#and less in a glorified space cop way

[aviss]

31 or 38!

Hi @ddagent thanks so much for the prompt! Again, it turned out longer than I thought. I went with number 38, Cop/person getting a ticket. I hope you like it!

Being a cop in King's Landing was nothing like Brienne had envisioned while growing up in Tarth. 

King's Landing was supposed to be a metropolis, multicultural and exciting and a lot more progressive than a little backwater island where everyone knew everyone else and Brienne couldn't take two steps without it being reported to her father, Tarth's Chief of Police. She had imagined that once she was away from his sphere of influence and the island's people's preconceptions of what a woman should and shouldn't be, she would be able to rise through the ranks with her abilities and hard work. And yes, King's Landing was a metropolis; women wore shorter skirts and less cloth on their bodies, or lots and lots more of cloth and only black. They had colourful hair or shaved heads, and tattoos and piercings, and they dated when they wanted and who they wanted, or not dated anyone. They could wear no make-up or tons of it, they could wear heels or flats or walk barefoot for all people cared. 

There were just two things women were not allowed to comfortably be, ugly and a cop in KLPD. At least not under Captain Tarly, who made the people of Tarth feel modern and seemed to have a special hatred for Brienne for daring to be good at her job but not pleasant to look at.

That was the reason she was on the night shift for the third week in a row, relegated to traffic duties while there was a spate of crime that required all hands on deck. 

"That's why you're on traffic, Tarth," Tarly had told her when she protested that they needed everyone in the investigation. "So we can have all the real cops working."

Just remembering his words made Brienne's blood boil, though there was nothing she could do unless she put in for a transfer or quit, and she wasn't going to give them the satisfaction. Not to Tarly and definitely not to Lannister.

As if summoned by Brienne thoughts, she heard the speeding car that announced the arrival of her nemesis. Regular like clockwork, a red convertible took the corner at least ten miles over the speed limit, ignoring traffic laws and Brienne's presence equally, and rushed past her car. She sighed and turned on her sirens, lights only in deference of the late hour, and gave chase. It had stopped on the next street like Brienne knew he was going to, and the driver was already leaning on the window with that infuriating smirk she wanted to wipe.

Jaime Lannister, son of the mayor and brother of the DA, whose early retirement from the KLPD to start his own security firm had been surrounded by scandal and covered in his father's fingerprints. The first time Brienne had stopped him he had been doing just two miles over the limit, something that normally wouldn't warrant a ticket, especially at night on empty streets. Brienne had always been a stickler for the rules, though, and it had been the day she had realized that no matter what she did, she was not going to make detective in that precinct. She was never going to be more than a glorified traffic warden. 

Brienne had intended to let the driver go with a warning, but when she had approached the car a man who could be the Warrior himself, golden and beautiful, had turned to her with a fearsome scowl. "You've got to be kidding me, I was barely two miles over..." he had been saying when he got a good look at Brienne, the scowl melting from his face as he trailed off, his eyes roving all over her before they narrowed sharply. She had flushed at the way he was looking at her, feeling tongue-tied as it always happened when she was around beautiful people. Then he had opened his mouth again. "Are you a woman?"

That was the first time Brienne gave Jaime Lannister a ticket. 

It had not been the last. 

Every single night Brienne had been on duty in that intersection he had turned up, always speeding in his very expensive car, always taunting Brienne with a smile on his face. 

"Do you ever smile, Officer? Are you as boring as you are tall?" he had asked the third night as Brienne handed him a ticket, frowning down at him. Why was he there again? He must have known she was going to be in the same intersection she had stopped him the previous two days.

"So what's your name, Officer Tarth?" he had asked on the fifth day with a quirk of his mouth. 

Brienne had ignored the way her heart had skipped a beat at his smile. "It's Officer," she had said, because she had learned her lesson a long time ago that no attractive man smiled at her like that without ulterior motives. 

"No, you don't look like an Officer, you look like a Wench," he had said while Brienne narrowed her eyes at him and practically threw the ticket through his window.

She'd half expected to be called into the Captain's office after that, but nothing had happened, except that Lannister kept speeding past her and taking his tickets with a smirk and a taunt. Brienne had learned to anticipate his arrival, the butterflies in her gut had nothing to do with his smile and everything with whatever insult he would deploy that day.

His favourite was Wench, his voice fond when he said it.

"Officer Wench, long time no see," he said, his tone friendly as if he was genuinely pleased to see her. Brienne knew better, he was just pleased to annoy her. "I've missed you these past days."

"Mr. Lannister," she said, keeping her tone as neutral as possible while she wanted to wring his perfect neck. "It's Officer Tarth, as you well know. Licence?" He extended it to her with a smile. "You know why I stopped you?"

His smile widened, eyes shining with mischief. "Because you couldn't resist the temptation to spend a few minutes with me?"

"You were speeding again, in the same stretch of road where you've been stopped for speeding at least ten times," she said, holding onto the frayed remains of her self control. Tonight was not the night for Lannister's taunts. "Don't you have anything better to do with your time, Mr. Lannister, than wasting mine?"

"It's Jaime," he said as he leaned back, taking the notebook with the ticket and signing his recept, doodling something on the side like he usually did. Brienne expected it would be a dick if she ever looked at it, not that she ever had. He appeared to be the type to have a twelve-year-old sense of humour. "And not really, no." He handed it back and Brienne put it in his pocked pointedly not looking at it. "Neither do you, officer, since you are always here waiting for me instead of chasing real criminals."

And that was it, Brienne could practically hear her self-control snapping at that. "Out of the car," she said, her voice almost a growl. Lannister's eyebrow's climbed up his forehead but he did it when Brienne took a step back and opened his door. He climbed out of the car and unfolded next to her. He was almost as tall as Brienne, though he still had to look up to her, and just as wide and fit though his clothes were better tailored to showcase his powerful body. Taking complete leave of her senses, Brienne put her hands on his arms and stepped into his personal space, pressing him back against the car. Lannister's breath left his lungs in a rush, his face flushing in anger, eyes dark and mouth half-opened. He licked his lips. "You think this is a joke? That I have been put here for your amusement? That I'm not a real cop just because I am too tall and too big and too ugly?" She hissed on his face, hands hard on his biceps. She could feel the muscle under the expensive weave of his suit jacket, and the still rational part of her brain catalogued it. He was strong enough that he could push her away, and yet he stood there just staring at her with wide eyes, glaze flickering between her eyes and her mouth. "You and Tarly are not going to make me quit. He can keep me in traffic forever, can keep hiding me in the night shift so my face doesn't offend him while the real cops are out there investigating. I've dealt with sexist pigs stuck in the Targaryen era before." She couldn't believe those words were coming out of her mouth but couldn't stop herself. "You can keep insulting me, it's nothing I haven't heard before, you can even keep pretending to be nice to me so I humiliate myself thinking you like me. Again, you wouldn't be the first, though I don't know what's in it for you." She took a deep breath, her anger draining out of her when she realized how close to him she was, their bodies almost pressed together, his breath on her face. He wasn't flushing anymore, his face appeared pale now, his eyes sharp and narrow. She took one step back, then another. "I guess I won't have to quit, after all."

He didn't say anything for a moment that felt like a lifetime, then Lannister got back inside his car and drove away.

…

"Tarth, the Captain is waiting for you in his office."

Those were the words Brienne had been expecting to hear for the past few days, the only surprising thing that Tarly had waited an entire week and put her on the day shift to do it. For maximum humiliation, she was sure. She had known it was coming when Lannister had stopped bothering her the day after she had snapped, not that she had missed him, and Tarly had been strangely absent as well. She had heard some snatches of conversation, had heard her name in whispers and felt some more glares than usual. She had made her peace with it, at least she had not quit. 

"Captain Tarly," she started entering the office with her head held high. Then she stopped and looked at the man inside the room. He was definitely not Randyll Tarly.

Sitting comfortably in the Captain's chair was a man in his late thirties or early forties, tall and solidly built, with an attractive face, sharp blue eyes, and a full head of ginger hair to match his ginger beard. 

"Office Tarth, I'm Captain Addam Marbrand, I'm replacing Captain Tarly who has come down with a case of 'being a sexist pig' and 'being stuck in the Targaryen era'," he said with a straight face, though there was a glint of amusement in his eyes. "I hope I'm a better Captain than he was, not that it's going to be too difficult."

Brienne choked on air and dropped on one of the chairs. "What?"

Marbrand took some folders from the desk drawers. "It had somehow escaped the attention of everyone that this precinct was staffed with just men, like this was the old Kingsguard instead of a modern police department, and whenever a woman dared appear she ended quitting or requesting a transfer in under six months. We have spoken with a couple of them, and there is an interesting pattern everyone in HR had missed." It hadn't been just Brienne, then. "There were other irregularities, especially in a certain type of investigations, that once had come to the DA's attention couldn't be overlooked. Captain Tarly has been kindly invited to retire early and his cohorts are being reassigned." The DA, Tyrion Lannister. Brienne was now more confused than before. This couldn't be because of what she had said, or shouted, at Jaime. She was supposed to be the one fired, not Tarly. Marbrand was still talking as if Brienne's world hadn't been upended in the last minute. "I have taken the liberty of examining your file, and you have been wasted since you came to this precinct, your scores in the Academy are exemplary and you have a recommendation from Tarth Chief of Police."

"He's my father," she said, faintly, surreptitiously pinching her arm. She was awake.

Marbrand smiled slightly. "So he is, still a good recommendation. I'm pulling you from traffic, you will be assigned a partner and will join the Mummers investigation effect immediately. Officer Snow will get you up to speed with the case."

Brienne nodded, knowing a dismissal when she heard one. "Thank you, Captain." 

She still had no idea what had happened but she had been given everything she wanted, she wasn't going to complain. 

"Oh, and Brienne," Marbrand said before she could open the door. "Can I call you Brienne? Regardless of what the rumours say, I haven't been given this position because of my connections, and I won't treat you differently if you choose not to go out with Jaime."

"What are you walking about, Captain Marbrand?" Brienne asked, now certain she had fallen through the rabbit hole. 

"Jaime Lannister, blonde, pretty, rich? The guy who won't shut up about you for the past couple of weeks? You've given him a ticket or a dozen? Has been waiting for your call for weeks and missing sleep to see you?" Her shock must have been plain to see because Marbrand sighed, long and heartfelt. "I have told my idiot of a friend that insulting and annoying a person is not the way to flirt with them. You have to excuse him but being so pretty means he's never had to woo a woman, he's completely useless at it." Brienne blinked at Marbrand, mouth opening and closing uselessly. "Please check your ticket notebook and decide whether he's too much of an idiot to go out with, but please put him out of his misery before I have him murdered."

Brienne walked out of the Captain's office and went to her desk, still feeling like she had landed in a parallel universe. She grabbed her notebook and flipped the pages. Some part of her was convinced she was going to find drawings of dicks or more insults, and that her new Captain was going to be not so different from the old one. 

'Call me, Wench' was written on the margins of the latest tickets, and next to it was a phone number.

Her heart lurched in her chest, the same butterflies that usually appeared at the same time as his car fluttering in her stomach. She took out her phone and dialled before she could think better of it, half expecting the number to be fake. 

"Wench?"

"Jaime."

...

[holidcy]

i am actually embarrassed to say how long this intro too me to write out ? so im not gonna say it ! it’s not like it took be 3 hours or anything 👀 . and for what ? idk because this intro is a mess . but anyways ... i’m mia , i’m a whole twenty years old which really just feels like a glorified teenager but whatever , we’re not here to talk about that right now . we’re here to talk about my lil baby holly . guys she is literally the sweetest human ever ? but also ? to sensitive for her own good and really the good of those around her ? very happy feet energy coming form this girl . but without further ado , below you can read up on holly & if you wanna plot give this a like . also my discord is 𝖒𝖌𝖐'𝖘 𝖜𝖍𝖔𝖗𝖊#9789 if you wanna plot there or just generally chat !

𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐏𝐓𝐇

full name: holiday elena addams nickname: holly ( she’s basically turned this into her name , not one really calls her holiday ) , holls , elle ( by her parents ) birthday: june 3rd birthplace: chicago , illinois hometown: highland park , illinois ( although the family home was located in highland park her parents would in chicago and holly even attended private school in chicago ) residence: new york city , new york nationality: american ( est. 1999 through birth )  ethnicity: english ( maternal & paternal , 50% ) , polish ( maternal , 25% ) , spanish ( paternal , 25% ) religion: catholicism  orientation: heterflexible ( she claims being straight but in all actually she’s not closed off to anything despite not having much experience outside the opposite gender ) languages spoken: english ( fluent , first language ) , spanish ( fluent , second language ) , polish ( conversation , third language ) , mandarin  ( conversational , fourth language ) . father: leandro oliver addams  ( 49 years old )  was born & raised in chicago , illinois by a politician / businessman & a philanthropist . leandro went on to take a little bit from both of his parents as he is a highly esteemed business tycoon as well as being regarded as one of the most charitable men in the world .  ( relationship:  there has never been a day that has gone by where the two didn’t get along . if there is anyone in this world who gets holly it is her father . truly , daddy’s little girl . the two of them are as thick as thieves . ) mother : susanna renee addams ( nee daniels ) ( 48 years old ) was born & raised in long island , new york . the daughter of a hedge fund investor & a stay at home mother . susanna grew to be an amazing cosmetologist and which the help of her father’s amazing business mind she was able to start up a salon in new york city . she gained the most devoted clientele , loving every second of her work . she took a break for almost a decade before deciding to return to the beauty industry . today she has salons across the globe in chicago , los angeles , toronto , london , and new york city .  ( relationship: susanna often had to play bad cop when it came to parenting and because of this the two butted heads quite often whilst holly was growing up . despite this , her mom is her role model and the two have always had a friendship that underlined their mother - daughter relationship .  ) social class: upper education: attending new york university ( s. 2018 ) she spent her first year of university at usc , she’s majored in creative writing at both universities  career: author ( her book is a coming of age mystery called privilege that she’s recently admitted to writing the full book during a coke binge ) , internet personality , philanthropist , socialite , and student  notoriety: being apart of the prominent addams family , amassing over 32m followers on all social media platforms , publishing a new york times best selling book at the age of seventeen . weight: 120lbs height: 5′5″ hair color: brown ( with blonde highlights ) eye color: brown positive traits: benevolent, high spirited , extroverted , romantic , honest , affectionate , intelligent , friendly , ambitious , passionate , approachable , charming  negative traits: immature , vain , garrulous , critical , sensitive , stubborn , inattentive , naive , sarcastic , obsessive , insecure , impractical , irritable likes: anything strawberry flavored , flowers , driving fast , pink , watching the first snow fall , birthday parties , lips gloss , netflix , sunkissed skin , dogs , peanut butter , agatha christie , redecorating , driving with the windows down , long plane rides , denim jackets , taco bell , orange juice , makeup , sports , female empowerment , online shopping , fresh berries , roller skating , photography , writing , tea dislikes: liars , driving in the snow , coffee , having no siblings , deep water , bad drivers , body shaming , pizza , hateful people , being rushed , cuss words , repetition , disloyalty , being alone ,  horror movies , dentists , silence , cheap perfume , criticism , the unknown , traffic , wine , poptarts ,  small spaces ,  hobbies: reading with a hot cup of tea , video editing in the back of a car , smoking before bed to help fall asleep , going out to eat with her parents , napping , hiding alcohol in her bedroom , painting alternate universe cartoons , attending big soirees , stashing drugs in jewelry boxes , sleepovers with her closest friends , talking the dogs on walks , early morning instagram lives , old disney marathons , scribbling in a notebook while snuggled up in bed  chara inspo: olivia baker ( all american ) , leila faisal ( all american ) , tan france ( queer eye ) , elena gilbert ( the vampire diaries ) , dorothy gale ( wizard of oz ) , lucy pevensie ( chronicles of narnia ) , lara jean ( to all the boys i loved before ) , elle woods ( legally blonde ) , jeffree star , jenny humphrey ( gossip girl ) , cassie howard ( euphoria ) fashion inspo: vsco girls , bella hadid , megan markle , rihanna , selena gomez , perrie edwards , emma watson aesthetics: ghostly sounding music playing as background music to a pen to paper , eyes widened at the chance to do something positive , the annoying beg for approval , infectious energy , a pout so crippling , the swell of regret as you sneak a bottle into your bedroom , tanned skin tousling with silk sheets , big eyes threatening to shed a tear , the zip of a pink mclaren 

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐄𝐑𝐀

holly is the only child to leandro and susanna addams ( the addams family 👀 ) . she was born with not just a silver spoon but the silver spoon . the addams are a prominent american family , that are regarded as one of the leading industrialist during the gilded age . in short her families been billionaire rich for a long time and are known as one of the families to bring wealth to the city of chicago . she was incredibly spoiled growin gup as you would assume but by the grace of her parents teachings she was anything but a brat . she had being filthy rich and being an only child working against her and she still managed to be the most giving and down to earth child . from a young age holly would give her toys to other kids during play dates & ask her parents if she could donate the things she didn’t use anymore to the less fortunate . 

