#health for coders

[clever-verse]

A Guide to Meeting PIC Microcontrollers Using Python

Are you fascinated by PIC Microcontrollers and their various applications in electronics? Microcontrollers are all around us and often we are not even aware of this. In this free online course, you will explore the working principles and circuit design of PIC Microcontrollers, why Python is perfect to combine with PIC Microcontrollers and what the various hardware and software requirements are to successfully complete your project.

[egberts]

why don't they just turn tumblr over to us, the users, i'm sure there's enough passionate people and coders milling about to take care of it, maybe even nurse it back to health... just ignore the possibility that we, the users, could accidentally (or on purpose) drive it even further into the ground. it really just depends doesn't it

[jamiedc-they-them]

Thunderbolts x reader, maybe continuation of the black widow fic you did where the reader is taskmaster, but basically the plot of the movie stays the same (minus Ava killing taskmaster) but actually become close with Ava and John and Yelena and reader having mental breakdowns together

Forgive me, little sister Part II (platonic)

Forgive me, little sister Part I

Marvel Masterlist I

Marvel Masterlist II

Anything in () aside from (Your name)is Russian :)

Summary: Years after being freed from being Taskmaster, you haven’t heard from your family. That all changes on one very special, apparently final, mission…

Warnings: Mental health, depression, suicidal thoughts, self-hatred, violence, trauma.

You didn’t know why Yelena and Alexei never called after Natasha’s death. They didn’t even try.

You were promised a family, but instead got nothing. You were left alone, with barely any memories or even identity.

Natasha may have apologised, but then she died, and Yelena never came back for you.

Valentina, a woman you hadn’t heard of before, approached you one day.

“Mask is a little needless,” she said, “but we can make it work. Makes you harder to track.”

So, that’s how you fell into a spiral: once again killing and tracking like you did with Dreykov, but people who were, as you were told, bad and deserved it.

You didn’t talk much, but when you did, you had a voice coder in your helmet.

“Edgy,” Valentina quipped one time when contacting you, “you know, I don’t care if you don’t let anyone else in. But you have to let me in. I can’t fully help you otherwise.”

“Help me?” You parroted.

“With your scars from the Black Widow programme,” she didn’t even look at you, knowing your eyes at widened, “oh, I know all about you. Tragic story, but skills that make you useful in a world where so many people are useless.

“Don’t worry, though,” she said as she condescendingly tapped your shoulder, “your secret is safe with me.”

For how long, though, you asked yourself.

You didn’t talk to anyone, just kept to yourself.

The idea that Natasha gave to you when Yelena, her, Alexei and Melinda saved you brought hope to you. Safety. Life.

That was just a lie, just like how you told yourself, in that moment, that you deserved it, to be cherished, loved, worth fighting for. 

It was a lie, all of it. 

So, you slaved. You worked yourself to the bone, only really patching yourself up when Valentina scolded you for it.

The Widows you hunted and killed, the innocent people you killed.

Why were you still here?

“I have another job for you,” Valentina said, “then you’re free to…do, whatever it is that you do in your spare time.”

She had found a sort of language with you. So, no response meant for her to just send it over.

O.X.E were being broken into, you needed to trail the person who was entering the premises and kill them.

Valentina had used you for experiments, so you were both Taskmaster and…something else.

When you entered, you saw someone who made your rage boil: Yelena.

So, she seemed to be the intruder? But, from what Valentina had told you, she did not match the description at all.

No, what matched it was the man she was fighting: The failed Captain America.

So, you got right into action. 

You were quick, but so was he. 

You were even, well, in terms of speed. You had guns and a blade, he had a shield. He launched it, and you ducked. 

You heard Yelena call out to you, but it was too late. You were sent flying by a new contender. She phased in and out, using it to dodge and then get one over on you.

It was brutal, painful, but nothing you weren't used to.

You got up, disoriented. As you went to the new person — a woman, Yelena got in front, hands up:

“(Your name), stop!” she cried, “Stop…we were all sent here to kill each other. Valentina set us up.” 

“Stop, (sister),” her voice was soft. It hadn't changed. She hadn't changed, aside from the blue eyeliner. 

“Wait, this twerp is your sister?” Walker asked. 

Yelena pointed at him: Careful. 

“I still have a job to do,” the Ghost said, gun aimed at you, “nothing personal.

To her surprise, one that made her pause, you put your weapons away and gently pushed Yelena aside. 

“Do it,” you said, voice clear for the first time in…god knew how long.

“What?!” Yelena said in disgust and horror.

She then turned to the woman, “Please…” 

Despite your helmet, the woman met your eyes before looking at you, actually looking at you.

“God, you're barely an adult,” she whispered. 

“Jesus,” Walker said, “they're sending kids to do an adult's job.” 

“Still kicked your arse,” the woman sneered, eyes still on you.

You hadn't moved. You hadn't spoken. You just waited. 

She lowered her pistol.

A new person entered. A man: Bob.

He was kind. Also kind of confused. 

A timer appeared: Two minutes. 

You were a solo act, not something you would exactly say with a proud smirk like some people in movies that you watched to attempt to claw back some semblance of a life, but more of a sad acknowledgement. 

So, for now, the four of you (and Bob) worked together. Walker used his shield to break a machine that blocked the woman's powers (that Yelena found). The woman was phasing out of the room, opening it, just before the incinerator killed you all. 

You came to, a hand reaching down to you, the woman who was meant to take your life and had now just saved it. 

You took it. She helped you up. 

“You alright?” she asked, sounding genuinely interested in your well-being. 

You nodded, so did she. 

Yelena was talking to Bob, a softness in her eyes. Sisterly concern, she had coined it. 

She'd found a new member of her family then, a brother. Another person who lost their memory.

Maybe she wouldn't abandon him. You hoped she didn't. 

“Hey,” the woman said, “look, you and your sister’s thing is your thing. But, right now, we need to focus on getting out of here alive, ok?”

You nodded, grabbing your pistol, unloading a magazine, and holding it to her. 

“Gun is nearly empty,” you said, English broken.

She took it. “Thank you.”

Walker broke the wall, announcing it to all of you. 

You found yourself at the bottom of a seemingly infinite climb.

So, you all hooked arms, starting to climb together.

“How old are you, kid?” 

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?” Walker said, not believing you.

“She had her memories corrupted,” Yelena explained, “file destroyed. She doesn't know, and neither does anyone else.” 

“Yeah, well, I was meant to be the next Captain —”

“We know!” the two women shouted.

You continued to make your way up. 

Then, the cucumber incident occurred. 

Even you joined in with the shouting of that. 

You didn't want all these people to fall and die.

Walker, being Walker, decided that he would be the one to do the heroics. Before anyone could stop him, he went up. 

You barely had time to reach your sword and slam it into the wall. Yelena grabbed onto you, leaning back and using her grappling hook to grab Bob.

“Ok, uh, we will climb up (Your name) and —” Yelena couldn't finish, as you slammed another blade into the wall, effortlessly moving while supporting the other two.

“She’s strong!” Bob cheered for his new friend. 

“This isn't right,” Yelena said. You paused, tilting your head to her, “What did Valentina do to you?” 

You didn't answer, only continuing to climb.

Yelena went up, then Bob. 

When he made contact with you, you weren't holding onto the ledge…you were somewhere else. 

Dreykov was there. You were younger. You could make out your features, but this was just when you were moved. 

He looked at your younger self before hitting you.

“Get up, pathetic one.” 

“Is she ok?!” a distorted voice asked. 

“I don't…(Your name), Wake up!” It was Yelena who answered. 

You took off your helmet, crouching near your younger self. 

You grabbed your arms, helping yourself up.

A gun cock. You turned. Dreykov had it on your head. 

“I should have killed you as soon as I met you, child.” 

“WAKE UP!”

You gasped, looking down into that pit of darkness. You were upside down. You felt a rope around your foot. Whoever had spoken before was now quiet. But how —

“(Your name)!” Yelena’s voice cracked. 

You looked up, Yelena was looking over that edge you were grabbing onto just moments ago, her grapple was out of its holder. Her eyes twinkled with tears. 

The other two stood, looking down at you with something foreign to you: concern. 

“Jesus, kid,” Walker said, “I mean…i don't know why I was facing the damn thing…but —” 

“You let go!” the woman shouted, eyes wide. 

You grabbed the rope, using a knife to cut the bit at your foot, using the but in your had to swing yourself to the wall. The other two helped Yelena in pulling you up. 

You reached it. Three sets of hands grabbing you and helping you up.

You felt two cup your face. Yelena knelt next to you. She put her head against your helmet, “Don't you ever do that to me again.” 

You would be honest, say that you'd try not to. Instead, you pushed her away, standing up and going to the door. 

“That was rude,” Walker said. 

You didn't answer, only looking out the door. 

O.X.E were here for you…and Bob.

Yelena’s plan was smart. But it required something you guys didn't really have: trust. 

The woman looked to you, before she went outside, “I'll be waiting. I promise.” 

Why was she being kind to you? Sure, she almost saw you die, but you had to guess that she had seen people die before. 

You went with Yelena and Bob, “can I have a gun?” he asked. 

“(Your name) and I will handle it. You just stay behind us.”

“We will get you out of this (odd one),” you assured. 

Yelena, internally, was relieved. You were together on this.

“Why did you push me away?” she asked, voice quiet. You continued flicking the switches that you needed.

“You don't get to play sister-dearest now. You left me.” 

You could feel the hurt coming off of her in waves. 

“I didn't mean to —”

“Valentina found me!” you snapped, “she found me trying to break into a building to just get found and die. She – she called them off, hired me instead. And now she just – she's like everyone else, they all find out in the end…even after I let her experiment on me —”

“You did —”

“Everyone leaves me, Yelena!” Was this the place? No. But, it was coming out now, “because I am not worth any of it. You promised family, then left! I let myself believe it, for a second!” You shoved her back, “but I'll get you out. I'll let you and your new brother Bob get out. I'm done after this. I tried, I really did…”

The lights went out, but not back on. 

Shit.

It was odd, how Yelena and you fell back into fighting together. You would lower your back, she would roll. She'd throw you something, you'd catch it. 

It was like old times. 

