#and then got hit by the paywall

[mysticpetals]

Couldn’t even complete the first episode because of my brain shutting down with everything going on and then the statement.

We’ll see if the changes they say they will include actually happen or if it was just to please the players (which none of them are btw)

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

I think I’m like 90% done with my archive!

[wolfchans]

guys you don't understand how my body started shaking like a scared chihuahua when i saw the article on the bazaar page dfjfjhgfjdf

[imflyingfish]

I want to play minecraft <- instead has played 5 hours of the sims 4 and has something important to do tomorrow

[merps]

archive.org version

you can post literally anything anywhere and some harry potter fan will appear and be like OMG this is just like flerky parsons #maraudersera 😍😍 and half the time flerky parsons is like, a race purist who was mentioned in the books maybe twice offhand and never had a single line of dialogue or a physical description

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[copperbadge]

When I was in college, round about 2002 or so, I did a paper on hate groups that necessitated a couple of visits to Stormfront, a white supremacist website and message board. One of the pages on the site was a "children's page" operated by the child of Storrmfront's founder, which was a unique form of horrifying. But I also remember looking at a photo of the kid on the site and thinking, that poor fuckin' kid, what kind of chance did he ever have?

But it was just a paper and that was just a photo of a child I didn't know, so I turned in the paper and graduated and got on with life.

In 2016, @archwrites posted a link to an article by the Washington Post titled "The White Flight of Derek Black" (sorry about the paywall, Arch's post quotes some relevant parts here). I thought it looked like an interesting read: it was about a white supremacist named Derek Black and a group of campus activists at the school Black eventually attended, who set out to see if they could change his mind about race with radical kindness. In large part because of their work, Black eventually renounced white supremacy and became an antiracist.

And then I hit a photo in the article and gasped, because I recognized it. I'd seen the same photo on the Stormfront children's website. The kid I'd seen and pitied was grown up and had gotten out. Immensely satisfying to see.

But it was just a news story about someone I didn't even know, so I posted about how pleased I was to see it, and I got on with life again.

This morning, I woke to the news (sorry, it's the Daily Fail) that R. Derek Black, now 35, has just published a memoir, The Klansman's Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism. And in the epilogue, they come out as trans.

I can't imagine better news I could have heard about them -- that they're out, they're thriving, and they're embracing themself.

Congratulations, kid. It's a great new photo.

[ID: A recent photograph of R. Derek Black, with long curly red hair, wearing a floral collared shirt and a red cardigan, smiling for the camera.]

[thoughtssvt]

O.F. COUPLE

nanami kento x fem! reader

cw: filmed sex, creampies, cunnilingus, vaginal sex (tagged as fem reader because kento refers to you as his wife, but aside from that & genitalia there are no specific fem descriptions), cum eating

It wasn’t like your page blew up over night, but the rise was definitely quick.

Turns out a lot of people were drawn to a couple who played no gimmicks. Didn’t put on a show. Hell, didn’t even do this for money. Nowhere in your eight videos posted to the hub did you splice enough content together to reel in engagement only to direct watchers to another platform hidden behind a paywall.

Not that your viewers wouldn’t use one hand to punch in their credit card information if that was the case.

It was impulsive at first, the filming of it.

A steamy night that started in the living room, lingering touches and hot kisses. Always followed up by grinding that had you both struggling to decide whether or not that’s how you wanted to finish or if those handful of seconds away from each other to undress was worth the high. You two ultimately chose the latter. A trail of clothes leading to the bedroom, Kento fishing his phone out of his pocket before dropping his pants and for some reason it felt oddly heavy in his hands.

He gave you a look, the look. It wasn’t unfamiliar to you, there had been plenty of times in the past where you’d filmed short videos of your intimate moments. Kento’s head between your legs, looking up at you with pussy drunk, half-lidded eyes. Hands flexing around your thighs as he licked his lips. Or awkward overhead angles of a makeout session so hot that it almost left your lips raw. Most videos were the last few seconds of Kento’s orgasm– you already delirious in your high– his breathy grunt cracking through the speakers before the microphone had time to adjust, recording the delicious squelch of your cunt letting him go as he pulled out. A thick glob of cum followed a few seconds after. His thumbnail white as he pulled one of your cheeks to the side to show the camera how you gaped for him.

