#people tend to forget that he's also very clever and probably a good politician as well as being a warlord

[arcticdementor]

There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great; real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each. But each has its problems.

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The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the opposite, a reflex to provoke.)

As a pundit, you sense this stress in every bone of your body; you can never show it to your readers. This creates a deep dishonesty in the parasocial relationship between writer and reader—like a marriage that can never escape some foolish first-date fib. The falsity, like the blue in blue cheese, flows through and flavors every particle of your content. Neither you nor your readers can ever be sure whether you are speaking the truth, lying to them, or lying to yourself—but you are constantly doing all three. You may still be very entertaining—enlightening, even. All your work is ephemeral, and once you die only your relatives will remember you. And it’s not even your fault.

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From my perspective, both the anonymous and official dissidents exhibit a kind of unserious frivolity, but a very different kind. The frivolity of the anon is imaginative, surreal and playful at best, merely puerile at worst. The frivolity of the pundit has no upside; in every paragraph he is breaking Koestler’s rule, and he knows it; the best he can do is to shut up selectively about the things he cannot write about.

And his mens rea, too, is awful. He is selling hope. He is selling answers. Pity the man whose life has brought him to the position of selling answers in which he does not believe, or which he is forced to believe, or which he must force himself to believe. However sophisticated and erudite he may be, he is just a high-end grifter. His little magazine is a Macedonian troll-farm with a PhD. He is lucky if his eloquent essays about the common good don’t appear above a popup bar peddling penis pills—and in fact, I know more than one brilliant scholar in precisely this bathetic position. The frame defines the picture; the context sets the price of the text. Sad!

Worst still must be the reality that bad punditry is worse than useless—since useless strategies for escaping from a real problem are traps. When you lead your readers toward an attractive but ineffective solution, you lead them away from the opposite.

You got into this business to change the world for the better. You cannot avoid the realization that you are changing it for the worse—because your objective function is that of Chaim Rumkowski, the Lodz Ghetto’s “King of the Jews.”

You exist to convince your own followers that they neither can nor should do anything effective. The easiest way to do this is to convince them that ineffective strategies are effective. And this, as we’ll see, is exactly what you cannot avoid doing, dear pundit.

Moreover, from our present position of profound unreality, where the official narrative shared and studied by all normal intelligent people and all prestigious institutions can only be described as a state of venomous delirium, the opportunities to play Judas goat are almost unlimited. Cows, remember: there does not have to be only one Judas goat.

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A particular favorite of the pundit is the error that AI philosophers call the “first-step fallacy.” It turns out that the first monkey to climb to the top of a tree was taking the first step toward landing on the moon:

First-step thinking has the idea of a successful last step built in. Limited early success, however, is not a valid basis for predicting the ultimate success of one’s project. Climbing a hill should not give one any assurance that if he keeps going he will reach the sky.

When a vendor sells you the moon and ships you a rope-ladder, you’ve been defrauded. Time for that one-star review.

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Today we’ll chart the edges of the legitimate possible by looking at three recent pundit essays which have done a fine job of exploring those edges, and maybe even expanding them: Richard Hanania’s “Why is Everything Liberal?”, Scott Alexander’s “The New Sultan”, and Tanner Greer’s “The Problem of the New Right.”

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After reading Hanania’s essay, a fourth pundit (who is out as a radical conservative) asked me: why does the right always lose? “Narcissistic delusions,” I replied.

Which was far from what he expected to hear, or what most readers will take from the essay. All three of these essays are good and true; but their inability to go far enough leaves them pointing their audience in precisely the wrong direction.

Most readers will emerge feeling that conservatives need more and better narcissistic delusions. Indeed, both pundit and politician are right there with just such a product. This meretricious frivolity, posing as seriousness, is too egregious to leave unmocked; yet the right reason to mock it is to challenge it to assume its final, truly-serious form.

Richard Hanania and the loser right

Hanania’s true point—backed up with a ream of unnecessary, PhD-worthy evidence—is that the libs always win because they just care more:

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Since the rebirth of conservatism after the revolutionary monoculture of World War II, all conservative punditry has consisted of attempts to create more excitement around policies and values which effectively resist the power of the prestigious institutions—giving “normal people” as much to care about as their fanatical, aristocratic enemies.

Sensibly, this tends to involve raising “issues” which actually seem to affect their lives, but which also run counter to aristocratic power. Over decades, the substance of these issues changes and even reverses; the opposite stance becomes the useful stance; and “conservative values” have no choice but to change to reflect this. (If this seems like a liberal way to rag on conservatives—the cons learned it from the libs.)

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“New Right” is not Greer’s term, but as a label I can barely imagine a worse self-own. It promises something ephemeral and irrelevant. So far as I can tell, this same cursed label has been used in every generation of conservatism to mean something different. When it inevitably fails and dies, people forget about it, and the next generation, stuck in the eternal present of a Korsakoff-syndrome movement, can reinvent it.

Who reads the conservative pundits of the ‘80s? Even those who remember them have to throw them under the bus. Every generation of National Review twinks, solemnly intoning what they conceive to be the immortal philosophy of our hallowed founders, is horrified by its predecessor, and horrifies its successor—a truly bathetic spectacle. And of course, each such generation would utterly horrify the actual founders.

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Greer then goes deep into David Hackett Fischer territory to explain the obvious, yet important, fact that this “New Right” consists of upper-class intellectuals (inherently the heirs of the Puritans, since America’s upper-class tradition is the Puritan tradition) trying to lead middle-class yokels (the heirs of the Scotch-Irish crackers, and (though Greer does not mention this) Irish, Slavs, and other post-Albionic “white ethnic” trash, today even including many Hispanics. He even gives us a clever historical bon mot:

Pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jackson masses!

Uh, yeah, dude, that would be called “Abraham Lincoln.”

But the point stands. Not just the “New Right” with its new statist ideology, but the whole postwar American Right, is a weird army with a general staff of philosophers and a fighting infantry of ignorant yokels. How can this stay together? How can the philosophers bring forth a mythology that creates passionate intensity in the yokels?

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There is wisdom in this madness, of course—the problem is caused by aristocrats whose minds are wholly given over to narcissistic delusions. Doesn’t it take fire to fight fire? Doesn’t it take passionate intensity? Isn’t passionate intensity generated only by myths, dreams, poems and religions, not autistic formulas for tax policy? So the answer is clear: we need more and better narcissistic delusions. Ie, shams.

After all, any “founding mythology” is a narcissistic delusion. The flintlock farmers and mechanic mobs of the 1770s, and the Plymouth Puritans of the 1620s, have one thing in common: none of these people even remotely resembles the megachurch grill-and-minivan conservative of the 2020s. None of them even remotely resembles you.

They did live in the same places, and speak sort of the same language. Otherwise you probably have more in common with the average Indonesian housewife—at least she watches the same superhero movies.

To Narcissus, everything is a mirror; in everything and everyone, he sees himself. No field is riper for narcissism than history, since the dead past cannot even laugh at the present’s appropriations of a human reality it could not even start to comprehend.

And fighting fire with fire is one thing, but fighting the shark in the water is another. For the aristocrat, transcending reality is a core competence. The essence of leftism—always and everywhere an aristocratic trope, however vast its ignorant serf-armies—is James Spader in Pretty in Pink: “If I cared about money, would I treat my father’s house this way?” Mere peasants can never develop this kind of wild energy: that’s the point.

Yet Hanania remains right about the amount of energy that a rational, Kantian agenda for productive collective action motivated by collective self-interest, or even collective self-defense, can generate. The grill-American suburbicon is like Maistre’s Frenchman under the late Jacobins: he has defined deviancy down to rock-bottom. “He feels that he is well-governed, so long as he himself is not being killed.”

O, what to do? When you are solving an engineering problem and see the answer at last, it hits you like a thunderbolt. The conservatives, the normal people, the grill-Americans, must accept their own low energy. They must cease their futile reaching for passionate intensity, whether achieved through Kantian collective realism or Jaffaite founding mythology. They must fight the shark on land.

Conservatives don’t care—at least not enough. Yet they want to matter. Yet they live in a political system where mattering is a function of caring—not just voting. Therefore, there are two potential solutions: (a) make them care more; (b) make systems that let them matter more, without caring more.

Conservatives have low energy. They want high impact—at this point, they need high impact. After all, once you yourself are being killed, it’s kind of too late. Any engineer would tell you that there are two paths to high impact: more energy, or more efficiency.

Conservatives vote but don’t care. If we don’t have a viable way to make conservatives care more—meaning orders of magnitude more—effective strategies and structures must generate power by voting, not caring. They must maximize power per vote.

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Interference means voters who are on the same team are working against each other. Impedance means voters resist delegating their complete consent to the team.

Interference is like a bunch of ants pulling the breadcrumb in different directions. To eliminate interference, point all your votes at one structurally cohesive entity which never works against itself.