But that was all they were…old. The past. 

You made it to Walker, after almost killing him, before using the armour from the people that you had hurt or killed as a disguise. 

It was working. You had made them all turn around when you took your helmet off. To your relief, and wonder as to why, they did. 

You made it…well, almost made it. You had to get a vehicle.

You wouldn't lie if you said you hadn't jumped when the woman appeared, appearing in the driver's seat. 

You sat with Bob in the back.

“I like your eyes,” he said.

“What?”

“Your eyes,” he elaborated, “they're a nice colour.” 

You weren't entirely sure how to take the compliment.

“Sorry,” he said, seemingly understanding, “I'm not great at giving or receiving them either. Have a little voice in the back of my head…some days it's louder. But, it's always there, saying —”

“You aren't worthy of it.”

Bob took off his helmet, smiling a sad but soft one, “Exactly.” 

You heard Walker talking to someone, an actual O.X.E employee. The employee was getting irritated. 

Looked like a fight was —

“Hey,” Bob said, “I um…I don't know how to use this thing, I'm sure my demonstration back there was pretty much the best example,” he said, scratching his neck as he took his armour off.

You nodded.

“But, you do. And, I'm sorry to ask — it's dumb — but, maybe.” 

You grabbed a rifle, checking the magazine before putting it back in. 

“If this is it,” you looked at him, eyes soft, “at least I won't be alone for a few minutes.” 

He smiled, “Thank you. I mean it.” 

You nodded, “Let’s go be dumb and lose our minds together.”

He smiled. He was scared, you were relieved. An ending. A use. 

You fired the gun, Taskmaster armour back on. Bob was behind you, shouting and grabbing attention

Guns were trained on you, the lights blinding.

You moved yourself in front of Bob, but he then moved himself next to you, hand going into yours. 

“Together?” you nodded.

“No, Bob helped,” Yelena said from the car. 

“Bob’s not alone,” Walker said, a small bit of fear slipping into his voice.

“Oh no…” Ghost said.

“What do you —” Yelena’s heart stopped.

Her ears rang when the bullets went. Watching your bodies jerk with each hit. Watching you fall. 

The ringing continued. She didn't even know if she cried out for you. She didn’t know if she screamed. She couldn't feel a tear run down her face. 

They had made it out, but it felt worthless without you.

Bob took off, literally. They all looked up. Meaning they didn't see you. They didn't see you crawl to a box for cover. They didn't see you crawl your way to a hill and roll your way down it. 

They ignored you, completely. 

A massive boom occurred, the shockwave waking you up as you felt your body heal itself. 

You slowly got up, legs shaky. 

You were alive again. 

Not even Valentina could kill you. 

You started walking through the night, with no sense of direction. You just walked. 

You didn't know if your body would break down without food or water. Would it eat itself, only to then repair?

You found a road and followed it.

Hours went by. Where had Bob gone? He was an experiment, too, it seemed. Why else would he have been there? 

Your legs gave way. Maybe you weren't invincible after all. 

You felt arms grab you, then turn you around. 

“Oh, (little one)!” a familiar voice yelled out. 

You felt hands grab your helmet. You couldn't stop Alexei. 

Your helmet came off, and then a bottle came to your lips, “Drink, (daughter). Drink,” he was soft, kind. Elated.

You opened your eyes and saw him. He still looked the same, a bit Balder than you remembered, but the same other than that.

“(Dad)?” you asked. 

He nodded, wiping a tear away.

He helped you up. “Are you alright?”

You shook your head.

“It's alright, I'm here. Pappa is here,” he said, comfortingly, “I'm here. Pappa is here.” 

He looked around, “Now, come. We must save your sister —”

The clap of the slap and the power took him by surprise. 

“Why do you have to be so nasty?”

He was shoved against the car the next moment, “it's always Yelena, Yelena, Yelena with you! What about me?! Your other daughter, the other one who is alive? Did you even think about me?!”

“Of course I did!”

“Then where were you?”

He faltered. So did you. 

“I let myself be pumped full of drugs and shit —”

“Language —”

“—Stuff,” you corrected, hands up, “to just try… I don't know, feel wanted?” 

Alexei felt his heart break. 

“I bet Yelena visited…”

“She did.”

You looked at the floor, fingers playing with each other, “of course she did,” you were too tired to be angry.

“Did you have cellphone?”

You shook your head.

“Thus I could not call —”

He held up his hand as you went to talk, “—but that is not an excuse. You are my daughter. I should have tried harder. Especially with your mind telling horrible lies.” 

You looked up at him, eyes glassy. 

He smiled, “I am glad you have kept yourself alive, even if not well. That is foundation that we can build from.”

You sniffled.

Alexei picked up your helmet, holding it to you, “wear it if you want,” he pulled it away when you reached for it, “but I do not think you have to. You are (your name), my daughter. And you look beautiful regardless.” 

You took it, but didn't have it on your head for once.

You rode in companionable silence. You felt a bit lighter, but still the darkness clawed at you. 

“There,” you said, pointing. 

Alexis started on the horn, laughing, “Ah, see? This is why I couldn't find you! You know how to hide tracks!” 

Despite yourself, you chuckled.

“YELENA!l Alexei bellowed, “YOUR SISTER AND I ARE HERE TO TELL YOU: DO NOT GO TO THE VAULT!”

Yelena looked up at the mention of you. Ava and Walker looked at each other: You were alive?

They made their way down to Alexei. Yelena got in the front, her eyes sparkling as she saw you eating snacks in the back seat, your helmet off. 

Alexei got in before she could speak. But he nodded, knowing what she was thinking. 

Ava got in, pausing as she looked at you. 

“Don't have too much,” she teased, “still need to run away, remember?”

You nodded, putting a thumb up. 

Walker got in, “You like, never get to eat any of this stuff before?” 

You paused, looking to him, before shaking your head. 

“Stuck in a lab?” Ava asked in understanding. 

“Sometimes,” you said, the pair noticing the Russian accent. 

“I'm sorry,” it was Walker who said that, in the softest voice you had heard him use. 

“Thank you,” you answered. He nodded. 

The conversation moved on to Bob. 

“He’s a bit weird, if you ask me,” Walker was back to his old self,”

“Ah,” Alexei groaned, “we all have quirks, failed Captain America.” Despite Alexei’s words being said with a happy tone, they stung Walker: “That's why we make friends, to find people who accept them.” 

Before it could continue, O.X.E forces showed up. John used his shield, you used your pistol. Ava tried to use her phase ability, only for the speaker that was used before to shriek and block her ability, forcing her to hold her ears. 

You pulled her in, feeling bullets tear into you. You fell to the floor. 

Yelena looked back, seeing you like that. It drove a rage in her. She leant out of the window, firing her pistol. 

The truck…exploded. 

Ava grabbed you, hoisting you back up, “I’ve got you,” she said. 

John was back at the window, blocking all the bullets that he could. 

Yelena knew there was a rage in her, but did it channel into her bullets —?

No, it was Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. 

John celebrated too early. 

“Ah, shit —” he couldn't finish his celebration, as the bomb Bucky put on your car went off. 

You woke up groggily. 

“Morning,” Bucky said. 

No one else was awake yet. 

You looked to him, “you know, before everything went down with our split and Thanos, Nat spoke about you. She wanted to try find you.”

You just watched him as he continued, “And…after everything, I tried to look for you for a bit. Thought maybe I could help. You remind me of me.”

He walked to you, then paused when you flinched. He put his hands up, moving slower, “You know I spent years hating myself for what I did as the Winter Soldier…”

As you watched him, you felt the tears build, “…and I don’t think it ever goes away. But, maybe I can help you find ways to cope.” 

“Why?” You asked, voice cracking.” 

“Because you deserve to be ok,” Yelena said, still trying to wake up herself. She blinked, “You…you deserve a good life.” 

Before you could answer, the others woke up. Bucky nodded at you before getting up. 

“They tracked you through this,” Bucky held up your helmet, “she put a tracker in there.”

You looked down. You almost got them all killed.

Of course, you almost did, you piece of —

“But, Bucky said, breaking you out of your thoughts, “they also did because that slow limousine Alexei was driving.”

“Hey!” The man roared, “Do not insult my car! It was getting faster —”

“We reached top speed before the chase even began,” Yelena argued. 

Alexei sulked. 

Bucky was shit at remembering Bob’s name, but he got the gist: Valentina wanted him for her gain, another victim to abuse and having agency ripped from them. 

“If I take that,” you nodded at your helmet, “she’ll know we’re coming.”

“Oh, don’t worry, she’ll know,” Bucky said.

You all looked at him. “I have a plan.”

So, the plan changed: Stop Valentina and save Bob.

Thus, the Thunderbolts were born. 

You sat in the back of the truck with Yelena, Ava and John. 

The fatigue of the past two days was catching up with you. 

As you playfully teased John for his helmet, you felt yourself drift off. Your head went on Yelena’s shoulder as your breathing evened out. 

No one moved. No one spoke. 

“Glad she’s able to get some rest,” John said.

“Just glad she’s alive,” Ava admitted.

“Going soft?” John teased.

“Shove off,” she said, but a smile was there. 

Yelena ran her hand through your hair before planting a kiss on your head. 

You were woken up by a crash as Bucky’s “plan” started. 

Yelena and you moved in sync once again. 

However, John called your name. You hopped on his shield, and he sent you up, before you slammed back into the ground. It caused enough of a quake to knock people over. 

Ava then appeared, grabbing you and moving you from danger. Alexei then took care of the ones who fired at you. 

Then:

“Jesus, you guys. I had them unlock the front door for you,” Valentina said, “Just come up.”

You did. This was going well. You all even kept each other in check with Valentina.

It all went wrong when Bob came down. He was in a suit, going by the name of Sentry.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

But he did. He really did hurt you. 

Bucky lost his arm. You lost your helmet. 

The rest of you got the hell kicked out of you. 

You all limped back to the lift, Bob kicking you your helmet before the doors shut. 

You all went outside the tower.

Yelena was furious, sad, and vulnerable. She lashed out. As she turned to you, though, she paused. 

You were vomiting. 

Ava was by your side, hand on your back. 

“Are you —”

You shoved past her before letting out a guttural scream. They all watched, and even civilians looked at you. 