You didn’t upload those videos, though. Those were a keepsake for your eyes only.

The videos that you posted to your account were always filmed at one of three angles. Atop the dresser that stood right across your bed or propped up on the lamp housed on your bedside table. The third angle was rare. One that was seen in a singular video.

Wife Rides Husband’s Cock, Begging To Be Filled After Two Weeks Apart - Close Up Creampie

The only video that had any cuts in it. Just one cut from the first wide angle, your figures backlit by the window behind you as you sat on his upper thighs, Kento’s head propped up against the headboard. Hot hands smoothing up and down your sides. Just enough light hitting your faces for the viewers to see your whispers, the phone far enough away that the only murmur his phone’s microphone could pick up was the bubbling giggled that had you lurching forward to press a chaste kiss to his lips. There was just something so genuine about you two that drew the readers in. How, besides capturing an inherently intimate moment, they could see how much you cared for each other once the cameras were off.

Half the comments always swooned about how sweet the two of you were no matter how rough or intense the content was. The other half of them comments on this video in particular was songs of praises and gratitude for the second angle.

Filmed from Kento's POV everyone got to see how you bounced and grinded, the way your thighs flexed and your hips wiggled. Everyone commenting the timestamp 21:06 when your fingernails dug into Kento's toned stomach, scratching the expanse as you huffed about how close you were. Kento's hand wrapped around your waist tight enough for your flesh to deliciously spill over the edges. god, did he love that. He would've commented on it if he wasn't more concerned about your comfort, asking if you wanted him to take over. You shook your head wanting to do it to the end, knowing you could. Begging Kento to cum with you because you were so, so close. Dragging him practically by the neck to join you as you whispered dirty pleas for him to fill you up. How you felt so empty while he was away.

This second angle was a godsend. Propelling the video to the top rank of verified couples. The way you fell over the edge together in itself already had most of your viewers making a mess on their own end, but the way you leaned back exposing the creamy ring that adorned the base of Kento's cock. Your glistening cunt so puffy and loved. The way you slowly rose up despite the fatigue in your thighs, previewing the mess between your legs as it streaked down Kento's cock. That had your watchers groaning, kicking themselves as the need for their hand to drift back to their crotches grew. The groan that reverberated from Kento's chest and the soft gasp that left your lips as you rose high enough for his heavy length to slip out of you, slapping his pelvis with a thick squelch was what made most, if not all, of them continue through the overstimulation.

No matter how much time had passed since posting that video, you still had comments coming in every day of people on their knees begging, offering ridiculous sums of money to get just a taste of that third angle. Just one more video where they could watch Kento's cum drip out of you and back onto his cock. Hell, even just a split second of your cum soaked cunt before the screen blackened to reflect their pathetic faces as Kento dropped his phone onto the mattress, unable to hold himself back from licking you clean. A lot of your viewers having confessed that they return to this video just to hear him devour you, sloppy smacks of his lips, heated groans and your weak mewls enough for a quick session.

You had devout watchers. People who never even ventured the amateur category had notifications on for your posts. People who longed for the impromptu videos that came according to no schedule or pretext whatsoever. Most of which who couldn't believe you'd give them this content for free. They could tell how much you loved each other and how much fun you had during these moments. Their hearts aching and fluttering for the whispers and smiles and the soft kisses that never managed to interrupt the flow that would lead to the signature plaps just minutes later.

They'd given and continued to give you so much love, the two of you figured it wouldn't hurt to plan a celebratory milestone video and maybe, just maybe you could convince Kento to film that third angle again.

A/N: i kinda wanna write more of this

nanami kento x reader master list

[phantomrose96]

Honestly I recommend everyone learn just a littttle bit of CSS because it really is powerful and just makes bits and pieces of your internet experience more convenient.

