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spikeisawesome456 · 4 years

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1. Spotify, SoundCloud, or Pandora? Uh… None, actually. I use YouTube and iTunes mostly. I have YouTube premium family (means that for $15, I get six accounts that can have YouTube Premium) so I don’t have to worry about ads and all that.

2. is your room messy or clean? Both? I only have a thin area of my room that can have movement, since it’s so small. The majority is taken up either of my bed or my dresser/end table/storage. So the room is full of stuff, but the main area is kept clean so I can move through it, ya know?

3. what color are your eyes? Green/blue, but mostly green. I also have brown in the center of my eyes. I guess you could call it hazel? I don’t really know what hazel eyes mean, honestly.

Here’s a close up I took a while ago. I’m looking at you!! Ha!

... I just realized I’ve not changed at all since I was a child. :-(

4. do you like your name? why? Yep! I like it. I have a long, more formal name (Katherine) but also a shorter, more informal nickname (Katie). I like this dynamic of my name. I also like how it sounds. Both of them. <3

5. what is your relationship status? Single, but okay with that. I’m starting to think I’m aro, as I don’t… ahh, like people? Much? It’ complicated.

6. describe your personality in 3 words or less Very, very, annoying.

7. what color hair do you have? I think you could call it golden?? I usually call it dirty strawberry blonde. It’s a coppery color, but also blonde. Not quite strawberry, not quite dirty. A mix?

This is a somewhat good example, but it is a bit more copper-toned than usual, due to the light next to my computer. The kids at work ask me sometimes if I dyed my hair, since it is almost completely orange on the badge my work printed for me, aha. But this shows the range of colors my hair goes through.

8. what kind of car do you drive? color? Ha! What, you think I’m a functioning adult? I don’t know how to drive.

9. where do you shop? Literally anywhere? I don’t care. I get my pants from Walmart, my shirts from wherever sells cute fandom shirts.

10. how would you describe your style? Ha!!! I answered this one in an ask, but I determined I have no style. I just prefer comfort to fashion.

11. favorite social media account Hm… I don’t tend to care much for social media accounts, personally at least. I just follow whatever is neat. I guess I like Game Grumps social media?? Eh.

12. what size bed do you have? Twin. It’s pressed up against the wall and I just sleep pressed into the corner like I’m trying to merge and become one with the wall. One day, sweet wall……..

13. any siblings? Sadly, yes. _._ An older brother. He’s actually fine, but still siblings...

14. if you can live anywhere in the world where would it be? why? Probably…. Hm. I liked New Zealand when I visited, but I don’t know if it would be the best place for me to live, since it’s just so different to how I live now. Same with Ireland, though both would be amazing for me. I think… honestly, where I currently live, since it has good weather and is familiar to me.

15. favorite snapchat filter? Don’t use snapchat! :-D

16. favorite makeup brand(s) Hm… I used to only use Bare Minerals, but they don’t have great coverage, I’ve found. I’ve been using Clinique now, but I think they make me break out, which is bad. I don’t like makeup and I always feel it on my skin, or else it makes me break out after usage. I have very sensitive skin, ya feel me?

17. how many times a week do you shower? Never! I hate showers. I don’t like the feel of being blind when the water gets into my eyes.

I take a bath twice a day, though. Once in the morning and once at night, where I wash my hair. I know I’m not supposed to wash my hair so often, but it’s a habit at this point and it helps me sleep now.

18. favorite tv show? Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly since it was so important to me growing up. I still love it, though! I just don’t tend to have favorites, ya know? But Buffy will always mean the most to me.

19. shoe size? I don’t… I don’t really know? Heels I’m a size 8, I think? But I wear size 9.5 for sneakers, since I like my shoes a bit big. I think??? I don’t really know.

20. how tall are you? Ehhhhhhhh I say I’m 5’4, but who knows. I think I’m 5’3 and a half. I just round up. According to my doctor’s records I shrank and am 5’2, so who even knows anymore. Height is a made-up concept to control the short. ;-)

21. sandals or sneakers? Sneakers, god. I wore sandals once for a fancy event and I got sand and dirt on my feet immediately. It was sad. :-(

22. do you go to the gym? HA!

23. describe your dream date I don’t really know. As I said, possibly aro. Maybe…… Uh…. Somewhere quiet. Private. I’m not good in groups or crowds. OR! Maybe a theme park, the absolute opposite of what I said. OR a fair. I love fairs! Anything, really. I’m not picky.

24. how much money do you have in your wallet at the moment? Oh! This one is a shock, because my dad just gave me a lot of money since I paid for dinner with my mom, since he was being an overly dramatic baby over me calling out his awful behavior and left us alone for dinner at Red Lobster, and he stubbornly paid me back. So I’ve got… let’s see… about $135, if you count the $30 I had in before.

25. what color socks are you wearing? Ha! Jokes on you! I’m not WEARING ANY SOCKS!!!! AHA!!!!!!!

26. how many pillows do you sleep with? One. Too many makes me feel weird.

27. do you have a job? what do you do? Well… I HAD job, because Covid. I was an after-school teacher, where I looked after kids, kind of daycare style, ya know? I loved it, and I love kids. Currently I’m “teaching” some of the kids I used to look after STEAM over Zoom. Apparently, the girls- sisters- missed doing my STEAM experiments each week and asked their mom to contact me to do the experiments with them over Zoom. I use “teaching” in quotes, since I mostly just do science activities with them, step by step, without much teaching involved. I used to explain why what we did was science, but I don’t want to make the kids do more work when they have so much with Covid going on. Also, I’m lazy, ha.

28. how many friends do you have? None! Seriously, but it’s okay. As I said earlier, I’m not the biggest fan of people so it’s kind of reliving to be on my own for the most part. I had been making a new friend before Covid, but we’ve not spoken much since. I did text her once and she seemed friendly still. Maybe we can meet up after this all is done with.

29. whats the worst thing you have ever done? Uh… I don’t really know? I used to get into fights online, mostly just fighting for what I believed in, but I never really attacked anyone, or I didn’t mean to. I’ve not done many bad things?? Not to make myself out to be a goodie-two shoes, but I don’t like hurting people or being “bad,” so I tend to avoid things like that. I’ve probably done things others consider “bad,” but that don’t register to me, so I don’t really know.

30. whats your favorite candle scent? Oh my god. I’m currently OBSESSED with this new candle from Bath and Body Works. It’s called Strawberry Pound Cake, but it smells like strawberry vanilla, and it’s AMAZING. I love it. I also have it in hand cream and hand sanitizer form and it’s THE BEST. It reminds me of those strawberry vanilla candy things from when I was a kid.

31. 3 favorite boy names Daniel, William, and… uh… I’m not sure. Alex, maybe? I know I like Daniel and William though.

32. 3 favorite girl names Emmaline, Clara, and… hmmm… Not sure, again.

33. favorite actor? Hm. Not sure. I don’t do favorites much. I guess Misha Collins? If this were about YouTube people, I’d say Dan Avidan in a heartbeat. Though… technically he is an actor… he did an actual YouTube show, with a plot and acting, so he’s technically an actor. So, then, him.

34. favorite actress? I’m even less sure about this one, honestly. I don’t pay attention to actors or actresses much, really. I know Misha since he does GISH, but otherwise I’m unsure about actors much.

35. who is your celebrity crush? Oh, Dan Avidan, clearly. He’s amazing. My profile pic on Tumblr has been the same for 4 years because I can’t get over the fact I met him. I used to change my profile pic every so often, with my artwork, but now I’m never changing my profile pic. Ever.

36. favorite movie? Uh…. Probably Phantom of the Opera, 2004. I love that film. Again, not super into favorite things, but if I had to pick one it would be PotO.

37. do you read a lot? whats your favorite book? Well, I DO read a lot. Mostly it’s fanfiction though, aha. And again, favorites aren’t really my thing. I used to say Island of the Blue Dolphins, but I reread that book a few years ago and didn’t like it as much. Still liked it but was more eh about it and never finished my read through. Maybe Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli. I’ve not read it since I was a child, but I recall it being really good. My favorite book I’ve read recently would probably have to be Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. I had a lot of problems with it, but ultimately, I loved that book.

38. money or brains? Brains, obviously. They taste better. :-)

Though to be honest, I do say brains. Money is good, don’t get me wrong, but with brains the person can actually think about doing what is right or wrong. Money corrupts and without thought, there’s so way around it.

39. do you have a nickname? what is it? Yep! Technically I only go by my nickname, since I go by Katie, but my full name is Katherine.

40. how many times have you been to the hospital? Ooooh, personally? Once, when I broke my arm when I was 4, almost 5. Well, many times for that, but one time overall. I’ve been in the hospital often for my mom and dad, though. My mom is disabled and is a bit of a hypochondriac, so we sometimes have to take her to the hospital whenever she has pain, just to be safe. She did once have kidney stones, though, so it was needed. My dad had a panic attack once and thought it was a heart attack, so we were there for that. I also went to the hospital once when my grandma was dying, to say goodbye with my dad. It wasn’t sad, which says a lot about my and my dad’s relationship with my grandma.

41. top 10 favorite songs HA! Can’t. Seriously, can’t. I love too many songs equally for this one.

42. do you take any medications daily? Yeah. I used to take Seroquel nightly, but that just made me gain 40 pounds and didn’t help with mood much. It only helped me sleep and that was replaced by over the counter melatonin and Benadryl. So I gained 40 pounds for nothing and I’m struggling getting the weight off. Yay!!!!!!

43. what is your skin type? (oily, dry, etc) Both, I think?

44. what is your biggest fear? Death.

45. how many kids do you want? I don’t know, one or two? I don’t know if I want to get married though, so… Single mom for the win? I also might want to adopt older kids, or foster them at least, give them a place to live. When I’m on my own and have a stable, good paying job of course.

46. whats your go to hair style? Whatever my hair naturally does, honestly. I just brush it out and it does its own thing. I have thin, wavy hair, though, so it’s mostly fine. It parts in the middle, and I don’t have bangs. It refuses to grow passed my boob level, no matter how long it goes between haircuts, so it hangs there. It always grows back to boob level, but never passed. No idea why.

47. what type of house do you live in? (big, small, etc) Very presumptuous, question thing, to assume I live in a house. I live in an apartment, with my mom, dad, and older brother. It’s fairly big, with two bedrooms and a converted den for my bedroom, but it’s small for 4 of us. Less then 1500 square feet. I think 1200?

48. who is your role model? Hm. This is gonna sound conceited, but myself. Or, the person I want to be. I have an idea of what I’d like to be in life, and that is what guides me. It’s not based off anyone I’ve met, but based on my own personal desires, a mis-mesh of ideals. The only person you can be is yourself. Trying to be like someone else will only hurt you. Even wanting to be like someone else can be hurtful. Not that I’m putting down anyone who has role models! But it just… never worked for me. Putting people on pedestals hurt me, so I just look forward to being the best version of me that I can be.

49. what was the last compliment you received? Hm… I get a lot of compliments on my Facebook page, people saying I’m doing a good job with that. So that, probably. 50. what was the last text you sent? It was too my dad, who, as previously mentioned, was being a bit of a butt and was mad at me for calling him on his rude behavior to me and my mom. I texted “alright,” to him telling me to not buy him a takeout dinner. I didn’t listen though, and he ate it when we got home after sulking a bit. He’s better now, but he’s yet to apologize. He never does. -.- 51. how old were you when you found out santa wasn’t real? Uh… Wait, Santa isn’t… real…?!?!?!

Aha. JK. I don’t know. Maybe 8?? I don’t remember. I just know I believed when I was 6-ish, when Polar Express came out, since I asked for Santa bells for Christmas. I think I also believed the next year, but I don’t remember much. I learned the difference between Judaism and Catholicism around then, and eventually decided to be Jewish when I was 12-ish, but who knows, man. Who knows?

52. what is your dream car? One that self-drives and doesn’t ever crash, so I don’t have to drive myself.

53. opinion on smoking?

Bad! Bad, bad, bad!!! No smoking!

Truthfully, honestly. My mom gets really sick around smokers, especially around pot and vape smokers. It makes her have an allergic reaction. 54. do you go to college? Yeah baby! I just finished and will be getting my (probably useless) degree in the mail soon! Summa Cum Laude, baby! (Highest honors, if you don’t know what that means). Now I just got to get into grad school so I can do something with my Psych BA! Aha. Haha. Ahahaha. Ha… 55. what is your dream job? School psychologist! I want to help children, but don’t have the temperament to be a teacher. I’m too lenient and would let them walk all over me. I kind of do as an after-school teacher. The kids respect me, though, and like me well enough. I don’t think I could be the only person responsible for them, though. I get frazzled, which I learned while doing my STEAM activities and the kids would NOT listen, sometimes. I could do it, though, if the whole school psych thing doesn’t pan out. Or school counselor, would be my second choice. Something to do with kids, though. 56. would you rather live in rural areas or the suburbs? Hm. I like city life, though I think I’d prefer suburbs. I live in a kind of suburb, though I live in a major city… We just don’t have skyscrapers near where I live, only downtown. We have over a million people in my city, and 3 million in the county. So, big. 57. do you take shampoo and conditioner bottles from hotels? Uhm yeah??? Why wouldn’t you? They’re free souvenirs! I went to a kid-themed hotel once, near Disneyland, for my parent’s anniversary, which had this neat bubblegum shampoo from their kid spa. I loved it so much I asked my dad to buy me a whole bottle of it as a body wash. It was… expensive, but I still have some left over, which I’ve kept for some reason. 58. do you have freckles? Some, yeah. Not many on my face, just some around my arms, scattered. I have a big one on my left palm, at the base of the meat of my thumb, if that makes sense. Otherwise they’re just scattered all around. 59. do you smile for pictures? Yep! Well… my version of smiling. I don’t ever smile with my teeth, since they’re small and my lips are so long, so it looks awkward when I smile with teeth. Instead I just smile with my lips. 60. how many pictures do you have on your phone? HA! I had to get myself a 164 GB phone to deal with the fact that I take lots of photos. Over 2,000, now. 61. have you ever peed in the woods? Ew? No? I hate the woods. Or, going into the woods. I like the idea of woods and I like being in them, guided, but staying in them? No. Scary. 62. do you still watch cartoons? Yep! I’m currently watching She-Ra! I like it! 63. do you prefer chicken nuggets from Wendy’s or McDonalds? Oh, no contest. Wendy’s. I do like McDonalds’ chicken nuggets, but Wendy’s are just *chef kiss* mwah! 64. Favorite dipping sauce? Ranch, but I especially like Wendy’s ranch. It’s creamy and nice. 65. what do you wear to bed? Pretty much what I wear during the day. I used to literally just go to bed in my day clothes, before I started taking a bath each night, about 6 years ago. Now I wear yoga pants (ones without pockets, since I finally found ones with pockets for day use!!) and an old faded T-shirt. 66. have you ever won a spelling bee? HA! HAHA! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I can’t spell. I’ve liteally been spelling half my words wrong this entire time. Spell check is my best friend. Though! I did get to the finals of a class spelling bee once, since they gave me easy words (to me, at least) and my classmates harder ones. It was almost funny. 67. what are your hobbies? I like to draw, paint, write, do other crafty stuff… Things like that. I also read, fanfiction mostly. :-) 68. can you draw? Yep!!

