#so it was super cheap but it was enormous

[alltimewhat]

there is a very specific christmas candle i want so desperately that my family had in ~2016 and i miss it so so badly and want it so bad but its hard to find and where i have found it its very expensive

[bmbochangetales]

Being a witch is a powerful thing. You can do pretty much whatever you want with a snap of your fingers. Sure causing death and destruction will get you as enemy #1 but most things will fly under the radar.

Savannah was going out for drinks alone. It had been that kind of week. None of her friends were available so she decided to have fun with it. She used her powers to grow her chest. A very manageable D cup. Just a bit more padding on her butt with more shapely hips.

One more snap and she had flawless hair and make up. Her normally frizzy black hair become a sleek style. Her make up was very glamorous. It would have taken hours. She completed the look with a dark red knee length dress and a pair of manageable heels.

The bar was decently busy. She was sure someone would buy her a drink. She sat at the bar with her cheap vodka soda waiting for a poor chump to come along. After a bit, a middle aged fellow sat next to her. He wasn’t the perfect ideal but free drinks were, well free drinks. His back was slightly to her in the bar chair. She was formulating a plan for how to work it when he ordered his drink and a second one.

He turned to her and said "Bartender said you were drinking the cheap stuff, I've upgraded you. No one should drink that stuff." This was easier than she thought. A glass was placed in front of her she inspected it and it seemed normal. She tipped her old glass back to chug the contents. She didn't catch him slip something into her previously safe cup. she lifted it to her lips and enjoyed much better taste.

"Tell me about yourself girl" he prodded her after she had a few sips. She normally made u stories for the men at bars but she found herself telling him her real life story. He asked more questions and she answered truthfully.

"Tell me what makes you special girl" he leaned back in the chair.

"Well I am a witch" she had never revealed that to anyone. She was shocked at herself even. He just laughed a bit but gave her a suggestion.

“Why don’t you give yourself huge boobs if it’s true? Like a solid J cup? I’m sure you’ll love them” He prodded her.

“Well okay” it wouldn’t hurt to show off a bit. She pointed at her chest and they began growing. She thought D cups were large before. These were comically so. She loved them though. A massive pair of tits looked so good on her. She should have done this way sooner. She was made to have j cups. Bigger boobs are way better.

She proudly showed off her tits to the stranger. Not caring that he knew her secret. That he just made her grow her chest to enormous proportions. She just simply listened. It felt good, She was rewarded with a shiver that began at her warm wet cunt.

“I think more jiggle and sensitivity will make you enjoy them more. Try it out” He calmly stated as he gestured to the bartender for another round. He was probably right as she worked her magic again. They didn't get any bigger but they felt so much better as the moved around and bounced. FUCK they felt good now. Why did she never do this before? This man was so smart. Fuck these tits were great.

She never thought about using magic to permanently change herself. It was silly really that she waited for this man to tell her. Why was she listening to him even. He noticed the confused look on her face. Like a thought was fighting to get through. He motioned to the bartender. He quickly gave a shot and he was able to slip the powder in as she fought with her thoughts.

"Drink this, and enjoy it like a good girl" She took a shot that had the same shimmer as her drink. She slowly took it to her lips making a show of staring him down. She tilted the shot glass in her lips and moaned like it was the best thing she ever tasted. She started licking every drop from the shot glass.

“You really love being controlled, don’t you pretty witch?” the words should have triggered her but she just giggled and stroked his arm. "It is super fun. I want to be a good little witch for you."

“Obedience powder. It’s so great, isn’t it?” He held a glittering powder in a bag in front of her face. It was so pretty. And it made her listen to master. She loved being controlled, there was something so sexy about.

[justalittlesolarpunk]

hey!! feel free to ignore this but i scrolled through your blog and really liked it and if you have the spoons I'd love to get your advice/tips on trying to live sustainably while in uni/on a limited budget? I'm going to uni in a year or so and I want to try and do it as sustainably as possible but I don't have a lot of money

love your blog <3

Hi! Thanks so much for the kind words, I am super new to tumblr and fairly new to solarpunk still myself, so I really appreciate it.

I’ll level with you: most of the really aspirational choices in sustainability are pretty expensive. Buying local organic food or slow fashion can really eat into a budget. The good news is that a lot of the frugal decisions you’d make are also good for the planet. You’re not going to be going out buying expensive cars, flying in private jets or any of the other earth-wrecking things that the super-rich do. Being conscious about your spending will mean you’ll probably naturally gravitate towards getting your clothes from charity shops and other similar money-saving choices. In some cities and certain supermarkets, plant-based food will be cheaper, while in others it will be more expensive, and so for this you’ll probably need to make choices on a case by case basis, weighing up each time how much you can afford and how committed you are to a certain diet. Getting a library card is also very solarpunk - free, communally owned knowledge! As a uni student you’ll likely also have your university library as a resource, which it’s definitely worth making use of. Have a look to see if there’s a tool library/library of things in your university town, as that will not only save you money but also reduce your purchase of things you might only use once or twice. Apps like TooGoodToGo offer cheap baskets of food from local restaurants, cafes and shops which would otherwise go to waste at the end of the day, and if there’s a ‘buy nothing’ or ‘stuff for free’ Facebook group for your local area it’s worth joining it - these are really exciting anticapitalist digital spaces where people can get what they need and dispose of what they don’t without exploitative or extractive relationships.

Starting a new paragraph here for readability, and also because it’s slightly a topic change - there are things you can do to be more sustainable that are fairly cash-cheap, but time-costly. As a student you won’t always be able to devote much energy to them between your studies and your social life, but if they’re something that’s important to you and your other commitments (or any disabilities you might have) don’t prevent you, then things like mending your own clothes instead of throwing them out and replacing them can help. But these are fiddly tasks so that isn’t possible for everyone, even if they do have time! Depending on the rules of your student accommodation you could also try having certain edible houseplants - salad leaves, strawberries, herbs, etc. My success rate with these has been very patchy but it’s worth a shot and the original outlay for seeds or a small plant isn’t too much (though if you’re planting from scratch, soil can be expensive as it always seems to come in enormous great bags).

Things like batch cooking or planning communal meals with other people you’re living with can also be greener, and cheaper, if it means food can be made to go further and wasted ingredients can be avoided. Uni is a really exciting time for a solarpunk because it’s the closest to cohousing many of us get - sharing facilities and responsibilities in a close-knit community of non-related people with common goals and experiences. Use this to your advantage to form networks of mutual support.

Similar caveat about time scarcity as above, but there are also things that tend not to cost any money that will make you feel better about your own environmental contribution which you can actually do at any age if you have enough free hours. These are things like volunteering with your local conservation volunteers or in a community garden - this latter is particularly good because volunteers might get to take home some of the produce, thereby saving money and getting access to local nutritious food. Some unis even have their own food gardens and teams of students who help tend them, so get involved with this if it exists and you can.

In the same vein, almost every uni will have its own climate justice or environmental student club, and attending these meetings if your schedule allows can be a great way to meet other people within your institution who share your priorities, and who may well have more advice on frugal, sustainable living that they can offer. Pooling wisdom like this means your can all do better.

It sounds like you might have already picked your uni, but if not there are factors you can consider to help you do better in these goals when you get there, like examining the relative cost of living in different cities or investigating how eco-friendly the university is. It’s worth asking questions like what is their endowment invested in? How much research into climate change and solutions do they fund? Are their careers services still promoting fossil fuel industry jobs?

University towns are usually pretty walkable and/or bike-friendly, at least in the UK and Europe, and these modes of transport are also the cheapest and most sustainable. Plenty also have good public transport too, and buses or hireable scooters are all options (though you’d probably have to use the scooters a lot to make the expense worth it, and if you do, please don’t leave them lying in the pavement like people did when I was at uni - it blocked wheelchair access and was really annoying). Certain cities have trams, which are like catnip to solarpunks lol. Transport can get expensive but tends to still be cheaper than driving in most urban centres, though as I said your own two feet or wheels can probably get you to most of where you need to go within the local area.

Your student’s union might well also run clothing swaps or second-hand book sales, so keep an eye on that and go along when you can. There’s also nothing to be ashamed of in collecting discount codes, coupons for free products, or loyalty cards, or with working if you have the time and ability to earn while you study. The more money you save the more of those slightly costlier green decisions you can make.

What I’d say last, though, is don’t be too hard on yourself! You’re young, the world is set up to be excessively expensive and to reward you for consumptive behaviour that is the opposite of ecological values. Of course you should try your best and I’m so glad that you’re thinking of it already, but remember that you probably won’t be able to do it perfectly - that pretty much no-one can unless they have insane amounts of time and money (in which case they’re probably not the kind of person who cares about this stuff). Remember to enjoy your new independence, to hang out with your friends, to be studious and whimsical and learn about life and yourself. And remember that I’m just one person and not all my ideas will apply to you, and there’ll be other things you could do that haven’t occurred to me because of the specific experiences and biases that inform where I come from.

