#mass effect ending analysis

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hello Dapper. I don’t really expect too much about this, but do you have any ideas for Wargs? They have an interesting relationship with goblins and are weird in that they’re essentially sapient wolf monsters, but I don’t think they’re ever really used that creatively.

Monsters Reimagined: Wargs, wolf panics, and the Economics of Lupophobia

While the surface level answer is pretty simple (warg is a conversion of varger, an old Norse way to refer to mythological wolves like Fenrir) there's actually a surprising amount of material to drill into here on the topic of sapient wolf monsters, especially for someone like me who has a interest in moral panics and mass hysteria events. Wolves were effectively a boogyman for pre-industrial societies, a deep seated generational fear that we only recognize today through cultural relics like the big bad wolf or boy who cried wolf.

TLDR: If you want to do something interesting with wargs beyond just "wolves that talk" I'd advise playing to their folk / fairytale roots. They're creatures of embodied dread, drawn from the stuff of the feywild to sow fear among those who would travel off the path or too close to the wilderness. This lets you tell interesting stories about how the party/major characters respond to fear: Does fear of being attacked in the dark drive the party to make risky decisions that might endanger their quest? How do the villagers react when the wolves are very literally at the door, demanding just one of their neighbours as a meal in exchange for safety?

I'd also advise getting weirder with a warg's powers, playing into that fear of the unknown by doing unexpected things. The party can fight off a pack of wolves, sure, but what does it mean when the lead wolf rips off the bard's shadow and takes off into the night?

Background: If you want a window into the headspace of wolf-panic, think about the neigh omnipresent fear of sharks created by the Jaws franchise. Children who have never seen the movie, let alone seen a shark in person can become irrationally afraid of getting into deep water because they've absorbed the pervasive cultural phobia, which goes onto shape environmental policy as sharks are overhunted or killed out of spite for their perceived threat.

So it was for wolves, even after they were largely hunted to near extinction by medieval and postmedieval societies, the fear of them was so ingrained into cultural traditions that wolf and werewolf panics were a thing that went hand in hand with witchtrails. France had a country wide one as late as the 1760s and the movie based on it ended up inspiring Bloodborne. Alternatively look at the anti-wolf efforts during the colonization of the Americas, right up to the opposition to reintroducing wolves back to Yellowstone park.

On that note (and because we can't have a Monsters Reimagined without some kind of class analysis), lets talk about how these fears are propagated: On many levels it makes sense for everyday people to be afraid of wolves, they're a hunting species that can absolutely pose a danger to us, and when you're living or travelling outside the protection of a settlement you really are vulnerable to a coordinated pack of carnivores running you down.

However, the primary threat that wolves pose to humans isn't predation, it's property damage, specifically in how they kill livestock. While we can talk about individual farmsteads beset by beasts, in reality the herds that wolves were most likely to prey upon belonged to the landowning classes, powerful people who had a profit incentive in seeing wolves driven off or exterminated. This is where you get bounties on dead wolves, not just paying for the value of the hide but actively rewarding people for going out and killing as many wolves as possible to the point of it becoming a profession. This practice has existed for MILLENIA and is still active today, primarily in places where big agriculture influences governments.

It seems incidental at first but then you realize that it fits the model of just about every other kind of cultural panic: widespread ignorance and fear that just so happens to mobilize the populace in a way that financially benefits a select few. You can see the same thing happening today in england with badgers of all things, which have been identified with the local dairy industry as a threat to their herds. This is not only led them to petition the government to cull the badger population, but to put out anti-badger propaganda, eventually turning it into a culture war issure to the point where conservative mouthpieces like Jeremy Clarkson openly encourages killing and gassing badgers on sight.

Returning to the land of fantasy for now: I think it's worth taking the idea of the warg and mixing it with a few other "black dog" cultural archetypes, which can also include the creatures like the shuck or church grimm. In this instance the warg is a sort of curse made manifest, the fear of a haunted place given literal teeth. People who transgress into these forbidden spaces find themselves pursued by a manifestation that dogs them till they're exhausted and vulnerable, much like a wolf harrying its prey.

The bhargest is also of special interest here, considering how I like to relate goblins back to the feywild. You could easily see bhargests as agents of fey that feed on human fear, leading a pack of goblins or hobs that occupy the desolate lands they've called to haunt. My version of Maglubiyet would also delight in employing such creatures as his emissaries.

Going back to the vargr/ Norse mythology angle, it's interesting that most of the wolves that show up are destined to devour something, whether it be a god or celestial certanty like the moon and sun. It's like the concept of an inevitable chase is so fundimental to what a wolf IS that it became a theme of ragnarok's inevitable certantly. Consider having certan packs of wargs be offspring of some fenrir style god eater, beasts of forboding doom who's mere presence is an omen of ill times.

Alternatively, if you wanted to play on the big bad wolf angle, give wargs the ability to take on flimsy human disguises, all the better to get close to their pray and sow fear among the townsfolk. Historical wolf panics after all are not all that different than serial killer panics, and it'd be a fun twist on a traditional werewolf adventure to have the party on a creature that didn't play by the usual lycanthropic rules.

Artsource

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Insurance companies are making climate risk worse

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Conservatives may deride the "reality-based community" as a drag on progress and commercial expansion, but even the most noxious pump-and-dump capitalism is supposed to remain tethered to reality by two unbreakable fetters: auditing and insurance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

No matter how much you value profit over ethics or human thriving, you still need honest books – even if you never show those books to the taxman or the marks. Even an outright scammer needs to know what's coming in and what's going out so they don't get caught in a liquidity trap (that is, "broke"), or overleveraged ("broke," again) exposed to market changes (you guessed it: "broke").

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is on its deathbed. The market is sewn up by the wildly corrupt and conflicted Big Four accounting firms that are the very definition of too big to fail/too big to jail. They keep cooking books on behalf of management to the detriment of investors. These double-entry fabrications conceal rot in giant, structurally important firms until they implode spectacularly and suddenly, leaving workers, suppliers, customers and investors in a state of utter higgeldy-piggeldy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

In helping corporations defraud institutional investors, auditors are facilitating mass scale millionaire-on-billionaire violence, and while that may seem like the kind of fight where you're happy to see either party lose, there are inevitably a lot of noncombatants in the blast radius. Since the Enron collapse, the entire accounting sector has turned to quicksand, which is a big deal, given that it's what industrial capitalism's foundations are anchored to. There's a reason my last novel was a thriller about forensic accounting and Big Tech:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

But accounting isn't the only bedrock that's been reduced to slurry here in capitalism's end-times. The insurance sector is meant to be an unshakably rational enterprise, imposing discipline on the rest of the economy. Sure, your company can do something stupid and reckless, but the insurance bill will be stonking, sufficient to consume the expected additional profits.

But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG – one of the largest insurers in the world – there would have been no Great Financial Crisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

Still, many of us have nursed an ember of hope that the insurance sector would spur Big Finance and its pocket governments into taking the climate emergency seriously. When rising seas and wildfires and zoonotic plagues and famines and rolling refugee crises make cities, businesses, and homes uninsurable risks, then insurers will stop writing policies and the doom will become undeniable. Money talks, bullshit walks.

But while insurers have begun to withdraw from the most climate-endangered places (or crank up premiums), the net effect is to decrease climate resilience and increase risk, creating a "climate risk doom loop" that Advait Arun lays out brilliantly for Phenomenal World:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-doom-loop/

Part of the problem is political: as people move into high-risk areas (flood-prone coastal cities, fire-threatened urban-wildlife interfaces), politicians are pulling out all the stops to keep insurers from disinvesting in these high-risk zones. They're loosening insurance regs, subsidizing policies, and imposing "disaster risk fees" on everyone in the region.