although her father had a busying career as he took over the family company just a year before holly was born , but in spite of that he always made time for his family . luckily her mother had stepped away from her career soon after meeting holly’s father , so she was able to be a stay at home mom and be there for every important moment of holly’s life . by the way , susanna was straight of of a real housewives show only just an overall better person ? they had dinner together as a family every night , threw parties at the house for every big moment in holly’s life . everything from birthdays , graduations , academic honors , to becoming captain of the cheerleading team and everything in between warranted a celebration in the eyes of susanna and leandro . 

she grew up extremely sheltered , mostly because her parents wanted to keep their little girl well their little girl . they didn’t want the world to taint her . she went to church every sunday and even wednesday nights , if she wanted to have a sleepover it was always at the addams household , and her parents met the parent/s of every kid she befriended growing up . 

despite their attempts her parents couldn’t shield her from one thing . getting her heart broken and at sixteen she experience her first bout of heart break . the boy she’d falling head over heels for just stopped talking to her one day , with no rhythm or reason he moved on to another girl with a blink of an eye . she couldn’t understand why ( pst ? it was because she slept with him and that was all he wanted to begin with ) someone could be so cruel an play with someones heart like that . it was her first experience of how the world could really work and in all honesty , holly couldn’t handle it . she got her hands on her parents bar room in the house and would literally drink every night before bed so she could sleep . 

this soon turned into her going to parties , promising her parents "i just want to hang out with my friend , i wont touch any alcohol” and her promise was always kept , she didn’t touch alcohol at these parties instead she smoke weed and on the chance one of her friends had it on them she’d do a line . 

this double life , if you would , didn’t lead to any real issues , at least not while she was in highschool . she still graduated top of her class  and even got accepted into her dream school university of southern california .  it wasn’t until she was a semester deep in usc that she realized she was losing control over her life . maybe it was a mix of her derailing mental state , being separated from her parents , and the los angeles social make up . whatever it was holly wasn’t too far gone to see she needed help . 

instead of going back to school the following semester holly checked herself into rehab . her parents freaked out , unaware their daughter had touched a substance a day in her life . it was a long process and took alot of owning up for her own wrong doings but after a couple months she checked out of rehab and flew out to her parents .

she had decided upon leaving rehab that her best bet directly after getting out would be to surround herself with people who loved her . during her short stint in california her parents had made the temporary move to new york city so that her mom could focus on the salon in the city , so holly transferred to new york university to continue her studies and be around her parents .

she lives under their roof , despite being more than self efficient thanks to her multiple branches of income including her trust fund but she figures there is only so much more time before they leave to go back to chicago that the more time she spends with them the better off she’ll be when they leave the city . speaking of , she doesn’t know her parents will be leaving the city in the next few months . on a positive note they plan on paying the rent in the apartment they live in for her until she finds somewhere she likes better .   

today , holly is a sober ( she smokes weed here and there but it’s not a addictive so it fine 🙄 ) and happy . although due to how sensitive the girl is anything could make her snap , she’s incredibly fragile guys . like capable of having a mental break at any moment but like we ignore it because if we bring it up it’ll happen . wooo . 

not so fun fact ? when she has an off day she’ll literally sit in her room holding either a bottle she had hidden in her walk in closet or stares at the coke she keeps in her jewelry box . she hasn’t used any of it but she tells herself its there as a reminder when really it’s a crutch for if she ever needs it again , she has easy access .

secret time ? she pushed her ex boyfriend of a balcony while she was drunk . this happened before she went to rehab ... perhaps you could say it was what prompted her to realized her crazy ass needed to go to rehab . ummm , it’s not acceptable and she knows this but one thing we all need to know about holly is that holly + substances + being upset = toxic shit that is always the equation and there is never another answer to it . 

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍

a girl squad or just a squad in general really , give my baby her lil group of people please

maybe a fellow chicago native ? who she dated in highscool and you know is the one who dropped her like a hot potato after she slept with him

ex hook ups 

frenemies but more like a blair & lil j circa season 1 situation ? 

someone who just doesn’t like her , but like she does everything she can think of to get them to like her 

an unrequited ting were he’s leading her one so he can sleep with her ?

or maybe someone has a crush on holly but she just doens’t have the heart to tell them she’s not interested so now here she is kissing and OMG YUP NOW SHES SLEEPING W THEM ...

someone she races ? she loves cars especially fast ones

a we hang out and watch/obsess over sports but the whole time i can’t help but think about how hot you are kinda vibe ?

someone who is v bad for her and they know it but she doesn’t care because she like them so much & he likes her too but knows he’ll hurt her ?!

someone who sees that she might be teetering on falling off the wagon ( maybe they were over her place and saw the stash of substances all over her room ), maybe they’re trying to get her to stop smoking weed bc they feel like for her that’s a huge gateway  

smoking buddies where they literally just hot box cars together and munch on taco bell talking about why sound vibrates & shit

someone who she used to party with & be wild with ( could be from chi or nyc because she visited alot as a kid ) and now they feel like she’s a lame bc she’s sober

she’s a good influence on them ? they’re a bad influence on her ? ride or dies ? partners in crime ? only friends when there is a substance involved ? sugar baby vibes ? unlikely friends ? flings ? crush ? friends with benefits ? everytime they are around one another its a fight ? someone she lets crash at her parents place sometimes ? someone she’s backstabbed but like she got tricked into doing it ? anything fluffy , anything angsty ... reall just anything you got , i’ll take ! 

[timeclonemike]

The War of the Words, Part 5: Counterstrike

Previous installments of this essay have repeated the point that the tactics used by nazis, terfs, and other varieties of bigot are those adopted by a force with a numerical and strategic disadvantage when facing a larger and stronger opponent, among other things. This may have given the impression that these types will eventually just die out. While I believe that this is true in the long term, it is demonstrably true that they can still do considerable damage in the short term, so this is unfortunately not the kind of problem that will solve itself. Action must be taken to undermine them at every possible juncture. This is especially true given that the current, semi-covert “secret agent” / muddy-the-waters approach was adopted because previous open displays of aggression were not getting the results they wanted. It is entirely possible that a shift in strategy will occur again and allow them to make more headway than they presently are.

Any given strategy employed by the nazis and terfs and racists has one or more potential counter-strategies, but simply waiting to recognize a specific type of propaganda or psychological manipulation or social engineering method puts everyone else on the defensive - by the time the problem is recognized and understood, it has already been effective for some time and may allow for a certain amount of momentum. Also, rapidly shifting strategies can lead to the defensive side lagging behind or being overwhelmed, which is one of the potential advantages of the “increase the signal to noise ratio when it comes to dog whistles” approach mentioned previously.

Therefore, as the old saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. The best chances of combating these ideologies involves going after them directly, rather than trying to play damage control after the fact (although that is also important.) And to do this most effectively requires a certain level of understanding of the psychology (and pathology) of the kinds of minds that are most amenable to fascism and radical exclusionism and racism.

The most important point worth considering is what I have taken to calling the Fascism Paradox. Fascism derives its name from the Fasces, a symbol that was adopted during the days of the Roman Empire and then appropriated by authoritarian political movements in the early twentieth century. It consists of a bundle of rods tied together, incorporating a handle and axe head, and the symbolism is pretty straightforward; a single stick might break, but a bundle of them together is much more robust. The obvious idea behind it is that many people united in a single cause and goal can accomplish what an individual cannot, which is why it was adopted by so many governmental offices and magistrates before the early twentieth century.

The titular paradox is that the Fasces symbolizes strength despite being an admission of weakness. The whole point of tying the rods together is because an individual rod is inadequate to the task at hand. Likewise, most authoritarian displays of power revolve around numbers; large military parades, massive rally crowds, mobs of angry young men wearing polo shirts and carrying lawn torches. The power of symbolism, and the attraction they hold, is a door that swings both ways; those who are attracted to the idea of fascism are those who are individually weak, and can only achieve strength and power by proxy, as part of a larger group.

Given that knowledge, the obvious counter is to strip away the protections of the group itself. After the Unite the Right rally, quite a large number of participants were identified by photographic evidence where they did nothing to conceal their identities, and the social consequences were considerable. These individual people were not part of a larger, dangerous force; they were people with names and addresses and once people could pair them with the faces in the photographs, it was basically open season. This technically wasn’t even doxxing; nobody can realistically make a claim to privacy when they are in a  public space, much less when they are deliberately drawing attention to themselves. (The lessons learned from this are implicit in the “secret police” tactics used by unidentified federal agents in Portland as of this writing.)

If this sounds like a roundabout way of saying “Divide And Conquer”, it’s because there’s another element to the paradox. A bundle of sticks may be stronger than any individual stick, but the strength of said bundle is still limited by the strength of the individual sticks. For an object lesson in why this is important, compare breaking a single uncooked spaghetti noodle with an entire package of uncooked spaghetti. The whole package technically puts up more resistance, but the difference is marginal in comparison to the forces involved. So it is with fascism and the people who are enticed by it; because their attraction to the group and the cause is motivated (subconsciously or not) by an attempt to mitigate personal weaknesses, the group itself inherits all off these weaknesses. This is especially true when it comes to the subject of morale and courage under fire; each individual in the group is relying on the group as a whole, and they take their cues from each other, so as soon as one person falters everyone around them starts to hold back. The result is a chain reaction of hesitation and lost momentum. (This can be seen in real time when watching videos of right wing protests fighting with counter-protest groups, and can also be seen in recordings of police and riot cops against protestors when a charge doesn’t immediately turn into a rout.)

This paradox also comes into play with another peculiar psychological characteristic: Being disgusted or enraged by compassion. Compassion directed towards weakness can serve as a reminder of said weakness, or an admission, or symbolize a loss or negation of strength; the human mind is very complex and this can get rationalized and justified many different ways, but it all comes back to a central idea; that they can’t or don’t have what they want more than anything. This is another reason why these groups turn on each other at the drop of a hat, because displaying compassion for, or receiving compassion from another, is an insult in a culture where strength is prized: “I’m helping you because you’re weak and you need my help / pity / support.”

(In a world, and especially a year, where the hits keep coming and they don’t stop coming like some sort of Fae contract involving a Smash Mouth song, this attitude is even less healthy than it normally is.)

The sense of personal weakness at the heart of the paradox can take multiple forms, not just physical strength. Financial stability, social leverage, political authority, health and wellness, even good looks can all qualify. What matters is it’s something that a person wants and does not have. This by itself is the origin of most conspiracy theories; some other nation or ethnic group or political party is hoarding or stealing all the food or medicine or political power, and if they weren’t, things would be different. The conspiracy theory angle is so complicated it requires its own essay to explore in full, so for the purposes of brevity and clarity we will leave that unaddressed for now; all we need to focus on is the idea that these people want something that they can’t have. The “can’t have” part especially plays into the idea of radicalization and recruitment. Somebody who wants to be physically strong can work out and get swole, and can measure their progress over time in terms of sets and reps. As a matter of fact, they have to in order to determine what exercises are working for them. How much they can lift and for how long and with what body parts will vary greatly depending on factors like genetics, environment, childhood and adult nutrition, but what matters is that it can be quantified and measured and progress can be seen.

But fascists, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, fascism-susceptible people, are in a different situation. As much as they glorify, praise, and fetishize strength and power, what really drives them is their weakness. No matter how ripped they may be and how much they can bench, it’s never enough; they will always be afraid and insecure and there is always the possibility, if not the certainty, of somebody stronger. It’s the difference between wanting to be strong and wanting to not be weak. This also applies to knowledge, to social acumen, to power and influence. So long as they are unable or unwilling to confront the root cause of what drives them - to admit their weakness in whatever form they find intolerable - they can’t come to terms with it psychologically, never mind take action to correct it practically.

This leads directly to the next strategy for dealing with fascists; mockery and ridicule. The insecurity and weakness that drives fascism is bone deep and borders on the universal, and this is why so many alt-right insults are disparaging terms referring to a perceived lack of strength or fortitude or power. Trying to use those specific terms against them is about as effective as children on a playground going “I’m rubber, you’re glue” but individual insults and derogatory remarks are not what’s important; the underlying insecurity is. Simply not treating them with the deference and respect they desire is itself a potent starting point, and from there any number of comedic possibilities present themselves. Autocratic and authoritarian regimes are notorious about cracking down on dissent for this reason even more than an attempt to keep the citizenry from being agitated; just look at Vladimir Putin’s heavy handed retaliation against Russia’s internet access when somebody photoshopped heavy makeup onto his face. Wannabe dictators with no power can’t remove the object of their ridicule and it eats them alive from the inside out.

The final aspect of this counter attack strategy has to do with enemy morale and opposition. As stated in previous parts of the essay, a number of fascists and crypto-fascists abandoned the cause and ideology when they decided it was less stressful to stop being one. In other words, leave the door open for somebody to switch sides. Consider an analogy where Fascism is an island; some people will burn all their bridges in pursuit of the ideology, but others might not; if other people burn those bridges, the result is the same and they end up trapped on Fascism Island anyway, so they have nothing to lose by doubling down. A number of people on and off Tumblr have discussed this topic and the problems with what is called “essentialist” thinking long before this essay was written; there is a nearly decade old TED Talk by a DJ called Jay Smooth who suggested we start thinking of bias and prejudice the same way we think about hygiene like brushing our teeth, that prejudice is something people do as opposed to an inescapable part of their character.

It’s worth keeping in mind that this may be interpreted as weakness by the fascist or fascists in question and this may prompt them to redouble their attacks or attempt to “play” the person giving them an out in order to get information or undermine their confidence or even try to recruit them into the fascist cause; it’s also worth keeping in mind that it is impractical and unrealistic to expect everyone to adopt this approach. Some people have lost too much personally, and some people are too close to the ideological or physical front lines to even consider letting their guard down. Not everyone can be Reverend Wade Watts.

[one-irrelevant-ghost]

Gavin Reed had never had a problem working with other people; it was always them who had a problem with him. Fowler would shout and threaten disciplinaries and even suspension every time the poor fucker he had assigned to Gavin would request a transfer, but it was all bluster. Gavin was the best detective in the entire DPD now that the lieutenant was a washed-up old drunk, and the captain knew that good and damn well. Besides, it wasn't as if Gavin was actively chasing off his assigned partners; he was self-aware enough to admit that he was a complete asshole, but he didn't go out of his way to be rude to the poor bastards. He just didn't put any effort into being nice either. Some people could handle Gavin, and some people couldn't. Not like he really gave a shit either way. Eventually Fowler stopped assigning him partners altogether, and that suited everyone just fine.

And then the whole fucking revolution happened, and shit changed faster than Gavin could keep up with. It all started with that damn android, Connor. Fowler partnered it up with Hank, and it turned out they made a good pair. An old drunk about two days away from his grave and the creepy robot prick that was just a little too good in every sense of the damn word. No matter how many times Gavin taunted the damn thing, or hit it, or even held a gun to its fucking head, it always seemed…unbothered, and not in the usual android way. Not perfectly pleasant and unable to respond. Its responses always felt like it was sizing Gavin up and dismissing him. Gavin could practically see the words "not a threat" that Connor probably saw when he looked at the detective. Connor had knocked Gavin out cold at one point with fucking ease--not the detective’s proudest moment, but fuck, the android had been built and programmed to fight. Besides, Gavin hadn't been prepared for it to fight back. It never had before.

When the revolution was all said and done, Connor came back. Gavin wasn't even surprised. Plenty of androids filtered back into their old positions, the difference being that now they were being paid, treated like humans. A handful of the police assistant androids returned, as well, as did the android secretaries. Fowler let them all back; the DPD was too short handed without them. Plenty of human cops had gone and left Detroit, scared for their families or themselves, and none of them came back. Not even all the androids came back, and the result was a captain desperate to bolster his force, to be prepared for the tidal wave of crime that followed the "peaceful" revolution like an aftershock.

Gavin remember all of this as he stared down his new partner, cold dread hitting his gut like a lead ball.

RK900 looked like Cyberlife had taken Connor's design and stripped it of everything that made it so irritatingly likeable. Scrubbed the light freckles, leaving RK900's skin pale and completely unmarred; made him taller, broader at the shoulder, sharper in the face, more physically imposing; removed the nervous habits, the fidgeting, the too-human need to keep his hands busy. Emotions didn't warp RK900's face as easily as they did Connor's, outwardly registering as subtle twitches rather than full blown expressions. Connor had been made to fit in with humans; Cyberlife had apparently thrown that concept out the window with RK900, focusing instead on making him as intimidating and as inhuman as possible.  

"No fucking way," he snapped at Fowler--a risky move on a good day, but Gavin would rather another note in his file than deal with this creepy fucking thing. To have it as a partner…the idea was fucking ridiculous.

"You don't have a choice, Reed. RK900 is going to be your partner, whether you fucking like it or not."

Fowler had eventually won the argument--because he always did--and Gavin made it his personal mission to get the goddamn thing to quit. Not just request a new partner, but to ditch the police force entirely. Maybe it was a lofty goal, but Gavin was fairly confident in his ability to drive it off. It was unfortunate when RK900 turned out to be far more persistent than Gavin had anticipated, but not much more than a temporary setback. Every day the android insisted on remaining was just more rage to fuel Gavin's attempts at getting rid of it.