You probably already know which subject you’re studying, and if that’s the case then there will be ways you can examine these issues within the curriculum of most degrees (except maybe maths? But I’m willing to be proved wrong haha). But just in case you’re still picking subjects and institutions, I’ll just leave a link to a really fascinating-looking new undergrad qualification I heard about a few months ago, that I am *gutted* not to have been young enough to apply for and study! Even if it isn’t the right fit for you, perhaps you’ll know someone who it could work for. I’m assuming, possibly wrongly, that you’re in the UK based on certain dialectical cues (for instance saying uni rather than college), but feel free to ignore this if you’re elsewhere in the world, I’m just very stoked about this course!

Thanks so much for your ask, and sorry for the insanely long essay response. If you’ve managed to wade through to the end then seriously congratulations on your patience. Best of luck with your studies and with your efforts at ecological living, and I hope you carry solarpunk with you as a source of hope, comfort and action into your future. ☀️

[entitycradle]

Future Anime Girl Gestalt

As a breakthrough in silicon nanostructure materials makes photonics and near-eye displays cheap, smart glasses become the new ubiquitous computers, replacing smartphones. The always-on display provides unique opportunities for advertisers, as does new machine learning-assisted ad targeting. In the new omnipresent augmented reality, ads become personalized, three-dimensional, interactive displays, emerging from blank rectangles in subway stations. You see your facebook friends conversing animatedly, drinking budweiser.

As smart glasses become increasingly necessary for modern life, brands are able to invade further into perceived reality. Cars shine luxuriously. The name and price of your coworker's smartwatch floats above it. Of course many modern advertisements no longer directly sell a product or service, but rather create and maintain brand identities. Large corporations advertise on everyday objects--the plate at your favorite restaurant reveals the name of a software company as you finish your food. Your brother's anger turns him super saiyan, reminding you of the new episodes. A poor neighborhood turns into an alien-inspired techno-organic nightmare.

Many companies use characters to perpetuate their brand. These characters can be personalized--the insurance company mascot that shows up on your car dashboard during a harrowing rush hour is your favorite color, features large, expressive eyes, and is covered in shaggy fur.

Of course, machine learning algorithms can be unpredictable. And ad agencies could not anticipate the omnivalent memetic power of...

...anime girls.

The algorithm customizes your pepsi soda into a fizzy anime slime girl. They customize the call to your healthcare provider to raise the pitch of the representative's voice and translate the audio to Japanese (your glasses display English subtitles). The missiles you see striking a city in Iran are ridden by pale, northrop grumman-labeled anime maids.

As more human agency is ceded to enormous, power-chugging processing centers, the connections between everyday occurrences and brand presence become more abstract. Every character on a show you're not paying attention to, every old shoe you own, every person you interact with, every grain of sand on the beach, every floater in your eye, is an anime girl.

As humans do, they adapt. Generation Glass becomes accustomed to experiencing two entirely foreign sets of sense-data: one, their local, mundane world, of humming processors and concrete and scraggly trees. The other, the networked world, where your entire visual field is painted in overlapping anime girls of various sizes and your auditory vestibular nerve is drowned in high-pitched giggling. Each girl represents some object--pomegranate, sunset, friends, love, death.

As global civilization gently deflates under the pressure of climate change post-2100, so does the capacity to manufacture complex electronics. Within the space of a generation, billions of people are reduced to creating facile, vapid illustrations of the moving, living anime girls they once knew as bigotry and tarmac. Pictures of anime girls are used to label street signs, mathematical concepts, genders, religious texts. Ironically, anime girls become more incorporated into the real world than they ever were in the Glass period, because they adorn real surfaces. A post-traumatic behavior develops, in which a person destroys objects bearing anime girl images in an attempt to, according to one individual, "let them out," or otherwise restore networked consensus reality.

Thousands of years pass. Peregrine sophists of the Fifth Yyrzoc clan uncover an underground concrete structure. In it are glyphs of a single, big-eyed, pale, skinny, large-breasted woman with bright blue hair, surrounded by female figures in blood-red uniforms who are collapsed on the ground. The sophists are able to decode this message and avoid what we would recognize as a nuclear waste storage facility. They theorize that the figures are ancient feminine gods of radiation and death. Several etchings and illustrations are published by a notable scriptorium. Years later they are largely forgotten.

[c0rpseductor]

i didn’t want to reblog from myself a third time but literally like here’s my terrible story

once when i was 11 or 12 and was like utterly new to the world of having a period i was out of pads on the first day of my period but had panty liners. i figured just layering like four or five of them in my underwear would be ok, so i did that. i was also wearing khaki pants which was a bad mistake. literally before the end of even my first class i was so horribly soaked in blood that people were Noticing and i had no idea and when my female classmates tried to tell me i just assumed they were trying to make fun of me and brushed them off. horrid. deeply worst

One of my teachers saw this during passing period and walked behind me to get me to I think either the nurse or counselor without the enormous bloodstain on my ass being too obvious. my middle school was a pretty nice one so the counselor-nurse-whatever had a package of like super cheap generic underwear to give me a pair from and i think a pair of pants to lend me for the situation. i don’t recall my mom coming to bring me new pants, or she would’ve brought underwear too. anyway this is how i learned the painful lesson that 4 pantyliners is not equal to a pad and also that you should never wear light pants on your period ever for any reason and it’s actually a form of hybris

all this to say. it was a dire situation indeed. but not one that involved my washing my own underwear in the school bathroom sink with my bare ass out

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

What are some of your hcs?

Hooooooo, boy I've been waiting for this one! I have too many to count, so here's some. I present to you:

Peter Parker x Felicia Hardy Couple Headcanons

Peter and Felicia may not look it, but they’re the perfect ‘opposites attract’ couple.

Peter is the most frugal, sensible person on Earth. He still wears t-shirts he brought in high school and considers Chinese Food a guilty splurge. And somehow he managed to bag a girlfriend with literally the most expensive taste ever.

Felicia wears only brand name. Her favorite handbag costs more than his rent. Half the time she looks at him and is like 

Originally posted by blondebrainpower

It isn’t until he starts dating her that Peter learns to relax and treat himself more. Felicia has to literally force him to take time off and pamper himself and take care of himself. Felicia Hardy is the self-care queen.

If Peter won’t treat himself, Felicia will do it for him, goddammit. (Even if that means stealing something and treating him to it.)

But on the flip side, being with Peter teaches her that not everything has to be glitz and glamour to be great. She starts enjoying eating in more than going out restaurants, if it means that Pete is cooking. She admires how resourceful he can be. 

And she also pays his rent on occasion. He gets flustered every time.

Talking about opposites attract - Peter is a night owl. You’d think the girl with the cat name would be the nocturnal one, but no. He just has so much shit to do. It’s really not odd for Peter to be hitting the mattress just as the sun is coming up. Felicia however, early-fucking-bird. Like it’s borderline ridiculous.

She’s a ‘2-hour workout to start the day’ kinda girl. The kind that makes a smoothie bowl and listens to Meg Thee Stallion at 7 am to ‘get in the zone’. Her alarm goes off at like 4:30 and she’s just up and at ‘em. She bullet-journals, she meal-preps. Peter envies how much Felicia has her shit together, but he has no idea how she does it - considering he’s the superhuman one.

Talking about being superhuman - Peter does doesn’t realize how good he has it until he starts dating her. Felicia is human. She doesn’t have super strength. Which means she actually has to work-out. Everyday. Intensely. It makes Peter realize how much he takes for granted. Sure, he has his Spidey-sense. But she’s all technique, and work, and gold medals.

Watching Felicia do her daily gymnastics, weight-lifting, MMA training, it just blows him away.

Felicia loves using him as a sparring partner. Peter’s humor makes him super-encouraging. He’s the best trainer ever. Peter doesn’t actually need the work-out, but he still comes along often. They’re the couple at the gym that are just super in-sync. It's like a daily mini-date for them.

After they’ve been dating awhile Peter has to move in to Felicia’s place, because Felicia’s enormous closet wouldn’t have fit in Peter’s small-ass studio.

It takes Felicia 3 weeks to get in the habit of calling him ‘Peter’ and not Spider. She still does it on occasion. She’s purposely call him Spider if she’s trying to seduce him, or worried about him.

Their apartment is just…chaotic. It’s not messy, but it’s chaotic. Peter’s science work, cork boards of superhero detailing, Felicia’s art and canvases - she was a art major after all. Between her closet, his tech, their superhero gear, and Felicia’s art, the Hardy-Parker apartment always has something odd going on.

Holy shit, do these two get competitive. Especially when it comes to gifts. They constantly try to one up each other with gifts. They take holidays like Valentines Day and Christmas very serious. Birthdays are even worse. Even Date nights too.

They're always trying to surprise the other and put a smile on the other's face, and considering they've both done the 'secret double life thing' they're really good at hiding presents from each other. Surprises and little gifts are their thing. Even if Peter can't afford it, he still tries to find cheap but sentimental gifts for her, and their date ideas are wild. (Indoor skydiving, anyone?)

Peter is Felicia’s biggest muse. I HC that Felicia is a Fine Arts major, with a knack for art forgery. They have multiple paintings of Peter in the style of famous artists like Picasso and Van Gogh.

Felicia has multiple cats, whom tolerate Peter to varying degrees.

Prior to their engagement, Peter saves up to buy Felicia a promise ring. She wears it constantly. 