You fell to your knees. 

Yelena wiped at her eyes. 

John looked down.

Ava gulped.

Alexei looked heartbroken.

A knee went in front of you. You looked up.

It was Bucky.

“Sometimes screaming is a good start to healing —”

“Bucky —”

“No, I’m serious, John,” Bucky said.

“She was watching me,” you said, “through this fucking thing.”

You slammed it on the ground. Letting out another scream as you hit it again, and again, and again. 

John pushed you back gently before using his taco shield to slam into the helmet. Ava then appeared, kicking it. Bucky then caught it, bending it.

He threw it to Alexei. He threw it.

Yelena looked at you. You just looked at the helmet.

She fired at it, emptying a clip, without even looking. 

“No more, Valentina,” she vowed, walking over to you and crouching next to you. 

“Go away, Yelena.”

“No.”

Go. Away.”

She shook her head, “Not this time.” 

She grabbed your arms gently, helping you up. 

“I should have stayed with you,” she said, “I'm sorry (little sister).” 

Then, she took your hand and led the way. 

You followed, numb.

“(Daughters) wait,” Alexei called out.

“No. Go away.”

“No.”

“Then keep following us.”

“I will. Because that is what family does.” 

“Stop!” Yelena yelled. She was angry, angry about the lack of content she had in her life, the emptiness she felt, the loneliness.

Her hand squeezed yours more and more. It was a release, to let it all out. 

“When I see you both, I don't see your mistakes.”

The three of you, for the first time, hugged. As a family. 

It didn't last long. Bob had been pushed beyond a point. 

The void was what they called him, what he was. 

“We are all alone,” he said, as people disappeared. 

Yelena and you, after you all had helped lift a wall, looked at each other. 

You couldn't run anymore, it wouldn't get you anywhere. 

You reached out first. Yelena’s hand then went into yours. 

You both looked at Bob, your friend. Your pseudo-brother in arms in all this, saying one thing:

“No, you're not.”

Your hands left each other when you went into the void. 

You were back there, with Dreykov. 

You tried to shield your former self. You tried and tried and tried. 

Your nose dripped with blood from the number of hits you took.

“You can end this, little one,” Dreykov said, kneeling, holding the pistol. He put it in your hand and aimed it at your head, “all those voices. All that noise. All that pain. It can all stop.” 

You heard banging on a wall. It was desperate. You heard a muffled voice. There was a window. Blinds started to close. 

You heard banging on the window. 

It stopped. 

Then, a figure appeared, Bob.

“Hey,” was what he said. 

You looked at Dreykov. You hit him, grabbed the gun and fired at the window, before jumping through. 

You landed on the cold floor. 

“(Your name)?!” Yelena said, helping you up. 

You were in a cold blue room. A training room. 

Yelena had finished loading the gun first. 

She walked over to her younger self, making sure she didn't see it. She reached a hand out to you.

You took it, tightening the grip as the whip fell against yours and the other girls’ hands. 

A mirror held Bob. Yelena fired at it, before, hand in hand, you jumped through. 

There was another Yelena, this one passed out against a bathtub.

Your Yelena looked to you, both to see that you were still there and to see your reaction. 

You put a hand on her shoulder. 

A fight occurred, the vodka being shoved down her. 

You went to help, but real Yelena put a hand up: don't.

The next time around, you let Memory Yelena be. 

Bob showed himself again. 

Once again, thank you, you held hands and went through the mirror. 

You sat with Bob. You spoke to him, reminded him that you were there, and that you wouldn’t leave him. You opened up about your own traumas. It was healthy.

“Before, when we were escaping,” he looked at you, “you said that I was Yelena’s brother. Why?” 

“I saw the look she gave you,” you admitted, “she only gives that to family. That level of concern.”

“Sisterly concern,” the two of you finished, “I said that when we were young. Before everything.” 

“This isn't about me,” you said, looking back at Bob.

“I can't — I can't get…the void hasn't just trapped me. Yes, you entered willingly, but…”

“I think what Bob is trying to say,” Yelena said, putting a hand on his lap and another on yours, “is that we may save Bob, but you will be stuck here in the process.”

“I —” your eyes shimmered, but both just sat, watching you with patient and understanding eyes, “it hurt me when you left to find the other widows. I didn’t know where you were or how to find you.

“Memories came and went. But…I had no purpose anymore. I felt…empty. I just…” You looked at Yelena, “I just wanted it to stop.”

She gulped, but nodded. She was listening.

You heard a door below you slam. Bob’s past. An abusive dad. The room shook, chairs and objects flying at you. 

You tried to do what you could to protect yourself, the three of you linking together. 

The others then appeared, helping stem the tide.

“We all ok?” You all gave affirmatives. 

“You said that this wasn’t the worst, right?” Yelena said, looking to Bob, “Show us the worst.”

She held his arms. A promise: you were here. 

You were helping him through the kitchen. Punching his high self. 

You made it to a facility that Yelena recognised. 

There, Bob sat, with similar shapes of the void on the wall. 

You all stood together. 

But the void had other ideas. 

You were pinned, and you felt a bit of shrapnel go through your arm. 

You all called out to Bob as he started to fight back…

But fighting wasn’t working. His fists hit the void, but it started to consume him.

The shadows overtaking him. 

Yelena looked at you and Alexei. 

You both nodded, using your strength to push the metal. Yelena went under. 

The ground cracked.

Objects flew at her.

She dodged them all.

The shadows almost reached him —

Her arms went around him. 

John was next.

Alexei looked at you, “Go, (little one), Pappa will be right behind you.”

You believed him. 

You went under next, dodging what you could before you joined John and Yelena in the hug. 

Ava then joined.

Finally, Alexei and Bucky.

Bob let out a cry. A scream. He let it out. 

He cried, but you still held on.

You all fell back, still holding him. 

You were back in New York. 

Sunlight was returning. 

Aleixi had said about you brining light back. 

You saw a hand, Ava’s, being offered to you. You took it, standing up. 

She dusted you off. 

“Shall we?”

You nodded. 

You joined John and her, him giving you a tap on the back. 

Yelena saw you, holding out a hand. 

You took it. 

You confronted Valentina. She had one more trick up her sleeve, however. 

“I’d like to announce the New Avengers!” 

What the fuck?

Months went by, and you were cleaning your teeth in the bathroom. You looked at yourself, the marks on your face. 

You were still getting used to it, being nice to yourself. But a kind word every so often from the others helped you keep going.

You were a support system for each other.

A unit.

Some might even dare say, a fa—

“Bathroom free?” John asked from outside.

You spat out your toothpaste, “yeah!” 

You opened the door, smiling at John, “how are we doing today?” He asked.

You nodded, “I, um, I’m sorry about your family,” you said.

He nodded, solemnly, “Maybe I can get back to them someday, but…” he looked to you, “you guys ain’t so bad.”

You chuckled, moving past him.

You moved to the kitchen. Ava was finishing with some food.

“I don’t think you ever ate properly in your whole life,” she said, “so, to the best of my ability, I made you these.”

Omelettes. She had made you omelettes. 

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. 

After you had eaten them, you continued on your way.

“There you are,” Yelena said. She hugged you, a now-common greeting between you. To ground you. A reminder to you that she still had you, still loved you, and wasn’t leaving. 

“Do you want to go on a walk?” 

“With all the cameras?” 

“Ah, let them take their silly photos,” Yelena said, waving off the threat, “I want us to have sister time, together.” 

“In a bit, I wish to see Bob first.”

She softened, “Alright, see you in a bit.” 

She ruffled your hair as she left. 

“Hey,” you called out, “where’s Bucky?”

“Tin arm man has gone to see, Sam. Something about a ‘copyright’ issue.” 

You nodded before continuing on your way. 

Bob was in bed, watching TV.

You knocked. 

Hearing a muffled “come in,” you did so.

“Thought you may want some company,” you said softly.

He patted the bed.

You go next to him. 

“I’m sorry if it gets annoying,” he started, “but I am grateful for you guys getting me out.”

“We always will, (brother). We have…we each other.”

He smiled, “I’m grateful to have met you guys. To have you in my corner.” 

You put your head on his shoulder, “(Me too).” 

You were. You were all a work in progress, and you would fall. But you could catch each other.

No one would get lost in the void, as long as you all had each other.

[saywhat-politics]

Unfortunately, infuriatingly, depressingly, short of cloistering oneself, it’s hard to keep the bad political and economic news at bay for any extended period. Hard because, even if you’re lucky enough not to be directly affected by one or more of the arrogant, cruel, spiteful, nonsensical, malicious, counterproductive, and frequently illegal actions Elon Musk and his DOdGEy crew of twentysomething coders and the Outlaw Prez are inflicting on the nation, you almost certainly know someone who is. The ubiquity of the Trumpian assault is what drove the outpouring of protests across the nation Saturday and probably will again April 19.

But with entire agencies, departments, and divisions being wiped out, with the missions of others being sabotaged—often by appointees openly hostile to the operations they’ve been put in charge of—it’s easy to miss some of the damage being done to smaller programs.

Like, for instance, the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (CLPPP), which falls under the Centers for Disease Control, now under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A week ago, all 26 of the program’s staffers were suddenly put on administrative leave and told their jobs were subject to a broad reduction in force. That effort will eliminate some 10,000 Health Department jobs. Together with the thousands of employees who have taken government severance, about a fourth of the department’s staff will be cut. 

Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places You can also catch me @meteorblades.bsky.social

[nobody-nexus]

A world of chaos and destruction, not much is known about what exactly the place is aside from the name of a blood bath of a free for all world where death is only a temporary set back... Welcome to...