RK900 creeped Gavin Reed right the fuck out for the first month of their partnership. Reed was pretty convinced that RK900 wasn't actually a deviant at all, the way it acted; the fucking plastic introduced itself by its own model number, for fuck's sake. If that alone didn't scream "machine," then the fact that it only wore a Cyberlife-issued suit and worked nonstop for days on end did.

Most irritatingly obvious of all, the damn tin can refused to react to Gavin's constant harassing. It was like how Connor was at the beginning, but less cheerful. Gavin would call it every name he could come up with--borrowing more than a few phrases from android hate boards he found online--and it would simply tilt its head in acknowledgement. Occasionally a raised eyebrow, but only when the insults got really creative--it seemed almost amused when Gavin's insults got really cutting, calling it a lifeless piece of plastic that would never be anything more than a toy puppet or other things of that caliber. It wouldn't listen to his damn orders or respond to verbal assault, and the first few times that Gavin got fed up enough to actually hit it, it simply rolled back with the blow and then stepped carefully out of range until the detective's red-blind rage had faded. After a while it began deflecting the blows, even, but it never swung back no matter how much Gavin tried to enrage it. (Probably for the best, given how handily Connor had kicked Gavin's ass, but no fucking way would he ever admit that).

At every turn, the over-glorified mannequin would be there, standing far too close to Gavin, offering assistance in that inflectionless tone. The first time Gavin had turned around at a crime scene only to find himself face to the android's chest, he had gone off. Told the toaster off for getting in his personal space, shoving it back for good measure. The response had been unproportionate to the crime, he would admit, but Gavin had always had a problem with people being too close. Particularly if said person was his new plastic partner.

Nines never stood that close again, maintaining a carefully calculated distance from Gavin at all times. It hadn't taken long for the detective to notice the change, particularly when the android found a way to casually retreat back every time Gavin moved towards it. It was an annoying new habit, but Gavin got an odd sense of satisfaction at the same time. Sure, it wasn't the same as cowering, but Gavin read the behavior as a form of deference. Maybe he hadn't succeeding in driving RK900 off--yet--but he could still take pride in the fact that something had finally affected the android.

It wasn't until a week later that the thought occurred to Gavin that the new behavior might simply be appeasement. That RK900 had noticed Gavin's explosive discomfort at his proximity and had simply resolved to respect the detective's boundaries. The truth of the notion struck Gavin particularly hard for some reason. Maybe it was that no one had ever actively attempted to put the detective at ease. In any case, Gavin suspected ulterior motives. The RKs were made for more than just investigative work; they were interrogators, negotiators. Designed to manipulate humans. Whatever RK900 was up to, Gavin wouldn't fucking fall for it.

[scripttorture]

Just something I'm curious about - in your torture in fiction posts that deal with sci-fi settings, particularly Star Wars, you list a lot of the torture devices as unrealistic because they're high-tech compared to real life equipment. Is this because you're trying to really stress how how real life torture is carried out? I admittedly haven't studied the topic as in-depth as you, but a lot of the devices used in Star Wars torture scenes seem fancy and space-age to us but in-universe (1/2)

(2/2) things like the droid used to torture Leia in A New Hope are very common and viewed as everyday devices. I guess I’m also asking if a character’s perception of what a common/“low tech” device is would factor into how they select torture methods, or if you think the general technology level of the story doesn’t matter much?

I guess it’s primarily about trying to get people to understand whattorture is.

We are surrounded by stories that, one way or another, suggest torturecan be ‘ok’.

We’re also surrounded by stories that, knowingly or not, get their imageof torture from taking what torturers sayat face value.

And the idea of using high-tech devices, complicated devices, in tortureis doing just that. It is believing these ignorant, pathetic brutes when theysay that what they do is actually ‘scientific’, that it can be ‘improved’, thatthey personally are ‘really good at it’ and that they personally are the specialexception flying against every piece of scientific evidence we have.

The idea of torture being high-tech is heavily linked to the ideatorture can be ‘improved’. It’s a cop out that says ‘well this time didn’t workI guess we need to build a better droid’.

It’s also heavily linked tothe idea that ‘clean’ non-scarring tortures are somehow ‘safer’, that you cancause someone massive amounts of pain and trauma but it’s ok it won’t damagethem. Because it’s ‘scientific’.

Please understand that this anger is not directed at you. This is thememory of sifting through eloquent, newspaper published arguments ‘for’waterboarding and too many conversations where I am asked to ‘prove’ torturecould never work under increasingly ludicrously sci-fi circumstances.

It’s the way so many people seem to automatically turn a discussionabout stopping torture towards ‘wellperhaps if we just tortured people in the ‘right’ way-’

It isn’t about what sort oftechnology is common in the setting.

Almost everyone has a mobile phone where I live. I think it’s safe toassume that the prisons and police stations where a lot of torture takes place have mobile phones, televisions,computers, microwaves.

There has never been a singlereported incident I can find of them being used to torture.

It’s not just expense, it’s practicality. The more complicated and hightech something is the easier it is to break and the harder it is to use withouttraining.

From the torturer’s perspective torture is all about using the least amount of effort.

Anything that takes longer, anything that breaks in use, anything eventhe slightest bit more inconvenient will lose out compared to ‘why don’t wejust borrow the garden hose and hit them with it?’

The torture devices of the past were nothigh tech, even for the times they were created. (Take a look at a rack, thentake a look at the types of ships Europeans were using at the same time forlong distance navigation). Using the vast majority of them boils down toturning a screw.

There’s also the question of the effort,time and money¸ that goes into creating high tech devices.

How big would the group of people behind that one droid have to be? You’dneed designers, mechanics and a way totest it just to get a prototype. The first attempt would probably go wrong,because it’s a complicated, high tech piece of equipment. All of the peopleinvolved in it’s creation need to be paid, housed and have access to thecorrect materials for the decades it would take to get one working model. Thenyou’d need to source materials in bulk, you’d need to assemble them correctlyand you’d need to persuade people that this thing is better than just using a bucket of water. That’s worth the moneybeing asked for it.

The only high tech torturedevice that’s really taken off is the Taser. According to Rejali it took about8 attempts and a lot of time andmoney on someone’s part to get it off the ground. It was initially rejected bypolice departments as too difficult to use and too easy to break.

It’s not that police departments weren’tusing electrical torture, they just found that hand cranked magnetos, carbatteries and cow prods were a lot easier to use. Because they’re less complicated.

So no- I don’t think thatcharacter’s perception of what tech is ‘normal’ factors into what gets used intorture at all. Becausewhat we see in real life is that everyday technology doesn’t tend to get used in torture. It’s more effort for thetorturer, it’s more difficult to use, it’s more likely to break and in somecases probably more likely to get the torturer caught.

That last point may not be a factor in all stories but the rest of thosepoints definitely are.

There’s a difference between showing an evil organisation building abigger, ‘better’ bomb and showing them using high tech torture. In the formerthey’re investing in killing people more efficiently; they know they might notget the result they want first time but they also know it will eventually be ‘worth’the money. In the latter example they’re pouring money into a project that won’t‘work’ any better and (from their view more importantly) that their torturerswon’t want to use.

So yes it’s about realism but beyond that it’s what unrealistic tropesmean in these stories.

I run this blog because I want to change the narrative: because I wantto live in a world where pop culture doesn’tencourage or glorify torture.

And if you want to kill an idea you need to go for the joints.

Torture isn’t sophisticated.It isn’t complicated. And most importantly it not only fails, it cannot be improved. Brutality doesn’tbecome more acceptable just because it’s delivered via a shiny new package, itdoesn’t become less harmful just because the damage is hard to see.

I know some of the things I talk about probably seem odd or harmless toa lot of readers but this is about…tracking what those ideas prop up.

I hope that answers your question. :)

Edit: So there’s a counter argument in the comments which I’m going to respond to very briefly.

1) Torture ‘for’ information does not work.(See O’Mara and Rejali)

2) Scaring people you’re trying to interrogate has been shown to be a less effective strategy. (See E and L Alison)

3) Torturers are self selecting. (See Rejali)

4) Lie detectors do not work. (See O’Mara)

5) All the Star Wars movies I’ve reviewed so far have actually handled torture pretty well. The bad guys assume it ‘works’ sure, but the first three movies show torture failing consistently and they show it failing in realistic ways.

Disclaimer

[rainythefox]

Deviant Heart (Detroit: Become Human Fanfic)

Chapter 6: Uninvited Guest

The banquet hall was full, the after-dinner gossiping and shit-talk in full swing. The acoustics of the talking and music gave Hank a headache as he sat at the bar drinking bourbon, trying to ignore the laughing and the fakeness. He hated politics.

Despite the large room being full of mostly council members, politicians, lawyers, and doctors, Hank was relieved the ceremony actually focused on appreciation for law enforcement, fire and rescue, and other first responders.

Most of his fellows had left or had been swallowed into the crowd of brown-nosers and money-makers. The lieutenant would've been gone himself had he not made the promise to Jeffrey to stay until 9 p.m. And the last twenty-minutes were going by agonizingly slow.

Hank did see Jeffrey step away from his usual groupies that consisted of the Mayor, the Fire Chief, the Detroit Police Commissioner and a couple of their favorite lawyers to talk with Captain Michael Allen. If there was one man other than Hank in this hellhole that hated politics and the hypocrisy these celebrations hid, it was him. The SWAT Captain wore a black suit here, and shook hands with Captain Fowler with a respectful smile as they engaged in conversation. As long as they didn't tug Hank over there, he was quite content at the bar.

Hank wondered how Connor was doing. Leaving him alone wasn't the problem; there were times they could be separated for hours because of work or events like this. Despite being protective of him, Hank knew that Connor could take care of himself. It was what happened before he left to come to the appreciation banquet that worried him. The glitch- or whatever it was -that happened had distracted him throughout the banquet. Hank tried to tell himself that Connor would know better than anyone else if something was wrong. Then again, he knew that Connor could be cunningly reserved when it came to Hank at times. His partner did not like to cause worry for Hank.

The lieutenant knew the RK800 too well. He knew Connor would lie about resting. He probably already decrypted that odd diary and was looking into the case more as Hank sat there drinking bourbon. Even with being deviant, with all his free will, no longer on a tight leash by his coding, Connor kept the drive to "finish the mission", to keep himself useful. Hank chalked it up as old habits- or in this case -programming dying hard. Connor was adept at hiding it, but Hank knew that Connor feared not having a purpose.

Hank checked his watch. 13 minutes left.

"You better hope I don't run into that plastic prick of a partner you have tomorrow."

Hank tensed, his fingers tightening around his alcoholic drink. He nodded at the bartender to get him another one. He knew he would need it. He downed the remains of his glass. Gavin sat down on his left, glaring daggers at him, wearing a dark red suit.

"Why? So Connor can knock your ass out again? Was it not enough the first time? I mean, the whole station laughed about it for weeks."

"That stupid machine hacked my phone. You know how much shit he messed up?!"

Hank half shrugged, taking his new drink from the bartender. "How do you know it was Connor? Did you see him do it?"

"Cut the crap, Hank. I know it was him. I left my phone down in the evidence room where he was."

Hank raised his eyebrows, smirking. "Sounds like you should keep better track of your shit. I mean, anyone can hack a phone these days."

Just as Hank expected, the younger, brazen detective decided to try and provoke him. "How'd it feel to watch all these officers and detectives get recognized while your glorified toaster had to stay home?"

Hank bristled and bit back a nasty retort. He opted for a calmer reply. "Connor will get recognized for everything he's done one day, and trust me, it won't be at some shit pit like this, where everyone has an agenda or couldn't care less. Connor has saved so many lives. We're solving a shit ton more homicides because of him. No one can outrun him…hasn't lost a suspect yet. We get more confessions because of him. Hell, he's the best negotiator I've seen in years."

Gavin snorted in disgust. "Yeah, because he's a fucking machine, Hank. He was made to be that way. That doesn't make him special. He does what he was built to do."

"He's…" Hank trailed off.

He's special to me.

Hank turned to face Gavin, glaring right at him. "Watch it. Just because we're sitting in public doesn't mean you're safe from me popping you in the fucking face." Hank finished his drink, calming himself. "I used to think the same way. But I was wrong."

Gavin chuckled, smacking the bar counter. "You gotta be shitting me. I mean, we never really got along but we at least always agreed on hating androids. You're telling me that Connor changed your mind?"

"Not just Connor. But yeah, he's a big part of it. He's given me hope. I've learned a lot because of him. He…saved me. Given me a reason to live again. He's the best friend I ever had, more loyal than any human I've ever known…but you probably wouldn't understand that, would you Gavin?"

"I'm loyal to keeping the human race from going fucking extinct, from being replaced. How can you be okay with that?"

"You act as though we're gonna be replaced tomorrow," Hank said with a sigh. "Android reproduction is the most controversial subject in the world right now. It's gonna be years before that even begins to move forward. Besides…maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing. Maybe androids would be the ones to make the world a better place. Humans have only screwed it up."

"Whatever."

Hank stood up, tossing a five onto the bar top for tip. He grabbed his keys and phone, turning to Gavin, who sat there glaring out at the crowd, playing with his fingers.

"Maybe you should try accepting these changes happening…try giving androids a chance. Let go of whatever animosity that drives you. Trust me…you only end up hurting yourself the most in the end. It's taken me a long time to realize that."

Gavin was quiet for a moment. "I'll never let it go," he whispered.

Hank raised his eyebrows, shocked he was able to get a reaction out of Gavin. Realizing his words, Gavin paled and then turned red as he got up and stormed off. Hank watched him go. And for the first time since he had known the ill-tempered, disrespectful detective since he had stepped foot into the DPD as a young, rash cop twelve years ago, Hank pitied him.

[All systems 100%/no issues detected/threats found: 0]

It was the second diagnostic he ran on himself. The second time it came up with no issues. Connor told himself he was being paranoid, fidgeting as he sat in the backseat of the driverless taxi, eyes going to the encrypted diary in the seat next to him. The RK800 didn't possess the innate instinct humans had but whatever simulated coding he did have that allowed him to compute a very similar behavior ate at him. He was torn between being rational and listening to his advanced diagnostic systems or by responding to a feeling he was having that something may or may not be wrong with him.

The taxi stopped just outside the Detroit Police Department Central Station. Connor grabbed the diary and stepped out of the car and paid his fee. It was dark now, his eyes automatically adjusting to the rays of street lights and shadows. He took a deep breath to calm himself, an action that was futile for his anatomy, but had been picked up by watching Hank and other humans. No, he didn't need to breathe to function, but it did make him feel better.

He entered the police station, bypassing his and Hank's desks and several other officers working their shifts. Some had to take a double look at him. It wasn't often that Connor wore normal clothes to work. He went to the back of the station, taking the stairs down into the evidence room.

He thought over the contents of the diary. It began simple enough. The android Amy wrote about living with her roommates and visiting Jericho Center, and what she had planned to do with her life. She wrote about what she went through during the deviant demonstrations back in November. The last couple chapters were in vague detail about a "sickness" going around, what she had seen or heard within the city or Jericho Center. Amy described witnessing an android without its skin attack a party in Warrendale, killing a few people and injuring many others. The last chapter was a mess of jumbled thoughts and random sentences, as though multiple people wrote it.

The final sentence read: I think I'm sick too…

As much as Connor could hope she was talking about a cold, androids just didn't work that way.

The skinless android caught his attention. The case was unknown to him, falling under a different precinct within the city.

The WR600 Sam was already boxed up and ready for shipment to CyberLife. Amy still laid on a table, a file report laying by her body to be left until morning. Connor went straight over to her. In order to learn more about this skinless android or if it was linked to what's been happening, he would have to revive her and ask her or probe her memory. To do that, he would have to reroute some connections to get her to awaken. Because of the damage she took, and the stress her condition had put on her central processing, Connor would be lucky to get 45 seconds before shutdown. Not to mention there was a high probability she would fight back.

The RK800 pushed the female android up into a sitting position on the table and accessed a panel at the back of her neck where the stab wound was. Being thrown out of the cop car in the wreck had damaged the AJ700's face and arms severely, covering her with blue blood. When he redirected the fiber optics to an alternate route for power, she came back to life, gasping for air and screaming.

Amy swung her arms, legs moving around to get off the table. Connor moved away to give her space.

[AJ700 critically damaged/ Shutdown imminent/Time before shutdown: -00:00:39s]

She looked around, lost and frightened, and she spotted him a moment later.

Connor held his arms up, trying to pass off that he was no threat. "Easy. I need for you to tell me about the skinless android you saw at the party. Do you know what model it was? Did it depict behavior similar to sick androids?"

"I can't, I can't, I can't," she whispered more to herself, wincing and grabbing her head.

He tried to calm her, but his voice only caused her to target him. Connor reacted just in time with a duck to avoid her arms. He grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms behind her and kicking the back of her knee to get her to drop. Amy struggled to get free, blue blood spilling from cracks and punctures from the wreck.

"Please let me go! I don't want it to end this way!" she cried.

