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natsaffection · 5 months ago

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Auge um Auge pt. 3 | N.R.

Investigator!older!Natasha x Robber!younger! reader

Warnings: Age gap (Natasha is 32 = reader ist 22) steamy tension, Natasha being overall cute

Word count: 5,9k

A/n: I love writing love confessions..🫂👀

The heist had already been ongoing for a few days, and the tension between the robbers and the police had become unbearable. The professor had anticipated the police’s response and had tasked you with laying the groundwork for the next step: infiltrating the police’s command network with a cleverly disguised trap.

Using your hacking skills, you had inserted malicious code into the police communication network. The code caused intermittent failures in critical systems like surveillance cameras, encrypted communication channels, and tactical coordination tools. It wasn’t a complete blackout, but it created enough chaos to leave the police scrambling for solutions.

“They’ll think it’s a sophisticated hack.” the professor had said. “And when they realize their own tech team can’t fix it, they’ll seek outside help. That’s where you come in.” You had smiled, though your stomach churned with nerves. “What if they don’t take the bait?” The professor had adjusted his glasses, his voice calm. “Trust me, they will. You’ve done good groundwork, and Natasha will bite.”

Officers shouted over each other, screens blinked with error messages, and the air was thick with rising panic. The robbers had taken over multiple police systems, rerouted communication channels, and disrupted surveillance feeds. Worse, they had fed the unit targeted misinformation, nearly leading to a catastrophic operation that left officers in complete disarray.

Maria sat at the central workstation, her jaw clenched as she desperately tried to regain control. “It’s like they’re toying with us..” she muttered, staring at the corrupted data streams on her screen. “They know exactly where to hit us. Natasha stood nearby, her arms tightly crossed. “How bad is it?”

“They’ve locked us out of certain areas of our own system.” Maria said sharply. “And their encryption? It’s not standard. It feels almost..experimental. Natasha frowned. “Can you crack it?” Maria paused, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, then exhaled sharply. “Maybe. But not fast enough. They’re three steps ahead, and we don’t have time to lose.” Natasha hesitated for a moment before speaking. “Then we need someone who thinks like them.”Maria turned to her, narrowing her eyes. “What are you suggesting?”

“I know someone who could help us.” Natasha said cautiously. “A civilian. Brilliant with tech, unpredictable, exactly the type of person who could mirror the robbers’ creativity.” Maria’s eyes widened in disbelief. “A civilian? You can’t be serious, Natasha. This isn’t some neighborhood dispute, this is a high-risk, top operation. And you want to bring in someone off the street?”

“She’s not just ‘anyone.’” Natasha countered firmly. “I trust her.” Maria scoffed. “And that’s supposed to reassure me? I trust you, Natasha, but this? You want to involve an outsider in our operation?”

“We’re already exposed!” Natasha snapped, her voice rising. “They’ve hacked our systems, locked us out, and led us straight into a trap. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results.” Maria folded her arms. “And you think your civilian will magically solve everything?”

“I think she’s our best chance.” Natasha said. “Maria, you’re the best there is, but even you said this isn’t standard. This encryption? It’s personal. We need someone who thinks like the person who designed it.” An officer hurried over to Maria with a report. “Ma’am, they’ve breached the surveillance network in the eastern quadrant. We’re blind.”

Maria slammed her hands on the table and cursed under her breath. “Damn it.” Natasha stepped closer. “We don’t have time to debate this. You need help, Maria. And you know it.” Maria stared at her. “Even if I agreed, why her? Why would she agree to this?” Natasha hesitated, her jaw tightening. “Because she’s already involved.” Maria frowned. “What do you mean?”

“She’s the one who gave us the tip about the camera.” Natasha admitted. “She’s brilliant, completely unassuming, but she knows things. I think- no, I know she’s exactly the type of person who could have designed this encryption herself.” Maria shook her head. “You’re taking a huge risk.”

Natasha’s voice softened. “If this fails, it’s my responsibility. But if we don’t try, we’ll lose this fight. And we can’t afford that.” Maria sighed and rubbed her temples. “Fine. But if this backfires, you’re the one taking the fall.”

Natasha found you in your usual spot at the café, your laptop open and your fingers flying across the keyboard. You paused when you saw her approaching, your eyes widening slightly. “This is becoming a habit..” you said with a nervous laugh. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

Natasha dropped into the chair across from you, her expression serious. “I don’t have time chatting this time, we need your help.” You tilted your head, trying to look confused. “With what?”Natasha leaned back slightly, crossing her arms. “My team’s systems have been compromised. Surveillance feeds, encrypted communication..they’ve all been affected by some sort of evolving encryption. We can’t crack it.” You raised an intrigued eyebrow. “And you think I can?”

“You’ve already proven you can.” Natasha said firmly. “The sniper incident..if it weren’t for you, we’d have walked right into an ambush. You see things my team doesn’t, and I’m not too proud to admit it.” You tried to appear hesitant. She’s taken the bait. “Natasha, I’m just a freelancer..I’ve never worked on anything of this scale before.”

“I trust you.” Natasha said, her voice steady. “And I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.” You swallowed, the sincerity in Natasha’s eyes tightening something in your chest. Stick to the plan, you reminded yourself. Finally, you nodded. “Okay, I’ll help.”

You entered the command tent under Natasha’s watchful eye, feeling the weight of every officer’s gaze on you. Maria was waiting at the workstation, her expression skeptical but resigned. “You must be Y/n.” Maria said, gesturing toward the monitors. “Show us what you can do.”

The professor’s words echoed in your head: “Stay calm. You’re one of them now. Look nervous, but not too nervous. Don’t let their chaos overwhelm you, control it.” But as you ventured deeper into the tent, it became harder to ignore the efficiency and organization of the police. Large maps of the bank were spread across tables, officers compared information, and intercepted radio transmissions flashed on the screens.

Your eyes landed on a monitor, and your breath caught. Names. Two names. Tokyo. Rio. The police had already identified two members of the crew. You froze for a moment, your thoughts racing. How? How could they already know their names? And why didn’t you know about this?

Natasha noticed your hesitation and approached with a clipboard in hand. “Y/n?” she said, her tone firm but not unfriendly. “Is everything okay?” You blinked and snapped out of your daze. Forcing a small smile onto your face, you said, “Yeah, sorry. It’s just..a lot.” Natasha’s eyes softened slightly. “It’s overwhelming, I know. You’re walking into a warzone here, and this isn’t an easy place to be.”

You nodded quickly, doing your best to play the role of an overwhelmed civilian. “It’s just..I didn’t expect it to be this serious. Seeing all of this..” Natasha gave you a reassuring smile. “You’re doing great. Just focus on your part. We’ll handle the rest.” You nodded again, but your stomach churned. Your nerves weren’t entirely an act anymore. The reality of standing in the enemy’s camp, surrounded by people working tirelessly to unravel the professor’s plan, hit you harder than you’d anticipated.

You sat down at a workstation, your fingers trembling slightly as you typed. You had to stay on course, complete your task without raising suspicion. But your thoughts kept drifting back to the screens with Tokyo and Rio’s names. If they were already so close to those two, how much longer before they found the rest? Natasha stood nearby, her presence both comforting and unsettling. You could feel her watchful gaze on you, her concern growing with every passing second. “You’re doing great.” Natasha said quietly, crouching beside you.

You forced a weak smile, your voice shaky. “Thanks.”The professor had arranged a distraction inside the bank, chaos that was meant to make your role as a nervous civilian more believable. The crew was supposed to fire shots into the air, throwing the police into panic and creating the perfect diversion for you to finish your task. But you were so lost in your own thoughts that you’d completely forgotten about the plan. When the sharp crack of gunfire echoed through the tent’s speakers, you flinched violently, your eyes widening in genuine fear.

Natasha frowned, her expression sharp. “Shots fired inside the bank!” she said grimly, grabbing a radio. “We need visuals on the situation, now!” Your heart raced, your mind screaming at you to get a grip. It’s the plan. It’s part of the plan. But the sound of the gunfire had shaken you to your core. You were too close to the enemy, too exposed. For the first time, the weight of what you were doing, the danger you were in hit you fully. Natasha noticed your trembling hands and pale face. “Hey..” she said gently, stepping closer. “It’s okay. You’re safe here.”

“I..I’m sorry..” you stammered, your voice breaking. “I just…it startled me, that’s all.” Natasha’s expression softened, her concern deepening. “This isn’t something most people are prepared for.” she said quietly. “You’re doing more than we could ever ask of you. But if it’s too much, you can stop. No one would blame you.”

“No.” you said quickly, shaking your head. “I can do this. I just need..a minute.” Natasha hesitated, then nodded. “Take all the time you need.” As you tried to steady your breathing, Natasha watched you closely, her own thoughts racing. She admired your bravery. Walking into such a dangerous situation as a civilian was no small feat. You looked up and caught Natasha watching you. “What?”

“Nothing.” Natasha said quickly, forcing a small smile. “I…I just admire your courage.” You blinked, surprised. “Courage?” Natasha nodded. “Most people wouldn’t put themselves in a situation like this. You could’ve said no when I asked. But you didn’t. That says a lot about you.” You swallowed hard, guilt churning in your stomach. “Thank you..” you murmured, turning your gaze away.

Eventually, you regained your composure, finished your task, and planted the necessary code into the police’s system. But as you left the tent, Natasha’s words echoed in your mind. “You could’ve said no. But you didn’t.” You had just led Natasha directly into the trap, exactly as the professor had planned. But for the first time, you began to wonder if the cost of the plan was too high. Your hands hovered over the keyboard as you pressed the final key, and the tent filled with the sound of systems coming back online. The previously chaotic screens now displayed a smoothly functioning network.

Natasha, standing nearby, let out a deep breath, visibly relieved. “You did it.” she said, her voice full of genuine admiration. You forced a small smile, but inside, your heart was racing. The professor’s instructions had been clear: “Plant the backdoor. Subtly, cleanly. Once you’re out, we’ll have access to everything.” That’s exactly what you’d done. The professor now had ears inside the tent, but you couldn’t let your relief show on your face.

Natasha approached, placing a hand on your shoulder. “That was incredible work, Y/n. I don’t know how you did it.”

“I’m just glad I could help.” you said, trying to sound humble. Quickly, you packed up your laptop, eager to escape the suffocating tension in the tent. As you slung your bag over your shoulder, Natasha stepped in front of you, her green eyes softer. “You’ve been through a lot today..” she said. “More than anyone in your position should have to.” You looked around nervously. “I’m fine.”

Natasha frowned slightly. “I don’t think you are.” She paused, her voice turning gentler. “How about some fresh air? A walk. After all this, you could use a distraction.” You hesitated. You weren’t sure if being alone with Natasha was a good idea. But her gaze was honest, her concern disarming. Finally, you nodded. “Okay.”

Natasha smiled and led you out of the tent. The two of you walked along a quiet path in a nearby park, the tension of the command tent slowly fading behind you. The fresh air was a stark contrast to the stifling heat of the tent, and you took a deep breath, trying to steady your nerves. Natasha studied you for a moment, her gaze softening. “You’re braver than you give yourself credit for.”