The Deadzone

The Digital Deadzone is an AU where Caine is the head of a sandbox free-for-all game that the cast are stuck in. Having infinite lives, they're all here to fight and die for the entertainment of a third party

Constant weapons, supplies, and stuff spawn for them and it's supposed to be everyman for themselves, however some form bonds over the years they've spent in constant chaos. Every character has a class, a passive ability, and an active ability- as well as the power to use any and all weapons that Caine provides them

Caine will also force the players and NPCs into teams to do missions to keep everything fresh and unique. But that won’t help everyone during an almost hopeless situation… Well. At least they have each other

Below the keep reading for the main cast! (All Humans + Caine)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: High Attack: Medium Defense: Medium Agility: High Height: 4’11’’ Real Name: Eliza Pavlova Old Occupation: Full Time Modeler and Coder Class: Offense

Passive Ability: Due to her cat-based abilities, her speed, agility, and flexibility is naturally increased. She has retractable claws and a tail that she can use to hold onto things -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: Very High Attack: Low Defense: High Agility: Medium Height: 5’6’’ Real Name: Amanda A. Raggson Old Occupation: Script Writer Class: Support

Passive Ability: She’s naturally resilient to most damage due to her plush and cotton filled body. She can take more hits than usual, and she can fix herself up easily. However, stuff like water, milk, or any other kind of liquid can slow her down if dosed in enough of it -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: Medium Attack: Low Defense: Very Low Agility: Very High Height: 6’4’’ Real Name: Jackson Mendez Old Occupation: Game Tester Class: Offense

Passive Ability: His jumping capability has been increased due to being a Leporidae, making him able to go high into the air and land without taking damage (if he lands on his feet, of course) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: High Attack: Low Defense: Medium Agility: Medium Height: 5’10’’ Real Name: Grace Sezer Old Occupation: Concept Artist Class: Defense

Passive Ability: Being made of ribbons, she’s naturally flexible and can go through tight spaces and reach places most can’t. She also can wrap herself around objects (when she doesn’t have clothes on, which is kinda weird) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: High Attack: High Defense: Low Agility: Medium Height: 7’2’’ Real Name: Zoe Imelda Albrechtsson Old Occupation: Environmental Modeler Class: Support

Passive Ability: They can take themselves apart and put themselves right back together due to their building block like body. This makes them practically immune to a good portion of explosives and limb detachment tactics -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: Medium Attack: Medium Defense: High Agility: Very Low Height: 6’4’’ Real Name: Caesar Kingston Old Occupation: Head of the Game Department / Head Coder Class: Defense

Passive Ability: Due to being made of a strong petrified wood, Kinger seems to not take much physical damage unless it’s from explosives or heavy environmental damages. He can still feel the pain though -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: Low Attack: Medium Defense: High Agility: Medium Height: 5’11’’ Real Name: Daniel Kaufman Old Occupation: Janitor Class: Offense

Passive Ability: His body is blubbery, which makes him less likely to be damaged by bludgeoning or stabbing like damage, however other sorts of physical damage do the same amount of damage to him -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Health: Very High Attack: Very High Defense: Very High Agility: Very High Height: 5’3’’ Real Name: “Master of the Deadzone” Old Occupation: None Class: ???

Passive Ability: He knows everything about every new player as soon as they enter into the world. It’s unknown how this is even possible, but it seems to be something he’s fed through an unknown source. But this does make him want to know more about the minds behind the stories… -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is an AU that means a lot to me personally. It will handle topics that I understand and relate to. It'll also be a rather serious AU as well

Once I post more about this AU (which I very much will be doing because I have a LOT about it), I shall make a proper masterpost on this one

And please ASK AWAY ON THIS AU. I legit have spent MONTHS working on this AU because I want it to be perfect

Hope to see more soon!

[phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess]

Lucifer Headcanon

Okay, coders and people with technical jobs use the Rubber Duck method to get themselves unstuck, by talking through shit until they find the error and correct it themselves yeah?

Imagine if you could create anything, anywhere, forever (and time's a lose concept to you anyway bc archangel/seraphim)...

But when things go wrong, in your heard, your life, your marriage, your journey as a parent... what do you do?

Your only potential therapist is a Sin, who you feel a weird sibling attachment to and it'd be like asking what a HelluvaKissnTug was of your parent, rather than Voogle it like the rest of the degenerates out there. Probably not even Incognito mode...

You hear about humans talking to inanimate things.

As an angel in the garden, you used to talk to animals and trees and such, but in hell... what grows and thrives is... Other. It's not the sympathetic listening thing you once resonated with. Some of the things might even dare to try and kill you, the creator... it wouldn't succeed, but the audacity is just, WOW.

but you hear about... the Rubber Ducks.

You miss ducks, but anything down here might get eaten in 0.0005 of a second if you dared create it... and let's be real, anything living you make comes out... tainted. Which is why you worried so much about Charlie when you were spinning her into being from the hopes and dreams you had left in your broken, betrayed heart... and that of your wife.

But inanimate? That could work.

You make the first one, generic and bright yellow. It squeaks. The noise brings a moment of joy. It's enough to spark something.

You talk to it, and feel silly for doing so. then wonder why? The servants are long gone, there's no one to worry after your clearly fucked mental health now.

So... you start to talk to the Duck. You name it. You talk through everything that has happened, even in languages beyond speech and sound because that's how ancient you are...

You speak about your emotions, and losses, the way breezes stirring through the curtains of your bedroom and stir the faintest trace of her perfume... and how occasionally shifts in hell make the chimes in Charlie's room jingle. How you recall the way she'd coo and reach for them...

You laugh and sob and yell at the duck. And it listens.

You start to worry the duck might be getting tired of you, might need a friend... and then, as you're partway through designing duck #2 you wnder if you've gone a little mad attributing personality and mental health concerns to a rubber object.

But then, there's two of them... and that number depresses... you make a tiny third and wow does that hit hard... so you just start making more. Different shapes and colours and forms.

And at some point you lose sight of the ducks as a distraction, as a little family that needs more... and you fall into the thrill of creation again. Nothing like your original powers... but a creation all of your own. Full of fuck ups and misfires, of a spring in the wrong place or a weirdly painted eye that pisses you off too much to finish that day...

And it consumes you.

You still talk to the original. The name known only to you. It and its happy little family sits in a place of respect and oversight at your workshop, keeping a calm eye over your frenetic work.

And it fills a void that you refuse to acknowledge.

For now.

[kathycare]

[eldritch-araneae]

So, it's been a while since I made a post about what's going on in my life. So here we go!

I'm doing well on the new job! I like it, our team is chill and it's pretty good working from home, esp when you don't have much work, so you can do other things, while waiting for coders to make a thing for me to test. I hope I'll get though internship bc I really wanna keep working here.

2. I'm working on Ena comic. 15 pages, 4 are already done. It seems like I'm doing a lot better when I make small comics for now. It's just easier to plan. Maybe later I could make several small stories introducing my OCs from different stories.

3. Figuring out my health again, idk why I suddenly started to gain weight and have issues with my guts. I have a suspicion it has to do something with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and /or treatment with prednisolone that might messed up my guts in some way. Waiting for test results.

4. Mentally I'm doing alright, I get anxious at time due to new job since all of this is new to me and being scared that I might fail internship. But i can deal with it.

So far it is. How are you?

(btw i revived my Discord server, so if you wanna hang out with me you know where to find me: https://discord.gg/zPxbjYqh )

[mariacallous]

On paper, the first candidate looked perfect. Thomas was from rural Tennessee and had studied computer science at the University of Missouri. His résumé said he’d been a professional programmer for eight years, and he’d breezed through a preliminary coding test. All of this was excellent news for Thomas’ prospective boss, Simon Wijckmans, founder of the web security startup C.Side. The 27-year-old Belgian was based in London but was looking for ambitious, fully remote coders.

Thomas had an Anglo-Saxon surname, so Wijckmans was surprised when he clicked into his Google Meet and found himself speaking with a heavily accented young man of Asian origin. Thomas had set a generic image of an office as his background. His internet connection was laggy—odd for a professional coder—and his end of the call was noisy. To Wijckmans, Thomas sounded like he was sitting in a large, crowded space, maybe a dorm or a call center.

Wijckmans fired off his interview questions, and Thomas’ responses were solid enough. But Wijckmans noticed that Thomas seemed most interested in asking about his salary. He didn’t come across as curious about the actual work or about how the company operated or even about benefits like startup stock or health coverage. Odd, thought Wijckmans. The conversation came to a close, and he got ready for the next interview in his queue.

Once again, the applicant said they were based in the US, had an Anglo name, and appeared to be a young Asian man with a thick, non-American accent. He used a basic virtual background, was on a terrible internet connection, and had a single-minded focus on salary. This candidate, though, was wearing glasses. In the lenses, Wijckmans spotted the reflection of multiple screens, and he could make out a white chatbox with messages scrolling by. “He was clearly either chatting with somebody or on some AI tool,” Wijckmans remembers.

On high alert, Wijckmans grabbed screenshots and took notes. After the call ended, he went back over the job applications. He found that his company’s listings were being flooded with applicants just like these: an opening for a full-stack developer got more than 500 applications in a day, far more than usual. And when he looked more deeply into the applicants’ coding tests, he saw that many candidates appeared to have used a virtual private network, or VPN, which allows you to mask your computer’s true location.

Wijckmans didn’t know it yet, but he’d stumbled onto the edges of an audacious, global cybercrime operation. He’d unwittingly made contact with an army of seemingly unassuming IT workers, deployed to work remotely for American and European companies under false identities, all to bankroll the government of North Korea.

With a little help from some friends on the ground, of course.

christina chapman was living in a trailer in Brook Park, Minnesota, a hamlet north of Minneapolis, when she got a note from a recruiter that changed her life. A bubbly 44-year-old with curly red hair and glasses, she loved her dogs and her mom and posting social justice content on TikTok. In her spare time she listened to K-pop, enjoyed Renaissance fairs, and got into cosplay. Chapman was also, according to her sparse online résumé, learning to code online.

It was March 2020 when she clicked on the message in her LinkedIn account. A foreign company was looking for somebody to “be the US face” of the business. The company needed help finding remote employment for overseas workers. Chapman signed on. It’s unclear how fast her workload grew, but by October 2022 she could afford a move from chilly Minnesota to a low-slung, four-bedroom house in Litchfield Park, Arizona. It wasn’t fancy—a suburban corner lot with a few thin trees—but it was a big upgrade over the trailer.