But the insurance companies themselves are simply not responding aggressively enough to the rising risk. Climate risk is correlated, after all: when everyone in a region is at flood risk, then everyone will be making a claim on the insurance company when the waters come. The insurance trick of spreading risk only works if the risks to everyone in that spread aren't correlated.

Perversely, insurance companies are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, these being reliable money-spinners where an insurer can park and grow your premiums, on the assumption that most of the people in the risk pool won't file claims at the same time. But those same fossil-fuel assets produce the very correlated risk that could bring down the whole system.

The system is in trouble. US claims from "natural disasters" are topping $100b/year – up from $4.6b in 2000. Home insurance premiums are up (21%!), but it's not enough, especially in drowning Florida and Texas (which is also both roasting and freezing):

https://grist.org/economics/as-climate-risks-mount-the-insurance-safety-net-is-collapsing/

Insurers who put premiums up to cover this new risk run into a paradox: the higher premiums get, the more risk-tolerant customers get. When flood insurance is cheap, lots of homeowners will stump up for it and create a big, uncorrelated risk-pool. When premiums skyrocket, the only people who buy flood policies are homeowners who are dead certain their house is gonna get flooded out and soon. Now you have a risk pool consisting solely of highly correlated, high risk homes. The technical term for this in the insurance trade is: "bad."

But it gets worse: people who decide not to buy policies as prices go up may be doing their own "motivated reasoning" and "mispricing their risk." That is, they may decide, "If I can't afford to move, and I can't afford to sell my house because it's in a flood-zone, and I can't afford insurance, I guess that means I'm going to live here and be uninsured and hope for the best."

This is also bad. The amount of uninsured losses from US climate disaster "dwarfs" insured losses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hurricanes-floods-bring-120-billion-insurance-losses-2022-2023-01-09/

Here's the doom-loop in a nutshell:

As carbon emissions continue to accumulate, more people are put at risk of climate disaster, while the damages from those disasters intensifies. Vulnerability will drive disinvestment, which in turn exacerbates vulnerability.

Also: the browner and poorer you are, the worse you have it: you are impacted "first and worst":

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities

As Arun writes, "Tinkering with insurance markets will not solve their real issues—we must patch the gaping holes in the financial system itself." We have to end the loop that sees the poorest places least insured, and the loss of insurance leading to abandonment by people with money and agency, which zeroes out the budget for climate remediation and resiliency where it is most needed.

The insurance sector is part of the finance industry, and it is disinvesting in climate-endagered places and instead doubling down on its bets on fossil fuels. We can't rely on the insurance sector to discipline other industries by generating "price signals" about the true underlying climate risk. And insurance doesn't just invest in fossil fuels – they're also a major buyer of municipal and state bonds, which means they're part of the "bond vigilante" investors whose decisions constrain the ability of cities to raise and spend money for climate remediation.

When American cities, territories and regions can't float bonds, they historically get taken over and handed to an unelected "control board" who represents distant creditors, not citizens. This is especially true when the people who live in those places are Black or brown – think Puerto Rico or Detroit or Flint. These control board administrators make creditors whole by tearing the people apart.

This is the real doom loop: insurers pull out of poor places threatened by climate disasters. They invest in the fossil fuels that worsen those disasters. They join with bond vigilantes to force disinvestment from infrastructure maintenance and resiliency in those places. Then, the next climate disaster creates more uninsured losses. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finance and insurance are betting heavily on climate risk modeling – not to avert this crisis, but to ensure that their finances remain intact though it. What's more, it won't work. As climate effects get bigger, they get less predictable – and harder to avoid. The point of insurance is spreading risk, not reducing it. We shouldn't and can't rely on insurance creating price-signals to reduce our climate risk.

But the climate doom-loop can be put in reverse – not by market spending, but by public spending. As Arun writes, we need to create "a global investment architecture that is safe for spending":

https://tanjasail.wordpress.com/2023/10/06/a-world-safe-for-spending/

Public investment in emissions reduction and resiliency can offset climate risk, by reducing future global warming and by making places better prepared to endure the weather and other events that are locked in by past emissions. A just transition will "loosen liquidity constraints on investment in communities made vulnerable by the financial system."

Austerity is a bad investment strategy. Failure to maintain and improve infrastructure doesn't just shift costs into the future, it increases those costs far in excess of any rational discount based on the time value of money. Public institutions should discipline markets, not the other way around. Don't give Wall Street a veto over our climate spending. A National Investment Authority could subordinate markets to human thriving:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/industrial-policy-requires-public-not-just-private-equity/

Insurance need not be pitted against human survival. Saving the cities and regions whose bonds are held by insurance companies is good for those companies: "Breaking the climate risk doom loop is the best disaster insurance policy money can buy."

I found Arun's work to be especially bracing because of the book I'm touring now, The Lost Cause, a solarpunk novel set in a world in which vast public investment is being made to address the climate emergency that is everywhere and all at once:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

There is something profoundly hopeful about the belief that we can do something about these foreseeable disasters – rather than remaining frozen in place until the disaster is upon us and it's too late. As Rebecca Solnit says, inhabiting this place in your imagination is "Completely delightful. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/28/re-re-reinsurance/#useless-price-signals

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

It’s gone midnight and I’m thinking about Six of Crows so y’all know what that means: it’s time for a long rambling thought process that will hopefully have some interesting insights into the books in it.

I want to talk about the animal, mostly bird, symbolism of these books because although it’s obviously something we’re very aware of I also think it’s something that runs a lot deeper than we necessarily always realise/talk about. Even when people aren’t being directly involved in bird metaphors (crows, pigeons, peacocks) they are often described as “squawking”, “flapping”, or with other phrases that further this semantic field.

Now the crows is obviously the main source of the symbolism, and it’s openly talked about in the book with the speech on how the recognise human faces and how they support each other. I’ve also seen a few people online talking about the Crows in conjunction with a poem/nursery rhyme about crows (it’s one of those that has many different versions spun of it, some know it was counting magpies rather than crows) wherein 6 crows symbolises gold, of course greatly linked to the plot of the novels as well as their anti-extreme capitalism message. It’s also key to mention that crows are massively underestimated birds in the general public view; they’re far ‘smarter’ animals than we would typically expect. Crows have a very high brain to body mass ratio, I believe the highest of any birds but don’t quote me on that, and although we understand very little about the brain the size ratio is currently considered a very good indicator for the general intelligence level of the animal. Crows can make tools, hide their food, mate for life, and - VERY interestingly for this book analysis - have even been suspected to hold funerals. Now I want to be clear I’m working on a mix of random knowledge and the first helpful looking website that came up when I googled ‘fun facts about crows’ so I am by no means an expert here, but to my understanding the practice that was initially considered to be a ‘crow funeral’ is actually a process wherein crows will gather around a dead crow to look for potential danger. So I feel like the links I’m establishing here are relatively obvious, the point is that, like the birds themselves, the Crows are undervalued, underestimated, and unexpectedly successful. But the symbol of the crow in these books arguably goes even further.

