#problem removal and implementation of solutions

[copperbadge]

I have a lot of feelings about the use of AI in Everything These Days, but they're not particularly strong feelings, like I've got other shit going on. That said, when I use a desktop computer, every single file I use in Google Drive now has a constant irritating popup on the right-hand side asking me how Gemini AI Can Help Me. You can't, Gemini. You are in the way. I'm not even mad there's an AI there, I'm mad there's a constantly recurring popup taking up space and attention on my screen.

Here's the problem, however: even Gemini doesn't know how to disable Gemini. I did my own research and then finally, with a deep appreciation of the irony of this, I asked it how to turn it off. It said in any google drive file go to Help > Gemini and there will be an option to turn it off. Guess what isn't a menu item under Help?

I've had a look around at web tutorials for removing or blocking it, but they are either out of date or for the Gemini personal assistant, which I already don't have, and thus cannot turn off. Gemini for Drive is an integrated "service" within Google Drive, which I guess means I'm going to have to look into moving off Google Drive.

So, does anyone have references for a service as seamless and accessible as Google Drive? I need document, spreadsheet, slideshow, and storage, but I don't have any fancy widgets installed or anything. I do technically own Microsoft Office so I suppose I could use that but I've never found its cloud function to actually, uh, function. I could use OneNote for documents if things get desperate but OneNote is very limited overall. I want to be able to open and edit files, including on an Android phone, and I'd prefer if I didn't have to receive a security code in my text messages every time I log in. I also will likely need to be able to give non-users access, but I suppose I could kludge that in Drive as long as I only have to deal with it short-term.

Any thoughts, friends? If I find a good functional replacement I'm happy to post about it once I've tested it.

Also, saying this because I love you guys but if I don't spell it out I will get a bunch of comments about it: If you yourself have managed to banish Gemini from your Drive account including from popping up in individual files, I'm interested! Please share. If you have not actually implemented a solution yourself, rest assured, anything you find I have already tried and it does not work.

[thydungeongal]

To me the greatest success of Apocalypse World as a game is how it bridges the gap between the in-fiction and out-of-fiction registers. There's very little reason to switch out of a register that abstracts the fiction in terms of game mechanics, partly because the game has very minimalist mechanics but also because the game very much accepts the fact that tabletop roleplaying games are played through the medium of language, and that for a very specific type of play the imprecision of language is acceptable as long as the language is deliberate in the interests of producing a certain type of play experience.

Now, this is one of those instances where I feel that Apocalypse World holds up much better than most games that have come since that utilize the framework it's built around. As a framework around which people make games, one of the biggest failures of Powered by the Apocalypse is people's unwillingness to capitalize on its many instances of "hey this is actually a cool thing that the game does." A lot of the cool things that Apocalypse World does get lost in a conversation that often revolves around Moves as a Thing, Playbooks, the shape of the dice, failure/partial success/success, and fiction first gaminv. (Incidentally, the fact that people don't talk about the fact that one of the ways in which Apocalypse World absolutely does support fiction first as an approach is through its bridging of the gap between the two registers.)

What's particularly funny to me is that sometimes games will try to go for an approach that differs from Apocalypse World's in order to make it more "grounded in the fiction" only to end up with a system that is actually so much more abstract that the process of translating it into the fiction requires extra steps. Apocalypse World's Harm Clock is basically just hit points by another name and Harm only really works if you accept it as a necessary gameplay abstraction to make the process of "how many bullets can my character take" not have to be a whole thing. But it works. A character shoots another character and they take terrible harm (+1 harm) and then we translate that into the fiction. Meanwhile, the approaches taken by some other PbtA games are supposed to bridge the gap between the mechanics and the fiction end up being so abstract in implementation that they require more effort to translate into the fiction. Mark a Condition. Remove a Move from a target. Harm a Stat.

Now none of that necessarily means those games are bad, but it very much feels, to me, like a solution looking for a problem kind of deal. Yes, Harm as a simple "points of damage" system isn't exactly grounded in the fiction and requires an extra step to translate into the fiction, but there is minimal mechanical friction to it and the process of translating the mechanics into the fiction is nearly effortless.

[toskarin]

Since Bethesda was so insistent on moving away from Morrowind's combat system for Oblivion and Skyrim, what would you have replaced it with?

contrary to what it might seem, I don't think replacing the skyrim combat system wholesale with sekiro or dark souls is really a viable solution to the problem, because it's fun for a mod load order, but it definitely makes the game feel unskyrim

so I'd approach this more from the angle of "what needs to be added to fill the void left behind by the simplified combat"

design rambles below the break. this is less of me offering actual solutions and more of me just saying what I'd do if I were given all the resources and executive power in the world for it, from an armchair. and it goes without saying these are all just Opinions

one of the largest basic design issues with modern bethesda melee combat is that it's tied really hard into melee being a single button input. if they want to stick with that, they should at least implement directional attacks and blocking (which I'll mention now is not something new for TES) with a simple aiming scheme, possibly similar to mount&blade's

stealing something else from m&b while I'm at it, two attacks colliding from the same direction within a tight frame window should clash

enemies need to have attacks you don't want to get hit by. somewhere in their list of moves, enemies need to do something different that necessitates either dodging, blocking, or otherwise reacting in any way. they also need to gapclose, but that's a given

healing consumables need to have a cooldown. as funny as cramming items in your face by the stack during combat is, it's a bandaid to an enormous design flaw in melee combat not being interesting. if you really wanted, you could keep some of that flow by having a skill for mixing preexisting potions together into single doses

addendum to that previous point, players should have a hotbar that allows lower cooldown consumption of certain items, which cannot be reconfigured in combat

magic needs to be stronger and riskier. heavy armour should eat into your damage and efficiency significantly, medium armour should do it just a little bit, and casting past your magicka pool should start consuming health at twice the rate it consumes magicka

blocking should have a higher damage reduction cap (it is currently 85%-95% DR depending on armour) but scale depending on how precisely you block an attack and eat into your stamina much more (with a stagger at zero, to steal another mechanic)

as they are, the entire shout system is a symptom of bad design. having a cooldown-based system that gives non-magic characters spells removes the strongest incentive to play magic characters. I'm actually not sure what to even do about this one that doesn't involve cutting all of the overlapping skills and keeping its focus on weird utilities? as a rule, I kind of hate every gameplay concept that uses "this is something only the player can do" as its skeleton, so this is a tough one for me to poke at

hitstop

[ahedderick]

Rules and Procedures

Is it adhd? Autism? Or just something in my upbringing? I need directions, man! When I'm doing something for the first time, I need directions. If somebody just says "Do the Thing," I will look at the problem, figure out a solution, implement the solution, and then have unhinged people screaming at me.

WHY DID YOU DO THAT!? WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THIS!?

Anyhow. On Sunday the 11th, my show at the gallery is over. At 4pm, I will need to remove 67 paintings and drawings, which I have to say is a big disappointment. I was hoping to sell more than just a handful of small ones. Anyhow, I have to get them out of there, work around the new artwork that is being brought in at the same time, and take them back to three different buildings (my house, a friend's studio, and a different house). It's kind of a big job, since they have to be wrapped up and moved carefully.