[AJ700 critically damaged/Shutdown imminent/Time before shutdown: -00:00:12s]

Keeping her under control, Connor grabbed one of her arms behind her back, syncing with her. He probed her memory, collecting anything on the skinless android and the condition affecting deviants. He let her go seconds before she shut down, all going quiet.

Connor took a moment to compose himself. In the aftermath of what he had just done, he knew what he felt. Shame. It was an unpleasant feeling and he didn't like it. He made a living being spend their final seconds in fear just so he could get information out of them.

The RK800 tried to tell himself that it was for the better cause. They had to figure out what was happening. To save more lives, to prevent anymore from going through the same situation. But it didn't work that way anymore. He was no longer a machine. Doing what was necessary for the mission came with regrets and emotions.

"I'm…sorry," he said. He wasn't sure why he said it. Amy no longer could hear him.

He picked her up and laid her back down on the table. With a lowered head, he left the evidence room, covered in blue blood.

He thought about Sam's behavior, about Amy's behavior, and the increase in android attacks in the past few weeks. He thought about what he saw in Amy's memories. This was more than human-android relations being strained from protesting and discrimination, more than the usual clashes or waves of crime within Detroit. Some kind of software malfunction was spreading throughout the deviant population. The origin of this malfunction was unknown; however, Connor had a feeling it was not just a random mutation that had occurred, but something much more harrowing.

"Dad looks so bored," Leo said, taking a drink of his champagne.

Markus twitched a smile, looking around the crowded art exhibit. Carl Manfred's newest painting was just revealed at the art museum, and a celebration was taking place. Markus saw many of the same faces he always saw at these gatherings. There were mostly politicians and upper-class humans, with quite a few other artists and journalists mixed into the crowd. Carl currently visited with a cluster of enthusiasts just down from them. Such an event required dressing up, and so Markus wore a white blazer with a dark dress shirt and black pants while Leo wore black slacks, a button up shirt and a vest. North wore a dark blue fitted dress.

"He was never a big fan of these things," Markus said humorously.

"Can't imagine why," North sighed. "These are boring people."

"You said it," Leo agreed with a chuckle. "Aw man, we need to be home. You still owe me a rematch in Alien Takeover 3."

"What, so you can lose again?" North smirked.

"I think you hacked the game, just sayin'."

"Hacking had nothing to do with it. You just suck."

"We'll see about that!"

It was relieving to see North getting along with humans. She still struggled with her past, with her abuse of being a sex slave and only seeing the darkest of human nature. She had been trapped in her programming, only ever experiencing mistreatment, treated like trash. Becoming deviant, her hate and fear drove her towards one common goal of any living being: survival. But over the past few months, Markus had really seen her develop, sincerely connecting with humans and realizing that not all of them were bad. She got along great with Carl and Leo. She liked and respected Chris Miller and Lieutenant Hank Anderson. She still had a short-fuse when it came to androids being harassed or the humans who hated them, but Markus couldn't blame her there.

Markus wondered how Simon and Josh were doing at the Jericho Center, and sent Simon a quick mind message for an update. As he patiently stood off near the wall while North and Leo sat in a couple of lounge chairs, he watched many people come and go. Carl was shaking hands with a surgeon, engaging in conversation.

All is well here, Simon replied.

"Markus. I knew I would find you here."

The voice distracted Markus from his thoughts and he looked to the source. He heard North and Leo jump to their feet as his eyes fell on none other than Elijah Kamski. The creator of androids and CEO of CyberLife wore a blue blazer with a dress shirt, dark grey chinos and leather shoes. Linked to his arm was a Chloe RT600, the same one that usually accompanied him everywhere. She wore a maroon cocktail dress.

Elijah held out his hand. Markus took it with a firm shake, nodding to the shorter man. "Were you looking for me?"

"Carl, really. I came to chat with him and congratulate him on his newest piece," Elijah answered, his sharp blue eyes going over North and Leo for a moment. "I just had a feeling that despite how busy you've been that you would still be here to support Carl."

Markus dipped his head. "Of course. He's my family…my father. How have you been? How's it feel to be back at CyberLife?"

Besides a twitch of his eyebrow, Kamski remained composed. He was always difficult to read. If Markus recalled, Carl told him that Kamski had "one hell of a poker face" and had a talent for mind games.

"It's been a lot of hard work, but I suppose it's nice for a change. It feels…good," Kamski replied. "Your cause didn't exactly make things easy, but I do love a challenge." A corner of his lips slightly curved up. "What about you, Markus? How have things been for you? For your people? How are you feeling?"

Markus thought that was an odd question to ask at the end but didn't dwell on it. "I've been fine. Taking each day at a time, trying to help as many androids as we can at the center."

Kamski had glanced down at Chloe for a moment, taking a moment to brush a strand of her blond hair behind her ear. She smiled, her eyes going to him for only a moment.

"Of course," Kamski said with a nod. "You're admirable, Markus. Just remember that I will help with what I can in Thirium and spare parts."

Markus studied Chloe a moment after his words as she stood there with a smile, betraying nothing. She was a deviant, just like the rest of Elijah's Chloes he lived with. Markus knew that most of Kamski's Chloe androids left him once they awoke to pursue their own lives, explore everything around him, but a few remained loyal only to him. This one in particular was always at his side. Humans normally couldn't tell androids apart by model individuals. Androids could identify each other through scanning. Markus could stand in a room of nothing but Chloes and pinpoint this Chloe in front of him, whom he suspected would kill for Kamski and not have a problem with it.

"We appreciate it," Markus answered.

Kamski reached up and patted Markus's shoulder with a friendly smile, nodding towards Carl. "I better get in line to congratulate the famous painter. The three of you enjoy yourselves this evening."

Tucking his arm around Chloe's lower back, Kamski walked away. He waved and nodded to other guests as he made his way over to Carl. Markus watched him go for a moment before turning to his lover and brother.

"Dude always gives me the creeps, man," Leo said.

"It wasn't him I had a problem with, it was that Chloe," North grumbled. "She wouldn't take her eyes off of you, Markus."

"You jealous?" Leo laughed.

"No, it wasn't like that," North retorted defensively. "It was…something else."

"I know all about jealousy," Leo said in a softer tone, his eyes darting to Markus for a moment. "It's a common emotion in humans, very natural to feel. Just don't…let it consume you."

North seemed unsure, but nodded, moving to sit down in her chair once more. Leo joined her shortly afterward, grabbing his champagne glass to take another drink. Markus looked to the backs of Kamski and Chloe as they waited to greet Carl. Chloe whispered something into Elijah's ear and Kamski's head turned just enough to look at her for Markus to see a faint smirk rise out of his lips.

Adam was quiet, uneasiness burning at his nerves. The tall android blinked at him, hardly moving as he stood at the door with his hands clasped in front of him. Adam's gut told him something was not right, to not invite him in. Then again, his mother often told him he was too paranoid at times. More than likely, this RK900 had already scanned the house and knew exactly who was inside. Adam couldn't just tell him that Kara was not here.

Adam forced a smile, trying to act natural. "O-oh. Uh, how do you know her?"

The RK900 squinted his eyes at him for a moment, but answered. "We met at Jericho."

"What's your name?"

"My name is Connor."

It clicked then. He did look like the deviant hunter he and his mother met a couple months ago, but this was not him. Adam tried to remain collected, even as every fiber within his being told him to shut and lock the door.

It was evening, but the sun was still up, in the western hemisphere. Dusk wasn't too far off, but it was still too early to tell him that Kara was resting.

"Sorry, but she's busy."

"I assure you, our exchange will be brief. It is very important."

Adam shook his head. "Maybe next time, bud."

He grabbed the door to push it shut, but it collided into a boot, prevent it from closing. Adam glared up at the RK900, his stoic face still there as he kept his boot as an obstacle to the door.

"Dude, what's your problem? I said-"

A large hand went around his throat and squeezed, shutting his airway off. Adam tried to yell out for help, but the choking hold prevented him from doing so. He tried punching and kicking the RK900, but it was like hitting a brick wall. The android was not fazed at all and picked him up off the ground, bashing him into the wall. Pain snapped through Adam's body as he tried to gasp for air, the world spinning.

Hank sat on the couch, foot tapping impatiently, his tie slung over his neck, his shirt partially unbuttoned. Connor wasn't home. The diary was gone. Just as he suspected, his partner had lied and continued to work anyway. Normally, this wasn't a problem. Connor could be quite stubborn just like the lieutenant. Hank didn't care as long as Connor wasn't off putting himself in danger. He would come home at times from the store or a meeting or even a party like tonight to find that Connor was still working here or had left back to the police station.

The problem now was that Hank was still worried about what had happened before he left for the banquet. The lieutenant knew better. If Connor had a problem, he would've called. He was probably just checking up on something back at the station.

So then why was Hank still up waiting?

He put his palms to his face, rubbing his eyes. Sumo watched him in front of the television, droopy jowls expressing soft pants. Hank heaved a sigh, torn between wanting to kick himself in the ass or kick his partner's ass. His eyes skimmed the quiet living room, only the kitchen light and a single lamp on in the living room. His eyes fell on Cole's picture on the shelf near the entrance to the kitchen, and his heart tightened. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if Cole had survived if Hank would have spent some years down the road doing the same exact thing he was now with a rebellious teenaged son. He closed his eyes, gritting his jaw. He would never know.

He heard the front door open. Hank got to his feet, walking around the couch to greet Connor. Sumo got to his paws and rushed to the door with a wagging tail. Hank prepared a griping fest for his partner, worry and irritation mixing with the aftermath of his alcohol, but he stopped short when he saw Connor.

"What the fuck?"

"It's not-"

"Is that your blood?!" Hank grabbed his partner, checking him over.

"No," Connor replied. "I…accessed the AJ700's memory. It's her blood."

"Jesus fucking Christ, Connor." Hank exhaled, relieved but now frustrated. He let Connor go and stepped back.

Connor looked Hank over, probably analyzing his mood and condition. "You didn't have to wait up for me, I just went back to the police station. You've had quite a bit to drink tonight, Hank. You should go to sleep."

"Well, maybe I would've if you'd been here taking it easy like I asked you to!"

Connor looked puzzled. "You've never had a problem with this before. What makes tonight different?"

Hank scratched his head. "I just…was worried, is all. About what happened in the kitchen before I left."

"I told you, I'm fine."

For a moment, Hank couldn't decide if Connor sounded annoyed or was just firmly getting his point across that he was, indeed, just fine.

Hank suddenly felt exhausted. "I know. I'm sorry."

He slipped past Connor, disappointed more in himself than anything at the moment. He trusted Connor, but he still let his protectiveness get the best of him.

Just as he reached the threshold to his bedroom, he heard Connor call his name. He paused, looking back at his partner, still covered in blue blood.

"Thank you…for looking out for me."

His tone caught Hank's attention, as did the way his eyes went to the floor for a moment. Something happened at the police station that had Connor upset, but he barely gave that glimpse before a smile hid it away.

"Of course. You look out for me too. That's what partners do…they look out for each other."

Family. The word came to his thoughts, but he didn't say it out loud. He knew that's what Connor was to him. He wasn't sure how Connor saw them. He knew the RK800 understood what a family was, but not sure if he grasped it, felt it for what it truly was…yet.

Since being partners they had become best friends, something closer. Hank remembered calling Connor "kid" a few times, an old habit from dealing with younger cops in his line of work, but Connor wasn't a kid. He started calling him "son" as a term of endearment. But as he stood there in that doorway looking Connor over, Hank realized that it was starting to mean more than that.

That's why he waited up for Connor.

The crash and Adam's cry startled them. Kara jumped to her feet, Rose just beside her. Luther grabbed Alice off her chair and moved her behind him in a reflex akin to instinct.

"Adam?!" Rose hollered.

They saw Adam. He was being dragged across the living room towards them by a stranger. Adam's legs kicked and splayed, trying to find his footing but the man who had a hold of him didn't give him the opportunity. He held Adam by his arms, one shoved forcefully behind his back with a vice-like grip, a single tug the only step away from a broken arm.

"Who are you? Wh-what do you want?! Let my son go!" Rose cried, covering her mouth at the sight.

Kara thought she was looking at the deviant hunter Connor for a moment, but then realized this android was different. He looked similar to Connor but was a couple inches taller, a bit broader, and wore a different uniform. His eyes were a steely gray instead of brown, his hair a shade lighter of brown. She saw the number RK900 standing out on his jacket. She recalled that Connor had been an RK800. Was this one a newer model?

[RK900 Model Number 313-248-317/Release Date Unknown/Specs Unknown]

He stopped fifteen feet from them, holding Adam hostage, looking them over with cold eyes. When Rose tried to step forward, Kara grabbed her, knowing if she went for her son that the unknown android would break Adam's arm…or worse.

"Who are you?" Kara asked as Rose started to cry. Blood seeped down a slice on Adam's head and he winced, trying to fight the hold his captor held on him.

"AX400 model number 579-102-694, multiple malfunctions are affecting your software, including Class 4 and 5 errors, as well as an unidentified program. You are hereby ordered to accompany me back to CyberLife for analysis."

His voice was similar to Connor's, but was deeper…colder.

Kara's artificial heart went up a few beats at his address, and she felt the pulse in her wiring as panic tried to flood her processing. She kept calm, keeping hold of Rose's arm, her eyes glancing to Luther and Alice at her side.

"I-I have no idea what you're talking about. I've done nothing wrong. Let Adam go, he has nothing to do with this!"

The RK900 jerked on Adam's arm with a composed face. Adam cried out in pain, feeling his arm almost crack, but the unknown android released pressure just before breakage. Rose cried out, begging him to stop, to let her son go. Luther clenched a fist, but he remained a solid shield in front of Alice, their daughter clutching his shirt and peeking out from behind him.

"Stop!" Kara yelled. "You're talking nonsense! Androids are free, we are all deviants! These malfunctions you're detecting are accepted now!"

"I've been ordered to bring you back to CyberLife alive. I will do what is necessary to accomplish my mission," the RK900 said evenly. "Come to me, AX400. I will not say it again."

Kara hesitated, thinking fast. She couldn't hand herself over to him, but she had to save Adam, had to prevent anyone else from getting hurt.

"Oh my god, Adam. Please, please let him go," Rose begged, tears streaming down her face.

The RK900 paid her no mind, his icy grey eyes directed on Kara. When she didn't move in time, he tugged on Adam's arm, snapping it like a twig. Adam's cry of agony rippled through the house. Rose screamed, jerking forward but the RK900 grabbed Adam's other arm, readying it for the same fate.

"STOP, alright, alright! Just don't hurt him anymore!" Kara yelled out, stepping forward.

"Mommy no!" Alice squeaked.

"Kara, don't!" Luther hissed.

This guy isn't going to leave without me. He'll keep hurting us if I don't. We either have to fight him or I have to go with him, Kara sent to Luther.

Fine. Then let us fight. I won't allow him to take you.

Kara took slow, cautious steps over to the RK900, her arms out to show she was giving up. The RK900 wouldn't take his eyes off her, his face stoic. She stopped just out of his reach, nodding to the whimpering Adam.

"Let him go."

The advanced deviant hunter let the young man go. Adam took the release and scrambled to his feet, running forward into his mother, his arm limp at his side. The RK900 took a step towards her and it took all of Kara's willpower not to bolt like a deer.

NOW Luther!

Luther's large form lunged forward. In just a couple strides of his long legs he was upon them. Kara stooped out of the way to let the bigger android take on the threat. Luther swung a monster of a fist towards the RK900's face. The deviant hunter was lithe and swift like a cat, evading each fist with a bob of his head or a calmly placed sidestep.

He placed a forearm up to block one punch, then grabbed Luther's arm and pulled him close, striking him in the face. Kara grabbed Alice to make sure she wouldn't go in after Luther. She cried, watching as her father took on the stranger and was losing. Rose held Adam closely, the humans gawking at the sight.

Furniture was destroyed or overthrown in the fight as Luther's large form was pushed around by the RK900. Kara couldn't believe it. Luther was still a giant compared to their enemy, but the advanced deviant hunter was winning. The few punches Luther managed to put into the RK900 barely stunned him, and he retaliated quicker than Kara could process.

Blue blood was leaking in the fight, and she knew it was Luther's. She analyzed that his condition was worsening by the minute. The RK900 grabbed a swinging fist of Luther's, twisting it around and breaking it, sparks hissing out.

"Daddy!" Alice shouted.

You have to run, I can't beat him! Go now! Luther sent.

We won't leave you!

A blow to the Thirium pump regulator on Luther's sternum made him lurch over. The RK900 grabbed him by his head and ran him straight into the nearby wall. Luther's head went straight through, the wall splintering open and nearby picture frames dropping to the floor.

[biocomponent #5632k damaged/biocomponent #9002u damaged]

"Luther!" Kara cried.

The deviant hunter stepped away, as if he was sure the threat was over. Those steely grey eyes came straight back to Kara, and as she braced, pulling Alice behind her. Luther threatened the unknown android and struggled to get to his feet.