Impedance is like getting married for a limited trial period, so long as your wife stays hot and keeps liking the stuff you like. As Burke pointed out in his famous speech to the electors of Bristol, the fundamental nature of electoral consent is unconditional:

To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of Constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a Representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider.

But authoritative Instructions; Mandates issued, which the Member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgement and conscience; these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental Mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.

The cause of electoral impedance in the modern world is the conventional concept of “agendas” or “platforms” or “issues.” When you vote not for a cohesive entity, but for a list of instructions you are giving to that entity, you are not voting your full power. You are voting for Burke’s opponent, who felt “his Will ought to be subservient to yours.” In effect, you are voting for yourself. Narcissism once again rears its ugly head.

When you vote an agenda, you are granting limited consent to your representative. You say: I vote for you, for a limited time, so long as you stay fit and cook tasty dinners. I am actually not voting for you! I am voting for “reforms for conservatives” (Hanania). I am voting for “a broad set of shared attitudes and policy prescriptions” (Greer). Dear, I am not marrying you. I am marrying hot sex, regular cleaning and delicious meals—till ten extra pounds, or maybe at most fifteen, do us part.

You implicitly withhold your consent for anything not on your jejune list of bullet points. Then, you wonder why your representatives have no power and are constantly mocked, disobeyed, tricked and destroyed by people who are legally their employees. This is not political sex. This is political masturbation. You voted for yourself. And instead of a baby, all you got was a wad of tissues. Nice way to “drain the swamp.”

Your vote does not work because you are not voting, delegating, or granting consent. You are like an archer with one arrow who, afraid of losing it, refuses to let go of it. Without releasing his dart, all he can do is run up to the enemy and try to stab.

So if conservatives want to maximize the impact of their votes, all they have to do is the opposite of what they’re doing. Instead of voting for the okonomi a-la-carte stupid little political menus of hundreds of unconnected candidates and their staffs, they can all vote for the omakase prix-fixe chef’s-choice of a single cohesive governing entity.

Such a power, elected, has the voters’ mandate not just to “govern,” but to rule. When no other private or public force enjoys any such consent, no other force can resist. We are certainly well beyond “rule of law” at this point! On the inaugural podium, the new President announces a state of emergency. He declares himself the Living Constitution. In six months no one will even remember “the swamp.”

Wow! What a simple, clear idea! The engineer, when he comes across so compelling and obvious a design, knows there’s a catch: he won’t get the patent. Someone else must have invented it before. People may be stupid—but they’re not that stupid.

Indeed we have just reasoned our way to reinventing the oldest, most common, and most successful form of government: monarchy. And we are setting it against the second most common form, the institutional rule of power-obsessed elites: oligarchy. And to install our monarchy, we are using the collective action of a large number of people who each perform one small act: democracy.

The alliance of monarchy and democracy (king and people) against oligarchy (church and/or nobles) is the oldest political strategy in the book. The suburban conservative, who just wants to grill, either has no idea this ancient and trivial solution exists, or regards it as the worst thing in the world—even worse, possibly, than his sixth-grader’s mandatory sex change.

And why? Ask your friendly local Judas goat, the pundit. Even the “new right” pundit—who only differs in his policies and issues. Which are, true, slightly less useless. As the top of the tree is slightly closer to the moon.

The 20th century even came up with a handy pejorative for a newborn monarchy. We call it fascism. No word on whether Cromwell, Caesar, or Charlemagne, let alone Louis XIV, Frederick II and Elizabeth I, were fascists.

But, to borrow Scott Alexander’s charming term, also not his own invention, they were certainly strongmen. TLDR: if you want to be strong, elect one strongman. If you prefer to be weak, elect a whole bunch of weakmen. Do you prefer to be weak? “If the rule you followed brought you to this place—of what use was the rule?”

The pundit reassures you that you don’t need a strongman to be strong—you’ll do fine with weakmen—so long as those weakmen have the right “shared attitudes and policy prescriptions.” By the way, here are some attitudes I’m happy to share with you. Click now to accept cookies. Did I mention that I have policy prescriptions, too? Skip ad in 5 seconds. Congratulations, you’ve been automatically subscribed! Check the box to opt out of most emails—void where prohibited by law—terms and conditions may apply…

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An odd sort of pundit, who remains only nominally anonymous but has always very much GAF, Scott Alexander does not have Hanania’s cagey diplomatic noncommittal. As a “rationalist,” he is deeply committed to his own class status, and to oligarchy itself—which, like most, he misidentifies as “democracy.”

While the whole raison d’etre of the rationalist is the irrationality of our oligarchy, as displayed in genius moves like refusing to cancel regularly-scheduled airline flights to stop a Holocaust-tier pandemic, the rationalist’s dream is a rational oligarchy—using Bayes’ rule, which given infinite computing power will become infinitely intelligent—in Carlyle’s immortal phrase, “a government carried out by steam.”

Obviously, this is not just logical—it immunizes the rationalists from the scurrilous charge of “fascism,” or worse. And they were right about stopping the flights. So was my 9-year-old. Sadly, in a world of universal delusional delirium, rationality can get quite pleased with itself by clearing quite a low bar.

My view is that no government can be or ever has been carried out by steam—only by human beings—a species the same today as in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, if possibly a little dumber on average—and this will remain the case until some computational or genetic singularity occurs. For neither of which events will I hold my breath. This is why I find it easy to picture 21st-century America under the phronetic monarchy of an experienced and capable President-CEO, and almost hilariously impossible to picture it under a Bayesian bureaucracy of polyamorous smart-contracts.

Alexander disagrees. Here is his analysis—the same text that Hanania quotes. Let’s go through it thought by thought, and see if we can’t turn it into some delicious carnitas.

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Let’s get back to those “elites.” Alexander conflates three quite orthogonal concepts in his use of the word “elite”: biology, institutions, and culture.

Elite biology is high IQ, which is genetic. Elite institutions are any centers of organized collective power—Harvard, the Komsomol, the Mafia, etc. Elite culture is whatever ideas flourish within elite institutions.

Destroying biology is genocide—specifically, aristocide. Destroying institutions is… paperwork. Who hasn’t worked for a company that went out of business? Same deal. And if the culture is the consequence of the institutions, different institutions (with the same human biology) will inevitably nurture different ideas.

The SS was anything but a low-IQ institution, yet it propagated a very different culture than Harvard. 21st-century Germany is anything but a low-IQ country, but the ideas of Kurt Eggers do not flourish in it. It seems that high-IQ institutions can be destroyed—and the new “elite culture” will be the culture of the institutions that replace them.

So the only target is the institutions. There is nothing “nasty” about closing an office. In the worst possible scenario, the police need to clear the building, lock the doors, and impound the servers. Such tasks are well within their core competence, and can be performed with calm professionalism. They will probably not even need their zip-ties.

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For democracy to be effective in such a situation, it must know its own limitations. It can seize the reins—but only to hand them to some effective power. This power must have one of three forms: an existing oligarchy, a new monarchy, or a foreign power.

Also, there are three classes in an advanced society, not just two: nobles, commoners, and clients. Since clients support their patrons by definition, once nobles plus clients outnumber commoners, the commoners have permanently lost the numbers game. This is why importing client voters is a recipe for either civil war or eternal tyranny—if not both.

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Yes. This is what happened in denazification, except with monarchy and oligarchy reversed. For example, all German media firms today are descendants of institutions created, or at least certified, by AMGOT. Nothing “organic” about it.

The essential problem with Alexander’s picture of this process is that, since like most smart people today he inhabits Cicero’s great quote about history and children, he simply cannot imagine replacing one kind of elite institution with another. Nor can he imagine high-IQ elites—human beings as smart as him—which are as loyal to a new sane monarchy as today’s elites are loyal, slavishly loyal, to our old insane oligarchy. Does he think that Elizabeth’s London had no elites? Caesar’s Rome?

If Alexander was analyzing the Soviet Union in the same way, he would conclude that elites are inherently devoted to building socialism for the workers and peasants. Since the present world he lives in is all of history for him, he cannot see the general theory which predicts this special case: elites like to get ahead. To genuinely change the world, change what it takes for elites to get ahead.

If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of “race opera,” as my late wife liked to put it, the floodgates of race opera will open. If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of Stalin hagiography, Stalin will be praised to the skies in beautiful and clever rhymes.

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There are two big strawmen here. Let’s turn them into steelmen.

First, “the populace uses the government” is non-Burkean. The populace (not all of it, just the middle class) installs the government. Then it goes back to grilling. So long as the commoners have to be in charge of the regime, and the commoners are weak, the regime will be weak. They need to “fire and forget.” Otherwise, they just lose.

Second, Alexander has clearly never heard of the atelier movement. No, this is not the same thing as your grandma in front of the TV copying Bob Ross.

What happens is this: every (oligarchic) art school and art critic no longer exists. Not that they are killed, of course. Just that their employers are liquidated (not with a bullet in the neck, just with a letter from the bank). They exist physically, not professionally. They were already bureaucrats—they had careers, not passions. Who gets fired, but keeps doing his job just for fun? Certainly not a bureaucrat.

