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kiruuuuu · 6 years ago

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Doc/Lion oneshot in which a secret comes out which Lion would much rather have kept from the rest of Rainbow. (Rating T, angst + happy ending, ~2.4k words) - written for @big-r6s-fan!! Thank you very much again for commissioning me 💗 I enjoyed myself writing this :)

Lion was 15 when lying became a necessity.

Before, it had been a fancy, a brief display of power: he could deceive people if he wanted, but it was no more than a trump card he was never forced to play. When he went out with his friends, his parents hardly showed enough interest or worry, making a lie redundant, and his peers didn’t really care either about his religious upbringing or other interests. He felt being the younger sibling keenly, and Sophie oftentimes reminded him of all the things she wasn’t allowed to do at his age, unaware of how much he actually took advantage of this freedom.

Many things happened at 15 which interfered with this dynamic, deeply disturbed his relationship not only with his family but also his friends. He stole his dad’s car for a joyride and ended up getting caught. The parent of an ex-friend he long ditched for being a teacher’s pet saw him drinking together with older kids. He snuck into the school’s chapel and pissed in the holy water. He started smoking, lost his virginity, and shoplifted. His parents didn’t find out about all of it, but they did find out about enough, gathered clues from half-hearted responses and all the details he omitted, saw it in his face. He had to get better at lying, if only to trick their system of regular texts and calls, checking homework, rigid curfew.

Not only that, he learnt to keep secrets to prevent ridicule. Just like most of his friends, he claimed to be an atheist since they were the loudest group and often harassed others for believing – in truth, he doubted yet hadn’t faltered. Church involvement repelled him as did the strict moral code, but he never fully gave up the idea of a higher power. He kept quiet about liking some of the catchy songs on the radio, about his crush on the prettiest girl in his class, about enjoying some of his classes, about his reading habits. He didn’t want to be uncool, so he went along with his peers, easily agreeing and keeping most of the things he truly held dear close to his heart instead of on his sleeve.

It resulted in fewer problems. His parents thought him converted, his friends thought him amiable and he started to enjoy telling lies.

One of his friends was already 18, owned a car and lived alone – in Lion’s eyes, he was the pinnacle of maturity, something to strive towards. It didn’t matter his vehicle was on the verge of falling apart and that his flat stunk of stale weed and had no wallpaper and that he worked in a supermarket; he could stay up whenever he wanted, had his own money, and could go wherever he pleased. Not only that, he also never took no for an answer. No matter how hare-brained the plan, he was on board, no matter how unachievable the dream, he gave support and encouragement. The little word which Lion had heard one too many times from his parents lately was missing from his vocabulary.

At some point, his friend told him to take his clothes off. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. This, too, Lion never disclosed to anyone.

Just like the fact that he liked it.

Years took their toll on him. One of the very few things he kept from his adolescence is his taste in music which he doesn’t readily share with others from his church. He doesn’t speak about his faith with his colleagues. The extent of his escapades has never reached his parents’ ears. Not once has he told any of his girlfriends about the men with whom he fooled around. At times, it eats at him, every little secret, every little lie another bite out of his conscience, and though he’s trying his best to follow the commandments, it’s a habit he simply can’t kick. It spares him so many intrusive, difficult questions that it’s just not worth giving up.

There’s one man in particular who seems keen on testing his limits, however. There’s no reaction from him when Lion attempts to change the topic, every excuse merely makes him dig deeper, every wall that’s thrown up causes him to redouble his efforts of scaling it – once he’s identified an issue, he refuses to let go until he’s received a satisfactory response and his bluntness frankly intimidates Lion. He has trouble dealing with it, walked off a couple of times instead of opening up but with time realised that judgement never followed. That his concessions were never met with disdain. That his bareness was reciprocated in kind.

It’s hard to accept that the one person who carefully dismantles the web of lies, half-truths and excuses he weaves as protection used to be his enemy.

But by now, he’s starving for affirmation and takes what he can gets without seeming desperate, and when Doc refuses to back down even when confronted with some of Lion’s unsavoury past, he eventually gives in. Hands himself over. Allows Doc to rummage through the myriad of memories he usually keeps under wraps, and watches helplessly as the other man treats it more like a historical museum than contemporary art – he reassures Lion that while all of it contributed to his personality, he’s greater than the sum of its parts. He sees something in Lion no one else does, and so he fiercely, jealously guards the emotions shared between them from the rest of the world. This is his. He will not risk ridicule. He will not let it wither in sunlight where it flourishes in darkness.

Which is why he’s overcome with dizzying nausea when Dokkaebi walks in on them.

They were cautious, both of them averse to endangering this fragile understanding between them, and though they began living in each other’s skin outside of work, they avoided each other in Hereford. Not obvious enough to draw suspicion but rigorous enough to resist temptation. This day, it just so happened that Lion had lab results to drop off at the end of his shift, and Doc was still around, and so they exchanged a few words. Maybe stood a little too close. Doc said something soothing, Lion reacted with a rare smile, and warm fingers found his own, lips neared his.

A quick peck. No more. But Dokkaebi bursts in just then and clearly realises what’s going on and though Lion scrambles to revert back to the persona which can lie like it breathes, he’s gotten used to not needing it in Doc’s presence and is therefore too slow.

Awkwardness settles in his bones, guides Dokkaebi’s stilted words and stiff movements, laces Doc’s curt response, causes Lion’s face to burn and him to take an unnecessary step backwards. It squeezes his heart until it desperately pumps against the iron grip, blackening the outside of his vision, and with a formal excuse, he leaves. He nearly misses the doorknob on the way out due to shaking fingers.

She knows.

And if she knows, so will everyone else the next day. His and Doc’s feud spread like wildfire the moment he joined Rainbow and there’s no doubt this tasty bite of news will do the same. They will all know.

His phone starts buzzing before he’s even home. Composure is a virtue and he thanks the Lord for gracing him with it or else he might’ve swerved his car into a ditch. Teeth chattering, he stops by the side of the road and turns the device off – he doesn’t need this unconditional compassion right now, even if he’s unsure what else he needs. All he knows is that he’d break down if the calm voice on the other end asked him whether he’s alright.

Intrusive thoughts haunt him almost like a badly edited narration over a bleak independent film. You don’t deserve him, and he’s fairly sure he’s hungry, so he puts a slice of bread into the toaster. Doesn’t it contradict your faith? He hasn’t even taken off his shoes, so he unlaces them by the couch, leaves them lying in the way. Believe me, you two aren’t gonna last. Coffee sounds good right about now, even if all he has is instant. Fucking coward, hasn’t even come out and probably blackmails Doc. Kettle, water, cup, spoon, powder. The metal in his hands feels too smooth. Wasn’t his kitchen a little bigger? He could’ve sworn it wasn’t dark out when he arrived. He’s still an arrogant twat. Great, his toast is cold now.

The voices of the people he’s forced to interact with every day are merciless.

It’s like he’s run a marathon and, despite being wholly drained, the residual adrenaline fires up his mind in uncomfortable bursts. Sitting down for longer than ten minutes is impossible and he finds himself going through his qualifications at one point. He’s good at his job. He’s sure he can find another one elsewhere.

Now and then, faces flash before him. The priest he told to go fuck himself when he tried to talk to young Lion about responsibilities. His parents after being informed about his fatherhood. Claire when she realised he was serious about the abortion. His own son upon seeing him the first time. And, lastly, Doc. The day his colleagues’ blood added to the crusty mess already on Lion’s hands.

He won’t be able to bear more. He’ll break if the rest of Rainbow adds to this embarrassingly long list of shocked, appalled, disgusted expressions, especially since it’d be over something so dear to him. So crucial to his survival. He can’t stand them shunning him for having found his heart’s desire.

Already resigned to a night of no sleep, he jolts upright at the sound of his doorbell. Sits there, motionless, paralysed in indecision. He should let him in. He doesn’t want to.

It still rings now and then five minutes later, every noise running marrow-deep. He trusts Doc fully, but he doesn’t trust himself.

For once, his mind comes up with a reasonable objection: isn’t he a little old to be self-sabotaging like this?

Doc doesn’t mention the wait once he’s crossed the threshold. He won’t get it, not with how supportive his family has been, not with how popular he is, not with how little he encountered rejection in his life. And yet simply seeing him helps.

“I don’t want to lose you”, Lion breathes into his hair and the reassurances convince him that his lover genuinely doesn’t understand – he whispers the words which usually soothe Lion, promises him to stay by his side and remains unaware of the real problem. It matters not that he’s loyal when no one will talk to them. It’s irrelevant how supportive he is when open hostility will make coordinated teamwork unachievable. The tension will carry over until it either permeates their entire relationship, leaves them irritated and frustrated with each other, or until Lion is reassigned. Or potentially leaves of his own accord.

Both would be the end of them.

In exposing their feelings, they have killed them. And though Doc’s fingers will eventually grow tired of brushing away wet streaks, there will always be more tears.

Needle pricks in his back. He feels them wherever he goes, head held high and seemingly impervious – but the gazes riddle him, erode his self-control and he’s sure that eventually, there’ll be more holes than substance. Wandering through the base is nightmarish, an omnipresent sense of dread unshakeable. None of the people around him dare to speak anywhere but in their minds, and so he’s powerless to defend himself. They all know.

Every smile is malicious, every bout of laughter directed at him. Today, the universe has assembled to judge over the mockery that is his life and finds it lacking.

Doc’s words are etched into the back of his brain, not as encouragement but as a reminder of how naive his lover is. Doc desperately holds onto this fundamental trust towards humanity, ignorant of his privilege, ignorant of how revered he is, how the seas part for him, how no one dares to speak ill of him. He blindly assumes his experiences are universal. It’s easy for him to confuse his own brightness reflected back at him with another source of light.

Lion isn’t so lucky.

Whenever anyone approaches him, he expects the worst, flinches pre-emptively and stumbles his way through conversations which should’ve gone a lot smoother. They shoot him more and more odd looks the further the day progresses, and it’s not just the albatross around his neck they see. A glance in the mirror confirms he looks like death.

Montagne is a good friend and Lion values his opinion, yet conversing with him is like nails dragging over a chalkboard. He inquires about Lion’s well-being and lies like this one hardly count anymore. The brief talk has him sit down or else he might’ve started swaying, and the deafening roar of his thoughts almost makes him miss Montagne’s parting statement: “I’m happy for you and Gustave. I wish you two all the best.”

He -

He can’t mean it, can he?

A day later, in passing, Buck says with a smile: “You’ve snagged a good one. Don’t let him get away, eh?”

And Ash, at the end of the week: “I’m very glad it’s working out with you and Doc.”

Lion has never received this many friendly words. Most of the team captains send him on errands which carry him past Doc’s office. Hibana assigns him and Doc together for an exercise without a second thought. Twitch begins buying one coffee more each morning.

The burden lifts. The queasy feeling dissipates. His future brightens. It’s an incredible experience, and the more he adapts, the warmer the others receive him. It’s a mutual thing, glowing and strengthening his confidence, and eventually he even admits Doc was right from the beginning.

“They don’t treat me any worse”, he adds when sharing his observations with a wholly relieved Doc, loose and content and not at all shy with his displays of affection.

“Of course not”, comes the gentle reply. “Everyone deserves happiness, Olivier. It’s time you start believing it.”

Lion has to concede that here, by Doc’s side, looking forward to a good night’s sleep and a challenging job with supportive co-workers, it’s a lot easier to trust in these words.

#rainbow six siege #doc #lion #doc/lion #fanfic #oneshot #commissions #very glad you liked it!!#this flowed out of my fingertips #if I write more lion this prob includes recurring themes

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago

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Collective Action: an interview with Cory Doctorow, author of ‘Radicalized’

A few weeks ago, we reviewed Radicalized, a fantastic collection of four stories from author Cory Doctorow about the extreme measures that people (or a certain Kryptonian) will take to push back against extreme forms of oppression or circumstance.

Recently, I had the chance to speak with Mr. Doctorow about what inspired these tales as well as what some of the real world parallels they were inspired from.

There will also be spoilers for the various stories in Radicalized (especially Model Minority), so make sure you’ve already them first…which you really should have already.

AiPT!: Every story in Radicalized is great, but Model Minority really stood out to me, mostly because it was one of the best and most uniquely structured Superman stories I’ve ever read. What was your approach going into it to make Model Minority different than what has come before it?

Cory Doctorow: Humans have always been portrayed as his Achilles heel, but I think there’s an even deeper [issue] for Superman that goes back to his origins as a character. He was created by Jewish men in Brooklyn who were horrified about the rise of Nazism across the Atlantic. They wanted to build an immortal and unstoppable hero who could conceivably punch Nazis until they…well, stopped being Nazis!

But the actual answer to Nazis in Europe — although there were many brave individuals — was in no way an individual action. In fact, the answer was the largest collective action in the history of the world.

For reason both noble and base, I think we like to frame big fights as a struggle between individuals. The heroic individual who was at the right place at the right time and makes the sacrifice that makes things happen. Humanitarian movements definitely cultivate this.

Rosa Parks gets a lot of press as a solitary hero for her bus protest during the Civil Rights movement. But she was actually a community organizer who—along with her colleagues—planned out a strategy to get her arrested so that a case would be keyed up with a certain set of legal consequences that would be easier to argue in court and play into existing precedencies. If Rosa Parks had merely been a lone individual who was brave enough to refuse to give up her seat, she likely would have died in jail. It’s because she was part of a huge collective that she was able to have such a huge impact.

That’s what Model Minority really tries to dig into—the limits of individual action and the importance of collective action. Our perception of the individual as the driving force for change (rather than the collective) is something that still has a paralyzing effect on society’s willingness to confront its own issues. Look at climate change. It’s not happening because you didn’t recycle enough. But chances are (if you live in a city) that your biggest contribution to climate change is probably your commute. But you can’t dig a subway— Elon Musk can’t do that. And if even you could, you couldn’t rezone all the buildings for it to work. It would have to be a collective action.

AiPT!: Aside from Model Minority, the rest of the stories in Radicalized had a very near-future, Black Mirror-esque feel. Do you see the technology and events that took place as things we will see in the next few years?