Nobody at the gallery has given me any guidance. But past experience tells me that there are SURE to be secret rules that I will break. I sent email this morning to two folks asking for their exact expectations. We will see.

[stagkingswife]

What do you do when you've forgotten how to communicate with the spirits around you? I used to find it as easy as talking to a corporeal person and now I can't sense or feel anything even though my friend says that the spirit has never left. I feel like I'm accidentally ignoring them, and while they're being patient I can't expect them to be forever. Have you ever had a similar problem?

I can't say that I've every had this problem, but I'm a tech at heart so my advice for any problem is basic problem solving strategy and trouble shooting:

Identify the problem: You can't sense or communicate directly with a spirit(s) in your vicinity

Establish a theory of probable cause: Something has changed that is blocking your senses

Test the theory to determine the cause: You've already confirmed that it's not that this one spirit is gone. So test if your senses work with other spirits, other energies. If you've always used one technique try a new technique. Try some divination to see what could be the cause.

Establish a plan of action to resolve the problem and identify potential effects: Let's say that through the experimentation in the last step you determine that a new ward you has constructed recently was the problem. It was built in such a way that it was blocking out spirits. come up with a plan to remove that ward and replace it, or adjust it still up.

Implement the solution or escalate as necessary: Implement your plan! Or get help implementing it if you need to!

Verify full system functionality and, if applicable, implement preventive measures: We're back to testing again! Try to sense and communicate with the original spirit, try with other spirits. If it doesn't work you need to go back to step 2 and try a different theory.

Document findings, actions, outcomes and lessons learned: I think it's important to take notes on these things, so you have a record to refer back to in case anything like this ever happens again.

Now it might take some time to go through this whole process so you need a band-aid or a workaround in the meantime. This is when we go back to the basics, pull out our divination tools and communicate the long slow way. It might not be as flashy or a cool feeling, but it's reliable. (And if you can't communicate through divination that's another piece of information to build your theory on.)

[rabbiteclair]

we were facing a problem that we have an object that we write to a string, and the system that we were sending it to expected the string to use double escaped characters

so instead of \"2021-01-12T11:20:43Z\", enclosing the value in escaped \" quotes, they want \\\"2021-01-12T11:20:43Z\\\", with the value enclosed in the escape sequence for the escape sequence for quotes, \\\"

my coworkers' solution to this, implemented over two days, was:

after creating the object, make a copy of it and iterate through every field, recursively down through child objects as well

for each field in the copy, check if it's a string. if so, pre and postpend $$$ to the value, so the date above would become $$$2021-01-12T11:20:43Z$$$.

use that copy to write the object to a string, so the string now has something like \"$$$2021-01-12T11:20:43Z$$$\"

after writing the object to a string, take the string and the object side by side

iterate through the original object again. find every string field, and add the $$$s to its value again. search the string for that value with quotes. so the object contains 2021-01-12T11:20:43Z -> search the string for \"$$$2021-01-12T11:20:43Z$$$\"

for each hit, remove the $$$ and the enclosing escaped \" quotation marks, replace them with double-escaped quotation marks, \\\". so \"$$$2021-01-12T11:20:43Z$$$\" becomes \\\"2021-01-12T11:20:43Z\\\"

after spending about an hour figuring out what the heck this was doing and why, I replaced all of that with

query.replace("\"", "\\\"");

and everyone's like 'hmm. oh. yeah, that does work'

[probablyasocialecologist]

In 2012, Dutch teenager Boyan Slat presented a TED Talk on his concept for cleaning up the ocean with simple mechanisms to sweep up all the trash. While scientists and plastics experts cautioned that his ideas were ineffective, Slat’s non-profit the Ocean Cleanup, founded the year after his talk went viral, has gained millions of followers and big-name backers, including Salesforce, Maersk, KIA, and PayPal’s Peter Thiel. But the venture had one major problem: its first two designs didn’t work, despite the group burning through tens of millions of dollars over the course of a decade. The Ocean Cleanup has since pivoted to work with upstream river “interceptors” that are much more efficient at capturing garbage, but its website still prominently features its latest ocean debris “solution”—essentially a trawl fishing net dragged between two boats that has, to date, collected a comparatively miniscule amount of trash. Tech projects like these are more of a curse than a blessing. Even if the Ocean Cleanup one day somehow beats the insurmountable odds and removes all surface-level traces of plastic marine pollution, it’d still be missing the vast majority of waste that sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor, or breaks up into tiny microplastics. While companies like these bring increased attention to the plastics crisis, they’re ultimately flashy gimmicks that lull our public consciousness into thinking a clever gadget can solve a collective-action problem. These projects also allow consumer brands—like Coca-Cola, an official “Global Implementation Partner” of Slat’s group—to greenwash their continued massive plastic production, while lobbying behind-the-scenes against regulations that would actually help the world break its plastic addiction.  “We now know that we can’t start to reduce plastic pollution without a reduction of production,” environmental scientists Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck write in the introduction to their forthcoming study, Plastics. To meaningfully address this crisis and others like it, we need to look upstream, invest in reuse infrastructure, and mandate biodegradable packaging and high material recyclability. At a minimum, we need to start making producers bear the cost for the collection and disposal of their poorly designed goods.

[taldigi]

I'm always a big proponent for localizing when necessary so I'm interested to hear your takes. For example, I'd much rather remove things like "senpai" or honorifics. If necessary, fully localize to the setting all the way down to the location (ex: Because Ace Attorney is a game that so heavily focuses on modern day Japan's legal system, there's the chance that could put off American players from buying the game for fear of being lost due to the differences in the systems, even though the game itself has no such issue. So localize to LA to break through that initial barrier and get the player to pick up the game). If not, keep the location (MOST stories don't need their location changed) and explain that which needs explaining, but fully translate all dialogue and speech patterns (I actually approve of P4s decision to use frequent bear puns in place of -kuma).

You don't need Japanese honorifics, English has its own honorific system. It's why children are expected to call all adults Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss [last name], except when they're family. It's why, if your boss lets you call them by their first name, they're considered more relaxed ("Please, call me [first name]. Mr. [Last name] was my father's name!") but if your university professor does so it's considered a sign of respect. And it's why it's noticeably, but not unprofessional, if someone goes by last name only without an honorific. If you're localizing a game, I believe you should use that language's honorific system. No -sans, -kuns, or -chans.

Same with things like "senpai." You don't need it. Find a way around it. I honestly don't think the solution to Teddie is to add more untranslated words. The problem with Teddie isn't what he's saying. It's dropped context. It's not clear enough that Teddie doesn't really get what he's saying. It reads more as if he doesn't get why what he's saying is wrong. But those are two different things. Knowing what you're saying but not knowing why it's wrong is a different problem than not knowing what you're saying at all and just repeating things you've heard. There isn't anything wrong with Teddie using the word "scoring," it's entirely in the way it's delivered.

Of course, that's just my thought on localization. I'm interested in yours!

I think I understand what you're saying, and I understand the exact sentiment. Normally, I feel that adding honorifics can be annoying- esp if the story doesn't really call for it.