Chapman then started documenting more of her life on TikTok and YouTube, mostly talking about her diet, fitness, or mental health. In one chatty video, shared in June 2023, she described grabbing breakfast on the go—an açaí bowl and a smoothie— because work was so busy. “My clients are going crazy!” she complained. In the background, the camera caught a glimpse of metal racks holding at least a dozen open laptops covered in sticky notes. A few months later, federal investigators raided Chapman’s home, seized the laptops, and eventually filed charges alleging that she had spent three years aiding the “illicit revenue generation efforts” of the government of North Korea.

For maybe a decade, North Korean intelligence services have been training young IT workers and sending them abroad in teams, often to China or Russia. From these bases, they scour the web for job listings all over, usually in software engineering, and usually with Western companies. They favor roles that are fully remote, with solid wages, good access to data and systems, and few responsibilities. Over time they began applying for these jobs using stolen or fake identities and relying on members of their criminal teams to provide fictional references; some have even started using AI to pass coding tests, video interviews, and background checks.

But if an applicant lands a job offer, the syndicate needs somebody on the ground in the country the applicant claims to live in. A fake employee, after all, can’t use the addresses or bank accounts linked to their stolen IDs, and they can’t dial in to a company’s networks from overseas without instantly triggering suspicion. That’s where someone like Christina Chapman comes in.

As the “facilitator” for hundreds of North Korea–linked jobs, Chapman signed fraudulent documents and handled some of the fake workers’ salaries. She would often receive their paychecks in one of her bank accounts, take a cut, and wire the rest overseas: Federal prosecutors say Chapman was promised as much as 30 percent of the money that passed through her hands.

Her most important job, though, was tending the “laptop farm.” After being hired, a fake worker will typically ask for their company computer to be sent to a different address than the one on record—usually with some tale about a last-minute move or needing to stay with a sick relative. The new address, of course, belongs to the facilitator, in this case Chapman. Sometimes the facilitator forwards the laptop to an address overseas, but more commonly that person holds onto it and installs software that allows it to be controlled remotely. Then the fake employee can connect to their machine from anywhere in the world while appearing to be in the US. (“You know how to install Anydesk?” one North Korean operative asked Chapman in 2022. “I do it practically EVERYDAY!” she replied.)

In messages with her handlers, Chapman discussed sending government forms like the I-9, which attests that a person is legally able to work in the US. (“I did my best to copy your signature,” she wrote. “Haha. Thank you,” came the response.) She also did basic tech troubleshooting and dialed into meetings on a worker’s behalf, sometimes on short notice, as in this conversation from November 2023:

Worker: We are going to have laptop setup meeting in 20 mins. Can you join Teams meeting and follow what IT guy say? Because it will require to restart laptop multiple times and I can not handle that. You can mute and just follow what they say ...

Chapman: Who do I say I am?

Worker: You don’t have to say, I will be joining there too.

Chapman: I just typed in the name Daniel. If they ask WHY you are using two devices, just say the microphone on your laptop doesn’t work right ... Most IT people are fine with that explanation.

Sometimes, she got jumpy. “I hope you guys can find other people to do your physical I9s,” she wrote to her bosses in 2023, according to court documents. “I will SEND them for you, but have someone else do the paperwork. I can go to FEDERAL PRISON for falsifying federal documents.” Michael Barnhart, an investigator at cybersecurity company DTEX and a leading expert on the North Korean IT worker threat, says Chapman’s involvement followed a standard pattern—from an innocuous initial contact on LinkedIn to escalating requests. “Little by little, the asks get bigger and bigger,” he says. “Then by the end of the day, you’re asking the facilitator to go to a government facility to pick up an actual government ID.”

By the time investigators raided Chapman’s home, she was housing several dozen laptops, each with a sticky note indicating the fake worker’s identity and employer. Some of the North Korean operatives worked multiple jobs; some had been toiling quietly for years. Prosecutors said at least 300 employers had been pulled into this single scheme, including “a top-five national television network and media company, a premier Silicon Valley technology company, an aerospace and defense manufacturer, an iconic American car manufacturer, a high-end retail store, and one of the most recognizable media and entertainment companies in the world.” Chapman, they alleged, had helped pass along at least $17 million. She pleaded guilty in February 2025 to charges relating to wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering and is awaiting sentencing.

Chapman’s case is just one of several North Korean fake-worker prosecutions making their way through US courts. A Ukrainian named Oleksandr Didenko has been accused of setting up a freelancing website to connect fake IT workers with stolen identities. Prosecutors say at least one worker was linked to Chapman’s laptop farm and that Didenko also has ties to operations in San Diego and Virginia. Didenko was arrested in Poland last year and was extradited to the United States. In Tennessee, 38-year-old Matthew Knoot is due to stand trial for his alleged role in a scheme that investigators say sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to accounts linked to North Korea via his laptop farm in Nashville. (Knoot has pleaded not guilty.) And in January 2025, Florida prosecutors filed charges against two American citizens, Erick Ntekereze Prince and Emanuel Ashtor, as well as a Mexican accomplice and two North Koreans. (None of the defendants’ lawyers in these cases responded to requests for comment.) The indictments claim that Prince and Ashtor had spent six years running a string of fake staffing companies that placed North Koreans in at least 64 businesses.

before the hermit kingdom had its laptop farms, it had a single confirmed internet connection, at least as far as the outside world could tell. As recently as 2010, that one link to the web was reserved for use by high-ranking officials. Then, in 2011, 27-year-old Kim Jong Un succeeded his father as the country’s dictator. Secretly educated in Switzerland and said to be an avid gamer, the younger Kim made IT a national priority. In 2012, he urged some schools to “pay special attention to intensifying their computer education” to create new possibilities for the government and military. Computer science is now on some high school curricula, while college students can take courses on information security, robotics, and engineering.

The most promising students are taught hacking techniques and foreign languages that can make them more effective operatives. Staff from government agencies including the Reconnaissance General Bureau— the nation’s clandestine intelligence service—recruit the highest-scoring graduates of top schools like Kim Chaek University of Technology (described by many as “the MIT of North Korea”) or the prestigious University of Sciences in Pyongsong. They are promised good wages and unfettered access to the internet—the real internet, not the intranet available to well-off North Koreans, which consists of a mere handful of heavily censored North Korean websites.

The earliest cyberattacks launched by Pyongyang were simple affairs: defacing websites with political messages or launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down US websites. They soon grew more audacious. In 2014, North Korean hackers famously stole and leaked confidential information from Sony’s film studio. Then they targeted financial institutions: Fraudulent trades pulled more than $81 million from the Bank of Bangladesh’s accounts at the New York Federal Reserve. After that, North Korean hackers moved into ransomware—the WannaCry attack in 2017 locked hundreds of thousands of Windows computers in 150 countries and demanded payments in bitcoin. While the amount of revenue the attack generated is up for debate—some say it earned just $140,000 in payouts—it wreaked much wider damage as companies worked to upgrade their systems and security, costing as much as $4 billion, according to one estimate.

Governments responded with more sanctions and stronger security measures, and the regime pivoted, dialing back on ransomware in favor of quieter schemes. It turns out these are also more lucrative: Today, the most valuable tool in North Korea’s cybercrime armory is cryptocurrency theft. In 2022, hackers stole more than $600 million worth of the cryptocurrency ether by attacking the blockchain game Axie Infinity; in February of this year, they robbed the Dubai-based crypto exchange Bybit of $1.5 billion worth of digital currency. The IT pretender scam, meanwhile, seems to have been growing slowly until the pandemic dramatically expanded the number of remote jobs, and Pyongyang saw the perfect opportunity.

In 2024, according to a recent report from South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the number of people working in North Korea’s cyber divisions—which includes pretenders, crypto thieves, and military hackers—stood at 8,400, up from 6,800 two years earlier. Some of these workers are based in the country, but many are stationed overseas in China, Russia, Pakistan, or elsewhere. They are relatively well compensated, but their posting is hardly cushy.

Teams of 10 to 20 young men live and work out of a single apartment, sleeping four or five to a room and grinding up to 14 hours a day at weird hours to correspond with their remote job’s time zone. They have quotas of illicit earnings they are expected to meet. Their movements are tightly controlled, as are those of their relatives, who are effectively held hostage to prevent defections. “You don’t have any freedom,” says Hyun-Seung Lee, a North Korean defector who lives in Washington, DC, and says some of his old friends were part of such operations. “You’re not allowed to leave the apartment unless you need to purchase something, like grocery shopping, and that is arranged by the team leader. Two or three people must go together so there’s no opportunity for them to explore.”

The US government estimates that a typical team of pretenders can earn up to $3 million each year for Pyongyang. Experts say the money is pumped into everything from Kim Jong Un’s personal slush fund to the country’s nuclear weapons program. A few million dollars may seem small next to the flashy crypto heists— but with so many teams operating in obscurity, the fraud is effective precisely because it is so mundane.

in the summer of 2022, a major multinational company hired a remote engineer to work on website development. “He would dial in to meetings, he would participate in discussions,” an executive at the company told me on condition of anonymity. “His manager said he was considered the most productive member of the team.”

One day, his coworkers organized a surprise to celebrate his birthday. Colleagues gathered on a video call to congratulate him, only to be startled by his response—but it’s not my birthday. After nearly a year at the company, the worker had apparently forgotten the birth date listed in his records. It was enough to spark suspicion, and soon afterward the security team discovered that he was running remote access tools on his work computer, and he was let go. It was only later, when federal investigators discovered one of his pay stubs at Christina Chapman’s laptop farm in Arizona, that the company connected the dots and realized it had employed a foreign agent for nearly a year.

For many pretenders, the goal is simply to earn a good salary to send back to Pyongyang, not so much to steal money or data. “We’ve seen long-tail operations where they were going 10, 12, 18 months working in some of these organizations,” says Adam Meyers, a senior vice president for counter adversary operations at the security company CrowdStrike. Sometimes, though, North Korean operatives last just a few days— enough time to download huge amounts of company data or plant malicious software in a company’s systems before abruptly quitting. That code could alter financial data or manipulate security information. Or these seeds could lay dormant for months, even years.

“The potential risk from even one minute of access to systems is almost unlimited for an individual company,” says Declan Cummings, the head of engineering at software company Cinder. Experts say that attacks are ramping up not just in the US but also in Germany, France, Britain, Japan and other countries. They urge companies to do rigorous due diligence: speak directly to references, watch for candidates making sudden changes of address, use reputable online screening tools, and conduct a physical interview or in-person ID verification.