Doctorow: I’m not a believer in the ability of science fiction to predict the future because I’m not a believer in predictable futures. That’s one of the big differences between an activist and a futurist. Activists believe that the future changes based on what we do. If the future were predictable, there’d be no reason to bring forth an event to create change.

The model of these stories is to show that the future can be great if we just don’t f*ck it up. The thing that drives a story like Unauthorized Bread is not merely that it shows how technological oppression takes place. It also shows how technical liberation takes place. People put a lot of emphasis on what technology does, but often overlook who it does those things for and who it does those things to. Often times that’s way more important.

Masque of Red Death was inspired in part by Doug Rushkoff’s story where he spoke to a bunch of hedge fund managers about their doomsday bunkers. They were trying to figure out how to make their bunkers sustainable after the apocalypse, but what worried them in particular was that their guards would kill them and take their food. One of the solutions they came up with were biometric food lockers that would only open for them. Once again, the issue isn’t what the technology does, but who has their finger on the button controlling it.

Going back to Model Minority, we have these predictive policing tools like the one Bruce sold to the NYPD. In reality, those tools are super racist. Patrick Ball, who runs the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, took PredPol (which is a major predictive policing tool) and gave it 2016 policing data from Oakland. He then asked it to provide where it predicted the most drug crime would be in 2017. He was then able to compare its predictions to the NIH survey about drug usage.

Predpol predicted that all of the drug crime was going to take place in black neighborhoods, which follows the police pattern that created its training data. If you’re only asking black people to turn out their pockets to look for drugs, then you all the drugs you find are going to be in black people’s pockets. According to the NIH data, however, illegal drug usage was pretty much even across the entire area among all demographics.

Now think about this: Instead of unfairly targeting a group of people, you could potentially use the exact same technology and data provided by PredPol (compared with the NIH data) to determine if policing patterns are racially biased. It’s all about whose finger is on the button.

AiPT!: Do you see the crisis on America’s southern border as a potential breaking point for people to become radicalized on both sides of the issue?

Doctorow: As a Canadian, I am somewhat baffled by both the American relationship to guns and the American relationship to healthcare. Every country has blind spots—when I lived in England, I couldn’t believe a country that managed to conquer the world still hadn’t figured out plumbing.

But America’s blind spots are pretty weird. The fact that they can’t do something every other country in the world has figured out is pretty baffling. It also spawns another weird question: Why is it that frustrated white dudes routinely shoot up mosques or kill their ex-wives, but don’t murder the healthcare executives who doom the people they love most in the world to die a slow, painful death? The pat answer would be that those executives are protected by a large amount of wealth and power. It’s much easier to punch down than punch up.

The other thing that Radicalized tries to do is to rebut our dominant model of radicalization, which is the contagion model. The idea with that model is there are a lot of people out there with very bad and dangerous ideas. If you get exposed to those ideas, then you will have the ideas too and go do bad and dangerous things.

But there’s not a lot of evidence to support that. Boston University did a study on the history of suicide bombers in the occupied territory in the West Bank. What they found was the biggest predictor of whether someone became radicalized was not ideology or a commitment to violence—it was if they were already suicidally depressed.

That trauma model—where people who are traumatized become much more susceptible/vulnerable to people with bad ideas—is a much truer account of what goes on in radicalization. It suggests that what we really need to be doing is reducing the amount of trauma as opposed to the exposure of people to bad ideas.

AiPT!: Where do you see that model at work in the current global landscape?

Doctorow: I feel like the people who are fighting it are being affected by racism that has been compounded by trauma. We’ve had 40 years of tightening belts and shifts in wealth from the middle to the wealthy. This has produced a large group of people who are traumatized and ready to be radicalized by difficult circumstances.

This about it this way: You think you have a secure chair at the table. Then someone announces “Actually, it’s not your chair. It’s musical chairs and at the end of the every turn, we’re going to decide whether or not you get one. Oh, and by the way, we’re going to let a bunch of people who have never had a chair compete for the chairs, as well…and we’re going to take away chairs at a faster than any in point in human history.”

When you consider that framework, it’s not a surprise that people can become racist, xenophobic a------s. It doesn’t exonerate or excuse them, obviously, but it does help explain it.

The arguments anti-vaxxers make today aren’t any better or more informed than they used to be. It was a stupid argument then and it’s a stupid argument now. Same with flat eartherism. What changes are the material circumstances of the people who believe the arguments. When you look at the rise of authoritarian movements throughout history, they almost always follow some sort of collective trauma.

Another source of trauma for people is that despite the wealth of information at our fingertips, there is a collective inability to trust it. There so many different sources of information that it becomes impossible to adjudicate them all, which forces you to defer to whomever is deemed the expert…or whoever shouts their information the loudest. That’s part of the reason you can have the FDA saying for 15 years that opioids were safe. Even the government can’t be trusted as a source. This leads to people often times finding someone who “feels” like someone they can trust whether they are credible or not—and you just believe whatever they tell you.

AiPT!: Moving onto something a little more light-hearted: Is Superman (or any other character in the DC Universe) someone you’d like to revisit in the future?

Doctorow: Honestly, I didn’t really always want to write Superman. In this instance, Superman was simply the right metaphor for the bigger question about individual and collective action and being an ally.

Speaking as someone whose father was a Jewish immigrant refugee to Canada, it was odd to see how he was initially treated as a racialized minority, but later “became” white. It showed me how whiteness is socially constructed—and how the last people on the whiteness boat are usually the first ones to get kicked off. In Charlotte, we had people chanting “Jews will not replace us,” but there are still conservative Jews (including within my own family) who treat white supremacy as a small price to pay as support for Israel and other portions of the GOP agenda.

One thing I wanted to draw attention to in Model Minority is that Superman’s whiteness (and humanity) is assigned to him as a courtesy. It is entirely contingent on his support of the establishment, who can withdraw it at a moment’s notice. It also shows the difficulty of allyship. No matter what you go through to help others, your struggle will pale in comparison to the ones without your privilege who you’re trying to help. Just like when Superman was asked “Where were you for the last 100 years,” you might have to confront the fact that you were previously a part of the problem.

That’s not to say we need to play oppression Olympics with everyone to compete for who has struggled the most in society. But I do think we need to acknowledge that the daily experience of different people in different experiences is something that we can’t fully comprehend.

AiPT!: This probably won’t be possible with Model Minority due to all the licensing red tape you’d have to jump through, but are there plans to make any of the other stories in Radicalized into other media properties?

Doctorow: Unauthorized Bread is currently in development as a television project. That’s all I can say for now

www.adventuresinpoortaste.com/2019/08/13/collective-action-an-interview-with-cory-doctorow-author-of-radicalized/

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angelarthurmorgan · 6 years ago

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❛ protector | when you’re taken for months at a time, things change. but there’s only one man that you can trust.

❛ warnings: physical fight, blood

❛ genre: angst, fluff

❛ word count: 2.6k

You were a girl who could handle herself, somebody that wasn’t afraid to be independent. You had many positive aspects of your personality, and many admired those traits; you were strong-willed, bold, independent, confident, and always prepared for the worst.

But, every human-being has their positive and negative traits. Even though you were somebody many others looked up to or tried to be, you had traits that made you not so good. Hot-headed, jumping into things without thinking things through, you sometimes cared too deeply for the wrong people.

Although you acted as if you didn’t need anybody to lean on, Arthur Morgan could see right through it. He understood that you wanted to do things alone and prove your own worth, and he let you, but he was always there to step in when you overstepped your boundaries. Most of the time, you would throw fits and spew insults and curses right his way, saying that he didn’t trust you enough to be alone and do things on your own, but deep down the both of you knew it was for your safety.

That was something you despised about yourself; you’d get frustrated and beyond pissed when people tried to protect you and keep you out of harm’s way. The self-hate you had for yourself only grew stronger when you realized you had adapted the trait of not being able to trust anybody anymore, not even the men and women you had called a family. It was hard to speak to them, even to look in their direction as it only triggered harsh moments you didn’t want to relive.

You tried not to dwell on the past and what had happened to you, but sometimes it was hard not to at least think about it, especially since every damn time you saw one of your gang members it just flooded back into your head. It was tough on you, it was tough on everybody else and especially Arthur.

A part of you thought that Arthur carried the guilt ten times more than the others carried. After you had been taken and had been gone for around a month, he must’ve felt partly responsible, even though it truly wasn’t his fault. You never blamed him for the position you were put in, maybe the others slightly, but you could never bring yourself to put anything on Arthur. You knew he was struggling with his own past, and struggling to even get through what was happening currently, and he only continued to carry every bad thing that had happened to him on his back. Arthur wasn’t and isn’t the type of man to just let those type of things go, and you knew he blamed himself for all of it.

A heavy sigh escaped your lips as you looked at the body length mirror in front of you, tears welling in your eyes as you observed your entire appearance. Small scars had been engraved in your rosy cheeks, burn scars were around your wrist and on your stomach, cuts that still hadn’t healed were scattered everywhere on your skin. The bruises had faded, but you could only imagine the blue-purple marks as you stared at yourself. It was hard for you to let go, especially when you were reminded of it just by seeing your own skin.

Usually, when you were upset before you disappeared, any of the guys would check up on you. John, when he truly felt the need to, he’d approach you and do his best to be as kind as possible when confronting you but it was difficult for him, but you appreciated it and talked to him sometimes. Javier, someone you had bonded with when you had spare time in camp; you always sang songs with him, attempted to play the guitar which always ended in laughs and giggles, you even tried to learn a few phrases in Spanish just to get closer to him. He’d usually know when something was up, so he’d do his best to comfort you. Lenny, the boy that was like your younger brother, someone who knew exactly when you were having a bad day and he would always talk to you and try to brighten it with jokes or drinks, always a fun person to spend your time with. Dutch, someone who didn’t think much of your state until he realized deep down that everything wasn’t alright, and being the fatherly figure he was he would question you, trying to be as gentle and sweet as possible as you were like one of his daughters. Hosea, who was similar to Dutch in a sense, but noticed it much more quickly and would approach the situation much more gentle and caring, using his wiseness to help you out through whatever you were struggling with. Charles, he spent some of his spare time with you, the two of you would go hunting together and talk about your past lives, he was always so humble and calm you had grown to admire him. He usually was there for you and would let you know he knows what’s up. Even Uncle and Bill would sometimes converse with you about your issues, and they weren’t quite as helpful, but the support was all the mattered — but now when they even noticed that something was wrong, you’d turn them away, leaving them worried and concerned.

You’d be lying if you said you didn’t miss the relationship you had with them, as most of them were like brothers or fathers, but you couldn’t bear to even be in a five-foot radius of them. After what they did to you, you couldn’t possibly forgive them. Some of them, like Dutch and John, didn’t seem to get the message about staying away, and that’s when the only man you trusted had to step in. Once you had told Arthur only a little of your story, he made a vow to himself that he’d protect you. He was protective before, but now if one little thing triggered you in a bad way he would be right there to get whatever it was away and spend the rest of his time with you until he made sure you were okay.

Loud yelling could be heard outside your cot in the camp, and you couldn’t help but listen in on it. Acting as if you weren’t eavesdropping, you crawled into your bed and buried yourself in the covers, pretending you were sleeping. It would be believable since all you did was lay in your bed when you didn’t want to deal with any of the camp members, especially since mentally you weren’t strong enough to even leave the camp.

“She really has the audacity to ignore us? It’s not like she can do it for fucking ever! Shit happens, that’s what happens when you run with a god damned gang with people constantly up your ass. We’re always there for each other, she needs to be there for us as well. Whether it be hunting, donating camp funds, whatever the case.”

That voice belonged to no one other than a hot-headed John Marston, who must’ve been angry about a whole ordeal, and seeing you must’ve frustrated him even more greatly.

You narrowed your eyes, clenching your fist and digging your fingernails in the palm of your hand, leaving some deeper marks than you wanted. Anger engulfed your whole being as you hopped right out of the bed, stalking over to where John was standing. Many other members observed from afar, knowing not to get between something so heated. You felt your chest grow heavy as you looked John directly in the eyes for the first time in forever; your intense stare could’ve burnt a hole right between his eyes. Without even exchanging any words, your fist flew right to his face as he stumbled backward in shock. You took this opportunity to leap at him before straddling him and holding him down, your fist meeting his face repeatedly as you punched with all your strength. “You fucking left me to die! You fucking deserve this, all of you fucking deserve this.”

In a matter of seconds, you felt someone roughly grab you by your shoulders, ripping you off of John instantly. “(Name), calm down and breathe. Look what you did.” It was a familiar voice, a voice you knew all too well; it was Arthur’s and you couldn’t help but listen to him. Hesitantly, you rose to your feet and there it was. There you saw his bloodied face, scratches and bruises on the right side of his face. Once you saw the aftermath, you couldn’t help but feel regret and sorry, but you refused to show that you cared for somebody that didn’t give two shits about you.

Arthur leaned close to your ear, his voice barely above a whisper. “I think it’s best ya go to your cot, I’ll take it from here, alright?”

You gulped. Half of you wanted to protest, argue that you had the right to fuck John up, he had it coming when he felt the need to badmouth you to the entire camp. Yet, the other half of you wanted to give into Arthur’s request, not only because you trusted him but because you were slowly falling in love with the only person that actually gave a damn. You turned heel and slowly walked back to your camp, but not without shooting a few dirty looks in John’s direction. Fucking asshole.

An angry Arthur was something nobody wanted to deal with, but now everybody was paying the consequences after the stunt both you and John had pulled. Arthur stalked over towards John and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, yanking him onto his feet, their eyes both narrowed. “I don’t know what the hell was going through your damned head, those wolves ate all of your god damn brains and common sense. You left her when she needed ya the most, you all left her when she needed ya most.”

“You wouldn’t have done anything differently if you were in the situation like the rest of us were. Maybe you should have been there, Arthur.”