Behold! My digital drawings!

This was my most recent traditional drawing, using charcoal for the first time. It was for GISH.

69. do you play an instrument? Nope! Ha, but I do wish I could, ya know? But I’m bad at doing different things with one hand vs. the other, which is why I can’t clap my hands and stomp my feet with alternating rhythm. I can only do one thing at once, ya know?

70. what was the last concert you saw? Ohh, hm. This is a good question… Hm… I think… It was at my county fair last year? A country dude with my parents. Trace Atkins, my dad said. I’ve not had the chance to see many concerts recently, sadly. :-(

71. tea or coffee? I like coffee better on the whole, but I’ve begun to like fruit teas, like raspberry or strawberry. I also like this nice orange/cinnamon tea.

72. Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts? Dunkin Donuts, is this supposed to be hard? We don’t have many where I live, though. I like their iced coffee from stores, though.

73. do you want to get married? Ehhhh…… I’ve talked about this before. I’m not sure, really. If I find someone I like who likes me, maybe. But I have a hard enough time making friends, so I doubt it.

74. what is your crush’s first and last initial? N.O.

(Stands for no one. :-) )

75. are you going to change your last name when you get married? IF I get married, probably not. I like my last name. It’s unique.

76. what color looks best on you? Hm. I don’t really know. Maybe red? I don’t have style so I don’t know. I like blue and purples, but who knows.

77. do you miss anyone right now? Eh, not really.

78. do you sleep with your door open or closed? Closed, but my “door” is a curtain, since I sleep in a converted den which has two open windows into the living room that are covered by curtains, and no door, which I also cover with a curtain on a shower rod. It was good when I was a sleepless teen, but now that I’m an adult trying to fix my sleep habits, it’s not so good, ya know.

79. do you believe in ghosts? Not… really. Not much more to say about this.

80. what is your biggest pet peeve? People being rude. Like… stop it.

81. last person you called` Hm. Prolly my dad? Or my brother. I don’t like calling people. Phone anxiety, ya feel me?

82. favorite ice cream flavor? Rainbow sherbet! Fun fact, when I was younger at camp, maybe 16 or 17, our camp counselor asked us this question and I replied with rainbow sherbet, saying it properly (sher-bet, not sher-bert) and my camp counselor went OFF, saying “Thank you!” for saying it properly. He was… something else.

83. regular oreos or golden oreos? Oooh, I like those cinnamon bun Oreos. You know the kind? They’re the BEST. I can’t buy them often or else… well. I’ve already gained 40 pounds the last couple years. No need for more, aha.

84. chocolate or rainbow sprinkles? Rainbow. Pretty!!

85. what shirt are you wearing? My “Scare to Care” shirt that I bought for charity a few years ago. It’s a charity that raises money for Camp Kesem, which helps children who have a relative undergoing cancer treatment have a nice, normal camp experience for free, I think.

86. what is your phone background? My lock screen is the picture of me and Dan, the background is the drawing I did of the Guardians of the Galaxy years ago.

87. are you outgoing or shy? Both! Aha. I’m friendly when talking to people, seemingly outgoing, but I don’t go up and talk to people. I fear I’m annoying them, ya know? And I’m awful in groups. I never know when to talk and when I do talk, I fear I’m annoying people. Actually… I always feel I’m annoying people. Aha. Ha…

88. do you like it when people play with your hair? Yep! People don’t do it often, though. Kids will, but you have to be careful when they do that. Sticky hands are not the best to be in your hair….

89. do you like your neighbors? I guess? I’ve not spoken to my neighbors since my next-door neighbors of 5 years moved out 5 years ago. They had kids my age, but we never really spoke. They were… not the brightest, or kindest. They once took in a stray puppy and locked it in their hot garage. My older brother and I freed it and kept it in our hallway outside our apartment, since we have emergency doors that we could close to keep him in, while we played with him. I’m allergic to dogs, though, and we have guinea pigs, so we couldn��t bring him inside our apartment. Luckily their parents got home after an hour or so and brought the dog to the shelter. They also had a different dog who kept escaping and my brother and I had to keep an eye on it often. It once got into our apartment and it was, ah. Fun. She didn’t hurt our pigs, though, so it was a plus!

90. do you wash your face? at night? in the morning? YES. Both morning and night. It has not helped my acne.

91. have you ever been high? Nope! Not even when I got my wisdom teeth out. I was fine the minute I woke. I felt ripped off. I was a bit over tired, but no more than if I’d not slept the whole night. Maybe I’m just always in a perpetual “high” state???

92. have you ever been drunk? Nope! I have a high tolerance, so one or two drinks does absolutely nothing for me. And I’ve never tried more than a coupe drinks. I’m almost afraid to see myself drunk, ya know? I’m so energetic usually, but keep a lot of thoughts inside, so who knows what I’d be like. I don’t like being out of control and I honestly think I’d hate it.

93. last thing you ate? Shrimp Scampi. From Red Lobster. ^-^

94. favorite lyrics right now Uh… Again, no real idea. I’m not good with favorite things.

95. summer or winter? Hm. Summer, I guess? It’s not much different where I live, though we get more rain during winter. I prefer heat to cold generally, though. So summer in general. I also like summer aesthetics, you know?

96. day or night? Hm. Day, though I do love night time. I just usually am inside during the night.

97. dark, milk, or white chocolate? Milk! I hate all other kinds of chocolate.

98. favorite month? Do people have favorite months?? February, I guess? Since I was born in February! And it’s a rebel. Only 28 days compared to the usual 30 or 31. And sometimes it has 29. Take that, months!

99. what is your zodiac sign Aquarius. :-D

100. who was the last person you cried in front of? Hm… that’s a… good question… I don’t like crying in front of people. Probably my mom or dad. I tend to head off on my own when I cry, though. I don’t like people seeing me sad, ya know?

Yay!! I’m done!! This took waaaayyyy too long. I’ve been doing this for probably over 2 hours. Hope y’all learned something. Prolly that I’m uninteresting, aha. ^-^ If you made it this far without skipping, I love you. <3 If you skipped… YOU’RE DEAD TO ME!

Ha, just kidding. ^-^

OR AM I?!?!

:-)

#My post #Personal #I don't know I did this other than I'm bored and I'm self-absorbed enough to want to answer questions about myself #I don't need you to ask me questions #I AM MY OWN WOMAN!!

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gilgaemsh-a · 5 years

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IM FINALLY ABLE TO MAKE MY BNHA OCS AHHHH!!!!! part one at least lmao i’m gunna make a part 2 reallllllllly soon

the style of this picrew is similar to bnha style so it’s better for me to think up my ocs (at least the girls) this way!! (i’m very picky orz)

also i’m always up for rping if anyone is interested!!!!! dm me dude!!!!!!!!!!!!

also also! quirks aren’t like final versions?? im still tryna figure out how to make quirks more... quirk-like lol.

intros under the cut!!

@bnhappreciation @bnha-oc-collection

ankou fuwara (#1 & #2)

the ever blooming hero: chloris

ankou is my most loved oc and the by far the hardest to make for some reason. her and her quirk went through so many changes its insane but i finally settled on something perfect.

she’s currently an active hero having just graduated from u.a. she’s extremely popular and currently number 12 on the hero billboard (shes 19 btw)

ankou quirk is overgrowth aka chlorokinesis - the manipulation of plant life and pheromone generation. (she can do a lot with her quirk so shes my second most op character)

her range is pretty much the same as pixie bob’s earth flow.

ankou was actually a child star, a very popular actress/model. she quit when she graduated to focus on her hero career which is one of the reasons why she’s so popular.

when ankou was in school to was the top u.a. student along with two others (they’re boys so i wasnt able to make them but one day i will)

ankou quirk is actually a combo of her parents her mother has minimal manipulation over plants and her father could manipulate his pheromones

ankou is the older sister type. she’s super kind and caring and protective of people close to her.

she unofficially adopts izuku when she meets him

she also (surprisingly) has a good relationship with bakugou. she treats him like a younger brother and teases him a lot.

ankou is also the type to be really scary when angry

ankou had a really hard time making friends growing up because she couldn’t control her pheromones properly

alot of the times her classmates or even random people would fall in love with her just by her scent or other times end up being despised by it

both of ankou’s parents actually come from hero families. they grew up together since their families knew each other & they were both the youngest. neither of them wanted to be heroes.

ankou’s mother (ririka) is a pharmacist for one of the top hospitals in japan while her father (aizen) is an a-list actor.

side note! ankou’s father aizen took ririka’s last name.

i hardcore ship ankou and tomura. it literally started by me just thinking “oh hey lmao ankou has a life quirk and tomura has a death quirk! wait-”

so now their my otp.

oh btw the first pic is how ankou looks currently, the other is her older.

kurena kan (#3)

the healing heroine: nightingale

my child. my baby. she’s never done a single thing wrong in her entire life.

kurena is a mixed baby, half japanese & half american

she grew up with her father sekijiro kan in japan, her mother, charity brown is currently deceased.

her quirk is miracle blood - the ability to heal others and herself using her own blood. she can manipulate her blood as well. kurena has high regenerative properties as well! as long as her blood is flowing she can heal herself extremely fast.

as you know vlad king (her father) is able to manipulate blood but kurena’s mother was able to heal people with her quirk (empathic healing) which resulted in kurena’s quirk.

kurena is currently a first year at u.a. in izuku’s class.

she’s the tomboy type, tends to get into a lot of fights though she’s actually really mellow and cool.

she’s also the type that if she were to dress as a boy, she’d make a really hot one. (though as a girl she’s super hot too)

she’s recovery girl’s apprentice and helps out alot in the infirmary of the school

deku spends a lot less time there since kurena can heal him lol

i ship kurena with todoroki and bakugou. my beloved ot3

all three of them are p competitive with each other (don’t worry it’s all healthy competition)

kurena’s mother came to japan to further to abilities and apprentice under recovery girl which is how her and sekijiro met

she died helping recovery girl heal all might as a backlash of her quirk

kurena’s mother is full blown italian! and partially named kurena because it sounds like carina which means beloved

in japanese kurena the kanji for her name is crimson

oh!! aizawa is kurena’s godfather on her mother’s side! the two are very close

charity and aizawa were best friends before she died

miwa midoriya* (#4)

all in one heroine: alter ego

oof my most op oc you can fight me im not changing her.

miwa is actually the daughter of two high profile villains

she’s actually an “experiment”, the two villains had been working on a way to merge their quirks in the perfect way to make a strong villain - miwa was their current project until she escaped them

miwa doesn’t know how many others came before her or what happened to them when she asked she was told her ‘siblings’ were disposed of.

miwa’s quirk is gunna be the hardest to explain lol the short version is: miwa’s body can mimic and control different elements.

like... full on mimics elements. yknow like and elemental spirit? how it’s just a being made of fire or water or air etc etc? that’s miwa.

i’m actually on the fence about making the elements miwa shifts into to be alters (like she suffers from dissociative personality disorder.) so basically every time she shifts into a different element that element has its own personality? tho maybe it doesn’t even need to be DID it could just be the way her quirk works? SOMEONE GIVE ME INPUT PLS

her mother is a shapeshifter while her father could control elements

miwa was rescued by izuku’s father and then later adopted by him when it was quickly realized she didn’t want anyone else

she grew up with izuku and bakugou. her a bakugou are actually quite close since she’s the first person to beat him in stuff. he likes how strong she is.

miwa is also a pacifist! she had no interest in being a hero (it sounded like more trouble then it was worth) but when bakugou and izuku applied for u.a. she didn’t want to be left alone so she applied.

miwa is a soft bean. she hates violence but is willing to ATTACK when her loved ones are in danger

she’s also in the constant fear that her parents are watching her every move. she feels as if her parents gave her up to easy or staged the hero rescue for a reason. she’s constantly paranoid lol

miwa is classified as “looks like a cinnamon roll; can kill you”

nagi the tempest (#5)

real name: aoka arashi

currently my only villain but don’t worry i plan on making more!

nagi is the only daughter of as prostigious hero family.