Prior to moving in together, Felicia ‘ironically’ collected Spider-man merch. Peter thinks this is funny, and he’s kind of gotten into it too. In an ‘ironic’ way of course. They have matching Spidey pajamas.

At one point in time during college, Felicia was apart of the Spider-man Fan Club. She says it helped her learn his fighting strategies prior to meeting him. She doesn’t tell Peter this information, and when he finds out she nearly dies from embarrassment.

Whenever Peter’s not looking, Felicia will put on his mask because she thinks it’s funny.

Felicia took a fashion course in college. She designed her own costume and does all the repairs on Peter's suit. She usually has to make him a new one every 6-12 months.

Felicia and Peter have a routine of watching the Daily Bugle every night and making fun of J.Jonah from their couch. Sometimes they’ll boo him or throw popcorn at the screen.

J.Jonah hates The Black Cat more than he hates The Spider-Man. Unlike Peter though, she loves the attention. Black Cat openly has beef with J.Jonah and will instigate the man on-sight. Peter really tries to dissuade her from doing this. She keeps doing it anyway.

Their relationship gives off ‘Excuse me? He asked for no pickles.’

And since this is long Imma just leave it there. But thanks for asking this! It was so fun to write out and I'll probably make another of these because I just have so many.

kk bye y'all! :)

[yeah-yeah-beebiss-1]

early impressions from the first 2 hours or so of pokemon scarlet: an ambitious, would-be phenomenal game held back by being released way too early

graphics are dogshit as expected, still looks like a late PS2 game

performance is rough - a lot of random frame drops and choppy animations, pop-in is somehow worse than PLA; there were several early cutscenes in the school classroom where all your schoolmates were moving at like 6fps that were extremely distracting

-koraidon’s jumping physics are super fucked up; in general the game has strong Bethesda energy with weird clipping and frame drops and general jank (for example, the only buildings you can enter are stores, and by “enter” i mean “the camera zooms in on the door until the whole screen is taken up by the door texture which is then used as a background for the shop UI”)

speedrunners are going to have a blast breaking this game wide open, which is to say the general quality control is very poor

pokemon variety is enormous, i nearly had a full PC box by the 2 hour mark just grabbing one of everything i saw

i can already tell that difficulty/level balancing is going to be a concern - exp share is always on and there are a lot of opportunities for experience, the only way you’ll be able to get through the game without being grotesquely overleveled for two of the three story paths is to box your whole team after completing one and starting over with low-level critters

overworld/catching mechanics don’t feel as polished as PLA’s; overworld catching is gone, there’s no reticule for aiming pokeballs to ambush wild pokemon, camera controls aren’t as flexible

you can set destination markers on the map, but they only show up on the minimap - playing this after finishing xenoblade 3 (which lets you see the markers in the world and even toggle guide paths) just makes me feel like it’s going to be a substantial learning curve for people not used to/fond of open-world games

terastallizing doesn’t feel like as much of a game breaker as dynamax or mega evolution

the gym leader implementation of terastallizing is boring as hell - rather than changing their ace to something that’ll counter whatever you brought to counter the gym type, they use it to change a pokemon that isn’t their gym type to match their gym type (the bug-type gym leader, for example, has a teddiursa that she terastallizes into bug type)

the soundtrack varies from respectable to absolutely amazing from what i’ve heard so far, the wild pokemon battle theme is dynamic based on area and the team star and tera raid battle themes go way harder than they have any right to - it’ll be interesting to see exactly how much influence toby fox had over the soundtrack, because some of these tracks definitely have his vibes all over them

in all fairness, i’m playing a leaked dump of a retail cartridge so there’s the possibility of a day-one patch fixing some of these issues, but the lack of polish runs so deep that i don’t think a single patch could address it

overall, i’m still having a decent time with the game because the pokemon formula is inherently pretty watertight and the exploration is pretty fun, but the game just feels blatantly unfinished so i couldn’t in good conscience recommend people drop $60 on it

i have a feeling there’s going to be more than a few instances of people getting buyer’s remorse and unloading their copies for cheap by early december, so i’d strongly recommend just waiting for that to happen so you can get it secondhand for $40-45

[mariacallous]

Last week, Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as “X.” New CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted that X would be “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking,” a step toward Musk’s vision of creating the “everything app” for the Western world. Musk has been focused on this vision for Twitter since before he even bought it, repeatedly praising the Chinese app WeChat in a June 2022 town hall at Twitter. WeChat is known for doing virtually anything an app can do—messaging, audio/video, meetings, translation, social networking, shopping, payments, ride sharing, food delivery, and more. It’s an indispensable app in China, and Musk wants to build X into that app in the United States.

Musk has been laser-focused on his vision of the everything app for longer than most realize. He’s also long been obsessed with the letter X—he named his original online bank X.com, founded SpaceX, and even named his son “X Æ A-12.” His X-ray vision, if you’ll forgive the pun, dates back to his founding of the original X.com. Musk described that firm, which would eventually merge with Confinity to form PayPal, as a “global financial nexus” that could handle bank accounts, mortgages, credit, insurance, stocks—anything and everything financial.

On the face of it, none of this seems unreasonable. Such an app would be one of the most valuable companies in the world if it succeeded. It’s a tall task, but Musk has been involved in the founding of three separate multibillion-dollar companies. WeChat (along with competitors such as AliPay) has proven that such apps can reach scale and be wildly successful. And WeChat was initially built on the back of parent company Tencent’s popular social network, QQ. If it can be done, why not Musk? And why not start with Twitter?

Unfortunately for Musk, his vision of creating a Western WeChat is doomed to failure. Companies like Meta and Alphabet have made attempts before. These companies have every advantage—more cash available than Musk, larger pools of technical talent, better public reputation, and more successful lines of business in the app ecosystem. Nevertheless, none have succeeded in building an everything app. WeChat exists in a very specific Chinese context, and attempts to brute force it in a very different context will crash and burn.

The most important function of an aspiring everything app is payments, which unlock enormous value for the app and convenience for the user. But mobile payments in China are an outlier—87 percent of Chinese people used mobile payments in 2021, almost double the next highest nation. And that outlier status comes from the unique way that China’s payment economy developed.

China’s explosive economic growth over the 2000s saw the country transition from being a mostly unbanked, cash-based economy to a phone-based, app-payment economy without ever having a middle phase of adopting credit cards. As China’s new middle class grew, credit cards were available to a limited upper class—but never became a commonplace part of national financial infrastructure.

What China did have was a lot of cheap smartphones. By the early 2010s, most people there still didn’t have a PC, but they had a mobile phone, and increasingly they were switching to cheap smartphones. But those smartphones were mostly low-end products, with limited processing power and storage space. A high number of bloated apps wasn’t going to cut it for an average user, so many basic functionalities began to cluster inside a small number of super-apps. With the public hungry to abandon cash, apps like WeChat were the natural and widespread solution. Most vendors didn’t have existing relationships with payment companies. But they were happy to jump all the way to taking mobile payments—especially since all they needed to do so was a cheap smartphone, not an expensive terminal. China essentially leapfrogged credit cards all the way to mobile payment.

The United States in 2023 is not in that same position. Americans, for the most part, are not newly middle class and unbanked. Americans love credit cards, have deep experience with them, and use them regularly. And the country is filled with an enormous number of financial firms competing at every level—banking services, credit services, payment apps, stock brokerages, and more. Musk’s X will be entering a far more crowded and competitive market for customers who are already using far better and more developed alternatives.

Competitive is the key word there, because there are many Western companies that would have loved to compete with apps such as WeChat. But China’s government long ago banned nearly every non-Chinese alternative to native Chinese apps in areas including social media, video sharing, messaging, news, search, finance, and more. The list of apps banned in China is so extensive that it’s likely faster to point out the few that aren’t banned.

With so much of the competition absent, it was much easier for Chinese apps to dominate many fields at once as Chinese internet adoption skyrocketed. The Chinese government mostly didn’t pick favorites domestically at first—but it kept out foreign competition and let domestic products thrive. Twitter/X doesn’t live in that same world. The U.S. government won’t protect Musk from competition.

One of the ironies in all this is that the window to develop an everything app may be over in China as well, as the Chinese government’s approach to the tech sector has changed. During China’s boom years, the state often took a laissez-faire approach to tech regulation. The Hu Jintao government and even the early Xi Jinping years saw a booming economy, where tech companies were allowed to grow rapidly and dominate markets as long as they cooperated with censorship, handed over information to the government, and paid off the right people. Analyst XiaoFeng Wang explicitly links this flexible environment with WeChat’s growth, saying, “The more flexible regulatory environment in China at the time gave internet companies like Tencent and Alibaba more room to extend to a wide range of businesses. WeChat benefited from that and grew into a super-app.”

But the Chinese government has grown deeply worried about the power of the super-apps, for both good and bad reasons. Any power that does not reside directly in the party’s hands is distrusted at a time when Xi has demanded total party leadership of everything—and the influence and reach of tech companies has been sharply curtailed in the last few years, wiping billions off their value. Chinese regulators were also genuinely worried about the sheer degree of anti-competitive practices. It had become common, for instance, for firms to block links to their competitors’ products. Breaking down those “walled gardens” has become a major part of regulation since 2021.