Arthur held back the urge to punch John square in the jaw when he was in such a vulnerable position. It would’ve felt so nice, teaching him some type of lesson, but he didn’t. “You damn well I’d risk my life for that girl, unlike you cowards. I’d protect her with everything I had. I’d be the men you couldn’t and can’t be. Hell, you probably wouldn’t even save Abigail and your son if your life depended on it.”

John opened his mouth to spit back an insult, a remark, but Arthur quickly cut him off.

“I ain’t gonna fight you, Marston. Just know that none of y’all have any place to say shit, because y’all made her this way and she needs support from her family, not some damned people who are gonna knock her down a couple more pegs when she’s already low enough. If y’all ever hurt her again, I promise you there will be consequences.” Arthur threatened, his voice dangerously low as he refrained from lashing out on everybody and John specifically. He dropped John to the dirt ground with no hesitation before leaving the scene, heading towards where you currently were.

Once he entered your small cot, he noticed you were sitting there with your head in your hands. Your right fist was covered in blood, and he wasn’t quite sure if it was John’s or yours. “L-look at me Arthur, I’m a mess. What he said was somewhat true, I’m useless. How am I gonna be in a gang if I can’t even leave the camp, or pick up a gun and shoot a couple guys?”

Arthur hushed you by bringing his finger up to your lips, wiping away a couple tears with the thumb of his opposite hand. “Nothing that came out of that idiot’s mouth is true; he’s just angry and hurt. Just like you are, (Name). You’re like a sister to him, a sister to the rest of ‘em and a daughter to Dutch and Hosea. One day you’ll be able to trust ‘em again, maybe a little, but for now, you have me and you always will.” Arthur stated, trying to make you understand how the rest of the gang felt.

With nothing else to say, you curled up next to Arthur, resting your head in his lap while he played with your (hair color) locks as a way to calm you and keep himself occupied.

The room was quiet for a while until your hoarse voice broke the silence. “Arthur, I trust you with my whole entire being, I hope ya know that. I mean it.”

Once Arthur processed this information, he only felt guilty. Everyone knew that he beat himself up about his past and about himself, and this was no exception. He was a bad man, he knew it, you knew it, the whole United States knew it and he hated it, and that’s why he felt that this was wrong. “I’m a bad man, (Name). You shouldn’t trust me with nothin’, and you shouldn’t trust me with such a thing, ‘cause if I lose ya it’s gon’ be my fault and I ain’t trying to deal with losin’ somebody I care about again.”

A frown adorned your features as you looked up into his emerald green eyes. You brought your hands up and cupped his cheeks, forcing him to stare straight at you. “When are you gon’ learn that you ain't-a bad man? That you’re just tryin’ to survive, and get through this life and get this country back to what it was ‘sposed to be? Maybe them lawmen think you’re a bad man, but you sure as hell ain’t to me. Look what you just did for me out there, just to protect me and make sure they knew that it wasn’t my fault I’m this way and that is was theirs. I can’t even explain how much of a good man you are to me Arthur, and everyone that doesn’t think so is blind.”

“That’s the most I’ve heard ya say in weeks.” Arthur chuckled, lightening the mood and you shoved him playfully, rolling your eyes. “Thank ya, (Name).” he whispered softly.

“Of course,” you responded before returning back to your previous position, cuddled up with Arthur on your bed.

One day, you would be able to leave this camp and return back to your daily duties. One day, you’d also be able to walk up those who betrayed and look them right in the eyes and smile. One day, you could prove those who thought you were weak wrong. And one day, you would surely get back at those who did those dirty disgusting things to you, but for now, you had somebody to loved and cared for you; and that’s all you needed to get back up on your feet.

Arthur Morgan’s love for you kept you going, kept pushing you forward and you were forever grateful. Even though the two of you had your negatives and issues with each other, you would always come back to him because he’s the reason you were a semi-functioning member of society currently.

Words couldn’t explain your thanks, but you knew he knew, and that was enough for you. All you needed was Arthur Morgan.

That’s all you needed and would ever need.

#rdr2 #red dead redemption #arthur morgan #john marston #hosea matthews #javier escuella #charles smith #arthur morgan x reader #x reader #fan fiction #reader insert #fanfic #rdr2 x reader #read dead redemption 2 x reader #red dead redemption 2 #fluff #angst #dutch van der linde #dutch van der linde gang

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arrghigiveup · 6 years ago

Link

There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman, Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama, Michael Johnson, and Jose L Gomez. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. But she had a theory that black holes have shadows, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet with only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's far more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at equal or less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrects and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936…

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606 This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop… This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attend she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156 This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/1116518544961830918 This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/ This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman… This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f… This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is a part. While I intentionally highlight her contributions in defense of her, her statement that it was a team effort is true. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

#Katie Bouman #Andrew Chael #black hole #black hole photo #science #programming

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agreateryesterday · 5 years ago

Text

Stucky - ABO Fics

Omega!Steve

sweet child of mine

pray for the thunder to pass me by by icoulddothisallday

(Last updated July 11, 2018) *Finished* 8 chapters, One Shot

It had been nine years since Bucky had last seen Steve Rogers. Nine years and he’d mostly lost hope of ever finding his friend again. All he had to hold on was that last night, the scent of Steve’s pre-heat and the warmth of his body. Until Steve abruptly reappears in New York, eight-year-old daughter in tow.

Steve had made himself a promise, when Charlie was born, that he would be honest with her — that he would answer all her inevitable questions.

Anam Cara

The Life and Times of CLUB Members

Stay My Brooklyn Baby

Never Have I Ever (Been This Drunk)

From Dust to Dust and Age to Age by JokerzPrincezz

*Finished* One Shots

"Whether the world was burning or freezing or made of nothing but misery and pain, I remembered your eyes, that won’t ever change, sweetheart." Steve struggles to adjust, living an isolated life to protect what little reason he has to live. Everyone seems to forget that this change, this new body, the fresh horrors he sees at night, aren't seventy years old for him. For Steve, just last year he was a scrawny little Beta with only one friend in the world. For Steve, last week he stormed a concentration camp and saw horrors beyond compare. For Steve, yesterday he had an Alpha and a pack forged in blood and battle. Now he's got a shield and a new form and secret heats. Now he's got fear and isolation and PTSD, now he's got a body he doesn't know what to do with and a mind he can't control. It should come as a surprise to no one that the moment Bucky is revealed to him, he's ready to follow him till the ends of the earth. Where Bucky goes, Steve will always follow, and in return, Bucky will always piece him back together. And, God, Steve has just been living his life in pieces, scraps of humanity and normality just barely masking his never ending fear and loneliness.

CLUB opens in secret in 1925, it's changed locations many a time, and had many patrons and employees come and go through her doors. This is the story of her Fabulous Foursome. A group of remarkable men who support and love each other against all odds.

"Please be well for me, sweet thing, please be good to yourself while I can’t. Please, please, above all else, don’t go where I can’t follow. Stay home, stay there, stay my Brooklyn baby. I promise I’ll return to you soon. Love always, Your Bucky” In 1942 Steve Rogers experiences his second heat during his USO tour. While he sleeps, while he goes deeper into that terrible heat, something unspeakable happens. And his reaction changes his life, changes the way he sees himself. Seventy years later, he tells Sam Wilson the truth of that awful night and finds he must make a choice. Justify his actions and absolve himself of his sins, or spend the rest of his days wallowing in guilt and self-loathing.

The Avengers face down aliens, again, and Tony throws a party, again. The gang decides to play a round of Never Have I Ever, Thor brings that good booze so Steve is officially sloshed. Fun times are had, secrets are revealed. Nat and Steve have more in common than either of them realized.

"But Bucky was no normal man, he was perfection incarnate, carved from the same marble that had shaped Steve Rogers. He may well have been born of Steve’s own rib, pulled from Steve’s own heart. His perfect puzzle piece. His anam cara. Cut of the same cloth, out of dust as one and to dust together again in their end." Steve and Bucky talk about getting mated, their relationship and argue over who deserves whom less. (Spoiler, they're both idiots with self-esteem issues and they're perfect for each other.) The other parts of this series really are required at this point in the story.

Season of all things by Claudia_flies

*Finished* 4 chapters

Steve really isn’t sure about sharing with an Alpha but he is starting to run out of options. There are only six Omega boarding houses in the city and Steve has been kicked out of four of them. Or: A small town a/o/b AU that nobody asked for.

Please, Take Me by sobermeup

*Finished* 10 chapters

If Bucky has to describe Steve’s scent using words that would be logical when speaking to the sense of smell, he’d say things like spring, floral, or meadow. The distinctness of certain smells in Steve’s scent is weaker than it is for other people. The doctors say it’s because of Steve’s underdeveloped body, because of the sicknesses he has been riddled with during puberty. And yet, despite Steve’s anxiety and distaste of his smell, Bucky can’t seem to find something to dislike about his scent. He smells... happy. It also seems that Bucky can’t find the proper olfactory words to describe Steve’s scent. He can’t help but associate emotions with Steve, his scent, and his pretty body.

Welcome Home

Destined by eclecticxdetour

*Finished* One Shots

Reunited after a mission, Bucky shows Steve how much he missed him.

Steve Destines as an Omega and talks about it with Bucky.

no matter the distance, I’m holding your hand by suzukiblu

*Finished* One Shot

“Your body temperature is elevated,” the asset says. “And you stink.” “Of course,” the captain mutters, tilting his head back against the bed. “I make it through every other alpha in the twenty-first century just fine, but five minutes around you sets me off.”

The Daily Grind by notlucy

*Finished* One Shot

In a perfect world, the need to rut and an omega in heat would line up every time. Bucky's world is rarely perfect. Steve puts up with him regardless.

I'll Look After You by Milk_Tea_Fantasy

*Finished* One Shot

When Steve’s in heat, all Bucky wants in the whole wide world is to take care of him.

with his educated eyes, and his head between my thighs

constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you by spacebuck

*Finished* One Shots

Living with an alpha was usually … difficult. The last alpha he’d shared a building with, some asshole whose name Steve had forgotten almost immediately, had been pushy – scenting the entire building, walking up and down the hallway of Steve’s floor on regular days, let alone when Steve was in heat. After a week of the guy literally scratching at his door, Steve had packed up and left, and the landlady hadn’t blamed him – had even given him back his bond, though she had been entitled to keep it given the circumstances. The worst part had been when they had crossed paths as Steve had been preparing to move out. The alpha had leered at Steve, catcalled and coaxed, puffed up and made his scent that much more potent. Convinced for some reason that Steve would mate him just because of his designation. Fat chance. Steve had held his breath the last time they had been face to face, refused to look at him, thrown the guy’s hand off when he’d tried to stop Steve from leaving. Bucky though? Perfect. Fucking. Gentleman. And it drove Steve nuts.

“Nuh uh, you gotta get up,” Steve murmured, and Bucky grumbled, not moving at all. “Don’t give me that,” Steve chastised, and Bucky ducked his head, tucking back in against Steve’s shoulder. Dealing with Early Morning Bucky was always an exercise in patience, most of all at this time of the year. “Don’t wanna,” Bucky mumbled against his skin, and Steve felt the alpha inhale deeply, before he let it out on a rumbling sigh. “Why’s that, Buck?” “Warm.” Steve snorted at that, taking advantage of the inattention to the rest of his body to turn and face Bucky fully. A warm hand immediately slid down to cup his ass, and Bucky’s nose tucked in against his throat. “I’m sure that’s the only reason,” Steve snorted, wedging a knee between Bucky’s, pressing it against Bucky’s crotch. The hand on his ass shifted, dipping under his boxers to rest against skin, and Steve shook his head. “Nuh uh, you’ll be late for work. Again.” “Don’t care,” was the mumbled response, and Steve thumped a hand against Bucky’s chest lightly.

Give Me Your Love, Baby by KimchiAndPasta

*Finished* 11 chapters

Steve wants to have a baby but Bucky isn't so sure.

the pulse that rages for you

all things will unwind by miraclemoon

*Finished* (Last updated Oct 10, 2017) 4 chapters, 3 chapters

In the midst of a mission, Steve is caught in the middle of an enemy made gas that forces him into heat. AKA, an ABO pwp that no one asked for.

There were many things Steve didn't expect from the 21st century. Even after receiving the serum, when he was no longer bird boned and could actually consider himself healthy, he never exactly imagined himself getting pregnant. AKA, an ABO mpreg fic no one asked for.

Overdue by cuddleslutloki

*Finished* One Shot

Six years after he presents as an omega, Steve goes into heat in the middle of World War 2. The trigger? Sparring with his best friend.

Baby, Can You Dig Your Man by dancinbutterfly

(Last updated March 16, 2018) 28 chapters

After a run in with the Winter Soldier Bucky on the never-ending hunt for HYDRA, Steve goes into heat. Now he's expecting but impending parenthood seems like the least of his worries. Hell, if it were the biggest complication he had, Steve's life would be just swell.

You Are Scent-sational by LightningStriking

*Finished* 15 chapters

Alpha Bucky has spent the last three years in Russia, working hard to become as successful as possible. All in the hopes of winning the heart of his best friend, Omega Steve, upon his return. Yet when Bucky comes home at last he discovers the small, adorable Stevie he left behind has transformed into a giant golden Adonis, and Bucky knows he's going to have to step his game up to have the slightest chance. Commence plan: Woo Steve Rogers Into Falling In Love Before He Realizes What's Happening. Sneakily wearing Steve's clothes so the blond will continually be smelling, and smelling of, the Alpha, sounds like the perfect way to start.

Always by attackmybutt

*Finished* One Shot

Steve never expected to go into heat in the middle of fighting against the Winter Soldier and much less that alpha would help him get through it. - "You are thinking too loud." For a second he feels like laughing. To just let out all his frustrated emotions but he can't when he feels like crying and rolling over to bare his ass and wriggle it in Bucky's direction. Oh yeah, the heat was definitely beginning to sip through his body.