However- Persona is a kind of series where it doesn't come off as annoying- because the story is very Japanese as well as being a game about the relationships between a bunch of super powered teens- so its implementation is more organic than say.. idk, if Pokemon did, where that relationship nuance isn't as needed.

There's a lot of nuance that gets lost when those aspects are translated or localized away. Rules like using a person's last name is wildly different in JP than it is in english. Sure, the relationships between first and lasts name have their own rules in ENG, but referring to someone via their last name can be seen as insulting, mocking, or scolding. Maybe even a bit demeaning depending on the context whereas in JP its seen as respectful and using a first name or lacking those honorifics can be seen as affectionate.

Being able to step into the headspace where these honorifics matter in relation to how the characters relate to one another is an integral part of steeping yourself in the narrative. IMO, Making it digestible for English audiences would be more akin to like... "Do we need child characters to refer to themselves in third person?"

English is no stranger to loan words to express things. American-English especially. Schadenfreude, Safari, Rendezvous. Doppelganger? If using "Senpai" is important in the narrative to define a relationship or denote authority or respect between two characters, then I believe it's important for the narrative. I mean, people don't step away from the game clueless on what a Persona or a Shadow is, right?

How I see it... Using English: If Naoto called Yu "Yu" it feels too personable, if they called him "Narukami" then it could be seen as dismissive. "Mr. Narukami" feels stiff and "Mr. Yu" is childish and unfitting. "Sir"? Maybe. But again, that feels too yielding? (AU where Naoto refers to Yu as "Dude".)

Kanji's use of honorifics is important to his characterization, too. Even though he's rough and easy to anger and slacks in a lot of social rules, he's still respectful and that's a really important.

However, I'm no linguist nor a philosopher- let alone know more than a few japanese terms at best. So that's just a train of thought. I know the balance between pure translation and necessary localization is a fickle one.

thought: If this was a fantasy world with fantasy terms and honorifics, is that annoying too? or is it good worldbuilding?

Localizing the area? N.. No. I fully disagree with that. No matter what. If someone needs to be coddled enough that they cannot handle a location change, they can go play a different game. It's like asking Pathologic to be anywhere but the Russian Steppe. That is a different issue divorced from being able to understand the meanings and implications of language.

That being said, I think most people who would find interest in a game like persona would be smart enough to pick up context in a story to give meanings to words. (imagine if persona or even SMT was localized to Soul Monsters LMAO)

(Topsicle is a translation I don't like, especially when they could have called it.. idk, a "Vanilla Bar" or just "Vanilla Ice Cream". "Animal Crackers" too. It's not hard, like.. make up more accurate names for them. "Nillabar" or "Cheeseas Crackers" idk. They had the copyright granted for them to use the originals. Weird.)

Taking a step sideways: Teddie was absolutely fumbled. And yeah, I think the blame lies less in him specifically and more in how the other characters treat him. You are correct in saying the issue isn't "scoring" vs "gyakunan", but I felt that it was the best way to express the issue curtly. But then, I must further inquire... why Scoring? Why not "I to be [Girl]'s hot stud!". I mean, I know why. but "scoring" has negative implications. Hell, they could have just used "hot wife" or "mistress" smth, which carries the ridiculousness forward more.

"Maybe I can be Yukiko's mistress!" "*gasp* YOSUKE, were you trying to be Sensei's Mistress?"

Just thinking out loud at this point.

(I want to emphasize, tho- that I LOVE Teddie. I think he is SO silly and sweet and he is absolutely in my top 5, if not top three, fellas from 4. And yes, I love his bear puns too. I like to use both them and the "Kuma" tics when writing him.)

They really needed to telegraph that the characters don't take him seriously and think he's silly WAY more. Not even in the sense of "child coded". He's a shadow. It's not that abstract that he's immature. But the rest of the world around him needs to act like he is, otherwise the reader/player isn't going to get it either. This is telegraphed suuuuper clearly ingame by the JP team, whereas the ENG team... does not. It is SO clear how fond the girls are of Kuma it's almost comical- and yeah, it even detracts from Yosuke's interactions with him. His annoyance is a little disagreeable in JP, while way more justified in ENG.

anyway, getting rambly. Hope I was able to express something akin to a reasonable opinion.

[cursedreverie1945]

Today is trump's inauguration

MLK Day

It's also the 83rd anniversary of the Wannsee Conference.

The Wannsee Conference was held OTD in 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. It was organized by Reinhard Heydrich, at the request of Hermann Göring, to discuss and coordinate the implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question,"which was the plan to systematically exterminate European Jews. Key attendees included:

Reinhard Heydrich: As the chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Heydrich was the main architect of the Final Solution. He called and chaired the conference to ensure coordination among various Nazi departments in the extermination plan.

Adolf Eichmann: A key figure in organizing the logistics of the Holocaust, Eichmann was the head of the RSHA department responsible for Jewish affairs and coordinating the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, ghettos, and death camps. He took minutes during the meeting. One copy survived and it wasn't even a full copy.

Heinrich Müller: As head of the Gestapo, Müller was involved in the coordination of secret police operations during the Holocaust.

Karl Eberhard Schöngarth: A commander in the SS and police in the General Government (part of occupied Poland), Schöngarth was actively involved in the implementation of mass shootings and deportations of Jews.

Josef Bühler: As the State Secretary for the General Government, Bühler advocated for the inclusion of Poland in the Final Solution plans, expressing eagerness to "solve" the Jewish question in his jurisdiction promptly.

Roland Freisler: A representative of the Reich Ministry of Justice, Freisler was involved in ensuring that legal frameworks were in place for the persecution and deportation of Jews.

Otto Hofmann: As the head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, Hofmann was responsible for racial policies that included identifying and rounding up Jews for deportation.

At the Conference, Bühler remarked “...that the General Government would welcome it if a start were to be made on the final solution of this question in the General Government, because here transportation does not pose a real problem nor would the deployment of a labor force interfere with the process of this operation. Jews should be removed from the area of the General Government as quickly as possible, because it is here that the Jew represents a serious danger as a carrier of epidemics, and in addition his incessant black marketeering constantly upsets the country's economic structure. Of the approximately 2.5 million Jews in question, the majority are anyway unfit for work.”

Soon after the Conference, the Holocaust entered into a new, more deadly phase. Among other events, Operation Reinhard was a direct result. Named for Heydrich, who was assassinated just months after the conference, it was intended to kill every Jew.

Operation Reinhard built a series of death camps called Operation Reinhard Camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Three other pre-existing camps, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Auschwitz II, were also put to work towards this goal.

Ultimately, 90% of the Jews of Poland would not survive.

May all of these sonsofbitches never find rest.

Pictured, Reinhard and Lina Heydrich the day before the attempt on his life 26 May 1942. He would die on 04 June 1942.

[max1461]

But why wouldn’t you want to remove everyone’s physical preferences anyways? Peoples shallow sexual preferences and fetishes in general cause a ton of horrifying social problems.

I would very much rather not!

So, first off, I suppose the social problems caused by people's "shallow sexual preferences" are looks-based discrimination, right? Good looking people get treated better. But if you removed everyone's physical preferences so that they now only had personality-based preferences, you'd presumably still get discrimination against personality types people find sexually unappealing, in the same manner. And...