And every (oligarchic) artist no longer exists—not that they are killed, of course. Just that the rich socialites who used to buy their stuff got letters from the bank, too. Libs sometimes talk about a wealth tax—a one-time wealth cap, perhaps at a modest level like $20 mil, will concentrate the rich man’s mind wonderfully on actual necessities.

Elites like to get ahead. The people who got ahead in the oligarchic art scene can no longer get ahead by doing shitty, bureaucratic, 20th-century conceptual art. Because there were so many of them, and because the demand for this product has dropped by at least one order of magnitude if not two, elite ambition is replaced by elite revulsion.

The enormous supply-and-demand imbalance for both art and artists in 20th-century styles leaves these styles about as fashionable as disco in 1996. “Paintings” that used to sell for eight figures will be stacked next to the dumpster. “Artists” once celebrated in the Times will be teaching kindergarten, tying trout flies, or cooking delicious dinners.

Inevitably, some of these people have real artistic talent. (The first modern artists had real talent—Picasso was an excellent draftsman.) They can go to an atelier and learn to draw. They will—because now, acquiring real artistic skill is a way to get ahead in art. And again, elites like to get ahead.

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There is nothing “normal” or “natural” or “organic” about oligarchy. Does Alexander think “uncured” bacon is “organic” because, instead of evil chemical nitrates, it uses healthy, natural celery powder? He sure is easy to fool. But who isn’t?

Culture and academia is already yoked to the will of government in a “heavy-handed manner”—yoked not by the positive pressure of power, but the negative attraction of power. When the formal government defers to institutions that are formally outside the government, it leaks power into them and makes them de facto state agencies.

Power leakage, like a pig lagoon spilling into an alpine lake, poisons the marketplace of ideas with delicious nutrients. Ideas that make the institutions more powerful grow wildly. Eventually these ideas evolve carnivory and learn to positively repress their competitors, which is how our free press and our independent universities have turned our regime into Czechoslovakia in 1971, and our conversation into a Hutu Power after-school special. PS: Black lives matter.

The paradox of “authoritarianism” is that a regime strong enough to implement Frederick the Great’s idea of “free speech”—“they say what they want, I do what I want”—can actually create a free and unbiased marketplace of ideas, which neither represses seditious ideas nor rewards carnivorous ideas. But it takes a lot of power to reach this level of strength—and it requires liquidating all competing powers.

I have never been able to explain this simple idea to anyone, even rationalists with 150+ IQs who can grok quantum computing before breakfast, who didn’t want to understand it. Ultimately it reduces to the painful realization that sovereignty is conserved—that the power of man over man is a human universal. (Also, we all die.)

No surprise that nerds who think of power as Chad shoving them into a locker can’t handle the truth. PS: I went to a public high school as a 12-year-old sophomore, was bullied every day for three years, and graduated college as a virgin. Whoever you are, dear reader, you are not beyond hope. You can handle the truth.

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And yet: Alexander’s post is about Erdoğan—and his description of Erdoğan is spot on. It also is a perfect description of Orban in Hungary; it applies to Putin in Russia and Xi in China; and it is even pretty accurate for Hitler, Mussolini and friends.

What all these “strongmen” have in common is that they are provincial. Turkey is not exactly the center of the world. Even 20th-century Germany was nowhere near the center of the world, though it could at least imagine becoming that center. If Turkey just disappeared tomorrow, no one would have any reason to care except the Turks. Who needs Turkey for anything? What would collapse—the dried-apricot market?

Erdoğan’s problem is that he cannot vaporize the oligarchy, because the institutions that matter are not in Turkey. The provincial strongman has no choice but to follow the “populist” playbook that Alexander describes so well.

Orban can kick Soros’s university out of Hungary; he cannot do anything at all to Soros, let alone to the global institutions of which Soros is only a small part. He is indeed “arrayed against” these institutions, to which his Hungarian elites (who speak nearly-perfect English) will always be loyal. The contest is unequal and has only one possible winner, though it can last indefinitely long. Even Xi, whose country can quite easily imagine becoming the economic center of the world, is a provincial strongman—in fact, he sent his daughter to Harvard. Sad!

In a global century, the only way for these provincial strongmen to develop genuine local sovereignty is to go full juche. This is simply not possible for Hungary or Turkey, both of which are firmly attached to the cultural, economic, and military teat of the Global American Empire. Indeed it is barely possible for North Korea, a marsupial nation still in China’s pouch. So Alexander is right: these “strongmen” cannot win. Their regimes will all go the way of Franco’s. It’s impressive that they even survive.

Erdoğan simply has no way to attach his best citizens to his own regime. They are citizens of the world. Elites always like to get ahead. If you’re a world-class talent in anything, why would you try to get ahead in Istanbul? Suppose you want to make a name as the world’s greatest Turkish writer. Succeed in New York, then come home. Turkey is a province; provinces are provincial.

Yet I am not a Turk or a Hungarian, and neither is Scott Alexander. The greater any empire, the more essential that its fall begin at the center. The Soviet empire did not fall from the outside in; it was not brought down from Budapest or Prague; it fell from Moscow out.

And the American empire will fall from Washington out—though that may not happen in the lives of those now living. And although nature abhors a vacuum and no empire can be replaced by nothing—and oligarchy, in the modern world, can only be replaced by monarchy—the “strongman” of this monarchy will not look anything like these mere provincial dictators.

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The result of Alexander’s perceptive calculations, which are only wrong because their only input data is the present, is simply that our present incompetent tyranny is and must be permanent. Of course, every sovereign regime defines itself as permanent. Yet when we look at the past and not just the present, we see that no empire is forever.

Some grim things are happening in America today. These grim things have a silver lining: they expose the gleaming steel jaws of the traps that the aristocracy sets for its commoners. They remind the cattle that a goat is not a cow and a baa is not a moo.

Every pundit is a Cicero. And amidst all the greatness of his rhetoric, Cicero could not imagine a world that had no use for Ciceros—a world governed by competence, not rhetoric. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, nothing had failed more completely than the whole Roman idea of governance by rhetoric—an idea many centuries old, an idea whose execution had beaten all competitors to capture the whole civilized world, but an idea that was past its sell-by date. Rome herself was no longer suited to it. The republican aristocracy of Rome no longer meant Regulus and Scipio and Cincinnatus; it meant Milo and Clodius and Catiline. Its factional conflict was the choice between Hutu Power and Das Schwarze Korps. Caesar was not a disaster; Caesar was a miracle.

In the death of the American republic, every detail is different. The story is the same. The contrast in capacity between SpaceX and the Pentagon, Moderna and the CDC, Apple and Minneapolis—between our monarchical corporations, and our oligarchical institutions—is a dead ringer for the contrast between the legions and the Senate.

The sooner we stop pretending that this isn’t happening to us, the better results we can get. Wouldn’t it be nice to get to Caesar, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, without passing through Sulla and Marius, Crassus and Spartacus? Alas, from here and now it seems unlikely. But I can’t see why every serious person wouldn’t want to try.

[c-is-for-circinate]

Who wants a little Cinderbrush AU on this quarantine evening?

A while ago, @brightandshinynewstories and I were chatting about what would happen if the Cinderbrush four lived in Exandria (and also relatedly, if the M9 were Monsterhearts characters, but that is a digression y’all should take up with her).  We figured it would start, at least, a little like this:

There’s a phrase Sasha's history tutor used once, when she was thirteen or fourteen and didn’t have a way to stop her parents hiring all her tutors and arranging her schedule for her.  Her history tutor was a stuttery little halfling man fresh out of Vasselheim, and half of what he said was deadly boring, but he was less brutally awful than her etiquette and protocol tutor, which was probably why he got fired before she turned fifteen.  That one conversation, though, has stuck with her for all these years.

“Everyone thinks they live at the end of history,” he’d said.  They’d been talking about the end of the reign of Uriel Tal’dorei at the time, how his decision to abdicate five minutes before he unexpectedly died in a massive dragon attack hadn’t accomplished much of anything except for making life massively difficult for his son fifteen years later.  “This is it, the final form of the world.  All the aeons of existence have led up to this moment right now, and finally we’re living in the future.”

“Isn’t everybody always living at the end of history, then?” Sasha had asked.  “If you look at it that way?”

“Not...not quite,” Kempler had stammered, a little off-balance the way he always was when she asked questions she actually wanted to know the answers to.  “Usually it means more like..the idea that everything, societal structures, social mores, everything has fallen into place in such a way that it doesn’t need to change any more.  Does that make sense?”

“Of course,” Sasha had said, and let him go on talking about dragons and heroes and the politics of non-existent emperors and kings.  She’d thought about it all afternoon.