You looked away, guilt twisting in your chest. You wouldn’t say that if you knew the truth, you thought. You stopped at a bench near a cluster of trees, the calm of the night settling around you. Natasha sat down and gestured for you to join her. For a moment, silence reigned, broken only by distant sirens and rustling leaves. “You were really scared in there..” Natasha said quietly, turning to you. You hesitated, unsure of how to respond. Finally, you nodded, your voice barely a whisper. “Hearing those gunshots…it was real. I’ve never been that close to something so…dangerous.”

Natasha’s expression softened further. “You never get used to it.” she admitted. “But it’s also not something you should have to go through.” You looked at her, the genuine concern in her eyes tightening something in your chest. “Why do you care so much?” you asked before you could stop yourself. Natasha blinked, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” You hesitated. “You barely know me. But you’re going out of your way to make sure I’m okay.” Natasha’s gaze dropped for a moment before meeting yours again, her expression unreadable. “Because I see that you’re a good person.” she said simply. “And because I’ve been where you are, thrown into something I didn’t ask for, feeling like I had to prove myself.”

As the two of you continued walking, the conversation grew more relaxed. Natasha shared stories about the less glamorous parts of her job, staking out warehouses in freezing temperatures, dealing with endless bureaucracy, and the time an overeager recruit accidentally locked her in a supply closet. You laughed despite yourself, the tension in your chest easing for the first time in hours. “You make it sound so… glamorous.”

Natasha grinned. “Oh, it’s every little girl’s dream. Dodging bullets, endless paperwork, terrible coffee. What more could you want?” You shook your head, a genuine smile spreading across your face. “I can’t believe you’re actually human.” Natasha raised an eyebrow, her grin widening. “Don’t let that get out. I have a reputation to maintain.” By the time you returned to the tent, you felt more at ease but also more conflicted. Natasha’s kindness and humor had broken through your defenses, leaving you questioning your role in the heist.

As Natasha held the tent flap open for you, she smiled. “You were amazing today, Y/n. Really.” You nodded, your throat tight. “Thanks. I… you know where to find me.”

————————————————————————

The bell above the café door jingled, pulling you back to the present. It was already late at night, and you were back in your usual corner. Her shift had gone on longer than you’d expected…You glanced up casually, expecting another late-night coffee addict. Instead, your eyes narrowed slightly when you recognized the woman who walked in.

Maria.

You remembered her from the command tent. Sharp and authoritative, someone who missed no details. What was she doing here at this hour? Your curiosity flared as Maria approached the counter, ordered a coffee, and then sat in a secluded corner. Her posture was casual, but you noticed her eyes scanning the room, as if assessing potential threats..or watching someone.

You barely paid Maria any attention until she pulled out her phone and dialed a number. Something about her body language shifted..relaxed, but not entirely. Whoever was on the other end was clearly someone she trusted. Ever the opportunist, you opened your laptop and connected to the café’s public Wi-Fi. A few quick keystrokes later, you intercepted Maria’s phone signal. A faint hum played through your headphones as you tapped into the call..curiosity had won. The connection stabilized, and a voice came through that made your breath hitch.

Natasha.

“Hey..” Natasha said, her voice softer than you’d ever heard it. “Hey…” Maria replied warmly. “Still in?”

“Yep…” Natasha sighed with a light laugh. Your fingers froze on the keyboard. What the hell? You hadn’t expected a private, casual conversation. You should disconnect. You should. But your curiosity burned too brightly. A pause followed, a familiar silence that hinted at a shared history. You frowned slightly and leaned closer to your screen.

“How are things? We haven’t really had time to talk lately.” Natasha asked, her voice quieter now.

“Well… I miss it, honestly…talking to you all the time, I mean. It feels like old times.” Maria replied.

Natasha didn’t respond immediately, and you heard the faint sound of her shifting in her chair. “Maria…”

Maria chuckled softly. “Relax, Nat. I’m not trying to stir anything up. I just wanted to check on you.”

An uneasy feeling churned in your stomach. You knew you were intruding on something deeply personal, but you couldn’t stop listening.

“I noticed something today..” Maria began cautiously but firmly. “That girl you brought into the tent…You’re spending quite a bit of time with her. And guess who’s sitting a few tables away from me?” A pause followed before Natasha answered, her voice sharper. “Wait…”

“She’s here. Midnight. Alone.” Natasha’s sharp intake of breath was audible. “You can see her?”

“Yes.” Maria said, her tone softening. “And before you say anything-no, I’m not going to approach her. I’m just trying to understand why she’s so important to you.”

“What?” Natasha began, but her voice faltered. She exhaled sharply, her tone shifting. “Maria, she’s been through a lot today.” Natasha said quietly. “And she’s helping us.”

“She’s helping you.” Maria corrected, her voice gentle but firm. “You brought her into the team. You’re the one spending all this time with her.”

Natasha sighed softly, almost as if she’d expected this. “Can we stop talking about this? I know where this is going…”

Maria’s voice softened. “Fine. Then I’ll just ask outright. Do you want to sleep with her?”

You choked on your coffee, quickly covering your mouth to avoid drawing attention to yourself. You glanced at Maria, who was still sitting calmly, completely unaware of the chaos she’d just caused. “Maria, seriously-”

“You’re not denying it…” Maria teased, her tone playful.

Your first instinct was to disconnect, but your hand hovered over the keyboard, frozen. This is too much. I shouldn’t be listening…But your curiosity won out. You leaned back slightly, guilt rising in your chest. I shouldn’t be here. But… I want to know…

A long pause followed. Natasha exhaled slowly. “You’re using the wrong word.”

“What do you mean?” Maria asked, confused.

“‘Sleep.’” Natasha said, her voice quieter now. “That sounds like a one-night stand. Like something meaningless.”

Maria chuckled softly, though it sounded sad. “And you want more than that?”

“Yeah..why not.” Natasha admitted, her voice steady but vulnerable. “If I were with her, it wouldn’t just be that. She’s not someone you just ‘sleep’ with.”

Your head spun, Natasha’s words echoing in your mind. She doesn’t want something meaningless. She wants… something more? Your heart fluttered, and a nervous laugh bubbled up in your throat. She’s not someone you just sleep with. Those words felt both impossibly heavy and surprisingly light. You clamped a hand over your mouth to stifle a grin. Stop acting like a teenager! This isn’t normal! But no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t shake the warmth spreading through your chest, or the guilt of eavesdropping on something so personal.

“Just be careful, Nat…” Maria said quietly. “That kind of trust is hard to earn. And if you’re not careful, it’ll hurt both of you.”

“I know.” Natasha replied, her voice firm but tinged with emotion. “Thanks for caring, Maria. But I’ve got this.”

Maria sighed, her voice dropping to almost a whisper. “Goodnight, Natasha.”

“Goodnight.” Natasha said, and the line went dead.

The connection ended, leaving you sitting there, completely stunned. You leaned back in your chair, staring at your laptop as if it might explode at any moment. Your cheeks burned, and your mind raced, replaying Natasha’s hesitant “Yeah..why not” over and over. What the hell just happened? you thought, running a hand through your hair. You’d hacked into Maria’s phone for a tactical advantage, not…whatever this was!

Natasha Romanoff wants to be with me?

Your thoughts shattered as Maria stood up and began walking toward you. You froze, your breath catching. She knows. She figured it out! I’m done for. Maria stopped at your table, her sharp eyes studying you closely. You gripped the edge of your laptop, your heart pounding so loudly you thought it might burst. “Everything okay?” Maria asked, her voice softer than you’d expected. “You’re here alone at midnight. That’s…unusual.”

You blinked, caught off guard by the question. “I’m fine!” you said quickly, forcing a smile. “I…I’m just working.” Maria studied you for a moment longer, then nodded. “Alright. Take care of yourself.” She turned and walked away, leaving you frozen in place, your head still spinning.

Meanwhile the activity in the command tent began to wind down for the night. Officers moved between desks, and the soft hum of conversations filled the air. Natasha leaned against a table scattered with files, her arms crossed as she studied the timeline of the heist on the main screen. Yet her thoughts weren’t entirely on the case. Maria’s words from earlier replayed in her mind, “She’s here. At midnight. Alone. I’m just trying to understand why she’s so important to you.”

Natasha sighed quietly, running a hand through her hair. Maria wasn’t wrong. You were always alone, and Natasha couldn’t shake the image of you sitting in that café, typing on your laptop as if you had nowhere else to be. It unsettled her in a way she couldn’t fully explain, and Maria’s direct question only made it worse.

“Why is she so important to you?”

Natasha pushed off the table as the commander signaled the end of the shift for the night. It was late, and most of the team members were heading home. Normally, Natasha would stay longer, but tonight she felt the urge to leave. You listened through your earpiece and when you heard the commander announce the end of the shift, you exhaled in relief. Finally. Natasha was leaving the tent, which meant you could leave too.

You started packing your things, sliding your laptop into your bag as you prepared to leave. The familiar chime of the doorbell froze you mid-motion. Your heart sank as you saw who had just walked in. Natasha stepped into the café, her eyes scanning the room quickly before landing on you. Her expression softened slightly as she approached, her movements deliberate but calm.

You froze, your bag only half-closed. Your heart pounded as Natasha closed the distance between you, her presence overwhelming even in casual clothes. “Hi.” Natasha said, her voice warm but tinged with concern. You forced a smile, trying to keep your voice steady. “Natasha? What are you doing here?” Natasha slid into the seat across from you, propping her elbows on the table. “I could ask you the same thing. I just got off work. Thought I’d check on you.”

“Again?” you laughed, your nervousness slipping into your tone. Natasha tilted her head slightly, studying you. “You’re always here late. Alone. That doesn’t seem right to me.” You swallowed hard, gripping the edge of the table. She’s noticed. She’s been paying attention.. “I…I like working at night. I’m fine, really.” you said quickly, your voice trembling slightly. Natasha raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. “That’s the second time you’ve said that. Are you sure that’s the only reason?”

You hesitated, your mind racing. What does she want me to say? You looked down at your hands, fiddling nervously with your bag strap. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.” Natasha said gently. “It’s midnight. Most people your age are either at home or out with friends. Why are you always here?” Your chest tightened. Natasha’s tone wasn’t accusatory. It was gentle, caring, and that made it even harder to deflect. You felt the weight of her gaze, the genuine concern in her eyes. “I… I just like it here.” you mumbled, avoiding her gaze. “It’s nothing.”

Natasha sighed, leaning back slightly. “I’m not trying to pry. But you shouldn’t be here alone so late.” You looked at her, your stomach twisting. She thinks I’m alone because I have no one. She’s not entirely wrong, but the real reason is so much more complicated.. “Come with me.” Natasha said suddenly, her voice soft but firm. You blinked, your eyes widening. “W-What?”

“Come with me.” Natasha repeated, her gaze steady. “To my place. You shouldn’t be here alone this late.” Your heart raced, panic rising in your chest. Go with her? To her place? I can’t. You shook your head quickly, your voice stumbling. “I don’t think that’s a good idea…”

“Why not?” Natasha asked, her tone calm but insistent. “You’ll be safe. You can bring your work if you want. But I don’t want to leave you here.”