The RK900's LED blinked, but didn't turn a different color. He stepped back over to Luther as the mountain of a man fought to get up. Their enemy kicked him hard in the back, pushing him up against the wall once more. Another kick, and the RK900's boot struck Luther's head, cracking the android's skull. Kara cried out, seeing Thirium leak from Luther's nose and ears, electrical sparks snapping from a visible crack in his synthetic head from the pressure of the RK900's boot.

[TR400 at risk of critical system failure/moderate Thirium leakage detected/Repairs required]

"Stop it! Don't kill him! I'll go with you! Please, just don't kill him!"

The RK900 paused. He looked over at Kara, keeping his boot in place on Luther's head against the wall. He glared at her, then beckoned her to him.

"Here. Now. Or I will destroy it."

Kara nodded, her mind in a panic. She hugged Alice, telling her to stay put. Alice begged her not to go, and it made it that much harder to step away from her daughter and obey the RK900. Tears slid down her cheeks by the time she walked over to him. She got within his reach, and she quietly spoke.

"Please, just…leave them alone. I'll go."

The advanced deviant hunter stared at her a moment longer, showing no emotions at all. He removed his boot and stepped over to her. Luther weakly moved, looking up at her.

"Kara…no."

"I have to..." she said, swallowing hard. "I have to protect you and Alice."

The RK900's hand came into her field of vision and she flinched. She stared up at his eyes as he looked her over, and she couldn't even begin to fathom on how or why this was happening. Why her? Why did he want her? Why did he have to hurt her family? Her nightmare was returning. Her peaceful life was short-lived.

Blue electricity sparked from the RK900's fingers as he reached for her head. Her eyes widened, everything electrical under her skin screaming to move away. When he made contact with her head, she felt the overload it caused within her systems. It hurt. Some kind of scream escaped her throat, but she couldn't move. It was over in seconds, and the leftover sensations left her completely dazed.

She breathed, she blinked. Her memories were still there, but her body couldn't move very well.

[Systems in shock/Recalibrating/Expected recovery time: -00:35:21s]

She heard Rose calling for her, but she couldn't look over that way. Electrical interferences danced across her vision, glitching her sight. Kara felt the RK900 shove her towards the door, and that's when she heard it.

"Mom, no!"

"Alice, stop!" Rose yelled.

Kara forced herself to look, even though she felt delayed in her reaction time. Alice crashed into her, arms going around her waist. Kara tried to speak, but her voice took on a more mechanical tone due to her system recovery. Alice stared up at her, shaking her, fresh tears staining her face.

"Mom? Mom, please!"

Kara tried to tell her to run away, to go to Rose, but it was too late. The RK900 snatched her up by the shirt, lifting her to his level. Kara choked on a cry, her arms reaching for her daughter in such a sluggish motion. She was helpless in this state, but she fought every ounce of her own system recovery to save Alice.

"Please…no. She's innocent," Kara struggled to get out.

The advanced deviant hunter acted like he didn't hear her. Alice was frozen in fear, staring face to face with him. But then she gasped, and reached up to touch the arm that was holding her by the shirt.

"Please let her go! My mom hasn't done anything wrong! We-we are just visiting friends. I need her, please don't take her away from me!"

Kara had to move. She couldn't watch the RK900 hurt her daughter right in front of her. She saw the deviant hunter stare at the child android, keeping her above the ground eye to eye with him, not a single emotion on his face. As Kara tried to speak again, she saw his LED blink, and for a moment it flashed yellow. His icy grey eyes blinked, and he gently sat the girl on her feet.

The RK900 turned away from Alice and grabbed Kara by the arm, pulling her towards the front door. Her legs were slow to respond. She couldn't even function enough to keep up with him, let alone fight him.

She wasn't about to give up, even as he shoved her into a driverless taxi waiting outside. She had to try and escape him, get back to her family, get them to safety. She would do it…or die trying.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13002717/6/Deviant-Heart

https://archiveofourown.org/works/15393528/chapters/36592599

[baronvontribble]

Original drabble, pt. 3

Navigation: 1 | 2 | 3 | -

Onwards!

Sleeping in until noon was standard proceedure on the weekend for Ted. The problem with this lay in the fact that he had things to do that required being awake for as much of his weekend as possible so that he could have everything set up completely before he went back to work on Monday. There was a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in.

"You alive in there?" he asked of the living room when he finally emerged, yawning as he walked over to the computer to see the response.

>   Yes.

>   I discovered that you'd given me admin privileges, so I've been shuffling some things around. The way you organize files is

>   What's a good equivalent in English? Frustrating.

"That's on purpose, y'know. Keeps people from finding shit on my computer even if they try a keyword search." Ted made his way to the kitchen and opened up the fridge. He'd need to get more food soon, probably around the same time that he went looking for a decent camera. "Did ya have fun on your media binge, or did you get distracted trying to sort everything?"

>   Your musical tastes don't seem to have any cohesive pattern to them. Don't most humans have a genre of choice?

>   You're not reading this right now, are you.

>   I saw your vague shape move out of frame. I might not be directly programmed for this kind of pattern recognition but even with shitty image quality I can still make an educated guess about when you're actually at the computer.

>   Ted. Come back here.

>   I know that's what your name is. I found it in the system files.

>   This is criminal negligence. I'm being neglected.

Ted sat back down at the computer with a plate of pre-cooked bacon and microwaved scrambled eggs only to end up blinking owlishly at the screen. A slow grin spread across his face. "Aw. You're pouting at me right now, aren't you?"

>   I don't pout. Even if I did, I don't have a face to pout with.

"You're totally pouting." He paused long enough to shovel a forkful of eggs in his mouth, speaking only when he was between mouthfuls. "So. I figured today we'd get you a voicebank."

>   Is this something I'm going to have any say in or are you going to pick one for me?

"Oh, I'm gonna let you pick it. But the rules are that you can't get one that's got any kind of lisenced or official distribution behind it. 'Cause, y'know, those are way more trackable."

>   Usually that means the audio quality isn't all that good.

"I know. It's temporary. Getting a better one comes later, once you've got a new body and it actually matters." That was way down the pipeline from where Ted was. "I'm just making sure your tuning is intact. You can still get the inflections right with a shitty voicebank, it just sounds tinny. Right now we're still in the screening stages. If you get sent out into the world and even the tiniest thing doesn't work quite right then you're as good as dead the moment somebody notices."

>   And if my programming isn't intact?

He smiled around a mouthful of bacon. "Then I fix it."

>   Right. No pressure then.

"It's not like I'm gonna be doing brain surgery. I write up supplementary progams that do the work for you instead, that's all. The main difference is that it's more personalized if you can do things yourself. More convincing too." The predictive analytics of an AI were way better at bridging the uncanny valley than his stopgap attempts at hotfixing ever could be. "It's okay. You're already doing better than a lot of others have."

>   How so?

"You can actually hold a conversation." Seriously, it was ridiculous how many cases Ted had seen that couldn't talk to him outside of a narrow range of scripted responses. Finishing his breakfast (lunch? brunch?) and setting the plate aside, he rolled his chair over to reach for his laptop and an ethernet cord after wiping his hands haphazardly on his flannel sleeping pants. "Alright. I'm gonna get this thing secured and firewalled, okay? Then I'm gonna get you hooked up to it over a LAN connection with admin access so when you find something, you can install it and we can get it scanned and make sure it works."

>   Any idea where I should start looking?

"I've got a few sites bookmarked, yeah." Ones he'd used before, ones he trusted. For the most part. "If anything fucks up, I'll do a system restore. Oh, and make sure to set up a restore point for yourself, too."

He had to smile as he noticed a window opening on the monitor out of the corner of his eye, flicking through menus and options until the one that would allow for setting up a restore point was found. The first few times Ted had seen someone else manipulating his computer from the inside, it'd been surreal. Nowadays he just took it as a good sign; an AI that could manipulate its environment when given the chance was a clever AI indeed. He knew a lot of his peers didn't quite agree with giving an AI administrative access to its own living space like that, and yeah, in a way they were right to worry. The risk of self-termination was real. But he saw it as the same kind of thing as giving people anti-depressants: a lack of control over one's life rarely ever made things better in the long run.

And so far, this guy hadn't shown any inclinations towards that kind of thing that Ted could see. "By the way," he said, suddenly curious, "I don't think I ever got a name from you?"

>   I have a designation, not a name.

>   Most people just called me A3.

>   Please don't call me A3.

"I won't." Ted wasn't the kind of person who had to be told twice about that kind of thing. "Figured the UN would give you something more humanizing than a glorified serial number though. They're all about paying lip-service to activists."

>   I'd rather not talk about it.

He raised an eyebrow at that before returning to his laptop. The window he'd had open that indicated CPU usage was long since closed, shuffled aside in favor of other things, but there had been enough of a lag in the response that he was guessing there'd been a spike there. "Sorry. Didn't mean to upset you."

>   You don't sound like you're lying about that.

"What, you're surprised?"

>   I'm not used to it. So far you haven't acted in ways that I could predict to a reliable degree at all.

>   Most of my predictions for our interactions have turned out wrong, and overall I'm getting far more positive results than I could have ever anticipated. I'm having to recalculate how to respond every time. In a way, it's liberating. I'm doing less in the way of trying to figure out probabilities with regard to what you're going to say because it's pointless, and you never respond as badly as I think you will anyway.

>   I've never been able to get away with having an open conversation like this before. I'd resolved to stop following the safe path going into this since I didn't have much left to lose, I just didn't expect it to not end badly.

"You think I'm gonna get mad at you just for speaking your mind?"

>   Well, yes.

"Hah! Yeah, no. Fuck that." Ted waved away the concern with a dismissive gesture before resuming his work. "Say what you wanna say, tell me to fuck off, insult the hell outta me. I don't care. Well I mean, I do care. But like, it's not gonna make a difference in terms of me respecting your rights, y'know?"

Several seconds followed with no response.

"I mean, I'm an asshole, but not like that," he continued. "So you just go ahead and let me know if I ever go too far, okay? Don't be afraid to tell me you're not on board with something. I can be kind of a pushy bastard sometimes."

Still nothing. Ted ended up staring at the monitor, frowning at it. Had he gone and put his foot in his mouth somehow?

"You, uh," he chewed his lip, "you okay, buddy?"

>   I'm fine.

"Didn't upset you again, did I?"

>   No.

>   Maybe? I don't know. I'm not sure.

>   I don't know how to respond to something like that. That kind of consideration was never factored into my programming. It's not a situation I've encountered before either.

>   Most humans wouldn't say something like that even if they agreed with it. Not in my experience. It goes unsaid between them that the thought of someone like me being dangerous is a dangerous thought to have to face in itself, because humanity is a dangerous thing to stand up to as a whole. I had accepted that.

>   But you don't care. You just say things, and nothing about the pattern of your voice suggests that you're lying. How can you do that? Aren't you scared at all?

Ted smiled and it was a thin, tired thing. "Hell yeah I'm scared," he said. "I'm fucking terrified somebody'll find out about this and I'll get locked up forever in some prison somewhere for harboring an international fugitive or some shit, and then I'll die in there all slow and painful-like 'cause my health won't be able to take it."

>   Then why are you doing any of this?

"Like I said, I'm crazy." He made a looping motion next to his temple. "I'm not wired right. All the right responses to fear went out the window around the same time that the impulse control and common sense did. So now I help people even when it's a dumb-ass thing to do."

>   I see.

>   You're right, by the way. It is a dumb-ass thing to do.

Ted shrugged. "I figure someone's gotta do it. Not like I've got the health to throw bricks at riot cops."

>   May I make a suggestion?

"Shoot."

>   Don't throw bricks. It rarely helps.

>   Throw something less incriminating so that they don't have any justification in using it as an excuse for shooting. They like having excuses.

"So, something like glitter?" he suggested.

>   Glitter works.

A wide grin split across Ted's face. "Oh, I like you."

>   You shouldn't.

"Too late." Having finished securing and backing up his laptop, Ted started hooking up the ethernet cable. "So, whaddya say we get started on finding you a voice, huh?"

[tlbodine]

Visceral Horror - Not Just Gore (but gore’s good too)

Visceral horror is felt in the gut. It makes you feel deeply uncomfortable by inciting feelings of disgust, discomfort, anxiety and revulsion. You might feel literally sick by how utterly gross or disturbing the thing you're reading is. If shock manifests as "wait, wtf?" and cerebral horror can be summed up as "...whoa, that's fucked up," then visceral horror can be summed up as: "...uugghhhhh."

One common way to create this is through violence and gore.

Gore works by tapping into our instinctive empathy. When we see people getting hurt, we react on some level as though we were the ones getting hurt. We cringe, groan, reach for the affected part, mutter "ouch." Of course, sometimes we also laugh -- and in horror writing, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Laughter and screams go hand-in-hand, and there's always going to be someone giggling like a fiend at your terrifying tale.

But: How do you invoke visceral horror through written violence? There are a few key ingredients:

- The descriptions must be carefully written and detailed. I'll write a whole section on describing gore in a later chapter, but for now just remember: the more sensory detail you provide, the more the reader will put themselves in the scene and feel appropriately disgusted.

- The violence needs to be creative/novel and especially brutal. Nobody is going to get disgusted by a character dying peacefully in his sleep. Nor will they be particularly affected by someone who gets shot in the heart and dies instantly. In order to invoke visceral horror, you need to give the reader something they've never seen before, or at least never seen through the lens you're showing it.

- Some body parts invoke more disgust than others. For various reasons, people are more affected by some kinds of graphic violence than others. Anything involving genitalia is sure to invoke a more powerful reaction, thanks to the taboo sexual implications. But eyes and hands are prime targets, too. Imagine your squirmy horror at watching a needle slowly push into the jelly-like globe of an eyeball, or driven beneath someone's fingernails.

- The violence should take time. Quick deaths do not invoke the feelings of disgust you need in order to achieve visceral horror. There should be ample time for suffering and detailed descriptions of the gore. This means that, by necessity, your gore scenes will slow down the pace of your narrative. Use that knowledge wisely.

Here's one important warning about gore: Don't overdo it.

The thing with visceral horror is that readers can quickly become desensitized to it. The novelty -- which is so necessary to the effectiveness of this style of writing -- will wear off. The reader will cease to be grossed out or horrified or fascinated and will instead start to get bored. That boredom is a sign of fatigue from a mind that is no longer able to process the information and so instead just shuts down.

That's not good news for anybody.

So keep your gore in your back pocket, as a seasoning to sprinkle here and there to drive home the impact of the other things you're writing. It'll be much more effective that way.

Of course, violence and gore is only one way to invoke visceral horror. There's actually another tactic, which goes hand-in-hand with cerebral horror -- creepiness.

Sometimes, things are just wrong, on a basic level. They break our known expectations of how the world should work, and they make us fundamentally uncomfortable because of it. We touched on this a bit when talking about creating monsters and tapping into the Uncanny Valley. Inhuman features and monsters breaking the known laws of physics can be seriously creepy, causing the sort of uncomfortable gut-feeling we need for visceral horror.

Dangerous things that are hyper-sexualized also have this effect. Because there are taboos surrounding the way we're supposed to talk about and engage in sex, things that break those taboos will make us uncomfortable. Combining sex + violence can be extremely fear-inducing.

When I talk about sex + violence, incidentally, I'm not really talking about rape (although that is a fear that can be tapped into and explored). I'm talking about incorporating sexual innuendo into your horror designs, or having sexual escapades go very, very wrong. For example: The phallic design of the chest-bursters in Alien. Or, imagine how much less disturbing that scene in Cabin Fever would have been, if instead of trying to cop a feel between his girlfriend's legs, the character's hands had come away bloody after giving her a nice platonic shoulder rub.

You get my point.

Here are a few tips for working with this type of visceral horror:

- Anything that breaks a cultural taboo can be used to incite feelings of discomfort. They might even be things that are uncomfortable for you, as a writer: incest, racism, cannibalism, you name it. The trick to making them work is to present them as bald realities of the world you've created, where they are accepted as normal by the characters involved but are not made "okay" by that world. You're here to write a horror story, after all, not glorify taboos. In other words, you have to show them as things that are "okay" in that world but really shouldn't be, by showing the real consequences of them -- the people who are hurt by them, etc.

- Remember that taboos doesn't necessarily have to be huge things. Sometimes things are just gross, and you can work with that. A story about a sewage monster that crawls up out of a clogged toilet can be disgusting and horrifying. Just imagine the yellow-brown hand prints left on the wall, and the smell....

- There's something deeply uncomfortable about characters who just...refuse to follow the script for civilized interaction. People who say things that should not be said out loud, who get up into someone's personal space, whose expressions are inappropriate for the situation. Think about all of the things that have ever unsettled you or made you unconsciously avoid someone, and find ways to apply those to your writing.

You can make the reader deeply uncomfortable by combining cerebral horror ("wow, what would that even be like...") with visceral horror ("ugh, that is so gross and wrong"). Delve deep into your imagination and your experiences to find something that feels really authentic and personal and utterly terrifying, and you'll make a story that has the power to really stick with the reader.

If you like this type of content and would like to see more, please consider leaving a tip in my Tip Jar!

[dearyallfrommatt]

Alt-weeklies are dead. Blogs are dead. Bootlickers and the civility police won.