But none of these methods are foolproof, and AI tools are constantly weakening them. ChatGPT and the like give almost anyone the capacity to answer esoteric questions in real time with unearned confidence, and their fluency with coding threatens to make programming tests irrelevant. AI video filters and deepfakes can also add to the subterfuge.

At an onboarding call, for instance, many HR representatives now ask new employees to hold their ID up to the camera for closer inspection. “But the fraudsters have a neat trick there,” says Donal Greene, a biometrics expert at the online background check provider Certn. They take a green-colored card the exact shape and size of an identity card—a mini green screen—and, using deepfake technology, project the image of an ID onto it. “They can actually move it and show the reflection,” says Greene. “It’s very sophisticated.” North Korean agents have even been known to send look-alikes to pick up a physical ID card from an office or to take a drug test required by prospective employers.

Even security experts can be fooled. In July 2024, Knowbe4, a Florida-based company that offers security training, discovered that a new hire known as “Kyle” was actually a foreign agent. “He interviewed great,” says Brian Jack, KnowBe4’s chief information security officer. “He was on camera, his résumé was right, his background check cleared, his ID cleared verification. We didn’t have any reason to suspect this wasn’t a valid candidate.” But when his facilitator—the US-based individual giving him cover—tried to install malware on Kyle’s company computer, the security team caught on and shut him out.

Back in london, Simon Wijckmans couldn’t let go of the idea that somebody had tried to fool him. He’d just read about the Knowbe4 case, which deepened his suspicions. He conducted background checks and discovered that some of his candidates were definitely using stolen identities. And, he found, some of them were linked to known North Korean operations. So Wijckmans decided to wage a little counter exercise of his own, and he invited me to observe.

I dial in to Google Meet at 3 am Pacific time, tired and bleary. We deliberately picked this offensively early hour because it’s 6 am in Miami, where the candidate, “Harry,” claims to be.

Harry joins the call, looking pretty fresh-faced. He’s maybe in his late twenties, with short, straight, black hair. Everything about him seems deliberately nonspecific: He wears a plain black crewneck sweater and speaks into an off-brand headset. “I just woke up early today for this interview, no problem,” he says. “I know that working with UK hours is kind of a requirement, so I can get my working hours to yours, so no problem with it.”

So far, everything matches the hallmarks of a fake worker. Harry’s virtual background is one of the default options provided by Google Meet, and his connection is a touch slow. His English is good but heavily accented, even though he tells us he was born in New York and grew up in Brooklyn. Wijckmans starts with some typical interview questions, and Harry keeps glancing off to his right as he responds. He talks about various coding languages and name-drops the frameworks he’s familiar with. Wijckmans starts asking some deeper technical questions. Harry pauses. He looks confused. “Can I rejoin the meeting?” he asks. “I have a problem with my microphone.” Wijckman nods, and Harry disappears.

A couple of minutes pass, and I start to fret that we’ve scared him away, but then he pops back into the meeting. His connection isn’t much better, but his answers are clearer. Maybe he restarted his chatbot, or got a coworker to coach him. The call runs a few more minutes and we say goodbye.

Our next applicant calls himself “Nic.” On his résumé he’s got a link to a personal website, but this guy doesn’t look much like the profile photo on the site. This is his second interview with Wijckmans, and we are certain that he’s faking it: He’s one of the applicants who failed the background check after his first call, although he doesn’t know that.

Nic’s English is worse than Harry’s: When he’s asked what time it is, he tells us it’s “six and past” before correcting himself and saying “quarter to seven.” Where does he live? “I’m in Ohio for now,” he beams, like a kid who got something right in a pop quiz.

Several minutes in, though, his answers become nonsensical. Simon asks him a question about web security. “Political leaders ... government officials or the agencies responsible for border security,” Nic says. “They’re responsible for monitoring and also securing the borders, so we can employ the personnel to patrol the borders and also check the documents and enforce the immigration laws.”

I’m swapping messages with Wijckmans on the back channel we’ve set up when it dawns on us: Whatever AI bot Nic seems to be using must have misinterpreted a mention of “Border Gateway Protocol”—a system for sending traffic across the internet—with national borders, and started spewing verbiage about immigration enforcement. “What a waste of time,” Wijckmans messages me. We wrap up the conversation abruptly.

I try to put myself in the seat of a hiring manager or screener who’s under pressure. The fraudsters’ words may not have always made sense, but their test scores and résumés looked solid, and their technical-sounding guff might be enough to fool an uninformed recruiter. I suspect at least one of them could have made it to the next step in some unsuspecting company’s hiring process.

Wijckmans tells me he has a plan if he comes across another pretender. He has created a web page that looks like a standard coding assessment, which he’ll send to fake candidates. As soon as they hit the button to start the test, their browser will spawn dozens of pop-up pages that bounce around the screen, all of them featuring information on how to defect from North Korea. Then loud music plays—a rickroll, “The Star-Spangled Banner”—before the computer starts downloading random files and emits an ear-splitting beep. “Just a little payback,” he says.

Wijckman’s stunt is not going to stop the pretenders, of course. But maybe it will irritate them for a moment. Then they’ll get back to work, signing on from some hacking sweatshop in China or through a laptop farm in the US, and join the next team meeting—a quiet, camera-off chat with coworkers just like me or you.

[turbofanatic]

Had a weird dream which inspired another storyline (which is honestly the last thing I need right now) and most importantly it has an ending rather than being an overstuffed epic that goes on forever. So we'll see where this goes.

There's echoes in places humans frequent. Places you can slip between if you're unlucky. Whatever you do, don't eat the food. Solution spaces just close enough to look normal at first glance. The backrooms, fairy lands, dungeon crawls, you know the drill. This is an old idea, who cares. The important thing is that these places echo human spaces the same way ML image generators echo human art, purely statistically, with no context. In 2020 an event occurred drastically increasing the rate of occurrence and driving people away from offices in the same way covid did. And people figured out how to open these spaces and did what they always do, take advantage of it! It's a statistically representative sample of real spaces! Go to your competitor's echo space, grab as much data as you can, collate it and generate a statistics based idea of what they're actually doing for profit! Of course you have to deal with the echoes of the people in there, and the fact that it confuses plumbing with intestines and wires with nerves. Good luck!

Meet Luke, a techbro loser who was laid off after getting stuck in one of these places and eating the food. He's a very rare survivor but his biology is scrambled, making him eat aluminum, ooze gallium, and be 5x denser than a normal human. His new job involves acting as muscle for an office-dungeon delving team. He is not happy with this. He deserves it. He's a reasonably good coder but also the sort of idiot that bought those ape NFTs and probably got scammed out of them all.

He's now forced to work with four other assholes on a job that only the craziest of people would take. But he's still got his health insurance at least.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

In defense of Deliverism

There are many ways to slice up the coalition that is the Democratic Party, but one important axis are the self-styled adults-in-the-room, who declare themselves to be realists, and the party's left wing, who are dismissed as idealists who don't understand politics: neither how to win elections nor how to wield power.

The "realists" are the ones telling us that we can't have nice things. They say that if the Dems promise bold action - protecting abortion, controlling assault weapons, funding infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, providing health care - they will lose elections. When Dems do win elections, they insist that none of these things are possible: the Supreme Court will strike them down, or the GOP will filibuster them, or the business lobby will subvert them.

For these realists, every negotiation is a grand bargain in which all the grownups meet in smoke-filled rooms where they niggle and cajole and flatter their way into tiny, incremental policy changes, "signature achievements" that are so modest that the enemy can't possibly weaponize them as the deeds of radical socialists who will bring the country to ruin.

To do otherwise, the realists say, is to court catastrophe. Wielding power will destroy the "comity" that makes the legislature effective. It will "delegitimize" the institutions whose trustworthiness is key to enacting sound policy. When they go low, we must go high - not out of a sense of decorum, but to preserve the republic itself.

This kind of politics - the "triangulation" politics beloved of the consultant class - took over the Democratic Party in the Bill Clinton years (see also: UK Labour under Tony Blair). But its foremost practitioner - the Triangulation GOAT - was Barack Obama.

Obama's inside/outside game was indeed remarkable. He assembled and steered a massive, grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign that leveraged his skills as a once-in-a-generation orator to inspire huge numbers of historical nonvoters to show up and cast their ballot (recall that nearly every US election is won by "none of the above," so GOTV is a winning strategy, if you can pull it off).

Then, after the election, he switched off that grassroots.

Literally.

At the time, Obama's grassroots was the most successful netroots in history. Talented coders and digital strategists figured out how to leverage the internet to identify, mobilize and coordinate volunteers across the country. And while netroots activists did their work across the whole internet, their home base was a server the Obama campaign controlled. Once Obama won, they switched that server off.

You see, the rabble is useful when you're out there, trying to turn voters out to the polls. But if you plan to spend your term in office playing eleven dimensional chess, you don't want the mob jostling your elbow and shouting in your ear.

If FDR's (possibly apocryphal) motto was "I want to do it, now make me do it"; Obama's was "I want to do it, now go away." Rather than surrounding himself with the great unwashed, Obama created a cabinet of technocrats, grownups from the upper ranks of industry and the consultant class.

Think of Tim Geithner, Obama's Treasury Secretary, who counseled that the banks should be bailed out with no strings attached, not even a requirement that they halt the seizure and liquidation of swathes of Americans' family homes. When Geithner told Obama he had to "foam the runway" for the crashing banks with the roofs over everyday Americans' heads, there were no grassroots organizers foaming at the mouth in outrage. Thus did Obama end the Great Financial Crisis - by creating the Great Foreclosure Crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

But Obama's signature achievement wasn't his economic policy - it was his healthcare policy. The Affordable Care Act was a carefully triangulated compromise, one that guaranteed a massive flow of public cash to America's wildly profitable health insurance monopoly and steered clear of any socialist whiff that Americans would get their care from the government.

The ACA was an technocrat's iron-clad dream policy. It would work! After all, it "aligned the incentives" of healthcare investors and "harnessed markets" to drive efficiency. No one could accuse this policy - which was copypasted from former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's RomneyCare - of being "socialist." It was invented by a Bain Capital consultant!