Unchained by LightningStriking

*Finished* 17 chapters

Growing up in ancient Rome where Omegas were nothing more than commodities, Stevanos was captured by the Empire and forced into slavery. Where he became the greatest Omega Gladiator that the nation had ever seen. However, rather than earning his freedom, this instead assured his place as part of an envoy sent to Egypt. But he was not delivering fabulous gifts to the Pharaoh. Instead, Stevanos was the gift. A physically perfect specimen demonstrating the might of Rome, and a pawn that might garner Egypt's goodwill. Pharaoh Bakari, the most powerful man and Alpha in all of Egypt, had little time for offerings from a far off nation. Yet when his eyes fell upon the gorgeous man whose golden hair brought to mind the great sun god Ra himself, Bakari found himself fascinated by the Omega who's body promised the greatest pleasure, and who's eyes promised swift death to any who dare touch him. Stevanos provides a challenge for a Pharaoh who has been denied nothing his entire life. Bakari provides a temptation that might be too great to resist. Caught in a web of desire where they are not simply Pharaoh and slave, or Alpha and Omega, but equals, can they both come out the other side whole?

The Nameless

The Named by dragonspell

*Finished* One Shots

They skitter around him, over him, through him. Ants on a hill. A cuff attaches to his arm, Velcro snapping in place. His other arm is opened up, the wiring and interior circuits poked and prodded. One ant makes a notation on a chart, quickly scribbling and moving on. They have no names. Like him, they are no one. Some would disagree if he said so. Some would grow angry with him. They would try to argue or punish him. In the end, however, he will go back into the ice and nothingness and when he awakes again, they will all be gone, names and faces erased with new ones having taken their place long ago. They will have had no meaning, no impact, no lasting legacy—no name. There is a faint hint in the air, a taste that tempts the edge of his tongue, makes something dead inside of him wish to stir again. He knows that it is due to the ants that scurry around him, but he does not know why. This is their sweetness that coils around him, possessing a distant echo that bids his dead flesh to rise. It is something that he should know, but he does not. (Or, Hydra has kept alpha!Bucky chemically neutered, but they cannot account for omega!Steve. Plays fast and loose with canon.)

Having just come back from his run, Steve looks like a picture in a magazine, T-shirt tight but sweat pants loose, the exercise barely affecting him beyond a slight sheen of sweat on his skin. He’s not even breathing hard, completely photo-ready. Steve’s the reason why Bucky is standing by the kitchen counter at seven in the morning when he would much rather be still in bed. After the first few days, when Steve finally would allow Bucky to be out of his sight for longer than five minutes, Steve had reverted to his set morning routine, slipping out of bed before dawn when all sensible people are still trying to sleep. It had taken Bucky two days to catch on and adapt to the new situation. Now, every morning, though he’s loathe to leave the bed that smells of him and Steve, Bucky rolls himself to his feet about an hour after Steve leaves to ensure that he’s by the door when Steve comes back. If he doesn’t, Steve will head straight for the shower to wash off all of the hard won sweat that Bucky would like to drown himself in. (Or, since being rescued, Bucky's relearning what he's missed. Steve goes into heat. Pretty much complete porn).

In the Jet to Russia by Cryo_Bucky

*Finished* One Shot

Steve goes into heat in the jet on the way to Russia at the end of Civil War.

My Angel by Rogers_Barnes45

*Finished* One Shot

Bucky met Steve when he needed someone the most. He wanted to be loved and cared for. So when the Alpha Dom came along and promised the Omega the world, Steve couldn’t say no. He had a bad past and Bucky wanted to help Steve move on, which is what he did and Steve couldn’t be happier.

it's gotta get easier somehow ('coz, i'm falling, i'm falling) by orphan_account

*Finished* One Shot

Bucky doesn't remember being Steve's alpha. Until he does.

Reassurance by Cryo_Bucky

*Finished* One Shot

Steve is afraid that Bucky doesn't want him anymore now that he's not the skinny little omega that he fell in love with, avoiding him and refusing to eat. Bucky shows him he's wrong.

Comics and Comrades by Pinkfrostdiamond

(Last updated Aug 9, 2019) 6 chapters

A fic about an omega comic book artist with an amazing service dog and an alpha who is head of the Russian Mafia learning to work through their past. Will love win? (Yes because these boys need a happy ending)

Blood and Honey by Claudia_flies

*Finished* 4 chapters

A growl. It makes Steve’s knees turn into jelly and his body clench again. With dawning horror Steve realizes what is about to happen.

Shorteralls by moonythejedi394

*Finished* One Shot

The first time Bucky ever saw Steve Rogers, he was struck by how Neanderthal-like his response was. It was immediately followed by a bout of mental scolding. The second time was just about the same. The third time, it was actually appropriate for Bucky to start a conversation with him, at which point he was determined to be the gentleman. No such luck. Steve Rogers is, always has been and always will be, a relentless flirt. These days, Bucky's Neanderthal-ist feelings about Steve are consensual and highly appreciated. More so now that they're having a baby.

Unsuitable Breeding Stock by sarahyellow

*Finished* 8 chapters

“You fucking son of a bitch!” Steve is spitting out, furious. His face is going red, poor thing, and Bucky feels a twinge of guilt for having smiled. He knows he shouldn’t be encouraging it. “Calm down, sweetheart,” he says. “It’s gonna be okay.” Bucky brings his omega home.

I never knew you... by Harry1981

*Finished* 4 chapters

Alpha, Beta and Omegas are known, but most of the population is made up of Betas. Alpha females are rare and Omega Males even more. But it doesn't really concern Tony Stark, who is a beta and everybody he knows is similar or either Alpha Male or Omega Female. Things become complicated when Steve Rogers, an Omega Male, more commonly known as Captain America, comes out of the ice and take reins of the team known as Avengers. It's not something bad, as per se. Just, why the hell is he obsessed with Tony? Natasha says it is not just him, but Tony knows that Steve Rogers has a special interest in him. What did he do to bear the weight of Mama Rogers, after all?

Anything you need (just knock) by Neonbat, polarRabbit

(Last updated May 4, 2020) 1 chapter

Knocked up, kicked out, and down to his last dollars, Steve moves into a new apartment. His neighbors range from awful to decent, and then there is 108. Bucky lives with his girlfriend Dot, happy(ish), and equipped with a plan. Marriage, eventually kids, all that good stuff. That is until an unmated, pregnant Omega moves in next door and calls all his future plans into question. After a rocky start, the pair form a friendship that gets gossip rippling through the complex. Between secrets, feelings, society, and a pissed off girlfriend, they have heaps of reasons to call it quits and wish each other the best but, that's not what friends are for. Are they?

[insert joke about pipes] by notallbees

*Finished* 2 chapters

Steve doesn't date alphas, or at least he tries not to. With a string of exes hanging around, Steve does the only sensible thing he can: pretends to be dating his hot alpha plumber. Unfortunately, Steve's plan has as many holes as his pipes. And no, that's not a euphemism.

Snowed In by DyslexicSquirrel

*Finished* 4 chapters

At 16, Steve Rogers knew two things: Bucky Barnes was his best friend and that he loved him. At 24, he hadn't talked to Bucky since the day before he moved to Colorado after his mom died and he thought he never would again, even when he moved back to New York City. Except Bucky showed up at his door and Steve ran to his parent's old cabin up state. It was probably a stupid idea to go for a walk when there was a storm threatening--he did it anyway. The last thing he expected when he got stuck in the worst snow storm that year was for Bucky to show up and rescue him, but maybe he should have because the alpha had been saving his ass since Steve was ten.

When the Brooklyn Boys Begin

If you care to know by fullarmorandahotfudgesundae

(Last updated April 26, 2020) *Finished* 11 chapters, One Shot

Steve just wanted to die in peace. An Omega without children, who couldn't have children, living for long after their Alpha was torn from them? Not happening, not even with modern medicine. So, having accepted his fate, why was he suddenly haunted by a hallucination of his dead Alpha? A really firm, tactile, weepy hallucination of his dead Alpha? Maybe he should just roll with it? (Bucky, for his part, just wants to know what the hell is going on and how he and his punk Omega managed to be alive in the twenty-first century. Oh, and also how to stop that little issue of the bond sickness killing his Stevie.)

In the aftermath of the Battle of New York, Tony really just wants to relax with Pepper and his new buddy, Bruce. Given that this is his life, those plans are interrupted by a Soviet-era myth and an unconscious Captain America. Sigh. His life was so hard sometimes.

Sarah by MMXIII

*Finished* One Shot

It's still dark when he blinks awake, early enough that there's no light filtering through at the edges of the windows, no traffic out on the street.

Fuck You... And Your Metal Peg Leg by jaybird6232

(Last updated April 26, 2019) 14 chapters

“Mother fu–!” Steve throws himself to the ground and covers his head, narrowly avoiding the cannon ball that plows through the ship’s wheel, destroying it completely. Steve scrambles to his feet, looking at the remnants of wood and nails with wide eyes, before fearfully turning his head to look at the ship. It’s massive, far bigger than he realized at first, and it clicks instantly in his mind that this has to be the High Captain’s ship. The Captain of the entire Hydra fleet is the one who is on a mission to kill them all. On the other ship, a tall, older man wearing a large topper sends him a smirk, whispering to a few alphas beside him and pointing to Steve. Oh shit, Steve gulps nervously, taking a few cautionary steps backwards and hovering his hand over the dagger secured on his belt. The man sends him a feral smile, nodding his head in Steve’s direction. The alphas next to him disperse, tucking their swords away and climbing the netting on their ship. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

Always Yours by LilyInTheSnow

(Last updated April 20, 2010) 1 chapter

Steve is in love with his best friend, and the only Alpha he trusts, Bucky. And maybe Steve is an oblivious dumbass that doesn't realize Bucky's in love with him too. Though maybe he should've figured it out when he asked Bucky to donate sperm so he could have a baby and Bucky suggested they date for six months first.

Like Rahab by moonythejedi394

*Finished* 29 chapters

"Brother of Rahab, Father Elliot had called him. As Steve fell asleep, he dreamed of Nazis invading New York and an American spy with Bucky’s face hunting for a safe place to hide…" – intertwined, prelude. On December 7th, 1940, Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. On May 8th, 1944, Nazi troops set foot in New York. On January 10th, 1945, Adolf Hitler was assassinated by a man now gone down in history as Captain America. Unfortunately, Captain America was killed after taking down Hitler, but his successful mission led to the Nazi invasion of the United States turning and the end of World War II. History recounts the legendary shot that took down Hitler, but it will always ponder why Captain America killed Dr. Johann Schmidt with the very next bullet. But before that, long before that, there was first an American sniper who needed a safe place to hide. There was first a prostitute turned spy who would take him in. There was first a strained relationship and a bittersweet reunion to be had, and when it was all over, there was then an escape to take place. After all, who would look for an American hero in Canada?

Be Mine, But Don't Make Me Ask by Apieceofurmind

(Last updated April 18, 2020) 33 chapters

Joseph waits his whole life for the perfect alpha son who will make him proud. The son who follow his father's footsteps and serves their country at war. And then, Steve Rogers is born. He is not strong, tall or muscular. But above all he is not an alpha. Betrayed by his own son, Joseph shuns him away. Enter James Barnes. Tall, muscular and strong. The perfect alpha. When Joseph saves his life on the battlefield, he asks him to marry Steve in return...

SOLDIER, KEEP ON MARCHIN’ ON, COME THRU LIKE THE SWEETENER U R by moonythejedi394

(Last updated April 13, 2019) 9 chapters

When Steve was seven years old, he found a mangey and half-starved cat in the alley behind his and his mother’s apartment building in Navy Hill. Despite being incredibly allergic to the creature, Steve had spent all of his allowance for that month on cat food and he spent the next few weeks nursing the stray back to health. The cat moved on after eventually, but a few months later, Steve found another one and the whole process started all over again. Bucky is another stray cat. Steve has no way of knowing what demons the Alpha carries in his head and he certainly has no way of knowing that Bucky won’t turn hostile on him, but Steve never learned his lesson to stop feeding strays. “This is gonna end badly,” Steve mutters to himself. So, as one does when one makes potentially catastrophic decisions that could and would backfire spectacularly based on how little self-control one has concerning bedraggled and sad-eyed stray cats and Alphas, Steve makes a cup of tea.

Captain America is more Alpha than Ares by LimaBeanie

*Finished* One Shot

The thing is nobody has ever even asked him about his status. Steve dealing with accepting himself and his designation. Alternatively all the times Steve had to come out.

A Scent to Fill the Lungs, A Soul(mate) to Fill the Bond by oceanfoamgreen

*Finished* One Shot

In a world where scenting one’s soulmate means that the onset of one’s first heat or rut is imminent, it is to be certain that meeting one’s soulmate can be extremely stressful. Or In the winter of 1937, Steven Grant Rogers scents his soulmate. In the spring of 1948, James Buchanan Barnes meets his.

I will not bow, I will not break by belovedbookdragon

*Finished* One Shot

Dystopian AU. The world's population fell dangerously low after a virus destroyed most of mankind's reproductive abilities. To combat the shrinking population, the Federation of Northern American States requires all children to be educated at government-run schools until the child presents. Alpha and beta children are sent to the military, omegas are sent to the breeding facilities. Steve and Bucky are separated at 14 and Steve will stop at nothing to get back to Bucky.

With a Love that Won't Sit Still

This Sudden Burst of Sunlight by dragongirlG

*Finished* One Shots

After buying plums from the market, Bucky returns to his apartment in Bucharest to find a small, half-naked Steve huddled on his bed. At first, Bucky thinks it's just a hallucination, but then he smells the honey-sweet slick in the air and comes to a shocking realization: Steve's presenting as an omega in heat, even though he hasn't been an omega in decades due to the supersoldier serum. Drawing on a mishmash of instinct and memory, Bucky takes care of Steve as best he can, trying to give Steve what he needs until Steve can safely be extracted from the situation.

In Bucharest, Steve gets hit with a weapon wielded by Black Panther that strips him of his serum mid-battle, turning him back into an omega and inducing his heat. He seeks out Bucky for help.