The crow-headed handle of Kaz’s cane represents everything about the crow I’ve already mentioned on top of his own symbolic layering to the cane as a sign that no part of him has not been broken, and no part him is not better for having been broken. So in Chapter 27 of Crooked Kingdom, when Kaz returns to the Slat and fights the Dregs before leading a coup against Per Haskell, the cane with the fake crow’s head that Haskell has contrived to mock him effectively represents the failing of everything the Dregs represent. They’re last, the remnants, the people with nowhere else to go: they are the people who have been broken and have made something new for themselves. Except Haskell. So the sheer ridiculousness of him mocking Kaz’s cane, something he clearly thought would win him favour and success, in the end becomes one of the biggest aspects of his downfall. Inej describes the moment when the Dregs begin to support Kaz, the way the look at Per Haskell with discomfort - “the feathers in his hat, the canes in his hands” (and then she goes on to highlight how they’ve seen Kaz use his cane in fights, “wielded with such precision”, whereas Haskell is washed-up, pathetic, never could have taken the fight Kaz did and walked out the other side). Of course they realise, then, how completely and utterly wrong all of this was. Because when they’re confronted with both of those canes they realise something. They know what Kaz’s cane represents; it’s power and strength in spite of a world that has that has scorned him, it’s taking something that was broken and not fixing it but emphasising it and making it into a threat, into a symbol, into a strength. They know that, even though they don’t know what happens in Kaz’s head, because they see themselves in that. The Dregs; the literal bottom of the Barrel, who have been broken and who have clawed their way to survival. They cannot see themselves in Haskell’s mockery cane. Haskell is not a man who reflects what the Dregs are at their core, but Kaz is. The emphasis on the feathers is also really interesting, because I think it’s implying a sort of gaudy, colourful feathering that (despite fitting in with the style of the Barrel) does not represent the symbol of the crow; it is not something shadowed, something half hidden that could have an unexpected bite. It’s almost more akin to Heleen’s gaudy peacock feathers than it is to anything the Dregs understand, or represent through being Crows.

The pigeons I don’t really see anyone talking about, but I think it’s pretty interesting. The idea of ‘the pigeon’ is the same as ‘the mark’; they’re the victim, the fool who’s easy to swindle. I think the imagery of the fools being pigeons, ie being everywhere and massively populating big cities, is really clever to show a divide between the few, the Crows, and the many, the pigeons. However, it’s not only the Crows who remark on others being ‘pigeons’, but other gangs as well. When Kaz confronts Pekka about the scam he ran on him and Jordie, he says “you were just two pigeons, and I happened to be the one who plucked you”. I’m not gonna lie to you guys I’m losing my point slightly, but I just googled ‘crows and pigeons’ and the first thing that came up was about how crows sometimes eat pigeons so I reckon that’s pretty relevant.

Ok I’m really tired and I feel like I’m clutching at straws here, so I dunno I guess if this does well then I’ll cover peacocks, lions, and the general semantic field of birds in another post. I hope at least some of this made sense, thanks for reading it if you bothered to get this far

[ladyluscinia]

I know my last experience with a season ending on a note everyone hated and unanimously tore to fucking shreds for destroying the story on every level was... atypical. Lockdown. 6 month mass hysteria at minimum. Conspiracy theories that were, like, real things we had on camera. There was a Twitter wedding. Creative fervor that broke 100k fics on AO3.

Like. I know this is not a rational point of comparison and I'm not going to expect anything in my lifetime to match it 🤣

But.

If that was the highest high of post-season fandom engagement built on a cocktail of tasting everything you ever wanted AND the absolutely lethal levels of spite and swearing to eat showrunners' hearts in the marketplace, then whatever the fuck is going on after OFMD S2 is the opposite of that.

OFMD S1 was a huge fandom explosion. One silly little streaming show that had a gay kiss and then it skyrocketed. Fic numbers were soaring, high activity fic and meta engagement lasted for at least four months, it was constantly trending and flooding the dash... Like, fucking hell, over a year and a half after the immediate finale fervor it beat Stucky in the top ships bracket?!? To the point I was willing to give it what felt like due credit toward its potential as a future juggernaut ship. Not guaranteed, of course, but the potential was there.

In that context, new content should be a blow out party. Which it kinda was pulling off as it was airing, but looking back now? Not even quite a month later?

The effect of S2 on the fandom is like... a blip. Possibly over already.

New fic numbers started dropping off the moment the finale aired and have returned to deep hiatus levels. It's dropped off trending and streaming leaderboards... I'm very curious to see the first tumblr Week in Review since the finale, though we're still waiting due to the holiday.

Like, I've even popped on to scroll a few Izzy hater blogs that I know loved the finale out of morbid curiosity what they were up to, and I'm telling you... if I hadn't just watched the new season I'd think they were still over a year into hiatus. Saw some standard bitching about the izcourse / Edward takes (aka the one thing that kept them going all hiatus), they're currently passing around posts mocking one specific long OFMD version of TJLC I'm just hearing of, the same BTS gifsets everyone else is thrilled by... But barely any new meta or discussions. There's like 2 people posting actual analysis of S2 that's getting reblogged and they aren't even names I recognize from the hiatus. Nor is it particularly interesting to read. 🤷‍♀️

In July of 2022 I could pop onto a random OFMD blog and scroll through a dozen enthusiastic Stede or BlackBonnet metas about jacket colors or that moth from 1x07 or lighthouse symbolism or whatever. Now the new stuff has the same energy as posts from June 2023. It's borderline dead. And this is what it's like when there's an active campaign to engage fandom and Renew as a Crew?

(I will say fanartists are bringing some energy and there's some lovely pieces being passed around, which I do think the Renew as a Crew campaign is helping to boost?)

Even the hundreds of people saying it was a beautiful season and they loved it so much don't seem to be finding it a very engaging or inspiring season.

It's such a turn, like, what the fuck.

[ogrepoppenangleaksofficial]

WHO WINNING THE TWERK-OFF: HtP edition

Through careful analysis I have determined out of nearly every character we've been introduced to so far, who would win a naked and covered in oil twerk competition

First up is the Arcanum and immediately most of them are disqualified for having little to no ass or heart. There's really only four worth talking about. Brok has cheeks but wouldn't do it (DO I'Z LOOK LOIK A POOF TO YEW?!), Grimy has potential but would not lock in and probably would end up doing some weird shit she saw in a doujin, Harry has the bod and knows how to move it, and Elise is well...just look at her

Team vamp is pitiful. Shitbeard canonically has negative ass, Ape is too wound up, and while Guy and the manager would do it if vitae was on the line, they wouldn't be very good. Pyotr is the only one bringing his A+ game and probably should diablerize the others for that instant BBL

Team Hunter has some choice picks. Boy is disqualified for obvious reasons (sorry kid, maybe if we get a timeskip), Horse physically cannot twerk, and Krakus won't leave the well so it's down to the mains. While the sweatpants are doing him some favors, Kitten couldn't possibly stand up to the competition, I'm sorry. Door could probably crush a Coke can with those buns of steel but he doesn't seem like he can't move that mass effectively. Marckus is really the only choice, as we can see an episode 1 that shit was moving like water. D obviously moves on but that should go without saying.

So who wins? I hate to say it but Harry, Pyotr, and Marckus aren't up to the task, they might be good but not that good. So it's down to Elise and D. (Though out of the runners up, I think Pyotr beats Harry by the skin of his fangs)

Elise has cake on cake on cake (I don't know why you guys made her so incredibly stacked) but D actually cinches it due to that. She's a natural talent and natural talents are known for not putting in the work because they don't really need to. Besides, I don't see this as being something she'd be particularly enthused about, so I can imagine her just squatting down and doing literally whatever because it's gonna clap and jiggle regardless.

D on the other hand is going to WERK. He is going to shake it like rent is due. It'd look like that one scene from American Dad. You didn't think it was possible for ass to move like this. He has decades of experience and this certainly isn't his first rodeo. He has flawless technique with the physique to seal the deal.

So in hindsight the answer was kind of obvious,

BIG-D WINS

[wakeupthemembersofbylernation]

reminder: byler is officially going to be bones next season! ❤️

you and all your fellow bylers are currently having all your delusion mass screenshotted and put in my twitter mutual's archive... once s5 comes out and byler is bones, she'll make a video mocking almost a decade worth of your delusion. the video will become viral and every single person in the world will be laughing at you. ❤️

enjoy your delusion while you still can, you fool. ❤️

Ngl, this is simultaneously one of the funniest and saddest hate anons I’ve received. You should be embarrassed, but because you possess not a shred of self-awareness or shame, you won’t be.