Right now I'm cataloguing recipes I've really enjoyed, just trying to get them all in one place. Many of these are instagram recipes and, because I don't trust link rot (aka the possibility that the instagram link goes dead one day), I'm including a screenshot of the recipe along with the link.

But instagram on desktop... looks like this

(Link, for credit. It's a good recipe)

I obviously could just copy-paste the recipe out of there. But a screenshot would be cleaner for how I'm cataloguing these.

And as-is, I'd have to scroll the whole height of that small right-side window about 4 times to fit it all.

But actually... I can just resize that div holding that whole right-side content

Basically I

hit f12 to open the dev tools

clicked the element finder

clicked on an element inside the recipe side

followed it up the tree until I found the element holding the whole recipe side (do this by hovering the div in the dev tools panel way on the right, then hovering upward and up until I find the element which is the highest up that still only contains the recipe-side content)

in the element.style part, set "width: 1000px" and "height: 1500px"

(I notice the width seems to still be less than 1000px, even though it got bigger)

likely suggests there's an element above it with a max-width set

go up the tree higher until I find the element with the max-width and uncheck that style

screenshot ready

Maybe that sounded complicated but it took me probably 20-30 seconds

And this isn't just about screenshotting recipes like.

website with an annoying gif? select gif, delete gif

do you want a clean screenshot of a digital receipt for record-keeping without a large company banner or irrelevant information? delete unnecessary elements, adjust widths, screenshot

SOMETIMES, you can bypass paywalls if they're relying on something like overflow: hidden, or an overlay in the way, or some JS that runs (you can disable JS in the dev tools)

lost the jpg/png file you used for your profile picture and size doesn't totally matter? grab it from the img src while logged in. (you might even be able to find it in a bigger size by changing the url query parameters)

color contrast on an article really bad? find and change background color. find and change font color

want to make a funny fake screenshot without learning photoshop? just edit the page content in the dev tools

This isn't about like being good enough to write scripts or browser extensions. Really if you just have some basic HTML/CSS understanding a hat worth of tricks, you can make so many little adjustments in your favor.

[omniphilic]

WAIT MARK ACCIDENTALLY KNOCKING YOU UP???, (from the last bit of the other ask) I just got to know how that would play out because omg 😭😭😭

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀18+ content below / MDNI tw: pregnancy stuff, baby stuff, medical intervention (it's reader's choice), angst ig?? but also a little fluffy

You see, if you were the responsible, reasonable, rational individual you should have been, you wouldn’t have let this boy in your bed in the first damn place.

But you did. And at first, you had sense. As much as you can have granted, you are fucking around with your daughter’s boyfriend.

Rule number one: Condoms always. If he's not wrapping, he's not tapping.

Rule number two: He can't linger afterward for too long. He needs to be gone before Amber is even thinking about coming home, and if he's planning to spend time with her then he's not supposed to be thinking about you.

Rule number three: No kissing.

"What?" He said to you, the exasperation on him audacious. "What do you mean no kissing? That's like, the best part?" He's crawling atop you as if he's the kind of boy that breaks rules and you have to be firm, place your hand on his chest and give him the spray bottle.

"No Mark," you shake your head and the boy wilts. "It's too personal. I don't need you falling in love with me or some nonsense like that." It's already too late for that, but he doesn't correct you. "We're already," he gesticulates, finger-in-hole, "You know? That seems plenty personal to me already, so what's a little kiss?" He says with that lilt he does when he's trying to convince you, his finger tucked under your chin to lift. "C'mon," he goads, lips puckered as he leans into you. "Just humor me?" You're not laughing as you place a finger over his lips and push him back. "Aww... not even a little one?" You scoff.

"There are other lips you could be kissing right now." He shrugs in concession. "You right." And between your thighs he goes.

He always was great at wearing you down though, he got into your bed after all.