“I..” You hesitated, your mind spiraling. What if she’s testing me? What if it’s a trap? Natasha leaned across the table, her hand brushing yours lightly. “Please..” she said softly. “I’ll feel better knowing you’re somewhere safe.” You stared at her, the sincerity in Natasha’s voice making your chest ache. She doesn’t know. She has no idea who I really am. She’s just…worried. “Okay..” you finally whispered, your voice barely audible. “I’ll come with you.”

Natasha’s apartment was exactly what you’d expected..minimalistic yet elegant, with clean lines and an undeniable sense of order. The open-concept living room was softly lit, a bottle of red wine sat on the counter, and the faint scent of cedar lingered in the air. The space felt personal yet guarded, much like the woman herself.

You stood awkwardly near the couch, unsure of where to put your hands or your thoughts. This wasn’t where you’d ever imagined yourself, and the thought of what might happen here made your stomach twist with nerves. Natasha, however, seemed completely at ease, shrugging off her jacket and tossing it casually onto a nearby chair. “Make yourself comfortable.” she said, her voice calm yet warm, catching you off guard. “Want something to drink?”

“Uh…no, thanks.” you replied quickly, your nerves making you sound more jittery than you intended. Natasha glanced over her shoulder at you, her lips quirking into a small, knowing smile. “Relax. I don’t bite.” You managed a weak laugh, shifting your weight from one foot to the other. “That’s…good to know.”

Natasha chuckled softly as she settled onto the couch with a grace that seemed effortless. She grabbed the remote and gestured for you to join her. “Come on. Sit. I thought we could watch something.” You hesitated for a moment before walking over and sinking into the cushion next to her. Not too close, but not too far. Natasha noticed and smiled to herself but said nothing.

“What do you want to watch?” she asked, scrolling through streaming options. “Action? Comedy? Something completely ridiculous?” You shrugged, trying to focus on her question instead of the growing tension in your chest. “Something light, I guess. Nothing too intense.”

“Alright.” Natasha said, selecting a movie and setting the remote aside. She leaned back, draping her arm over the back of the couch, close enough for you to feel the faint warmth of her skin. The movie started, the sound filling the quiet space, but you found it hard to focus on the screen.

Fifteen minutes in, you were acutely aware of every detail about Natasha..her presence, her proximity, the subtle scent of her perfume. She sat close enough that her arm occasionally brushed yours, and you felt her gaze on you now and then. You tried to concentrate on the movie, but your thoughts kept wandering. Why had she invited you here? Was this just her way of unwinding, or was there something..more? The possibility made your heart race.

Then you felt it…her hand on your shoulder. At first, it was a light touch that could’ve been accidental. But then her fingers curled slightly, her palm resting firmly on your shoulder, and you realized it wasn’t a mistake. You froze slightly, your breath hitching. Natasha noticed immediately. “You look like you’re waiting for something to explode.” You laughed nervously, rubbing the back of your neck. “Maybe I am.” Natasha raised an eyebrow, her smile widening. “It’s just me. You don’t have to be so tense.”

Just her. That was the problem. It wasn’t just her! It was her. Natasha Romanoff: sharp, confident, undeniably alluring. You had no idea how you’d ended up here, in her apartment, watching a movie, feeling like the ground beneath you had completely shifted. “I know.” you murmured, trying to steady your voice. “I… just…”

Natasha leaned closer, her hand sliding from your shoulder lightly down your arm. “I’m not going to do anything you’re not comfortable with. You know that, right?” You nodded, your heart pounding in your chest. “Of course!” For a moment, neither of you spoke, the sound of the movie filling the space between you. The way she looked at you, with a mix of amusement and something warmer, softer made your breath catch. Before you could stop yourself, you blurted out, “I’m not good at this.” Natasha tilted her head, her smile returning. “Not good at what?”

“This..” you said, gesturing vaguely between the two of you. “Being here. With you. It’s…I don’t know. You make it hard to think straight.” For a moment, Natasha just stared at you, and you felt your cheeks heat. But then she laughed, a soft, genuine laugh that made your stomach flip. “That’s cute.” she said, her tone carrying a playful edge. “You’re nervous.”

“I’m not-” you began, but the look she gave you stopped your denial mid-sentence. “Okay, maybe a little.” Natasha’s smile softened. “Why?” she asked, her voice quiet but genuinely curious. “Why does this make you nervous?” You hesitated, your heart racing as you searched for the right words. “Because…it’s you..” you finally admitted, your voice barely a whisper. “You’re…I don’t know. You’re intimidating. I-In a good way! And I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with…this kind of thing.” Natasha leaned forward slightly, resting her elbow on the back of the couch as she turned toward you. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure..” you said, trying not to sound as nervous as you felt. “Why does this make you so uneasy?” she asked gently, her voice devoid of teasing now. “Is it exactly me? Or…something else?” You hesitated, your heart pounding as you considered your answer. “It’s not you..” you said finally, your voice quieter now. “It’s…I guess it’s just that this feels… different.”

“Different how?” Natasha pressed, though her tone remained careful, as if she didn’t want to push too hard. “Like… I don’t know!! Like it matters..” you admitted, your cheeks flushing. “And that scares me.” Natasha’s expression softened further, her gaze searching yours. “I don’t want to scare you.” she said quietly. “That’s the last thing I want.”

“You don’t.” you said quickly. “It’s just…I don’t really know what I’m doing here.” Natasha studied you for a long moment, as if weighing her next move carefully. Then she spoke, her voice low and steady. “Would you tell me if I did something that made you uncomfortable?” You nodded. “Of course.”

“Okay.” Natasha said, exhaling softly. She shifted slightly closer, her hand resting gently on the back of the couch. “Because I want to kiss you. But only if you want me to.” Your breath caught, her words sending a wave of nervous excitement through you. You stared at her, your heart racing as you processed what she’d said. “I’ve never-” Natasha cut in gently, her tone steady. “It’s okay. We don’t have to.”

But something in her patience, in the way she didn’t push or demand, made you take a shaky breath and nod. “I think I want to..” you said softly. Natasha didn’t move immediately, her eyes staying locked on yours. “You’re sure?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

“Yes.” you whispered, your voice trembling slightly but sincere. Only then did she lean in, her movements slow and deliberate, giving you every opportunity to change your mind. When her lips finally met yours, it was soft, so soft that it left you breathless. Her hand cupped your cheek gently, her thumb brushing against your skin as if to steady you.

The kiss was unhurried, warm, and filled with a tenderness that surprised you. You felt yourself relax into it, your nervousness melting away as you kissed her back. Natasha pulled back slightly, just enough to look at you, her forehead resting lightly against yours. “You okay?” she asked softly. You nodded, a small, shy smile tugging at your lips. “Yeah..” Her lips curved into a smile of her own, and she pressed a brief, tender kiss to your forehead. “Good.” she murmured. She leaned in again, her hand remained on your cheek. The connection was both electrifying and calming, as if nothing else in the world mattered except for this.

But just as the kiss began to deepen, Natasha pulled back slightly, resting her forehead against yours. Her breath was warm, and her voice was soft but resolute. “We should stop..” she said gently. You opened your eyes, looking at her. “Why?”

Natasha gave you a faint smile, her fingers brushing a loose strand of hair from your face. “Because you’ve had a long day. And because I don’t want this to feel rushed. For either of us.” You bit your lip, your cheeks heating again. “You think I’m not ready?”

“I think you’re nervous.” Natasha replied honestly. “And I don’t want you to feel like we have to go anywhere tonight. We don’t.” Her words felt like a weight lifting off your chest. She wasn’t angry, wasn’t pressuring you, she was giving you space, something you hadn’t even realized you needed. “Thank you.” you murmured, your voice barely audible. Natasha tilted her head, her smile softening. “For what?”

“For being patient with me.” you admitted, your cheeks flushing again. Her smile grew softer still, and she pressed a brief, tender kiss to your forehead. “Get some rest.” she said quietly. “You’ve earned it.” Natasha stood, walking into the kitchen and pouring you a glass of water. After a moment, she returned and set it on the coffee table in front of you. “You can take the bed.” she said as she settled back onto the couch. “I’ll sleep here.” Your eyes widened. “What? No! This is your apartment.”

“Exactly.” Natasha replied with a playful glint in her eye. “And I’m saying you take the bed. No arguments.” You shook your head, laughing softly. “You’re impossible.”

“I’ve been called worse..” Natasha said with a smirk. The playful exchange eased your nerves further, and you found yourself smiling as you stood and stretched. “Fine. But if you wake up with a sore neck, don’t blame me.” Natasha laughed, her gaze following you as you headed toward the bedroom door. “Goodnight.” she said softly.

You paused in the doorway, glancing back at her. “Goodnight, Natasha.” As you stepped into the bedroom and closed the door behind you, you let out a shaky breath. Your heart was still racing, and your mind replayed the kiss over and over, but there was also a warmth in your chest, a quiet comfort in knowing she understood. That she wasn’t rushing you or asking for more than you were ready to give. You lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling with a small smile on your lips. You hadn’t expected any of this, hadn’t seen it coming..but maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t as terrifying as you’d thought..

#natasha x reader #natasha romanoff #natasha smut #natasha romanov x reader #dom!natasha x reader #nat x reader #natasha romonova #the avengers #natasha #natasha romanov smut #natasha romanoff x you #natasha romanoff smut #natasha romanoff x reader

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sabrinahawthorne · 2 months ago

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Introducing: Chimera Hearts!

A Network for People Who Care about RPGs

Way back in February, I made This Post (inspired by This One) talking about some of the issues facing the RPG hobby and industry, and calling some of my peers to action to see what we could do about it. Originally, the goal was to hold a discussion with speakers & debate, taking the lessons we learned from each other back out into the world. After a week or so of incompatible schedules, we decided to expand the discussion. After a bit more back-and-forth, something kind of amazing happened.

With the incredible leadership of Daniel of The Copper Compendium, that same gaggle of folks has been putting together a discord server to act as the hub of what we hope will be a larger movement in RPGs. We call it Chimera Hearts – and we want you to join.

The Chimera Hearts server isn’t the heart of the movement – rather, it’s a hub for discussion & teamwork between disparate corners of the RPG world. A place to share tips and tricks – effective methods we’ve found to address the heads of the proverbial hydra, and a place to go when we’re looking for the solutions others have developed.

We also want Chimera Hearts to be a place where folks from across the industry can get together to build programs, initiatives, and infrastructure to cultivate the health & longevity of the industry.

There are already a couple of folks developing such programs; Aaron Voigt is putting together a mentorship program to give people the tools to start making their own RPG videos on Youtube! And I am currently in the middle of an experiment (which you can read about here), the goal of which is to figure out how to create a casual indie RPG audience in your city.

Chimera Hearts isn’t centralized; this isn’t a project built around a group of experts or authorities. The goal of the network is to connect people between otherwise disconnected subcommunities and give them the tools to start improving this industry in accessible, practical ways.