the arashi family was known for its variety of powerful weather related quirks and continued to plan marriages based on quirks

the arashi family was also very abusive in its training and pushed nagi through limits she still has nightmares about; the training was due to how volatile nagi’s quirk is. which she was often blamed for

one day nagi snapped and destroyed the arashi family home along with everyone inside she was on the run for awhile before dabi found her

at that point i guess he was already apart of the league of villains? i’m not sure when dabi joined tho so this is just me guessing

nagi’s quirk is storm - nagi is able to create storms and manipulate them! it’s an extremely violate quirk that almost got her killed when she first manifested it. it’s the reason her training was so grueling. nagi needs moisture in order for her quirk to work

and while thunderstorms are something she can make she can’t actually control the lightning; not because it’s not apart of her quirk but because lighting is tricky to control in itself

she wields a katana that acts as a conduit for the lightning

when nagi does try to control the lightning more often than not it backlashes onto herself creating wounds/scars on her body in the shape of lightning bolts

dabi thinks they’re really pretty

nagi is the silent type. she very rarely talks and no one in the league of villains has ever heard the sound of her voice

dabi brags about being the only person nagi talks too

the name nagi was given to her by dabi it means the calm before the storm

though dabi gave her the nickname he often calls her aoka when they’re alone

despite her blonde hair and blue eyes nagi is 100% japanese!

her and dabi are hardly ever seen apart and if you haven’t guessed it i ship them lol

hinata enma (#6)

the beguiling heroine: enchanter

my trans baby girl!!!!!!!!

a 5th generation geisha currently a maiko of course

her quirk is heartbreaker - a succubus quirk! besides her supernatural beauty and over all supernatural condition (strength, speed all that good stuff) hinata’s real quirk is her voice; her voice has the power to control others and even alter reality.

you know allison hargreeves from the umbrella academy? that’s hinata

i’m still not sure how i want hinata to be able to trigger that power like how allison as to say “i heard a rumor” to use her power?? idk what i want hina to say

a hinoenma is a japanese yokai extremely similar to succubi which is where i got hina’s name

as i mentioned, hina is a geisha! not a prostitue

growing up hina was taught art, dancing and singing she excels at all three uwu

hina’s mother, yuuhi, is close friends with masaru bakugou. masaru usually goes to her for help with traditional japanese fashion

because of this bakugou and hina grew up together

the two are best friends even though they go to separate schools katsuki is the only one hina doesn’t use her power on

katsuki is also the one to encourage hina to become a hero though the two don’t go to u.a together instead hina attends shiketsu high

the two of them video call each other daily

hina is very mischievous!! she likes playing harmless pranks and teasing others

when she was in elementary and middle school she was often picked on for her quirk being a ‘villain’ quirk

she’s never used her quirk in malicious ways

the most malicious way she’d use is to help play a prank

she trains with bakugou when she can

#bnha #bnha oc #mha #mha oc #boku no hero oc #boku no hero academia #my hero academy oc #my hero academia #my hero academia oc #mine #my ocs #ocs

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gold-from-straw · 5 years

Text

Crush

This is a fic I wrote after I accidentally flirted with @unticka by telling her I had a crush on the person in her profile pic.

And then found out it was her ACTUAL FACE and had to go and crawl into a hole. Luckily she agreed it should be a Cherik fic so here we go lol!

Read this utterly silly fluffy thing on AO3 if you prefer ^_^ Warnings for some allusion to past drug addiction and lots of Erik being a socially anxious bean.

Erik’s phone buzzed and he picked it up, smirking at the comment Charles had added to their chat.

CX: I swear on all that’s holy if one of you brings Jaegermeister to my party this year I will scream

CX: I found the last bottle in the back of my cupboard. I can smell it through the glass I am not even joking

Erik pushed himself forwards and quickly typed brb, just going to the liquor store, grinning as it appeared on the screen.

Raven cleared her throat, and Erik looked up. “Are you quite finished?” she asked, raising one eyebrow. “I’m glad you’re enjoying the group chat I invited you to join, but I am now sitting in front of you. In the flesh. Buying you coffee.”

“Sorry,” he grinned sheepishly and put his phone away.

“It’s fine,” she smirked. “You and Charles are getting along well, I see.”

“He’s an idealistic idiot,” said Erik immediately.

She nodded and sipped her latte. “And he makes you laugh. Honestly, you two need to just start messaging each other directly, let the rest of us get a look in on the group chat.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his face dropping. “I never meant to irritate anyone.”

She shook her head. “You’re not, really, I’m only teasing. Don’t take me seriously, Erik, you know I’m full of shit.”

He twisted his lips and nodded, but he didn’t believe her. There was no smoke without fire, after all, and she had been kind enough to introduce him to all of her friends when he moved to New York. He didn’t know what he’d have done without those contacts. The only reason he hadn’t spent his entire first month in his apartment alone was because of Raven and her friends.

She put her hand over his, squeezing gently. “I’m sorry, Erik, I really was only joking.”

“Are you sure I’m not imposing on the group?”

“Absolutely. Look, you’ll see on Friday when we all get together for Charles’ birthday up in Westchester. I know you’ve met Sean and Emma already, the others are looking forward to getting to know you in person too. And if you and Charles start debating politics again there are plenty of empty rooms we can lock you in together until you sort your shit out. We’ll just eat the pizza and watch the movie.”

“Without the birthday boy?” Erik laughed.

“Oh, a good argument will be Charles’ favourite birthday gift of the day, trust me,” Raven said, flicking her red hair back.

Erik tucked his phone into his bag and focused completely on Raven for the next couple of hours, discussing the latest gossip, the assignment Raven had to do on her poetry module and whether Erik had found an actual bed, yet, or if he was still sleeping on the futon they’d found on Craigslist when he first arrived in New York.

Erik was proud of himself for not having glanced at his phone until he was walking the last stretch between the subway and his apartment. A new message showed up on his phone, and Erik would have denied to his dying day that he got a little jolt under his sternum when he saw the name come up - Charles Xavier. He clicked on the notification.

CX: My friends tell me I need to talk to you directly rather than through the group chat. Apparently we’re clogging up the airwaves.

Erik’s smile pulled at his cheeks and he tugged his bag higher on his shoulder, freeing up both hands to type.

EL: Raven told me the same thing

CX: They’re obviously just jealous

EL: Or not nearly interesting enough.

Charles sent back a laughing emoji and Erik tapped on his profile picture, trying to enlarge it a little, as he so often did when he spoke to Charles. He’d always idly thought that someone’s profile picture could tell you a little bit about them. His own was a picture of a great white shark that Raven had texted him from the aquarium saying ‘he’s got your smile’. Hank had a picture of a southern blotting array, apparently - he’d asked, once, and left none the wiser. Moira and Sean had pictures of actors, Emma had a picture of herself flipping the bird, and Raven’s picture changed every couple of days, a landscape, a piece of artwork, a macro close up of a leaf, whatever she felt like at the time.

Charles’ photo had to be of an actor or a celebrity of some sort. The photo was clearly professionally taken, for a magazine or something. The man in the picture had dark brown hair falling in waves around his face, a broad nose and the most gorgeous lips, quirked into a half smile, as if the actor, whoever he was, didn’t want the photographer to know he was amused. He was wearing a blazer, his blue shirt open at the top few buttons to show tantalizing hints of collarbone and freckles. And his eyes. Oh, dear god, his eyes, so wide and blue and staring right into Erik’s soul.

Erik definitely had a crush on the nameless actor. But the best thing about it was that if Charles had a picture of some pretty actor on his profile, he was also probably, maybe, possibly queer himself.

His phone chimed, and he clicked back off the picture.

CX: Raven tells me you’re definitely coming to the party on Friday! It’ll be good to meet you in person, my friend

EL: Thank you for inviting me - are you sure you want a complete stranger there??

CX: You’re hardly a stranger, we’ve been talking for weeks!

Erik found himself smiling again. Charles was so cheerful and friendly - what on earth was he doing chatting with a sarcastic misanthrope like Erik all the time?

EL: You’ve all been very kind. The people who told me New Yorkers were unfriendly are bastard liars

CX: Ah, well, I’m hardly a New Yorker, I’m afraid. I’m only Raven’s step-brother, and never managed to pick up the accent. I’m English

EL: To be fair people tell me the English are unfriendly too. Liars, the lot of them

Charles sent another laughing emoji, and Erik wondered what Charles sounded like when he laughed. He wondered what he looked like, for that matter.

EL: Can I bring anything to the party?

CX: Only yourself, please.

He didn’t know what it was that made him ask. What was he thinking? He couldn’t even blame the alcohol, because Raven and Sean had been monopolising most of that on the drive up to Westchester, and he couldn’t blame his giddy mood on the others, because Moira had been talking to him most of the trip about the recent opinion polls. So why? Why in the name of all that’s holy had he sat back after they stopped to pick up some more beer, opened up the messaging app and texted Charles?

EL: I have to confess, I’ve got a massive crush on the guy in your profile picture, and it’s driving me mad - who is he? I don’t recognise him from any films

And then the reply that made the bottom drop out of Erik’s world and made his stomach cold with horror.

CX: Oh… well, that’s very flattering. It’s a picture Raven took of me a couple of years ago

And now what the hell was Erik going to do? He couldn’t ask Moira to stop the car so he could run out into the woods and become a hermit. He couldn’t exactly brush it off. He couldn’t take it back. What he wouldn’t do for the ability to go back in time and tell him to leave his fucking phone alone.

He wanted to apologise, but why would Charles even want to talk to him? How creepy was it to hear someone had been checking out a picture of you? He’d thought it was a photo of an actor, but there was no way he’d ever have told the actor he found him captivating. What was Charles meant to do with this information now, when Erik was about to turn up at his door and impose on his hospitality for hours?

Part of him wanted to send him a photo of himself as some sort of twisted apology, but what was that meant to do? Was Charles meant to go ‘oh, I too have a crush on you!’

“What’s up, Erik?” Raven asked, shoving his shoulder.

“I just told accidentally told someone I have a crush on them,” he croaked, just taking Charles’ name out of the equation before he could fuck things up even further.

“How the hell did you do that?” she laughed, taking another draw of her beer.

“I didn’t know it was their picture,” he moaned. “I just wanted to know which actor it was and it was them.”

“Show me!” she said, grabbing for his phone. He stuffed it between his legs, and she narrowed her eyes at him, calculating. “Don’t think that’s a no-go area for me, Lehnsherr.”

“How am I going to look them in the eye now?” Erik wailed instead, covering his face with his hands.

“I bet she was pleased,” Sean said, turning around from the front passenger seat. “It’s a compliment, isn’t it? Not like you were creepy to the girl, were you?”

“No,” he said, not bothering to correct Sean’s assumptions. “I mean, not deliberately… but it’s creepy to think someone’s been looking at your picture that way, isn’t it?”

“Only if you’ve been wanking over it,” Sean shrugged.

“Sean!” yelped Moira, slapping him on the arm.

“Hey! It’s true, isn’t it?”

Raven patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, man,” she said. “Whoever it is would be lucky to have you perving over them.”

“Oh god, don’t put it that way!” he yelled.

***

He spent the rest of the drive trying to work out what to say in response, to work out exactly how he could apologise and regain a little bit of his pride. He knew he was overthinking this, Raven, Sean and Moira had changed the subject and started chatting about something else quickly enough, but he was already worked up about meeting so many new people, to have made such a social faux pas before he’d even met them was almost unbearable. So much for thinking he’d got his social anxiety under control.

The worst thing about it, the thing he really couldn’t admit to, wasn’t that he’d just told some stranger he thought he was pretty. It was that he’d told Charles he had a crush on his face. Charles. He already had a fucking crush on Charles through his messages! Now he was going to have to meet him for the first time without being able to hide his feelings, rather than feeling out whether Charles would be open to maybe going out for coffee or dinner with him, he was dumped straight past that careful searching right into blurting out ‘gosh you’re pretty!’

And then he had to walk up the drive to the most fucking gorgeous mansion, Raven making sarcastic comments about how she fucking hated the place and she didn’t know how Charles could stand living in all the bitter memories of their shitty childhood, and he wondered if anyone would notice if he just… ran off round the side and didn’t stop until he found some summerhouse or something - Americans had those, didn’t they? - and just hid there until he could sneak back into the car at the end of the party.

Raven shoved the door open. “Charles? Hey, birthday boy!”

Emma poked her head around the corner. “He disappeared somewhere about fifteen minutes ago, we were gonna send a search party. But you guys have beer, so fuck that!” She kissed them all in turn, waving them through to a huge panelled living room where people were scattered over leather couches and a pool table that had been pushed to the side. “Hey, everyone! This is Erik, be nice.” She smirked at him and left.

Erik stood tall and smiled at everyone. Mistake. A gangly lad slouching on the pool table actually squeaked. It seemed Erik had smiled like thatagain.

He toned it down and went to put his beers on a desk that was really never meant to be abused in such a way. The crowd mostly went back to their conversations, and Erik felt like he could breathe again. At least until Charles came back.

But he didn’t come back. Another fifteen minutes passed. He made awkward conversation with a blond kid who looked about nineteen and like he’d be more at home in a biker gang, and then much less awkward conversation with a guy called Darwin who had some interesting opinions about the state of the education system, but got called away mid-rant.

And Charles still wasn’t there. Nobody seemed too bothered, but Erik couldn’t help feeling like it was his fault somehow. Like he’d made things weird and Charles didn’t want to see the guy who’d been enlarging his profile photo to get a better look at his beautiful blue eyes.

Fuck. He needed to get out of there. He slipped quietly away from the room, back into a corridor, trying to find the main door, but the place was bloody huge. He must have taken the wrong turning somewhere. That door looked right - he turned the handle and… well, that was definitely not the door to the kitchen. “Oh, shit, I’m so sorry!”

The man in the wheelchair turned, long brown hair flicking back over his shoulders, and startled, familiar, blue eyes met his. “Charles?” Erik asked, blinking.

Charles opened and shut his mouth. “Erik?”

Erik laughed. Somehow having him right there across from him made his earlier fuckup so much smaller. “God, I’m so sorry for my message, I didn’t know that was you in the picture, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Especially on your birthday.”

“Uncomfortable?” Charles blurted. “You didn’t make me uncomfortable at all.”

Erik raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been in a dark room for about half an hour during your birthday party.” He frowned. “Actually that sounds like something I’d do.”