Mark Grayson breaks your rules because as it turns out he’s not a very good boy at all. He weakens your defenses—warming you up to the idea, he lies—undressing you, starting from the bottom and going up.

He hides orgasms behind paywalls, if you really want to cum as bad as you mewl, then you'll give him a kiss right? It's like a reward, he persuades, for all his hard work. If he’s making you feel sooo good, show him how good, as if your crossed eyes and his fucked up back don't speak for themselves. You want to rationalize it's just "whatever" when you two are tongue kissing on the bed; considering you've already fucked him, which now makes sense in a way it never had before. Your reservations turned to hoops and hurdles, mere obstacles in your race to completion. It doesn't help that Mark comes pre-equipped with justifications as well, ever eager to whittle your boundaries away with those soft brown puppy-dog eyes.

He starts being messy with his entrances and exits. He can start the day in Amber's arms but still somehow in your bed at night, holding you still as the post-orgasm exhaustion sets in, eyelids and limbs leadened, skin tacky with sweat and... other things.

So eventually, it makes sense that you stick your hand up when he pulls out the dreaded condom, waving it away.

"Just put it in, Mark."

And what kind of man would he be if he didn't oblige?

(Assuming you don't have your tubes tied.)

Arguably letting that boy into your bed was the dumbest decision you've ever made in your life. The second was letting him hit it raw. In most cases birth control would have all your bases covered. But this is not one such instance.

You don't know he's a Viltrumite. Which probably needn't be disclosed if you two maintained a more appropriate relationship with the other--but I digress.

You guys haven't seen each other since you've last had sex, and that was about... four weeks ago. Your birth control has been effective with other partners, so you didn't anticipate any issues. Couldn't have, in your stubborn mind, because it was easier to evade the guilt by not thinking about it; however, it is much harder to brush off when you feel that telltale rise of bile in your throat some early morning, a dizzying nausea gripping your stomach and pulling your heart down into it.

Clearblue, Pregnate and Nautilus all come out positive and by the end of it you're sitting on the toilet, wiping hysterical tears from the corners of your eyes as you're frantically flipping through contacts, trying to call Mark. You hesitate. Should you even? He's too young to be a father and he's still dating your daughter. Maybe it's better if he just doesn't know.

If You Tell Him, but you're not keeping it:

He's appalled, ecstatic and terrified all at once. He's fully prepared to commit to supporting you (in whatever ways he can) too, which is what concerned you the most. He doesn't have the time to spare to care for a kid, and you weren't exactly looking to give Amber a sibling at any point. So, you do the reasonable, actionable thing, and terminate the pregnancy.

Mark is devastated in a way he never expected to be. So are you, in a way. You wonder what could have been, almost, then dash the thought.

You're doing the smart, actionable thing. You tell yourself that whenever you feel your stomach turn, the hormones fogging up your reality, forcing tears to your eyes.

You probably stop seeing each other around that time. You realize sneaking around isn't worth the headache or heart attack. Mark is upset about it reflexively, but you drew your line in the sand, and he'd be one to respect that. If you don't tell him, you still break it off anyway.

You Get Pregnant and Keep It:

Maybe it's a bad case of baby fever that seduced you into your second bout with motherhood. Whatever the case may be, Amber is gonna have a baby sister soon! She's excited at first. Then grossed out. "...ewwwww, Mom..."

"Listen, you asked about my belly bump first. As far as I'm concerned, this TMI is all your fault."

Mark is just as frightened as he is aroused by the idea. He likes the way you look laid up and relaxed, how you're a little more helpless, crawling all over him for things. He thinks it's cute when you're needy.

You get really horny, too. It's really fun for you though, cause as bad of a boy that Mark Grayson is, he's at least a gentleman.

He'd visit more often, though his behavior/attitude towards the pregnancy changes depending on how he learns about it. Amber's attitude about little sibling changes depending on who the parent looks like.

What if you don't tell him, but the child looks like him completely? You had a hookup, and maybe it just sort of happened on accident. Or that's what you say, whether you're telling the truth or a lie is for you to know.