The truth is, you’re clearly insecure and scared that we’re right because no one who is actually secure and happy with their ship acts this way. No one. If I were a Mlvn, I would simply enjoy Mlvn through fan art, edits, analysis, S5 predictions, memes, etc.- you know, all the things we’re doing here, like a normal fandom, in peace?

I wouldn’t spend my time harassing a group of shippers I believe to be “delusional,” who support a ship that I see as “bones.” We aren’t bothering anyone or harming anyone.

That isn’t even middle school behavior. That’s elementary school behavior. Your juice boxes are by the animal crackers and the Go-Gurt, btw.

So what if we're “delusional” (we aren’t, but so what if we are?) How do our so-called “delusions” have any effect on your fandom experience whatsoever? You’re making yourselves miserable by being bullies instead of enjoying Mlvn.

Additionally, Byler is beautiful and life-affirming and lovely and wonderful all around. There is nothing bad about rooting for queer joy and for Will (and Mike) to get happy endings together.

And there is nothing delusional about shipping a ship that is semi-canon where one half of it literally made a romantic painting for their bestie and the other half of the ship spent the entire penultimate season having heart-to-hearts with them. Nothing, nada, zilch.

You being bereft of subtext, fueled by flagrant homophobia, and blinded by heteronormativity isn’t our problem. It’s yours. And if against all odds, we’re wrong, that’s on the writers of the show. It still wouldn’t make us delusional or foolish, and there would be nothing to mock.

That’s because there is nothing foolish or wrong about rooting for queer joy. The only thing that’s foolish is rooting against it, which you’re doing now. We have nothing to be ashamed of, and you have everything to be ashamed of.

So compile what you wish. Continue down the astonishing path of total self-unawareness. Laugh, mock, and cackle. Guzzle down your homophobia. Place your head on your pillow at night in the smug satisfaction that you’re oh so enlightened because you aren’t delusional and see that Mike and El are explicitly dating on screen, so they must be endgame.

And we will see you on the other side. And maybe, just maybe, when you’re entirely wrong in 2025 and Byler is not, in fact, bones, you’ll rethink your life and work on being a better, happier, kinder person. I pray that day comes sooner.

[marrok-dark-knight]

One of my absolute FAVORITE scenes in Mob Psycho is when he appears at the end of the Everyone vs Shimazaki fight. The reason I love it so much is because it reminds me of this scene in Princess Mononoke. LET ME EXPLAIN:

When Mob walks into the area we see his feet and his power just wispng off of him. But it’s also silent.

In Princess Mononoke we see the same thing, heavy music and intense stuff going on and then BAM silence as the Forest Spirit walks in, its powers coming off and growing/killing the plants around it.

Something about this is just so MHMMM to me. I’m not very good at art cinematography analysis but this definitely stuck out to me each time I watched both the movie and series. Something about the quiet power of both individuals, the power of life and death in their hands. Everyone’s power is loud and flashy, with battle music, but Mob and the Forest Spirit silence all of it. Both of their feet take up the whole screen just showing the mass effect they have. It draws full attention to them. It sets this tone, somber, threatening, but gentle. I JUST WANTED TO SHARE THIS. Season 2 had a couple moments that gave me Princess Mononoke vibes mostly Mob and Ashitaka comparisons. Feel free to share your thoughts!

[petite-elf]

APA In-Text Citations

[ID: A screenshot from scribbr.com showing an example paragraph with in-text citations. The citations are highlighted, and the text reads: "Body image issues have been widely associated with social media usage in young women (Perloff, 2014). The relation between media depictions and body image concerns is well-established; a meta-analysis by Grabe et al. (2008) concluded that exposure to mass media is linked to body image dissatisfaction among women. Several empirical studies have focused on Facebook usage in adolescent girls (Meier & Gray, 2014; Tiggermann & Slater, 2013), while a systematic review by Holland and Timmerman (2016) established a relationship between social networking and body image for both women and men." End ID]

2. Chicago Style Footnotes

[ID: A screenshot from scribbr.com showing an example of Chicago Style Footnotes. The numbers are superscript numbers and correspond to footnotes.

The main text reads: This is an example of a full note,1 and this is an example of a short note.2 The footnotes read:

Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1989), 75-89.

Covey, 7 Habits, 75-7

End ID]

[apas-95]

I think that the concept of immediacy is one that's pivotal to modern political analysis, but which is sorely missing in many discussions.

The most obvious example is in our existential threat - climate change. To a simple, omniscient material analysis, capitalism would be appearing to act incoherently here. The capitalist system is the expression of the political will of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie. This class acts towards its own interests, to maintaining its own power and improving its standards of life. To this end it does many things that impoverish and oppress *other* classes - it creates masses of unemployed and unhoused people and forces violence on them, to maintain a reserve army of labour; it carries out violent redistribution of territory between its various states, wars fought with the blood of the lower classes, to restore the rate of profit; it impoverishes entire nations, repressing them politically and economically, to create favourable markets to export its capital to and import labour-power from - but climate change threatens to destroy the capitalist class as a whole, alongside everyone else. Plainly, it is not in their material interest to poison the air they breathe and the food they eat.

Why stop there, however? There are a number of other things that threaten the common ruin of the contending classes - but even so, if we focus only on the ruin of the *ruling* class, there's only one threat we need bother focusing on. Travel back to the establishment of the bourgeois republic, to the revolutionaries fighting feudal monarchy - is this in their interests? By the standard we've just established: no! Inexorably, plainly, as the capitalist class just overthrew the aristocracy, so too will the bourgeoisie themselves be overthrown by the working class. In the long term, they're simply dooming their own class to its inevitable destruction. Yet, they carry out their revolution anyway, for reasons that are quite obvious - it's not their problem right now. The eventual overthrow of their class is effectively immaterial to them, compared to the immediate benefits of revolution. In the same way, on a halfway-smaller timescale, the current capitalist class has more immediate problems to face than climate change. The long-term doesn't matter anyway if you don't survive the short-term.

This is, of course, not only applicable to climate change. Having established this premise, an important focus is the imperial core, and third-worldism. Does the working class of the imperial core benefit from anti-imperialism? Well, yes, and no! In the long-term, it's plainly evident that the proletariat of the imperialist nations would be better off under socialism. However, it's also clear that they presently *do* receive benefit, compared to the proletariat of other nations, due to imperialism. The *immediate* effect of anti-imperialist political organisation and action in the imperial core would be a worsening of their conditions, while the long-term, ultimate effect would remain a massive improvement in their conditions. In the final analysis, socialist revolution is in the interest of *all* workers - however, for some workers, it's very much not in their *immediate* interests. Understanding this, without a need for claims of ideological corruption or some innate counter-revolutionary tendency, shows clearly *why* certain sections of the working class oppose global socialism *and the circumstances that would bring about their support*.

[olderthannetfic]

Re: ‘most big fandoms are dominated by male characters so there’s less f/f’ - I think the conclusion that there’s so much more m/m and m/f out there because media with big fandoms include fewer women as characters and we are ‘just writing about the characters [we] connect with in the media [we] enjoy’ removes some of the agency involved in how we choose the media that we potentially end up fannishly enjoying. Yes, if there were more characters who are women in media with huge existing fandoms, we might see more f/f, but I think that many of us gravitate toward new media (and if we click with that new media, then new fandoms) based on our established interests from prior media/fandoms. I’ve been in online fandom in various capacities for over 20 years and in the first decade of my fannish ‘career’ I largely shipped m/m and wrote m/m. I was therefore, unsurprisingly, often drawn toward new media with m/m potential.