I’m blown away by how people responded to my call to action, and intimidated by the scope of motion that seems to have been set by it. It was by the dedication and expertise of Daniel, Aaron, and the rest of the folks working to put this together that Chimera Hearts exists, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it in any way. I hope you’ll join us and be a part of it, too.

Currently, the founding team of Chimera Hearts includes: @monsterfactoryfanfic; @thecoppercompendium; @in-case-of-grace; @theresattrpgforthat; @rowansender; @thefiresontheheight; @ladytabletop; @stoicheincat; and Julian, the Game Mistress of @tinytablepodcast!

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #ttrpg community #indie ttrpgs #chimera hearts #tabletop rpg #tabletop rpgs #tabletop roleplaying #rpg community #indie rpg #independent roleplay

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mariacallous · 25 days ago

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The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

This effort—the attempt to hash out what went so wrong—had something of a rocky start. After 2016, many liberals were inclined to diagnose the pathologies of the internet as a problem of supply. Some people have bad ideas and beliefs. These are bad either because they are false (“climate change is a myth,” “vaccines cause autism”) or because they are pernicious (“we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch,” “foreigners are criminals”). These ideas propagate because the internet provides bad actors with a platform to distribute them. This story was appealing, both because it was simple and because it made the situation seem tractable. The solution was to limit the presence of these bad actors, to cut off the supply at the source. One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like. It was a childish fantasy to think that a neutral arbiter might be summoned into being, or that we would all defer to its judgments as a matter of course.

The major weakness of this account was that it tended to sidestep the question of demand. Even if many liberals agreed in private that those who believed untrue and harmful things were fundamentally stupid or harmful people, they correctly perceived that this was a gauche thing to say out loud. Instead, they attributed the embrace of such beliefs to “manipulation,” an ill-defined concept that is usually deployed as a euphemism for sorcery. These low-information people were vulnerable to such sorcery because they lacked “media literacy.” What they needed, in other words, was therapeutic treatment with more and better facts. All of this taken together amounted to an incoherent theory of information. On the one hand, facts were neutral things that spoke for themselves. On the other, random pieces of informational flotsam were elevated to the status of genuine facts only once they were vetted by credentialled people with special access to the truth.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it as a context for evaluating facts. The adoption of a world view had less to do with rational thought than it did with desire. It was about what sort of person you wanted to be. Were you a sophisticated person who followed the science? Or were you a skeptical person who saw through the veneer of establishment gentility?

This perspective has come to be associated with Peter Thiel, who introduced a generation of conservative-leaning acolytes to the work of the French theorist René Girard. This story has been told to hermeneutic exhaustion, but the key insight that Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The upshot of all of this was not that people had abandoned first principles, as liberals came to argue in many tiresome books about the “post-truth” era, or that they had abandoned tradition, as conservatives came to argue in many tiresome books about decadence. It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. People who didn’t really know anything about immunity noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against vaccines, and the low-cost option was to just run with it; people who didn’t really know anything about virology noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against the lab-leak hypothesis, and they, too, took the path of least resistance. This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. It is simply to observe that most of us have better things to do than deal with unremitting complexity. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a first approximation of thinking, to conserve our time and energy by just picking a side and being done with it.

Liberals were skittish about this orientation because it replaced our hopes for democracy with resignation in the face of competing protection rackets. But what they really didn’t like was that their bluff had been called. Their preferred solution to informational complexity—that certain ideas and the people associated with them were Bad and Wrong and needed to be banished from the public sphere—wasn’t much better. The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise. They were frank about their tribalism.

Recent discourse attending to a “vibe shift” has tended to emphasize a renewed acceptance, even in erstwhile liberal circles, of obnoxious or retrograde cultural attitudes—the removal of taboos, say, on certain slurs. Another way to look at the vibe shift is as a more fundamental shift to “vibes” as the unit of political analysis—an acknowledgment, on the part of liberals, that their initial response to an informational crisis had been inadequate and hypocritical. The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST. It had been close, but the vibe shift was just the concession that AGAINST had prevailed.

One side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins. Nadia Asparouhova is an independent writer and researcher; she has held positions at GitHub and Substack, although she’s always been something of a professional stranger—at one company, her formal job title was just “Nadia.” Her first book, “Working in Public,” was an ethnographic study of open-source software engineering. The field was inflected with standard-issue techno-utopian notions of anarchically productive self-organization, but she found little evidence to support such naïve optimism. For the most part, open-source projects weren’t evenly distributed across teams of volunteers; they were managed by at most a few individuals, who spent the bulk of their waking hours in abject thrall to a user-complaint queue. Technology did not naturally lead to the proliferation of professional, creative, or ideological variety. Tools designed for workplace synchronization, she found at one of her tech jobs, became enforcement mechanisms for a recognizable form of narrow political progressivism. In the wake of one faux pas—when her Slack response to an active-shooter warning elicited a rebuke from a member of the “social impact team,” who reminded her that neighborhood disorder was the result of “more hardships than any of us will ever understand”—she decided to err on the side of keeping her opinions to herself.

Asparouhova found that she wasn’t the only one who felt disillusioned by the condition of these once promising public forums. She gradually retreated from the broadest public spaces of the internet, as part of a larger pattern of migration to private group chats—“a dark network of scattered outposts, where no one wants to be seen or heard or noticed, so that they might be able to talk to their friends in peace.” Before long, a loose collection of internet theorists took on the private-messaging channel as an object of investigation. In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The title was an allusion to Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” which explains the Fermi paradox, or the apparent emptiness of the universe, as a strategic preference to remain invisible to predatory species. The writer Venkatesh Rao and the designer Maggie Appleton later expanded on the idea of the “cozyweb.” These texts took a fairly uncontroversial observation—that people were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones? Their faith in memetic culture had been shaken. It wasn’t selecting for quality but for ease of assimilation into preëxisting blocs.

In the fall of 2021, Asparouhova realized that this inchoate line of thought had been anticipated by a cult novel called “There Is No Antimemetics Division.” The book is brilliant, singular, and profoundly strange. Originally serialized, between 2008 and 2020, under the pseudonym qntm (pronounced “quantum,” and subsequently revealed to be a British writer and software developer named Sam Hughes), as part of a sprawling, collaborative online writing project called the SCP Foundation Wiki, “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is part Lovecraftian horror, part clinical science fiction, and part media studies. (This fall, an overhauled version will be published, for the first time, as a print volume.) Its plot can be summarized about as well as a penguin might be given driving directions to the moon, but here goes: it’s a time-looping thriller about a team of researchers trying to save the world from an extra-dimensional “memeplex” that takes the intermittent form of skyscraper-sized arthropods that can only be vanquished by being forgotten (kinda). The over-all concept is to literalize the idea of a meme—to imagine self-replicating cultural objects as quirky and/or fearsome supernatural monsters—and conjure a world in which some of them must be isolated and studied in secure containment facilities for the sake of humanity. What captured Asparouhova’s attention was the book’s introduction of something called a “self-keeping secret” or “antimeme.” If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

This is the animating contrast of Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” published with Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective. She has devoted her attention, as she puts it in the introduction, to the behavior of “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” She is interested in ideas that cost something. Her initial examples are a little bizarre and slightly misleading: Why do we still observe daylight-saving time when nobody likes it? Why don’t people wash their hands when they know they should? (A clearer and more salient reference might be to the newly memetic “abundance agenda,” which remains essentially antimemetic in substance, insofar as it attempts to replace procedural fetishism and rhetorical grandstanding with the hard, unglamorous, possibly boring work of applying ourselves to basic problems of physical infrastructure.) What she’s ultimately after is a much bigger set of questions: Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? As she puts it, “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind.” These antimemes are crowded out by the electric trivia of online signalling: “As memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire. Taken to the extreme, this could be seen as a horrifying loss of human capacity to build and create in new and surprising ways.”

There are plenty of different frames Asparouhova might have chosen for an investigation into how the structure of a given channel of communication affects the kind, quality, and velocity of information it can carry, but she has settled on the cool-sounding if cumbersome notion of “antimemetics” for a reason. The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did. Thiel’s invocation of Girardian scapegoating anticipated the rise of “cancel culture” as a structural phenomenon, and Yarvin was early to point out that the antidote to dysregulated public squares were “smaller, high-context spaces.” If she accepts their descriptive analysis of how the open internet deteriorated into a tribal struggle over public “mindshare,” she rejects their prescriptive complicity with the breast-beating warlords of the new primitivism. Memetic behavior may have got us here, she writes, “but as we search for a way to survive, it is a second, hidden set of behaviors—antimemetic ones—that will show us how to move forward.”

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong. It was foolish to hope that the radical and anarchic expansion of the public sphere—“adding more voices to a room”—would prove out our talent for collective reasoning. But neither do we have to resign ourselves to total context collapse and perpetual memetic warfare. She does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable desert. While some camps are bigger and more storied—think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords—its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.”

The book “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, which makes it a generative and fun read. The central concept is not always clear or systematic, but that seems to come with the antimemetic territory. At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. Elsewhere, antimemetic ideas represent the sacred reminder that we are frail and uncertain creatures deserving of grace. This is quite explicitly a pandemic-inflected project, and she often returns to the notion that antimemes have “long symptomatic periods” and are “highly resistant to spread”—if one manages to “escape its original context” and spreads to networks with high “immunity,” it can be prematurely destroyed by the antibodies of “pushback.” The concept can thus seem like a fancy way to say “nuanced,” or like a synonym for “challenging” or “hard-won.” There are places where she implies that antimemes are definitionally good—as in, a name for elusive ideas we should want to propagate—and places where she argues instead that they are morally neutral. Sometimes antimemes are processes—like bureaucracy—and sometimes they seem more like concrete goals. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing, rather than a source of irritation or confusion, is that she’s quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought, or of a group chat.

As is perhaps inevitable in even the best internet-theory books, Asparouhova’s antidote ultimately entails the cultivation of the ability to decide what matters and choose to pay attention to it. She recognizes, to her credit, that such injunctions are often corny invitations to flower-smelling self-indulgence; her icon of patience and stamina in the face of obdurate complexity happens to be Robert Moses, which makes for an odd, if refreshing, contrast with the bog-standard tract about the value of attention. More important than one’s individual attention, she continues, is one’s concentrated participation in the subtler kind of informational triage that high-context communities can perform, but she doesn’t think it’s sufficient to give up and tend only these walled communal gardens. The point is not flight or bunker construction. She envisions a recursive architecture where people experiment with ideas among intimates before they launch them at scale, a process that might in turn transform the marketplace of ideas from a gladiatorial arena to something more like a handcraft bazaar: “Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings. Memetic and antimemetic cities depend on each other: the stronger memes become, the more we need private spaces to refine them.”