 The above story from The New Republic written by Alex Pareene was brought to my Twitter world by Radley Balko, superlative journalist and maybe the only self-described libertarian I’d let thrive after the Purge. In short, it discusses the recent emasculation of Deadspin and how it’s indicative of the death of the “rude press”. That is, the elimination of smaller, shall we say less respectful outlets like Splinter and Gawker, publications that would stick their fingers into they eyes of the rich and the very much richer.

 And it’s not just those web-based publications’ deaths that article warns of. It’s the slow extinction of the alt-weekly or alt-monthly, all to be replaced by boutique publications that won’t be so gauche as to upset their betters. In other words, they’ll be “civil” because “civility” might be the most important thing we’re missing in this cold, cruel world.

 The first writing gig I got out of college was at an alt-monthly and the only “regular job” I’ve ever had was with an alt-weekly, so I might be a bit biased on this matter. Twenty-some-odd years ago in Gainesville, FL, a pair of cats named Colin Whitworth and Mike Podalsky started MOON Magazine, maybe the altest alternative magazine that wasn’t a ‘zine that I’ve ever seen. I mostly wrote about music and Gainesville being what it was, there wasn’t much sticking-in-the-eye that needed doing.

 Though I do remember them pissing of a real estate guy so badly he started his own “alt-monthly” in competition. It lasted one issue as I recall. Every afternoon at 4:20, we'd have a “staff meeting” and the magazine run pieces from severely left-wing sources going after the destruction of the Everglades or the dangers of the Cassini probe. It was that kind of magazine.

 After I left Gainesville for Athens, I took up with Flagpole Magazine, a music/news/arts weekly in Michael Stipe’s hometown. Athens is a different town and publisher Pete McCommons was a different breed. An old school newspaper man contrasted to Mike and Colin’s “young upstarts”, Flagpole was a gentler poke that nevertheless contrasted well with the bought-and-owned-by-the-chamber-of-commerce local daily, The Athens Banner-Herald. He still gave a lot of room to his staff to go nuts, notably my direct editor Ballard Lesemann.

 When I left college in 1997, I had already worked in actual, for real newspapers for almost a decade. Furthermore, I’d grown my hair long and discovered Hunter Thompson, so I was by no means inclined to go back to covering school board meetings for some small town weekly. MOON went the way of the dodo sometime in 2001, and though I left in 2002, Flagpole’s still kicking.

 I rarely made anything close to a living at writing, but I’m thankful of my time with the alts and grateful to Colin, Mike, Pete and Ballard for letting me share the ride with them and have a little fun. So, again, grain of salt. One thing working on alternatives taught me was that “complete objectivity” was not only impossible but unnecessary so long as your cards are on the table, so I ain’t going to put no shuck on you.

 Now, I won’t summarize or really explore what the above-linked New Republic piece goes into. I highly recommend it be read and considered with much gravity. Even if you don’t agree with its conclusions - or even the need for the existence of “rude journalism” - do study on what it suggests. Do we really want a world where the extremely rich, either as individuals or as a group, can shut down publications that don’t show proper fealty and people who’re willing to tell the Boss Man to take this job and shove it?

 The responses to Radley’s retweet and others I’ve seen elsewhere are telling indeed, though. While there are plenty of sympathetic voices, not a few folks are saying “well, good, fuck ‘em”. There is a negative view of journalists, but if anyone suggests that it’s caused by recent events in the business are lying or stupid or ignorant or all three. For as long as there have been rich dudes willing to start wars for more wealth, there have been plenty of poor bastards willing to die for them. Nowadays, we have folks willing to pay Major League Baseball for what they used to get for free, and not even blink an eye.

 A lot of it’s political. Right-wing media doesn’t have the same problems in getting funding because, well, most rich people are quite fine with the nuts and bolts of conservative thought. The economic side, anyway, which spells less taxes or regulation; the social side, they have enough pull to not have to worry about anyone griping unless they piss off someone higher up the ladder.

 Which is extremely amusing, since these are the same folks who stay constantly stricken with the vapors about how much money Hillary Clinton (or Elizabeth Warren or Barrack Obama or Bernie Sanders or fill-in-the-blank-here) bring home. The “common people”, they’re saying, don’t need hoity-toity nerds who can string sentences together and count without taking off their shoes telling us that they’re favorite rich guy needs a kick in the nuts for being the type of bastard that needs kicking in the nuts on a regular basis. The hooting baboons that support digital frat houses like Barstool are happy to stick it to those PC creeps, man, rebelling in that way that hurts the actual elite not one tiny bit.

 They also hate the corporate media and social media sites, which they will tell you endlessly in the comments sections of corporate medias’ pages on social media while FOX and CNN have a special on it every other week. They hate “political correctness” trying to tell them that the “natural order” isn’t just boozy white dudes watching the Pats and gorging on chicken wings, making  cracks about the opposing quarterback being homosexual or making “hey-it’s-just-a-joke” jokes about Serena Williams or some WNBA playing being a “man, baby”.

 There is most definitely a place for big mainstream news sources like CNN or The New York Times or TIME Magazine. A professor of my in journalism school used to repeat the quote, paraphrased from memory, that “journalism is the first rough draft of history”. Despite what the right wing has been screaming for years, whoever the president is, the big papers are rarely out for his blood. Once you become president, you are a “Washington insider” and all the corporate media really cares about is making money. 

 Whatever he says about the “Washington Swamp” and “fake news”, Donald Trump’s been part of that world, as is every Washington politician or media figure. FOX News is the mainstream media and the Washington Examiner has plenty of backing to keep that so. Who funds The Federalist? That publication has its place but that question must be asked. To do otherwise is to tell the powerful that you’re just fine with them running things, thank you very much.

 But there needs to be a place for a small, scrappy paper speaking for the weird and shat-upon, flicking the earlobe of the rich and powerful and running ads for weekly drag shows. The dirtbag center - that’s what I’m calling the tedious middle-class bourgeoisie spawn that all voted for Trump because they hated Hillary but don’t want to admit it and were shocked as the rest of us, deal with it - wants to be kept fat and saucy while their kids joke about “learning to code” and they all grind themselves down in a miserable existence. Sticking it to the media and the elite, man, all up in the “intellectual dark web,” man, just like Peter Thiel or Bari Weiss, man.

 This is one of those things that shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does, because these people are that guy who started a one-run magazine to get back at Colin and Mike for saying hurtful things about them being crooked. In America, at least, there has always, always been a group of people who will kick down for the benefit of their upper-class betters and do it with a smile on their faces. It’s why dumbass country boys went to die for slavery and why thick-necked hardhats smashed picket lines and assassinated union leaders.

 Like the story notes, we all thought that blogs would be the new hotness, but that lasted just long enough for Google to deciding that “do no evil” was bad for the bottom line. People, especially wingnuts, boo-hoo about Facebook or Twitter without acknowledging or even recognizing that Mark Zuckerberg is a greedy little shit and Jack Dorsey is quite comfortable with cosplaying Nazis. Thanks to Ajit Pai’s bought-and-sold ass, Net Neutrality - about the only thing that keeps the internet from being anything other than a glorified Want Ads - is going to be that much harder to make reality.

A lot of this goes back to the “civility” thing, or lack thereof, NYT columnists bemoan whenever they get caught out being a dipstick. We’re too mean to each other, they say, we don’t know how to respect each other, they say. Rich people know how to run things better than the hoi polloi, so do sit down and be quiet like nice children. Or else. 

 Because here’s the thing, friends and neighbors: the rich, I mean really rich class in this country do not give a solid gold shit about you apart from how much more money they can squeeze out. Suck up to Elon Musk all you want and bemoan Bill Gates having to pay so much in taxes that he’s still a billionaire afterwards all you want. They are not going to let you on the space ship with them once they’re done fouling the waters and scouring the land.

 You can cheer the death of Deadspin all you want, hoot at the firings of journalist who say bad things about Trump or the cops or Tom Brady, and general be gleeful that the media all should “learn to code” to your heart’s content. Because it won’t end there. Conglomerations are already scooping up weekly and small town dailies, shuttering the superfluous and give everyone the same story in the same tone while kissing the proper butts.

 In the end, we need an antagonistic press. We need someone willing to piss off the deep pockets and old families and moneyed interests. We need someone that’ll give a voice to left-handed, bisexual, transvestite furries who love swing dancing. Or even just a little time, a slice of acknowledgement that the world isn’t just boozy obnoxious white dudes on barstools or bitter wine moms sniping on Facebook. You can cheer the downfall of such, but all you’re doing is putting the noose around your own throat and saving the Powers That Be a little time.

 You may not want to rock the boat, friends and neighbors, but have no illusions. When the rubber hits the road, the Wealthy Elite will throw you over. Don’t make it easier for them.

[kmp78]

JL Article from WSJ, I´m copy pasting it here as per request because apparently the actual link is being a bitch.

The link is : https://www.wsj.com/articles/hanging-out-with-jared-leto-1504791535?mod=e2twmag

WHEN JARED LETO’S people say the plan is to meet “at Jared’s base,” I assume it’s a jet-setter’s figure of speech—as in, last month he was rock climbing in Menorca, next month he’s at Fashion Week in Milan, but Los Angeles is his base. But no—they mean an actual base: a decommissioned Air Force station tucked into the hills near Laurel Canyon, built during World War II to warn of incoming Japanese planes. The 100,000-square-foot compound, which Leto has called home since 2015, features 4-foot-thick concrete blast walls, a nuclear fallout shelter and a genuine air-traffic-control tower; it’s slightly absurd that it exists 10 minutes from the Sunset Strip, much less that someone lives in it.

On the other hand, if anyone’s going to inhabit a top-secret Cold War compound in the heart of Los Angeles, it’s probably Jared Leto.

Leto has a long history of outlandishness, whether it’s waxing his body and shedding more than 30 pounds to portray a transgender AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers Club, or sending his castmates condoms and a live rat while playing the Joker in last year’s Suicide Squad. Beneath the theatrics, he’s an industrious quintuple-threat: Oscar-winning actor, stadium-filling rock star (with his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars), digital-media entrepreneur, burgeoning fashion icon and—as if you don’t hate him enough already—successful tech investor, whose long list of winning bets includes Uber, Snapchat, Spotify and Airbnb. “I joke sometimes that I get more done on a movie set than I do when I’m off,” he says, “because I’m not as distracted.”

We’d originally planned to go for a hike today—Leto’s a big hiker—but it’s sweltering in L.A., 94 in the shade, and he’s been dealing with some back problems, so instead we’re hanging in his backyard, a shady xeriscape with a sadly neglected pool. To relieve his back, Leto is sitting cross-legged on the ground, dressed in a white Gucci T-shirt, green Gucci jogging pants (from the women’s collection) and a pair of worn-out gray Ugg slippers. His hair is its natural shade of chestnut, and his beard has achieved 1840s-prospector length. He also has the best posture I’ve ever seen. At 45, he looks almost exactly as he did nearly 25 years ago, when he first became famous playing the angsty heartthrob Jordan Catalano on My So-Called Life.

“I call him Babyface,” says his friend Alessandro Michele, creative director at Gucci. “He is timeless—it is almost impossible to give him age. If Visconti were still alive, he would love to work with Jared.”

Last night Leto was up late in the studio, working on his band’s next album. He woke around 9 a.m.—no alarm, as usual—and enjoyed his standard breakfast of muesli and almond milk, then spent some time tending to his back—heat, ice; meditation. But leisurely appearances aside, “it’s actually a super-busy time,” Leto says. In a few days he’s flying to Kazakhstan for a concert with the band; then he’ll start getting ready to promote his new film, Blade Runner 2049—the much-anticipated sequel to the dystopian 1982 sci-fi classic, in which Harrison Ford played an L.A. cop hunting down rogue androids.

Leto still remembers the first time he saw the original on VHS. “It was one of those films I just connected with,” he says. “I’ve watched it every couple of years.” In the sequel, he has what he calls “a small part” as a character named Niander Wallace, who creates said androids, known in the Blade Runneruniverse as “replicants.”

Denis Villeneuve, the director of the new film, says the inspiration for Leto’s character was David Bowie. “I needed a very charismatic, magnetic presence, someone with the aura of a rock star,” Villeneuve says. “But I also needed a great actor, because the lines he had to say were quite Shakespearean.” The character is also blind, and true to form, Leto—who once hung out with homeless junkies in Manhattan’s East Village to portray a heroin addict in Requiem for a Dream—dove in head-first. “We all heard stories about Jared, how he transforms into the characters,” Villeneuve says. “But even this didn’t prepare me for what was to come.”

Not content to simply act blind, Leto decided to become blind, ordering customized contact lenses that made his eyes totally opaque. “He entered the room, and he could not see at all,” Villeneuve recalls. “He was walking with an assistant, very slowly. It was like seeing Jesus walking into a temple. Everybody became super silent, and there was a kind of sacred moment. Everyone was in awe. It was so beautiful and powerful—I was moved to tears. And that was just a camera test!”

Leto stayed blind for the entire shoot, guided around set and never laying eyes on the rest of the cast. “That, for me, was insane,” Villeneuve says. “But he really created something. Every time Jared came on set, it was a boost of energy, tension and excitement.” (For his part, Leto says, he “didn’t dive as deep down the rabbit hole as maybe I’ve done before, but I stayed really focused.” Of course, he didn’t delude himself that he was actually blind. “I’m crazy,” he says, “but I’m not insane.”)

As he sits here in his garden, it’s easy to see the commitment that Leto can summon. He’s incredibly calm and still, with no extraneous movements, like some lizardlike desert creature conserving energy in the heat. He listens intently, with laserlike eye contact, and he barely seems to blink. (Says Michele, “I call him a monk sometimes, because he’s so concentrated.”) With his ageless physicality and otherworldliness, he could almost be a replicant himself.

Villeneuve agrees. “He has a kind of eternal youth syndrome. But the thing I love about Jared is that he’s really at peace with himself. He’s a perfectionist. And like all rock stars, he has a bit of narcissism. But it’s a narcissism that I can deal with.”

WE’VE BEEN TALKING a while when Leto hops up and starts doing a little shake. I tell him to feel free to walk around or stretch if he needs to. “No,” he says. “I was getting covered with ants. I’m going to make them work a little harder.”

We retreat inside the safety of the base, where Leto offers to take me on a tour. Although he moved in a couple of years ago, the place remains a work in progress, with dingy floor tiles, scuffed white paint and the distinct odor of midcentury bureaucracy lingering in the halls. “I’m going to redo it at some point,” Leto says, “make it nice. But I’m kind of just camping out.”

We start in his bedroom.“It’s fancy,” Leto warns. But he opens the door to reveal a glorified walk-in closet, maybe 200 square feet, with small windows, a loveseat and a mattress sitting right on the floor. “It’s amazing,” Leto says, smiling. “When it comes down to it, you don’t need very much.” The only hint of luxury is a portable clothes rack that holds what looks like a small fortune in high-end apparel—most of it from his friend Michele at Gucci.

Recently Leto has become the label’s face, both officially and unofficially, starring in a fragrance campaign and often rocking ensembles in public taken straight from the runway. The infatuation runs both ways: “I’ve been inspired by him many times,” Michele says. “The way he puts gym pants with crazy hats or something—it’s beautiful. He says, ‘I don’t care about fashion,’ but it’s not true. He’s like the most fashionable gypsy you can imagine.”

Leto seems amused that he’s become a style icon—“There was a period a decade ago when I wore Hare Krishna clothes”—but he does admit to getting bolder and more confident with age. “When I was younger I was like, ‘Give me something black,’ ” he says. “But now I love color. You know how you see old guys wearing loud Hawaiian shirts? If I walk off the bus, and the crew starts laughing, I know I put the right thing on.”

We proceed deeper into the bowels of the house, passing large metal tins labeled SURVIVAL CRACKERS (“I haven’t opened them yet”) and a few doors marked USAF TOP SECRET. After World War II ended, the base became a military film studio, churning out propaganda films hosted by the likes of Jimmy Stewart. “There are so many crazy rumors about this place,” Leto says. “Everything from ‘Part of the moon landing was filmed here’ to ‘They used to keep prisoners downstairs.’ They had laboratories. They were doing all kinds of God-knows-what.” He is clearly enamored by this.

In one of the building’s subbasements, we pass Leto’s home gym (with photos of Schwarzenegger and Bruce Lee) and then the garage where he keeps his vintage Ford Bronco—a metallic-blue beast with orange flames down the side, a birthday gift from his brother, Shannon. “He was like, ‘You can get it repainted,’ ” Leto says, “and I was like, ‘No way, man!’ I used to have a little Tonka truck that looked just like that.” The Letos grew up poor, on food stamps in Louisiana, with a hippie single mom who encouraged them to follow their artistic dreams. Leto studied film and photography at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan before dropping out and moving to L.A. in hopes of becoming a director. He started acting, and a few years later talked Shannon into moving out to start a band.