But you gave birth to a twin. From his cute brown eyes, to his nose, to the jet-black hair. They even have the same beauty marks. Amber keeps giving her odd looks in the crib. She seemed so familiar, but Amber could never quite place it.

But she's showing her off to whoever she can find, posts about it on her socials. Mark goes to see the baby in person as soon as he can and... he knows that's his kid.

It kind of makes him feel odd, like he's gone back in time and plopped himself in this crib. He feels like he should be panicking, sweating shaking, crying. But he just... holds her.

It's not going to be easy, but maybe not terrible? Of course, his relationship with Amber will end, your daughter is going up and it becomes an unignorable and uncanny resemblance.

Don't even mention when her powers start to come in.

She'd will put two and two together, eventually. Say goodbye to your daughter. Probably most of your friends?

But at least you have Mark, right? Whenever he's not saving the world, you guess.

But he really does love you <3 Though, I think it would be your mortality that saddens him. You're too soft, too sweet for his life. He'd just die if anyone got their hands on you.

Overprotective as shit as a partner, though. He's a sweet little golden retriever up until he sees someone eyeing you up and then he's just in go mode dude. Anybody who steps to him is getting thrown over the bar.

But,,, no Amber. Your daughter hates you. Forever. Would probably keep in contact with her sister, and eventually she's gonna know the truth of her birth. Who knows if she'll want to talk to you after?

But you made your bed, and Mark chose to lie in it.

[mirstrikesbacks-unofficial]

Nerd AU!

An episode card, since I felt like drawing something with colors

I actually think this Fenton gun is like mechanical: you pull on the pull handle and it creates a really low density in the transparent vessel and the ectoplasmic anti-ghost liquid evaporates into gas, so then you let go of the pull handle and the gas shoots out and like damages the ghost.

I’m not good at physics at all, in fact, I don’t remember absolutely anything from the physics lessons I had in school, and the last one was like 3 years ago, so I don’t know if the weapon would actually work, but it seemed like a fun concept to me.

The gas kind of works like a tear-gas for ghosts, and I imagine one of the starting plot points would be that Fenton tests it out in the basement and Phantom goes through the portal at the exact moment he sprays the gas, so it’s hard to see, and Jazz covers for Phantom and he ends up making a run for it while Fenton works out how he can like make the blasts of gas more targeted or something

I’m on Season 2 Episode 5 so far, but I got hit with a paywall so I have to wait for a few hours before I can continue, I was like on minute 16 or something.

People also asked if I watched S2EP6 and I didn’t yet!! I’m guessing Danny splits in two in that episode? But I had no idea that he did that, it’s definitely exciting that I kind of predicted it, I’m really looking forward to watching it!

[coffee-at-annies]

Honestly idk. I’m not seeing any (new) discourse about gygax or dnd tbh. I’m in indie rpg spaces outside of tumblr (one of the other special interests)(tumblr I keep to myself cause actual play fandoms burnt me tf out in 2020) so like I’m aware of some of the common gripes, just not this specific one? A lot of the bullshit I see stems from a couple different places which I’m throwing under a cut.

1) wizards of the coast and the parent company, hasbro, are big corporations and are y’know evil in various ways. Hasbro literally hired the Pinkertons to go after a guy last year bc he accidentally received a magic the gathering set early.

2) wotc/hasbro wants you to keep giving them money forever. A lot of ppl in online rpg spaces don’t want to do that.

3) the table top role playing game (ttrpg) space is so saturated by dnd that it is most people’s first and only game. This is exacerbated by actual play podcasts, twitch streams, and youtube series that only play dnd. This has led to many many rounds of discourse about “playing other ttrpgs” and “play indie ttrpgs.”

4) building off that, a lot of casual players and gms resist learning other systems when they can instead “hack dnd to do things and genres it was never meant to do so they don’t have to learn another game.” (Something I’ve had an acquaintance say to my face about a homebrew campaign she wanted to run).