Ok, whether that would actually amount to less discrimination or not is a statistics question, right? Like "appealingness of looks" and "appealingness of personality" are distributed across the population according to, well, some distribution, and sometimes they cancel out (a person with an unappealing personality gets stellar looks, or vice-versa) and sometimes they compound. And so the question is something like: is the mean of the combined distribution higher or lower than the mean of just the "appealingness of personality" distribution? Meaning: would people at large get treated better, on average, if others only considered their personality? And the answer is, I don't know! And neither do you. And it goes without saying that "appealingness of personality" does not neatly correspond to "virtuousness of personality" or anything like that.

Would the world be better if, on a further hypothetical, sexual attraction was entirely determined by virtue? Possibly, possibly not (for funky game theoretic reasons), but possibly.

Anyway, so, the assumption of your ask might not even be right. But beyond that, I think it is desirable to have the capacity for aesthetic and sensual experience, right. Having physical preferences is a necessary consequence of having the capacity to find sexual and aesthetic pleasure in the human form, and the capacity to find sexual and aesthetic pleasure in the human form is wonderful and one among many parts of the human experience that makes the human experience worth experiencing. I would be extremely hesitant to take that away.

And, of course, if we're imagining a big button that deletes everyone's sexual preferences, that would necessarily involve nonconsensual alteration of other people's minds, which I find per se objectionable.

So there are a whole lot of reasons why I would not want to do this.

Consider also, anon, if you would be sympathetic to similar actions if they did not involve sex. People do rather heinous things in service of having access to food they like, right? Factory farming, exploitation in the global south, really horrible shit on a much vaster scale than the things people do in service of sexual gratification. Would you, in light of this, approve of removing from everyone their ability to enjoy the taste of food, so that they no longer desired meat or bananas or whatever other food source causes the suffering? Or would you rather see some other solution to the problems of factor farming, labor exploitation, and so on implemented instead?

[girlactionfigure]

🔵PM ANNOUNCES CEASEFIRE - Real time from Israel  

ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

▪️PM:  Netanyahu: I promised victory and we will achieve victory. We will complete the elimination of Hamas, the return of all our abductees and the return of the residents of the north.

We achieved incredible achievements in the 7-front war.

I am determined to do everything to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Removing this threat is the most important task.

(Syrian president) Assad is playing with fire. This is no longer the same Hezbollah, we set Hezbollah back decades, the ground in Beirut is shaking.

At any given moment I look at the overall picture, not just on one front. I am determined to give the soldiers the full means, so I will bring a ceasefire.

If Hezbollah violates the agreement we will attack.

There are three reasons for the ceasefire - focusing on the Iranian threat, delays in weapons shipments that will soon be renewed, cutting off the connection between Lebanon and Gaza.

Tonight we will bring a ceasefire agreement to the cabinet, we maintain full military freedom of action. If Hezbollah tries to arm itself - we will attack, if it launches a rocket, digs a tunnel, brings in a truck with missiles - we will attack. I remind you that this is what they said during the cease-fire in Gaza, but we came back and we came back.

There have been significant armament delays - this delay will end soon.

▪️US PRESIDENT BIDEN.. to speak on the ceasefire at 21:30 Israel time.

🔸CEASEFIRE NEWS.. Meeting with UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert and Defense Minister Israel Katz, who says Israel will "act against any threat...  every attempt to smuggle weapons will be thwarted and every threat to our forces or to the citizens of Israel will be destroyed immediately."

▪️A HERO SOLDIER HAS FALLEN.. Tomer Othman, 21 years old, from Kfar Yasif, in battle in Gaza.  May his family be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, and may G-d avenge his blood!

🔹LEBANON.. The Lebanese Minister of Education announces the suspension of classes tomorrow, Wednesday, all over Lebanon.

🔹HEZBOLLAH SAYS.. Hassan Fadallah, Hezbollah's representative in the Lebanese Parliament: "Hezbollah of Lebanon, after the cease fire and the end of the war with the Zionist regime, will continue to be active in other areas."

🔹US SEC STATE BLINKEN SAYS.. “Israel will always have the right to face risks to its security, like any other country. What we have a chance to achieve now is an effective implementation of UN Resolution 1701, something that was not possible until now. The result of the decision not being effectively implemented so far was that Hezbollah remained in a position where it could attack Israel. We are now close to reaching an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on the basis of 1701 including the withdrawal of Hezbollah and Israel, the placement of Lebanese army forces in the south alongside UNIFIL and a monitoring mechanism to ensure that the agreements are indeed implemented. If this is indeed implemented, this is the solution to the problem that has plagued the area for decades and that this constant threat of harm from Hezbollah will end and people will be able to return to their homes.”

[boreal-sea]

I studied American & British government and politics at a level, and the first thing we covered was electoral systems because they are so *so* awful.

The way I try and explain it to people who are struggling to understand FPTP is imagine a group of 10 people are deciding on a snack.

Your choices are:

Packet of ready salted crisps.

Packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

Packet of peanuts.

3 people pick ready salted crisps. 3 people pick salt and vinegar.

4 people pick the peanuts.

So 60% DONT pick peanuts, that's less than half. But EVERYONE gets peanuts. (And what if someone who voted crisps is allergic to peanuts? Tough. That's what everyone gets)

The electoral system is fucked. But if we replace the Dems with salt and vinegar, an Independent with ready salted, and Republicans with peanuts. It shows how Easy the Republicans can get a seat if you Don't vote blue.

I hope this helps people who struggle to get why not voting blue is a vote for the Republicans.

In my country (UK) the Conservatives (that's like your Republicans) don't have a majority of votes even though they have the majority of seats in Parliament.

(This doesn't take into account your absolutely fucked electoral college that doesn't make sense, sorry,,, I struggled to wrap my head around that)

Yeeeeaaaaah our electoral system is so, so fucked on LITERALLY every level, which is why it's so god damned important that we vote blue no matter who and that we don't do anything to damage people's willingness to vote blue. Republicans make sure the system is incredibly stacked against marginalized voters, because marginalized voters know that voting blue is the only way we get to cling to rights. We literally cannot afford to lose even a single blue vote.

On the bottom level, on the basis of the voters, Republicans use our system to fuck them over in many ways.

Restrictions against individual voters

Many states having difficult voter ID laws designed to prevent marginalized people from voting. These voting laws are implemented by Republicans. So there's a bunch of Democratic votes that never get cast.

Next, each state and city run by Republicans often do things like removing voting locations, making it harder for marginalized people to vote by making it harder for them to get to polling locations and making the lines in those locations longer. Marginalized people are often lower class, and it's almost impossible to get a whole day off to stand in line to vote, therefore, these people often have no choice: they can't risk their job to go vote. So there's more blue votes that never get cast.

Also, many of those states have restrictions on absentee voting, which could be a solution for folks who can't take time off to vote, but because absentee voting is made purposely difficult and confusing, it again restricts people from voting. More blue votes lost.

Those are just the harms done to individual voters by Republicans. We haven't even gotten to voting districts yet.

Voting Districts

So the way the electoral college works is that everyone's individual votes are first funneled up to voting districts, and then those districts are tallied to decide who won the state. The problem is, human beings draw those districts - and Republicans like to drawn them in very shitty ways that ensure marginalize people's votes don't count as much.