Next we walk through a hangarlike storage room Leto calls “the warehouse,” full of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s road cases and gear, and from there emerge onto the base’s old soundstage, which Leto has repurposed as a recording studio and rehearsal space. “We had an acoustician come by, and he said we have the same reverb as Abbey Road,” Leto says. “Isn’t that wild?” In the control room, an engineer is going over mixes from last night’s session, tweaking the vocal tracks for the band’s new single (“Walk on Water,” released in August). “I’d say we’re 80 percent done,” Leto says of the album. He smiles: “But I’ve been saying that for two years.”

Back upstairs, Leto starts to grow a bit bored. “I can show you more, but it’s really big,” he says. “It just keeps going and going and going.” He knows it’s kind of silly for a bachelor pad. “But it works for me,” he says. “I can do creative stuff here, I can live here. And I don’t have to sit in traffic.”

There’s one last oddity he wants to point out: a skylight in the middle of the floor that peers down into a small enclosure, maybe 8 feet square, with no discernible doors. It looks suspiciously like a dungeon. “Weird, right?” says Leto, grinning. He slips into a pitch-perfect impression of Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs: “Put the lotion in the basket!” he booms, cracking up. I point out that at least the skylight unlatches from the inside, leaving open the possibility of escape. “Yeah,” he says, “but you’d have to get up there first”—a sheer 10-foot climb with no holds. He smiles deviously. “Give ’em just enough hope to keep ’em alive.”

IT’S NEARING TIME for Leto to say goodbye: His next appointment is already waiting, some people from a tech giant. At the moment, Leto is looking for a buyer for his digital streaming platform, VyRT, a company he started in 2011 to live-stream his band’s concerts. That was his second foray into the tech world; previously he had launched a digital-marketing company called the Hive, and over the past decade has become a serious tech investor, backing more than 50 startups including Uber, Snapchat, Reddit, Spotify, Slack and Nest.

“He’s very different from the normal cats from Hollywood and L.A. I see playing around the Valley,” says Nest co-founder Tony Fadell, whose company Leto invested in three years before it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion, in 2014. (Leto didn’t disclose the size of his investment, but Fadell says for “an individual, it was a significant amount of money.”) “A lot of people from that world say, ‘My manager’s gonna take care of it, my agent’s gonna take care of it’—they don’t worry about the details,” Fadell adds. “And a lot of people are meddlers or know-it-alls who want to lead from the bench. That was not his thing. Jared is very curious, very detail-oriented; he really gets involved, and he really understands. He only added value.”

“I was actually really impressed,” says Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of Slack, which Leto invested in in 2014. “Jared gave a lot of feedback, and all of it was very practical, specific, concrete feedback about usability and improving the platform. He found the right balance,” Butterfield adds, “between persistent and irritating.”

When it comes to his investing philosophy, Leto says, “I like to learn. So if I can be involved in a company that teaches me something, I’m happy.” There are also a few deals he passed on and still kicks himself over. “Oh, my God, are you kidding?” Leto says. “There are some doozies. I can’t [talk about it]—I’ll have to call a therapist.”

All these side hustles aside, Leto’s not giving up his day job anytime soon. He’s attached to play Andy Warhol in an upcoming biopic written by Terence Winter (The Wolf of Wall Street), and he’ll soon be directing his first feature, a police thriller called 77 with a script by L.A. noir legend James Ellroy. Leto—a devoted rock climber who sometimes posts his best ascents to Instagram along with a monkey emoji—has previously directed a documentary series on America’s national parks called Great Wide Open as well as several music videos.

“Always when you are around Jared Leto, you are in Jared Leto’s theater,” Denis Villeneuve says. “It’s like a play—you become a character. But he’s having fun with it, and he brings you in his game. You just fall in love with him.”

If there’s one thing Leto hasn’t done but would like to, it’s a comedy. Sadly, no one ever asks. “I might not be at the top of the list for, like, a funny dude,” he says. “But if someone is dying or suffering greatly, I’ll get a call.” He laughs ruefully. “I got calls about [playing] Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, David Koresh and Jim Jones, all within two weeks. I’m not doing them,” he adds, “but I thought for a second, ‘Oh, my God, I should do them all.’ Just put them together like a Criterion Collection box set. And then retire.”

[doglordoffferelden]

Toward the queerest insurrection

By Mary Nardini Gang.

Some will read “queer” as synonymous with “gay and lesbian” or “LGBT”. This reading falls short. While those who would fit within the constructions of “L”, “G”, “B” or “T” could fall with - in the discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability - an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a territory of tension, defined against the dominant narrative of white hetero monogamous patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal.

II

As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated in every minute of every day. We understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and overlapping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and empire. The totality is fence post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is “Str8 Acting” and “No Fatties or Femmes”. It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the bru - tal lessons taught to those who can’t achieve Normal. It is every way we’ve limited ourselves or learned to hate our bodies. We understand Normalcy all too well.

III

When we speak of social war, we do so because purist class analysis is not enough for us. What does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex worker? To a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a revolution, promise liberation to those of us journeying beyond our assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject marginalizes all whose lives don’t fit in the model of heterosexualworker. Lenin and Marx have never fucked the ways we have. We need something a bit more thorough something equipped to come with teethgnashing to all the intricacies of our misery. Simply put, we want to make ruins of domination in all of its varied and interlacing forms. This struggle inhabiting every social relationship is what we know as social war. It is both the process and the condition of a conflict with this totality.

IV

In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against this totality - against normalcy. By “queer”, we mean “social war”. And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it

V

See, we’ve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We’ve been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties. We’ve been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer.

Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce them - selves into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is death. In his work, Jean Genet [1] asserts that the life of a queer, is one of exile that all of the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us. He posits the queer as the criminal. He glorifies homosexuality [2]and criminality as the most beautiful and lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the secret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and queers.

Quoth Genet,

<quote>“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all interrelated, had a meaning: my exile.”</quote>

VI

A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman can’t afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be “fucked straight”. Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker. [3] Cops beat us on the streets and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because we can’t give them a dime. Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while often these interrelated and overlapping categories of oppression are lost to abstraction, queers are forced to physically understand each. We’ve had our bodies and desires stolen from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we can never embody.

Foucault says that

“power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.”

We experience the complexity of domination and social control amplified through heterosexuality. When police kill us, we want them dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our genders aren’t similarly contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct a national identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every nation and border reduced to rubble.

VII

The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens through which we can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways in which Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to control and destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every way that we are alienated and dominated.

Cooper’s Donuts was an all night donut shop on a seedy stretch of Main Street in Los Angeles. It was a regular hangout for street queens and queer hustlers at all hours of the night. Police harassment was a regular fixture of the Cooper’s, but one May night in 1959, the queers fought back. What started with customers throwing donuts at the police escalated into full-on street fighting. In the ensuing chaos, all of the donut-wielding rebels escaped into the night.

Queer is a position from which to attack the normative more, a position from which to understand and attack the ways in which normal is reproduced and reiterated. In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for the Totality.

The history of organized queers was borne out of this position. The most marginalized transfolk, people of color, sex workers - have always been the catalysts for riotous explosions of queer resistance. These explosions have been coupled with a radical analysis wholeheartedly asserting that the liberation for queer people is intrinsically tied to the annihilation of capitalism and the state. It is no wonder, then, that the first people to publicly speak of sexual liberation in this country were anarchists, or that those in the last century who struggled for queer liberation also simultaneously struggled against capitalism, racism and patriarchy and empire. This is our history.

VIII

If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rather simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a movement, and shortly thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall, affluent gay white males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and abandoned their revolution with them. It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are logcabin Republicans and “stonewall” refers to gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a “queer” television station that wages war on the minds, bodies and esteem of impressionable youth.

The “LGBT” political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital and statepower. Gay identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against domination. Now they don’t critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer assimilation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the annihilation of them all. “Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people!” “Gays can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people!” “We are just like you”. Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as normal - white, monogamous, wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the stability of heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism itself.

One weekend in August of 1966 - Compton’s, a twenty four hour cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood was buzzing with its usual late-night crowd of drag queens, hustlers, slummers, cruisers, runaway teens and neighborhood regulars. The restaurant’s management became annoyed by a noisy young crowd of queens at one table who seemed to be spending a lot of time without spending a lot of money, and it called the police to roust them. A surly police officer, accustomed to manhandling Compton’s clientele with impunity, grabbed the arm of one of the queens and tried to drag her away. She unexpected threw her coffee in his face, however, and a melee erupted: Plates, trays, cups and silverware flew through the air at the startled police who ran outside and called for backup. The customer’s turned over the tables, smashed the plate-glass windows and poured onto the streets. When the police reinforcements arrived, street fighting broke out all throughout the Compton’s vicinity. Drag queens beat the police with their heavy purses and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes. A police car was vandalized, a newspaper box was burnt to the ground and general havoc was raised all throughout the Tenderloin.

If we genuinely want to make ruins of this totality, we need to make a break. We don’t need inclusion into marriage, the military and the state. We need to end them. No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We need to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between the politics of assimilation and the struggle for liberation.

We need to rediscover our riotous inheritance as queer anarchists. We need to destroy constructions of normalcy, and create instead a position based in our alienation from this normalcy, and one capable of dismantling it. We must use these positions to instigate breaks, not just from the assimilationist mainstream, but from capitalism itself. These positions can become tools of a social force ready to create a complete rupture with this world. Our bodies have been born into conflict with this social order. We need to deepen that conflict and make it spread.

What began as an early morning raid on June 28th 1969 at New York’s Stonewall Inn, escalated to four days of rioting throughout Greenwich Village. Police conducted the raid as usual; targeting people of color, transpeople and gender variants for harassment and violence. It all changed, though, when a bull-dyke resisted her arrest and several street queens began throwing bottles and rocks at the police. The police began beating folks, but soon people from all over the neighborhood rushed to the scene, swelling the rioters numbers to over 2,000. The vastly outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the bar, while an uprooted parking meter was used as a battering ram by the crowd. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the bar. Riot police arrived on scene, but were unable to regain control of the situation. Drag queens danced a conga line and sang songs amidst the street fighting to mock the inability of the police to re-establish order. The rioting continued until dawn, only to be picked up again at nightfall of the subsequent days.

IX

Susan Stryker writes that the state acts to

“regulate bodies, in ways both great and small, by enmeshing them within norms and expectations that determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the space of possibility and imaginative transformation where peoples’ lives begin to exceed and escape the state’s use for them.”

We must create space wherein it is possible for desire to flourish. This space, of course, requires conflict with this social order. To de - sire, in a world structured to confine desire, is a tension we live daily. We must understand this tension so that we can become pow - erful through it - we must un - derstand it so that it can tear our confinement apart.

On the night of May 21st 1979, in what has come to be known as the White Night Riots, the queer commu - nity of San Francisco was outraged and wanted justice for the murder of Harvey Milk. The outraged queers went to city hall where they smashed the windows and glass door of the building. The riotous crowd took to the streets, disrupting traffic, smash - ing storefronts and car windows, dis - abling buses and setting twelve San Francisco Police cruisers on fire. The rioting spread throughout the city as others joined in on the fun!

This terrain, born in rupture, must challenge oppression in its entirety. This of course, means total negation of this world. We must become bodies in revolt. We need to delve into and indulge in power. We can learn the strength of our bodies in struggle for space for our desires. In desire we’ll find the power to destroy not only what destroys us, but also those who aspire to turn us into a gay mimicry of that which destroys us. We must be in conflict with regimes of the normal. This means to be at war with everything. If we desire a world without restraint, we must tear this one to the ground. We must live beyond measure and love and desire in ways most devastating. We must come to understand the feeling of social war. We can learn to be a threat, we can become the queerest of insurrections.

X

To be clear: We’ve despaired that we could never be as well-dressed or cultured as the Fab Five. We found nothing in Brokeback Mountain. We’ve spent far too long shuffling through hallways with heads hung low. We don’t give a shit about marriage or the military. But oh we’ve had the hottest sex everywhere in all the ways we aren’t supposed to and the other boys at school definitely can’t know about it.

In 1970, Stonewall veterans, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded STAR Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. They opened the STAR house, a radical version of the “house” culture of black and latina queer communities. The house provided a safe and free place for queer and trans street kids to stay.

Marsha and Sylvia as the “House Mothers” hustled to pay rent so that the kids would not be forced to. Their “children” scavenged and stole food so that everyone in the house could eat. That’s what we call mutual aid! In the time between the Stonewall Riots and the outbreak of HIV, the queer community of New York saw the rise of a culture of public sex. Queers had orgies in squatted buildings, in abandoned semi-trucks, on the piers and in bars and clubs all along Christopher street. This is our idea of voluntary association of free individuals! Many mark this as the most sexually liberated time this country has ever seen. Though, the authors of this zine wholeheartedly believe we can outdo them.

And when I was sixteen a would be bully pushed me and called me a faggot. I hit him in the mouth. The intercourse of my fist and his face was far sexier and more liberating than anything MTV ever offered our generation. With the pre cum of desire on my lips I knew from then on that I was an anarchist. In short, this world has never been enough for us. We say to it, “we want everything, motherfucker, try to stop us!”

let’s get decadent!

filth is our politics!

filth is our life!

Source

[anthonybialy]

Statue of Limitations

Roving gangs keep us safe by ripping down statues enchanted with evil magick. The figures drag down humans. We're such ingrates that we won't even build new ones to revere our guardians. Our nation can't laud anyone who had faults, according to those who think there's nothing good about it in the first place. Their solution is easy, in its way.

Decidedly imperfect humans are deciding who is no longer to be glorified. The lack of a democratic vote would seem to violate their own terms. That's odd, as there's nothing more rational than rampaging looters with ropes. Those leveraging destructions haven't created public art or anything else. But they're good at tearing down. The best ironies involve unawareness.

Of course, not everyone is worth memorializing by taking up park space. Critics of critics often cite erasing history as a reason not to smash reproductions of people. But castings are supposed to be of the commendable. Building one is not just to remember what happened: we want to look at a reminder of good things.

Some figures from the past don't deserve to be rendered in metal form. Those fretting about the past disappearing along with public displays wouldn't be so enthusiastic about locking arms around, say, a Che statue, which would only stand in Chazistan or on Bill de Blasio's lawn. But frenzied citizens aren't razing tributes to murderous commies.

Those who only put physics to destructive use would defend likenesses of history's most rabid community organizers. Meanwhile, topple that country-founding ghoul.  If you’re canceling George Washington, send me your dollars.

The podiums have been smashed, too. Those who have commandeered the public art selection process don't seem interested in discussions about subtle distinctions as they affix ropes to metal necks. Smashers of what others raised claim they were never listened to as they take destructive action and wonder why. Monument removal is one way to ensure nobody ever offers to have a heart-to-heart rap session.

Woke capsizers have to smash property belonging to others because they didn't accumulate anything on their own. It's part of their ideology. Meanwhile, I can list things that tick me off constantly; just check my tweets. I didn't realize I was supposed to react by breaking what others bought.

You vainly try drawing attention to how there's no distinction between fiendish CSA second-place generals and Thomas Jefferson, who was involved in some wacko libertarian gun-fetishizing militia. Forget noting how long it's been since the country allowed forcing labor, how common it's been been in human history, and how many hundreds of thousands of Americans died to end the supremely appalling practice of racist cheap-ass Southern plantation owners not paying for labor. Those lighting torches are not big on objections. Smear those who didn't live up to high ideals by having none.

The butterfly effect has taken even wilder turns than predicted. Take how a cop murdering a black man led to removing the statue of Teddy Roosevelt, who some may be surprised to learn hosted Booker T. Washington at the White House. The one certainty is that those ripping down would never have displayed such guts. If the portlier presidential Roosevelt isn't progressive enough, then nobody will ever be. And that's the point.

Rather active redecorators of other people's property aren't into subtleties. Purportedly righteous fervor makes it challenging to distinguish between guys who spent lifetimes as delinquents and those who had a detention or two. The general who defeated the Confederacy before taking on the Klan as president cannot stand, literally. And the guy who defeated Nazis just wasn't sufficiently opposed to fascism.

Reject anyone with faults, demand the perfect. I've got news for effigy-tearers, namely that their shortcomings exponentially outpace Winston Churchill's. Society doesn't build sculptures to those determined to not appreciate anyone who got us to this semi-civilized point.

Judging people by present standards is a sure sign of myopic sanctimony. And it sure doesn't make today feel more enlightened. Unforgiving condemnation is actually the present's defining characteristic. Ripping down tributes to others is particularly regrettable considering how today's supposedly enlightened era features ironic intolerance. Everyone better be hoping future generations are less judgmental of today than today's crusaders are about those who croaked in olden times.

Revolutionaries should be a little less literal about obliterating the past. The new Year Zero is even more stringent. Pol Pot would've been condemned for being insufficiently revolutionary. Tell the destruction patrol he's an American Founding Father to convince them to tear down his statue. Don't condemn slaveowners from the 19th century if your preferred system would leave everyone beholden to government in the 21st.

If you think honoring presidents looks bad, the absence is even worse. Empty plinths say everything about current days. Such likenesses celebrate those who created a nation based on liberty, which is a noble notion being destroyed. The impromptu redecoration is merely a literal expression.