This isn’t quite the end of history, Sasha figures now, half a dozen years later.  If it were, there’d be a better way to work her way up in the government of Emon besides playing personal aide to Arbiter Ethna for the next ten years in hopes of getting appointed to a magistrate’s position someday.  Some kind of school for barristers and politicians, at least, instead of everything coming down to her parents’ names and polite tolerance for her existence.  Her advancement wouldn’t depend so much on this awkward noble apprenticeship system where she’s more tied to Ethna’s reputation than her own skills.

It’s got to be getting pretty close, though.  It’s 853 PD.  Emon’s a miracle of government and engineering.  Uriel Tal’dorei’s been dead for forty years, there haven’t been dragons around to ravage anything since Sasha’s parents were children, and every day law, order, and the modern age prove a little more how they triumph over chaos.

It’s good to live at this end of history, Sasha tends to think.  There’s just enough still to do in the world to give her a chance to do something really special about it.  Just enough wiggle room left to let her...bend the rules.  Just a little.

Nobody says arbiters and politicians can’t have a little magic on their side to...smooth things along, just a little.  Nobody says aides like Sasha can’t spend their free time however they like.  Nobody tells Sir Murasaki’s daughter she can’t go where she wants, besides Sir Murasaki himself.  If she likes to sit auditing classes in the back of the room at the Alabaster Lyceum--if she happens to enjoy practicing classical violin or running vocal exercises in her tiny little office behind Arbiter Ethna’s courtroom--well.  The bardic arts might be a relic of the past, when people had to go out slaying monsters and dealing with dragons every other day, but history hasn’t quite left them useless yet.  Anything can be a tool if you’re clever and charming enough to use it right.

Living at very-nearly-the-end of history might be the best tool there is.  The best thing about it, Sasha thinks, is the chance to make sure she’s the one who decides how it ends.

.

Sasha told Cam about her end-of-history theory once, some starlit evening on the rooftop balcony of his parents’ townhouse, looking out over the sparkling lights of the Cloudtop District and enjoying the quiet.  He’s not sure he’s smart enough to really understand it, but that’s Sasha for you.  There’s a reason she’s going to be on the Tal’Dorei Council someday, while Cam’s going to be...whatever Cam’s going to be, by then.

Probably running the family business, one way or another, if his dad hasn’t actually killed him instead of letting him inherit.  It’s basically fine, as life plans go.  Parts of it don’t suck.  That’s something.

It’s why everyone was so in favor of him courting around with Sasha in the first place, anyway.  The Murasakis are nobility and all, but they’re from some island in the middle of the Lucidian Ocean on the other side of Exandria.  The Solomons were nobodies, until they just happened to own the only still-operating stone quarry in a hundred miles in the wake of the destruction of Emon forty years ago.  Sasha’s parents have influence, Cam’s have money.  Even Cam knows putting that combination together is a recipe for power.

Real power, probably, not the magic kind.  Fewer rules.  Fewer restrictions.  Fewer demons, whispering in the back of your ear when you’re trying to sleep.

If this is really the perfect future that everything’s always been trying to lead to, then shouldn’t they have wizard magic or some shit that would just get the stone out of the ground without needing miners and overseers and crap like that?  And then, like, nobody would send some stupid human kid with no darkvision into the back end of the quarry just because he’s the boss’s son and some fucker thinks he needs to be hazed for “company morale” or whatever.  Just for example.

So maybe the world’s not getting better, it’s just that the bullshit that piles up a little deeper every year has just about reached a critical maximum.  That’s fine.  No wonder Sasha’s looking forward to the future so much, gets along with the world so well.  He used to watch her weave her own web of total crap every time she worked a room, catching eyes and shaking hands and making everybody fall in love with her as soon as they met.  It’s kind of the most impressive thing Cam’s ever seen.  He kind of hates her for it, right at this moment.

Cam’s just not built for that much shit.  He's charming, sure, people trust him, people like him, but he can’t talk his way out of any- and everything like Sasha can.  Probably that’s a nobility thing.  The Solomons aren’t nobility, everybody knows that, especially Cam’s dad, and he’s never let Cam forget it for two seconds in a row his whole life, so right, no wonder Cam’s useless in Sasha’s kind of world.  No wonder he lets himself get into such shitty situations sometimes.  No wonder he can’t get Anukirai to leave him--to leave Sasha--alone.

If that’s what he wants.  Which--it is, of course, it should be, it has to be, it’s just.  Hard, sometimes, when Cam’s father decides if he can’t be the normal born kind of nobility, he’d better just prove he’s the High Lord of All Assholes.  When Cam’s trying not to be the kind of guy who just up and punches his problems in the face.  When Anukirai starts making promises, and Cam--when Cam can feel the power behind them, the weight of thousands of years of lurking underground, lying in wait, full of so much more patience than Cam’s ever had himself.

He’s pretty sure he could Command his dad to do just about anything, once.  Just once.  So far he hasn’t tried.

The worst thing about living this close to the end of history, Cam knows for damn sure, is feeling the weight of all of it crushing down on top of you all the time.

.

Jamie’s heard about it, too, somewhere along the way.  Lunch with Sasha at the Lyceum is always interesting, one way or another.

It’s bullshit, of course, but it’s the sort of bullshit that always appeals to people like Sasha.  As though there are other people in the world like Sasha Murasaki.  Things don’t end, they just die occasionally, and leave stinking corpses of whatever they used to be there to entertain passers-by.  Witness the inside of poor Cameron Solomon’s head these days after that particular breakup, case in point.

But of course it’s enticing to picture the world as just half a step short of perfection, all the for pretty, perfect people who think they might just be that last piece of perfection Exandria’s waiting for.  That, at least, isn’t exactly an uncommon attitude around the Alabaster Lyceum.  Everybody thinks they’re going to be the next Allura Vysoren, or whoever it is they’re all idolizing these days.  Everybody thinks they need just that little bit of extra edge to get there.

Jamie’s done with that particular race, which doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy spectating it.  There’s a lot of benefits that come from staying enrolled as a student of the arcane arts at the Alabaster Lyceum of Emon.  Greg Wrenly keeps paying tuition, room, and board, for one.  There’s a handful of cantrips and a couple of halfway decent wizard spells in Jamie’s back pocket now, too, which is never a bad thing.  It’s always good to have options.

For instance: now the desperate, overachieving would-be wizards of the Lyceum don’t have to fight their way through years of arduous study and spend enormous reserves of magical energy to cast True Seeing.  A little bit of druidcraft, a couple of exactly the right mushrooms, and for a handful of gold coins Jamie can provide a direct line of sight to the Ethereal Plane with negligible side effects to follow.  Options.  They’re practically a public service.

Jamie prefers to keep as many options open as possible; gods know nobody in this fucking city seem to realize they have any.  That’s what needing to be the best will do to you.  If a quarter of their classmates realized how much power the average archdruid has at their command, there’d be a mass exodus of ex-arcanists desperate to be the next fucking Voice of the Tempest, every one of them desperate to live up to thousands of years of legends and heroes and complete fairytales.  Every single one of them would miss the entire point.

Jamie doesn’t need to be the best.  They just need to maintain their own, extremely specific skill set, market it in the right way to the right people, and not get caught up in everyone else’s everything.  Stay a minimum safe distance away from Sasha.  Enjoy Cam’s company without getting too invested in the pretty and the trauma.  Enough wizardry to mess with peoples’ heads and not be too bound to the whims of nature, enough druidry to keep in good supply and not be too bound to some fucking hand-scribed spellbook.  Enough alchemy to keep in business.  Enough business to make sure they don’t completely lose touch with reality, the way so many mages tend to do.

Of course it’s not exactly traditional, or historical, or Respectful of the Great Arts, or whatever the fucking line is.  What the hell would be the point of that?

The best thing about living on this end of history, whatever the fuck that means to anyone, is getting to pick and choose exactly which parts of it you want to keep.

.

Aff gets the whole history thing in pieces, in passing at first, but it makes more sense the more they think about it.  You can learn a lot slinging pints of ale in your dad’s tavern on a regular old Grissen weeknight.

It’s not like they’re friends with Sasha Murasaki of all people.  Aff hadn’t even known who she was until Amanda from the livery stable down the street explained it, and apparently there’s an actual member of a titled noble family on her way up the ranks in the Watchful Hall who comes out to Aff’s dad’s tavern, like, a lot, which is just crazy.  It’s just that sometimes when Sasha’s waiting for somebody, or she and her trio of Emon’s Who’s Who are bored or whatever, they invite Aff to sit down and talk for a while.  Cameron Solomon’s... whatever, he’s cool, Aff’s mom doesn’t live too far from his dad’s mine these days, so maybe they’d helped him out while he was puking in an alleyway once or twice before even moving to Emon, out in the countryside where being a super-rich merchant prince didn’t matter that much.  And Jamie...Aff doesn’t really get Jamie, but they’re in here a lot, alone at a table where a whole rotation of people sit down to join them and then leave ten minutes later.  You learn a lot about someone when they drink by themselves while they’re doing some kind of weird shady business in your bar at least once a week.  That’s all.