She grants that this sounds like a lot of effort. It’s an invitation to re-create an entire information-processing civilization from the ground up. But if the easy way had worked—if all you had to do was get rid of the institutional gatekeepers and give everyone a voice, or if all you had to do was remind people that the institutional gatekeepers were right in the first place—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Antimemetics” arrives at an opportune moment for two reasons. The first is that private group chats have matured in precisely the way she predicted. “Somewhere out there, your favorite celebrities and politicians and executives are tapping away on their keyboards in a Signal or Telegram or Whatsapp chat, planning campaigns and revolutions and corporate takeovers,” she writes. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith of Semafor provided ample corroboration, reporting that the venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen turns to group chats for the coordinated dissemination of “samizdat”—the opinionated venture capitalist, according to one source, apparently “spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time.” As the Substack economist Noah Smith put it, “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.” Not all of Asparouhova’s predictions were quite right, though: “No journalist has access to the most influential group chats,” she asserts, a statement rendered hilariously inaccurate by the events of the last two months. None of these examples seems quite like the models of high-minded exchange Asparouhova described on the basis of her own experience, but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The other thing that’s rendered the book particularly timely has been the development of something like a moral self-audit among Silicon Valley intellectuals, Asparouhova among them, who have come to wonder if their own heterodoxy over the past decade has had politically disastrous consequences. In a miniature drama published online titled “Twilight of the Edgelords,” the writer Scott Alexander, of the widely read blog Astral Codex Ten, has one of his characters declare that “all of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.” The character outlines a series of examples: “We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string ‘trans-’ in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.” Alexander has more or less done what Asparouhova would have recommended: supervise the rigorous exchange of controversial ideas in a high-context, semi-private setting, and hope that they in turn improve the quality of the public discourse. What Alexander seems to be lamenting is the way the variegated output of his community was, in the end, somehow reduced to FOR or AGAINST, and the possibility that he inadvertently helped tip the scales.

Given the revelations in Ben Smith’s reporting—and his argument that Andreessen’s group chats were “the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed”—Alexander’s honorable exercise in self-criticism seems more like a superfluous bit of self-flagellation. From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

For all of its fun-house absurdity, qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division” seems legible enough on this point. Humanity, in the novel, has lived under the recurrent threat of catastrophically destructive memes—dark, self-fulfilling premonitions of scarcity, zero-sum competition, fear, mistrust, inegalitarianism. These emotions and attitudes, which circulate with little friction, turn us into zombies. The zombie warlord is an interdimensional memeplex called SCP-3125. The book’s hero understands that her enemy has no ultimate goal or content beyond the demonstration of its own power, and in turn the worship of power as such: “SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible. But it is a lie.” The antidote to this lie is the deliberate commemoration of all of the things that slip our minds—antimemes such as “an individual life is a fleeting thing” and “strangers are fellow-sufferers” and “love thy neighbor.” In the universe of the novel, these opposing forces—of what is too easy to remember and what is too easy to forget—have been locked in a cycle of destruction and rebirth for untold thousands of years. For the most part, it has taken an eternal return of civilizational ruin to prompt our ability to recall the difficult wisdom of the antimeme. The march of technology insures that every new go-round leaves us even more desolate than the last one. This time, Asparouhova proposes, we might try not to wait until it’s too late.

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compneuropapers · 2 months ago

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Interesting Papers for Week 18, 2025

Dialogue mechanisms between astrocytic and neuronal networks: A whole-brain modelling approach. Ali, O. B. K., Vidal, A., Grova, C., & Benali, H. (2025). PLOS Computational Biology, 21(1), e1012683.

Dorsal hippocampus represents locations to avoid as well as locations to approach during approach-avoidance conflict. Calvin, O. L., Erickson, M. T., Walters, C. J., & Redish, A. D. (2025). PLOS Biology, 23(1), e3002954.

Individualized temporal patterns drive human sleep spindle timing. Chen, S., He, M., Brown, R. E., Eden, U. T., & Prerau, M. J. (2025). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(2), e2405276121.

A synapse-specific refractory period for plasticity at individual dendritic spines. Flores, J. C., Sarkar, D., & Zito, K. (2025). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(2), e2410433122.

Rescaling perceptual hand maps by visual‐tactile recalibration. Fuchs, X., & Heed, T. (2025). European Journal of Neuroscience, 61(1).

A solution to the pervasive problem of response bias in self-reports. Grimmond, J., Brown, S. D., & Hawkins, G. E. (2025). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(3), e2412807122.

Nonresponsive Neurons Improve Population Coding of Object Location. Haggard, M., & Chacron, M. J. (2025). Journal of Neuroscience, 45(3), e1068242024.

Saliency Response in Superior Colliculus at the Future Saccade Goal Predicts Fixation Duration during Free Viewing of Dynamic Scenes. Heeman, J., White, B. J., Van der Stigchel, S., Theeuwes, J., Itti, L., & Munoz, D. P. (2025). Journal of Neuroscience, 45(3), e0428242024.

A combinatorial neural code for long-term motor memory. Kim, J.-H., Daie, K., & Li, N. (2025). Nature, 637(8046), 663–672.

Spontaneous slow cortical potentials and brain oscillations independently influence conscious visual perception. Koenig, L., & He, B. J. (2025). PLOS Biology, 23(1), e3002964.

Coordinated representations for naturalistic memory encoding and retrieval in hippocampal neural subspaces. Kwon, D., Kim, J., Yoo, S. B. M., & Shim, W. M. (2025). Nature Communications, 16, 641.

Geometry and dynamics of representations in a precisely balanced memory network related to olfactory cortex. Meissner-Bernard, C., Zenke, F., & Friedrich, R. W. (2025). eLife, 13, e96303.3.

Recurrent activity propagates through labile ensembles in macaque dorsolateral prefrontal microcircuits. Nolan, S. O., Melugin, P. R., Erickson, K. R., Adams, W. R., Farahbakhsh, Z. Z., Mcgonigle, C. E., Kwon, M. H., Costa, V. D., Hackett, T. A., Cuzon Carlson, V. C., Constantinidis, C., Lapish, C. C., Grant, K. A., & Siciliano, C. A. (2025). Current Biology, 35(2), 431-443.e4.

A recurrent neural circuit in Drosophila temporally sharpens visual inputs. Pang, M. M., Chen, F., Xie, M., Druckmann, S., Clandinin, T. R., & Yang, H. H. (2025). Current Biology, 35(2), 333-346.e6.

Central amygdala NPBWR1 neurons facilitate social novelty seeking and new social interactions. Soya, S., Toda, K., Sakurai, K., Cherasse, Y., Saito, Y. C., Abe, M., Sakimura, K., & Sakurai, T. (2025). Science Advances, 11(3).

Tactile edges and motion via patterned microstimulation of the human somatosensory cortex. Valle, G., Alamri, A. H., Downey, J. E., Lienkämper, R., Jordan, P. M., Sobinov, A. R., Endsley, L. J., Prasad, D., Boninger, M. L., Collinger, J. L., Warnke, P. C., Hatsopoulos, N. G., Miller, L. E., Gaunt, R. A., Greenspon, C. M., & Bensmaia, S. J. (2025). Science, 387(6731), 315–322.

Understanding the neural code of stress to control anhedonia. Xia, F., Fascianelli, V., Vishwakarma, N., Ghinger, F. G., Kwon, A., Gergues, M. M., Lalani, L. K., Fusi, S., & Kheirbek, M. A. (2025). Nature, 637(8046), 654–662.

The integration of self-efficacy and response-efficacy in decision making. Yang, Y.-Y., & Delgado, M. R. (2025). Scientific Reports, 15, 1789.

Critical Avalanches in Excitation-Inhibition Balanced Networks Reconcile Response Reliability with Sensitivity for Optimal Neural Representation. Yang, Z., Liang, J., & Zhou, C. (2025). Physical Review Letters, 134(2), 028401.

Sustained EEG responses to rapidly unfolding stochastic sounds reflect Bayesian inferred reliability tracking. Zhao, S., Skerritt-Davis, B., Elhilali, M., Dick, F., & Chait, M. (2025). Progress in Neurobiology, 244, 102696.

#neuroscience #research #science #brain science #scientific publications #cognitive science #neurobiology #cognition #psychophysics #neurons #neural computation #neural networks #computational neuroscience

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dreamings-free · 1 year ago

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‘A dirty nightclub in an arena’ – behind Louis Tomlinson’s Faith In The Future World Tour

Louis Tomlinson and his tight-knit touring crew traverse the world in close to 80 shows, fulfilling a ‘dirty nightclub in an arena’ brief with a dynamic live campaign.

Production Profiles 5 January 2024

Following the success of his record-breaking Live From London livestream, which reportedly raised over £1m for touring and live events personnel and charitable organisations, Louis Tomlinson and his tight-knit crew have toured the world twice over. This time, visiting sold-out arenas in Europe and the UK with a cleverly networked live production with abstract video and lighting and a ‘no frills’ approach to sound, which guaranteed that every ticket holder experienced the same show, regardless of where they stood, sat, or screamed (more on that later). With close to 80 shows under their belt, TPi visited London’s O2 arena ahead of the production’s penultimate date of 2023.

Words: Jacob Waite Photos: Justin De Souza and Oli Crump

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“A team effort is required to get this show off the ground,” explained Technical Manager, Sam ‘Kenny’ Kenyon, who has been a fixture of Louis Tomlinson’s live output since joining as Lighting Crew Chief in 2019. “This has been a complete redesign, and the production has expanded and gotten more complex, which requires different solutions to make it happen.”

Kenny and the team oversaw the deployment of an A and B rig. “We’ve been fortunate for the European stint that the venues we’ve toured have, mostly, been arenas. The main difference between the A and B rig is the addition of IMAG and further lighting header trusses. Aside from that, the A rig fits everywhere. If anything, we’ve run into weight issues, which we can overcome swiftly by removing overhead trusses.”

For the first few shows, Riggers, Ian Bracewell, and Alex Walker incorporated load cells on trusses to get an accurate rate and account of the weight of the load of each truss. In the UK, The Brighton Centre had a particularly low-rate roof with weight limitations. Production Manager, Craig Sherwood and Tour Manager, Tom Allen’s vendors of choice included: Altour (travel), Beat the Street, BPM SFX, CSE Crosscom, Colour Sound Experiment (lighting, rigging, and video), Hangman UK, Boxcat Studio and Two Suns Creative (video content), LED Creative, Ox Event House (custom light housings), Sarah’s Kitchen, Seven 7 Management (artist management), Solotech (audio), Stardes Trucking, and TANCK (production design and video content).

There was no video director, as the show’s visuals were programmed and interspersed with live footage and triggered by a lighting console at FOH, thanks in part to an intricate network setup. “There’s a lot going on in racks that people never see, but it has been stable thanks to the quality of kit supplied by our vendors, who have invested heavily, and the team taking the time to programme the show,” Kenny noted.

Key to the success of the operation was the incorporation of Central Control software, which takes a signal from a lighting console, be it ACN or Art-Net, and translates it to talk to various products – in this case, video. “There is a giant brain that nobody knows exists other than those that have programmed it,” he added.

Additional crew members joined the tour in Europe to aid the video deployment and lead to far more efficient load-in an -outs. “We are close to 80 shows in and on days where we have access to multiple trucks, it comes out very quickly, which for a show of this scale is impressive and credit goes to the team,” enthused Kenny. “The biggest hurdle is when you’ve only got a two-truck dock.”