Building a super-app would be hard in China today—and even harder in the United States or Europe, with their anti-monopoly legislation and political skepticism toward powerful tech companies. Even if Musk’s X could theoretically succeed, it probably wouldn’t be allowed to do so legally.

Yet paradoxically, while regulators raised eyebrows, elements of the Chinese government also welcomed the opportunities that WeChat and other ubiquitous apps offered. Chinese firms exist at the pleasure of the state and are always subordinate partners to it. WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, is well known for collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party in areas large and small, producing sycophantic patriotic games and engaging in widespread censorship and espionage. Foreign Policy has reported that Tencent was even partially funded by the Ministry of State Security in its early days.

These incidents highlight why an app such asWeChat would be permitted to thrive—because it’s useful to the party. In the James C. Scott sense, WeChat increases the legibility of Chinese society. You can’t control what you can’t see, so make sure you can easily see everything. If all of Chinese daily life is funneled through a single portal, it’s that much easier for the party to observe and control lives. Monitoring a single WeChat account could allow police to see an individual’s travel patterns, spending, and social contacts, which is why many dissidents or activists avoid using the app when possible.

Chinese consumers have become more privacy-conscious about the data they hand over to companies—but are hopeless or unaware of the amount of information the government can get from them. Western companies hoping to emulate WeChat not only don’t have the government on their side, but also face a much tougher and more skeptical audience. And in Musk’s case, who—apart from the most ardent of fans—is going to trust him with their money at this point?

WeChat and its counterparts in China grew up in unique, nonrepeatable circumstances. They faced a massive middle class with plenty of cheap smartphones but no traditional banking or credit cards. They were protected from Western competition by the Chinese government. That same government applied a very light regulatory touch as the companies grew, and also encouraged centralization as a way to maintain greater control.

None of those factors exist in the United States today, and Musk’s dream of building the X app for everything is essentially impossible without them. American consumers already have dozens of easy payment choices through credit cards, debit cards, and existing mobile apps. Musk won’t be protected from competition by the government. Instead, he’ll be treated in a more hostile manner by regulators concerned about privacy, monopoly power, and his general history with flouting the law.

Larger and more important tech firms than Twitter—or, as Musk now insists, X—have tried and failed in this area. Meta owns several social networks and several messaging apps, and has tried expanding into areas like marketplaces, video, payments and more. But most of these experiments have failed to reach any sort of scale, and Meta’s successes have come from disaggregating and breaking things apart rather than bundling them together. Google’s Alphabet parent company has succeeded in a wide variety of areas such as search, video, email, payments, and more. But its attempts to build a social network flamed out spectacularly, and like Meta, their biggest successes have come from separated apps and brands, not a singular everything app.

For all its cultural importance and for all that the chattering class is addicted to it, Twitter’s just never been that large. Meta has nearly 4 billion monthly active users across its family of apps. Twitter/X, even if you believe Musk’s suspiciously cropped data, is a bit more than a 10th of that. Meta and Alphabet are orders of magnitude larger and more important than Twitter/X. If they’ve tried and failed to create the everything app, there’s no reason to believe that Musk can succeed.

Musk’s vision for the original X.com impressed Silicon Valley. By 2000, X.com had merged with Confinity, and Musk took over as CEO of the new company. He focused his vision on the global financial nexus, the proto-everything app, despite investor and board skepticism. He pursued that idea maniacally, to the detriment of PayPal/X’s core product of payment by email. He also insisted on branding the company as “X,” despite PayPal’s strong existing brand.

And in less than a year, he was coup’d out of the company and replaced as CEO by Peter Thiel. PayPal was saved as a company because its board ejected Musk. This time around there’s no board that matters except Elon, and there’s no one to save him from himself.

[joy2paris]

Paris To Do List!

Clubs:

- l’arc paris (jorja and burna went) - can’t go if you’re short apparently

- silencio 2nd (kaytranada did a set)

- pamela - disco. not as picky with who they let in but go on a thursday as more relaxed

- carmen

- wanderlust

- aquarium de paris cinéaqua

- la machine du moulin rouge

- JAZZ - caveau de la huchette (€10 entry)

- humeur exotique club

- raspoutine

- madeline

- bridge

- supersonic (indie vibes)

- the pop up (bar and concert venue with a free jazz night every tues by gare de lyon)

- SOULECTION NIGHT!!!

- palais de tokyo (izzybozzy did a set there)

- Pachamama (latin american bougie) also mainstream, cash only but bouncers can be weird

Bars:

- le tres particulier 18th

- la pelle

- saint gervais

- le progrès

- bar griffon

- no entry - speakeasy in the basement

- lavomatic

- le syndicat (on same studio road)

- chez prune: next to canal st martin (11/10 from nimue)

- la cidrerie du canal

- the cork and cavern (have pub quizzes every tuesday)

- le nouvel institut (fun student bar 5e and open till late)

- l’orée du parc (5e and recommends any of the spritz)

- au clair du lune (nice cocktail bar with happy hour)

- le balto (6e, great happy hour and vibes, right by christine cinema)

- ruprances - in le marie, lots of young people (louis)

- la perle

- la flèche d’or (kaytranada inspired night)

- Le pavillon des canaux - old house that has been turned into a bar/working space

- la cafe d’église near 10e

- sky drinks thing (vanessa)

- fanzone - place de la concorde. rugby match

Restaurants:

- Benedict - eggs (4e)

- big mama

- bistrot victoires

- kintaro opéra

- chez janou

- le bonaparte

- Jah Jah Paris

- Zinga

- super smash burgers paris

- pho tai - 13 rue philibert lucot 75013

- big black cook

- passage à niveau

- le petit bouillon pharamond (1e)‼️

- le jardin du petit palais

- walyfey

- cook n saj

- flottes

- candide in belleville

- Shana/shosh (2e)

- Chateau voltaire

- mouffetard saigon - most incredible food nimue has ever had in paris

- amagat

- chambre noire studio

- gros bao - amazing chinese/pan asian restaurant next to canal

- bouillon pigalle/république - best cheap french restaurant. good for cheap birthday meal: €15 for starter, main, glass of wine or alternatively their 3 litre bottle of wine to share

Cafes/Food spaces:

- le mazarin

- le mansart

- le très particulier

- chez meunier

- café saint honoré

- SAFE (sunday, work space) near Amar

- espeletia

- 45 rue olivier de serres 75015 paris

- carré pain de mie

- cafe bogata

- a fole

- le carre voltaire

- KITH

- carette, place du trocadéro (viral place w hot chocs)

- belleville market

- arabica coffee at beau passage courtyard

- oliera paris

- sonny’s pizza

- galerie paradis

- recto verso

- benchy

- café berry

- the coffee

- bar principal

- brasserie martin

- onii-san

- cafe charlot

- poilane bakery

- asian/japanese next to opera

- rue santan - known for asian food

- mouffetard - best road in all of paris: right by sorbonne/pantheon/ENS. filled with cheap takeaway places and cute bars

- Le Cèdre - great falafel wrap

- chez nicos - best crepes. good for a night out and open until 3

- trantranzai - yummy noodle chain, one right by pantheon

- nomas tacos - 2ere

- bobs bake shop - 18ere, english speaking

- bonjour jacob

- 207 rue du faubourg

- dumbo paris

- gramme (11e)

- Princess cafe (10e)

- boulangerie de quatre

- le pain retrouve

Cafes to work in:

- cafe husby

- cafe nuage

- l’anti-cafe

- maison fleuret

- SAFE

Shops

- la marelle 2nd - go upstairs

- come on eileen

- Nuovo (quite middle aged vibes)

- villa cœur

- bobbv

- acid violette

- merci

- at dawn

- relique

- louise gift shop

- puces de vanves

- puces de montreuil

- ^ best flea markets in my friend who has recommended me this’s life: enormous and so cheap and better than the central paris ones)

- life drawing in montmartre (class every sunday in a cafe, spenny but lovely vibes, coffee after, discussion, v social. go w a friend and then go to au claire de lune after)

- OFR Paris - magazine shop (3e)

- 8 cité d’antin 75009 paris

- bouliner les halles -

- freepstar

- la pharmacie des âmes - book store

- yvon lambert

Museums/Galleries:

- palais galliera 16th

- mad paris

- sis rue du pas de la mule july

- lacrapule

- 59 rivoli

- fondation h (closed sun, mon)

- YSL museum

- louvre

- tokyo palace

- LV foundation

- rodin museum

- musée de l’orangerie

- pino

- galerie angalia paris 3 - congolaise

- musée de quai branley

- albercon museum and gardens

- south side of siene - shakespeare book company english language

- abbey book store

- perrotin

- pompidou

- Galeries La Fayette

- Bourse de commerce - Pinault collection

Neighbourhoods:

- le sentier - beautiful passages

- montmartre

- the latin quartier

- place des vosges - marais

- PARK - parc de buttes chaumont (best park in all of paris, go at sunset with some beers)

- 9th - good vibes (louis)

- 18th, 6th, 7th nice

- 16th and 8th to avoid

- giverny (monets gardens)

- jardin lazare-rachline

- montparnasse cemetery - rue Daguerre nearby

- canal st martin + chez prune drink

- montparnasse for drinks

- sénat - palais du Luxembourg

- Place where you can see people dancing

Cinemas:

- @moviesinparis

- UGC les halles

- MK2

- christine cinema (6e, show lord of old english language films, do student discussions too)

- the filmothèque (best cinema in 5e, showing old 35mm films)

- la librarie du cinéma du panthéon

- la cinémathèque française - museum dedicated to history of cinema, masterclasses, special screenings

- le forum des images - debates, master classes, exhibitions related to cinemas

- l’arlequin- special screenings and cinema club

- cinema en plein air de l’hôtel paradiso screenings on the rooftop

- On rue Champollion - queue outside cinemas for tickets - you won’t be assigned a seat

- Le reflet Medicis

- La filmothèque (€5 tickets) - shows lots of older films

- Le champ - best programming - usually does all nighters

- Le grand action - shows new releases and English films in a cool cinema

- Lost in Frenchlation - works with cinemas around the city to put on French films with English subtitles! Reccommended at sorbonne nouvelle so lots of students go to meet people

- L’épée de bois

Other:

- BNF - national library and €15 for national student pass. access to all their reading rooms. lovely cafe

- eiffel tower

- 21st JUNE la fête de la music

- Arts et mètiers

- saint german des près

- JAZZ FESTIVAL

- sacré cœur

- banlieue blues

- la villette jazz festival

- le popup du label

- le compte “movies in paris” on IG

- @miaousb

- @bishopnast

- @vsaulz

- @monsieurbonheur

- Pigale (la fete)

- châtelet

- 99 ginger Bercy

- poissonière

- colonel fabien

- billard nation

- bi urban pop play game @mr.glo_ tiktok

- picnic by eiffel at port du belli (mia in france)

- bateaux mouches (1hr seine cruise, €15)

- disney land

- petit palais

- père lachaise

- journée de patrimoine

[eleanorfenyxwrites]

The Romance of Anonymity

Part 2/2

@polyshipweek 2023 prompt day 3 - Bed Sharing

I have nothing much to say about this one other than the fact that finishing this puts me officially at 12,058 words written for these first three prompts for the week. I just started writing it all this weekend...I'm very sleepy haha.

--//--

Their final stop on this outbound leg of the trip, before they turn back towards home, is a Super 8 just off of route 212. Meng Yao draws the short straw so he gets out of the car and pauses to stretch his arms high above his head, even going up on his toes to elongate his spine as much as possible. (Is he possibly doing it partly to make his enormous boyfriends jealous that they can’t get out to stretch yet? Yes, absolutely yes.)

When he’s given up on getting the perpetual tight spot at the base of his spine to pop for now, he drops his arms with a huff and heads into the motel lobby that smells like all motel lobbies do – a little bit like floor cleaner, a little bit like cigarette smoke, and a lot like stale air that way too many people have breathed first.

He asks the bored looking teenager behind the counter for a room for two nights, and he smiles pleasantly in the face of her bright pink bubblegum expanding, expanding, popping before she turns a bored look down to the check-in book, her ballpoint pen waggling manically between her thumb and forefinger.

“All we’ve got’s the honeymoon suite,” she tells him around her chomping. “Tourist season, you know?”

“Yes,” he commiserates, because if there’s anything he understands it’s the pain of menial retail work, even if he doesn’t understand why the Super 8 has a honeymoon suite. “That’s fine, I’ll take it.”

The girl – Amanda, according to her scuffed up nametag – nods and blows another bubble as she reaches for the key. She runs through the usual gamut of questions to check him in, informs him of the check-out time two mornings from now and the existence of a continental breakfast at 8:30 in the morning that Meng Yao desperately hopes they won’t need to subject themselves to, and then he’s heading back out to the lot with the key and a smirk on his lips that his boyfriends clock the second he gets back in the car.

“What are you so happy about?” Mingjue asks him, already smirking as well just in anticipation. Meng Yao leans forward over the seat to bat his eyes at Xichen behind the wheel, dangling the rather unremarkable key off the tip of his finger with a little jingle.

“Er-ge,” he purrs, “Will you please drive us around the back of the building to the honeymoon suite?”

Mingjue’s deep belly-laughter is music to his ears as Lan Xichen turns a brilliant shade of sunset pink and buries his face in his hands, shoulders shaking with his own laughter as well.

“A-Yao if you walked in that lobby and asked for this we’re stopping in Vegas on the way home,” Mingjue tells him when they’ve finished hauling all of their luggage inside for their luxurious two nights in the same place. Xichen’s currently stuck staring in dreamy-eyed awe at the king-sized bed (thankfully bed-shaped and not heart-shaped as Meng Yao had half-feared) that they’ll be sharing, so Meng Yao leaves him to it and sets about digging around for his toiletries.

“Much though I’d like to see this strange new impulsivity of yours play out, no, I did not walk in and ask for this room. It’s the only one left, apparently the motel’s packed with tourists.”

“I sincerely hope we aren’t sharing a wall with a young family,” Xichen pipes up, his voice a little muffled from the way he’s still covering both of his cheeks with his hands, his face smooshed up between his own palms. “Their children may require The Talk a little prematurely.”

“Occupational hazard when staying in cheap motels, I suppose. But no, ge, we have a supply closet on one side and the laundry on the other, I checked as we were coming in,” Meng Yao tells him. “Probably for the best considering what the room is for.”

Mingjue wrinkles his nose a little at that and spares the bed a dubious glance.

“Oh god how many people do you think –”

“Absolutely do not under any circumstances finish that thought,” Meng Yao warns him with an admonishing finger pointed straight at his face. “You do not want to know the answer, and I would like to get laid tonight.”

“You say that like you haven’t already gotten some every night this trip, including the one we spent in the car.”

“I’ll do it either way, A-Yao, I don’t care,” Xichen offers; Meng Yao snorts and shares an indulgent look with Mingjue.

“We know, er-ge. Your willingness has never once been in question.”

“And there’s a very good reason for that, sweetheart, have you seen both of you?”

“I swear I had no idea being cooped up in a car with us for a week would make him so horny,” Mingjue mutters out of the corner of his mouth. “When we get home I’m sticking him in the Jiangs’ big fridge at Lotus Pier for at least a full day.”

Meng Yao raises a brow at Mingjue and makes a point to drift a little closer to where Xichen is still making googly eyes at the bed. “Speak for yourself, I’m thoroughly enjoying horny Xichen. You’re just ungrateful.”

On cue, Xichen reaches out to reel him in with an arm around his waist and a smile pressed into his hair that makes Mingjue roll his eyes at them before clearly giving them up for a lost cause, considering he turns to dig around in his own suitcase for his toiletries.

“Fine, fine, I’m going to go take a shower and you two enjoying being gross together out here.”

“Are you doubting the shared showering capabilities of the Super 8 Motel’s honeymoon suite, Mingjue?” Meng Yao teases to feel Xichen laugh against the side of his head, to see Mingjue tilt his head back to stare up at the ceiling for a long moment in an attempt to pretend like he isn’t smiling too.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am. We won’t die if we take turns one at a time tonight.”

Meng Yao shrugs and settles into Xichen’s arm with a happy sigh, pleased to have his steady, tight warmth wrapped around him to counteract the way he feels like he’s still kind of in a moving car after so many hours and days on the road.

“You’re tense, A-Yao,” Xichen murmurs in his ear as Mingjue disappears into the bathroom. “Want a massage?”

“I should be offering you that, you drove most of today. Tradesies?”

“Mmm deal.”

By the time Mingjue comes back out of the bathroom smelling like home (now that they have the time to bother with breaking out their own soap rather than using what’s provided) and wrapped up in nothing more than a scratchy little too-small towel, Meng Yao is laying between Xichen’s thighs with his face buried in his boyfriend’s stomach and arms around his waist while Xichen scritches through his hair and occasionally dips down to rub his shoulders. (Meng Yao feels like he could start purring any second he’s so content.) When the massive bed barely dips under Mingjue’s weight, Meng Yao reaches blindly for him until he can lace their hands together and bring Mingjue’s hand to his mouth to kiss his knuckles before he just…holds his hand right there, knuckles pressed to lips as he breathes in the steam-sticky air.

They ate dinner out earlier, a long stop at a steakhouse on their route, and so there’s nothing pressing to do now that they’re in for the night except…exist. Meng Yao drifts happily through lazy lassitude and feels it like a barometric change as Xichen and Mingjue both lose the keyed up energy of the road in favor of the same sleepy sort of heaviness dragging at him. He isn’t tired, he isn’t in danger of falling asleep, but it’s been a long week (it’s been so good, but so draining), and he knows Mingjue and Xichen feel the same. It’s nice, then, to lay together like this knowing that they don’t have to go anywhere in the morning if they don’t want to, and there’s nothing else for them to do tonight.

(Xichen called Lan Qiren last night to reassure him they haven’t died on the road, and then Mingjue called Nie Huaisang to make sure he hasn’t died on his own in their house. Meng Yao gets them all to himself tonight, as he has for the vast majority of this week, and yet somehow it still doesn’t feel like enough.)