About a decade ago my personal interests began to shift and I found myself more drawn toward women characters and f/f. If I’m interested in women and f/f, I’m not going to keep focusing on new-to-me media with a whole slew of men and a couple women who barely interact. I’m keeping an eye out for media with several prominent female characters, media with lots of women, media with f/f potential. Luckily, that isn’t as hard to find across a variety of genres and formats as it used to be. It doesn’t always click — I enjoyed watching She-Ra and Ahsoka, for instance, and saw the f/f potential, but neither were id matches that sparked fannish creativity for me personally — but if I’m not checking out media with women and am instead continuing to watch/read/play media where the characters are largely men, then yeah, I’m going to get frustrated by the lack of f/f i those fandoms pretty quickly. That’s on me though, not on the fandom at large. If I’m not looking at what’s out there, trying to find the media that hits those iddy places and sparks the fannishness I crave, then am I really that interested in f/f in the first place? I don’t think fandom ‘hates women’, but I do think a lot of fandom just isn’t that fannishly interested in women for a plethora of reasons, and that’s fine! I do wish we could just admit that though.

There’s also…look, there are assholes in every corner of fandom. There are plenty of people out there who write posts that criticize unrealistic m/m smut, but that doesn’t seem to drive away the m/m fans from writing that super unrealistic m/m smut they want to read. Why then do a few jerks criticizing what they believe to be unrealistic f/f smut get blamed for driving people away from f/f? Did you really want to write that f/f smut to begin with? It’s okay if you didn’t really want to write it! But also, there is fantastically unrealistic f/f smut out there on ao3 with an appreciative audience. Unrealistic smut always has its place.

--

Yuuup.

I do think the few loud jerks on whatever topic have a disproportionate effect on things that people are already insecure about or that there's already less content about. Criticism from inside the house also seems to hit harder than from outside, for various definitions thereof. But I agree that there are bullies or just loud assholes everywhere, and it doesn't stop the juggernaut ships and fandoms. I think "the meanies made me not write f/f" is not a good analysis of the overall trend even if some specific people really did get bullied quite badly.

I do see people acting surprised that they don't like any f/f, yet not checking out media with multiple female leads. This is silly and we should move away from this along with ditching "There are no interesting female characters".

But another pattern I see is that, for the most part, really big fic fandoms come from things a ton of people consumed in the world overall. (The reverse isn't necessarily true: something can have mass mainstream popularity and no fic.) So even aside from willful blindness on the part of individual fans or personal reactions to gender, the overall lopsidedness of media does still matter for the big meta discussions that look at the ratio of stuff on AO3. If someone isn't really into small fandoms, they're going to have to go where the crowd is already going.

The top fandoms, according to tag search, are these (counts are different from current AO3 works if you click through, but they seem inflated by roughly similar amounts):

Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling ‎(664365)

Marvel Cinematic Universe ‎(389476)

방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS ‎(289493)

Original Work ‎(273412)

Marvel ‎(233004)

Teen Wolf (TV) ‎(219504)

Haikyuu!! ‎(215127)

The Avengers (Marvel Movies) ‎(208509)

原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game) ‎(207259)

Star Wars - All Media Types ‎(188548)

Sherlock (TV) ‎(169092)

Batman - All Media Types ‎(137281)

Captain America (Movies) ‎(118954)

Minecraft (Video Game) ‎(117892)

Stranger Things (TV 2016) ‎(117489)

Video Blogging RPF ‎(110169)

Voltron: Legendary Defender ‎(105117)

Miraculous Ladybug ‎(104003)

Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan ‎(103914)

魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù ‎(101819)

文豪ストレイドッグス | Bungou Stray Dogs ‎(95606)

Merlin (TV) ‎(88893)

僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) ‎(86484)

NCT (Band) ‎(85868)

Dream SMP ‎(83222)

Stray Kids (Band) ‎(82711)

One Direction (Band) ‎(79490)

呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Manga) ‎(78975)

Homestuck ‎(77676)

Game of Thrones (TV) ‎(77361)

Good Omens (TV) ‎(76805)

陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) ‎(73444)

DCU ‎(71054)

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 | JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure ‎(70648)

Undertale (Video Game) ‎(68959)

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin ‎(67854)

Star Trek ‎(67221)

Doctor Who ���(65172)

Doctor Who (2005) ‎(65166)

呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime) ‎(65109)

Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett ‎(63727)

Once Upon a Time (TV) ‎(62211)

Avatar: The Last Airbender ‎(61743)

Hetalia: Axis Powers ‎(61343)

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy ‎(59581)

Iron Man (Movies) ‎(59158)

EXO (Band) ‎(58948)

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types ‎(58055)

Hannibal (TV) ‎(56796)

Thor (Movies) ‎(56604)

I'm seeing some truly gargantuan franchises and their network of metatags, top Weekly Shounen Jump manga that are mega bestsellers far, far beyond how much any shojo manga sells in Japan, some of the biggest musical groups and most popular youtubers in the world, etc.

Some of these do seem a lot more popular with the AO3 crowd than the world in general, of course. It's not an exact 1:1 causal relationship between media's audience/impact and how much fic writers care or how much fic writers on AO3 care. It's certainly possible for fandom to make fetch happen with a relatively less popular canon; it's just not the default and not driving the big overall numbers.

I look at The Untamed and (often mistagged) MDZS) being on this list and I think of all those hot fanvids for f/f Chinese dramas.

I keep seeing fans watch one, go "Okay, I have got to watch that next!" only to be disappointed that the canon is a handful of 5-minute episodes, not some epic 50-episode thing like the censored m/m ones and the bromance ones and the het ones get. They want The Untamed-but-with-ladies, not the reality of those canons. I suppose there are some nominally-straight series with two female leads and not a heavy focus on a het romance with just a single female lead, but the one I'm thinking of was reportedly godawful and the people who saw potential between the women had no interest in writing fic about it.

Do any of those f/f c-novels have good translations? That's not what brings the big fic crowds (it's the adaptations that do that), but maybe I should try reading a few. I just keep getting turned off of Chinese webnovels in general by dodgy translations.

[veliseraptor]

March Reading Recap

Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare's First Tragic Heroine by Sophie Duncan. I actually really liked this one! It was an interesting look at several different lenses that have been used over time to look at Juliet (specifically Juliet, not the play), including the relationship between fascism and Juliet in Verona, Italy and the development of West Side Story (didn't know Juliet was Jewish in an early version). I enjoy sort of niche/specific books focusing on a very particular subject, and this book scratched that itch well.

The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It by Helen Scales. I read this book too soon after The Underworld by Susan Casey which, while not necessarily a better book, covered a lot of the same terrain. The trouble with a keen interest in a niche topic is, I suppose, that the books on it can start to get repetitive sometimes. It was still good, though, and this one focused a bit less on the history of human exploration than Casey did and a bit more on the ecosystems themselves, which I did welcome.

Blood of the Chosen and Emperor of Ruin by Django Wexler. The second and third books in the series that started with Ashes of the Sun - both continued the trend of "I don't know that I'd call these particularly good works of literature but they were very enjoyable and propulsive." The second book was stronger than the third - I ended up feeling like the conclusion of the trilogy was weaker and a little rushed, but I still enjoyed the experience as a whole and would offer at least a tentative, general recommendation of the series for those looking for a fantasy series that's not particularly innovative or serious but is an exciting ride.

The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis. This book reminded me a little bit of Such Desperate Glory but wasn't quite as well done, I don't think. The back compared it to Mass Effect but I don't really see that as a reasonable comparison. Possibly one of my favorite things about it was the cover design, which fucks. I still liked it, though, and I'm going to read the sequel.