Prior to the tour, the team had five days of production rehearsals spent in Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun. “When we came to Europe a week later, we had a week of re-prepping with a day of rehearsals at Hamburg’s Barclays Arena, the day before a show,” he described. “It’s been a fun and long run,” added Stage Manager, Torin Arnold. “We’ve visited a good range of venues and countries – especially the Eastern European legs, visiting places you wouldn’t ordinarily tour and experiencing how they operate. This show is designed so it can be accomplished in any part of the world.” Carpenter, Harry Reeves was also on hand to support the build.

The routing, however, was sometimes challenging with some late arrivals and difficult border crossings. “There were a few times in Eastern Europe where we were doing a ferry back-to-back to arrive at 11am, sitting at a difficult border crossing. We usually start with a 7am mark out, so knocking hours off your load-in is tough but everyone pulled together to overcome it,” Arnold explained, noting that touring without staging, and instead, using venue stages (particularly rolling stages), was a blessing during those late arrivals. “As with any tour, as dates progress you build a rhythm while maintaining the safety of the build,” he noted.

Arnold also highlighted the benefit of Lead Truck Driver, Neil Thornton and Truck Drivers, Matt Marlow, Ben Woods, Sarah Goldsmith, Bob Miles, Alam Minshall, Franco DeRosa, and Ollie Thornton who “speed up the process” and maintained a level of consistency.

The transitions between support acts before Louis hit the stage was equally seamless, with ample downstage space for the singer-songwriter to traverse during his performance. “Having a clean frontline means we have space to get the bands on and off,” he added. “Our vendors have also provided everything from an audio package standpoint for support acts, which also speeds up the load-in and -out.”

Highlighting a ‘bucket list’ show at Hollywood Bowl, working closely with US union officials as a “fun” and “interesting” experience, Arnold reflected on the entire tour with crewmembers he now considers close friends. “This is a close team and I’ve made some great memories and stories. It’s been a fun year!”

A DIRTY NIGHTCLUB IN AN ARENA Production Designer, Programmer and Director, Tom Taylor, and Francis Clegg of TANCK have worked with Louis Tomlinson ever since he made the leap to solo artist. “The production design has evolved into an angular, grungy, asymmetrical setup, borne out of the ‘dirty nightclub in an arena setting’ creative brief I was given,” Taylor said, citing the creative influence of Matt Vines and Seven 7 Management. “Louis is a phenomenal performer, and the crowd is captivated the entire time. We started knocking ideas around, speaking to Louis about his inspirations and influences, which we then developed into a creative deck, which I sketched in Blender, and imported into WYSIWYG for visuals, to create stills and pre-visualise.”

Taylor spent 10 days programming the visuals at Colour Sound Experiment, a firm he shares a “longstanding” relationship with. “They are always a call away regardless of the day or time. Their team is easy to get along with and I like their whole ‘production sphere’ – sometimes it’s nice to split lighting and video, but for a show like this, aligning those departments with one line of communication is ideal,” he said, underlining the support of Colour Sound Experiment Account Handler, Haydn Cruickshank.

With production rehearsals under their belt and recordings from Louis Tomlinson World Tour (2020–22), where TANCK piloted Central Control software, the creatives understood how the singer and his band moved on stage, developing a rhythm and consistency of when to implement visual cues and which camera angle fit best. This allowed the team to pre-programme the visual content to timecode.

Video content was made by a combination of TANCK, Two Suns Creative, and Boxcat Studio, with the latter creating 3D models and rendered content, all of which was broadcast across a unique set of video surfaces. “Having the abstract video columns on stage makes it much more interesting than your standard slab of LED at the back of the stage,” Taylor noted.

On stage boxes created by Ox Event House housed GLP JDC Line 1000 strobes with reflective panelling and fabric that were printed to look like heavy concrete slabs, ladened with custom LED Creative solutions. These boxes then moved up and down using Wahlberg Motion Design winches to provide a “low-level, clubby feel” to the set.

“The winches can only carry 50kg and the lights alone are 35kg, so we had to be careful not to overload them, but the result was cool. We also have one single lightbulb on a winch which comes up and down above Louis to create a classic lighting moment,” Taylor said, further highlighting Ayrton Huracán’s prismatic colour wheel as a ‘fan favourite’.

The lighting design saw a wall of GLP impression X4 Bar 20s at the rear of the stage in 12 columns. Further lighting trusses over the stage carried the Wahlberg winches for several automated looks. The DMX winches were utilised for three or four songs, either statically or moving up and down, while JDC Line 1000s provided colour and strobe effects, to achieve varied looks, with a relatively minimal overhead lighting package.

Taylor elaborated: “There are some shutters for one specific track which go directly in-front of some of the GLP X4 Bars to get the aura of the lights, instead of the lenses, which I really like the look of. Lighting and video complement each other during this show – there’s also a section with flickering fluorescent tubes on the video content with the X4 Bar 20s behind the LED screens flickering in a similar way.

Taylor was delighted with the performance of the crew. “Overall, it has been a great run, executed flawlessly,” he commented, citing the support of Lighting Crew Chief, James Box; Dimmer Technician, Rick Carr, and Lighting Technicians, Amy Barnett, and Kieran Hancox.

The wider lighting rig comprised Ayrton Eurus, CHAUVET Professional Strike Array 4, Claypaky Mini-B eLumen8 Endura 1Q120, and Robe BMFL fixtures with robo cameras, all fixed on various HOF MLT3, Litec QH40 and Thomas James Thomas Engineering Superstruss. The lighting riser featured Ayrton Huracan LT and GLP JDC1 fixtures.

Robe Spiider fixtures were situated on the up and downstage video trusses, with the floor package boasting the deployment of further Ayrton Eurus, LEDJ Spectra Flood Q15 and Chroma-Q Color Force 72 units, the latter chosen for key light. Atmospherics came in the shape of Smoke Factory Tour Hazer 2, Martin Professional JEM ZR45 and MDG Atmosphere ATMe hazers with TMB ProFans. “We had some challenging shows, implementing an arena-scale design into sheds in the US, but it’s been good to return to Europe and witness the fans enjoying the show,” added Lighting Crew Chief, James Box, who pinpointed the use of the multicoloured glass gobo in Hurricanes as among his favourite looks.

“There is a lot of effort put in by TANCK to ensure we get the utmost from every fixture on the rig, which is great to see, when the team has gone to the effort of assembling the show each morning. Seeing the looks they achieve from the rig and the extra details, with each advanced cue within the show, is a pleasure.

Almost every pixel on the JDC Line 1000 and X4 impression Bars are being used.”

Video Crew Chief, Dave Mallandain, formerly of Colour Sound Experiment, supervised the video build and the team of Video Technicians, Ed Driver, Frank Wlliams and Tim Curwen.

“Working with Colour Sound Experiment again, in a freelance capacity, certainly has its benefits,” he stated. “You get to know the workflows and personalities of the company. There is an element of trust there and our relationship is stronger because of that.” The 2.5m by 2.5m video screen, made up of Leyard CLM6 LED panels with Colorlight Z6 processing on the back end, was built in an abstract configuration – hung from varying size steel structures fixed on to lighting truss, spanning the entire stage, as opposed to a traditional backwall. “This setup requires us to build it quicker, so the backline can start building their world, but it’s very lightweight and easy to use, so once the local crew are up to speed, it flies up in no time,” he reported.

During the show, there was a lot of camera angles fed into a Blackmagic ATEM switcher, with content then fed into Resolume media servers which was processed and treated with video effects and filters to manipulate the content, monitored by the video team, and pre-programmed by Taylor via an MA Lighting grandMA3 console, operating in MA2 mode.

“The fan camera, which was one of Tom’s ideas, has evolved to the point where Frank and I are on stage during Out Of My System, pointing these cameras fabricated in an old VHS-style shell at Louis’ face in reference to the fisheye-lens inspired music video.”

A mixture of Marshall Electronics and Panasonic PTZ cameras ensured the wider on-stage action was captured. “While the visual content is the same, the shots differ based on the energy of the crowd from night to night,” he explained. “We have an overhead shot for the drums, and another behind Louis, which shoots over his shoulder to the crowd. We also have a PTZ camera on the ground in front of Louis which can rotate to capture crowd scans along with a little ‘bullet camera’ for each musician. It’s been a fantastic tour; everyone on this team has been phenomenal.”

The special effects and pyrotechnics package supplied by BPM SFX included Galaxis PFC 10-way receivers running Galaxis, with a main and a backup controller, which ran through an MA Lighting grandMA2 console, to trigger MagicFX Stadium Shot IIs and a single shot of red streamers. The latter, a “signature of Louis Tomlinson live shows”, according to BPM SFX Technician, Jack Webber – who toured with a new custom control rack, with much of the hardware integrated in one rack.

BPM SFX Account Handler, Matt Heap and SFX Technicians, Blake Harward and Phillip Mathew also provided Webber with support. “The one major change on this tour was putting the Stadium Shot IIs at the downstage edge, and adding lasers for the O2 arena show,” said Webber, who has been involved in past touring campaigns with the camp. “This is the first touring camp to take me to the US, so I feel incredibly privileged.”

Safety was paramount for the BPM SFX team, who implemented the safeguard of warning notices on-stage to ensure the band knew exactly when an effect was triggered. In closing, Webber referenced the ‘rainbow-inspired’ track, She Is Beauty We Are World Class, which demonstrated the strength of the special effects package. “There are about 22 rapid fire chase Comets all going off at the same time with a big lift, which differs in comparison to the other looks with eight units.”

MIXING IN A SEA OF SCREAMS FOH Engineer, John Delf mixed on an Avid S6L 32D console with onboard plug-ins. “I use the onboard plug-ins as much as possible because I want to keep it as simple as possible and know I’ve got a show out of the box without any added extras, which is particularly useful during fly-in gigs, where I have to use a house console or have limited time to set up,” he noted. Delf also toured with some choice pieces of outboard gear including a Rupert Neve Designs 5045 primary source enhancer for vocals, an Empirical Labs Fatso two-channel compressor for drums, and further Distressors for the bass guitar group and vocals.

“The bulk of my mixing is riding the DCA control groups and the vocals, balancing between them, and when there is a lead guitar solo, I’ll jump to that. Most of the mix should stay where it is, and I shouldn’t have to think about it, but every day you make major tweaks and refinements based on how the musicians are performing. Most of the gig is turning the band up and down without affecting the vocals because I have DCAs for drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, main vocal, backing vocals, and an ‘all’ DCA that includes everything but vocals,” he said, explaining his mixing wizardry modestly. “I also run snapshots in which I am changing the sub send amount for different songs, as well as reverb and delay times. If the band changes the set last minute, I have the desk synced to the timecode and that will trigger the snapshots.”

At the beginning of the set, the noise of the crowd can be between 112 to 116dB. “We have a little bit of headroom. When they are loud, I can push the mix, and when they are quieter, I can pull it back for the more introspective moments of the show,” he explained.

“My favourite section to mix is the transition from a cover of Arctic Monkeys’ 505 into Back to You. When that kicks in, I push the “All” DCA up to +10. We’ve built the set up to that point, where I’m able to throw it to the top before the end of the set. The three songs in the encore are also fun songs to mix,” he enthused, accenting the support of Solotech Account Handler, David Shepherd.