Aff doesn���t even really think any of them are friends with each other, either, anyway.  Sasha and Cameron used to come in on dates, a couple of kids from the Cloudtop slumming it in Diamond Liquor out in the Central District, but they don’t really do that any more.  The one time Sasha showed up when Cam was already here, he got up and left.  Sometimes Sasha goes and sits at Jamie’s table in the corner, and she’s usually there for a lot longer than ten minutes when she does, but she still always goes back to the rest of her crew and Jamie goes back to drinking alone.  Jamie and Cam have come in together a couple of times, and it seems like Jamie doesn’t even do business on those nights, but like, who even knows what’s up with that, right?

Not that Aff’s being creepy or anything.  They’re the bar...not-maid.  Bartender?  No, that’s their dad, ruling over the land of kegs behind the actual physical bar.  Bar...server?  Is that a thing?  Whatever, it is now.  Aff’s the bar-server, they hear things.  They notice things.  That’s all.

Like Sasha talking about the end of history, which, it took Aff a couple of different conversations to realize she didn’t mean the end of the world, which is probably good.  Aff’s pretty sure she means the fact that they live now, in modern times, which don’t really have dragon attacks or cool heroes or crazy adventures any more, because all the cool heroes already went on all the crazy adventures and killed the dragons so that modern times could happen in the first place.  Which is great!  Right, that’s totally for the best, dragons are definitely bad news.  Aff’s seen a couple of places where Emon got rebuilt forty or fifty years ago after half the city...melted, they guess?  So like, it’s good that that’s not happening nowadays.  That’s a good thing.

It’s just...

Look, Aff’s a good bar-server, or whatever you want to call it, and they like living here with their dad, and Emon’s not a bad place to be, it’s just.  Hard, sometimes.  It’s hard, when they get so angry they just want to hit something, again.  Like, a lot.  Again.

If there were still adventurers and dragons and shit, then maybe Aff would have a use for all that pent-up aggression or whatever.  Maybe they could, y’know, kill monsters or whatever, and it would make them a hero instead of a fuckup.  If it were still the old days like that, maybe Aff would be good for something.

If this really is the end of history or whatever, Aff thinks that maybe the hardest part is feeling like they got smacked down in the wrong part of it.

.

The trouble, of course, is that history is nowhere near through with them.  Or with its own twists and turns, which is how history tends to work, really, even when you think it’s all just about settled down.

The third week of Fessuran is...confusing, more than anything.  Everything happens so fucking fast, in a blur of blood and fear and sleep-deprivation, washed over with a little extra haze from Jamie’s very good berries, and a couple of days go by in either about two hours or two weeks, and this is never going to make a good story to tell any kids they ever have, if they ever survive long enough to have kids.

Half a dozen people are very dead, that’s very clear, well beyond the help of any cleric or reasonably-ethical necromancer.  Amanda from the livery stable down the street from Diamond Liquor was pale and streaked in blood, breathing shallowly and barely alive, last time they saw her.  That might be worth something, if they could figure out or agree on what.

The four of them are not dead.  They are not under arrest.  They’re not in Emon any more, either, but since staying away might be the only chance they have to keep being not-dead and not-arrested, that’s probably a win, too.

They look at each other, hollow-eyed and dazed, across the table at the only inn in the tiny nowhere town of Cinder Hills, where they didn’t dare sleep last night and had better leave the minute they finish breakfast and also decide what the hell comes next.

“What,” Cam says, speaking for them all, “the fuck?”

.

“Look,” Sasha says.  “It’s fine.  We just…go to another city, and wait for things to die down.  Come back when it’s all over and pretend none of it ever happened.  Nothing to do with us at all.”

It’s fine.  It has to be fine, because if it’s not then Sasha’s lost everything.  Jail isn’t the only way to be trapped.  Freedom costs so much.

“You cannot possibly think that’s going to work,” Jamie says scathingly.  “You think there’s anybody in Emon who doesn’t know who the great Sasha Murasaki is?  We run, and we do not come back.”

Fuck Jamie, fuck them, just…fuck.

She’s spent years building herself a future in Emon.  Years, fighting to make herself a place in history.  Scrounging for every fucking scrap her parents would let her have, every fraction of respect or freedom that couldn’t just be taken away on a whim because she didn’t lower her eyes enough on any random night.  And now she’s going to lose it to this?

“Um,” Aff says.  “I have family in Emon?  I’m not just going to disappear on my dad.  And like, what about Cam’s dad, or Sasha’s family, or–”

“I can’t see my dad right now,” Cam interrupts quickly.  “Leaving actually maybe sounds good.”

“Oh, and leaving where, Jamie?” Sasha demands, because she’s ignoring Cameron right now until she can handle looking at him.  “Are we all going to stay with your little forest friends?  Sleep on leaf mattresses and learn to be druids, then?”

Jamie snorts.  “I’m not taking any of you within ten fucking miles of any druid circle I’ve ever met.  You, they’d eat alive,” and he gestures dismissively at Aff, “and you, they’d never forgive me for.  Luckily the world’s pretty fucking big.”

“So, what, you just want to–what, get on a ship and go to Wildemount?” Cam asks, interrupting Sasha again before she can get started on what even she knows is going to come out sharp and bitter and useless.  “Never come home?”

“You can do whatever the fuck you want.  I’m going to Kymal as soon as I can get on the fucking road, to see if I can rebuild even a third of what I just left behind.” Jamie says, like it’s just…that easy.  “Maybe Westruun, eventually, depending on how that goes.”

Sasha cannot start over in fucking Kymal.  She can’t.  She’s going home.  She’ll get this straightened out.

Everybody knows who her parents are.  They could smooth the whole thing over, probably, if she went down on her knees and begged hard enough.  If she agreed to let them ship her off to whatever cloister or rich husband they chose, and lost everything to spending the rest of her life under her mother’s thumb and her father’s commands anyway.

Fuck.  Fuck.  It feels like the walls of this tiny shitty tavern room are closing in on her already.  Sasha is so fucked.

It was supposed to be perfect.  She was almost done.  She was on her way.  It was going to be perfect.

“We should probably stay together,” Cameron says worriedly, looking between Sasha and his precious Aff and Jamie fucking Wrenly.

“Westruun,” Sasha says.  It’s too small to build anything worth having and it’s too far away from everything she’s ever built so far and it’s too big for her to matter at all and it’s too close for her to really be safe.  Westruun’s nothing.  But at least it’s better than fucking Kymal.  “We can go to Westruun.”

Or Vasselheim.  Or Rexxentrum.  Or Ank’harel.  Or Port Damali.  Sasha’s a little afraid to start running.  She’s a little afraid that once she gets going, she won’t be able to stop.

.

Notes on Level 2:

Sasha, human bard 2 Cantrips: Message, Prestidigitation L1 spells (3/day): Charm Person, Sense Emotions, Disguise Self, Comprehend Languages, Detect Magic

Cameron, human warlock 2 Patron: Fiend Cantrips: Mage Hand, Friends L1 spells (2/day): Command, Charm Person, Hex Invocations: Beguiling Influence, Devil’s Sight

Jamie, human wizard 1 druid 1 Cantrips: Friends, Mind Sliver, Minor Illusion, Druidcraft, Infestation L1 spells (3/day) : Cause Fear, Color Spray, Silent Image, Charm Person, Sleep, Identify, plus any druid spells prepared that day

Aff, human barbarian 2 Rage (2/day): +2 damage

[ambitchiovs]

lenny back at it again… i warned y’all about the intros dump. anyway, off to this bitch:

&&. isn’t that [ DEBORAH ANN WOLL ] walking around the hamptons? oh no, nevermind it’s just [ ADELAIDE MONTSERRAT ]. y'know, the [ 19 ] year old [ CIS FEMALE ] known to be quite [ CHARISMATIC and DETERMINED ] but also [ CUNNING and RUTHLESS ]. currently, the police has them as [ A PERSON OF INTEREST ] in the case of samantha wheeler, because they [ WERE PART OF SAMANTHA’S FRIEND GROUND ]. but they go on about their life as [ A STUDENT ]. i wonder what secrets they’re keeping?  [ lenny/23/gmt+3/she/her ]

TW: eating disorders, addiction, mental disorders, possible suicidal thoughts/mentions

DON’T YOU EVER TAME YOUR DEMONS, ALWAYS KEEP THEM ON A LEASH.

In the eyes of Adelaide Montserrat, there was never a girl to be found. If you dare to pry, you will not find what strangers see when they pass her by the crowd. You will look into a bottomless void that threatens to swallow you whole and it will look back at you with smiling teeth. Little Addie, once a girl with pink tutu’s and ballerina shoes, was never one to be meddled with - she would captivate all her teachers and classmates with rosy cheeks and a clever tongue beyond her years, but there was nothing warm or kind about the little girl whose parents held so close she nearly choked to death.