The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race by Farah Karim-Cooper. Sometimes when I read things I feel like a snot because I go "this is interesting information but the writing feels a little amateurish" and that was my situation with this book. It was good analysis and interesting to read, though sometimes the "and this is how this is modern-ly relevant! q-anon mention" felt a little bit...ehhh, unnecessary, but the writing itself was...yeah. It felt amateurish. Which might just be a result of the book itself being targeted at a particular audience that's less academically-minded than I am, that's certainly possible, but it did affect my enjoyment of the book.

Last Days by Adam Nevill. Mostly this was good spooky fun, though it lost me with the "the ultimate bad guy is an overweight bisexual actor with AIDS" (it's a little more complicated than that, but not enough). Too bad, because conceptually and in terms of imagery it could've been very good. Between this and my last Nevill, I might have to give future books a pass. My search for horror that isn't playing on bigoted tropes apparently continues, since I'm on a bit of a streak there with this and Ring.

China: A History by John Keay. I'd call this one a solid overview despite the choice to use "bureaux" for the plural. However, I'm taking a lot of it with a grain of salt since as far as I can tell he didn't use many or possibly any Chinese secondary sources, and relied primarily for quotations/analysis on English secondary sources. I would've liked to see more of a balance. Still, as far as background information and a general broad history goes, it feels like it was worth reading for me to get a little more background/grounding in history I don't have a lot of familiarity with. (Also, holy shit did Ken Liu crib hard on Liu Bang and Xiang Yu for The Grace of Kings and now I know that.)

Remnants of Filth: vol. 3 by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou. I continue to really enjoy this book and this volume might be my favorite yet - the flashbacks were satisfying to fill in some of the gaps in mysteries as yet unrevealed, and having Gu Mang fully "back" (more or less) is a fun development that is already having consequences changing the dynamic between him and Mo Xi in delightfully angsty ways. Of the cnovels I'm currently in the middle of this one is close to LHJC as far as my favorite.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi. This one is what I think people would call a "romp" which is all well and good and I probably should've known what I was getting into, but I think I am just not much of a "romp" reader. It was fun, I guess? But I don't know that I felt like it was good, and I'm probably not going to go around recommending it. My first Scalzi, and I don't know if that's typical of him, but I probably won't be in a hurry to pick up another one anytime soon.

Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation ed./trans. by Ken Liu. Short story collections are really hit and miss for me, but this was actually a collection that was pretty hit all the way through! Very interesting stories, a couple I'm still thinking about. I'm looking forward to reading my other collection of short stories in translation, which includes some fantasy - some of these actually felt somewhere between fantasy and science fiction in a very interesting way that I liked.

--

phew. I read a lot last month! Currently I'm reading Medea by Eilish Quin (we'll see how that goes); I have on my docket The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (recommended to me) and I think I might reread She Who Became the Sun so I can read He Who Drowned the World. I've been on more of a fiction than a nonfiction kick of late, but I am eyeing Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn and might make that part of my rotation. we shall see!

[betterthanbatman1]

This is so. Fucking. Stupid.

Before I dive in let me just say: This writing is so pathetic simply because this is how humans act?? Like how fragile does Bruce’s ego have to be that he’s going to start a fist fight with his son. It’s like in the damn high school movies where the bully pushes a girl and the other guy punches the bully in the face. People don’t just go around punching people!! They get frustrated and angry but they don’t just fucking punch someone who they disagree with!? (Majority of the time)

Now for the actual analysis: I actually had high expectations for this, I really thought that writers have learnt that no we actually don’t love seeing Bruce beating the shit out of Jason/his kids. “hEs a ViGaLaNtE and Jason’s a cRiMiNaL” fuck off that’s not an excuse.

Honestly Jason shouldn’t even try to convince Bruce anymore, it’s always the same shit. “They’re bad people, they deserve to die”

“You don’t get to decide that” *punches his son in the face*

How many times have I had to read this?? Every fucking comic that includes Jason and Bruce ends up in a fist fight. I’m fucking sick of it.

The writing was genuinely so stupid

“If you think one more death is fine if it stops more death- then shouldn’t I kill you?!”

There’s so much here that just doesn’t make sense and that’s excluding the fact that Bruce is threatening to kill his son.

Do these contemporary writers not understand that Jason doesn’t kill everyone who may kill others. He’s not a “Mass murderer”. He kills the dirtbags of Gotham. He kills the worst of the worst. He kills the r*pists, the abusers, and anyone who brings harm to women, children and the vulnerable. He doesn’t go storming into a restaurant and shooting up the place??? That’s what a mass murderer would do.

Now with that in mind, the logic would be No Bruce you shouldn’t kill Red Hood because he doesn’t just kill people. You wouldn’t be reducing the deaths in Gotham because without Jason killing the scum who terrorise the vulnerable, then there will be more deaths. Killing Jason if anything would increase crime. In UTRH, when Red Hood first appears, Batman himself said “crime is down”. That shows that what Jason does is in fact effective, which is why he does what he does. If Jason was just a killer killing other killers, Jason’s whole reason his own morals would not be consistent or accurate!! If that was the case then yes YES Bruce you should theoretically kill Red Hood. If if if god forbid Jason was one of the nasty scum of the earth that he tries to wipe out, then yes by his morals he indeed deserved to die.

These writers are so clouded with having this raw masculine rage between the two characters; being allowed to kill someone or not, that they blindly and stupidly forget that both of these characters are human and therefore have complex morals and values.

Jason fundamentally believes he is doing good for Gotham- and the statistics prove that!! Bruce knows that what Jason does is needed. He knows that Jason’s methods help Gotham. Jason is a consequentialist and both Jason and Bruce should know that. Likewise, Bruce is a deontologist, he believes the actions are wrong and immoral but he knows that Gotham is better off. He just doesn’t agree with the methods. Jason said himself “I’m doing what you won’t” Bruce knows Jason isn’t a dumb vengeful maniac terrorizing Gotham. So why the fuck did the writers bring these characters so low that Bruce would even suggest that Jason should be killed along with the other criminals.

Lastly, if the answer was yes, then Bruce why the fuck are you asking to kill your son? Like you’d actually do it you little bitch. Kill the joker first and then ask about your son.

Really shitty writing, it’s so frustrating. Like, I was actually excited to see what this new Jason comic was going to give me. But now…More fights between him and his Dad. Yippeee this is really what the readers want. Smh

Call me naive but I just thought maybe Jason and the bats would be able to connect without beating the shit out of each other.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

From the news I'm getting here across the Pond, it seems like Liz Truss has perhaps achieved a marvel in that she's turning out to be more incompetent than Boris "Big Dog" Johnson. What are the chances the U.K. will have a new Prime Minister by the end of the year?

Yeah, she's exactly as competent really but, and this cannot be overstated, the person whose mess she's inherited IS Boris Johnson. But she compounds this with a Chancellor who is much, much worse.

Uh, this answer got long, sorry about that, but lol what can you do? Exercise restraint? Pfft.

By the end of the year... probably slim, as hilarious as the letters of no confidence are; the party can't survive another new leader that quickly. Johnson's greatest legacy - his greatest gift to the left - is the one he was always going to leave: he rose to power on a platform of 'feelings not facts', a method that is highly effective in the short term but horrendously unsustainable in the long run, once the shine of the bombast wears off and people realise that the bins aren't going out anymore. You cannot bluster and jazz hands your way through running a country indefinitely. You have to be competent at the daily grind.

Big Dog was not.

But during his tenure, everyone either threw all their weight behind him to suck his Union Jack-coloured cock and get a cushy ride themselves, or they were openly fired for disloyalty. He single-handedly created a Tory party that was defined by patriotism-flavoured incompetence. And then the bubble burst, and his old nemesis Mr Consequences came calling, and the situation was, very suddenly, that he was hot garbage - just absolute weapons-grade 'this is not a place of honour' levels of toxic - to have in charge of the party, but most importantly, crucially, none of them could get rid of him without also incriminating themselves.