The Corset Prince by LeisurelyPanda

(Last updated April 8, 2020) 6 chapters

The year is 1836. James David Henry Buchanan Barnes, called Bucky by close friends and James by family, is an alpha, a soldier without peer, a skilled military commander, and a charmer. He has allies and friends on both sides of the political aisle in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. By all accounts, he is the favorite to become King when his father dies. There's just one problem. Bucky is the Duke of York, not the Prince of Wales. His brother, known throughout the world as Brock, is the eldest of the King's children. He has all the charm of a feral Doberman. He inherited their father's temper and his overall tendency towards excess. Enter one Steve Rogers, a little known nephew of a new, powerful merchant and innovator recently appointed to the House of Commons, Howard Stark. Steve is young and innocent. His engagement to Prince James is sudden and it sweeps him into a world unlike any he'd ever imagined. The palace, for all the lights, casts many shadows. However, there is more to Steve than anyone suspects, including himself.

in the heat of the moment

on the nose

knot without you by Deisderium

*Finished* One Shots

"His time is upon him," Mrs. Rogers said solemnly. Bucky stared at her, taken aback and not altogether certain what she meant. It kind of sounded like she thought Steve was on the edge of death, but if that had been the case—again—she probably wouldn't have had a smile curving up the corners of her lips. "His heat," Mrs. Rogers said more bluntly. She was a nurse, after all. "Steve has presented as an omega." In which Steve presents very late as an omega. Bucky isn't supposed to go see him, but when has he ever done what he was supposed to do where Steve is concerned?

"Barnes," barked the sergeant, and Bucky jolted out of his thoughts. He strode forward to get his mail and was thrilled to see not only a letter from Becca and another from his ma, but an actual package from Steve. He took his treasures and retreated back to his tent. Inside the package was another bound in butcher paper and string, but much smaller than the shirt. There was a note tucked in the strings of this one too, but it was just a small square of folded paper. The note in the string was much shorter than the letter Steve had sent him with the larger package. It read in its entirety: don't open this unless you're alone. In which Bucky receives a sexy letter from home.

"I have to," Steve said stubbornly, even though Peggy hadn't tried to discourage him, not yet. "You heard Phillips," she said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. "He's probably dead." "There are a lot of men and women of the 107th who might not be," he said, and then, because she knew him too well: "He's my alpha." "He was." She wasn't trying to be cruel, he knew that; but he slapped a hand to his neck, where the mating bite used to be, and glared at her. "It's all right, Steve. I know a man with a plane.” In which Steve goes to get his man from the Hydra factory, and Bucky discovers that Steve's a little different from the last time he saw him.

Blossom like sunshine, nectar sweet as sin, the devil's drink has me pulled in by moonythejedi394

*Finished* 3 chapters

“Your son was said to be as beautiful as Brooklyn’s sweet apple blossoms,” Barnes said, and his lips lifted in another smile, then his eyes moved and Steve was startled by the intensity of his gaze. Barnes gave pause, long enough that Steve’s heartbeat picked up again. Then he spoke again. “But no blossom could compare,” he said. “Not even the most perfect of untouched flowers.” Steve felt his cheeks heat up; he blushed right to the roots of his hair, pulled back from his face by Wanda’s best braids. Barnes’s gaze somehow intensified even more as his gaze just shifted enough that Steve was sure he saw him blush that far. Barnes’s lip lifted at one corner by a hair. “I’ve never been gladder to have my expectations so far exceeded,” he concluded.

I Just Want a Friend by elliot_edison

*Finished* One Shot

Trapped in an unwanted engagement with an unpleasant alpha twice his age, omega Steve makes a plan to run away with the beta stable boy he befriended. Featuring a dirty-mouthed Steve, shy amnesiac James (spoiler: it’s Bucky). “Why did you—why am I—what do you want from me, sir?” James asked softly, looking down at his gloved hands. “What do I want? I want a fuckin’ friend. I want someone to call me by my name for once, instead of that ‘sir’ or ‘young omega’ bullshit. I want to be treated like a goddamn person instead of an object.” Steve was practically shouting, and then his face twisted sadly. “I just want a fuckin’ friend, James.”

Brambles and Bonfires by Lasenby_Heathcote, StarshipEnterprise

*Finished* One Shot

Bucky is an Alpha gone feral living up in the mountains. Steve is a lost Omega wannabe-hiker. Bucky, a creature of instinct, decides he’ll make the perfect mate to keep and breed, no matter what Steve has to say on the matter.

Back in the day

Making camp by Jokers_Wild

*Finished* One Shot, 2 chapters

Bucky returns home after working after a long day at work, finding Steve all curled up in the nest that they'd made in preparation for the Omega's heat. The Alpha can't help himself, not with how tantalizing Steve looks sprawled out in it and it's just so easy for the Alpha to get the Omega all hot and bothered. It's not his fault if he sets Steve's heat off early, its just something he's particularly good at doing.

Steve has saved his Alpha, they've made it back to camp and now comes the hard part. Talking about the change in their dynamic now that Steve is suddenly larger, stronger, and overall just more than his Alpha would have ever expected the man to be...But that's what you get when you sign up for an experiment to make the best soldier. Shame Bucky hadn't been there to tell Steve what a dumbass he was, he'll just have to do it now and if that leads to some great reunion sex that's fine too.

The last one

Meeting the Children

Another

Little Sister

Loki

Names

Domestic

Baby Stark Doo do by AngelynMoon

*Finished* 5 chapters, 7 chapters, one shot, 2 chapters, 2 chapters, One Shots

Captain America is an Alpha, Steve Rogers has always been an Omega.

In which Bucky Barnes meets his kids. Also known as that fic where Steve adopts the Avengers and Bucky's just along for the ride, as per usual.

In which there is another pregnancy for Steve.

The Avengers and Avengers adjacent meet a little Dream.

In which Steve adopts another kid and Bucky is still just along for the ride.

Bucky starts to remember names.

Tony has some thoughts.

In which Tony announces his and Pepper intentions to have a baby.

Start from the Beginning by omgbubblesomg

*Finished* 4 chapters

What about a sex pollen fic where the pollen-ed one doesn’t remember getting hit in the face with a sex flower, and wakes up midway through the depollenating? Or: the one where Steve wakes up on his back with a stranger buried balls-deep in his ass.

no grave can hold my body down, i’ll crawl home to him by moonythejedi394

*Finished* 6 chapters

1917; James "Bucky" Barnes is born. 1918; Steve Rogers is born. 1936; Bucky Barnes bonds Steve Rogers. 1941; Bucky Barnes is drafted. 1943; Steve Rogers becomes Captain America. 1945; Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers die separately. 1972; the Winter Soldier is recovered by SHIELD. 2011; Captain America is recovered by SHIELD. 2012. The Winter Soldier is asked to care for Captain America during subdrop.

let me hold you close by icoulddothisallday

*Finished* 2 chapters

When Steve went down with the Valkyrie, he'd only just started to wonder if he might be pregnant. But there's no way a baby could have survived 70 years in the ice. Right? (We've all seen the stories where Steve's pregnant when he comes out of the ice, and through the miracles of the serum the baby is Okay. This is the story where the baby is Not Okay, but somehow still Okay.)

Who could ever love a Beast?

Surprise! It's an Omega! by alexisriversong

*Finished* 7 chapters, One Shot

Basically the Beauty and the Beast story with the Marvel characters. Mix between the various versions of the Beauty and the Beast stories out there.

Setting right after the end of the Beauty and the Beast AU, basically, the same plot as the movie but with alpha/omega/beta and the Avengers team. Not really necessary to read the first fic, but in some places might not make sense without reading that first.

For Your Own Good by MoonMated

*Finished* One Shot

Steve has to deal with life-altering consequences after tracking down Bucky.

easy love by moonythejedi394

*Finished* One Shot

In 1918, Joseph and Sarah Rogers welcomed their first and only child into the world. Joseph was the heir to Rogers & Rogers Medical Innovations and a very wealthy man. He had grown up in the high society circles of New York and as a high society man, he conversed with his peers about his son’s future before the boy was even born. With a good friend and business associate, George Barnes of Barnes Telecommunications, he struck a quite reasonable deal. George had one son already and a daughter on the way. His boy had the DNA markers of an Alpha and his daughter would likely be an Omega given their family history. They agreed that, however Joseph’s boy presented later in life, their families would merge with a marriage. Joseph’s son was named Steven Grant and his parents cautiously assumed by his fifth birthday that he would present as an Omega. At 16, he did. At 20, he married James Barnes.

innocence came screaming by moonythejedi394 (Some tentacle porn, but not overly “wierd”)

*Finished* One Shot

There had been no rain since the beginning of spring. The crops were dying. The river, what little freshwater they had on their island, was drying up. The village well was, too. They had made many sacrifices to the Great God of the Deep, and yet, the air remained dry. At last, in final desperation, the priests announced that a sacrifice of greater caliber was needed. “Only the sacrifice of a young, unbred Omega will turn away the Great Old One’s anger,” the high priest said to Steve. “You will honor your people.” Thus, he was left to die in the Great Old One's temple. The Great Old One, however, had other plans for him.

One Step at a Time (Like this?) by peachycinnamon

(Last updated Dec 28, 2020) 3 chapters

Will long lost friends be able to recognize each other? Be able reignite a flame and maybe make it burn into something else? Its their last year, and everyone is going to be faced with some kind of obstacle, the main question is, how will they deal with it?

Warming Up (To You) by Huntress79

*Finished* One Shot

Omega Steve is anything but happy about the week-long “company vacation” Tony has arranged for them all for Christmas, participation mandatory. He is lonely, he forgets to refill his suppressants before the trip, there’s a blizzard heading towards the resort – and on top of that all, he has to share the chalet with none else than his archnemesis, hot Alpha Bucky Barnes.

Compliance (The Knot Fic) by WhiteCeilings

*Finished* 2 chapters

It's not that Steve's alpha is cruel, he just doesn't consider himself his own person.

Of Feasts And Family by stevergrsno (noxlunate)

*Finished* One Shot

“Nothing?” He sounds almost… offended? Steve might not know the dude, but he’s pretty sure this random alpha sounds offended that Steve’s plans for Thanksgiving involve Steve, a frozen pizza, and watching the parade on tv. “That’s what I said,” Steve says, squinting at Sam’s list for a moment before grabbing two bags of marshmallows, “What, you’ve never had a nice boring Thanksgiving home alone with some Digorno?” The man makes a horrified noise and softly repeats Steve, “Home. Alone. Digorno,” in the way that people repeat something when they're expecting it to somehow change. In which Steve Rogers meets Bucky Barnes and somehow spends Thanksgiving with him the next day.

The Soldier's Omega by PandaFey

(Last updated Nov 16, 2020) 2 chapters

Bucky is back, but he's not the same. He doesn't know how to be an alpha or how to treat omegas, but Steve is willing to help teach him. Even if it hurts him in the process.

the Kept Boy

Into the Dark by moonythejedi394, Neutralchaos

*Finished* (Last updated Nov 13, 2019) 25 chapters, 18 chapters

Here is James Barnes, the most dangerous Alpha in New York. Rich, powerful, cocky and short-tempered, his only skill greater than his persuasion or intimidation is his marksmanship. Head of the Seyrbakov crime family, inherited over the heads of the late Aleksei Seyrbakov’s own sons, who he had deported when they attempted to murder him. Top of Interpol and the FBI and the CIA and probably the NSA’s most wanted lists, but there’s never enough evidence to bring even a parking ticket against him, as it has been for New York’s Bratva since the late 1910s. His company smuggles weapons, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, exotic animals, you name it, but you’ll never find a shred of proof. If land barons still existed, then Barnes – owning property in all the five boroughs, the state, the country, even on other continents – would easily be one. When you think of the Russian mafia, you think of Barnes. Here is James Barnes, gracing the scum and lowlifes of Brooklyn with his presence, and here is Steve Rogers, not-so-cheap yet consistently broke hooker, sitting on his lap like he belongs there. Very rapidly, that makes him the most dangerous Omega in New York.

After the traumatic events that marked six months in his and Steve’s relationship, things aren’t the same. There’s a nightlight in every room, set to automatically switch on after sunset. Neither of them can stand the sight of a rat. Bucky can’t go away on business trips and leave Steve behind anymore; he can barely leave his baby home for a day while he goes to work, he brings Steve with him more days than not. Neither of them sleep as much as they used to, and Bucky didn’t even sleep evenly every night before that. But it’s not bad. They have each other. And together, it’s so much easier to brave the things they fear.Starting with going into the dark.

Post: Part 2

0 notes

reginaldbelchhuggins-blog · 8 years ago

Text

The Short and Miserable Romance of Victor Criss

Chapter 6: Last Meeting

Pairings: Henry x Victor, with some side Butch x Mrs Criss Rating: M Warnings: Domestic abuse, noncon elements, major character death, canon-standard content, bullying, racist slurs, violence, strong language Chapters: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], 6, [7]

Ao3: [x] Summary: The end...

July 1989

“Get the fuck up and talk to Burp!” Victor didn’t open his eyes, moaning in protest when he felt the warm, cozy blanket disappear. Ice cold air conditioning stung against his skin, and forced him to curl up, his legs breaking out in gooseflesh. “I am tired of him calling!”

Not content with just stealing his comforter, his Mama grabbed the corners of his pillow, and pulled hard. His head struck against the lumpy mattress, jolting him wide awake. He rolled to try and grab it, but it was already too far out of reach.

Mama’s face was an emotionless mask – her eyes permanently fixed in a droopy, tired gaze. But Victor knew it was hiding a sadness that had been wrapped up inside bitterness and buried so deep, it was practically Mumm-Ra. He knew it had been his actions that had summoned the Ancient Spirits of Evil to create those feelings, and he was sorry, but his one attempt to apologize had been thwarted by Butch. Butch stood in the hallway with his back turned, telling Mama that some boys needed stronger discipline.

“Andy always was too soft,” Butch said, ominously. “Spare the rod, spoil the lamb, as the good Lord commanded.”

Victor hadn’t quite drawn up the strength to try again.

His Mama walked out the door, bedding in her arms, and Victor was glad to see her go. He glanced around the room. It was empty, but he still felt his skin crawling – leftover feelings from his nightmare. He wished he could pull his blanket in tight, and roll his face into his pillow. But it was time to wake up, apparently. Then again, maybe, if he turned just right, he could sleep without them.