It startled a laugh out of Charles, just a short one, and Erik grinned. It sounded more lovely than-- shit, he shouldn’t be thinking like this, he’d already made things so awkward between them. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I can go if you--”

“No!” Charles cleared his throat. “I mean… you don’t have to. I’m… I just…” he sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I was embarrassed.”

Erik winced. “Yeah, I can’t apologise enough.”

“Not about that,” he said, blue eyes peering up at him, and he looked so damn sad. Erik wanted to hug him. “I just… I should have changed that profile picture. I just… I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Erik asked, frowning. He found himself crossing the room, sitting on an armchair across from Charles.

Charles gave a sad half-smile. “Well… it’s a bit misleading, isn’t it? I don’t look much like that any more. I mean, I’m getting better, I’m off the morphine, I’m… well, I’ve had a lot of help with everything. But I don’t… that’s not me in that picture any more, I suppose.”

Erik cocked his head on one side. “I recognised you.”

“I assume the wheelchair was a bit of a giveaway.” He glared at Erik suddenly. “I’m not ashamed of it. Not anymore - I had some… issues with it to start with, but that’s not why I’m hiding. If people can’t cope with my disability they can fuck off. It’s…” He gestured to his face. “I’m not exactly… that person any more.”

“First of all,” said Erik, “I didn’t know you were in a wheelchair. I didn’t know you’d had an accident, I’m sorry to hear you’ve had a rough time but… I recognised you from that picture. Your eyes are the same, your nose.”

“Oh, God, my nose,” Charles said with a rueful chuckle. He glanced up at Erik, long lashes framing his perfect blue eyes. “Now you must think I’m terribly vain. Hiding in here because I’m worried my lovely new friend won’t have a crush on me any more now he knows I look like a washed up old junkie.”

Erik groaned and dropped his face into his hands. Then he looked up at Charles again, the soft brown curls framing his face and falling down to his chin. He wondered how the scruff on his cheeks would feel against his fingertips, and he took a step over the edge. “I had a crush on you before I knew that was your face,” he said quietly. “The way you talk, the way you argue, your passion - your bloody naivete, honestly, Charles! I’ve been looking forward to meeting you in person so we could talk properly, interrupt each other in person, discuss politics and literature and chess until everyone else around us gets bored and leaves.”

Charles smiled, a wide, sincere thing which curled up his cheeks and crinkled the skin by his eyes. “Well,” he said, the room dark and quiet around them. “And here I was thinking I was the only person who could fall for someone by text.”

#My writing #Crush #cherik #Charles Xavier #Erik Lehnsherr #charles/erik #fluff

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thats-what-sidhe-said · 6 years

Text

Voltron Actor AU

This fic’s going to be a little meta and a little salty. (A little?) Though TBH, in the saltiest bits I wasn’t thinking of Voltron. (Fuck Blood Ties so much. So, so much.)

Previous part here. This is all super rough. I’m just kind of going with it.

---

It was two weeks later when Sanda, the showrunner, called the entire main cast in for a meeting. "I've just come from a meeting with the network!" she said exuberantly. The cast - Shiro, Keith, Allura, Lance, Pidge and Hunk - looked at each other.

"Are you sure?" Hunk asked carefully. "You don't usually look like that after you've talked to the network."

"I know," Sanda said. "But I've got excellent news. They have agreed to have a gay character on the show."

"Wow, that's great!" Shiro said, and the others agreed.

"I did have to make a few concessions," Sanda admitted.

"A gay character," Keith said warily.

Sanda nodded. "I'm sorry, Keith. Sven and Akira would make a good pairing, but the network's nervous. It'll be Sven. We'll introduce a romance with a new character and reveal his sexuality as a part of the story. Shiro, I assume this won't be a problem?"

"Not at all," Shiro said. "I'm proud to be a part of this. We're breaking new ground."

Keith nodded. He sank back in his chair and swallowed his disappointment. "Yeah, this is good," he said honestly. "It's great, Sanda. Thanks for fighting for us."

"I know how much this means to you," Sanda said. She took a deep breath. "Because of this, we're going to be making some changes in the upcoming season." She chuckled. "To be honest, we weren't expecting them to say yes so soon. But we'll roll with it. Like I said, the network wanted a few concessions. Keith, you're going to get the half-alien prince storyline."

"What?!" Lance yelled. He jumped to his feet. "That's mine! We've been teasing McClain as half-Altean for three seasons!"

"I know," Sanda said. She held his hands out placatingly. "It's not going to be a full swap. The half-Altean story will still happen, but we're pushing it to the following season. Akira will be revealed to be half-Galra, which will set up a great Romeo and Juliet romance between him and Princess Fala." She grinned winningly and took a careful step back.

"What?!" This time it was both Lance and Keith.

"Well, with Sven being confirmed as gay, the network wanted to make it clear that everyone else on the team was straight," Sanda said, the words tumbling quickly from her mouth.

"Oh, that's lovely." Keith folded his arms over his chest and scowled.

"You think Keith can pass for straight?" Lance scoffed.

"Better than you!" Keith snapped.

Lance leaned forward, his hands on the table. "Sanda, come on, my agent's putting me out for romcoms. I need to show my romantic side."

Keith rolled his eyes. "Just come out already."

"Oh, yeah," Lance said sarcastically. "Because I really want to spend two seasons doing off-Broadway zombie musicals."

Keith jumped up and leaned towards Lance. Allura sat between them, so they weren't quite face to face. "The fight choreographer was doing his last show before retirement. I asked for the time off because it was my one chance to work with him. Some of us care about the work, not our ranking on People's Sexiest Genre Stars."

"You're just jealous because you ranked below Wil Wheaton!" Lance snapped.

"All right!" Shiro rose to his feet and placed his hand on Keith's shoulder.

"Lance," Allura said. She rested one manicured hand over his. "I could use some work on my romantic image, too. Perhaps you and I could make some appearances together."

"Oh, yeah?" A small smile emerged out of Lance's scowl.

"Sure. I know of a little sushi place in Pasadena with a beautiful view. We could go, have a nice dinner, get caught by the paparazzi on our way out?"

"You think you could stand an evening with li'l ol' me?" Lance said, slowly sitting back down.

"Maybe more than one," Allura said.

"Two more seasons," Pidge groaned. "Hey, Sanda, wanna write me off the show?"

"Sorry, Pidge," Sanda smiled at her. "We're keeping Katie's big adventure. Hunk, we're going to explore your family a little." Hunk gave him a thumbs' up. "And Lance, we're going to come up with something amazing for McClain."

"I hope so," Lance said, the lines of his scowl reappearing.

"Look, all of you, this is big news and we want to control the story," Sanda said. She looked at Shiro. "Shiro, you're going to be asked a lot about your personal history, especially about your coming out. Your relationship with Keith will probably be a big point of discussion as well, since you're both on the show."

Shiro nodded. "I'll have our publicist talk to Bibobi and we can strategize." He looked at Keith who also nodded.

"Yeah," Keith said. "I'm all in. This is important."

"Good," Sanda said. "We're going to be pretty busy in the writer's room sorting this out, so Mitch will be directing the next episode. Be good to him."

"Always," Shiro said.

---

Keith drove home, his little BMW taking the curves of the hills at faster than the recommended speed. He had a sixth sense for hazards and always made it home safely.

"Do you want to eat anything?" Shiro asked, as they went up the stairs from the garage. They'd had dinner on the set, but that had been several hours ago.

"You cooking?" Keith gave him a tired smile.

"Sure," Shiro said. "I could make cereal, protein shakes, cold pizza-"

"I finished the pizza this morning," Keith said.

"Scratch the pizza then," Shiro said. "We could call for delivery?"

"Cereal's good," Keith said. He yawned and unlocked the front door. He heard the click of toenails on hardwood, approaching at full speed. Shiro took a neat step to the left and Keith took the full force of Kosmo's pounce. Keith's rescue dog was believed to be part Irish wolfhound, part malamute, and part prehistoric wolf. The vet disputed the last part, but Shiro was pretty confident about it. Keith was pinned on the floor, laughing, as he ruffled his dog's fur and Kosmo licked his face. Shiro had and Keith had lived together for most of Kosmo's life, but it had been Keith that found him as a young pup and brought him home and Kosmo hadn't forgotten.

"Come on, boy," Shiro said, slapping his hand against his thigh. "Let's get you some dinner." Kosmo followed Shiro to the kitchen and Keith had the chance to get up brush himself off. Shiro fed Kosmo from a bin of dog food in the pantry while Keith poured them bowls of cereal. They ate on the center island of the kitchen, sitting on barstools. "How are you feeling about the news today?" Shiro asked.

"It's great," Keith said. "It's good for the show, it's good for the LGBTQ community, and it's good for all-ages television."

Shiro hooked his ankle around Keith's, as if they were teenagers drinking milkshakes. "Come on."

Keith lowered his spoon and sighed. "It's selfish. It's just - I've always wanted to play opposite you in a big blockbuster movie. Not some indie pic where one of us dies, either. A real action-adventure with a romantic subplot."

"That'd be amazing," Shiro said. "But this isn't the end. We can still do that."

"Yeah, there's a lot of queer high-budget action movies." Keith sighed.

"Not yet," Shiro admitted. "But there will be. If they won't hire us, we'll start a production company."

"You have not looked at our budget recently, have you?" Keith said dryly.

"Okay, we're not there yet," Shiro said. "We'll get there. We're on the way up and this is going to be a big boost. To you, and to me, and to genre media. If parents can let their kids watch queer people at home, they'll let them see them at the movies."

"There's still the foreign market," Keith reminded him.

"A harder sell, but Deadpool proved you don't need China to be a success," Shiro said. He slid his arm around Keith's waist, pulled Keith against him, back to front, and rested his chin on his shoulder. "I'll get you your blockbuster," he said softly, against his ear. "I will save a hundred million dollars penny by penny, if I have to, but we will have our movie."

Keith rested against him and smiled. "I love you."

"I love you, too," Shiro said, and kissed his temple. "This'll give us a boost, I promise. I already told Coran and he's trading notes with Bibobi. He said he might be able to parlay this into a Vanity Fair profile."

"Vanity Fair? Off this?"

"Sure," Shiro said. "'Hollywood's Queer Power Couple - Breaking the Pink Ceiling Together.'"

"'Power Couple'?" Keith asked.

"Fake it 'til you make it," Shiro said.

"Pink ceiling sounds like a feminist thing," Keith said.

Shiro grinned, his stubble brushing against Keith's ear. "We'll let Coran write the copy."

"Hey, Shiro?" Keith asked. His words had a little drag at the end, meaning he was reaching the end of his energy.

"Yeah, babe?"

"Can we get a Jackie Chan cameo in our movie?"

"Definitely," Shiro said.

"Get him to choreograph the fights?"

"James might get get jealous if we hire someone else."

"Not if it's Jackie Chan," Keith said.

"Point," Shiro said. He kissed Keith's temple. "I think we should get some sleep."

"Sleep," Keith yawned. "Okay."

They put the dishes in the dishwasher and went up to bed.

---

My AO3.

#voltron #sheith #allurance #shiro #keith #lance #you are welcome to tell me if you want more of this #you can ask about Blood Ties if you want my rant #my fic: voltron actor au

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guylty · 6 years

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Ok, please don’t get excited. I am fully aware that my pictures aren’t really that great. I’ve seen much better ones, taken from much closer up. But I have decided to follow up the first and very wordy Q&A post with some visual goodness. All in service of a happy weekend 😉.

Before you get to the pictures, let me quickly describe the set-up of the con. Photo opportunities were restricted to four separate events where photography was allowed – the opening and closing ceremonies, and the Q&As. (There were two other events that featured Richard, but photography was not allowed during the photo and the autograph sessions.) As a general rule, photography happened from wherever the photographer was sitting – there was no scrum or mosh pit in front of the stage for photographers to get a quick close-up at the beginning of the event. The main hall, where all the Q&As took place, had space for 500 people or so. The first five to eight rows of the hall were reserved for Gold ticket holders. I had a regular ticket and would’ve been placed in the last five rows or so. But since I had volunteered to work as a steward during the con, I was actually allowed to sit in the rows reserved for Stewards, right behind the Gold ticket holders. However, that was still bang in the middle of the hall, with restricted view. I spent half a Q&A standing at the back of the hall to get an unobstructed view of the stage Richard on Saturday; and then another half a Q&A the following day shooting from the side, back against the wall. In both cases I was too far away to shoot close-ups. The indoor lighting also meant that I couldn’t shoot at a low ISO (which would have resulted in extra clear images). Neither would a flash have illuminated my subject from as far back as I was.

Sigh, it sounds as if I always have excuses why my photos are shit. The truth may actually be that I am not that great a photographer 😂. I am certainly a bad photographer in the sense that I do not like to muscle my way into the front, obstructing other people’s view by being a pap. Well, and my equipment needs upgrading, I guess. So, disclaimer: Richard was beautiful; my photography wasn’t up to scratch. Here’s the loot, sorted according to the four occasions I took them at, with a quick explanation of the set-up and where I was.

Friday Evening – Opening Ceremony

Before Richard appeared from stage left on the stage in the main hall, we already got a little glimpse of him on the screen to the right of the stage: The Great Red Dragon was making his presence known – with some shadow play 😂. What a great introduction to and by Richard – I so like it when he is funny and playful. Myself, I was sitting on the right hand side of the hall (my POV), about half way up. (Clicking on an individual photo will open the picture bigger on your screen.)

Saturday Q&A

Having realised that the pictures from the middle of the hall had not turned out great the day before, I opted to stand at the back for the Saturday Q&A, checking whether I could get better pictures from there. I clicked away for about half of the Q&A and snuck back to my seat when the floor was opened up for fan questions. I took a few photos with my iPhone from my seat in the middle of the auditorium (left-hand half, my POV), too, but they are far too soft to be usable.

Sunday Q&A

For a change of perspective, I shot from the left of the main hall, leaning against the wall and avoiding to obstruct any other fans’ view. I had an unrestricted view of the stage, but it was a bit too far away, really. (Clicking on an individual photo will open the picture bigger on your screen.)