He stirs a little at that thought and nudges Xichen’s shirt up enough with the tip of his nose to drag kisses against his warm skin that barely count as such; he parts his lips and drags them over the soft planes of Xichen’s stomach, over the waist of his jeans, down into the warm space between his forearm and his hip, and Xichen shivers slightly underneath him before he relaxes again, more than before.

“Er-ge needs his shoulders rubbed, da-ge,” Meng Yao mumbles against Xichen’s hip. “I’ll do yours if you do his.”

Meng Yao melts further into Xichen as Mingjue gently breaks their grip on each other’s hands in favor of skating a broad, warm palm down the length of his back, ending with his hand on his ass and like this it barely even feels sexual, it’s just…comforting. To be held, to be theirs. To be so solidly theirs that any touch is okay. Anything feels good, simply because it makes him feel known.

“You have to let him up if I’m going to rub his shoulders. Sorry babe,” Mingjue tells him with an apologetic kiss to his temple.

Meng Yao does as asked with some grumbling. Xichen sets aside the book in his free hand with a smile to sit up straight again, and adds his own apologetic kiss to Meng Yao’s other temple, just for good measure.

It takes a bit of adjusting – Xichen on the floor at the foot of the bed, Mingjue sitting behind him with his feet on the carpet, legs bracketing Xichen, and Meng Yao kneeling behind Mingjue – but they get there with the same lazy happiness suffusing everything else about their little bubble. Once settled, Meng Yao hooks his chin over Mingjue’s shoulder and slings his arms around his waist to watch him press and dig strong thumbs into the tense, long line of Xichen’s neck until their boyfriend sighs in barely-concealed relief.

“There you go,” Mingjue says, soft and warm. “Good, A-Huan.”

When that simple praise makes Xichen whimper, Meng Yao’s hands on Mingjue’s stomach twitch in sympathetic pleasure, and without his conscious input he strokes delicate fingertips up the thick line of him, sturdy and densely-muscled. He’s just so much in the best way possible, and some of Meng Yao’s lassitude slips away as he skims teasing hands along the beloved, familiar contours of him.

“A-Yao, feeling me up is not the same as rubbing my shoulders,” Mingjue says. Meng Yao, one hand squeezing the swell of Mingjue’s pec without any shame and the other slipping down towards the overlap of his towel hanging on for dear life by a mere inch of fabric, just smirks and lays his cheek on Mingjue’s shoulder to kiss his neck.

“I’m getting there, don’t question my methods.” He pinches Mingjue’s nipple for good measure; laughs when Mingjue jumps and swats at his hand with a laugh of his own.

“You two are hopeless,” Xichen hums from his spot sitting tailor-style on the floor, hands on his knees like any good Lan boy trying to meditate and relax in spite of his boyfriends roughhousing just behind him.

“It’s just foreplay, er-ge, you know he likes it rougher than you do,” Meng Yao says sweetly as he stops groping Mingjue long enough to find a knotted up muscle just under his shoulder blade. Where Mingjue’s method of massage is slow, firm pressure and coaxing tired muscles to relax, Meng Yao takes a somewhat more…pointed approach.

Mingjue hisses through his teeth for Meng Yao digging the point of his extremely bony elbow straight into the center of the tension, but he doesn’t let up. He holds Mingjue’s shoulder still with his free hand and presses, presses, presses – until Mingjue rolls his shoulder a few minutes later and the muscle gives up with a not-very-reassuring crunch and a judder.

“Fuck that feels good,” Mingjue groans, slumping forward until his forehead is resting against Xichen’s hair. Meng Yao runs the flat of his palm up and down Mingjue’s spine a few times, slow and soothing, and marvels again for what feels like the thousandth time this week that they can just…do this. He can have this. It still strikes him at odd times, utterly unexpected – a lightning flash of sharp hot want, a desire to be selfish and greedy and claim everything that these two will give him, followed by the thundering rumble, steady and building, that that’s not only allowed, but desired.

“Mingjue,” he mumbles to try to hide how it wants to stick in his throat, all this wanting. “Can you and er-ge come to bed?”

Xichen, already so closely attuned to all the little nuances of his voice for better or for worse, pats Mingjue’s hair to get him to sit up and extricates himself neatly from his loose hold to stand, turn, and promptly press Meng Yao down into the bed exactly how he likes, firm but not overbearing. Meng Yao goes easily under the weight of him, willowy strong and lovely as he leans in to press their cheeks together, just breathing through the intimate press of it until Meng Yao (hopefully) won’t feel like he’s willing to crawl out of his skin if it’ll mean getting to be closer to his partners.

Somewhere underneath the hazy warmth Xichen is pressing into him, there’s a tiny piece of him that worries it’ll all be swept out from under him one day, and that sooner rather than later. But it’s hard to think about the worst that can happen when Xichen is holding him down, when Mingjue is shucking his towel and turning down the covers without dislodging them. When he’s done, It’s easy enough to do an awkward little shimmy up the bed far enough to slip between too-crisp, too-cool sheets to join Mingjue beneath them, already bare and radiating more than enough heat to make even the thin cotton sheets too much to cover up with, let alone the blanket and comforter also still piled neatly on top.

There’s quiet talking and a few chuckles for the questionable logistics of finagling all three of them into getting naked and settled into a comfortable configuration when none of them want to be too far apart, but when they do finally get there, for a few long minutes there’s nothing but the comforting hush of out-of-synch breathing, the hum of the air conditioner under the window, and the occasional whisper of skin-on-skin, or skin-on-cotton.

Meng Yao drifts in it, content and resting, waiting patiently now that he has bare, warm skin pressed against his and the knowledge that they have all night together settling under his skin again, his moment of urgency soothed instantly by the two who know him and his moods the best.

Mingjue, for all his teasing earlier, eventually makes the first move. Meng Yao sighs and settles in as Mingjue brushes scratchy little kisses along the line of his shoulder, his neck, until he’s turning Meng Yao’s head the other way with kisses to his jaw – and of course Xichen is there to meet him in a heartbeat. He and Mingjue are just…like that, Meng Yao has found, and while at first it had made him feel perhaps a little left out, it had quickly become something he loves (mostly because they use their weird synchronicity to give him everything he asks for and then some in ways that take him apart and put him carefully back together again, so it really all works out in his favor).

What starts out slow and ponderously lazy doesn’t stay that way for long – it never really does when it’s all three of them, to be fair. Tenderness is usually saved for when Xichen is with him or Mingjue separately, or on the rare occasions Meng Yao doesn’t feel like biting every inch of Mingjue he can get his teeth around. And so when his boyfriends fuck him so good he forgets he even has a body, Meng Yao sinks into the satisfying exhaustion of it with a grin he can’t suppress and his heart pounding with the knowledge of what he’s going to tell Mingjue and Xichen the second they’re recovered enough to actually hear him.

He practices it once, in a whisper, under the cover of their ragged breathing. With so much bed to go around they’re both barely touching him as they recover, outstretched hands and tangled ankles under their kicked-off blankets all that binds him to them as he stares up at the spot of a streetlight from the parking lot glowing on the ceiling and tells them, soft and simple, “I love you.”

This time Xichen gets to him first. There’s an arm slung over his waist, squeezing tight tight tight, and a face buried in his neck that suddenly feels warmer and wetter than it had a moment ago. Meng Yao wraps an arm around Xichen’s shoulder and presses a kiss to his forehead just as Mingjue kisses him in the same spot near his hairline, long and slow, leaning over him propped up on one elbow to manage it without squashing him.

Meng Yao feels Mingjue rubbing his free hand up and down Xichen’s back, and Meng Yao strokes Xichen’s hair off the back of his neck, and when Xichen’s recovered enough from both his orgasm and the strongest of his emotions Meng Yao finds himself under an onslaught of kisses punctuated with ‘I love you’s in every flavor spilling from Xichen’s kiss-swollen lips in between each frantic press of mouth to skin. Mingjue mutters it against his hair, his temple, his ear, his jaw, and Meng Yao blinks up at the ceiling gone a little wobbly around the corners of his vision and wonders, half-wildly, if Mingjue was serious about that pit stop in Vegas on the way home.

(They spend the next day in bed, because there’s no reason on earth why they can’t. Yellowstone will still be there the day after, with all its trails and quiet spaces and whatever else it is his boyfriends are so interested in seeing. Meng Yao is happy enough for now with just this – just his boyfriends lazing around in bed with him, the tv set to some awful news channel low enough that it’s nothing more than a murmur, and each of them pursuing their own pastimes in each other’s company.)

(A few days later, when they’ve turned to trek home again, he finds out Mingjue was, in fact, very serious about going to Vegas. They make it all the way to the Strip before Meng Yao folds, and Mingjue laughs at how deeply Xichen pouts about not getting to marry one of them after all [he doesn’t even know if that could happen, but it’s worth knowing anyway]. Meng Yao strokes his hair back over and behind his ear from his usual perch in the back seat and promises him one day they’ll find a way to do it. Xichen’s smile could light up all of Nevada, and probably California too.)