5) the refusal to explore outside a nebulous “comfort zone” negatively effects indie creators trying to eek out a living on the indie/self-pub side of it. Would they have made a sale anyway? I dunno. But it’s hard to reach/grow an audience when half the market only wants to do one thing. (This circles back to #3)

6) idk people like to hate things and decades old misogyny is an excuse to start cancel culture puriteen bullshit. There was some nonsense a couple years ago about phylactery being a Jewish word and omg is this secretly antisemitic?

7) this one is personal opinion, but dnd isn’t actually the best system out there for everything and i feel like a lot of the arguments are people trying to get others to acknowledge that. Dnd has severe limitations and a habit of putting everything on the gms shoulders to “make the game work.” Depending on what I’m trying to do or what type of game I want to play there are other rpgs that do it better. My first thought, no time spent thinking, example is if I was going to do a wrestling game, I would go crack open world wide wrestling, a system designed top to bottom to tell stories about wrestlers rather than trying to figure out how to do it with dnd’s combat or skill check system.

8) a lot of indie games will handle things for gms and players so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a game work. Some things can be hacked easily enough but I love cracking open a playbook and having everything handed to me. One of the first indie games I ever read/played was called Sleepaway and had people play as camp counselors at a camp haunted by the lindworm. Sure I could make the sporty counselor, the arts and crafts counselor, the lifeguard, and the newbie in dnd classes but instead the rulebook did the heavy lifting for me, and kept it thematically relevant. Why not let the rulebook hand me character tropes rather than inventing it by myself?

9) something something queer players should give queer creators money instead of it going to a soulless corporation or misogynist creators.

10) idk I’m just adding bullet points at this point cause the adhd likes “and one more thing” and 10 feels like a nice even number

Anyway I feel like attacking the creators boils down to “you should hate this thing cause this guy sucks” and also a bad argument in favor of playing other games. I fully endorse checking out the extended ttrpg scene if you’re looking for something outside the fantasy genre that DnD has made its standard. There’s a ton of games out there worth playing. I am a better role player having played other games

okay but fr what is the goal of these "d&d creators bad" posts I keep seeing. yeah okay those guys sucked. now their games are played by women and queers and even - holy shit - queer women. so. we won! yay

"the game was made by bad people" ok?? so???? like is the end goal that everybody gotta make sure to prostrate themselves somehow before having fun because d&d is ontologically evil, since some dickheads touched it forty years ago??? this sounds suspiciously like bullshit

[zoekrystall]

Hello hello excuse me why the absolute fuck can you not mute words on bluesky I am going to combust that is such a basic thing?? What the fuck?? I might not use it until they implement that bc what is this. I just tried to mute bc I glanced at my timeline and read bg3 and remembered oh. Right. The thing that makes me avoid all streams rn. (good game, specific character brings bad thoughts up, don't ask, twt is already agony since but not anyone's fault the mute function there sucks). Also like me and a lot of other people got more standard bad stuff they don't wanna see and don't want to start muting whole accs we follow??? There is a free extension I need to figure out how to get on mobile (shouldn't be too hard for me) but I shouldn't need to do that for such a basic and no brainer function. Idc if it comes later stuff like that should be there from day 1. Like even if no-one would post abt the most standard triggering topics literally everything can be a potential trigger for someone even the most harmless stuff.

[unabashedmoonlight]

The year is 2035. Netflix just cancelled yet another brillant show. Emily in Paris got renewed for Season 15. There is a meteor about to hit the Earth. The news articles about safe zones are paywalled. I turn the temperature down, cling to my blanket and go to sleep. All is well.

[tam--lin]

Books For People Who Liked Leverage and White Collar

I've always been a big non-fiction reader, and I'm particularly fond of frauds, scams, and white collar crime. Ever since I finished White Collar last year, I've been meaning to pull together a collection of related books. As you'll quickly learn if you dive into this list, the truth is often wilder than fiction. (A lot more FBI agents yelling FUCK YOU!! at each other across board room tables, for one thing.)