You get an idea of the size and distance from the foreground that I left in the picture in some instances.

Sunday Closing Ceremony

Lastly, Richard attended the closing ceremony on Sunday evening. He was the last one to come out – the top star of the evening. I was sitting at a round table, again about half way back, and right against the wall on the right hand side of the hall. This time, the actors/guests did not appear on stage but were on the main floor, hence it was a bit more difficult to catch a glimpse of them between the heads of all the people sitting in front of us. Even though none of my pics are truly great, these are even less than “not great” because they didn’t come from Marky Mark but from my little red Canon PowerShot 420. Even with digital zoom disabled, the pictures are grainy. It almost looks as if I put one of those hated filters on…

Sorry, not that great. Mind you, at least I got a good view if the temples, and I can confirm that a bit of salt and pepper is still there. As well as the gorgeous profile.

⇢ 📸 ⇠

So, that’s it. As previously, these images are my gift to you, fellow fans. So feel free to use – for fan art, personal print outs, screen savers. Repost if you like – but please credit me if you do so. And remember: for non-commercial use only 😉 – not that these would be good enough for selling, anyway.

For the previous parts in the RDC5 write up click the following links:

Part 1: Spoof Write-up

Part 2: First Picture Post

Part 3: Summary of Saturday Q&A

The Photo Loot from #RDC5 [part 4] Ok, please don't get excited. I am fully aware that my pictures aren't really that great. I've seen much better ones, taken from much closer up.

#photography #Richard Armitage

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darkspellmaster · 6 years

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Anon Asks in my Inbox as of 10/29/18 –Afternoon edition

Updated link of the Master Guide: http://darkspellmaster.tumblr.com/post/179532344635/update-and-edit-and-master-post-to-the-fokker

1. i(.)imgur(.)com/2UHctWY(.)png this picture works if you paste it into your address bar and just remove the ( ) symbols around the dots. It's his left hand since you can see the overside. Wether you find it weird to hold someone at the waist when kissing them or not is irrelevant, the arm and hand does not vanish which is the main point. Add it to your post so people can see for themselves.

Thank you for the picture Anon, due to the blanket removals of BTISudio related things I’m holding off putting the image up and I’ll use something as a representation of the arm motion that you have up. Again apologies for not being able to put the picture up. But I see it, and you’re right the arm is there, but it’s a really weird way of placing it as the natural cure of a kiss like that would have it where one person would have their hand higher than the other. Like I said it’s a weird position.

I’ll link your said picture so others can look at it. It’s in the main one.

2. You say in 4 that the studio leak image is that of a cropped shot of the previous leak as they cut off the other mouse - but that's not true. You can clearly see the mouse on Pidge's shoulder.

Added the Edit to the post anon. Thank you. I explained why I missed it. It’s still a bit odd that the mouse has not moved at all.

3. The voiceline thing that one anon was talking about was, somebody took lines Lance’s VA said in other shows/games he worked on and they also picked some lines from the 1 voltron VR game and put it together in one clip. The person included some random lines from the other characters too. And claimed it was “leaked audio” they got. Never said how they got it. Clearly fake, and a whole bunch of K/L fans obsessed with it for a bit before they lost interest.

Okay so they claimed to have data mined. That’s interesting because normally you would only be able to do that with games, since there is a lot of dialogue that is recorded and then left in there when they choose not to use it. Actors will record hours of dialogue for a game and then studios may change plans on how they are going to use it.

For example, Yuri Lowenthal, who voiced Yosuke, for Persona 4 had lines that indicated that at one point in the game they were planning to have Yosuke be a love option for the MC, but then dropped that plan for whatever reason. This was later data mined by fans from the finished product. But I’ve never heard of a way to data mine for recordings via a tv show, since the extra tracts would be left off the final disk, and you would have to have access to the main audio recordings of the show, and I don’t think Andrea would just go leaving them out there.

I’m sorry that the fans had to deal with that. That’s also a low thing to do because it cuts into issues with the whole audio department and such. Also it sucks for the fans because it’s a cheap way to get attention and isn’t fair to the listeners nor the actors.

4. I didn't see this added yet, but there was a Plance fake "leak" that got a DMCA takedown here on Tumblr from DreamWorks 3 days ago. The artist admitted it was fake when posted, it was meant as a joke and to show how easy it was to make a "leak." This kind of takes validity away from "posts are getting taken down so it must be real!" Sounds to me Dreamworks just wants all of this to go away (since it's upsetting fans or whatnot.)

Yeah I got one too way back on the 24th, and realized that that was probably why my first post was taken down. I’m trying to be more cautious out of respect for the BTIstudio. But yes, using any form of intellectual property:

Name of studio, logo of studio, art, dialogue, written words, even plants and other items.

Can be subject to claims. So even if it’s something made to debunk, if it so much as has a whiff of anything that could be connected to the actual studio, then that stuff has to be taken down for copyright reasons, and I completely understand that.

Next time I go to my convention in May, there’s a lawyer group that shows up and I’m going to try to ask about leaks and fake leaks and blanket take downs and the rules of it all.

5. Honestly Shiro's sight lines in the first 2 pics make more sense if someone shorter was standing next to him. In the third, (I) it's a profile shot so it'd be easy to rotate or tilt the head up/down if this Fokker is a dummy stand-in for another character and (II) Shiro's hand is literally on Fokker's ass due to hand position and the dude's height which is A LOT for a Y-7 show. Now if it were a shorter character, Shiro's hand would be at his waist. 🤔

Interesting catch there. In the original art where the head shot seems to have come from, the eyes are pointed down and to the left away from where Roy is looking.

This would leave us with the question of who is shorter than Shiro right now, as the only ones I can point to are Pidge, Romelle, Allura I think, or one of the Aliens. Keith, Hunk and Lance are all about the same height to him, and since he is looking slightly sideways it makes me think he’s looking at someone who is not the person with him. It’s a weird line of sight that is for sure for the shot.

6. Apologies if I misread this, but I think you implied the crisscross watermarks were a function of VSI Chinkel software and therefore would only appear on their studio's work. However in the other Chinkel studio shots, that crisscross isn't there. Watermarking is done by the originator (I.e. Dreamworks) not by the recipient. Also the pause | | in the upper right hand of the wedding is from the program the leaker is watching it in (VLC media player, specifically)

Yeah I thought that it could be something that happened there. But you’re right that the other image clearly shows that it’s not happening on the main one. I’ll have to edit that factor. Still the actual dubbing equipment, according to their website is one of a kind.

The thing about the VLC is also right, since we use it at my college. However I don’t know of any dubbing studio that would use VLC when they have access to more expensive and better software to watch media on. Also most get it in some digital form that they could play on Adobe or other media player that is far more useful for pausing and doing scripting, and seeing where the audio track is and what it’s doing. So I find that someone using an Open source tool is strange, at least to me, when it comes to a professional workplace.

7. that dude isn't roy, i think, he has the same skin tone as adam.

Oh anon, bless your heart here. Your right in that it’s not Roy himself, because that would land them in real hot water. He’s a look alike or representation. I don’t know if the character has a name at this point, but I’m calling him Roy as it’s easier than calling him “The dude that’s clearly a homage of the guy from Macross that was an inspiration to Shiro himself as a character.” Because that would take way to long. As I said before, this could be what someone thinks Adam without glasses and longer hair would look like.

8. I also thought Roy's arm disappears through Shiro, but in another pic of that kiss that's in a google doc going around debunking the leaks, his arm is very much in that photo and around Shiro's waist like you'd expect. Ngl, that threw me off because I'm starting to think I imagined things and only saw flaws where there weren't actually any at all.

And this is kind of the purpose of leaks that are not clear, or are not right, or have bad resolution. They are there to cover up the mistakes or things that make people realize they are false.

It’s one reason art forgers will be very careful to not make mistakes, but the issue is that there are always tells. Some are very very tiny and you have to take them under a microscope and look at them with the eye of someone trained to find them out.

As for the situation, take a break from it Anon. Go outside, enjoy the fall weather, watch another show or find something else to do. As I keep telling people, relax. No one has a horse in this race, I certainly don’t and nether should you. Our focus should be more on the real image that came out from JDS and LM and figuring out what was up with the table and, hey, on the plus side we have a “The End” shot. XD

9. Saw an anon point out that the “missing arm” is there and they are right. It is mainly behind shiro’s new arm and the hand is on his waist. It is a very normal way to hold someone, just because you can see the majority of it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there at all.

As I said I edited the post to reflect that info. The arm may be there, but there’s still something off about the whole thing to me. And again, if I’m wrong, oh well, if I’m right, oh well. I have no horse in this race and honestly am not into the ships.

10. Lotor’s statue isn’t 3D.... it’s very clearly painted... I think you’re starting to reach a bit with some of your debunking.

Changed the statue to an actual screen shot that I have to reflect it better. The thing is to me it looks like what you would do with a matte painting over a 3D image to create a more statue like approach to things. Since we have the white light filter over it, it makes it harder to see if it has the same 3D like rendering as Aang’s statue. Also between the time that Korra came out and now, they may have made the program smoother so it’s harder to tell if it’s 3D or not.

While I agree that they do some statues in normal drawings, the other ones, like Lotor, seem to need details, and I feel like a 3D rendering would be a better way to do it than, a 2D drawing.

11. I so want to believe they’re fakes. So much points to it, but one thing bothers me: this is an awful lot of trouble that someone has gone to, for a cartoon!? I mean finding photos on I’m assuming private Instagram accounts or other social media to highly edit? No one can actually find the originals. Plus Chinkel do actually use the multiple watermarks thing. So? Maybe those ones with the cast in them are real. They seem like far too much trouble to fake unfortunately 1/2

2/2 and I’m gonna stab a guess here and say that DreamWorks and whatever other studio it was, aren’t taking any real action besides silently removing the images but not saying anything because they feel like the images don’t give away a huge plot spoiler? Just the supposed one year later thing? Like I said it’s far too much trouble to go to. Someone would’ve had to literally scour the ENTIRE French VAs’ personal social media to find that cast pic, because no one else can find the original.

To be honest Anon, you would think that right? But the thing is that there are people out there that do this for fun. Namely because they know that it upsets a fandom and they’ll try to stir up the fans and then sit back and laugh at them.

Given the incident with the actresses and the cloud leak, it can be done. Seriously you can hack anything that has some sort of connection to the net. There’s always a back door, and it’s something that the “White Hats” have been trying to deal with for years. Social media isn’t a safe place when it comes to keeping pictures and such because people can and will break in, all the time. Remember the Sony leak not that long ago?

The photo with the cast is real, I just think the image on the screen is not. BTIStudio was sending takedowns, I got one on the 24th of October from them from a Mr. Rachel in the IT department. So my guess is it was a blanket take down regarding the name being used, since BTIStudio is now owned by Investors Shamrock and Altor, who just got the studios recently so there may be business reasons, or intellectual reasons “name being used” to pull it down. As another anon pointed out a Fake debunking image got pulled too because of them showing how to do it.

It's work, but for someone who has the time and skills it’s not insanely hard to do. Because of digital media and how good Photoshop, illustrator, and several other programs are now, it makes it easier and easier to copy art and make forgeries. It’s something artists are dealing with right now because people are finding ways to copy and sell fakes of their digital paintings.

12. Something else I noticed about the fake leaks - Ezor's eyepatch. So far, none of the galra with missing eyes wear eyepatches. They all have some sort of cyber prosthetic. Like Sendak, Ranveig, Branko, and Janka. Why would Ezor have a normal eyepatch while the rest of them don't? Doesn't make sense

That’s an interesting point there too. Given what we’ve seen previously, it doesn’t make sense to change up how a character is shown to have a wound like that covered. Unless she couldn’t’ get it done, but that doesn’t make sense either since if she was working with the Blade they would have set her up with stuff on earth by now. And Ezor doesn’t strike me as the type to be all “No I won’t have something cyber put on me” that’s more Zethrid.

13. The photo with JDS and Lauren are from His official Twitter account.

Thanks Anon, I think I’m going to do some Theories about that when I have a moment. After I finish sewing my costume’s sleeves, and getting done with the prologue to my novel.

I did see it, and it’s interesting, especially with the Red ribbon of fate, the candles and the silver piece on the side. Though that could have been there from another event. XD

14. I saw that apparently the joke fake "pl/ance leak" was taken down by DW because of copyright as well? if so that proves that the leaks don't need to be real to be taken down.

Yup! As long as it has something that equates to “Intellectual Property” studios and copyright owners can take anything down. It’s a huge issue with Youtube and their review groups and such. That’s why the Essay’s have evolved so much to only put shorter clips in and other aspects.

Fan Art can be copyrighted if it’s too close to original works, or even fake fakes like the Plance art. Most studios just go “Anything that has our name on it, take it down” even if it’s not a real leak.

15. I think that the anon who mentioned the "fake Klance voicelines leak" is talking about the fake audio leaks that were taken from Jeremy's line from another show and claimed to be about Klance and also a fake picture of Keith with Lance's jacket on .

Well that’s different. As I said, data mining is a bit hard to do from a tv show since there would be no additional tracks. It’s why most people don’t do that when it comes to creating fake info about a show and typically stick to art, or altered scripts since it’s easier to do. Typically all tracks that are recorded are edited and the ones that are not used are stored on a server that’s not easy to access and isn’t even on the net, it’s in an in house server.

As for the picture, huh, I think I heard of that one but never saw it.

#voltron #vld #voltron legendary defender #fake voltron leaks #voltron leaks #ask darkspellmaster #anon asks #answered questions #hope this helps people

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falseroar · 7 years

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Can You Wake Up? Part 3: Just a Dream

((Links to Part 1: Great Things and Part 2: I’m Sorry, You’re Dying))

Your expression must have answered for you, because Mark moved closer to your bed, pulling up a chair of his own so that he was closer to eye level. “Y/N? What’s wrong?”