Look at this. That third diagram is what happens in states all across America. Anyone who thinks the USA works on a "one person, one vote" system is wrong. You do not directly vote - your vote is tallied as part of your district, and that total is what determines who wins the state.

And then you have what happens at the state level, because the system continues to fuck over voters.

The Electoral College

You thought it couldn't get worse? It gets worse. Each state has officials called "Electors", and they are the people who actually cast the true vote for president. Now, legally, in many states, these Electors are legally required to cast their vote for the candidate selected by the districts in the state, but in some states they technically could just vote for whoever they want. They don't, because they'd never win reelection, but still.

So, ok. How many Electors does each state get? Is it based off something logical, like population maybe? Kind of. Every state gets 1 for each Senator (so a total of 2) and then 1 for each congressional district - and the number of congressional districts a state gets is based off population.

This system, unfortunately, ends up giving more "weight" to voters from less populated states. Some people claim this is good, because it means those states will still have their opinions expressed in government. Other people note that land doesn't vote, and it's completely unfair a small number of voters get to basically override the choice of a majority of voters.

So, a candidate has to win 270 of these electoral votes to win the election. Notably, the electoral college results do not always match the "popular vote" - that's the 1:1 vote of the people. There have been several situations where the majority of individuals in the USA voted for candidate A, but because of how the electoral college works, candidate B won instead. The last two times this happened, it was Democrats who lost. Most recently, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over three million votes, but lost in the Electoral College, so we ended up with Trump.

Summary

If any of my followers are confused, I get it. But hopefully, you will also see now how incredibly stacked the system is against minority voters specifically because they're more likely to vote Democrat. Maybe now you will see that Republicans basically have to cheat at every stage of an election to win, and that if we actually had fair elections in this country based on 1:1 votes, Republicans couldn't win.

And maybe, hopefully, this will make it clear why it's so fucking dangerous to tell people to not vote for Biden. We are walking a razor thin wire across a chasm of jagged rocks, while Republicans laugh and throw fireballs at us. They don't want the system to change, because it benefits them! Every voter we successfully get to the polls is a win for us and a lose for them.

Please vote. Please vote blue. Please vote for election reform.

[timetravellingkitty]

Hi, what do you think about the reservation for SC/ST and OBC for entrance exams and seat allotment? It feels unfair for the general category people. I see that you don't support caste based discrimination and seem to have read quite a bit about it so I just want to know your opinion and hear a perspective from someone who knows more about the topic.

Hoping that you'd answer this ask. Thank you!

P.S- I enjoyed scrolling through your blog so much during the elections results.

prefacing this with the disclaimer that I don't just oppose caste based discrimination, I want the complete abolition of caste. it is a bullshit social order and there's nothing that could ever justify its existence it is nothing short of rotten and dehumanising

in the nicest way possible, i'd like to challenge your notion of reservations being unfair to general category people. they make up what, 25% of india's population? they're an overrepresented statistical minority. the rest of the population are sc/sts, obcs and muslims. ideally, this ratio would be reflected in institutions, where instead you see an overwhelming majority of both students and teachers being upper caste hindus because of the way caste apartheid works

sure you could point out issues in the implementation of reservation policies. at the same time the problem does not inherently lie in reservations. the solution would not be to reduce or completely remove reservations. whatever faults lie in the functioning of reservation schemes aren't on the people who avail them btw they are not seat stealers or freeloaders they are people exercising their fundamental human right to education and other facilities, ones that they've been denied for ages

you might say that people who got admission through reservations are untrustworthy because people should be selected on the basis of how deserving and capable they are, unlike the ones who got in this way, yes? but do you seriously believe that in a true, genuine meritocracy, this tiny statistical minority would overtake or overpower quite literally everyone else? or that they're inherently superior and more capable? the same courtesy isn't extended to people who get admissions through management quota, why is it only sc/sts who are questioned on their excellence and capabilities?

think about it.

[rjzimmerman]

Yesterday, I posted a summary of the study and report described in this Grist article. We get more details (if we're interested) here. Additionally, to me, the recommendations to proceed more holistically with the numerous global issues dealing with biodiversity and the climate are critically important. I've been repeating this mantra for several years, and will continue to do so. Deal with the environment = solve the climate crisis.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

As global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, researchers and policymakers have proposed solutions like installing renewable energy, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones, and developing technology to suck carbon out of the air. But these policies often address climate change in isolation — without regard for other pressing issues like a decline in biodiversity, the contamination of freshwater sources, and the pollution of agricultural soils. 

A new report released Tuesday by the United Nations’ expert panel on biodiversity makes the case for a different approach based on addressing the “nexus” between two or more out of five essential issue areas: climate change, biodiversity, food, human health, and water. Such an approach is not only more likely to help the world meet various U.N. targets on biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate mitigation; it’s also more cost-effective.

“We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos,” said Paula Harrison, a professor of land and water modeling at the U.K. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a co-chair of the report, in a statement. Other scientific reports have studied the interlinkages between two or three of these issues, but she told reporters on Tuesday that this latest report is the “most ambitious” to date.

The new report was the result of three years of work of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, an expert body that’s analogous to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which periodically assesses the state of the science on global warming.

The report centers on biodiversity — that’s the IPBES’s remit, after all — describing how the variety of life on Earth is “essential to our very existence.” But it goes out of its way to show how rapidly accelerating biodiversity loss is both contributing to and being exacerbated by other crises. Climate change, for instance, is making some habitats inhospitable to their erstwhile animal populations, while the loss of those populations can have impacts on freshwater availability and carbon storage. The five interlinking issues were selected by representatives of the 147 IPBES’s member countries.

Meanwhile, solutions that focus on just one issue may have detrimental effects on other elements. Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, gave the example of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, a climate solution in which crops are grown to draw CO2 out of the air and then burned to generate energy. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are captured and stored in rock formations, with the aim of removing them from the carbon cycle permanently.

The problem, Smith said, is that to implement this process on a large scale would require vast tracts of land that might otherwise have been used to grow food crops — so BECCS can unintentionally harm food security. Devoting land to single-variety crops can also use up lots of water and jeopardize biodiversity.

[hausofmamadas]

Until The Day You Don't Come Back

⁂

Pairing: Andrea Nuñez & David Barrón (+ some implied Dinarrón)

Prompt: "All we have are our choices" and Crossroads - for @narcosfandomdiscord Narcovember - #14 Book of Decisions Decisions Decisions

Word count: ≈ 4.2K

Note: shoutout to the homie @rerorero-my-cherry whose discord tonteria, talking about skipping off to Mexico to escape fascism somehow sparked the idea for this fic and I can't even explain how or why😂

TWs: Canon-consistent violence, descriptions of violent acts, smoking

There was no possible universe in which he was brought here by conscience. So naturally, she was dying to know the real reason they were meeting now under this bridge... Andrea gets a mysterious call from a potential new informant one day with information on notoriously corrupt politician and money launderer, Carlos Hank Gonzalez. She agrees to a late-night meeting on the US side of the border, so she can get all the tea, and boy is that tea scalding. (This ended up entirely too long but here you go world.)