[mahounomanga]

Chikyuu Bouei Shoujo Iko-chan

One of the interesting side effects of defining this blog's scope in the way that I have is that, for better or for worse, only focusing on magical girl manga that don't have anime adaptations automatically filters out almost every multimedia franchise. Sure we've talked about a couple manga adaptations of big live action productions, but there's a difference between that and a series that spreads itself across a handful of mediums simultaneously. Most magical girl multimedia projects from Japan will throw an anime of some form into the mix. Which is to say most, but not all. Today we'll be taking a look at a series which, throughout the late 80s and early 90s, released manga, a video game, a live action series, and more, but has no anime.

Chikyuu Bouei Shoujo Iko-chan (Terrestrial Defense Girl Iko) started as a live action direct-to-video series in 1987. The protagonist is Iko Kawai, a middle schooler who one day helps a member of the intergalactic police she sees lying unconscious on the pavement, and as a reward she is gifted a high tech headset called the Super Incom. The Super Incom allows her to use ESP to do what she believes is right, giving her abilities including but not limited to instant outfit changes, teleportation, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, shrinking, and communicating with beasts. In using her newfound powers, she catches the attention of an Earth defense squad known as the Light Terrestrial Defense Team, LTDT for short. They recruit Iko as a new member, and now armed with her Super Incom and gadgets from the LTDT, it is her duty to protect Earth from extraterrestrial threats.

The first entry in the series, an approximately 47 minute movie, was released on February 28, 1987. The monster designs were done by Toru Narita, who had done special effects work for Godzilla, and co-created Ultraman; so his involvement helped draw attention to the project. The series even has an Ultraman parody character in the form of Miracleman, who can grow to enormous size, but passes out when he does so.

A second movie was released on July 14, 1988, at the start of which Iko bequeaths her Super Incom to a new girl, coincidentally named Iko Sugekawa, who also goes on to work for the LTDT. While the original Iko was played by Akiko Isozaki, a relatively obscure child actress, the new Iko was played by Mia Masuda, a popular idol who was just getting her start around this time. This meant many Iko-chan fans were also Mia Masuda fans, and vice versa. Even now many people seem to know of the series predominantly through her involvement. This movie gives Iko a new (and more iconic) outfit, plus a spectacularly intelligent and accomplished rival named Runna Hakuba. Mia Masuda would stay on as Iko for the third movie, released on June 22, 1990, but each subsequent production would cast a different actress in the role. As for the series director, Minoru Kawasaki is known for producing tokusatsu parodies on the cheap, with Terrestrial Defense Girl Iko being one such example.

Due to the success of the original movie trilogy, a video game based on the series was released for the PC98 engine on December 4, 1992. Titled Chikyuu Bouei Shoujo Iko-chan ~UFO Daisakusen~ (Terrestrial Defense Girl Iko ~The Great UFO Strategy~, this is a turn-based battle game with visual novel elements, in which the LTDT face off against various aliens. Unfortunately, the game didn't sell well. It's speculated that the gameplay style didn't capture the appeal of the title's tokusatsu origins. The in-game art is very pretty though, for whatever that's worth.

Iko would continue starring in live action sequels and spinoffs after that, and a number of companion books were released for the series as well, but the release most relevant to this blog is the Iko-Chan manga.

Running in monthly Comic Comp from the May 1988 issue to the May 1991 issue, this manga was created by Yoshito Asari, with writing input from Minoru Kawasaki, the original director. Asari is best known for his involvement in the production of the original Evangelion anime, for which he was an assistant character designer, and he penned a 4koma spinoff titled Evangelion Yonkoma Zenshuu. However, he is an accomplished mangaka in his own right, creating works such as Wahhaman, Manga Science, and Space Family Carlvinson, the lattermost of which would get an OVA adaptation in 1988.

Over the course of its' run, the Iko-chan manga would amass a total of 32 chapters. The first tankobon volume, containing chapters 1 through 18, was published by Kadokawa on September 13, 1990, but the remainder of the series would not be compiled until a new edition of both volumes was released by Hakusensha under their Jets Comics label on December 25, 1999. A digital rerelease, also by Hakusensha, was made available on December 26, 2014.

This manga makes some changes to the original plot, particularly in Iko's backstory. In this version, Iko already works for the LTDT part-time at the start of the series, and she gets the Super Incom after helping Miracleman while he's drunk. It's less momentous, but I actually prefer it given how poorly the original Iko's buddying up to cops has aged. The way the Super Incom works is slightly different too: it activates when she says please, enunciating each syllable (o-ne-ga-i). This makes whatever she thinks will help happen, but if she attempts to use this power for selfish reasons, the device will malfunction.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to read very much of the manga, and the language barrier made it difficult to get into any version of this series. Huge shout-out to the surprisingly detailed Japanese Wikipedia page, which was a tremendous help in researching for this overview. They also have quite a bit of information on later installments in this series I glossed over. There is a lot more I could get into, but I wanted to mainly focus on the meat of the franchise, and this post is long enough as is.

I really hope fan translations of the series become available one day, because Terrestrial Defense Girl Iko seems like a lot of fun, and I would definitely recommend it to fans of older tokusatsu. There are elements of it I don't vibe with, but still, it has an interesting premise, some decently entertaining humor, a super catchy theme song, and a killer aesthetic.

[windows-in-the-night]

young girls in makeup stores

tbh i can see both sides of this argument so....

the side that everybody is taking:

i agree with the fact that it's okay to take some time to figure out how to be a kid and have an awkward. like when i was 10, i didn't have a phone or social media. i was reading all day and playing with my sister outside. i also had a really weird obsession with triangles. it was a pretty sweet reality now that i'm looking back on it.

i also think that these kids in stores need to learn how to take responsibility for money. i've seen a lot of tiktoks with older siblings and babysitters showing off the makeup collection of a young girl, and it definitely looks like it costed a lot of money. i understand that there is inflation nowadays and everything costs so much more, but the value of a dollar still goes a very long way.

another thing i've heard is that the kids in these stores aren't being very nice to employees, and that's another thing that they need to learn. a little bit of kindness goes a very long way. retail also isn't a kind field to work in to begin with, so just always being nice to the employee asking you what you need in the store or the employee behind the register is one of the best things that you can do for them.

finally, kids need to learn how to do research about products or ask employees nicely. CHILDREN DO NOT NEED RETINOL DROPS! if these girls want to learn skincare from a young age, you need to start with a very gentle cleanser, a face lotion without harsh ingredients, and occasionally a fun fruity exfoliant or a cheap face mask.

now i'd like to play devil's advocate here:

what if this is the new way to have an awkward phase? kids have been evolving all throughout history, and that's perfectly natural. i'm sure that if you showed someone from the 40s what kids in the early aughts were like, they would be horrified at how bad they were. i'm sure that a lot of these kids are going to look back and be like "what was i doing omg??!!" personally i feel like my awkward phase is now coming to an end, so I've definitely looked back on a lot of the stuff i did and said when i was younger with the exact same reaction. having an awkward phase is literally just a part of growing up, and these little girls getting bullied on the internet for it aren't going to feel any better about themselves. i feel like other adults and people online need to approach this whole thing with a lot more sympathy than what they're saying about these girls rn.

kids do need to learn how to take responsibility for money, yes, but it is also the parents' faults. do these parents even know where their money is going?? i feel like it's super important for parents to know a bit about the lives of their children, such as their kids' friends, what their kid likes to spend money on, kids' opinions about school, etc...

it's also the PARENTS who need to teach these kids manners. lots of teachers on tiktok nowadays are complaining about this in addition to the employees in makeup stores, so we can definitely see that manners are an issue. i feel like gentle parenting is good in seeing what your kid wants and needs, but at the end of the day, this millennial gentle parenting bullshit needs to have some sort of discipline that goes along with it. if these parents are afraid to see their kids get upset or cry, then they're cowards. obviously you shouldn't be parenting with this intention, but you have to realize as a parent that your child needs to hear the word NO, even if they get upset about it.

finally, parents need to give their kids a little bit of guidance!! if you see your 10 yo child obsessing over retinol drops or foundation shades because "all of my friends are doing it," sit down with your kid and have a talk. what you'll discover besides the enormous amount of online influence and peer pressure that comes with this is that your child is growing up!! especially for girls, many of whom are starting to get very insecure about this age, it would be helpful to give your daughter some skincare pointers and show her what are age appropriate products that she could be using.

a separate thing but kind of related to this argument

there is no need to be a misogynist about this. there's actually never a need to be sexist. you don't need to be like "girls these days are awful" or "my girl needs to learn how to have fun like a boy" because it isn't these girls' faults!! remember that a little kind guidance goes a very long way <3

[ghostcrows]

Human civilisation will definitely make it through climate change intact, and if you live in a developed country, you won't see the worst of it. However, heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, rising sea levels, increasing desertification, species extinctions and wars over scarce natural resources will get more common. It's nuanced! Yes, it's bad to deny or ignore climate change, but it's also bad to get into doomer mode about it! Most issues aren't either "perfectly fine or the end of the world," but somewhere inbetween. I hate how social media's oversimplified world view seems to push us to extremes about this - and just about anything. Both climate denial (it's not happening, it's happening but it's not us, it may be a good thing, etc.) and climate doomerism (the world's going to end no matter what we do, no point in pretending otherwise) promote a "we shouldn't do anything about climate change" mentality. Since climate change denial is increasingly hard to maintain, fossil fuel companies have started to bankroll climate doomers - it has the same "might as well, nothing we can do about it" effect!