Sure, the left would carp about Medicare For All and whine about the unjust enrichment of insurance barons. And sure, the right would try to convince "low information voter" lumpenproles that the individual mandate was an imposition on their Freedumb (TM), but in the end, more of us would get covered, prices would come down, and America would flourish.

That's not how it worked out. Prior to ACA's passage, 85% of Americans had health insurance. Today, it's 90%. That's not nothing! 5% of the US is more than 16m people. But what about the 85% - 282m people - who were insured before the ACA? Their insurance costs have doubled - from an average of $15,609 for a family of four in 2009 to $30,260 today. Obama promised that ACA would lower the average family's insurance bill by $2,500/year - but instead, insurance costs increased by some $15,000.

ACA wasn't just about cost, though: it was supposed to end discrimination, by forcing insurers to take on customers without regard to their "pre-existing conditions." On this score, too, Obamacare has failed: thanks to the ACA's tolerance for high-deductible plans, the number of Americans enrolled in plans that force them to pay for their chronic care out of pocket has skyrocketed from 7% to 32%. Yes, your insurer can't discriminate against you for having diabetes, but they can make you pay an extra $2,000 in deductibles every year before covering any of your diabetes care.

Now, maybe business-as-usual would have been even worse. Perhaps not passing the ACA would have left Americans poorer and sicker. But we're not comparing ACA with doing nothing - we're comparing ACA with more muscular, direct programs, like M4A. What if Obama had enlisted his grassroots, summoning up a left-wing answer to the Tea Party that turned the GOP into the party of no (including no compromises)? What if he'd jettisoned comity, appointed new judges, sent every executive order the Supreme Court rejected back to the court to be struck down again?

What if he'd governed like Lincoln, or FDR:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

There's a name for this kind of politics: it's called deliverism:

https://prospect.org/politics/case-for-deliverism/

Deliverism is the idea that if you promise things to the voters, they will vote for you. It's the idea that if you deliver things to the electorate, that they will re-elect you.

Deliverism is a subject of hot debate in the Democratic Party, because Biden is an empty vessel that gets filled by different party factions, which means that his policy is incoherent, but includes some of the muscular, get-stuff-done politics of the Dems' Warren-Sanders wing, but that agenda is often undermined by the "responsible grownup" do-nothing Schumer wing.

The responsible grownups say that deliverism is dead, because voters mostly respond to hot-button cultural issues, while material improvements in their lives barely move the needle:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/

In support of this proposition, deliverism's critics point to Obamacare, lauding it as a policy that made Americans better off, but still failed to win enough support for the Dems to defeat Trump at the end of Obama's second term.

In their rebuttal in The American Prospect, David Dayen and Matt Stoller point out that for most Americans, Obamacare didn't produce any improvement to their health care. The ACA made their care far more expensive, and the ensuing concentration across the sector (mergers between insurers, and between insurers and pharmacy benefit managers and pharmacies) made their care worse, too:

https://prospect.org/politics/2023-06-27-moving-past-neoliberalism-policy-project/

The rise in health care costs is no mystery: monopolies have taken over healthcare. In particular, healthcare is now the domain of private equity rollups, where a fund buys and merges dozens or hundreds of small businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers

Every layer of the healthcare stack is has grown steadily more concentrated since the Obama years: "Hospitals, doctor’s practices, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, ambulances, nursing homes, rehab facilities." As Stoller and Dayen put it:

> Every part of our health care world is increasingly controlled by greedy bankers who kill people for money.

The same corporate concentration has eroded wages, meaning that workers are paying for higher healthcare cost out of smaller paychecks.

Stoller and Dayen argue that the polls show that politicians who make material improvement to voters' lives do win popularity. Take the Child Tax Credit, which lifted more American children out of poverty than any initiative in history. The majority of voters who received the credit favored the Democrats. After Joe Manchin killed the credit, that support flipped, and that cohort now supports the GOP by a 15% margin.

Sure, Biden couldn't order Manchin to support the Child Tax Credit. But he could have gone to WV and campaigned for it with Manchin's base. He could have loaded the bill with pork for WV that was linked to the credit, and dared Manchin to vote against it. He could have "fought dirty" (which is what the grownups call "fighting to win").

The grownups say that if Biden had done that, he might have alienated Manchin and lost future votes, or caused Manchin to run as a Republican in his next election - but that presumes that Manchin won't switch sides anyway, and it presumes that failing to deliver the Child Tax Credit wouldn't also jeopardize the Dems' legislative majority.

The grownups in the Democratic party say we can't win by campaigning on economic issues like monopoly, nor on pocketbook issues like M4A. But when Biden slashed the cost of insulin, his approval numbers shot up.

The grownups' claim that they should steer Democratic electoral strategy is grounded in the idea that they can win elections, and without electoral victories, the Dems can't do anything. The grownups' claim that they should steer Democratic governing strategy is that they can win policy victories, and that these will get the Dems re-elected.

But neither of these claims hold water. Far from being pie-in-the-sky idealists with no theory of change, the party's left is incredibly good at getting stuff done. Take the antitrust enforcers Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, as well as the recently departed Tim Wu. They aren't mere idealists - they're brilliant tacticians and proceduralists who have figured out how to use their existing authority to do more than decades of their predecessors combined:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

By contrast, the grownups in the party - people like Pete Buttigieg - have notably, repeatedly failed to master the procedural technicalities needed to exercise comparable authority. You can't be a technocrat unless you understand the techniques:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

As for electoral strategy, the consultant class puts all its focus into eking out these incredibly marginal wins - the name of the game is to guarantee a 50.1% win and then move on to the next fight, which ensures that governing will be impossible. Meanwhile, union organizers like Jane McAlevey seek out 97% majorities for strike votes, in the teeth of voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and disinformation campaigns that are far worse than anything we see in a general election. And yet it's the party's labor wing that is smeared as unserious about electoral victories:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

It's true that the right has been scoring electoral wins with appeals to ideology and identity rather than by promising concrete, material improvements for their supporters' lives. You can win elections that way - but only by demonizing half the country as the enemy and then promising to make their lives miserable.

That doesn't invalidate deliverism as a strategy for winning elections. People may not have the time or interest to follow politics in detail. They may not understand how the ACA's internal technical workings are structured. The ACA has a lot of deficits - for example, it doesn't allow people to discover which insurance companies deny the most claims:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-often-do-health-insurers-deny-patients-claims

But even if that data were out there, there's only so much attention people can or want to pay to their insurance policies. People want health care that works: that takes care of their illnesses and injuries, without bankrupting them. Something like the VA (at its best). Or Medicare (at its best).

Improving peoples' lives isn't merely good governance - it's also good politics. Playing hardball is hard and can be unpleasant, sure, but most of the risk from taking big swings while in office is that the voters won't stand with you and give you the political capital to score big wins.

"I want to do it, now go away" guarantees that there will be no polity at your side, giving you political capital. The politics of grand bargains only produces unimpressive, incremental change.

For all the failings of the GOP's radical wing (and there are many such failings), there is this one virtue: they get stuff done. The GOP has taken massive swings - seizing the courts, dismantling the administrative states, stacking elections, and siphoning off trillions for its donors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

The Democrats don't need to copy the GOP's abandonment of material policy for ideological hardlines. Indeed, it shouldn't: when they go low (culture war bullshit), we go high (delivering real benefit to voters). But the Democrats' left wing could sure stand to learn a trick or two from the GOP's right - namely, how to turn "I want to do it, now go away" into "I want to do it, now make me do it."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

The Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop (I’m a grad, instructor and board member) is having its fundraiser auction to help defray tuition. I’ve donated a “Tuckerization” — the right to name a character in a future novel:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/clarion-sf-fantasy-writers-workshop-23-campaign/#/

[Image ID: An old fashioned tickertape parade. In an open-top convertible, surrounded by security, is a kicking Democratic Party donkey colored red, white and blue.]

[preservationofnormalcy]

as someone who tried the catperson thing, would not recommend. negative ten billion out of ten experience. literally cannot get health insurance. can't talk to most wizards and also cant work normally. i have a tidy job working coder hours and i do look pretty good tho. still not worth it. i get like a month to feel normal out of a year. rest i need a psychotropics cocktail to be functional. dont take the catpill lol.

See?

It's just not worth it.

Thank you for writing in and sharing, hopefully this helps people think twice.

[descendants-daily]

My Carlos Rewrite

Carlos is brilliant, anxious, funny, and endlessly kind. While he often hides behind humor and sarcasm, he carries deep emotional wounds from a life of fear and manipulation. Despite being raised by a cruel narcissist who taught him to fear animals and believe he was weak, Carlos has an innate gentleness that shines through. He’s a creative thinker and skilled with technology, often building gadgets to help others or make life easier on the Isle.

He struggles with anxiety and self-worth but becomes a powerful example of healing, growth, and quiet resilience.

Rewritten Arc

Carlos is raised by Cruella in a fear-based, emotionally abusive environment. She constantly belittles him, uses dogs to scare him, and mocks his intelligence. As a result, Carlos is timid, avoids conflict, and clings to others for safety. But he’s also incredibly smart tinkering with salvaged tech to escape his harsh reality.

In Auradon, Carlos grapples with panic, imposter syndrome, and the fear that he doesn't belong among the more confident VKs. When he begins forming a bond with Dude the dog, it challenges everything he’s been taught. He also faces tension when Auradon adults who view him as “the harmless one,” diminishing his pain and intelligence.

Carlos learns to stand up for himself not just against his mother’s legacy, but against systems that infantilize him. He uses his tech skills to bridge communication between Auradon and the Isle (tracking safe zones, building magical-neutral devices, etc.). Through therapy (yes let’s normalize it in Auradon), close friendships, and mentorship from Fairy Godmother or Belle, Carlos gains confidence and becomes a vocal advocate for VK rights.