You shook your head, ignoring the twinge in your neck as you tried to find the words to even begin to list everything that was wrong here. “I’m not…I’m Y/N, yeah, but I’m not them. That was just a bunch of videos, something you made up, Mark.”

Dark shifted in his chair, as if to get a better look at you. His intense gaze was not making things better. “You know about the Who Killed Markiplier videos.”

“Y-yeah,” you stammered, practically able to feel Mark’s disbelief even if you didn’t understand why he was surprised. You were thrown off by Dark’s stare but you continued, “Why wouldn’t I? I mean, they’re…right there on the first page of his YouTube channel…”

It was hard to just say you were a fan of Markiplier with Dark sitting right there. As much as you might have loved his character, being in the same room as him was…unsettling, like all of a sudden your whole body was sending off alarm bells to just get out of there every time he smiled or his eyes rested on you. Every now and then there would be a ripple in his appearance, a red or blue flash of something else in his dark aura that disappeared before you could really see it.

“Y/N,” Mark said, his voice shaking slightly. “I know your memories are a bit confused right now, you’ve been through a lot the past couple of…but you were the district attorney. You were our–my friend. Don’t you remember any of that?”

“No,” you said, trying to figure out why Mark wasn’t understanding. “I can’t be them, it wasn’t real. Even if it was, all of that took place back in like the 30s or 40s or something, right? I wasn’t even born then!”

You mentioned the year you were born and swore you saw Dark shoot Mark a look as he shifted uneasily in his chair.

“You remember another life,” Dark said, and when you nodded, added, “Dreams from the mirror.”

“No,” you said, feeling a rush of frustration. “They weren’t dreams, that was–is my life. I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on here, if I’m dreaming or what—”

“Y/N, I don’t know what you saw in that mirror, but maybe if you just tried to remember…” Mark trailed off, letting the suggestion rest in the air.

You felt a spike of anger, not something you ever expected to feel toward Mark, not really. A small voice in your head that sounded like you but not quite whispered, Why isn’t he listening? Doesn’t he know what he’s saying?

“Perhaps that dream was more…preferable to your reality,” Dark conceded. “If so, what drove you to break out of the mirror?”

“It…I…” Softly you said, “…It was an accident.”

You didn’t see the shared look between Mark and Dark, the alarm at those all too familiar words.

“The other car came around the corner too fast. I—I think my seatbelt broke, I thought there was something wrong when I buckled it before, but it was supposed to just be a short trip. I went out of the car, I-I-I—” You broke off, your eyes clouding over with the memory of the screeching metal, the crash, the pain, the people who just wouldn’t listen when you tried to move, to prove you were still alive. Or maybe it was just the tears making their way down your cheeks.

“Y/N,” Mark said softly, moving to put a hand on your shoulder to comfort you.

Again Dark grabbed his wrist, but you were the one who felt another flash of anger, stronger this time. The voice in the back of your head, the one calm part of you that wasn’t freaking out over all of this, spoke again: Don’t let them do this.

You sat up so that you could look them both straight on as you yelled, “It wasn’t a dream!”

“Y/N—” They both started to speak, but you were shaking now.

“Believe it or not, but someone telling me that my whole life, that everyone and everything I know and love isn’t real is not helping! Even if all of that stuff I can barely remember did happen, then that means you two are the last people I should ever trust!” You felt the tremor run through your body as what they were saying sank in. “It means one of you is a friggin demon wearing a friend’s face who trapped me in that mirror! Meanwhile, the other one’s the idiot who started all of this instead of just asking for help and who’s now walking around in that friend’s actual body!”

There it was. Because, if they were right, then that meant this wasn’t your Mark, the one you knew, loved, and at times wanted to throw into the ocean. This was Markiplier, Actor Mark, whatever you wanted to call him. The man who ruined so many lives in just three days, including, if they were right, your own.

But of course, none of this was real. Right?

“Wait, barely remember?” Mark asked, once he had recovered from your outburst. “So that means you remember something?”

“Really? That’s what you took from that?” You shook your head, ignoring the now familiar twinge in your neck as you tried to wipe away the tears. “I don’t know, earlier I thought I saw…It was just a mess of stuff, none of it made sense.”

Dark spoke, his soft, cajoling voice setting you back on your edge. “Y/N, please, tell us. It might help to talk about what you saw.”

He’s manipulating you, the voice in your head said, pointing out the obvious. But he’s right, you need to tell them.

“I saw you, and Mark, in the house from Who Killed Markiplier. Not, not together, I mean…” You paused, taking a moment to try and gather your thoughts. “It was different things, one after the other. One minute I saw the colonel crying, and then it’s Wilford, laughing. I saw…It looked like you, Mark, but its eyes were wrong, and its smile…”

Mark looked confused, so you tried to explain. “It looked like that thing from Tumblr a while back, when you changed your profile pic and did the whole mask thing.”

He looked even more confused now. “…What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He was doing this now? “Seriously, Mark, you know what I’m talking about. All those weird posts when you were coming home from tour, right after you said Dark and Wilford were dead.”

Dark gave Mark the most outraged, affronted look he could muster. “You did what?”

“That was a joke,” Mark said hastily before he tried to turn the attention back to you. “But I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Still, you remember us and the colonel, so that’s a good start—”

This again. Before you could interrupt him yourself, the door to the infirmary burst open and slammed into the wall behind it as Wilford Warfstache barreled into the room.

“Y/N! There you are, you scamp!”

No one had time to react, and Mark and Dark certainly could not have stopped Wilford before he bounded across the room and leapt onto the bed next you, throwing an arm around your shoulders. Thank God he didn’t sit on the other side where all the wires and tubes were.

He grinned at you, his eyes practically shining above that ridiculous pink mustache, and you couldn’t help but grin back even if you still felt like crying. Maybe his smile was that infectious, or maybe it was just a relief to have some kind of distraction from what you were thinking right now.

“How did you know they were here?” Mark asked, rising from his chair. Opposite him, Dark also seemed to be bracing himself for something. “Wilford, do you…do you remember Y/N?”

“Do I?!” Wilford chuckled, giving your shoulder a squeeze. “Best unpaid intern I ever had! Until they went and ran off before I could give them their college credit! How have you been, Y/N?”

“Uh…” You hesitated, aware that both of the others just visibly relaxed. “Could be dead, so…”

“Brilliant!” Wilford looked at Mark as if just realizing he was here. “Why, if it isn’t the handsome, world-famous Markiplier! Back for another interview?”

“Oh, God no.”

“Mark was just stopping by to check on our friend here, Wil,” Dark said, eyeing the other ego carefully. “He won’t be spending the night.”

“Says who?” Mark said, but you were barely listening.

Wilford Warfstache was a crazy, dangerous man, you knew that. He killed people like it meant nothing, because to him it didn’t mean anything. It was all just a joke. If Mark and Dark were right, although you still believed this was just some dream or nightmare, then he was the man who had shot you.

But leaning against him now, you felt peaceful, to the point your eyelids began to droop, your body giving in to the desire to just go back to sleep.

You saw him again, gun in hand, facing the detective who had his back to the door. You reached out, unheard over the shouting, and felt your whole body jolt with the gunshot. You remembered the colonel, holding your body as tears dripped down his cheeks, repeating the same words over and over again.

“I’m so sorry. It was an accident,” he whispered in your ear.

“What did you just say?” Dark said.

“Left a red sock in the station wash, turned everything pink!” Wilford declared. “Poor Y/N got blamed for it, but I think it made all our clothes fabulous! Let me tell you about the time we took the Jims out for some investigative reporting…”

You fell asleep at some point in his story to the sound of his laughter rumbling through his chest where your head lay. While Wilford did not stop in telling one wildly false tale after another, his grip around your shoulders tightened just a bit, as if some small part of him was afraid you might disappear again.

((End of Part 3. Thank you again for reading! Juuuust out of curiosity, if you all were given the choice of getting out of here with Mark or staying in the Ego house at this point, what would you choose?

Link to Part 4: Warning Signs

Tagging @silver-owl413 @determinedrevolutionary @cherrybomb-jaguar

Also super sorry to the person who messaged me earlier to be tagged, whose username I forgot to write down before I replied. I promise I didn’t forget you, I just have no clue what I’m doing.))

#markiplier #who killed markiplier #wkm district attorney #wkm y/n #wkm mark #darkiplier #wilford warfstache #wkm colonel #can you wake up #it was an accident #everyone's hiding something #their investigative reporting put them hot on the lead of a suspicious squirrel #fanfic

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spacerainbows · 7 years

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Pick 10 ships before reading/answering the questions

chronologically ordered

I found this posted on someone’s blog and even though I want tagged I decided to do it anyway

1. Destiel (Supernatural)

2. Sabriel (Supernatural)

3. Drarry (Harry Potter)

4. Spirk(Star Trek TOS/AOS)

5. Johnlock (Sherlock BBC)

6. Merthur (Merlin)

7. Cockles (Supernatural actors{Misha and Jensen )

8. Jim/Pam(The Office)

9. Stony(Marvel)

10. Spideypool (Marvel)

1 - Do you remember the episode/scene/ chapter that you first started shipping 6?

Merlin was recommended to me by a friend that already shipped Merthur, so I ended up walking into it expecting to ship it. I already shipped it by the end of the first season because they are so reliant on each other and “two sides of the same coin” I call soulmates

2 - Have you ever read a fic about 2?

Yes I have. I actually started shipping it because of fan fiction because there isn’t a ton of fule for it in the show. Way to go random destiel works for getting into a new ship*distant sounds of applause*

3 - Has a picture of 4 ever been your screensaver/ profile pic / tumblr?

Yes it actually is my phone screensaver currently. I’m rewatching TOS and it’s wonderful. My name is based around an inside joke with my brother regarding spirk and the enterprise so I guess that counts for something I found a shirt with the enterprise that had a rainbow trail behind it and my brother said “You know it’s because Kirk and Spock are getting it on” and I said “It’s just the spacerainbows having some fun”. Yeah that probably didn’t need to be said. Anyway…

4 - If 7 were to suddenly break up today, what would your reaction be?

I’d cry. Cockles is beautiful. The conventions would fall and it would be sad. They are wonderful together and they know it. I would never let this happen. Even if they aren’t actually together*for all that we know* so much could happen if it stopped. Also a good section of tumblr would probably be crying and rage posting.

5 - Why is 1 so important?

I don’t know if this question means important to me or the fandom so I’ll explain my thoughts on both. For me it seems so important because Dean has been alone for most of his life constantly worrying about protecting his little brother. He always needed to be strong enough to protect because there was no one really there to protect him. Then enters Castiel, a celestial being capable of killing thousands in seconds. He’s an angel of the lord who “gripped Dean right and raised him from perdition” He has the capability to protect Dean, but Dean needs to be able to let him. I feel like this took many seasons for him to finally admit and he still doesn’t but through all of it while Castiel looses and regains his mojo Dean is always there for as much as he can. They protect one another. Dean can finally have the comfort he needs. And then there’s Cas. He’s an angel. They appear as emotionless beings that could care less about the world but Castiel isn’t, and right at the beginning in season 4 you could tell that he knew this. He was scared to admit to himself that he could and did feel. The first person he confides in is Dean. Throughout the show he embraces these feelings and grows new ones and learns the meaning of love and family*cried over season 12 episode 12* They’re always there for each other,and even if the show never shows them as anything other than platonic, their still friendship means so much. As for the fandom as a whole, I feel as though it’s provided a focus point and feeling to build. I feel like all good shows have two characters that fit so perfectly, either as friends or lovers, together; just watching the relationship solidify and grow is just showing how amazing character development can be. Then there is the fandom uniting over it. I don’t really care if you ship destiel or not or you ship wincest or samstiel or nothing at all, you still know that it exists and is something that is talked about in the show. The fact that it has come up as a topic in the show itself shows how much it has affected the Supernatural fandom as a whole.

6 - Which one has the strongest bond?

I’d have to say Spirk. Throughout both aos and tos they would do anything for each other. They would stand by each other during death and fight to save each other. Not to mention the Vulcan bonding or honds. #t’hy’la

7 - Which ship has lasted the longest

Spirk. Probably. I mean it’s know as one of the first slash pairings in existence and one of the first to actually start the spread of a fandom gathering and forming around one thing. It’s sometimes called the flagship or the mothership. I’ve shipped it since I was a little kid because I grew up watching tos and the movies. My dad said would say that they were secretly gay for one another as a joke and my small young mind believed him so I got mad whenever they were ever with anyone else and they shipped caried over to when I took to watching it again on my own. And small me also noticed how similar their actions were to straight couples and I asked my dad if they were dating and that’s what led to the secretly gay thing that my dad started saying

8 - How many times, if ever, has 6 broken up I mean.

They never canonically got together and one of them is kinda dead now until further notice. If you want to count when and before Arthur dies because of the fight and his death than sure, but there were other times when they would get with other people and Arthur was kinda married to Gwen by the end of the show so…

9 - If the world was suddenly thrust into a zombie apocalypse, which ship would make it out alive? 2 or 8?

2. Sorry Jim and Pam but you’re being pinned against a hunter who deals with zombies on a daily basis-one of the actually less crazy things he’s seen- and an arch angel capable of snapping his fingers and changing things to fit his desires. I think they would be pretty good. Also angels can heal and not die unless killed by an angel blade or in Gabriel’s case an arch angel blade, so unless a zombie can find one and stab Gabe I think they’d make it out pretty unscathed. 10 - Did 7 ever have to hide their relationship for any reasons? I mean, this could be canon, but for all I know it isn’t, soooo i don’t really know the answer but for all we know they could secretly be hiding it right now.

11 - Is 4 still together?

I mean, is you take into account the new information brought from aos you know they’ve known and been friends with each other until Jim’s death. So I can only imagine that if it truly were canon they would still be together because they’d be able to go against time as they’ve done it before for each other.