History goes, her father — her biological father, anyhow, was a very powerful politician before he dropped dead. Nobody really knows what happened that night - all everybody seems to know is that all her loved ones seem to fall like dominoes. Her father died when she was 16, during a robbery. The men were never caught, but little Adelaide was left bawling into her mother’s lap. Surprising as it may be, she was actually the product of a one night stand and poor lack of judgement, or so her mother likes to tell her - but Catherine Montserrat was no fool, and she took him for all he had - and as it turns out… That was a lot.

That doesn’t come cheap, for Adelaide, anyways. Being a part of a new family meant she now had a new player to share her inheritance with - and damned if she didn’t do everything she could to throw them off the board. In the eyes of her parents, she could do no wrong - she was pure and pristine and everything they hoped their little girl would be. You’d assume being the younger sibling meant competing for attention - but she never competed. She never even considered it a competition. She won, plain and simple. Her half brother, that man who called himself her “father” now were but pebbles in her shoes, nuisances she had to navigate through to continue on with her luxurious lifestyle. They didn’t understood her, didn’t particularly wanted to, and it was easier to smear on some foundation and bake it with powder than let explain why her skin was cracking. It was easier to strap on those old ballerina shoes and put on a show until her toes were bleeding, than to try and show them what was behind the curtains. And all jewelry in the world, all praise, all money and countless designer bags she accumulated every year could never fill up that gaping hole, that detachment she felt towards the outside world and inability to connect with things and people - even those supposedly closest to her.

You see, Adelaide didn’t lose, because she tailored the game to her whims and batted her heavy set of lashes to make it seem fair. And if she did lose - the game be damned; she’d destroy it and any evidence of her failure with the wrath of a woman scorned. She didn’t want to be a little sister, or a daughter, or something for men to gawk at. She wanted to be something else. Anything other than this vile thing dripping with self-loathing , cloaked in a veil of perfectionism. Something that wasn’t rammed into this golden mold before she even took her very first breath.

Addie’s behavior as well as their parents favoritism only blurred the lines between love and hate between the half-siblings, complicating her understanding of relationships even further. And it certainly didn’t help that her new brother was just as stubborn and competitive as she was. The children were picture perfect, carrying on the legacy of their parents on their backs as if it weighed no more than a feather - while whatever had been good or soft in them began to rot.

But just who is Adelaide Montserrat? The reincarnation of the Virgin Mary to most. The girl with perfect hair, perfect hair and a perfect family. In truth, Adelaide could be seen only as a terror taken human form to those who opposed her, and a perfect, exemplary girl for those who keep a safe distance. What she is, what she truly is, is a game of smoking mirrors - a fragmented girl, scattered into so many pieces to cater to the whims of crowds, that now, when she looks into a mirror, the image that looks back is something recognizable; distorted.

Fueled by her own securities and desire to obtain perfection, paired with the crowd of rich kids that were offered to her as friends growing up, it didn’t take for things to escalate; by the age of only fourteen, poisoning their blood with alcohol, snorting up enough cocaine so she had to carry around wipes and kicking each other in the stomach while crouching over the toilet became somehow ordinary. Encouraged, even. All that deep-rooted self-hatred had to spill someway, somehow. She grew to resent how boys were granted more freedom, more room to misbehave and make mistake. She resented girls for being themselves, for not wanting to scream every second of every day. And she resented Samantha for how genuinely she could smile - for how easily everything came to her, and for how she was everything she could never be; while she was lying in a grave she dug herself - shackled to the image of perfection she’d crafted, held to the highest of regards, expected to never falter nor stutter. It was hard to define the relationship between her - one moment Addie was sweet, the next she was cruel. And as to that unfortunate Halloween night, she claims they parted ways before she could see anything.

All the harder she tries to cling to this illusion of control, the deeper she dives into that well. Parents often say kids will “grow out of it”; their fits of rage, their apathy towards other children, their unwillingness to share, their manipulative, spoiled ways of obtaining what they want- but Addie never did. Somewhere inside there’s still that little girl who’d rather break her toys in half than to share it with other kids. Who’d bump into other little girls at school, and tell the nurse they tripped. Who’d rather set her arm back in place herself than say “you were right”. The little girl who’ll sit in an empty throne all alone, built with the bones of the people she once claimed to love.

PERSONALITY-WISE:

Adelaide is emotionally unstable and has a very competitive, volatile, manipulative personality; she doesn’t forgive, and she sure as hell doesn’t forget, and she can lash out in incredibly ruthless ways due to her extreme lack of empathy for hers. Her addictions and unwillingness to ever speak to anyone in depth about herself only worsen the state of her BPD. Despite all this, on the surface, she can seem like just like any other pristine, privileged girl. It’s not usual for people to find her charming - she does exude that sort of magnetic aura that’s very easy to fall for, because people tend to see what they want to see - and therefore, it’s easy for her to adjust her personality to the expectations of whomever she’s trying to captivate. In a way, her entire personality has merged with her addiction: being friends with her feels a lot like moment of high in exchange for an eternity of sorrow.

She can be a loyal friend, to some extent, although she’ll never put anyone above herself. She’s also very insecure and prone to fits of rage (in private) whenever she doesn’t get what she wants (think broken mirrors and glasses), as her self-image is heavily dependent on what she can achieve and how others perceive her. Deep down, this all stems from jealousy - she so desperately wishes she could connect with other people and things the way everyone around her does, but in the end she can’t, and she’s left feeling like an outside looking in. If she’s miserable, why shouldn’t everyone around her be too?

HIT ME UP TO PLOT U COWARDS !!

for reals, though - i know this was unnecessarily long, but oh well. you can be ex friends with her? don’t know why they’re not friends anymore - but i’m willing to bet it’s addie’s fault.

maybe some sort of competitor?  academic or otherwise.

maybe there’s some poor ex out there who knows what a headcase she actually is? but probably can’t say much bc they fear for her life lmao.

she wouldn’t openly date anybody who could reflect poorly on her reputation, so secret hookups??? give me someone who’s getting sick of being used pls. ( she’s a closeted bisexual. society isn’t very welcome to the idea rn ) so girl crushes yes pls let girls have crushes on her. let her manipulate them bc she knows. i need.

also gimme someone who deals drugs to her tbh, bc this needs to be kept SUPER lowkey, but it’d also be hilarious bc she wouldn’t have to fake her personality around them & it’s like bitch what the fuck this girl is dr jekyll and mr hyde.

i’d love love to see a fake relationship - but i don’t mean the ‘secretly have feelings for each other’ - i mean the… secretly despise each other but they’re image-obsessed people and like being seen as the golden couple.

oH and pls someone give me a… dare i say sisterly connection? mostly, a girl who idolizes her or puts her on a pedestal, that she might or might not have a soft spot for ( which in addie’s handbook just means she’ll be that much crueler whenever she feels like it tbh ) & see it as some sort of protegee.

idk i’m open to anything, these are just suggestions thrown at the wall here. the point is… plot w me u cowards. and yes, my muse does bite.

[phidiaspickle]

For @pdxblonde

Sagittarius - CHEERFULNESS OPENHANDEDNESS SOLICITUDE VALOR HONOR REASON OUTSPOKENNESS RECKLESSNESS BAD MANNERS VACILLATION CARELESSNESS CONTRADICTION

“I see”  Fire, Jupiter, Mutable

Cat - TACT FINESSE VIRTUE PRUDENCE  LONGEVITY HYPOCHONDRIA AMBITION COMPLEXITY DILETTANTISM SECRETIVENESS SQUEAMISHNESS PEDANTRY

“I retreat” Negative Wood, Yin

The prudent Cat side of this couple tugs at the Sagittarian’s carefree arrow till he snaps it loose. It falls to the ground before leaving the bow. In other words, in this person the recklessness of Sagittarius is defused by the Cat’s virtue and sense of measure. This Sagittarian is not so brash as his brothers and sisters. A Sagittarian born in a Cat year will be sensitive to his real surroundings, aware of the need for diplomacy and, because of the Cat’s serious ambition, sagaciously yoked to his or her career.

There is a spirited melancholy in this person’s makeup. The Sagittarian born Cat seems to have been improved or pepped up through sorrow, tempered by loss or hurt. He is buoyant yet resigned to certain bitter truths that others prefer to ignore. The Sagittarius/Cat does not surrender to this mournful air, but rather exploits it well, using a sad smile to appeal to millions. This Sagittarian, honed to a fine edge by his careful Cat side, is able to synthesize his energies sufficiently to create a powerful self-image. Armed with this overwhelming sense of self, the Sagittarian Cat can confront almost any form of opposition. Not that he goes looking for trouble, but he is not afraid of adversity. Defiance is his natural habitat. He is bold and dares to achieve dominance and to overcome competition.

The Sagittarius/Cat is also clever enough to know how to hold on to his hard-earned position. He feeds his public just what they need to continue to be addicted to his wares. The Sagittarius/Cat dispenses great gobs of understated love to his fans and, as a result, he keeps them on his side. People believe in the Sagittarius/Cat because he understands the delicate blend of solicitude and command necessary to seduce throngs.