“I’ve worked with Dave for years, while he was at BCS Audio (now part of Solotech). He’s been my go-to account handler for a very long time, and Solotech has inherited this gig from them, so there was a natural transition.”

System Engineer and Head of Audio, Oli Crump walked TPi through the PA system: “We’ve been using L-Acoustics, which is our preference, since the start of last year’s tour. The main hang has been K1 with K2 downfill for both tours, however, we are touring with a much larger system this year with K2 on the sides instead of KARA-II. We’re flying subwoofers and carrying delays with us, which is also our preference in big arenas, like the O2 – it provides an even level of coverage across the audience,” the TPi Breakthrough Talent Award alumni said, explaining the thought process behind a larger sound system.

“The PA system is naturally bigger this year because we’re touring larger venues. The crowd is very loud, and we need to be able to compete with that at points of the show. The window of dynamic range we have without it being too loud is compressed because the background level from the crowd is so high, so we need to be able to get our level as consistent as possible from front to back. This setup really helps overcome that.”

Out of ear shot from Crump, Delf extolled the virtues of his partner at FOH: “Oli and I work well together. Every day, regardless of the venue, I know the system is going to sound consistent. We deal with different venue acoustics each day but as soon as I run up my virtual soundcheck, I’ve got the mix back to where I want it because the PA is at the same level every day. I used to walk the room a lot during sound check, but it always sounded consistent, so I’ve stopped doing that because I trust him explicitly.”

The PA generally sat in a standard location for an arena PA, 10.5m off centre and no wider than that, using the same basic system design as Louis Tomlinson’s past touring campaign, which Crump worked on with Kenny to ensure it didn’t impede the production design. “The number of boxes we deploy varies from show to show, based on the venue. The worst-case scenario [visually] is that the PA needs to be a little lower than usual and gets in the way of the IMAG screens slightly,” Crump detailed.

He designed the system using Soundvision, then imported his file into Network Manager, with a DirectOut Technologies PRODIGY.MP chosen for system processing. “I have visited many of the European arenas before so I’ve got fairly accurate plots, however, sometimes you will stumble across an error someone has made in building the models,” he continued. “Madrid’s WiZink Center had different CAD drawings for each layer of the venue and one of the layers was accidentally scaled wrong, so the bottom floors were fine but as you went up everything was out. You get curveballs like that occasionally but that’s why it’s important to verify drawings.”

An audience also changes the acoustics of a room, generally for the better, but sometimes not, so Crump was on hand at FOH to make tweaks when required. “As rooms get larger, they generally get more difficult, reverb time will go up purely as a factor of the room size, regardless of how you treat it. The O2 is quite tall seating-wise, so you end up having to angle the PA up into the roof a lot,” Crump noted.

Over by the stage, Monitor Engineer, Barrie Pitt mixed the five-piece band and frontman using a DiGiCo Quantum 338 console. “Louis and the band are good at verbalising what they want. They’ve been playing a long time, so it’s my job to translate those desires into the mix,” he explained. “DiGiCo has been my ‘go-to’ brand of console for the past 15 years. The 338 is an incredibly powerful console, which can do as much as any other on the market and more in a much less convoluted way. I know it like the back of my hand and how to get the best out of it and do the most complicated things at the push of a button. The Capture features are ridiculously powerful.”

Pitt oversaw 85 channels, 64 directly from stage, with additional channels for shouts, sends, returns, communications, and routing, among others. His outboard rack included a classic Lexicon PCM 91 digital reverberator for vocals. “The way I set up the communications and shout systems are the same across the board. For the layout, a lot of people have instruments on one side and vocal and effects on the other, however, I tend to adjust my banks of faders visually, how you would see it on stage, left to right, as a nod to my analogue mixing days. My second layer is usually tracks and any track content with reverbs next to the vocals, so they’re changed in unison. Sometimes, I’ll do a custom layer of [drum or spill group, two lead guitar channels and vocal] the things I use most, particularly if it’s a busy show input-wise.”

Pitt referred to the basis of his mix as ‘static’ with minor changes. “Louis changes a fair bit between songs I’m running upwards of 60 scenes with a lot of songs having multiple scenes for verse and chorus or specific sections,” he explained. The Monitor Engineer is a big believer in unifying the in-ear monitors, so what he hears is the same as those on stage. “We use Shure PSM1000s, JH Audio Roxanne in-ear monitors for Louis and JH16s for everyone else, except for the drummer, who is using Ultimate Ears IEMs. Louis and the band are solid, and they keep their ears in from start to finish. Louis wants the rock star mix; he likes to feel the weight of the mix. It’s not an overpowering mix but it’s a full mix with his vocal on top with Neve 5045 primary source enhancers on all vocals. Everyone else has a standard band mix at moderate level with their instrument and vocals high. The drummer has the most straightforward mix with his drums and shouts layered on top.”

A further pair of subwoofers stage left, and right were situated under the stage risers, providing the weight of side fills without the top end. “It’s a big rock show with drums and guitars, so the less noise I can have flying about the stage, the better,” he said.

The microphone package included a Shure Axient Digital AD4D two-channel digital wireless receiver, a AD2 vocal microphone with a KSM9 capsule for vocals. Sennheiser MKH 60 and AKG C414 XLS microphones captured the ambient noise of the room. “We track everything, including the two sets of ambient microphones for recording and virtual soundcheck, in case the band decides to do anything with the live content,” he noted.

Having collaborated with Solotech and previously BCS Audio multiple times, Pitt was pleased to see the company on the tour sheet. “They are a solid choice and I know Dave Shepherd well. They fix any problems swiftly, and all their gear is well packaged and maintained,” he said. “The band and crew are lovely. It’s rare to come across a camp so friendly on a show of this size.” Pitt thanked Solotech Monitor and Stage Technician, Matt Coton. “He is fantastic. He takes all the second guessing out of my day and is so meticulous and thorough that I know everything will be as it should be from the get-go. When there are issues, he knows exactly what to do to remedy it. He’s been a joy to work and hang out with.”

Audio Technicians, Matt Coton, Tim Miller, Kim Watson, Elliott Clarke, James Coghlan, Matt Benton; Bassist and Keyboard Technician, Chris Freeman; Guitar Technician, Dan Ely and Playback Technician, Scotty Anderson made up the sound team.

CURATING A HOME AWAY FROM HOME Sarah Nicholas of Sarah’s Kitchen and Caterers, Rebecca Henderson, Helena Robertson, Chris Carter, Matty Pople and Tamsin Manvell provided band and crew catering, ensuring morale stayed high and stomachs were full on the road. Making a name for themselves as One Direction’s caterers, the outfit now cater for each of the band members’ individual tours and private functions, amassing a dedicated online following. “I started catering for Louis and the rest of One Direction during their first theatre gig in Watford and I feel very privileged to have that connection. At dinner time, we perform a plate service, which I think is important – our reputation is not only built on really good food but the entire hospitality package, creating a nourishing environment away from home,” Nicholas said.

Sarah’s Kitchen provided a range of vegan, gluten-free and vegetarian options. “We also provide disposable products and water coolers, and our runner regularly collects fresh, local produce from markets based on where we are in the world,” she explained.

The wider European crew featured Security, Kristian ‘Ches’, Ross Foster, Ben Major, and Gav Kerr; Merchandisers, Jon Ellis and Maddy Stephens; Bus Drivers, Aivaras Arminas, Frederico Antunes, Scott Pickering, Chris Grover; Entourage Bus Driver, Paul Roberts; Merchandise Truck Driver, Warren Dowey; BTS UK Account Handler, Garry Lewis; Stardes Account Handlers, Tyrone Reynolds, and Alam Minshall; CSE Crosscom Account Handler, Hannah Evans and Altour Travel Account Handler, Alexandra Gati.

Having wrapped up the best-selling livestream of 2020 – a lofty achievement given the proliferation of remote productions amid the grounding of live events with in-person crowds – Tomlinson shows no signs of slowing down post-pandemic, making the leap from sold-out theatres to arenas across the globe with his trusty crew in tow. “Live From London was great because the crew and I really needed it,” Delf said. “It gave us some much-needed work amid the lockdown, and all the proceeds went directly to the crew, which was an incredibly honourable thing to do. To come back out on the other side of lockdown was great. It was a dark time back then for everyone, but to be back out on tour surrounded by friends, who feel more like family, it’s special.”

-> read here on Issuu

#louis #fitf tour #fitfwt #lt crew #tpi magazine #05.01.24 #article #touring #thank youu omglarryrabbit ;)#love getting to peek behind the scenes this is great

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collapsedsquid · 4 months ago

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But Financial Times analysis of railway data shows Germany’s state-owned rail group Deutsche Bahn consistently delivering one of the least reliable services in central Europe — and even when compared with the UK network, which is routinely criticised for poor performance at home and abroad. [...] The Swiss network, renowned for its punctuality, has resorted to stopping some late-arriving German services at the border to prevent them disrupting local operations.

Germans failing miserably, I believe the traditional solution is to send them to the eastern front

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horsesource · 10 months ago

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"A rather superficial thought has been going round my head for some time: no one listened to Antonin Artaud, but he was right. We have to get out of the insanity our civilization is creating. But drugs, alcohol, and in fine madness and/or death are no solution; we must find something else.

Meaning is withering…The forms I've known as mine are falling away. My writing is foundering, I’ve nothing interesting to say anymore, nothing worth trying to say…How many psychologists would call me insane if I told them that it feels as though I’ve lost my grip on everything? So that’s what’s driving you to hole up in the mountains!

Yes indeed, and now you’re really losing the plot, because even the mountains are coming apart. Losing cohesion because of melting ice, because of these heatwaves. The handholds are crumbling rocks are falling, this is how it is. And friends are crashing at the foot of the sheer rock face…something inside me is ringing in response, something that hurts and unbalances me.

It’s would have been so easy if my personal unhappiness could be summed up by an unresolved family issue…But no. My problem is that my problem isn’t mine alone. The misery my body is expressing comes from the world.”

Nastassja Martin In the Eye of the Wild

“We live, like all other life forms – animal, plant, fungal, bacterial – in the midst of enormously complex networks of semiotic life…A brain in a vat could never generate meaning. What is needed for mind is a living body in a lived world. Place, or umwelt, isn’t incidental. Places, and the tongues that ‘speak’ there, are a central aspect of what makes us. Human linguistic meaning-making in metaphor does not spring brand new and unbidden from the cosmos. It has evolved from natural metaphors and meanings which are gathered in evolutionary layers in all the life forms of this planet. The evolving organism draws on these hidden and nonconscious layers of meaning-making, and so do the poet, the artist and the scientist as they discover new forms of living knowledge. [..]

When meanings become unstable, inventiveness through exchange may be possible, and new habits may be made and laid down. But when reciprocity is refused or absent, then we are nothing but a chaos of broken relations. With that, we are in the presence of what the Estonian semiotician Ivar Puura called semiocide. Carelessness over meanings – in nature and in culture – is a symptom of relational sickness.”