After a few moments of mental debate, Victor rolled out of bed. The walk down the hall was slow, due in part to the swollen knee that Bill Denbrough left him with. In his ninja turtle boxers, he could very clearly see the yellow and purple decorating the skin around it. It was like someone had dipped his knee in watercolor, like an Easter egg. At least it wasn’t black anymore, or bleeding.

The other part was due to the headache throbbing away on the right side of his face. That, too, was because of a well-aimed rock. But while the swelling around the gash had lessened, the pain beneath it grew, and shifted, until every flash of light made him want to vomit.

When he turned the corner into the kitchen, he winced as the sunlight struck him dead on from the window. His Mama turned to look at him, and then gestured to the counter, where she had set the phone down. Without a word to him, she went back to making herself, and only herself, lunch.

Vic wasn’t hungry anyway.

“Hey Belch,” Victor said as soon as the phone was to his ear. He pressed his fingers into his head and turned away from the window. It soothed it a little, but the headache was persistent.

Henry’s voice came through the line on the other side, aggravating it even more, “Hey asshole, why are you avoiding me?”

“Megatron,” Victor said, pinching the bridge of his nose. He was not in the mood to deal with this.

“That doesn’t work on conversations,” Henry stated, sounding more than a little annoyed. “Now, answer the question. Why. Are you. Avoiding me?”

“Fuck off, Henry. I’m not feeling well,” Victor lied. Well, only half lied. “I have a concussion, remember? Doctor says take it easy.”

“It’s been a week—”

“You know more than my doctor, do you?” Victor asked. He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice, but it crept out all the same.

“No, but I know you were feeling good enough to go to the movies with Peter Gordon last night,” Henry said. “He was getting awful chummy from what I saw.”

Victor’s nose flared as he took a deep breath, and suffocated that anger before it could break out and get him in trouble.

“What, you wanna say something about that?” Victor paused for a moment, wanting to say more, but his Mama was still within five feet. So instead, he said, “Marcia accused him of cheating, which is a bitch thing to do because Peter’s head over heels for her skanky ass. So we went out to get his mind off it.”

Victor paused again as his Mama passed. She carried a small thing of soup and a diet coke into the living room, where she was watching her Dallas VHS tapes. Lowering his voice, Victor added: “You know his girl, right? Marcia Fadden? She had a pregnancy scare last Christmas? Didn’t know whether it would be you or Peter was going to stand at the end of her daddy’s shotgun on her wedding day. Funny thing is, weren’t you seeing someone else around that time?”

“I didn’t…” Henry sighed. It was deep, and weighted. Victor could almost see Henry on the other end of the line, clutching the phone as he curled over it. It was the same way Henrietta had stood when talking on the phone. “Vic, I never had sex with her, or any of them.”

That was genuinely surprising. The tables flipped for a moment, Victor wasn’t sure if he believed Henry. Instead of looking at that deeper, he shook it off.

“Look, whatever, alright. I don’t care,” Victor said. “I’m just taking a breather. The last two times we hung out, we got hurt. So unless we’re talking Dairy Queen and a new Nintendo game, I’m out.”

Victor didn’t need to mention that Henry had promised they’d talk last time. It had been the selling point of his pitch, even.

“I’ll explain everything,” Henry had said, his tongue dripping silver and honey. But if it wasn’t Belch hovering around like he was the mother hen making sure his idiot chicks didn’t hurt themselves, it was Henry shutting down whenever Victor even started talking about it. His eyes would fall to the ground, his hands between his knees, and his mouth stubbornly silent until a distraction came along.

Trying to spell out his fear, and his needs, without accusing Henry of anything directly was trickier than anything Victor had ever done. But it was impossible when Henry refused to listen. So Victor resorted to the age old tradition amongst Criss men, which was avoiding the problem. He was a little young to drop a paycheck on some whiskey – and maybe he would’ve never done that anyway – so instead, it was kitten-napping.

That’s what Mrs Huggins called it when someone had a series of proper hour to two-hour long naps sandwiching a large snack – kitten-napping.

They couldn’t carry on as they were. Victor’s heart couldn’t take it. He loved Henry – loved him. But he also hated Henry so much more than he ever hated anyone in his life. Because Henry knew him better than anyone else on the planet, and still had the audacity to peg him for something he would never do.

“You weren’t exactly complaining,” Henry said, with a dangerous tone. “I mean, ain’t you the one that crushed that little Pickaninny’s fingers with your boot?”

That was true, and Victor regretted it. He regretted it long before Bill Denbrough and five other kids showed up armed to the teeth with large, jagged rocks. Victor regretted it the minute he got out of the car. By the time he actually put hands on the Hanlon boy, his mind had detached itself, and his emotions had become a void.

But once he was in it, he was in it. It was as always – every kick, every thrown rock, each one represented something he wanted to scream.

The rock that smacked Trashmouth between the eyes was Andy Criss leaving for Bangor after dragging his family to live some poor ass hick life on a farm. The one that hit Tits on the chest was stupid Henry, and stupid Henry’s stupid paranoia. The one that got Eddie was Butch Bowers playing with his hair, like a fucking creepazoid pervert.

Victor was almost feeling better when Bill Denbrough locked eyes with him. He knew it was over then, but he went down swinging. He got Bill so many times before that final blow took out his knee and Vic was out of the game. Even worse than the pain, though, was watching the kid let blow after blow fall off him, like he didn’t even feel it.

If you had told Vic a week ago that he’d be frightened of Stuttering Bill, he would’ve laughed. But that kid was the terminator, and Victor neverwanted to fuck with him again.

“That was him,” Victor finally said. “I said we got hurt. I got a concussion, man. Patrick’s dead. You couldn’t even stand up for like an hour. So how about I stay home today, okay?”

There was silence as both boys waited for the other to say something. Almost too quietly, Henry started filling it with what took Victor a moment to realize was song lyrics.

“Maybe I didn’t love you quite as often as I could,” he said, his voice tender. “And maybe I didn’t treat you quite as good as I should. If I made you feel second best, Vic I’m sorry I was blind. But you are always on my mind.”

Victor had to cover his face, physically trying to keep the smile from breaking out. It was such a stupid little thing, but it was everything. To hear him say things like that, even borrowed from someone else, it created that glow beneath Victor’s skin, warming his cheeks into a red splotchy blush. He didn’t want to let go of his anger, but it was slipping.

“Pretty ballsy using Elvis to try and apologize,” Victor commented. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his Mama still wasn’t listening. She wasn’t. She couldn’t care less. “Wasn’t he the one who said ‘we can’t go on together with suspicious minds?’”

“Shut up. And I wasn’t quoting Elvis, that’s the Pet Shop Boys… isn’t it?” Henry asked. The smile on Victor’s face couldn’t have gotten any larger. He bit into his bottom lip to keep a laugh from escaping. Henry chuckled a little himself; it was low and throaty, and tickled Victor’s ear pleasantly. He felt himself leaning towards Henry’s charm, the trap closing in around him. He could almost feel the teeth of it digging right into his heart.

It was the same as last time, and Victor was aware of this. He still couldn’t stop it happening.

“It was Elvis first,” Victor said, the smile creeping into his voice. He twirled the phone cord around his finger, listening as Henry took several deep breaths, preparing for some kind of speech. Vic expected something cheesy, maybe something trashy. He didn’t expect anything close to what came next.

“Look, I don’t have a… suspicious mind,” Henry started, his words chosen carefully. “I know you aren’t like that. But Patrick…” Henry was speaking slowly, as he did when he didn’t want to say what he was about to. It immediately drew all of Victor’s attention. “He’s smarter than me. He dresses better. He has better hair, and all his teeth… and he wouldn’t ask you do weird shit during… you know…”

The silence was thick. The phone cord uncurled and fell free of Vic’s hands. He heard Henry sniffling, like he’d been crying. “Henry—”

“And I was afraid that you were getting tired of my shit,” Henry said, his voice cracking. “I know now it was a stupid thing to say. I wasn’t thinking when I said it. I was just scared because I’ve got nothing to give you.”

Victor knew he should’ve been angry still. After all, Henry wasn’t really saying anything different. The accusation was still there, only the narrative around it changed. But at the same time, hearing it in those words, Victor found some feelings of guilt surfacing.

Sure, he’d spent years soothing away all the shit Butch put in Henry, things like feeling stupid, or weak, or cruel. But who put it in his head that he was a bad boyfriend? Or that he, Henry fucking Bowers, whose hair was soft hay and skin was the sun itself, whose eyes were painted by the Gods, was anything less than desirable?

Victor would trade owning the world with anyone else for one private moment with Henry, and the idea that he had failed to somehow make that clear was both horrifying and heart-wrenching.

“I’m pretty sure Patrick was into weirder shit than hair pulling, first of all,” Victor said. Henry laughed, but the sound of it made Victor certain that Henry had been crying. “Second, I don’t want anything from you but you, and that’s something nobody else can ever give me.”

Mama was still not paying attention. Victor did a quick check when he realized what he said. On Henry’s line, he could hear noise in the background as someone moved around. Henry’s voice changed immediately, becoming louder, colder, “Anyway, my dad left his gun with me and he won’t be back until late. It’s just me, Belch, and some cold beers. Come on and let’s destroy some shit.”

Victor rubbed at his dull headache, knowing that loud noises were only going to make it worse. But the siren song of unsupervised target practice was hard to ignore by itself, let alone in the shadow of what Henry said. It dulled the warning bells telling Vic not to fall for it again.

Before he could say anything, Henry already knew his decision. He heard Henry’s hand close over the mouthpiece as he whispered very clearly to Belch, “he’s gonna say yes. Go! Now!”

“Tell him not to wait outside,” Belch said. He sounded far too excited, and Vic’s resolve was gone. He could practically see Belch’s face, all bright and happy, like a puppy waiting for his master to come home. It was that final thing needed to seal his fate. The trap closed completely, and Victor was a dead man walking.

“Alright,” Victor said, knowing he’d regret it later. “I’ll be there shortly.”

“Cool,” Henry said. “Belch will come get you.” Then, taking Vic completely by surprise: “I love you.”

The line went dead. Once the phone was back on the cradle, Victor walked back to his room to get dressed. He had to take a moment to lean against the door, his heart coming alive.

You’re such a fucking idiot, his brain supplied. Victor didn’t disagree. Still, he threw on that sleeveless shirt Henry liked, and fixed his hair.

His emotions were a roller coaster – soaring high when he remembered how it sounded to hear Henry say he loved him – and falling low when he thought of how many times he had overlooked some important clue to Henry’s insecurities.

When he heard Amy, Vic decided not to think about it, but just to continue forward with a better understanding of things.

He tried to say goodbye as he walked by his Mama for the last time, but she barely even looked up at him. She would remember it later – his little wave and quiet bye, mama. The way his face was young, and full of hope. It would be about the only thing she remembered, for as soon as the door was closed, she pulled out the vodka and rum Vic had brought her nearly a year ago.