Taking oneself seriously can be a giant pain in the neck for intimates and onlookers. But in the case of such directed people as Sagittarius/Cats, arrogance and an air of self-satisfaction seem natural. Or at least this character knows how to make them seem natural. It’s true that the Sagittarian born Cat puts himself on a pedestal and renders his person untouchable. But that’s all part of the mystique that works so well. The Sagittarius/Cat is highly individualistic. His or her methods are always unusual. They may be unscrupulous, and if they don’t succeed (and many don’t) in enticing their audience, in captivating crowds and convincing millions, Sagittarius/Cats are wise enough to know when they are beaten.

Generally, the Sagittarius/Cat is an amiable fellow. Good cheer emanates from his aura. The Cat’s sense of elegance and presentation quells almost all the Sagittarian’s natural bumptiousness, and leaves us just that smidgen of vulgarity we like to call “the common touch.” Cats born in Sagittarius conform to social norms and care deeply about what others think of them. They are not easy to figure out and have no intention of becoming so. This is a brave Cat and a toned-down Sagittarian. It’s a very strong marriage held together by a bond of self-interest.

Love

This person tends to engage in multiple subsequent relationships. There is a great deal of sexual energy here. Much of the energy is, of course, covert and pent up. One doesn’t think of any Cat subject as a sex maniac. But the Sagittarius/Cat is a bit of a tom. He skulks about marking territories and claiming some that don’t even belong to him. By the same token, she may not hesitate to “cat around” with other people’s mates. The Sagittarius/Cat is not really unfaithful. But the need to be admired is so enormous here that sexual fidelity is impossible. Personal fidelity is, however, very serious for this character. He may love ‘em and leave ‘em, but he never forgets those he has cared for, and is careful to keep old friendships alive.

So you are in love with a Sagittarius/Cat? My suggestion is that you look up to him or her. Stroke and cuddle this mettlesome Cat, but don’t try to keep her by the fireside. You must remember that your admiration is pleasant to her, but it’s never going to be enough. This person needs to be loved by a cast of thousands. If you can keep from being jealous of your Sagittarian Cat’s large following and put up with her constant primping and preening in front of prospective admirers, I guess you can take the heat. But I don’t think long-term affairs or marriages with this crowd-pleaser are meant to be shared by any but self-sacrificing types.

Compatibilities

Aries, Leo and Aquarius/Dogs know instinctively how to touch your deepest emotions and make wonderful lovers for your personality type. Leo, Libra and Aquarius/Pigs are also on sympathetic terms with you, as are Aries and Aquarius/Goats. The Aries/Snake woos you without half trying. But Gemini, Virgo and Pisces/Roosters and their Tiger counterparts conspire to put you on edge. Tell them to pick on somebody their own size.

Home and Family

The Sagittarian Cat’s home will be in many places at once. This nature is itinerant, and for the enormous objectives of the Sagittarius/Cat to be fulfilled, he or she must be able to travel—first class all the way. No question about that. Because he is, after all, a Cat, this person may well have one place he considers home. It will most likely be situated in the deep, remote countryside. There, he or she will have installed many comforts, a few domestics or even a second family—and of course, I almost forgot, the bodyguards.

The Sagittarius/Cat parent is very self-involved. These people often marry and have kids but they will probably leave the rearing of children to a homebody mate. This person won’t be available to small fry. But as the children grow and become really able to communicate, the Sagittarius/Cat parent is likely to take a friendly interest. This parent is of the do-what-I-say-and-not-what-I-do school of education. Strict and even, boarding-school oriented.

The Sagittarius/Cat child is certainly talented for theater or music, athletics or even public speaking and debate. The ability to captivate audiences is what shows through first with this smiling babe. He or she must be encouraged to pursue these talents and given every opportunity to use them in a disciplined fashion. Try, while your Sagittarius/Cat child is still malleable and young, to increase his or her willingness to communicate on a one-to-one level. You may find this child introverted except when called upon to perform. He or she will aspire to greatness and have much appeal.

Profession

The talents of the Sagittarius/Cat, be they artistic or commercial, mechanical or technical, are all-encompassing. In other words, this person will have a major gift and be able to exploit that main talent. He or she must be very careful not to disperse energies in personal dramas or dilute talents by trying to do a variety of unrelated things. They can and will go far if they keep their sights fixed on success in one well defined area—theirs.

The Sagittarian Cat is a loner. He or she can open a business, or run a factory and manage almost any amount of work. Too, these people have a special appeal for groups. They can take charge in an office situation. But they must be allowed free rein, and as that is not always possible, I suggest this person try to be self-employed. Sagittarians born in Cat years want their own way too much to knuckle under to systems and strict hours. They are self-directed.

Some suitable careers for Sagittarius/Cats might be: politician, jockey, tour guide, diplomat, actor/actress, dancer, singer, restaurant owner, supermarket manager, religious leader, musician.

Some famous Sagittarius/Cats: Edith Piaf, Augusto Pinochet, Frank Sinatra, Aaron Carter, Brad Pitt, Milla Jovovich, Morgan Brittany, Tina Turner.

[shigetsugu]

Ieyasu-chan :D

Ieyasu Tokugawa

Why I like them: Hard to say because in the first place, I’m not really fond of Ieyasu. Though, because I’ve seen a lot people talking about him and explaining what they felt about him, I started to see an other face of him. If I had to say why I like him, it would be mostly because of his fans. I haven’t done his route yet but from what I learnt, Ieyasu really got — if not the best — a very excellent character development. He is also, hands down, the best “villain” in the game since he is very clever.

Why I don’t: Well first of all, I have a really hard time with the “tsundere” type. I don’t like how he tends to manipulate people by threatening them or belittling them to make them feel bad. It’s true that my opinion of him is quite low because I’ve mostly seen only his bad sides, but I hope to see it changed through trying his MS myself and with its next ES. But that’s for certain that I’ll never really like him as a lover, he is not my type at all, I would probably cry or get overly angry if I had him around, lol.

Favorite episode (scene if movie): I was thinking of talking of a scene in his MS but since I didn’t do it, I can’t really remember anything special, unless it’s him “forgiving” Yasumasa for what he did to MC…? 

Favorite season/movie: For this one I thought of talking about my favorite ES instead but since we only got one from him so far… It’s a bit useless sadly.

Favorite line: It’s not my “favorite” but I can’t forget in Kojuro’s “Our Sultry Night of Passion” ES when he got MC in the hall and asked her about how she managed for Kojuro to like her and just then, going straight to the point that she must have open her legs for him. Damn, boy, I was so upset I couldn’t stop having my jaw hanging open after that!

Favorite outfit: I love Ieyasu battle armor, especially his… thing on the head… It makes me laugh, okay?

OTP: Will talk here about his relationship with the MC. As far as I remember, she doesn’t hesitate to answer him even when he is in a bad mood. After all, she is the only who broke through his shell and see a genuine side of him. Not my favorite OTP for the MC, but I give her credtis for sticking up with him and helping him trust other people, especially the ones who are the closest to him!

Brotp: It’s not a brotp because, I mean, Ieyasu doesn’t have that kind of relationship with his retainers, but his relation with Tadatsugu is important. I mean, okay sometimes it’s funny, especially when he wants to plucks out his remaining hair, but you can see that Tadatsugu really cares for Ieyasu and I love it personally.

Head Canon: Mmh, I’m really bad to think about headcanon just like that without context to help but let’s try a Modern!AU one? I see him with a job with a high position, so either he is in what we could call the “good side” and choose to be a politician or he is in the “bad side” and would totally be an oyabun from a yakuza family!

Unpopular opinion: I don’t know if I can call it an unpopular opinion but his manipulative behavior really his the scariest thing ever. I mean, he is able to get under your skin with almost knowing nothing about you… Scary but fascinating!

A wish: I just wish for him to be more honest and drop his little bitch act when talking with MC, honestly. Be nice to your girl, Yasu!

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: I thought about History and remembered what he did to his first wife… I doubt Voltage would use this trope to kill MC in his sequel, but omg, I don’t see why Ieyasu would die in it either so… I pray for none of them to die…

5 words to best describe them: Smart, Cautious, Manipulative, Fragile, Doubtful

My nickname for them: The only kind of nickname I give him through the routes I’ve encountered him was just me calling him “bitch” out of frustration, oups…

God, I hope I made him justice just a little! Poor Yasu, he doesn’t have a really good place in my heart but he is still such a good character in his development that I can’t bring myself to hate him! Hope to learn more about him this year! ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿

[smartphone-science]

The novel Good Omens was first published in 1990. And this is my original copy.

Unless you’ve been asleep for the last few months (if so, are you a snake, by any chance….?) you will have noticed that there’s recently been a very popular television adaptation of the much-loved book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens.

I have always loved this book, and I love the TV show even more. Obsessed? Erm. Anyway. Can I wring a science-themed post for my blog out of a story about a demon and an angel saving the world from Armageddon? Of course I can.