That's why it took so long before the wave of resignations finally kicked things into happening. That's why it had to be a wave of resignations. None of the limping high school debating champions that were left in government could survive without him; even though he was actively poisoning them, they would die immediately with him gone. The tipping point came when finally that particular cost-benefit analysis see-sawed the other way.

And what's left? What was always going to be left: a hardcore radical group of 'feelings not facts' fascists, and an insipid hodgepodge of self-deluded clowns with the life skills of a particularly underwhelming five-year-old, all of whom are embroiled in bitter internal bitching wars and cliques and spend their days writing each other's names in a Burn Book rather than doing their jobs.

Everyone is blaming each other. No one is taking responsibility. The party can no longer agree on anything, except perhaps "Woe is us."

This latest leadership contest was actually a vicious thing that added to the damage and made the in-fighting worse. If we now add ANOTHER to the pile... well. I think we would see, at minimum, mass defections to UKIP. Very possibly some new political parties, like what Labour did when Jeremy Corbyn was too left-wing for them so Angela Smith and Chuka Umunna founded Change UK and claimed it was because Corbyn was racist and then Angela described people of colour as "black or a funny tinge... you know, a different... from the BAME community" and then Change UK was quietly dissolved after 10 months and no one remembers them anymore. It would be a disaster, is what I'm saying.

A new Chancellor, though... that's more likely, I think. Kwasi Kwarteng was rumoured to have had an affair with Liz Truss and honestly I strongly suspect that's why he got the job - he wrote a stupid book about economics that no one liked, on the night of the Brexit vote was overheard by a journalist saying “Who cares if sterling crashes? It will come back up again", and then became Chancellor, and then released a mini-budget last week that has tanked the pound to the lowest performance against the dollar since records began and immediately embroiled his PM into a financial crisis so bad she literally went into hiding for a day and a half. The UK is... actually completely fucked, as of this week. I cannot overstate what a fucking unmitigated disaster that budget is, or the damage it's causing. We were already doing very badly. This is catastrophic. This is like having an infected foot and everyone being concerned because it's turning gangrenous, and then Kwasi turns up and chops off both your legs and your dominant hand and then also the legs and dominant hands of everyone else present as well, except for himself and his rich mates. We are a long, long way beyond "First, do no harm."

But Kwarteng is also very replaceable.

However:

Liz Truss is extraordinarily stupid. I honestly don't know if it will occur to her to sacrifice him. If she's sensible she will; but 'sensible' is not a word I associate with Liz Truss.

The other option, of course, is an early general election being called, for the seven-hundred-and-fifteenth time in the last decade I stg. However, Tories only call for those if they stand a chance of winning.

One poll yesterday put Labour thirty-three points ahead of the Tories.

To put that into perspective, if that were to translate into a GE performance, the outcome of the vote would leave the Tories with...

THREE SEATS.

But! Of course! It's not so simple anyway:

That was an opinion poll, and those are always more extreme than an actual vote because people use them to express dissatisfaction. A vote would not be that extreme.

That was one of several polls yesterday. If we take an average, the actual figures are:

Labour are nineteen points ahead of the Tories.

Would you like some context?

In 1999 when Tony Blair won his landslide Labour victory - the greatest Labour lead in recent history - do you know what his polling lead was?

Twelve points.

Lol

So it is vanishingly unlikely the Tories will call a GE themselves. Their only hope now is that they can somehow do a good enough job to fix their party and win public confidence back before the next GE, which will be no later than January 2025.

In ENTIRELY UNRELATED NEWS I'm sure, Labour have just declared that they are backing a change to a proportional representation voting system in place of the UK's archaic first past the post system. Funny that.

[firewalkzwit]

runt // jonathan crane x reader. (1)

Chapter 1. Prelude

cross-posted on AO3

masterlist

Meticulous analysis of her own motivations had driven Y/N to come to the conclusion that her hatred was justified. Nothing was done without something profoundly belonging to one's own unresolved conflicts being involved in the decisions and paths of choice. Such was the case of the Batman, she'd concluded. Whoever he was behind that mask, he was not pursuing his role as a masked 'protector of Gotham' without a great degree of personal motive beyond selfless devotion to the wellbeing of the city. Long had she studied this concept meticulously, as to do introspection on her own reasons behind her new objectives. The Batman and herself found congruence in the belief that violence was an indispensable tool to maintain order, humanity after all was nothing but an attempt to break a deeply embedded bond with primitive, animal instincts, such as sin. However it was this particular ethic that took from Y/N the only person who stood by her side since the day she was born.

Her brother, like a forbidden fenix, had found in the drug business what was ethically questionable, but an opportunity to a new life at last. Poverty had reigned in as many generations as their family registered for, which were not many, but enough to bring a loss of hope at ever escaping the circumstances. The drug business was dangerous, but her brother was sly and grown to be a street-smart individual, he knew where he could mess and where he couldn't. Finding also a strike of luck in the fact that where they lived -a little apartment above a Chinese-owned laundry shop, was a precarious condominium where a low-ranked pawn from Carmine Falcone also had his home. This kid had befriended Y/N's brother and recommended him with Falcone, being the crucial connection to begin working for the druglord.

While unable to approve of his line of work, Y/N couldn't find it in her morality to refuse his dirty money. Like Tony Montana he'd return home with the fruit of his criminality and she'd accept it like a gift, one with a catch, but her brother always managed to sound reassuring enough to make the odds of something happening to him seem lower than they were. Oh, was it such a crime to be gullible and young, and believe your older brother? Y/N had once tried to believe that she simply didn't have what it took to stop him, or that it wasn't her place in his story, fate had planted it's seed on him and his demise was only meant to happen the second he agreed to dance with the Devil.

Despite her brother's rapidly increasing earnings, she felt it a moral obligation to maintain her job as a janitor in Gotham University. She was no Will Hunting, but she did find a particular itch of interest in the fields of sociology and psychology; studies of human condition. The job allowed her to ocasionally lean besides the auditoriums to listen to the lectures of intellectual professors. Her mind was like a sponge, and her curiosity drove her to absorve every drop of information she'd hear, and study it later in her free time.

It was one of those days where she spent some hours off the clock on campus, long done with her cleaning duties yet attentively listening to the lesson behind the door. Had she left on time maybe the butterfly effect that spiraled into the end of her brother's life could have somehow been different. Had she left later, perhaps, something in the trail of events could have flipped a switch to prevent what happened to him. But she didn't, she stayed and listened to a seminar on social conducts and masses, while somewhere in Gotham her brother received punch after punch from the Batman as God's punishment for his temptation and greed.

If the Bat had intended to kill him or not was not of her concern, as intentions didn't free the vigilante from having her brother's blood on his hands. It was while checking the stock of a recently dropped off container in the portion of the port Falcone had used his filthy money to buy that Batman had striked. Her brother tried -in a naive act of loyalty, to defend the property of his employer. Poor boy, forgotten as another dog of the drug world, but to Y/N a victim of his circumstances trying to make the best out of the little life had to offer for them. Died in the hospital as he awaited for interrogation, his insides mashed into a gorey pureé of organs that spat their own blood and failed to survive the brutality of their wounds.

Sure, the Batman may have saved damsels in distress from having their purses snatched by low life thieves, or prevented a hypothetical drug addict from getting another taste of their self-indulgence, but was he really saving people? Doing something worthwhile? For all she knew, all his masked activism was of no use if they had no effect in the long-term and the masses, and in the process took the lives and resources of hard-working low income people. She was no fool, Y/N had obviously assessed the possibility that maybe what happened to her brother was, again, a matter of fate, a divine punishment for succumbing to the desire for easy money. But then again, his motivations were only honest, and he was looking out for his and his family's best interest. What more does a man have to do to be noble and worth of living without being punished for collateral misdoings that are only human?