Carlos runs Auradon Prep’s tech and innovation lab. He leads a youth program teaching Isle kids tech and coding as a form of empowerment. He also speaks openly about emotional abuse and mental health, breaking generational cycles. His friendship with Jay and Evie remains central he's the heart of their group. His bond with Dude becomes legendary. (And Yes, He also still has an Orphanage on the Isle. I couldn't let go of that for the Rewrite)

Fixes to Canon Inconsistencies

Instead of reducing it to a fear of dogs gag, Carlos’s trauma is treated with more depth. His arc includes working through PTSD, panic responses, and redefining his sense of safety. Cruella’s manipulation is portrayed seriously not just comedic evil.

Carlos isn’t just “the guy with the 3D printer.” His intelligence is central. He’s a coder, inventor, and systems thinker. He helps modernize Auradon’s outdated tech with compassion-driven design.

Instead of the rushed romance with Jane, Carlos's arc may or may not involve a love interest but if it does, it's someone who respects his healing journey. It’s slow-building, trust-focused, and mutual.

[lurkiestvoid]

This Is So Much Worse Than Last Time

Why Democrats and the media are struggling to capture the insanity—and danger—of the new Trump administration.

Alex Shephard

February 5, 2025

There is practically no way to describe what is currently happening in the United States without sounding hysterical, or like some sort of crank—or, maybe, insane. But here goes!

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has seized control of the Treasury Department. He is deciding who the government pays and who it doesn’t. The federal payment system he has access to contains the Social Security numbers and even the bank account information of nearly every American. It also has information about Musk’s private-sector competitors that he can now use for his own self-enrichment. Musk has given a handful of inexperienced young coders control over this sensitive system, where they can—and reportedly have—started to mess with its code. At least one of them is not even old enough to drink. This is a hostile takeover of the finances of the U.S. government. It’s blatantly unconstitutional. It’s a coup. It sounds like the treatment for a Gerard Butler action flick.

That’s not all! Trump and Musk have shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and cut off nearly all foreign aid. This will have devastating consequences for global health, global democracy, and the future of American soft power. Speaking of: Trump has spent the early days of his presidency threatening 25 percent tariffs against Mexico and Canada for no real reason, other than that he thinks a tool that worked more than a century ago will work now. (It won’t.) Even if he doesn’t end up enacting these tariffs—which would likely be a form of economic suicide—he has already likely damaged the future of any trade agreement between the U.S. and its closest allies. He has also pardoned over a thousand violent insurrectionists and now seems ready to fire hundreds of FBI agents who helped prosecute them.

But there’s more! The administration is freezing funding for climate and infrastructure spending despite numerous court orders. Trump just released a ton of water into California’s Central Valley in a publicity stunt. All he accomplished is screwing over farmers who will likely need that water in the summer; it did absolutely nothing to fight the (mostly contained) fires that devastated the state last month. His administration is waging an all-out war against trans people and seems on the verge of all but ending gender-affirming care for minors. As I write this, American planes are flying migrants to Guantánamo Bay, where they will be held in a concentration camp. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—supposedly one of the normal people in this administration!—just reached an agreement with El Salvador where it will accept deportees of all nationalities, including Americans.

I have not mentioned confirmed Cabinet members like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (problem drinker who has been credibly accused of sexual assault) or those who seem on the verge of confirmation, such as Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy (conspiracy theorist, had a literal brain worm, no experience, looks and sounds like a beat-up pleather recliner). Even then, this is just a fraction of the horror that has been unleashed over the last two weeks. As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick put it, the past fortnight has been like “a distributed denial of service attack on people who believe in reality.”

This is all very bad. Saying that it is very bad feels like an understatement. There is an ongoing oligarchic takeover of the U.S. government. Donald Trump’s authoritarian project has never been more threatening and fully realized. Things are already so much worse than his first term. The first time around, the president was stymied by legislative checks, particularly by a handful of congressional Republicans who occasionally emerged to block him, a still embryonic political project that had a dearth of apparatchiks to fulfill his (often insane) requests, and a bureaucracy that often frustrated his unconstitutional overreach and general authoritarianism.

Now the Republican resisters have been replaced by lackeys and cowards (sometimes a combination of both) and his administration is being staffed by fascistic loyalists eager to do his bidding; these loyalists are now engaged in a project aimed at destroying much of the existing civil service, particularly any part of it that was deemed insufficiently pro-Trump. (USAID, for instance, is under fire in part because of the perception that it is a hotbed of Commies; the FBI, famously not a hotbed of Commies, is under fire because it investigated Trump’s attempted coup after he lost the 2020 election.)

All of this (and the litany of horribles I haven’t mentioned) has happened over the course of two weeks. Most of Trump’s nominees aren’t even confirmed yet. There are no signs of a brewing rupture between Musk and Trump. Every sign points to the fact that this is going to get a whole lot worse. Many signs suggest that there may be no coming back from this.

Despite all the full-frontal fascism, the response has been oddly and frustratingly muted. The story of the first Trump administration was one in which the president constantly embarrassed the country and himself. But it was also about a clear manifestation of anger and pushback over his avowed plans (usually tweeted at odd hours) or his trying to implement them and being met with resistance. That resistance hasn’t really materialized yet. If Trump merely talked about building a moat filled with alligators at the southern border in his first term, now there’s a non-zero chance he’ll just do it.

Why has has the response been so muted? There has been a sense since his reelection that much of the public is simply exhausted by an wearying decade of Trump and is doing what it can to tune him out. It’s hard not to blame the populace for taking a break from the daily grind. If you were born toward the end of the last century, it’s possible you’ve never voted in a presidential election without Trump on the ballot. That’s a hellish quarter-century to live through.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, who ostensibly don’t get to take a break from this, have, in characteristic fashion, taken the wrong lessons from his reelection and seem to have spent much of the last two months paying the same consultants who lost the election to tell them how they can be more like Trump. Despite the takeover of the Treasury they are, incredibly, still voting for some of his nominees. (Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, was confirmed as energy secretary with seven Democratic votes on Tuesday.)

In some quarters, a fighting spirit is stirring, and members are starting to sound like the #Resistance Dems of old. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ron Wyden, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have taken on the administration and publicly condemned Musk’s role as a shadow president perpetrating an ongoing takeover of the U.S. government; on Tuesday evening, there was a large protest at the Treasury Department attended by two dozen members of Congress.

Media coverage has somehow been even less inspiring than the Democratic response. During Trump’s first term, the press struggled to find a way to deal with Trump’s admittedly difficult to describe mix of extremism and incoherence. The speed of all of this and the enormity of it is, to be fair, difficult to capture. But there are bigger problems emerging in the ongoing coverage. One is simply that Trump and his cronies are taking direct action against the press, threatening to shut down via lawsuits (or, in the case of National Public Radio, defunding) any outlet that they deem as being critical, and appear to be serious about it. ABC has already settled one lawsuit, while CBS seems ready to settle another—settling both would essentially amount to paying Trump protection money.

But there’s also been the return of an old malady: The mainstream press’s wholesale inability to grasp the magnitude of Trumpian misrule and capture the existential threat he poses. There is also the standard illiteracy and dysfunction among many major outlets that fails to rise to the moment: Over the past two weeks, for example, New York Times headlines have argued that the plain text of the Constitution is actually a matter of partisan argument and that the Treasury system Musk and his Muskrats have taken over is a legitimate means of deficit reduction; Bloomberg somehow found the only liberal legal scholar willing to say that the constitutional order has been resilient against Trump and for some reason published his take, despite it very clearly being incorrect.

Worse still, all of these old problems have been exacerbated by an emerging consensus that the media’s intelligentsia somehow extracted from Trump’s reelection campaign, which is that much of the public thought that their coverage was too sensationalist. And so there has been a palpably strenuous effort to dial things back, at the very moment when Trump and Musk are escalating their war on American life. No one is crying wolf, but the wolves have arrived.

These are facts, I’m afraid: Over the last two weeks, the incoming president has disabled most of the federal government as he figures out how to purge the federal bureaucracy and remake it into an instrument of personal revenge and self-enrichment. To do this, he has empowered the richest person in the world to take control over the federal government’s financial machinery and given him permission to refashion it at the source-code level. To say that seems hysterical. To experience it seems insane. But that’s precisely what’s really happening.

[obviousbaitfish]

lmaooo at that one person saying "so no one can talk about their mental health on their blog anymore i guess 🙄🙄" my sibling in christ that person was graphically describing their suicidal thoughts and threatening suicide because 2 people asked them about why exactly they think the plagiarism machine isn't actually doing plagiarism

It's not worth it. By their posts theyre clearly going through it (arent we all in one way or another). I said my piece, which wasnt really supposed to be seen "publicly" or be seen as a public all-encompassing statement (but dont mind if people see it, if that makes sense). But that's exactly how tumblr functions and how I like it. Even if someone trolls you or makes you mad on something you deemed as not to be interacted with, it can still be a good experience in whatever you want it to be - logic. out trolling them. a trial in patience and not responding. It certainly got me thinking about my creative career since the pandemic started, and how its not up to my par (i like DIY and sewing and stuff but i do find it more tedious than enjoyable most of the time).

And it helped me articulate why I dislike AI and got me wanting to blog again, which is nice (I wasnt big into text posts to begin with, except in highschool when i mostly complained). I dont expect to do this often unless something strikes my fancy but it has been a while since I've done... any serious interactive thinking. My shitty job just took it all out of me. I am the type of person who needs someone to talk TO, i think coders refer to this as the rubber ducky method, but I cant talk to a Thing. It feels too silly. Normally it'd be a private discussion with a friend but AI hasnt come up much.

ANYWAY. The next thing I'm gonna reblog is gonna be a rat.

[aetherdar1ing]

i hate the fact that i'm too stupid for college. i got through online high school through looking up answers to stuff because i genuinely can't focus. i'm trying to complete my virtual orientation but i can't focus on anything. it's too much. i don't even want to be a medical coder but being an artist in this economy is near impossible and i'd die working overtime at my local grocery store. the only reason why i want to be a medical coder is so i can move out because my grandparents want to move in w my parents and i don't think i could live w that. i can barely live w other people given my parents are loud but living with FOUR OTHER PEOPLE would break me. not to mention my grandparents want me to have kids.

do you think the autistic girl who can barely take care of her own mental health and cries when someone turns on the blender can handle FUCKING CHILDREN?

why can i never win in the end? i just want to live alone so i don't go insane but unfortunately rent prices are too much