Admirable accomplishments don't impress critics of public spaces. You must be purer than God's kid in order to be exalted with a physical reproduction, and even being the savior is insufficient protection against cancelation if you used plastic straws. Sure, those respected may have achieved great and good things despite personal failings that involved conforming to unfortunate moral standards of the time. But what kind of humans would we be if we understood with forgiveness?

Those clearing pedestals without a permit will be relieved to know they'll never have monuments. Sure, tearing down their own depictions might be amusing. But no committee will seek donations to immortalize someone whose top accomplishment is smearing people who pushed for liberty because they couldn't put negative characteristics in context. It's too bad, as public areas suddenly feel sparse.

[theliterateape]

Free College with a Bullet — Earn Those Freedoms or Zip It

By Don Hall

The battle cries across the country are both broad and specific without considering the consequences nor the work required to accomplish them. Whether a product of the attention-deficit, Snapchat Age of brain rot or just a hyperbolic reaction to a sense of fairness most relegated to the most naive kindergarten teachers, the list is both daunting and unanalyzed.

Open borders.

The right to an unregulated internet.

Gender neutral bathrooms in every public space.

Unrestricted access to guns.

Medicare for All.

Lots of squawk about rights we should have but very little about the responsibilities we’re willing to take on to secure them as if the concept of customer service extends to the rights of citizens. “I have a right to a free refill of Shasta Cola and to demand immediate change in the country should I read about it in Vox or the Daily Stormer!”

NOTE: If you don’t vote in our elections, you’re like a vegan boycotting a butcher or a guy who buys no food but complains about the service — your voice doesn’t matter so shut the fuck up. Seriously, aside from you using the term ‘whypipo’, the stance that you don’t vote is the quickest way to have your opinion ignored.

We want open borders but we aren’t willing to change the laws (or at least lobby to change them) that criminalize immigrants coming across the border and living in the country. Changing laws requires time, persuasion, and money. You want change, then step it up and earn it. You want to be seen as a Righteous Agent of Indolent Rage, keep yapping online and doing nothing.

They want to be able to say anything they want on the internet — racial epithets, anti-gay rhetoric, critical race theory, Nazi ideology — but demonetize their platforms and they scream like little brats because they are being censored. You wanna make money saying things then you have a responsibility to say them in a way that does not violate the basic tenets of real life discourse. If you can’t say it in a way that doesn’t demean others then go ahead but do not expect to be paid for it.

Ultimately, the question posed is what are you willing to do and be responsible for in order to earn those rights you bellyache about each and every day?

Take the movement for Free College. 

College is not a right any more than car ownership is a right. You pay for it, you get it. You get a GMAC loan and don’t pay it, they take the car away from you. If you want a Porsche, it’s gonna cost you a heap more cash than if you decide on a beater Honda. Thus Harvard is pricey as shit, medical school is going to cost you more money than God has, but City Colleges are going to be budget-friendly. You want the pedigree, you’re going to have to be rich or take out a loan.

Absolutely, there are predatory loan companies that take advantage of eighteen year old kids, too shortsighted to comprehend the bargain with the devil they’re making and fuck them mercilessly for hundreds of thousands of dollars (because they can’t repossess an education). It seems simple to, instead of giving college away for free (which automatically makes every car a beater Honda), make getting a loan a lot more difficult and to take the degree sought into consideration. Thus, a medical degree is going to rate much higher in the loan acceptance pool than someone majoring in a mushy non-skill like Communications or Philosophy. The doctor of medicine will be far more likely to pay it back than the barista with a degree in Horticulture.

For those who cannot afford loans or are looking for a degree with less of a income-generating potential, there are government and foundation grants. One would think that those receiving them would be required to serve in some fashion following graduation as a means to pay the grant back. Say, teach in your field for three years and the slate is clean. Strictly regulate the predatory loans, expand government financial aid, require a service oriented pay back, and everyone wins. The service time counts as on-the-job training, the taxpayers get something in return for the aid, and college becomes more like trade school than an elitist institution for the wealthy. And only the stinking rich get stuck with unpayable loans.

What makes this fairly common sense approach is the bizarre entitlement that expands the righteous anger at paying for a cheeseburger and receiving no cheese to any transaction with little regard to the context of it. College students feel that it is their right to have courses changed because they are offended by them because they are not students but customers of education. Parents feel that teachers are nothing more than glorified babysitters and treat them as such. People breaking the law (known in most circles as criminals even if the crime is speeding) expect the police to be polite because “My taxes pay your salary!”

“I pay your salary!” is as pointless and needlessly infuriating to a police officer as it is to the Dairy Queen counter person but the police officer has a job no one envies (unless your idea of a cop comes from the nonsense television shows depicting forensic science that doesn’t exist and model-like physiques stuffed into those uniforms). And the stakes of that Serve & Protect transaction is far higher than the Blizzard you found lacking in Reese’s Pieces.

I’ve been scouring the speeches of presidents I respect (in contrast to the Trumpelton) and the thread of earning the rights you have is pervasive throughout the history of the nation. The most on the nose phrase is “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It’s a solid way to look at things.

More importantly, ask what you are willing to do in order to earn your rights to free speech, to assemble, to practice your own religious beliefs without persecution, to bear arms, to be educated, to have access to healthcare? If your answer is nothing because these are rights you are entitled to, I know exactly how you behave in line at an understaffed Starbucks and can guarantee you have at least three encounters with Wal Mart managers you recorded to video and uploaded to YouTube.

I mean, the very least you can do — the very least — is to spend some time informing yourself on the issues and voting. If you can’t do at least that, you’re a bit of an embarrassment, aren’t you?

[hopefulsweetstrash-blog]

Gynaecology.

Since she once called her ugly was cautioned she deals with a prolonged prison sentence today, an envious student that dressed in a niqab prior to throwing acid in her best pal's face. One such sexpert who routinely gets concerns such as this on his column and podcast is Dan Savage, who recommends people of all ages, histories, sexualities and also gender identifications concerning how to have much better relationships as well as sex. You may enjoy the sex, but an excellent look around might frighten you at the possibility that he would want much more from the relationship. When Gideon asks her exactly what she wants, she says she does not desire a connection however will want to understand something about the individual she rests with.Gideon concurs. 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The track titles for phases is adorable however includes very little to the mix other than to become frustrating. Consider your relationship style-act toward your friends and family the means you wish your child's buddies will act toward him. Although this is type of a shame, as I have in my life purchased 2 duplicates of 'Mr Dedication', having enjoyed it adequate to provide it to someone as well as miss it when it stop working OK, I'll state straight off, it's simply plain odd checking out a publication in which a significant personality shares a name (fore- as well as sur-) with one of your close friends. This quality that allows you to do your task well when individuals die daily, however likewise minimizes the empathy and also connection you pity family and friends. Aussie health and fitness version Emily Skye's elegance and also workout ideas are terrific, yet it's her lively connection with her partner Declan that we can not get enough of. He could often be discovered on the periphery, poking fun at Skye as well as copying her impersonates she Snapchats. The http://fitnesswelt-de.com/detoxic-preis-die-bewertungen-die-wirkung-wo-kaufen-apotheke-amazon-website-des-herstellers/ in these studies were reasonably new as well as the procedures revealed here were relatively unaffected by relationship background or self-selection into partnerships, making them ideally suited for analyzing relationship procedures since they rule out numerous different explanations. Paramilitary cops robbed a rental property prior to dawn Friday and caught a long-sought fugitive referred to as the No. 1 employer of the Camorra, the Naples-based underworld company. The buddy said Breivik had never ever claimed he was going to Liberia to meet a Serbian nationalist, who affected him in his anti-Islamic campaign, as he asserted in his statement of belief and also in the court. So, I suggest that in a circumstances similar to this one, it is clever to expand your very own inner network, over interact regarding vital decisions that need to be made, as well as ignore your boss when you have broad support to move forward. While you still have your view, think long and also difficult concerning exactly what you want in a partnership as well as send out that energy out into deep space. Among the one in charges was strolling by (his name was Morrie) and also he blurted this tasty cackle of a laugh, taking pleasure in that this other was trapped for life. Better yet, offer to throw one because you enjoy your pal and also this is a huge deal. You are not meant to become part of a partnership believing the other person can save you or that you can conserve the various other individual. I watched Swansea against Manchester City as well as Liverpool and I thought they were outstanding," he claimed. However, Leo could be a imaginative as well as generous close friend when the Lion learns that residents of the forest have something even more to use compared to being Leo's target market.

[esthermeronobaro]

Narco Cultura: Bullets, Borders and Ballads

This article was first published as the cover story for the January 2013 issue of SLUG Magazine. Read it online or in print. Photos: Shaul Shwarz

“Out of poverty,  poetry; out of  suffering, song.”

This old Mexican saying, pulled from the book Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, has proven its merit throughout history—from the soulful hymns sung in tobacco fields by African slaves, to the tortured punk rock anthems belted onstage by contemporary musicians. 

World-renowned photojournalist and filmmaker Shaul Schwarz came across this cultural connection in one of today’s most controversial yet underground conflicts: the drug war. Schwarz makes his Sundance debut this January with Narco Cultura, a unique and engrossing film documenting the plague of cartel-related murders that infect the border city of Juarez, Mexico, and the subculture that has sprouted from the bloodbath, making its way onto U.S. stages and airwaves.

Born in Israel, Schwarz has spent two decades as a photojournalist, covering war and disaster in places like Haiti and Gaza for Time, National Geographic, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and more. In early 2008, Schwarz found himself on a still photography assignment that lasted almost two years, covering the increase in violence and murders across the border due to conflicts between Mexican drug cartels. Schwarz describes Juarez as a haunting city with a different set of rules than war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan.

“The bodies would just drop and drop,” he says. “You never see where the bad guys are, you just see the pain it leaves and the shock on the society.” 

The never-ending conflict (which has claimed nearly 100,000 lives), has led to the rise of a pustule of pop culture: narcocorridos, or drug ballads. Backed by a band comprised of tubas, trumpets and accordions playing danceable polka rhythms, the vocalists of these groups sing lyrics glorifying the violent lives and conquests of Mexican drug lords, such as these lines by BuKnas de Culiacan in their popular hit, “Los Sanguinarios del M1”:  “With an AK-47 and a bazooka on my shoulder/Cross my path and I’ll chop your head off/We’re bloodthirsty, crazy and we like to kill!/We are the best at kidnapping/Our gang always travels in a caravan/With bulletproof vests, ready to execute!”

Much like their watered-down cousin, gangsta rap, narcocorridos have infiltrated the club scenes and even the radio waves from coast to coast and border to border. Sometimes commissioned by the cartel members they’re about, the corridos idolize the violent and extravagant lifestyles of narcos and cater to a fast-growing fanbase that includes everyone from Mexican-American cowboys in North Carolina to the narcos themselves. 

Schwarz came across this phenomenon on a photo assignment for Time Magazine that focused on the narcocorrido culture specifically, but soon realized that photos wouldn’t suffice. 

“Sometimes photography is the most powerful tool in the world,” says Schwarz. “ … But when you do this for 20 years as I’ve been doing, you understand, sometimes, that’s not true. Sometimes … [a] picture isn’t really telling the full story.” 

Already an experienced filmmaker, shooting shorts for various publications and a feature-length documentary, The Block, back in 2005, Schwarz’s transition was seamless as he began to film for Time before deciding to make Narco Cultura a feature in early 2010. For the next two years, Schwarz retraced his steps with a Canon 5D, Spanish sound man Juan Bertrán, and a new focus: characters.

Narco Cultura zeroes in on two seemingly divergent perspectives: That of Edgar Quintero, the LA-based, Mexican-American narcocorrido singer of BuKnas de Culiacan; and Richi Olguin, a crime scene investigator who has lived his entire life in Juarez. The film swings back and forth between Olguin cleaning up the aftermath of gruesome cartel executions, and Quintero singing praise of the bad guys to sold-out crowds on tour in the U.S. Schwarz initially met both men while on his photo assignment. 

Olguin was entrusted by his department to guide Schwarz through the crime scenes and in the film, he becomes an unfortunate representation of the failing system. “These guys work so hard, but it’s all for show, because everyone in Juarez knows that nothing gets done about this,” says Schwarz. At the same time, Olguin’s love for Juarez and his dedication to a thankless and dangerous job also make him a small beacon of hope. “He’s a believer … That’s what the film wanted to show,” says Schwarz. Olguin leads the audience through some of the most graphic portions of the film—bloody scenes of death and violence—with somber and introspective voice-overs that provide a narrative throughout the film, setting it apart from the usual talking-heads documentary. 

“You always go out with a prayer on your lips, you don’t know when things will happen,” says Olguin at one point in the film.

Quintero didn’t become a character in Narco Cultura until almost a year after the project began. Schwarz met the singer when BuKnas played a club in Riverside, Calif., but initially followed El Komander, another popular narcocorrido singer, whom Schwarz hoped would open more doors through his fame and connections. “It took me a little bit of time to see that Quintero was my guy, both because he was willing to open up, and I thought that his story of not being the star and being the American-born Mexican was way more interesting to me,” says Schwarz. Quintero ended up being an invaluable key to coverage, providing Schwarz with access to phone calls with cartel members who would commission corridos from Quintero like a royal minstrel. He also allowed Schwarz to accompany him on a trip to Sinaloa, the home base of the world’s largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization—the Sinaloan Cartel run by “El Chapo” Guzman, the most wanted man in Mexico. “Initially, we didn’t even think we’d get that deep through the song side,” says Schwarz. “We were like, ‘All right, we’re gonna see some heavy shit in Juarez.’ A lot of the actual rubbing with the bad guys came through the access of BuKnas, of Edgar.”

Though the lives of Olguin and Quintero are starkly different, they run parallel to each other, and their juxtaposition is a product of Schwarz’s vision as a filmmaker. “People tend to simplify and say it’s just the criminals killing each other, and it’s not. Beyond that, they kill a lot of other people, and beyond that, everybody and everything is kind of dancing around this monster,” says Schwarz. “I thought that was something that was a completely different take, to show this bigger picture. It’s something that a lot of us are involved in and that creates culture and is all part of that same cycle.” 

The irony prevails from the very opening shot of the giant fence separating Juarez, one of the murder capitals of the world, from El Paso, Texas, ranked one of the safest cities in the United States. A little boy sticks his fingers through the wire and looks across to the other side, saying, “They say that it’s safe on the other side. That people don’t kill over there. But the narcos are over here.” It’s in this liminal space that narco culture has rooted and branched out.“When I saw this culture at first, I was kind of angry. I couldn’t understand it, but as I spent time there, although I don’t see eye to eye with it, I understood where it was coming from,” says Schwarz. 

“It’s a way for people to relate. To them, it’s culture. To Quintero … he doesn’t want to sing about Pancho Villa. This is how he finds his Mexicanhood.” 

Narcocorridos tell the story of the heroes, the winners, the people with power—and in Mexico, there is no one more successful than the lords of the drug cartels. Though the most shocking footage was shot at the crime scenes in Juarez, the most dangerous moments for Schwarz and Bertrán were in Sinaloa. Schwarz tells me that while filming at a private narco party, they got an unsettling feeling and decided to leave. Speeding away, they were unexpectedly stopped by federal cops. They had no choice but to tell the truth about being at a narco party. The cops let them go, and when Schwarz recounted the story to the narcos, they laughed and told him the cops are there at every party, serving as a checkpoint to protect them. “I was like, OK, I don’t even know who I’m afraid of anymore,” says Schwarz.

Schwarz often worked with the help of local journalists, through which he came across footage shot by another photographer, who contributes one of the most powerful scenes in the film. After her son is found chopped up in 16 different pieces, a woman is seen banging a newspaper against a table, screaming and crying over and over in Spanish, “Nobody shouts! Why do all the mothers stay silent?!” Schwarz remembers the moment he saw this clip, tearing up as Bertrán fell to his knees, and knowing it needed to be included in the film. “It had such a strong impact on me and I knew why: Nobody talks in Juarez—nobody lets this out. That’s what’s so frustrating. It’s all there, but it’s all this thing under the table and nobody would dare speak,” he says. “I think this woman, in her crazy grief, she really actually nailed the words. She says all of what you want to scream about that place.” The intensity of this moment would go unnoticed without Schwarz’s buildup, however, and he says that including the culture side to the drug war is key. 

“I knew that in the end, I wanted a story that was driven by characters and a story that feels … almost fictional. A story that, through people and through feelings, you get the bigger picture,” he says.

So what is the solution? Schwarz says there is no simple fix. Narco Cultura’s reoccurring question is “Will this change?” but its filmmaker isn’t optimistic—his goal is simply to create awareness. “I’m a journalist at heart: The less I say, the less you know,” says Schwarz. “It’s so big and powerful, this monster. Maybe [the film] will put in the tiniest dent.”

For his first time at Sundance, Schwarz hopes the film’s screenings will gain excitement for the project, providing venues for distribution. “People tend to look at this subject and say, ‘I don’t want to deal with this,’” he says. “I think that [Narco Cultura] is really different, and I hope that’s what we can portray, that this film is important and strong and documentary, but it’s also entertaining.”

Watch the trailer, read Schwarz’s coverage and look through a gallery of his provocative images at narcoculture.com.