12 - Is 10 canon?

Na, the only canon thing on my list is Jim and Pam. They are adorable and great btw. I shipped them by the end of the very short first season and all their interactions are adorable and all the stuff they go through to finally be happy together and when the start a family, aaaaaaaaa, it’s just too great.

13 - If all 10 ships were put into a couple’s Hunger Games, which couple would win?

If I had to answer honestly I’d say it come down between 1 and 2 because of the healing capabilities, and then it would be a 4 way suicide. Sam and Dean would never be able to kill each other and I doubt Cas and Gabe would want to kill each other either, so it would either be a battle that would never end or a suicide. Also DON’T THROW MY CHILDREN INTO A PIT OF DEATH i cry

14 - Has anyone ever tried to sabotage 5?

Mary Watson… you know how she ended up. She’s actually great though.

15 - Do you spend hours a day going though 3’s tag

Not as much as I used to but if I get a sudden urge.

16 - If an evil witch descended from the sky and told you that you had to pick one of the ten ships to break up forever or else she’d break them all up, which ship would you SINK?!

Stony. Sorry, but civil war kinda happened. If that fight doesn’t count as a break up as is for their not canon pairings I don’t really know what does.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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I am posting a series of articles on the misinformation campaign being waged by the Trump campaign and other nafarious actors including Russia, Iran and China..Its important we recognize, educate and share this information ahead of the 2020 election. The misinformation is 20 fold to the misinformation campaign waged in 2016. WE MUST DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP FOR THE SAKE OF OUR DEMOCRACY. PLEASE SHARE!!! TY🙏🏻🙏🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

THE BILLION-DOLLAR DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN TO REELECT THE PRESIDENT..... How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 Election

By McKay Coppins | Published MARCH 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 13, 2020 |

(**Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.)

(PART 1 /2)

One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

'THE DEATH STAR'

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn’t become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office—and his efforts will shape this year’s election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds—claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice—including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. “I just made up a price,” he later told The Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures—a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale—a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience—was running the Republican front-runner’s digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump’s orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious—with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’s. “Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,” says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.

The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale’s most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. “He was a get-shit-done type of person,” says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump’s digital ignorance to flatter him. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools. “Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who’d been around the block a few times might say, ‘Oh, that will never work,’ Brad’s predisposition was to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ ” From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the campaign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president’s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.

Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”

'DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE'

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie—who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster—said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

"Shady political actors are discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text message."

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched—and publicly accessible—“library” where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful—and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”—a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use—and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear—and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

'WAR ON THE PRESS'

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter’s credibility.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it’s been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president’s eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting—but the effort has yielded fruit.

"PASCALE HAS SAID THE CAMPAIGN INTENDS TO TRAIN “SWARMS OF SURROGATES” TO UNDERMINE COVERAGE FROM LOCAL TV STATIONS AND NEWSPAPERS."

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”

What’s notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”

It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm—instead of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

'DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS'

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting “irregularities.” When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse—posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”)

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky’s election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America—a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren’t new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. “It’s almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, “I don’t think [they] work.” He may be right—it’s unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Regardless of where they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a “hall of mirrors.” He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn’t know who was behind the efforts targeting O’Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. “But you can’t watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone’s fucking with something,” he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden’s campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate’s legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary—opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

'FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE'

As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effort and does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to do whatever it takes.”

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”

"EVENTUALLY, THE FEAR OF COVERT PROPAGANDA INFLICTS AS MUCH DAMAGE AS THE PROPAGANDA ITSELF."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president’s campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan’s plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative—and controversial—measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning “hometown news” stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they’re paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator” ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game” because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote—a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking—but said she would pursue any strategy that was “in the bounds of the law.”

“We are in a radically disruptive moment right now,” McGowan told me. “We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly … I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.”

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and “deepfakes” (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party’s values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.

Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year’s presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news—an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem,” he told me, “but it’s going to help with volume.”

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

'POWERS OF INCUMBENCY'

If there’s one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it’s that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility—but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn’t want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren’t supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans—inside the organization or out—hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “He knows he has the confidence of the family,” one former colleague told me, “which gives him more swagger.” When the U.K.’s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale’s spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. “The president is an excellent businessman,” he told the tabloid, “and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.”

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale’s standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump’s attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale’s digital expertise, he doesn’t have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump’s message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? “People start to ask the question—you’re building this apparatus, and that’s great, but what’s the overarching narrative?” said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn’t have in 2016—the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he’s willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming “invasion” and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe—but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the “crisis” having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?

It doesn’t require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they’re injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

'NOTHING IS TRUE '

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal—the one in which Joe Biden is the villain—and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”—prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case—that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal—if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

______

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The 2020 Disinformation War.”

______

MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

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theday · 7 years

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anyways, ill say bye now... i hope ure well rested and have a good day!! (wait, i remember what i wanted to ask!! at least i think this is what i wanted to ask? anywys, do u know what u want to do now that ure finished w school? if u dont mind me asking, of course, i understand if u think its a bit personal!) ok, now im done, have a good day!! take care and stay hydrated!! (and now i really did send u a bunch of asks..)

omg i hope u dont mind but ill be answering the stuff from ur last ask here (the one where i… deleted everything) under cut bc itll be 2x longer now

so first !!!!! how i got into kpop!!! it was thanks to my good pal (@.briwoon) boxy! i follow her on twitter and despite her being a day6 stan twt i had her unmuted anyway bc.. after years of being an anime blog on tumblr and seeing all my anime mutuals slowly converting into kpop blogs one by one i was able to filter the kpop out of my brain?? smth like that since back then i wasnt into kpop and i didnt want to unfollow since im mutuals with most of them :-0

another backstory - i was one of those people who never saw themselves getting into kpop? and i think the main reason was bc i thought liking kpop would make u seem lame?? due to the influence from people around me?? but as years went by and as my mutuals changed interests it stopped bothering me and that mindset kind of just? faded away bc who am i to call other people’s happiness bad?? but despite being okay with it i never really made the move to get into any groups lmao that was until i got tired of my interest at that time (seiyuu, japanese voice actors) and my interests would always. not last?? idk so maybe thats why i didnt want to get invested but it happened regardless

anyway usually i wouldnt take notice of her rts but this . this beautiful man with orange hair and minion glasses caught my eye when i was scrolling through my timeline and i was like o worm? oh mu god? hes beautiful? so i slid into her dms and asked her whomst the beautiful man was and she sent me all their mvs after that from congratulations to i smile (the most recent mv at that time, late june) for me to watch :-D now at that time, from what little knowledge i had of kpop.. i understood that groups would be singing and dancing so i was prepared to see some sick moves or smth?? but then. i clicked on miss i smile and my wig flew off? bc… wtf.? they were playing instruments???? and they sounded good ??? so i was like oh my god? a band??????

before day6 i also had (have) a preference for bands and the way their music sounds so i was like?? ready to just. get on board yknow?? i watched how can i say and i saw the lanky noodle wearing glasses and i was like o fuck mu life? i caved and asked boxy for their names and other information and best decision of my life bc.. they really make me happy!!! after that like the day after ? myabe they did a vlive and i was like o shit? what do i do… so i downloaded the vapp and wowie i love it? its my second home…… i watched every vlive they had at that time and i thought that was a lot… (it isnt, compared to mx) and i was just rly content??

(ok i know u asked for kpop and not … day6 or other groups bc im gonna talk abt how i got into mx and astro too bc…… how can i Not.. u can skip this part tho i just wanna ramble abt my loves? ill tell u when u can continue)

that was peak happiness for me at that time.. until… boxy started talking about monsta x in our groupchat (with @.tokayhk) and she would just ramble abt this kihyun fella (who i vaguely knew bc my real life friend likes him and mx and i bought her his pc before along with the guilty clan part 2) so i was like hmm interesting… and honestly? i wasnt going to get into monsta x i really wasnt planning on asking her abt them (since i was scared id lose interest in day6 right after) but then.. she started linking videos and i .. my resolve crumbled down as i heard monsta x yelling and … this beautiful cover (which boxy sent to show us how powerful kihyuns vocals are but i was 2 focused on mister aka minhyukku) and she told us how funny these monsta men are and i was like o h no…………….. eventually one day in late august i asked her to tell me more about these monstas…… aftert that i watched every mxray episode (starting from season 2 bc i dont know 1 comes before 2) and even though i didnt know anyone who was on screen except jooheon i found it really funny and?? it made me laugh so much i love mx?? ya… boxys kind of like my guardian angel?? shes really the reason im living tbh… introducing me to all these lovely people?? thank u miss boxy i love u

now. for the astrosus….. they were a bit different.. because i didnt have boxys help and they were the first group i took interest in solely bymyself so i knew i was in for a wild ride (at first, i couldnt even differentiate brian from sungjin in day6 lmao) after stanning monsta x and day6 i became more?? open to kpop and i started watching unhelpful guides on youtube bc . they were funnie and idk its nice??/ and i stumbled upon the astro one (which wasnt that funny but more helpful than anythng) and i was like. oh worm? the cicada group… bc i watched a short clip of them catching that stupid cicada in their office as it appeared on my tl one day so i clicked on the video ..and after watching that it led me to another video of astro being extra for 6 minutes and those six minutes/????? best six minutes of my life because theyre so fnny and they made me laugh a lot? (combined with the editing from op) so bc they were funnie i decided to look them up and read their profiles/??? i watched their nimdle video and only knew mj bc his tag was the two letters m and j lol but it really made me bust both of my lungs i just?? laughed A Lot

im not sure how i managed to put name to face so quickly but it mightve been bc after the nimdle videos i watched every ddoca and astro play as well as their vlives available bc.. i just inhale the content at godspeed??

for mx and astro i was drawn in by their personalities before their music because they were on more variety shows and had more chances to show dorky they all are which made it way quicker for me to fall for the two groups??? for day6 its a bit sad but the weekly scheduled vlives arent enough for me to tell what kind of people they are (although those r still hilarious) i just wish they would go on more variety shows?? its understandable if they themselves dont want to be on any shows though!!! i love all 3 groups with all my heart :-D

ok if u skipped u can start from here ill be answering the questions now lmao

FIRSTof all,,,,, youre learning how to drive?? thats so cool >:-0 we’re not allowed to learn until we’re like...?? 18?? or 21 idk but not so Soon :-( and its cute u think abt me (or of what to say) but pleaseth stay safe... i hope ur driving lessons go smoothly until u end theM!!! hopefully youll be able to get ur licence :-D

aNDD!!! the thought of drinking warm tea when its cold outside.. is so ?? nice to think about hecc u better drink that tEA and enjoy it !!!! stay warm and comfy miss RM ..... and it even snows there????? thats so cool tbh ?? (i love snow but maybe thats bc it doesnt snow here so i dont know the tru evil of snow but like.... its so.... white and fluffy??) i would ask u 2 take pics and show me but alas...... the time is not right :-( do u know when we’re allowed to expose ourselves?? i forgot rip... but its sometime next month right im excited???? since its near my birthday !!!!!

ok now to answer this ask no i actually have no clue what i want to be after i finish school?? yikEs but last year i (jokingly) said i wanted to be a farmer??? idk if i might actually do that probably not i guess im just freestyling (going with the flow) for now we’ll see where life takes me

and like i said u can ask me anything !!! im fine with it :-) alsooooo please dont ever feel bad about sending too many asks bc its a lovely thing to wake up to and i just?? get rly happy when i see all the asks in my activity :-D!!

#asks #rachel maria #oohh my this got really long #its already the next day so ill quickly answer the nxt set

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localbizlift · 6 years

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Twitter widens its view of bad actors to fight election fiddlers

Twitter has announced more changes to its rules to try to make it harder for people to use its platform to spread politically charged disinformation and thereby erode democratic processes.

In an update on its “elections integrity work” yesterday, the company flagged several new changes to the Twitter Rules which it said are intended to provide “clearer guidance” on behaviors it’s cracking down on.

In the problem area of “spam and fake accounts”, Twitter says it’s responding to feedback that, to date, it’s been too conservative in how it thinks about spammers on its platform, and only taking account of “common spam tactics like selling fake goods”. So it’s expanding its net to try to catch more types of “inauthentic activity” — by taking into account more factors when determining whether an account is fake.

“As platform manipulation tactics continue to evolve, we are updating and expanding our rules to better reflect how we identify fake accounts, and what types of inauthentic activity violate our guidelines,” Twitter writes. “We now may remove fake accounts engaged in a variety of emergent, malicious behaviors.”

Some of the factors it says it will now also take into account when making a ‘spammer or not’ judgement are:

Use of stock or stolen avatar photos

Use of stolen or copied profile bios

Use of intentionally misleading profile information, including profile location

Kremlin-backed online disinformation agents have been known to use stolen photos for avatars and also to claim accounts are US based, despite spambots being operated out of Russia. So it’s pretty clear why Twitter is cracking down on fake profiles pics and location claims.

Less clear: Why it took so long for Twitter’s spam detection systems to be able to take account of these suspicious signals. But, well, progress is still progress.

(Intentionally satirical ‘Twitter fakes’ (aka parody accounts) should not be caught in this net, as Twitter has had a longstanding policy of requiring parody and fan accounts to be directly labeled as such in their Twitter bios.)

Pulling the threads of spambots

In another major-sounding policy change, the company says it’s targeting what it dubs “attributed activity” — so that when/if it “reliably” identifies an entity behind a rule-breaking account it can apply the same penalty actions against any additional accounts associated with that entity, regardless of whether the accounts themselves were breaking its rules or not.

This is potentially a very important change, given that spambot operators often create accounts long before they make active malicious use of them, leaving these spammer-in-waiting accounts entirely dormant, or doing something totally innocuous, sometimes for years before they get deployed for an active spam or disinformation operation.