Wendy Wheeler “In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss”

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mbta-unofficial · 4 months ago

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Why are there no rail lines which arc around Boston? I noticed this the other day when I wanted to go from Newton Centre to Magoun Square and realized that using the MBTA would take 90+ minutes because I'd have to go through downtown Boston, whereas if there were some kind of arc through the suburbs then it would be much faster?

I’ll get to the point in a second but you picked a very funny example because for the T, you can’t really do better than a 1 seat ride, even if there were a circle line. That particular stop pair already has the highest efficiency you can expect from the network, and the only way to cut travel time is increasing operating speed. (not a bad idea but a technical challenge)

The short answer to “why aren’t there circles?” is “well there are but they are buses and they overlap to do all the highest traffic segments” and the slightly longer answer is “a train would probably be less efficient than the buses for some reasons I could get into but also why is speed the primary metric?”

A throughrunning hub and spoke system like boston (as compared to a terminal hub and spoke like chicago or a grid like new york) gives access to the opposite side of the network in a single seat. This is one of the arguments against circle line proposals: Though shorter trips are served by intermediate service, nobody ever rides the whole circle because they would end up where they started, and on the T this is doubled because a circle is never as efficient as a line, that’s geometry. Why go around the city if through the city is a shorter trip?

However, this doesn’t actually address inter-neighborhood trips which are mostly why people want circles. The solution the T has, intermediate bus routes like the 66, is actually tailored to that critique because it takes the most in demand legs of where a circle would be and connects them. I felt like the 66 was a perfect transit solution when I lived directly on it and I still take it weekly, because it connected the parts of boston I was regularly going to, and if I needed to go farther away I would need to hit downtown usually anyway. Conventional wisdom says that these trips are less common, and therefore less of a priority, compared to downtown trips. I work downtown. Those who, like me, work in an office building are going to need to make 10+ trips a week to that building, while we might make 1-3 inter-neighborhood trips to get somewhere other than where the jobs are. Now, conventional wisdom isn’t everything: Huge numbers of people do work in adjacent neighborhoods to where they live and aren’t going to BMC Central/park street/government center. However, while all the downtown trips are centralized, ~2m people coming in and going out every day, the interneighborhood trips are distributed over a much larger area. Boston is too small to have more than one major city center, which means that network trips like Queens-Brooklyn-manhattan connections don’t need to exist either. Each of these would put pressure on a hypothetical circle line proposal because it would be weighed against alternatives like bus improvements, debt service, The Chelsea Everett Blue Line My Beloved and the other fucking albatross around this blog’s neck, the north south rail link. The T doesn’t have a lot of leeway to Build a Whole Subway that might not actually have that many riders.

I do think that the circle line is always going to let someone down though. There are fewer than fifty cities worldwide where I think that cars won’t always outperform trains or buses on speed and that’s because there are fewer than fifty cities worldwide with more than 10 million people and the thing you need for transit to outcompete cars is so many goddamn people that it’s physically impossible for all of them to have cars. Cars are well optimized for autonomy and unless density is over certain thresholds your transit needs will be better met by being able to go directly to your location. Past 10m, you get crowding where traffic is unmanageable and transit gets an edge not because it’s faster but because driving slows down, and congestion pricing even takes that transit edge away. Connecting two sub-average density neighborhoods in a city guarantees exponentially fewer trips than connecting a low density neighborhood to a high density one, for two reasons. 1: fewer people in a station catchment area means fewer trips. People are not usually thrilled about walking more than a quarter mile to a train, so as many people as possible in that quarter mile radius is important. 2: Less density means less specific attraction. Fewer jobs, less recreation, and fewer individuals mean less people coming to a place by any transit solution. When you connect two suburbs, these density issues combine multiplicatively to decrease trips compared to the line to downtown.

However, despite the critique of circle lines, I do think we should still be fighting for more service on the buses we have, and further restricting traffic. Ideally, I would love a personal vehicles ban inside the kennedy greenway down to about arlington but we’re a long way from that. I just think the buses with more frequent service, especially on the 51, 86, 65, 22, 24, and 117, are a better solution than a new construction of rail.

The other thing that matters to me for transit is that speed isn’t everything. Transit is far more accessible, affordable, healthy, safe, and green, and static infrastructure like stations create firm expectations that structure economic growth. Cars get you somewhere. Trains define a neighborhood, generate town squares, and economize the movement of people and goods.

Long post I know, but often in transit “would this be faster” is a losing game because trains and buses make frequent stops. They’ll never beat a car that is not doing that in a race, not even in Shibuya, São Paulo or the DF. It’s not would this be faster, it’s what do the externalities look like? Does this improve health outcomes? property values? accessibility? Transit always wins those fights.

#Been a while since I went on a proper screed #Magouning

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megashadowdragon · 11 months ago

Text

s [Comic] Don't make a bet if you can't afford to lose

source : www . reddit . com/r/toarumajutsunoindex/comments/1e7iyn9/comic_dont_make_a_bet_if_you_cant_afford_to_lose/#lightbox

reddit comments

The writings of the real life Aleister Crowley: en . wikipedia . org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Law

supports accelerator x misaka

Hadit and Nuit are two gods that are central to Aleister Crowley's religion of Thelema. Hadit and Nuit are described as not just being "married" but also inseparable and being two sides of the same divinity. So if two characters are meant to embody Hadit and Nuit, then they would inevitably be deeply connected in a similar manner.

Hadit and Nuit are gods that belong to the Age of Horus, the new age of spiritual awakening that the real life Aleister preached about, and also how the Toaruverse Aleister describes his ultimate goal of remaking the world by replacing all older forms of magic with "Science" (aka Thelema). Since Aleister is trying to create the Age of Horus, this naturally leads to the question of if he is also trying to create the gods of the Age of Horus in some way, perhaps by cultivating the Level 5s. And when people analyzed the series with this in mind, it turns out that Accelerator's character deeply aligns with the traits of Hadit and Mikoto/the MISAKA Network with Nuit.

Nuit is described as "Lady of the Starry Heaven, who is also Matter in its deepest metaphysical sense, who is the infinite in whom all we live and move and have our being" and is depicted as a naked woman covered in stars.

Mikoto consistently gets star-related imagery ascribed to her in all of her major character moments and in the Level 6 Shift she literally looked exactly like how Nuit is depicted. Mikoto's power is over the fundamental force of electromagnetism, which governs essentially all macroscopic physical interactions between matter (electromagnetism is the underlying principle of all chemical reactions and the reason that solid things are even solid).

Nuit is also described as "Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof" and "a sphere whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere." Nuit is further described with "Note that Heaven is not a place where Gods Live; Nuit is Heaven, itself."

"Nuit is All that which exists, and the condition of that existence. Hadit is the Principle which causes modifications in this Being. This explains how one may call Nuit Matter, and Hadit Motion."

This is practically a perfect match of the MISAKA Network that covers the world and how the Network is the basis of an artificial heaven, devoid of the influence of the old gods, and eventually an entirely new world tree as the Clonoth. Nuit is the underlying field through which Hadit moves. The MISAKA Network is literally what allows Accelerator to move after his injury.

Now there is some dispute here over whether this means Mikoto herself is Nuit or if only the Network is Nuit, but there is actually no conflict here because the solution can be found in Mikoto's name. Misaka Mikoto = MISAKA no Mikoto 'the Lord who is MISAKA'. Mikoto and the MISAKA Network are ultimately one and the same.

Hadit is described as "the infinitely condensed point, the center of Nuit's infinite circumference", "eternal energy, the Infinite Motion of Things" and depicted as a "winged globe".

Accelerator's ability is fundamentally the ability to control the motions of all things. And as mentioned above, Accelerator is literally the center and focus point of the MISAKA Network which is Nuit. Out of everyone that has been depicted with wings, his are the only ones that appear to be innate to him.

Nuit is the "infinitely-expanded circle whose circumference is unmeasurable and whose center is everywhere." Hadit is "the infinitely small point within the core of every single thing" and "the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star, and the worshipper's own inner self".

Mikoto has the largest AIM field out of all ESPers by several orders of magnitude, and the MISAKA Network's AIM field literally covers the entire world. On the other hand Accelerator's ability is completely centered on himself and his AIM field extends barely a few millimeters away from the surface of his skin. Accelerator's ability also lets him completely cut himself off from the rest of the world, a literal physical manifestation of the concept of inner focus and solipsism.

Now there is also an argument for Touma being Hadit, centered on the lines of Hadit being depicted as a serpent and being an exorcist and a magician, but at this point, thing that Touma has over Accelerator is that Accelerator doesn't have any snake imagery associated with him (yet). In all other respects Hadit clearly matches with Accelerator. It was Accelerator who "exorcised" Choronzon at the end of NT and Accelerator is the only ESPer who can go up against magicians (besides, how is Touma even a magician anyway, magic literally stops working around him). But most of all, Hadit and Nuit are Thelemic deities and the ESPers are basically Thelemic magicians so the Level 5s becoming Thelemic deities is a perfect match on a conceptual level, whereas Touma's whole shtick is being beyond the framework of any supernatural systems.

Basically, Aleister Crowley himself ships Accelerator and Mikoto.

Ive never really been into the whole Hadit/Nuit thing (if i have to see one more debate about whether Misaka or Misaki is Nuit im going to go insane), so i dont really remember a lot of this stuff off the top of my head, but i do know that theres a lot more evidence for Touma being Hadit than you give him credit for, even if i cant actually remember the specifics. A big one i can remember is the blue/yellow and green/pink color dynamic associated with Touma and KnT in NT22R, which apparently is the color scheme specifically associated with Hadit or something. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can discuss this better, because im like 90% sure that saying Accelerator is more Hadit than Touma is just...not true. Especially if youre trying to use it to claim canonicity to a ship between characters that have like, 3 interactions max, one of which involves one of them traumatizing the other.

You can find detailed arguments on the 4chan archives: https://desuarchive . org/a/

These are only two main traits of Hadit which appear to point at Touma and not Accelerator:

Blue am I and gold in the light of my bride: but the red gleam is in my eyes; & my spangles are purple & green.

I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down mine head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one.

I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness.

I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy.

The only time we saw those colors was with Touma's dragons and so far Accelerator has never been associated with snakes.

As I said before, I think the strongest argument against Touma being Hadit is simply that Imagine Breaker is supposed to exist outside of any frameworks of magic, Thelema included, so locking him into a rigid role within Thelemic Theology as the embodiment of Hadit just doesn't make sense. On the other hand, the power of ESPers is completely derived from Thelema.

Misaki is probably a backup plan for Nuit. At this point in the story, it is all but certain that the MISAKA Network is embodying Nuit, and if you look for Hadit based on that starting point then the evidence points to Accelerator (winged globe at the center of Nuit), not Touma.

Especially if youre trying to use it to claim canonicity to a ship between characters that have like, 3 interactions max

Kamachi has like 50 more volumes to develop that relationship. We are far from the point where the plot is going to start explicitly referring to certain characters as Thelemic gods.

#a certain magical index #misaka mikoto #accelerator x misaka #to aru majutsu no index #accelerator

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