She would still be sitting there, drunk and crying, when she got the call later from Officer Conley.

~~~

There was a power in holding a gun that just couldn’t be matched with anything else in the world. Not fucking someone so hard they forgot how to be human; not getting off a good comeback and shattering someone’s ego; not diving off a cliff or screaming at tornadoes. Being on the right side of a firearm felt like what Victor imagined He-Man felt like as he thrust the Power Sword to the sky.

For those few seconds before you pulled that trigger, you were immortal.

He couldn’t imagine being on the wrong side of one. Staring into an endless dark barrel, knowing that death was one quick burst away, could make a man crumble – not a man made of paper, as Butch so eloquently put it, but even the ones made of stone and steel and leather. It made men who hated life remember what was worth living for, and it could make men who lived it to the fullest realize that they just want it all to end.

But Butch wasn’t God, and he wasn’t Superman. He might’ve felt like it when he held up that gun, the same as Victor had. But he was the paper man, not Henry. He was a paper man with a powerful toy, and he needed to prove something to someone, though Victor didn’t know who. Maybe it was himself.

Regardless, he casually aimed that gun, and then he pulled the trigger.

Don’t show him you’re afraid…

As Vic leaned back and tried to block the light with his bangs, his headache having taken over the back side of his head completely, he glanced over to where Henry had been sitting. The older boy was no longer there, but was coming down the driveway. Victor hadn’t seen him move, but judging by the stiff way he was walking, he still hadn’t quite recovered.

They’d all been sure Butch was going to actually hit Henry – none more than the target himself. But instead of Henry’s chest, it was the ground at his feet that exploded. Three shots, each one getting closer and closer to Henry’s boot, until one left a scuff mark, and a dark, dampness spread across Henry’s lap.

Victor watched Henry shuffle past them, heading towards his house. Victor started to walk towards him, but Henry just gave him a look, silently commanding Victor to stay put. He stood outside on his porch for a few moments, and then disappeared behind the front door. Victor did not follow, but he didn’t like it.

“Maybe he’s just getting some clean pants,” Belch said, his voice dropping into a whisper. “Look, when he comes back, let’s just go straight to ma’s house. My mom can take in my old clothes to fit him, and we can figure out the sleeping arrangements later, but the basement ain’t that cold right now. It ain’t the best solution, but there won’t be no fuckin’ crazies tryin’ to put holes in him neither.”

“Butch knows that trick now,” Vic said, crossing his arms. He rolled a rock around with the toe of his boot, thinking. “What if we just… kept driving? How long you think before we reach Canada?”

“I can’t leave my mom. I’m the only one she’s got,” he said. Vic turned around, closed his eyes, and pressed his forehead against Amy’s roof. All he needed was one good idea— “What the fuck?”

Victor looked up at his friend. Belch was slowly leaning away from Amy, his fists clenching. Vic spun around to see whatever it was, preparing to punch someone.

Henry was back on the porch, the screen door slamming shut behind him. He turned to face them, slow, stiff, like he was thinking. Vic’s eyes fixated on the red spots on Henry’s face, watching as they slowly ran down his face, becoming red streaks. As soon as Vic realized that it was blood decorating his boyfriend, the panic was immediate.

“Vic, no…”

He forgot Belch was even there as he moved towards Henry, a singular train of thought taking over the whole station: Henry’s hurt.

He was going to cup Henry’s face, push back his hair, and find out where the wounds were – find out how to fix them. Vic didn’t see the knife in Henry’s hand, at first. Belch did, but he might as well have been shouting at a wall, because Vic didn’t hear him over the sound of his own anger rising. Just as soon as he realized what Henry’s intentions were, it was already done. The blade moved left to right, leaving a red smile in its wake.

Victor felt nothing worse than the prick of a mosquito bite. It was the heat in his throat as he desperately tried to pull another breath through it that told him something was wrong.

Belch was screaming, but it was far away. Blood crept between Vic’s fingers as he tried to push it back in. He felt it moving through his throat, rushing to the newly created opening, trying to escape. It flew out of his mouth as he choked on it, speckling Henry’s face even worse than before.

Victor stepped away from Henry, landing on his hurt leg wrong. His knee buckled, and his ankle twisted. His headache was screaming when his skull collided with firm soil, but then numbed itself to nothing. Lying there face down in the warm grass, it occurred to Victor that he was dying, and it had been Henry that killed him.

It just didn’t feel real. His body was working a wonderful magic, trying to lull him to sleep. Everything felt dull, and dreamlike. Even Butch looked like some child’s nightmarish take on himself. His skin sallow and eyes sunken, looking more Frankenstein than police officer, with orange pom poms instead of buttons on his uniform. If Victor could’ve felt anything, he might’ve felt fear. But even that was lost.

“That Hank. Always did like putting his little sword in the throats of pretty boys. Just like his old man,” Butch said, his voice sounding off with its playful tone. He crept closer, moving in large, slow jerks. “I know what you think about me, you disgusting, dirty little thing. You tease and taunt, but you always run away. Now you can’t run, can you?”

He smiled a hideous grin, teeth as sharp as a shark’s beneath the layers of rot. Victor’s scream was as much blood as it was air. The Butchenstein would’ve lunged for him if Belch hadn’t hit the ground between them, Henry following after. Vic realized that he had to have tripped over Victor’s body, but he didn’t feel anything at all.

Henry threw a punch, and Belch caught it, and then twisted Henry’s wrist. Henry let out a feral cry, and brought his other hand down. There was an odd squelch – the same sound a cantaloupe made when being cut open. When his hand came back up, it was covered in blood, the glint of the knife barely visible beneath it. Henry was bringing his knife down again, and again, and again, but Victor could only hear it.

His eyes were fixed on Butch, who was leaning over him, pulling his hands away from his neck.

“Now it’s my turn to eat you, pretty boy.”

But the world had already turned a bright white for a few seconds, and then, it went black.

#stephen king #it 2017 #it movie #fanfiction #it #henry bowers #victor criss #writing #death scene #it prompts #henvic #henry x victor #victor x henry #henry/victor #victor/henry

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thechocoboexpress-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Relief

WOO! I ACTUALLY LIKE THIS ONE.

This guy clocks in at 2,814 words and 15,549 characters.

P.S. Amaranth is also known as Purpleheart, lookit up, it’s lovely.

@hypaalicious @wrathwritesthings IT’S H E R E, YA’LL WILL ACTUALLY GET TO READ A LITTLE BIT OF INTERACTION FROM CAMELLIA WITH ARDYN NOW.

High Commander Lord Ravus Nox Fleuret is about as observant as a brick, he’s no sleuth, no spy, it’s why he plays at war, not politics.

But even he in all his bluntness can notice some… Quirks. To that of Chancellor Ardyn Izunia, the man he’s grudgingly forced to work alongside almost constantly.

Ardyn Izunia is a man without shame or morals, and will use anything to keep the edge in a debate, time and time again would the clever man use an enemy politicians disabilities or ailments against them,- while maintaining a false friendliness all the while- bringing up an Altissian council member’s failing lungs to make him second-guess a decision that would work against Niflheim.

This is where the strange hitch in Ardyn’s personality comes up, for all his willingness to dig at a persons’ shortcomings, he refuses to even acknowledge that an individual is in a wheelchair or braces, eyes fluidly skipping straight past such hindrances, there’s been more than one instance where a deal could’ve been turned to their favor if the Chancellor would have just called their physical capacity into question, and yet he without fail ignores that there is anything to call into question.

But this strange reaction to people that need braces or wheelchairs doesn’t seem to stop there, Ravus has become well acquainted with how important the facial expression of the Chancellor is. If at any point the man’s face flattens out you’ve entered a dangerous territory, like playing roulette, sometimes there’s this… Unusually helpful side of him that comes out, uttering quiet advice or recommending foods with the strangest look on his face, however most of the time it meant something very bad is about to happen.

He never gets physically violent, and yet he spits bile so viciously that the person he’s inflicted such foul words upon recoils as if they had been struck.

Ravus wonders every time something like that happens where the darkness in the Chancellor comes from.

He’s seen that face often.

And yet there’s one specific instance that the High Commander recalls the most acutely, once again he was forced to suffer the company of the condescending Chancellor in Tenebrae, staying quiet as Ardyn made jabs at him disguised as simple friendly conversation. He was in the middle of one such jabs when the daughter of a Tenebraen diplomat arrived alongside a nurse and the diplomat himself, and Ardyn could not keep his eyes off of her.

At first Ravus thought that maybe the Chancellor knew her, but not once did the obnoxious weasel talkative man actually go to interact with her, and that look, that expressionless mask as he bored holes into her, Ravus didn’t understand what the woman had done wrong, she was a sickly quiet thing, with all assortments of metal contraptions to keep her body straightened, and she was stuck in a wheelchair, she’d lost the strength in her bones to walk a long time ago.

That day didn’t seem to be very pleasant for her either, she was constantly almost in tears, and her father didn’t seem to care in the slightest, if anything he was annoyed by her, clenching his jaw every time she sniffled and shifted, and the nurse looked, well. Helpless. It was the first time Ardyn moved from his spot in fifteen minutes, perhaps the longest he’d ever been quiet in his damn life, too, and Ravus almost expected him to tell the nurse to move her elsewhere.

Instead he crouched down to eye level, offered a handkerchief, and murmured ingredients to the nurse beside her- something about a salve- before turning to the young woman again and telling her something about ‘It will smell exceedingly foul, but it will help you with the pain.’

The woman came back in tears the next day, singing the high praises about Chancellor Izunia, and how it was the first time she’d felt this good in years.

That, to this day remains the first and only time Ravus Nox Fleuret has ever seen Ardyn do something genuinely kind.

Ravus had tried to ask Ardyn what that was about, and was met with a vicious glint in the Chancellor’s eyes that left no room to question as to what would happen if Ravus asked again.

Because why?

Why would Ravus deserve to know about Camellia? Why would he deserve to know about the years and years of painstakingly crafting medicine to help her, of the appointments and the restless nights with his face in his hands, listening to her sniffle and choke on nothing as she tried to grapple with the pain.

The world then didn’t deserve her, let alone the spoiled brats now, that war with one another, and butcher one another, and have the audacity to think they’re any better than their enemies while they experiment on their own children.

Certain memories feel as old as they are, some feel like they occurred only yesterday. These are among those memories.

The smell of fine made drinks and food and the hum-thrum of people going about their day. Back when his chest didn’t ache and he didn’t realize how terrible the world was.

Fourteen days it’s been, no letter nor signal from Tiel informing him of whether or not he has the schematics, or if he’s even alive at this point, perhaps he’s stolen them and made off with them, or maybe Niflheim has executed him for his crimes.

But alas, now wasn’t the time to dwell. Dwelling was a foul thing that sours the mood. And why would he want to be in a sour mood today of all days? He gets to see his daughter after all. Five days without your child can make the heart ache so terribly.

The double doors of his home outside the castle are taller than even he, beautiful Amaranth and glass like a circle cut into four sections. Even from here the familiar scent of books and vanilla and just slightly wrought iron crawls out from between the gaps in the door- inviting those that approach inside.

But that doesn’t compare to what greets him when he opens the door, the familiar blast of warm air that combats the snowy outside, and the sound of women giggling from deeper in the house, past the foyer, Ardyn was sure to stroll slowly, poking his head into every room he came across.

Finally he found himself at the sunken kitchen, where three steps down the checkered rich redwood floor abruptly changes to cobblestone and instead of white marble it’s loose gray brick for walls, it’s the only circular room in the house- with a curved wrought iron window sitting at least fifteen feet above the highest countertop, casting a sharp sliver of pale winter light into an otherwise warmly lit room.

The kitchen is perhaps the fondest place in his home for Ardyn, it’s the only place he didn’t build in the house, it’s in fact one of the oldest places in Insomnia, it was a farm of some sort before the rest of the city was built around it. Ardyn can distinctly remember as a young boy with scuffed knees and wild hair, how he’d walk or run past the massive pile of bricks and the only portion of the building left was the mill itself.

He was seventeen when they’d planned to tear it down the rest of the way, and Ardyn had voiced his disappointment that they’d waste history over dinner, his father, the King and ever the opportunist when it came to instilling principles in his sons, immediately asked what he’d do. And of course, he’d build into it, integrate it into a home or shelter or public building of some sort.

And so his father offered him this, he’d get to build his own dream home there with the mill attached, but he had to be there every day to help build it himself.

And here we are, a massive home where the oldest part of the building is a kitchen with a ceiling that's four floors high.

But back to the point-

He can hear the giggling, louder now. His daughters quiet bubbly voice and the slightly lower, stranger voice of her caretaker, the only person that had not only been kind and patient enough to her for Ardyn’s taste, but also with an agreeable enough personality that the two had become fast friends.

It’s when he steps up the three steps into the dining room that he finds them, Camellia in her wheelchair- he’d carved elaborate designs into it himself a few months before, ‘only the finest for the most beautiful Princess in all of Eos’ he’d said, she’d giggled and her warm blue eyes sparkled at the words- bent over snickering as her caretaker Gentiana whispered gossip about the nobles her age in Lucis into her ear.

“My my, don’t you both know it’s unladylike to speak foul of suitors?” He’d taken off his hat and placed it on the rack, grinning as his daughters eyes snapped to him and she lit up like stars in the sky.

“Father! You didn’t inform me you’d be home today! I would’ve better prepared a welcome home for you.” He’d approached her before she could begin the arduous task of wheeling out from under the table to greet him and knelt down to kiss her on the cheek warmly.

“Precisely why I said nothing. I don’t want grand gatherings, little flower. I just want you here and happy.”

She’d hummed her acknowledgement and squealed when he suddenly snatched her up out of the chair, plopping her down into the seat closest to his as cooks began to place food down for them. They’d discussed their weeks with each other and Camellia had nearly gotten her father to choke to death on his wine when she asked if he met any ravishing ladies on the road. Then she got Gentiana to laugh when he’d incredulously denied and she without missing a beat followed up with: “My apologies, any handsome men?”

And though this day was the beaming idol of a pleasant time, not every day was, there were never arguments, no. But Camellia’s health varied harshly from day to day, there were the times where she was okay enough to try and hide the pain, giving him a nervous smile and hoping he didn’t notice how puffy her eyes were from crying.

But then there were the times where it was so terrible, so achingly bad, that he’d have to come up to her bedridden frame and hold her against his chest while she shook and hiccuped and whined into his collar from the pain. And he’d want to cry hearing her rasp and wheeze and fight desperately for oxygen.

After that evening Ardyn’s patience wore very thin, not willing to keep waiting, waiting for Tiel to inform him of whether or not he got the schematics for his daughters’ braces. Until one day the schematics by themselves were at the foot of his doorstep. With a little note that said ‘Sorry I’m late. P.S. Please don’t hunt me down and skewer me your highest-ness-est-ness-however-them-fancy-titles-goes.’

He’d laughed like a madman for a hot moment, before peeling open the parchment and looking at what was inside.

And suddenly it wasn’t a victory anymore. Because these were some of the strangest blueprints he’d ever seen. Elaborate copper and mythril rods and thick leather bindings and soft cloth and wool so the metal didn’t dig into the wearer's skin. A need for proper measurement so it’d fit right and a lot of heated metalwork.

Anyone with enough experience in any of these departments would know what they were, and where they came from, making it all too easy to hold the knowledge over the Prince’s head. So he set off looking to rent out an entire smithy. If he couldn’t hire someone, he’d just have to do it himself.

And that made for some very interesting stories. Ones where he grabbed red hot mythril and it immediately burned straight through his skin and almost to the bone. Or the many many times he stabbed holes clean through his fingers and the palms of his hands as well. All the massive gashes from incidents with carving tools, and worst of all was an incident that wasn’t even his fault! Equipment in the smithy gave way and his arm was crushed underneath very heavy metal shards, it’d taken the smiths an hour to get the debris off and even then the whole thing looked chopped up and almost purple.

It was a damned miracle that he didn’t lose his arm. And upon returning home after heavy medical attention his daughter had grabbed him and begged that he stopped with whatever mad gift he was making for her, that no gift could be worth watching him inflict one more injury upon himself for her.

It was one of the only times where his daughter and Gentiana took care of him instead of the other way around, fatigue, exhaustion, blood loss, and a badly mangled arm finally got him to take a six blessed break from his mission in the smithy.

But alas, despite Camellia’s desperately trying to convince him to stop, six weeks later he was back to the forge working on his masterpiece. And he was close. So close.

It took another two months to finish it. And while Ardyn was disappointed in himself for being so gods’ damned slow, it was here and that was all that mattered now, he needed to remind himself to get something very expensive as a gift for Gentiana, as she was so kind as to provide his daughters measurements no hassle.