Falcone had presented his distant condolences in the shape of a young man knocking at her door, offering the drug lord's words of comfort and a pitiful offer for a job in his headquarters at The Penguin's Iceberg Lounge. "A pretty face like yours could be pretty popular." spoke the raspy voice of The Penguin as his grotesquely large fingers held her chin. The Iceberg Lounge didn't belong to Falcone, but his connections allowed him to offer Y/N a job as a waitress in the place. Had she any choice? Not really, with her brother now dead, the income as a janitor was not nearly as much as the inviting sum of tips that sweetened her ear with the same voice of temptation that once spoke to her brother. Besides, she did need the money, and building links -even if they were mostly symbolic, with the Bat's enemies could grant her a closer look to the new channel of all her hatred.

It was once that Y/N begun to work for The Penguin that she fully committed in the sinful night-life. Her entire scheme and survival now relied on crime, sin and immorality. She had now signed her own contract, and indulged fully into the world of darkness and depravity, one that was once unknown to her and was now tied to her identity. She fed off of other's lust and crime, making her a criminal herself. But she no longer felt the fear or rejection for the underworld her brother's job had once made her feel, she now embraced it as her own for the sake of greater motivations. Like a legacy she had chosen to carry on, taking the job got her to quickly see first-hand the very embodiment of hedonism and sheer self-indulgence. The energy in the club was heavy, dark and evil, but Y/N resisted her days through it and engaged in her friendlies as a standard procedure for the night, meeting interesting people in the process.

[ljesak]

🌲pinned🌲

im Maki, a 20 year old hobbyist artist from serbia currently majoring in compsci ! I have a bunch of interests, main ones being art (visual and writing), philosophy, sociology, media analysis, biology and video games as a storytelling medium

✦ main fandoms: warrior cats, elder scrolls, fallout, furry

✦ i engage with various other things too but these are the biggest!

✦ when it comes to art i enjoy portraying atmosphere and emotion, subjects are varied as im interested in too many things to settle on only few! I do wanna make more oc content, though and finally branch out into humans

✦ i enjoy a plethora of movies/books/shows/games etc. but it felt bloated to include them all here

✦ art is under #art tag !

my characters: https://toyhou.se/ljesak (art with them is tagged with their name, ex. laurie)

✦ other socials and commission info: https://ljesak.carrd.co/

I open commissions sporadically, my messages are open for inquiries

more about art/stuff i like! video games: fallout nv, what remains of edith finch, disco elyisum, the talos principle, witcher 3, skyrim, firewatch, SOMA, beginner's guide, baldur's gate 3, outlast franchise, cyberpunk 2077, citizen sleeper, fran bow, undertale, outer wilds, the unfinished swan,, there's def more but those are the favs i rmbr so far. i want to get into dragon age and mass effect

webcomics im currently reading and enjoying: What Lurks Beneath, Lackadaisy, Oren's Forge, Golden Shrike, I Hope So, Tofauti Sawa shows: bojack horseman, atypical (except the 4th season that one was awful), midnight gospel, dungeon meshi, atla, dragon hunters, arcane... i did watch many shows but i remember these personally resonated. i need to watch more shows in general but they are quite a big time investment films: most of miyazaki's work, favs being princess mononoke and spiried away, WALL-E, coraline, ratatouille, I'm thinking of ending things, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind... and more. i tend to prefer animation over live action as it's more expressive (obv not always the case) again i did watch more movies id consider good but not personally meaningful enough to mention books: i mostly read philosophical texts and fiction!! my fav authors are probably meša selimović and chomsky but i really need to expand my horizons with books, I'm least experimental with them, so its classics mostly unless i get a good recommendation music: mostly indie folk/rock but i do listen to most genres, fav artists rn are Lord Huron, Daughter, Wickerbird, Slowdive, Warpaint, Arcade Fire, Wilsen, Aphex Twin and more!! i rlly love ambient music too so a lot of the games i mentioned previously have gorgeous soundtracks will probably edit this periodically as i remember more things !!

[topgunreacts]

please share your thoughts on canon ice with the peanut gallery. character analysis i beg of you. this funky little guy has been shaking in my parlor like a sopping wet chihuahua and i cannot understand him by God. break him down for me. explain him.

what are your thoughts. feelings. complaints, concerns. rude remarks. who is Iceman what’s he about

Omg I'm so bad at these. Please take everything I say with a grain of salt. I will try my best. My real character dissertations are in my stories.

Thots

Tall

Moist

I don't give a shit what color his eyes are; it's running gag of mine (and only funny to me) to switch up his eye color between stories

Stop wearing sunglasses indoors

Great bone structure in the fingers

Fuckable but not by me

Misunderstood

Gum problem

So fucking tired

Incredibly bad at talking about his feelings. So bad. But god he tries his best to make Maverick feel better after Goose goes to the Untitled Game in the sky.

Too smart for his own good

Afraid of emails

Home of sexual

Every time I give him anxiety, I also give him a huge cock as a consolation prize. It's what he deserves.

Could use a good consensual caning. He could learn from Chance Engagement Ice.

Goes to bed at 9 PM

From California or Hawaii or Michigan or Canada or somewhere, a place definitely, with a location that is real

Is NOT a rule follower. Look at his fucking hair. He says YO to Viper. He is unapologetically Doing His Own Thing. Werk.

Concerns

Iceman is regarded as a shallow villain-antagonist by many people. This is very silly. Just because Maverick is The Hero doesn't mean he's right about everything or that what he does is justified. Each and every time Ice calls Maverick out on his behavior, he's (1) correct and (2) motivated by a desire to go home alive at the end of each day. Maverick IS dangerous. He IS unsafe. His behavior SHOULD be regarded with suspicion re: his intentions by his supposed allies. These people are flying around in high-speed metal triangles. Have you ever seen the end result of a mid-air collision between aircraft that AREN'T going mach speeds? Here is an example! [image depicts plane crash debris, no bodies, but...nobody survived this] [TCAS wasn't invented until after the 1956 Grand Canyon collision!!!!!] The DC-7 was the faster jet in the incident, with a max speed of 406 mph (653 km/h, 353 kn). Those little regional jets you might have flown on for short domestic hops can hit speeds of 600 mph in the modern era. A Tomcat, remember, can go supersonic. Ice would become confetti. I'd fucking say something, too!

At no point does Ice come across as cruel when he makes these comments about Maverick's performance, also. He shit talks (cough cough bullshit) but it always struck me as standard issue locker room talk crap. It's not Personal. He's not trying to throw Maverick off his game or anything. Ice isn't there to make FRIENDS he's there to WIN is at TOPGUN ready to do his job and kick ass. And he also, you know, wants to survive to graduation without getting slammed [aerially] by the guy who thinks it's fun to break aviation regulations over an ACTIVE AIRFIELD. People like to compare Ice to Hangman in terms of attitude. A lot. And Ice is not even remotely like Hangman. Asking Maverick whose side he's on after Maverick demonstrates careless piloting--behavior that directly endangers Ice and others--is not the same thing as bringing up somebody's dead dad as like, a dig.

Feelings

Spoonable.

Val Kilmer's little mole is cute.

Complaints

Needs more gay

Needs more lines

Needs more ass shots like the ones Miranda got in Mass Effect 2*

Rude Remarks

Take off your fucking shades in tha club, you absolute square.

*(Did you know the person who made the ME2 mod to remove Miranda's ass shots made a mod for the legendary edition to re-add the ass shots? The studio took out the ass shots on their own for legendary. To be modern and corporate-approved feminist or something. And this modder was like no. Only I can do that. They took Miranda's ass out of this world and they're going to put it back in.)

Conclusion

pussy shot.