⁂

Andrea checks her watch. Almost midnight. The road is quiet, cars passing by every fifteen minutes. The thinnest nail clipping of the moon is out and her informant is over a half an hour late. The lone street light flickering on the overpass above feels like a doomsday clock urging her to cut her losses and go home.

Really, loitering at this fork in the road under a highway bridge isn’t the most sensible idea, not when people were being gunned down in the streets in broad daylight and the cartels were using the bodies of their victims to send telegrams to each other. At least she had enough sense to insist the meeting take place on the US side of the border where her death would at least be investigated should things end badly. Just a few miles from Tecate, she’d found an unmonitored stretch of border the gringos hadn’t fenced off yet a few months ago and had been using it to touch base with informants.

It’s for this reason Salgado is always telling her she’s a clever girl with no sense. And also that if she’s senseless enough not to listen to him, as La Voz’s editor and her boss, he makes no bones about using it to his advantage. And he had - a series of groundbreaking stories about the hipódromo, Carlos Hank Gonzalez, and the AFO were enough to prove her senselessness enough of an asset, no matter how much of a danger it posed. Until the day you don’t come back, he’d note ominously.

But if not her, then who? The job was easier to do if you knew you were already dead. She did. She also didn’t think about it too much. Plus, this lead was too big to pass up. The call with the tip-off had come directly to her desk, an anonymous insider allegedly high enough in the AFO to know all about Gonzalez’s dealings not just with the Arellano family but with Amado Carrillo Fuentes in Juarez; news she wasn’t yet privy to but that made enough sense to catch her attention. And that’s how she ends up on these back-country, dirt roads in the middle of the night.

Of course, she knows it could be a trap too - she’s senseless, not stupid. She knows full well this little rendezvous could be no more than someone making good on a bounty for the head of any journalist from La Voz. She couldn’t even bring herself to revel in the I told you so, when the street edict came down from the AFO after Salgado enacted the policy of removing writers’ names from the bylines, even if she did tell him it was a short-term solution to a long term problem. It was even shorter than they bargained for because within a week of implementing the policy, the AFO had branded anyone who came in and out of that office fair game. Normally she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to retroactively gloat, but this time it didn’t seem fair. Salgado did his best to protect them and it earned the whole staff a scarlet letter. But who’s fault was that really? So she left well enough alone, like she never had an opinion on the matter to begin with.

So yeah, the prospect of this being a trap had occurred to her. More than once. And the longer she sits here, leaning against the hood of her station wagon, checking her watch, the more the possibility keeps rearing its ugly head. Right on cue, the sound of footsteps crunching on gravel has her going for the handgun in her waistband and spinning around to greet the void of what she hoped would be empty space under the bridge.

“Hello? Who’s there?” She does her best to breathe, keep calm, as she anchors the gun in both hands, aiming for the shadows.“Dejate ver. Muestrate si no quieres tomarte una bala en el culo.”

A pair of raised hands are the first things to emerge followed by a modestly dressed man with a clean-cut crop of dark hair, dark eyes, and a sharply drawn mustache that gives him the look of a French nobleman caught in the wrong timeline. Her stomach drops several floors and liquifies into a puddle on the ground as it sinks in, just who he is. She’d give anything not to but there’s no eradicating the sense of recognition.

So this is it then. The end of the line.

She’d pictured it just like this. In fact the scene is so familiar, she feels the distinct impulse to laugh at just how much of a cliche she’s about to be. Because as much as she can acknowledge the possibility - meeting a grisly, undignified end, painted somewhere on the streets of a city she’s fought for and loved, just another macabre telegram - she’s also struck by the kind of shame that accompanies shattered hubris. That, somewhere along the way, she mistakenly bought into a brand of exceptionalism she always hoped to avoid, one might call it downright American. Rationally, she’s known the odds, even accepted them. And yet somehow it was still something that only happened to other people.

What a fool. She’d kick herself if she wasn’t about to die. Or maybe … How fast could this guy move? How quick could his hands be? Maybe she’d turn her gun on herself, get a shot off before he could get his out. Take things on her own terms. Not that she can even see a gun. But she doesn’t need to, to know it’s there, tucked in his waistband right at the base of his back.

After all, he is the AFO’s top sicario, David Barrón Corona. One of the most lethal men in Tijuana. Maybe all of Mexico. She’s only ever seen him at a distance, through a telephoto lens or in grainy photographs developed thereafter, but she could recite a list of his exploits from memory like a kid in some perverse spelling bee: the shootout at Christine’s, the airport massacre, the assassination of Ocampo, the shootout at the Belmont cafe. The man’s resume is a mile long and filled with nothing but death.

In her experience, meeting monsters like this tended to be unsettling for how boring and anticlimactic they always seemed to be. He appears no different. Just a man walking on two legs, with two eyes to see, and those eyes aren’t even crazed or rage-filled or brimming with hate. Whenever she came face to face with someone like him, it tended to incite within her a twinge of irritation that they couldn’t do everyone the courtesy of coming with some kind of warning label.

One of her hands drops and she walks toward him, gun drawn as she cocks the hammer and fires a warning shot into the ground next to him with an ease that surprises even her. He barely flinches. It’s obviously not his first rodeo. Which, yes, is to be expected but the stillness of him is still downright chilling.

His posture is relaxed, hands up in an effort to suspend hostilities. She’s decidedly unmoved in her hostility.

“Y’know,” he attempts to reassure her, “if I wanted to kill you, ya estarías en el piso, desangrándote en la tierra,” but it looms more like a threat.

It catches her off guard though, how much softer, gentler his voice is than she expected. It’s almost enough to disarm her entirely until she remembers all the coroner’s reports and crime scene photos she’d come across in her research. His handiwork. Well-executed executions, meted out with such quiet indifference he could’ve been telling them a bedtime story. This is who she’s dealing with.

“O sí? Pues soy yo ya quien tiene la pistola. So start talking, cabrón antes que te dé por el culo,” she flicks her wrist, pointing the gun barrel at the gravel disturbed by the first shot, “with another one of those.”

He chuckles, “Usually when people, civvies especially, say that,” making sure to keep his hands up, careful not to make any sudden movements, “no les creo. Pero a ti? A ti te creo.”

“Arre. So, if you’re really not here to kill me, fuiste tu con quien hablé por el telefono?”

He gives a stiff nod.

Andrea cocks her head to one side, examining him in the flickering street lamp light. He’d be handsome were it not for the vacuum in his eyes, no warmth, no life, yet here he was, breathing and blinking and talking all the same. There was no possible universe in which he was brought here by conscience. With what she knew, he was likely immune to that particular plague. So naturally, she was dying to know the real reason they were meeting now under this bridge, at this dirt crossroads, near the dirt town of Tecate.

“Do I, uh, have to keep these,” he looks right, then left, at each of his arms, “up the whole time?”

She considers the risk for a moment, ultimately deciding to let him but refuses to drop her gun. His hands come swinging down by his sides apparently unbothered by the fact that he remains caught in her crosshairs. Yeah, clearly not his first rodeo. Not even his second. Or third.