His hands were bruised darkly again, but this time he remembered to have the courtesy to bandage them before taking his gift to his daughter. And my it was heavier than he expected. However, spread out the weight should be rather comfortable.

At this time she was not at home, rather in the castle visiting her aunt and uncle, and when he found her she was out in the courtyard, with Gentiana reading her books as she let her feet rest in the water.

He’d ‘hidden’ the bag with the braces behind his back and cleared his throat comically loud, and when Camellia had turned to look at him she’d giggled at the very obvious bag behind his back.

“Hello, father! Say, before you begin talking, could you help me to my wheelchair, seeing as your hands are so very clearly unoccupied.” She’d laughed when he gave her a crooked grin.

He’d set the bag on the ground and immediately scooped her up into his arms before delicately placing her into her seat. Making note of the fact that once again Gentiana was smiling and staring directly at him. With her eyes closed.

“My gift is done, darling, are you ready to see what it is?” He’d eagerly scurried over to the bag, picking it up in both arms and laying it slowly onto her lap. And when she’d opened the bag and saw what was inside, she was already almost in tears.

“Y-you made me the braces? This is what you’ve been working on for so long?” She’d never taken her father for a shallow man but still she hadn’t expected him to give her this of all the things in the world.

He watched from the side as she pulled the bracing out, in Ardyn’s opinion it looked almost identical to a padded, leathery skeleton without it’s head, and he watched as her face scrunched up in pain before relaxing into a relieved sigh each time she placed a brace on.

By the time she’d finished placing each item on all her fingers and toes, arms and legs, neck and torso she’d been in tears. Not from pain or frustration this time. But from the relief, it pushed and held muscle and bone and joints and frayed and worn out nerves into place and she cried because she hadn’t felt this good in years.

And it most certainly made sure there was no way in hell she would walk, as it kept her stiff as a ramrod underneath her clothes in every point of her body, but she didn’t care, she didn’t walk anyways. And she’d practically thrown herself into her fathers arms and wept and thanked him over and over for this wonderful gift of his.

And to him. Every injury, frustration and pain, was worth it just for that alone.

#Jo kwehs #text #Ardyn Izunia #Ardyn Lucis Caelum #drunkle #trash jesus #Golden Garbo™#ffxv #final fantasy xv #Ravus Nox Fleuret #rage bird #Hallelujah I actually like this fic #Gentiana #Constantly Sleep Standing

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horyu-ji · 5 years ago

Photo

A nice reflection about Katie Bouman’s role now that this is old news, by Misty S. Boyer.

There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's. So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma. "She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!" There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie. And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history.

As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then? Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it. The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo? The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate. And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from? Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well. Data that would need to be sorted. Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand.

To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors". CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman. At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information. That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created.

The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole. This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at less-than-equal contribution to others.

While it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives. If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

A list of the various articles read to piece this together:

The twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. Another Twitter thread here.

Caltech colloquium, Friday, April, 12th — “Imaging a Black Hole [Shadow] with the Event Horizon Telescope”.

A 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP.

This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm.

A 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work.

A paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author.

Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub.

A paper describing Chael's work.

The official EHT telescope website.

This article speaks to some of the other people involved.

This is the article that describes CHIRP data sorting.

This article mentions Bouman coming up with a new algorithm.

This article explains Honma's significant role. Another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is an integral part. While I'm intentionally highlighting her contributions in defense of her, it should be understood that, like with most scientific breakthroughs, there were many unsung heroes.

#science #women #society #incels #people #old news #black hole girl

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courtneytincher · 6 years ago

Text

Inside Matteo Salvini's Secret Russian Money Machine

Alberto Pizzoli//AFP/ReutersROME–Italy’s Mussolini-channeling, selfie-taking, race-baiting far-right leader, it might be said, knows no shame. Over the course of 14 months as interior minister and vice premier, while acting as if he already ran the government, Matteo Salvini also became something of a cop-impersonating wannabe hero, taking a selfie in every insignia-laden security windbreaker and polo shirt he could squeeze into to try to somehow channel the power of the uniform to puff up his ego and invincibility. He even directed a police officer to take his teenage son on a joyride using an official security service jetski during his summer vacation. And it all seemed to be working very well–until it didn’t.Salvini, leader of the former Northern League separatist party, now known simply as the League, doubled his support from a paltry 17 percent in March 2018 national elections to more than 34 percent in European parliamentary elections in May. He had been on the periphery of mainstream politics, thought to be too extreme in his rhetoric and adoration for Benito Mussolini's nationalistic style of governing to ever actually come close to power. An Italian Expose Documents Moscow Money Allegedly Funding Italy's Far-Right SalviniBut with Donald Trump’s endorsement on a campaign visit in Philadelphia in 2016 and careful curation by Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Salvini went viral–quite literally. He hijacked social media in a way no Italian leader had ever come close to doing and held Trumpian campaign-style rallies–more than 200 in just over a year–rather than spending time behind the desk. He might have apologized for the jetski incident, but he was unapologetically racist in his policies, most of which were announced via Facebook Live. Then, last month, Salvini overplayed his hand, provoking a catastrophic collapse of the Italian government in the expectation new elections would put him in office as the full-fledged prime minister.But the whole time Salvini was reaching for what he hoped would be unbridled power, he was up to something fishy behind the scenes–and, as with his American idol, that something involved the Russians. A series of journalistic revelations in recent months make the case Salvini was enabling Russian interference in exchange for dirty money filtering into his political party coffers. And in a dramatic parliamentary confrontation, the prime minister Salvini hoped to force out threw the accusations in his face. Last February, an Italian exposé pulled back the curtain on a scandal that has yet to be fully unraveled. But it involves a group of nefarious Russians with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin attempting to buy influence in Europe's far-right parties through hard cash and dirty fuel. And Salvini, long an unrepentant Russophile, seemed all-too-happy to oblige. As accounts of the scandal were drip fed by the Italian press, Salvini attempted his midsummer parliamentary coup. Obviously he hoped early elections would hand him full powers, but may also have wanted to get the “Russian Affair” out of the headlines. Whatever the reason, the coalition’s mild-mannered professorial prime minister Giuseppe Conte, who had for 14 months carried out Salvini's hardline bidding on migration and national security, suddenly found his voice. In a stunning resignation speech last month, Conte condemned Salvini as a radical lout and a faux Christian. In a scathing 60 minute parting shot in parliament, Conte accused Salvini–seated right bedside him–of everything from blasphemy for kissing his rosary when it was convenient to hedonism for inviting scantily-clad supporters to lap dance during the national anthem at a mojito-fueled beach rally. But of all the accusations Conte lobbed at his soon-to-be former interior minister and vice premier, one thing stood out. In a not-so-veiled accusation, Conte implied that perhaps Salvini's master wasn't his own ego, but Vladimir Putin. There was an audible gasp in parliament when Conte crossed the invisible line, putting his hand ever-so-softly on Salvini's shoulder and saying Salvini “still had some explaining to do” about a certain October 2018 meeting Salvini’s associates had in Moscow in which details were discussed about funneling millions of euros into Salvini’s League party through an illicit kickback scheme involving underpriced Russian fuel. “The Russian affair deserved to be clarified also for its international implications,” Conte told him during his speech. “You refused to share the information.”* * *In fact, a few weeks before Salvini pulled the plug on the government, the “Metropol” affair, named for the Moscow hotel in which a secret meeting between Salvini associate Gianluca Savoini and Putin's henchmen took place, was that he pulled the plug on the governing coalition. What is important is that Savoini, the man at the center of the Russian affair, is one of Salvini's closest allies, but has been kept at a discreet distance from his governmental affairs. He is married to a Russian woman named Irina whose personal history is opaque. The couple own homes in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Milan, and he frequently tweets photos of Red Square with the caption “Third Rome.” Savoini is the head of the Russian-Lombardy commercial group set in northern Italy, and has been referred to by Italian Vanity Fair as Salvini’s “sherpa,” who “doesn't speak a word of Russian but who is fluent in the language of politics.”Not long after the story first broke in February, an Italian magistrate put Savoini under criminal investigation on suspicion of international corruption, along with Gianluca Meranda and a former banker named Francesco Vannucci–the other Italian men reportedly at the table during the Moscow meeting. The mens’ homes in Italy have been searched and documents said to be bad for Salvini have been sequestered. Both have admitted to being at the Metropol, but each has denied wrongdoing, pleading instead that they were negotiating legitimate private business deals that, while they might have looked bad, given international sanctions against Russia, were not illegal. Prosecutors looking into the affair have told The Daily Beast that they do not think the dirty oil deal was ever carried out, but the plans alone constitute a crime whether they came to fruition or not because of the ties to Salvini's political party. Salvini was called to the Italian senate to answer questions earlier this summer, but he refused, calling the allegations “fantasies” brought on by political opponents. He said he had never taken a ruble from the Russians, although it appears he would have had the deal not fallen through. (One is reminded of U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure a huge real estate deal in Moscow. It failed, but not for want of trying, even as he ran for president in 2016.)Igor Dodon is Vladimir Putin’s Moldovan Mini-MeThe Moscow meeting was first reported by the Italian newsmagazine Espresso last year and was picked up by BuzzFeed, which has since teamed up with the investigative news site Bellingcat and the Russian site the Insider to dig deeper. Earlier this week, BuzzFeed and the others published new audio tape from the Metropol meeting in which a voice identified as Savoini’s can be heard trying to close a deal for $72 million that would have been funneled into Salvini's League party ahead of the European Parliamentary elections last May. The Russians caught on tape are identified as Andrey Yuryevich Kharchenko and Ilya Andreevich Yakunin. A third man at the meeting known only as “Yuri” has not been identified by name. In a hearing on the case Thursday in Milan, lawyers for Savoini argued that the BuzzFeed audio is inadmissible because its origin cannot be verified. It is widely thought to have been taped by one of the men in attendance at the Moscow meeting, found during the police investigations of Savoini and the other men, then leaked to the press by someone who wanted to do damage to Salvini. The journalists who had been trailing Savoini in Moscow also have photos of all the men at the Metropol that day which have been entered into evidence in the case. Lawyers also argued that Salvini had not been privy to the details of the meeting and that Savoini was acting on his own to benefit the League.The Russians identified on the tape are no strangers to Putin's inner circle. Kharchenko is an aide to Russia’s most notorious alt-right leader, Alexander Dugin. During the five-year-long war in Ukraine, Dugin emerged as a nationalist leader, denying globalism and liberal values; but after the failure of the Russia-backed forces to claim more territory in eastern Ukraine he claimed “Devil disrupted the Russian Spring.” That Putin would court someone like Salvini is hardly surprising. Salvini has posted selfies from Red Square wearing a t-shirt with Putin’s image and is no stranger to Moscow, traveling there often both officially and privately. He has been a strong advocate of lifting European sanctions on Russia and campaigned for the European Parliament on forging closer ties to Russia. In the past three or four years Putin has supported far-right ideologues and has met frequently with one of Salvini’s closest allies in Europe, French politician Marine Le Pen. Putin also has met Hungarian leader Victor Orban, who refers to George Soros as “Satan,” and with the far-right Czech President Milos Zeman, who are all part of the same umbrella group that is now pushing to lift Russian sanctions in the European Parliament. Putin’s ruling party United Russia has even gone so far as to sign cooperation agreements with Salvini’s League and Austria’s Freedom Party (FPO). Putin ally Dugin has told The Daily Beast that Steve Bannon is “the last hope in the United States, Salvini in Italy, Le Pen in France.”It is impossible that Putin would not have known about the multi-million euro deal being forged with Savoini and Salvini. As has been proven in the past, when Putin gives the “green light,” Russian banks, businesses and government spring into action to find ways to discreetly channel Russian money to Europe’s far-right parties. “We openly act against the West’s mainstream political powers,” Sergei Markov, a Kremlin advisor active on the international scene, told The Daily Beast. “We share the same values as Europe’s far-right groups, such as Christian beliefs, strong families, the defense of private property.” Markov named the Kremlin’s key political allies as France, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Spain. Russia’s Alt-Right Rasputin Says He’s Steve Bannon’s Ideological Soul MateMarkov also told The Daily Beast that Salvini is crucial in Putin’s plan. “There is nothing strange about our businesses wanting to help him,” Markov said. “He will block the anti-Russian sanctions at the European parliament.” Olga Kryshtanovskaya, the head of research at the Russian State University of Management, says that the Kremlin’s current strategy is to build a network of friends in the West. “Putin personally approves the list of far-right leaders that Russia should be dealing with, then his elite, including politicians with soft liberal views, like Vladimir Pligin, promote, because they serve him as soldiers,” Kryshtanovskaya told The Daily Beast. The BuzzFeed report about Salvini’s dirty Russian money also mentions Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, Putin’s close friend from St. Petersburg. During his Moscow visit last October, Salvini met him and later denounced the West’s sanctions against Russia as “cultural folly” and met with Kozak and Pligin. Shortly after that the U.S. put Kozak on the sanctions list. "The Russian elite is dreaming about the end of tensions with the West but since Putin is not going to give Crimea back for anything, he chooses to redesign the West, and Russian elite is helping him," Kryshtanovskaya told The Daily Beast.For now, Salvini is out of office in Italy, but he is still a member of the European Parliament, where he can bide his time waiting for the new Italian government–presided over by none other than Giuseppe Conte–to fall. Salvini can also use his time out of the spotlight and off the government's clock to do as he pleases, meet with old friends, fund raise for the next elections, and, very likely, take more selfies in Red Square. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

September 07, 2019 at 10:24AM via IFTTT

#Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

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atomicgeek · 6 years ago

Text

Black Hole Photo - long story

Posting by Misty S. Boyer in Facebook (2019-04-12)

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Data that would need to be sorted.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet containing only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal. And there are those who could just as easily say the same about his contribution, or the contributions of many others.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

Edited:

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

Edit: Thanks to Zoë Barraclough and someone who would prefer not to be named, for messaging me with another couple of edits. As confirmed on Kazu Akiyama's twitter, there were more than four leaders for the four imaging teams. As I find out the names of these co-leaders, I'll incorporate them into the post.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606

This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop…

This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attention she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf

This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156

This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/

This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman…

This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f…

This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html

This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190410-eht.html

Here is another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team. He does a great job of explaining how all of the algorithms in question were, in fact, capable of producing accurate images of the black hole, and a part of the task of his algorithm was to verify the accuracy of those generated photos.

0 notes

misccee · 6 years ago

Link

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were.

As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Data that would need to be sorted.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.

Edited:

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606 This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

#black hole girl #black hole #expert judgement #non spn #STEM

0 notes