IMPORTANT! Please don't pirate! It hurts authors. Most of these books are available through your local library, including as e-books. You can help local bookstores by purchasing through bookshop dot org, or as audiobooks through libro dot fm.

Category #1: Stand Outs and All-Time Favorites

Bad Blood reads like a thriller, and I genuinely mean that. It's gripping, it's incredible reporting, it's just a jaw-dropping story. Theranos was one of the biggest corporate frauds in history, and Carreyrou masterfully details its rise and fall. Not to spoil what could be considered the book's big twist, but there's no one better to write it, either.

Empire of Pain is also masterful reporting by a well-regarded journalist, but it leans more family drama than thriller. This details the personal machinations that helped create the opioid crisis in America. [Leverage: Redemption 1x1, which IIRC was actually written before the Met removed the Sackler name from their exhibits. Also goes well paired with The Fall Of The House Of Usher.]

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks is a collection of Radden Keefe's writing for The New Yorker. It explores wine crime (Leverage 5x13 and White Collar 1x12 directly draw from this), a passionate defense attorney, whistle blowers, hit men, and international organized crime. While I recommend the book, much of this content is available for free at newyorker dot com / contributors / patrick-radden-keefe (you can use paywallreader dot com to legally get around the paywall).

Number Go Up moves quickly and is full of fascinating characters and unexpected celebrity cameos. You've got your cringe rappers, your coke-on-a-yacht billionaires, your Harry Potter rationalist poly cult. Seriously, I wish I could read this again for the first time.

Category #2: Odd, "Cozy", Strange

The Feather Thief covers a unique crime by a 20-year-old obsessed with fly fishing.

The Art Thief tells the story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, the most prolific art thief of all time. He stole during the day, from museums full of people, again and again - over 200 times, in fact. He kept his treasures in his bedroom. A fascinating portrait of a strange criminal.

Category #3: Grab Bag

Including stuff that's more adjacent to the topic but still of interest, books I got part way through, and books that are still on my TBR.

Chickenshit Club I'm part way through and enjoying, Never Split the Difference is GREAT and includes lots of true hostage negotiating stories, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing I couldn't get into but that could be because I don't need two pages of text explaining what a string is. (I'm planning on giving it another go.)

Anansi's Gold and The Corporation are both on my TBR; Con Queen of Hollywood is a riveting con story for the first half but gets a little bogged down in biography in the second half.

The Confidence Game is on my TBR and is a classic of the genre, Molly's Game is one of my partner's favorite books, and The Gospel Of Wellness does a great job at exposing how scammy the entire wellness industry is.

Genuinely there are SO many more books I could have included, and I might do another post at some point. Some books were left off intentionally, because I didn't care for them or because another book did it better. Some books were left off simply because my white collar/fraud/cons TBR is extensive and I can't include everything! And some were left off simply because I don't know about them. I'm always looking for quality non-fiction - please do share any related recommendations in the notes.

[charmac]

Variety just dropped a whole feature on Rob and Kaitlin’s relationship.. their marriage and navigating raising their kids, etc. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in this including commentary from Glenn, Charlie, and Danny !!

(Type 12ft.io/ in front of the http. of the URL if you’re hitting ads/paywall)

Of significant note:

Rob seems to be changing his surname.. I can’t tell if this is a joke and neither can Glenn (why did they ask him about this like it affects him lmfao)

Of course they recounted the secret relationship (and reconfirmed they first got together at Charlie and Mary Elizabeth’s wedding, which means the piss story was Season 3’s filming), and Charlie weighed in here…

I said yeah I’m sure.

They also talked about this issue I think a lot of us were confused about with Kaitlin hiding the boys’ faces and Rob putting them on the Wrexham documentary.. apparently that was a major battle (understandably)

And, fucking finally, they reveal that Rob has ADHD (and Kaitlin talks about how the diagnosis really helped them put a lot into perspective!)

Really solid piece, honestly.