the rates and money and caused people to teeter at the edge. 

I think she knew I smoked in the restroom and she probably assumed I jacked off in there too, which wasn’t untrue. I indulged in what I was able to get away with. There was even this time me and this customer who I’d been chatting with locked eyes in the lobby when I came into work one morning. He and I went back into the bathroom and did all sorts of stuff. I think she knew about this too because we had security cameras but between us there was this tacit understanding that if you don’t have a big house with lots of dollars the coast in California is just a place where you go to dissolve into the sunset and burn off. 

    I told my manager I had a friend of a friend who needed a job and if she knew if we were hiring. She told me we weren’t but had seen that the steakhouse across the street was looking for servers. Both of us thought it was stupid that there was a steakhouse in this tiny little community. Apparently some silicon valley investor had got it in his mind that the real estate in this area would explode. The idea was that by developing some businesses and property in the area the energy of the coming boom would surge directly into his net worth. He had opened this all glass steakhouse, the type of building with exposed steel beams inside. So now, amid aging victorian homes and fields of wildflowers there was an all-glass restaurant that looked more like it made napalm than served ribeye. Maybe the meat was cloned. Either way, it had good reviews on Yelp.

    I told Samantha that if her friend was really looking for work that it was available here at this pretty stupid steakhouse.  We had this weird friendship that congealed around this time we did acid when we were seeing each other years ago. It was late and we were bored and awake so we decided to take a tab each and walk the couple miles down to the beachfront where we lived in central California. When we got there we took our shoes off and waded up into the ankles in the ocean. The wind was strong and the cold ocean water on our bodies began to feel like needles. There was this dingy beach motel by us with an iron gate that was rusted from the ocean breeze. It opened easily and we decided to take refuge in the stairway of the motel.  

All night we stayed awake feeling the euphoria from the acid and having the full force of California beach kitsch weigh on us. I remember taking solace in eating a bag of popcorn we bought and staring at this dead fly on the windowsill. When the sun rose we walked outside and I remember Samantha made fun of me when I took a picture of the sunrise. I told her not to be an asshole, nobody is better than the sun.

 On the sidewalk walking home we passed by subarus and lending libraries and stopped to look at the sky. There was a series of six orange lights high above us, moving fast and leaving a small streak of light behind them. We stood there walking with our heads fixed above. We watched them fly across the ocean and over the hills until they were far out of our sight. We didn’t even say anything to each other, we just kept walking by early morning joggers and freshly manicured lawns afterwards, staring at the sidewalk silently. 

That was so long ago now and certainly before I came out and she became a Christian. We just had an unspoken understanding that we needed to head in different directions. So I moved further up the coast here and she got some tech job in the Bay Area. I remember getting these weird emails at the time from this place called Excelsior Corp about test piloting this hardware VPN product. The emails just had one line of text: “Looking for test pilots hardware VPN now” and pictures of this big black box I assumed was the hardware you would have to install to access their VPN. I always sent the emails straight to the trash but somehow they always bypassed my spam and ended up straight in my inbox.

But after some time not talking to Samantha I reached out. I was smoking my wax pen on my porch one night when I saw a bunch of shooting stars shoot over me in rapid succession. I thought of Samantha. I sent her a text asking how she was doing. She told me she’d been well but had been having these weird things happen to her. She mentioned all these emails she’d been getting and that she’d started seeing drones in the sky and lights every few months. I hadn’t seen the lights but I’d gotten the same emails. She was telling me about it and she sounded scared but also she said she was doing well. 

“I’ve got a stable job and you know I go to church and stuff, and there are some really wonderful moments, just now I saw all these incredible shooting stars.” 

She sounded anxious and I was worried for her. I asked her if she liked smoking dabs. She’d never tried one. 

“It’s really chilled me out since that time we took acid.”

“I like my church and alcohol.”

 I was happy though because despite her nervousness she seemed happy. I let her know I’d seen the same shooting stars and she was ecstatic. Since then we’ve texted and called about strange stuff we see, about weird things happening in our phones, about plans for the future, about her theories on the Greeks, about my times engaging in public sex, about the hotel, about god, and about other things. We were friends and I enjoyed hearing about her world, from the far reaches of the front desk of the New Ocean Hotel. 

On the computer screen a wad of Chick-fil-A waffle fries were being squashed into potatoey dough. Me and my manager sat there watching until the steel cylinder had fully flattened the fries and the video faded to black. 

My manager gestured at the steakhouse, “What do you think it's like working there? Surrounded by glass for everyone to see? I could never do that. When I worked in a restaurant the kitchen’s used to be closed off from the eyes of the customers. Now they leave it wide open, I feel like I’d go insane.”

I thought of the owners of the hotel lording over me and reprimanding me every time I looked at youtube. “I’d probably go insane too,” I said. 

“I definitely would.” 

    When my shift was over I walked home and  stopped at the convenience store to buy a pack of gummy sharks.  I chewed on them while thinking about Samantha. I imagined her in church, with some ridiculous outfit on, sitting with her friend. I imagined them both listening intently to the words of the sermon, and getting up from the pews afterwards to fraternize with the other church members. I thought of how all that seemed impossible to me, making conversation to other people in a church. Maybe if I tried hard enough I could imagine it. I tried and my mind thought of being submerged in water. I thought of being in the womb. I thought of what it must be like to feel full. I thought of being in a congregation. What singing with others must feel like. I started to imagine myself there, sitting among the pews unable to join in with everyone’s song. I imagined what it would be like later on during the service, when the pastor gave his sermon. In my mind I listened to him while a stranger next to me reached for a bible on the shelf on the back of the pews and turned to the book of revelations. He placed the bible on my lap while I unbuttoned my pants and unfolded myself hard, smack dab in between the pages that talked about angels, blasphemy and a new Jerusalem. Then I imagined him stroking me while I listened to the sermon, my mind cascading through illuminated halos, until all that remained was a gold blur and me hooing softly like an owl, letting myself leak onto the thin paper pages and onto the carpet below. 

    It was funny to me that after that time taking acid Samantha started going to church and I got a hold on my sexuality. Too much of my life could be periodized around that trip and sometimes I felt at the brink, torn between the life I lived before and the life I was living now. But there was no actual break between the two, and they were both happening at the same time. I knew that in reality my life prior and my life after bled into each other, with experiences since then coloring the way I read the past and my life prior shaping the way I read the present. But a long black fissure stood there in my mind, dividing the two lives while they tried to congeal around the edges of the abyss. From that fissure too came not just me but Samantha, and maybe anyone else who had seen the lights. We sprouted out of it in different directions like vines, crawling out of black depths and over the grey plane of our existence, stretching into the bright orange line of the horizon. 

     My teeth smushed the blue-white body of the gummy shark in two. I chewed one piece and stared briefly at the shimmering half body of gelatin I held in between my two fingers. It would be possible for Samantha’s friend to find a job here. I even had an extra room in the converted apartment of the old Victorian house I rented. Then what? I suppose nothing, I would continue with my life, trying to learn to code and working at the hotel. Who knows what would happen when we met. There was this sensation I had though, that everyone who me and Samantha came in close contact with was somehow also sprouting out of the abyss, extending themselves over that grey plane and trying to reach the sun.