Here goes. There’s a moment in the second episode of the TV adaptation* when the demon, Crowley, is driving his Bentley very, very fast, and the angel, Aziriphale, says: “You can’t do ninety miles an hour in central London!”

This caused a bit of confusion for some non-British viewers§. Not the idea that you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, drive extremely fast in a built-up area, but rather the fact that Britain is a European country, isn’t it? At least, for the moment. Don’t the Europeans use the metric system? Shouldn’t he have said one hundred and forty-five kilometres per hour?

So you thought Brits used the metric system? Haha.

I mean, okay, we do. Scientists in particular are quite keen on it. But we also use imperial units really quite a lot. And coincidently, this all arose just after the politician Jacob Rees-Mogg issued a style guide to his staff declaring that they must “use imperial measurements” — which at first sounds typically Victorian of Rees-Mogg, but actually… if your aim is to at least try to be consistent, he might, just might, have a point…

Allow me to try to explain.

Firstly, a little clarification: the “metric system” is an internationally-recognised decimalised system of measurement, that is, a system where units are related by powers of ten. I stress this because “metric” and “decimal” do not mean quite the same thing, which is relevant when it comes to money. The metric system takes base measurements — kilograms, metres and so on — and says that all versions of those measurements can only be connected by powers of ten, and must not introduce new conversion factors. So, grams (1000th of a kilogram) and tonnes (1000 kilograms) are both metric, but a pound (0.454 of a kilogram) is not. Scientists know this as the SI system of measurements. Okay? Right. Let’s get on to the amusing cocktail of units the British have to cope with in their every day lives…

Britain loves inches.

Length The length of small-ish objects is measured in centimetres and millimetres. Sometimes. Except the diameter of pizzas, the sides of photos and photo frames, and the diagonal of laptop screens and televisions — all of which are almost always given in inches. Screws, as in woodscrews, are often given in  fractions of inches. Let’s not get into jewellery, for that way madness lies.

Longer objects are measured in metres and centimetres, except for the height of people, which is almost always quoted in feet and inches. Chippies (that is carpenters, not people that cook fish and chips — keep up) tend to colloquially use feet and inches for planks of wood. For example, “I need a bit of six by nine” — meaning a piece of wood 6 feet long and 9 inches thick.

What do you mean, how do you know which one is 6 and which one is 9? You’d hardly have a 9 ft piece of wood that was only 6 inches thick, would you?☨

People do sometimes use metres for short walking distances, e.g. “it’s fifty metres to the shops”, however Brits also like to use yards, a yard being 3 feet. But that’s okay, because a yard is close enough to a metre as to make little difference to a casual walking estimate, so they’re pretty interchangeable.

Marathons are measured in miles. Shorter road races use kilometres.

The sorts of distances involved in lengthy travel are always measured in miles. The distance from Oxford the city to Oxford Street in London, for example, is about 55 miles. No British person would ever describe this as 88.5 km. Speed, as we saw in Good Omens, is thusly described in miles per hour (mph). For the record, the speed limit in a built-up area such as Oxford Street would normally be 30 mph, or sometimes (more and more frequently) 20 mph. Crowley was indeed driving ridiculously fast, but then, he has demonic magic to help him avoid both pedestrians and police.

Miles are also used for marathons. However, not for shorter running races, which are often described as “5k” or “10k” meaning, obviously, 5 kilometres or 10 kilometres. The cynics may wonder whether this is because 5 kilometres sounds longer than 3 miles, but I’m sure runners aren’t concerned about such vanities.

Is all of that clear? Okay, let’s move on…

Weight Weight (physicists: I mean mass, yes, you’re very clever, shhh now) of people is measured in stones and pounds (there are 14 pounds in a stone). Except for babies, which are little and are therefore measured in pounds, because everyone knows a baby ought to weigh somewhere in the region of 7 pounds or so, and if you quote a baby weight in kg, Brits have no idea whether to gasp, coo, or wince sympathetically.

The weight of food is mostly measured in kilograms and grams (or possibly grammes; it’s essentially the same thing) these days, although a lot of people still favour pounds and ounces. This leads to oddities, such cake recipes which call for 225 g of butter (half a pound). There are, by the way, 16 ounces in a pound, because it would be far too easy if it were consistent with the pounds/stones thing, wouldn’t it. Oh, and Brits have quarter pounder beefburgers in restaurants — none of that ‘Royale with cheese‘ business for us, thanks.

Larger weights are mostly quoted in tonnes, because that’s easy, but sometimes we use tons as well, which has the added amusement of sounding exactly the same when you say it out loud. 1 tonne is about 1.1 tons, so it’s not too much of a problem unless you’re planning a really big building project. Very large amounts are sometimes given in hundredweight, which sounds metric, doesn’t it? It’s not. A hundredweight is 50.8 kg, or 112 pounds. Did you think it would be 100? Yes, well, there are reasons.

Once again, let’s not get into jewellery. If we start on carats we’ll be here all day.

Beer, blood and milk are measured in pints.

Volume Small volumes of liquids tend to be measured in millilitres or (particularly for wine) centilitres. The exceptions are beer, blood and milk — which are given in pints. Wandering into a British pub and asking for half a litre of beer is guaranteed to cause everyone to stop what they’re doing and stare at you. As will asking for pint of blood, for different reasons.

Larger volumes are measured in litres. We’ve mostly given up on gallons, now that all the fuel stations quote their prices in pence per litre because it looks cheaper that way.

Chemists like to be awkward, though, and use cubic centimetres — written cm3 or occasionally cc just for fun — for small volumes of liquids, and dm3 (cubic decimetres) for litres. 1 cm3 is 1 ml and 1 dm3 is 1 litre, so there’s really no reason for any of this other than to confuse students.

Temperature Temperatures are mostly quoted in Celsius (aka centigrade, well, more-or-less), and most Brits these days have a fairly good feel for that scale. But Fahrenheit still gets rolled out when either a person or the air gets hot. A midsummer’s day might reach ‘100 degrees’ (that is, a little under 38 oC) and someone with a fever might also be described as ‘having a temperature of over a hundred’. Once it gets chillier, however, we’re firmly back to Celsius, because ‘minus five’ sounds a lot more dramatic than 23 oF.

In case you’re wondering, no, I did not choose this particular picture of a thermometer by accident.

In case you thought you were on safe ground here, don’t forget there’s also Kelvin (where 0 oC = 273 K) which is the SI unit of temperature and very popular with physicists. And, if you’re cooking, the mysterious ‘gas mark‘ — which is more-or-less unique the U.K. and which is based on some sort of occult formula. (Gas mark 6 is about 200 oC or 400 38 oF.)

Energy Energy is measured in Joules. Except when it comes to food, where it’s measured in calories. Actually, kilocalories, but everyone just calls them calories. There’s meant to be a capital C to help tell the difference, but no one ever remembers. This is all fine.

Pressure Are you sure you want to go here? Okay. FINE.

Tyre pressures are quoted in pounds per square inch, that is, PSI. Most British car owners can probably tell you roughly what their tyre pressures ought to be in PSI, even if (having learned metric at school) they have a somewhat shaky grasp of what either inches or pounds are.

Atmospheric pressures are usually quoted in atmospheres, because everyone knows what that means (sea level is one atmosphere, give or take). Of course, that’s not the SI unit, which is Pascals: 1 atmosphere is 101,325 Pascals, which is a bit unwieldy, so scientists often use bars, where 1 bar is 100,000 Pascals, and thus 1 atmosphere is more-or-less 1 bar, which, for once, is sort of helpful (no, really).

Blood pressure is usually quoted in mmHg

But then there’s also Torr, which arises from the historical practice of using mercury to measure pressure. 760 Torr is 1 atmosphere, while 1 Torr is 133.32 Pascals. Blood pressure, of course, was traditionally measured with a mercury sphygmomanometer, but just in case you thought you were on top of this, 1 Torr is nearly, but not quite, the same as the measurement in that case, which is mmHg, 1 of which is equal to 1.000000142466321 Torr.

Money British money is decimal (but not metric, for the reasons described back at the start there), but only became so in 1971. If Rees-Mogg has his way I’m sure we’ll be back to pounds, shilling and pence before we know it.

It’s all your fault, isn’t it, Crowley?

In summary…. Since no one in this country is going to give up miles any time soon, if you want to be consistent about units it makes a certain kind of sense to insist on sticking to imperial, I suppose. As much sense as imperial measurements make anyway, which is not much.

You do have to wonder how we ended up with such a confusing mixture of measurements. It’s almost… demonic….

* Page 51 of the original print edition, second line up from the bottom. Obsessed? No idea what you mean. § And possibly non-British readers of the book in the 1990s, but Twitter didn’t exist then, so any puzlement went largely unnoticed. It was a quieter time. ☨ would# you? I don’t bloody know. Apparently it’s obvious. # or, indeed, wood.

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