He meets her eyes but says nothing and the silence starts to feel like a third party in the conversation that just won’t shut up. Andrea taps her foot impatiently but he doesn’t seem to get the memo that this is the part where he’s supposed to do the talking.

“Alright.” She exhales crossly, rolling her eyes. “What did you want to talk about? On the phone you said something about Hank and Juarez?”

“That’s right.” Barrón takes a few steps closer, hands now clasped together at his waist, no more troubled by the gun than when he was further away. “He’s been working with Amado since he took over. Cleaning his money.”

“I don’t understand. Wasn’t he already doing that for the Arellanos?”

He nods.

“Wait, but that doesn’t make any sense. Why would he align himself with warring plazas?”

Looking down, Barrón shrugs, “That’s above my pay grade,” kicking a rock across the dirt, dust trailing behind it like a tiny, terrestrial shooting star. “I’m not that high on the food chain.”

She regards him skeptically, brows crinkling.

His tongue clicks against the roof of his mouth, “I can only guess,” seeming to take the cue this time. “He’s probably too high-profile for either plaza to fuck with, so big homie can afford to do business with both. But I doubt Sr. Kingpin Accountant accounted for the heat it’d bring back on him with all the, uh– y’know, scrutiny.”

Grinding her teeth, Andrea snorts. Scrutiny was both a succinct and delightfully vanilla way of saying, ‘global attention thanks to all the bodies of the streets.’ But the implications of Hank laundering money for Juarez were big. He might be playing the plazas off each other, biding his time until a victor emerges, one he’ll be all too happy to chuck right under the bus the minute the political machine decides it needs to offer up its next sacrificial lamb to the gringos. Standing there, trying to put all these new pieces together, Andrea suddenly remembers the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her flannel and wishes she’d thought to smoke one before they’d started talking. She can’t afford the distraction of lighting one up now, what with having to keep the gun in place.

“Alright, so he’s doing business with both plazas. How the hell do you know this? You said it yourself, you’re not that high up on the food chain.”

He seems to bristle at this, throwing her a sideways glance through half-lidded eyes, face overtaken by a dangerous, far-away look that spooks her even more than the gun at his back. “Why would you need to know that to write your little story.”

Interesting. Something personal, perhaps. She’d get it out of him one way or another. But later.

“Well,” she grips the gun even tighter, knuckles going white and she hopes that by keeping her voice level, he can’t sense how scared she is, “it’s not going in an article per se. But for reasons that I hope would be obvious? I can’t identify you as a source. You’ll have to remain anonymous.”

“You don’t gotta do that on my account.”

Practically gagging on disbelief, she manages to sputter out, “For you? What are you kidding?” before regaining her composure. “I mean– well frankly, you’re a criminal, a killer at that, putting a rival cartel in the headlines, so it’s more an issue of self-interest. Now, I know doing something like this does nothing but put you at risk but my readers won’t know that. So, telling me how exactly you found out about all this would lend you more credibility as a source. O sea significa que podemos confiar más en lo que me has dicho.”

This seems to wound him privately somehow like he’s taken it worse than the bullet she’d fired. But whatever it stirs in him is gone before she gets a chance to interrogate it further.

No less relentless, it is enough for her to ease up on her delivery. “So do you have proof? Something concrete that I can take back to my editor?”

His hand goes in his pocket and he begins digging around for something. Andrea’s whole body stiffens and she takes a step back, arm straightening to retrain the gun on him more decisively. If he notices, he doesn’t show it as he continues fishing around in his pocket until he finally brings out a few folded documents along with a bag of rolling papers. He takes a pre-rolled cigarette out of the bag, popping it between his lips while reaching out to pass her the documents. A few hesitant steps forward, she lowers the gun slowly snatching the papers from his hands quickly before scurrying back again. Her head bobs up and down between watching him and trying to read what’s on the page in front of her.

“What are these,” she flips through a few pages, “business licenses?”

“Among other things.”

She skims the first document and for the first time she feels like this whole thing might not be a trap. Fixing him with the coldest, most I-will-kill-you stare she can manage, “I’m taking a big risk, doing this. No me hagas arrepentirme o te arrepentiras, lo prometo,” she flicks the safety on and puts the gun in her waistband, in front so he knows she still has easy access.

Bowing his head, Barrón agrees, "Noted," cracking a small smile, something akin to respect or maybe admiration and it’s the first time his face displays any emotion. It puts her a little more at ease.

Both hands now free, Andrea combs through the documents, a few loose, the rest stapled together, some with carbon copy backings, and skims for the highlights - important phrases, dates, places, signatures - until she finds a signature at the bottom of a business license for an aeronautic manufacturing company.

“A shell company,” Barrón confirms her suspicions before they’re even fully formed. “Makes specialty parts for small planes. Like Cessnas.”

She flips to the next page, documents showing ownership stakes in the casino at the hipódromo along with two of the Arellanos’ discotheques. Flipping through the rest, it’s more of the same, SEC and CNBV registrations for shell corporations, licenses for legitimate businesses, and share certificates, none of them bearing Carlos Hank’s name but nonetheless tying him to both Tijuana and Juarez by a signature almost as important: Carolina Vera. His lawyer. She was all over these documents.

Speechless, Andrea’s head rises slowly to look at Barrón. When she said proof, she wasn’t expecting it to be this monumental. The cynic in her kicks up, wondering if it isn’t just a more elaborate trap designed to lull her in a state of submission before the jaws snap shut for good.

“It gets better," he says, examining his zip-o lighter before flicking the top back and forth a few times with his thumb.

Which reminds her, in desperate need of a cigarette, Andrea folds the papers up and sticks them in the back pocket of her jeans and then feverishly digs around the pocket of her shirt for her pack. Once retrieved, she flicks her lighter several times, sparks flying at the end of the cigarette in her mouth, until finally a little bloom of flame appears out of the corner of her eye to light it for her. He's a smooth motherfucker, she'll give him that, although strangely, there was nothing smug about it. He brings it back, cradling the flame with his other hand to light his own. After a first drag, Andrea dips her head back, a cyclone of smoke pouring from her lips while she exhales in relief.

“How,” snapping forward again, she takes another drag before asking, voice thick, each word encased in smoke, “does this get any better?”

“I have another source.”

“What? Who?”

“Cristina Palacios Hodoyan.”

“No me digas." The shock has her nearly wheezing the words and her eyes are wide, almost feral with curiosity. “You know where she is?”

He smirks. “Who do you think hid her?”

“What? So– but wait, so you didn’t—y’know. Her sons?”

Suddenly he can’t meet her eyes and she can’t wipe the image of the bridge from her mind - the row of lifeless bodies strung up, punishment para los soplones, whose biggest crime was usually no more than bearing witness to things she never agreed to see in the first place. That Alex and Alfredo were more involved in the extracurricular activities didn’t change the fact that they were just boys.

Perhaps trying to get a read on Andrea or maybe just hoping to fill the silence, Barrón offers, “Everyone assumed- and for good reason. But that time wasn’t me. I was in San Diego, trying t–”

“Save it.” With one look, she skewers him, eyes narrowed, mouth tight, not here for his bullshit. “Vete alaverga con esa ‘that time.’ How many other times was it you, huh?”