So if Twitter is able to link an active disinformation campaign with spambots lurking in waiting to carry out the next operation it could successfully disrupt the long term planning of election fiddlers. Which would be great news.

Albeit, the devil will be in the detail of how Twitter enforces this new policy — such as how high a bar it’s setting itself with the word “reliably”.

Obviously there’s a risk that, if defined too loosely, Twitter could shut innocent newbs off its platform by incorrectly connecting them to a previously identified bad actor. Which it clearly won’t want to do.

The hope is that behind the scenes Twitter has got better at spotting patterns of behavior it can reliably associate with spammers — and will thus be able to put this new policy to good use.

There’s certainly good external research being done in this area. For example, recent work by Duo Security has yielded an open source methodology for identifying account automation on Twitter.

The team also dug into botnet architectures — and were able to spot a cryptocurrency scam botnet which Twitter had previously been recommending other users follow. So, again hopefully, the company has been taking close note of such research, and better botnet analysis underpins this policy change.

There’s also more on this front: “We are expanding our enforcement approach to include accounts that deliberately mimic or are intended to replace accounts we have previously suspended for violating our rules,” Twitter also writes.

This additional element is also notable. It essentially means Twitter has given itself a policy allowing it to act against entire malicious ideologies — i.e. against groups of people trying to spread the same sort of disinformation, not just any a single identified bad actor connected to a number of accounts.

To use the example of the fake news peddler behind InfoWars, Alex Jones, who Twitter finally permanently banned last month, Twitter’s new policy suggests any attempts by followers of Jones to create ‘in the style of’ copycat InfoWars accounts on its platform, i.e. to try to indirectly return Jones’ disinformation to Twitter, would — or, well, could — face the same enforcement action it has already meted out to Jones’ own accounts.

Though Twitter does have a reputation for inconsistently applying its own policies. So it remains to be seen how it will, in fact, act.

And how enthusiastic it will be about slapping down disinformation ideologies — given its longstanding position as a free speech champion, and in the face of criticism that it is ‘censoring’ certain viewpoints.

Hacked materials

Another change being announced by Twitter now is a clampdown on the distribution of hacked materials via its platform.

Leaking hacked emails of political officials at key moments during an election cycle has been a key tactic for democracy fiddlers in recent years — such as the leak of emails sent by top officials in the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 US presidential election.

Or the last minute email leak in France during the presidential election last year.

Twitter notes that its rules already prohibit the distribution of hacked material which contains “private information or trade secrets, or could put people in harm’s way” — but says it’s now expanding “the criteria for when we will take action on accounts which claim responsibility for a hack, which includes threats and public incentives to hack specific people and accounts”.

So it seems, generally, to be broadening its policy to cover a wider support ecosystem around election hackers — or hacking more generally.

Twitter’s platform does frequently host hackers — who use anonymous Twitter accounts to crow about their hacks and/or direct attack threats at other users…

Feds cant touch us. NCA cant touch us. KEK we the big bois running around the internet with our 1337 bootnet! Come catch us we are untouchable! Living on TOR nodes and Open DNS. Smoking that good stuff with our bois at radware.

— APOPHIS SQUAD (@apophissquadv2) July 18, 2018

Presumably Twitter will be shutting that kind of hacker activity down in future.

Though it’s unclear what the new policy might mean for a hacktivist group like Anonymous (which is very active on Twitter).

Twitter’s new policy might also have repercussions for Wikileaks — which was directly involved in the spreading of the DNC leaked emails, for example, yet nonetheless has not previously been penalized by Twitter. (And thus remains on its platform so far.)

One also wonders how Twitter might respond to a future tweet from, say, US president Trump encouraging the hacking of a political opponent….

Safe to say, this policy could get pretty murky and tricky for Twitter.

“Commentary about a hack or hacked materials, such as news articles discussing a hack, are generally not considered a violation of this policy,” it also writes, giving itself a bit of wiggle room on how it will apply (or not apply) the policy.

Daily spam decline

In the same blog post, Twitter gives an update on detection and enforcement actions related to its stated mission of improving “conversational health” and information integrity on its platform — including reiterating the action it took against Iran-based disinformation accounts in August.

It also notes that it removed ~50 accounts that had been misrepresenting themselves as members of various state Republican parties that same month and using Twitter to share “media regarding elections and political issues with misleading or incorrect party affiliation information”.

“We continue to partner closely with the RNC, DNC, and state election institutions to improve how we handle these issues,” it adds.

On the automated detections front — where Twitter announced a fresh squeeze just three months ago — it reports that in the first half of September it challenged an average of 9.4 million accounts per week. (Though it does not specify how many of those challenges turned out to be bona fide spammers, or at least went unchallenged).

It also reports a continued decline in the average number of spam-related reports from users — down from an average of ~17,000 daily in May, to ~16,000 daily in September.

This summer it introduced a new registration process for developers requesting access to its APIs — intended to prevent the registration of what it describes as “spammy and low quality apps”.

Now it says it’s suspending, on average, ~30,000 applications per month as a result of efforts “to make it more difficult for these kinds of apps to operate in the first place”.

Elsewhere, Twitter also says it’s working on new proprietary systems to identify and remove “ban evaders at speed and scale”, as part of ongoing efforts to improve “proactive enforcements against common policy violations”.

In the blog, the company flags a number of product changes it has made this year too, including a recent change it announced two weeks ago which brings back the chronological timeline (via a setting users can toggle) — and which it now says it has rolled out.

“We recently updated the timeline personalization setting to allow people to select a strictly reverse-chronological experience, without recommended content and recaps. This ensures you have more control of how you experience what’s happening on our service,” it writes, saying this is also intended to help people “stay informed”.

Though, given that a chronological timeline remains not the default on Twitter, with algorithmically surfaced ‘interesting tweets’ instead being most actively pushed at users, it seems unlikely this change will have a major impact on mitigating any disinformation campaigns.

Those in the know (that they can change settings) being able to stay more informed is not how election fiddling will be defeated.

US midterm focus

Twitter also says it’s continuing to roll out new features to show more context around accounts — giving the example of the launch of election labels earlier this year, as a beta for candidates in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. Though it’s clearly got lots of work to do on that front — given all the other elections continuously taking place in the rest of the world.

With an eye on the security of the US midterms as a first focus, Twitter says it will send election candidates a message prompt to ensure they have two-factor authentication enabled on their account to boost security.

“We are offering electoral institutions increased support via an elections-specific support portal, which is designed to ensure we receive and review critical feedback about emerging issues as quickly as possible. We will continue to expand this program ahead of the elections and will provide information about the feedback we receive in the near future,” it adds, again showing that its initial candidate support efforts are US-focused.

On the civic engagement front, Twitter says it is also actively encouraging US-based users to vote and to register to vote, as well as aiming to increase access to relevant voter registration info.

“As part of our civic engagement efforts, we are building conversation around the hashtag #BeAVoter with a custom emoji, sending U.S.-based users a prompt in their home timeline with information on how to register to vote, and drawing attention to these conversations and resources through the top US trend,” it writes. “This trend is being promoted by @TwitterGov, which will create even more access to voter registration information, including election reminders and an absentee ballot FAQ.”

#marketing

0 notes

pmsocialmedia · 6 years

Text

Twitter widens its view of bad actors to fight election fiddlers

Twitter has announced more changes to its rules to try to make it harder for people to use its platform to spread politically charged disinformation and thereby erode democratic processes.

Some of the factors it says it will now also take into account when making a ‘spammer or not’ judgement are:

Use of stock or stolen avatar photos

Use of stolen or copied profile bios

Use of intentionally misleading profile information, including profile location

Less clear: Why it took so long for Twitter’s spam detection systems to be able to take account of these suspicious signals. But, well, progress is still progress.

Pulling the threads of spambots

Albeit, the devil will be in the detail of how Twitter enforces this new policy — such as how high a bar it’s setting itself with the word “reliably”.

The hope is that behind the scenes Twitter has got better at spotting patterns of behavior it can reliably associate with spammers — and will thus be able to put this new policy to good use.

There’s certainly good external research being done in this area. For example, recent work by Duo Security has yielded an open source methodology for identifying account automation on Twitter.

Though Twitter does have a reputation for inconsistently applying its own policies. So it remains to be seen how it will, in fact, act.

Hacked materials

Another change being announced by Twitter now is a clampdown on the distribution of hacked materials via its platform.

Or the last minute email leak in France during the presidential election last year.

So it seems, generally, to be broadening its policy to cover a wider support ecosystem around election hackers — or hacking more generally.

Twitter’s platform does frequently host hackers — who use anonymous Twitter accounts to crow about their hacks and/or direct attack threats at other users…

— APOPHIS SQUAD (@apophissquadv2) July 18, 2018

Presumably Twitter will be shutting that kind of hacker activity down in future.

Though it’s unclear what the new policy might mean for a hacktivist group like Anonymous (which is very active on Twitter).

One also wonders how Twitter might respond to a future tweet from, say, US president Trump encouraging the hacking of a political opponent….

Safe to say, this policy could get pretty murky and tricky for Twitter.

Daily spam decline

“We continue to partner closely with the RNC, DNC, and state election institutions to improve how we handle these issues,” it adds.

It also reports a continued decline in the average number of spam-related reports from users — down from an average of ~17,000 daily in May, to ~16,000 daily in September.

This summer it introduced a new registration process for developers requesting access to its APIs — intended to prevent the registration of what it describes as “spammy and low quality apps”.

Now it says it’s suspending, on average, ~30,000 applications per month as a result of efforts “to make it more difficult for these kinds of apps to operate in the first place”.

Those in the know (that they can change settings) being able to stay more informed is not how election fiddling will be defeated.

US midterm focus

On the civic engagement front, Twitter says it is also actively encouraging US-based users to vote and to register to vote, as well as aiming to increase access to relevant voter registration info.

via Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2NY4NUv

#IFTTT #Social – TechCrunch

0 notes

un-enfant-immature · 6 years

Text

Twitter widens its view of bad actors to fight election fiddlers

Twitter has announced more changes to its rules to try to make it harder for people to use its platform to spread politically charged disinformation and thereby erode democratic processes.

Some of the factors it says it will now also take into account when making a ‘spammer or not’ judgement are:

Use of stock or stolen avatar photos

Use of stolen or copied profile bios

Use of intentionally misleading profile information, including profile location

Less clear: Why it took so long for Twitter’s spam detection systems to be able to take account of these suspicious signals. But, well, progress is still progress.

Pulling the threads of spambots

Albeit, the devil will be in the detail of whether and/or how Twitter actually enforces this new policy — such as how high a bar it’s setting itself with the word “reliably”.

The hope is that behind the scenes Twitter has got better at spotting patterns of behavior it can reliably associate with spammers — and will thus be able to put this new policy to good use.

There’s certainly good external research being done in this area. For example, recent work by Duo Security has yielded an open source methodology for identifying account automation on Twitter.

The team also dug into botnet architectures — and were able to spot a cryptocurrency scam botnet which Twitter had previously been recommending other users follow. So, again hopefully, it’s been taking close note of such research to underpin this policy change.

Though Twitter does have a reputation for inconsistently applying its own policies. So it remains to be seen how it will, in fact, act.

Hacked materials

Another change being announced by Twitter now is a clampdown on the distribution of hacked materials via its platform.

Or the last minute email leak in France during the presidential election last year.

So it seems, generally, to be broadening its policy to cover a wider support ecosystem around election hackers. Twitter’s platform does frequently host hackers — who use anonymous Twitter accounts to crow about their hacks and/or send attack threats at other users…

— APOPHIS SQUAD (@apophissquadv2) July 18, 2018

Presumably Twitter will be shutting that kind of activity down in future.

Though it’s unclear what Twitter’s new policy might mean for a hacktivist group like Anonymous (which is very active on Twitter).

The new policies might also have repercussions against Wikileaks — which was directly involved in the spreading of the DNC leaked emails, for example, yet nonetheless has not previously been penalized by Twitter.

One also wonders how Twitter might respond to a future tweet from, say, US president Trump encouraging the hacking of a political opponent….

Safe to say, this policy could get pretty murky and tricky for Twitter.

“Commentary about a hack or hacked materials, such as news articles discussing a hack, are generally not considered a violation of this policy,” it also writes, so is giving itself a bit of wiggle room on how it will apply (or not apply) the policy.

Daily spam decline

In the same blog post, it also gives an update on detection and enforcement actions related to its stated mission of improving “conversational health” and information integrity on its platform — including reiterating the action it took against Iran-based disinformation accounts in August.

“We continue to partner closely with the RNC, DNC, and state election institutions to improve how we handle these issues,” it adds.

It also reports a continued decline in the average number of spam-related reports from users — down from an average of ~17,000 daily in May, to ~16,000 daily in September.

This summer it introduced a new registration process for developers requesting access to its APIs — intended to prevent the registration of what it describes as “spammy and low quality apps”.

Now it says it’s suspending, on average, ~30,000 applications per month as a result of efforts “to make it more difficult for these kinds of apps to operate in the first place”.

In the blog, the company flags a number of product changes it has made this year, including a recent change it announced two weeks ago which brings back the chronological timeline (via a setting users can toggle).

“We recently updated the timeline personalization setting to allow people to select a strictly reverse-chronological experience, without recommended content and recaps. This ensures you have more control of how you experience what’s happening on our service,” it writes now, saying also this is intended to help people “stay informed”.

Though, given that a chronological timeline remains not the default, with algorithmically surfaced ‘interesting tweets’ instead being most actively pushed at Twitter users, it seems unlikely this change will have a major impact on mitigating disinformation campaigns.

Those in the know (that they can change settings) being able to stay more informed is not how election fiddling will be defeated.

US midterm focus

With an eye on the security of the US midterms, it says it will send election candidates a message prompt to ensure they have two-factor authentication enabled on their account to boost security.

On the civic engagement front, Twitter says it is also actively encouraging US-based users to vote and to register to vote, as well as aiming to increase access to relevant voter registration info.

#TechCrunch

0 notes