It'd be super irresponsible to ignore all the bad things that are already here and will get worse in the future - species extinctions, coastal cities flooded, the spread of deserts, more extreme weather events like heatwaves and floods, etc. But it's also a distorted picture if we don't include the fact that renewable energy is becoming really cheap and widespread, cities and countries are starting to do something about the problem, and the flip side of increased effects of climate change is increased awareness and calls for action. Human population growth is slowing and we're predicted to stabilise at around 10 billion by 2080. Already we've avoided the worst case scenario predictions from 10-20 years ago. Back then there was legitimate talk of temperature rises up to 6 degrees C by 2100, which would have been a mass extinction level catastrophe. Now the worst case scenario looks about 3 degrees C by 2100 - STILL ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE MIND YOU! But also literally not the end of the world. Also, back then the problem seemed insurmountable as fossil fuels seemed the only way to power our planet to allow everyone to have a high standard of living. That's no longer true. We now know what to do to solve the climate crisis, and we now CAN do it! It's just a matter of political will. Also, bear in mind the climate isn't a binary switch going from "everything's fine" to "the end of the world" in an eyeblink, it's not a yes/no thing but a spectrum! Huge and irreversible environmental damage has already been done that we can't fix, sadly, but we still have an enormous scope for slowing and stopping climate change before it gets TOO bad, and maybe even reversing it in the distant future! A lot of people seem to see the future as a choice between an uninhabitable wasteland and a glittering paradise with advanced technology. But the world is already a mix of both in some ways, and will probably continue to be! I don't get why we have to pick between utopia and dystopia and assume that every little step away from utopia is inevitably a step into dystopia. The future probably won't be perfect and it won't be catastrophic - it'll probably be "eh, alright I guess?," with ups and downs like the present and the rest of human history. The great thing about the climate crisis is that it's a human crisis and that's why it's a good idea to be optimistic. Faith in humanity isn't like, for example, faith in religion. Either God exists or he doesn't, and your belief can't change that either way. Same with optimism and pessimism about a disease, a natural disaster or anything else you can't change. But if you believe in humanity, that will affect your actions as a human, and if enough of us do, that will affect our actions as a species. Optimism about the human future is a self-fulfilling prophecy! So - let's not ignore the climate crisis, but let's not fall into doomerism either. Let's have climate action fired up by enthusiastic optimism about the fact that a better world really is possible - we can do this! We can save the world!

You're right

Thank you for sending this cause I get very doomer mode about it all and it's definitely not conducive to action at all you are right about that . And it's good to hear from someone who does have hope in a realistic way

I believe in a better earth...change the world my final message goodbye

[shainachantake2]

Great news, my parents just informed us they're visiting my sister for the latter half of December 👍👍 The way they did was just super ugh but what else is new 🤣

Mother: hey [sister] do you have a wishlist for Xmas? And what about [brother-in-law] for his birthday? And what about you, [father]?

Sister: not yet! I'll think about it!

Mother: oh yeah [Shaina], we're going to visit [sister] on 15 December!

She either deliberately or just in her usual neglectful way forgot to include us there, lol. Might I remind everyone she also never did us the courtesy of asking what my daughter wanted for her bday and bought her a cheap ass dress from the supermarket, not even in her favourite colours and it's too short. They came in March with an enormous Playmobil set that they chose to quote "make up for the last few years" (because the last thing they got her (and us!) before that was a play tent from Amazon in March 2020), but the theme is just..... What.... As for what I got, uhm.... I think I got a table runner? 🤣 For everyone's info, they're well off financially so it's not a case of, they can't afford it. I remember my grandparents doing so much for us, so I'm supremely unimpressed.

Whatever. The reason this is a good thing is that I am planning to announce the pregnancy on Chanukah when I'll be 35 ish weeks, and they'll be all the way in the US so they'll be super distracted with the golden child and won't be tempted to come visit or freak out or put me in the spotlight. 👍 I'm giving them the absolute bare minimum because I do not want my children to be their trophy to brag about, especially not one that cost us £8000 and lots of tears and anguish. And blood and bruises. 😆

[randomvarious]

Today’s compilation:

Super Bad Is Back 1973 Funk / Soul / R&B

K-tel, a prolific Canadian compilation label that became a fixture of middle-America in the 70s, and was synonymous with overall cheapness and disposability, provided one hell of an outlier here with this 1973 record of theirs that's filled with contemporaneous funk, soul, and R&B tunes. Usually what mars K-tel is their gathering of huge, obvious hits, rendering their releases as practically useless and annoying, but with this album, even though they still chose a couple enormously popular songs, like Barry White's sex-blaxploitational "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby" and Bill Withers' gospel-inspired "Lean on Me," the rest of these tunes haven't fared nearly as well, commercially.

And that's what ultimately makes this such an exceptional release from K-tel. The selection here is simply stellar, with almost all of its tracks coming from 1973, specifically, and almost all of them magnitudes more obscure than what you'd expect from a typical K-tel release too. To be clear, all of these songs still managed to chart in some capacity in the US, but most of them didn't end up charting that well, and if they did, they're, for the most part, not signature hits.

For example, it took some time for Earth, Wind & Fire to become maybe the most popular funk and soul band of the 70s, but in their first few years, their biggest hit was a song with a touch of Latin to it called "Evil," which only made it to #50 on Billboard's Hot 100 and #25 on its R&B chart. And Curtis Mayfield, who had clearly established himself as one to definitely look out for by 1973, appears on here with "Future Shock," a flute-infused funk stunner that features his famed falsetto, that only barely scraped the top 40 and didn't make the R&B top 10 either!

And there's so many other examples of phenomenal, yet underappreciated gems on this album. Brooklyn's Mandrill delivers a lively piece of funk-rock with a blistering guitar solo called "Fencewalk," which only made it to #52 on the Hot 100 and #19 on the R&B chart, and in the case of one-hit wonders, a vocal group who dared to call themselves New York City doesn't even come with their one hit! Instead, K-tel gives us "Make Me Twice the Man," a terrifically lush soul joint that only made it to the bottom of the Hot 100 and #44 on the R&B chart.

So, in total, there's 20 songs on this album, and I ended up adoring 18 of them. This is another one of those compilations that reminds you just how much fantastic funk, soul, and R&B was floating around out there in the pre-disco 70s. Not even the charts could properly handle it all, but in this one rare case, K-tel was surprisingly able to. Unless you're a true-blue, dyed in the wool early 70s funk, soul, and R&B maven, I really don't see how you could possibly be familiar with a significant chunk of this amazing sampling of songs that mostly came out in 1973.

I also can't believe I found an essential K-tel album. This is like picking a four-leaf clover, folks! 🍀

Highlights:

Joe Simon - "Theme from Cleopatra Jones" First Choice - "Armed and Extremely Dangerous" Annette Snell - "You Oughta' Be Here With Me" The Manhattans - "There's No More Me Without You" Fred Wesley & The J.B.'s - "Doin' It to Death" Chakachas - "Jungle Fever" Kool & the Gang - "Funky Stuff" Barry White - "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little Bit More Baby" Millie Jackson - "It Hurts So Good" The Chi-Lites - "Stoned Out of My Mind" Curtis Mayfield - "Future Shock" Don Covay - "I Was Checkin' Out She Was Checkin' In" Bill Withers - "Lean on Me" New York City - "Make Me Twice the Man" Mandrill - "Fencewalk" Lyn Collins - "Think (About It)" Earth, Wind & Fire - "Evil" James Brown - "Sexy, Sexy, Sexy"

[aquaticpal]

44. Hardest sidequest in the series?

I'm not a sidequest completionist so there are probably a bunch of ones I found to be too much of a pain to do... but shoutout to the Big Poe hunt for the 4th bottle in OoT: I suck at horseback archery, I suck at shooting moving targets, I suck super major hard at the intersection of both, bye.

45. Best sidequest in the series?

After a whole lotta thought, I'm gonna give kudos to OoT's Gold Skulltula hunt. The rewards are useful even if you only collect a portion of them, there are clear and unmistakable audio cues, the map thoroughly documents locations you've cleared out, and they're often hidden in creative ways (and no cheap-outs like "kill a miniboss and three collectables pop out"). It just hasn't been the same since 😆

46. Favourite remake/remaster (Ocarina of Time 3D, The Wind Waker HD, Link's Awakening for the Switch)?

To be an enormous nerd, it is actually Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition for packing the already content-filled game with MORE CONTENT. DLC CONTENT. CONTENT NO ONE ASKED FOR. CONTENT THAT YOU WON'T FINISH AND HAVE TO MAKE SPREADSHEETS OVER. GIVE IT TO MEEE (yeah I didn't finish it either.)

47. Most fulfilling Zelda game?

Gonna have to be Breath of the Wild because of the sheeeeer amount of things you can accomplish, especially if you like exploring. Like pwning enemies with a huge arsenal of tools? Like solving a buttload of puzzles? Like being ADHD-distracted collecting shiny things? Like hiking? Like hunting? Like being a nature photographer? Like playing dress-up? Like being a gourmand? Uh sorry what was that about a princess I'm supposed to rescue?

TLOZ asks