Meeting her eyes again like he recognizes his mistake, he responds matter-of-factly, “Plenty,” head held high, no attempt at contrition, false or otherwise.

Still, she’s expecting him to plead his case, so she waits for the explanation, the mental gymnastics, the cognitive dissonance, the rationalization for every single horrific act of violence wrapped up in that plenty. After standing there, watching each other in silence for who knows how long, she realizes there won’t be any of that. And up sprouts the tiniest kernel of respect that she already hates for being there. But she can’t help it. David Barrón could be called a lot of things but a hypocrite wasn’t one of them. She rolls her eyes because christ, who needs heroes when the bar is this high.

She mumbles to herself, “There’s a fire sale and everything must go,” but before he can voice the look of pure confusion on his face, she’s onto the next question, something tugging at the back of her mind since he first stepped out of the shadows of the overpass. “So, what’s in this for you? Why are you telling me all of this?”

Gaze shifting off to the light polluted horizon, he goes quiet. Eventually he just says, “That’s a big question.”

If this was a television interview, the broadcast would’ve been cut for all the dead air between them but she just waits, hoping he might give her just a little more, something to put this whole bizarre night into perspective.

“It’s just—” he shakes his head, “the way I come up—” putting his smoke to his lips and taking a pull so long, she wonders if maybe the question hasn’t short-circuited him a bit.

“Gettin’ into all this,” he waves his hand around at nothing in particular, a party streamer of smoke left behind its path, “wasn’t really a choice for me. Not like how it is here. Now in this new– whatever. Era. It wasn’t supposed to go this way. We were supposed to legitimize. Climb outta this ditch, not dig it deeper.

“This? What do you mean?”

“The game,” he huffs in a moment of frustration, the only emotion he’s let escape so far. “Used to be no civvies, no bystanders, no regular folk. If you was in the game, you get popped on the street, well okay, you knew what you signed up for. But all this other– truth is, man, I’m just tired. Tired of the game, the life, tired of doing all this shit just to be someone’s second choice.”

It was the most he’d spoken the entire time and she didn’t want to interrupt for fear he’d clam up again and go back to nods and one-word answers, but she’d have to start asking some follow-up questions if he didn’t start putting some names to these pronouns.

“I tried to save him, y’know, for her.” He keeps going, face fixed with a thousand yard stare so vacant and icy, he might’ve had the surface of the moon in his eyes. “But I couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to. She knows I tried but maybe she knows that too.”

“Hm.” Crossing her arms, one hip cocked out to the side, Andrea examines the end of her cigarette before holding it off to the side and tapping it with her finger. “So the rumors were true. You and Enedina.”

“I thought it’d be different.” Barrón turns back to her, flashing a nihilistic smirk that reveals how broken he is. “But the things she’s asked me to do,” he shakes his head, “I don’t know. The game ain’t in me no more. And this last one, well—”

“This last one?”

“Your editor. He was greenlit.”

It takes a moment to register. When it finally does, Andrea feels like someone’s pressed pause on reality only to start playing it again in slow motion.

“Y— you mean, my—? uh, Salgado? Ramon?

“Pues, sí.”

“You’re certain?”

“Mhm. My next mark.”

“Hijoueputa,” she mutters. “No es posible.”

Stamping his cigarette out in the dirt with the heel of his wingtip, he nods. “Best believe it.”

“Well— so what? Are you still gonna go after him?” Andrea’s getting more panicked by the second, her fingers finding the grip of her gun.

Chuckling, Barrón puts a hand up in gentle protest, “Nah, chill.”

For some inexplicable reason, she listens to him.“Fine. So, what’re you gonna do then?”

”Something I’ve never done in my whole life.”

“What’s that?”

“Miss.”

Andrea appears to take some comfort in this as her shoulders drop, a breath escaping that she didn’t even know she was holding. Remembering her cigarette, she takes a last drag while noting dryly, “You know, you can never go back.”

A blank look from him is the only response she gets.

“If you do that— y’know, miss. The minute I talk to Cristina, the minute I write this, they’ll probably figure out it’s you. You can never go back.”

Barrón just shakes his head, resigned. “No, ma’am.”

“No? What, no? If they find out you’re my source, they’ll kill you.”

“Of course. I know how they’ll do it too.” He says it with a twinge of pride that reminds Andrea exactly who she’s talking to. “It’ll be someone I know. I’ll see it coming. They’ll want me to see it coming. Cause they know I know.”

Despite this reminder of who he is, what he’s done, she can’t quash that kernel of respect that’s been planted. Even if he wanted to atone, he had enough respect not to insult her by trying to. Nor did he feel sorry for himself that he probably didn’t deserve to. It was a display of accountability she rarely saw from someone as morally bankrupt as he’d had to be. Until now anyway. And this makes her feel, in spite of herself, almost sorry for him. “You’re not scared?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Well, of course,” she shrugs, twisting the filter of her cigarette until the cherry and remaining tobacco fall out before tossing it behind her. “But I w–“

“But you wouldn’t deserve it. And it’s true, I got it coming. Made my own bed as they say. But I can still be scared. Even if I know, at the end of the day, all we have are our choices.”

Andrea smirks, crossing her arms, looking down at the ground to push some dust around with the toe of her boot, unsure what to say next. When she looks back up, he’s already walking away, hands in his pockets, leisurely like he’s got nowhere to be, back to the shadowy spot under the bridge he came from. She wondered if his car was parked there or somewhere else. Or maybe he’s just some visiting ghost of Christmas past and she’ll wake up from this dream.

”Hey,” she calls out.

Just before he reaches the edge of the void, he spins around on his heels, hands still in his pockets, eyebrows raised, and waits.

“For what it’s worth– well, you do have it coming. But … I hope you find your way to some peace somehow.”

The unexpected happens then. He smiles. But this time it travels up his face all the way to his eyes, lighting them up. It might be as rare as a passing comet. So there are signs of life, after all.

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[dearest-and-nearest]

Not to disrespect your OC or anything, but how would Glass (who is so adorable btw!) have turned out had she… not had an awful childhood? Or had she not been a bhaalspawn? Sorry if this question makes no sense

No offence at all!! I'm more than happy to talk about her (and any of my ocs, lol)

Glassred... I think real changes would be only if remove Bhaal's blood from her. If change childhood (through, she had a pretty average. Not garbage, she lived in rich family, problem was with need of her mother to not be killed one day), she would stay the same. Like 90% of her problems with people grow from hunger Bhaal implemented into her. It's hard to keep morality, when there's need to eat all the time.

So, if strip her of her hunger... it would be completely different person. I imagined her very much like Karlach - cheerful, easygoing, but with one little thing: she's lawful evil, lol. Because Glassred in any of her version has low wisdom and problem with reading people because of it, so solution would be obvious for her - anyone who breaks the law deserves the worst punishment right here and right now. If someone lied - then they should loose their tongue for it. Glassred wouldn't slaughter her order in this au (and I think she would still use her real name), but she's no less violent, because I think it's a part of her nature, no matter of Bhaal's influence, just her violence is much more controllable and justified (at least in her eyes. Through, justice and mercy are usually quite the opposite things)

Thank you for ask, it was such fun to think about her in such context!!