#that's a zero win scenario for all involved (and some people /not/ involved)

[theresattrpgforthat]

Hi :) Perhaps an odd one, but I was wondering if you had any recommendations of games to play out events that have already happened? The end game has been predetermined, but the events that lead to it are more mutable? I'm running a dnd game with a group that has been very open to trying out different systems and I was thinking it could be very fun to put the player characters back in time into the shoes of other characters during the campaign's inciting event. Thanks!

Theme: Recalling Events

Hello friend, so there are definitely games that allow you to do something similar to what you’re looking for. There are games that go back in time, games that flashback to previous events, and games that take place at moments in our real-world history that have already happened. I don’t know if any of those games exactly work for what you’re looking for, but they might be interesting to look at in order to ask yourself how you want to run something in a timeline that you’ve established for a specific setting.

Ten Candles, by Calvary Games.

Ten Candles is a zero-prep tabletop storytelling game designed for one-shot 2-4 hour sessions of tragic horror. It is best played with one GM and 3-5 players, by the light of ten tea light candles which provide atmosphere, act as a countdown timer for the game, and allow you to literally burn your character sheet away as you play. 

Ten Candles is described as a "tragic horror" game rather than survival horror for one main reason: in Ten Candles there are no survivors. In the final scene of the game, when only one candle remains, all of the characters will die. In this, Ten Candles is not a game about "winning" or beating the monsters. Instead, it is a game about what happens in the dark, and about those who try to survive within it. It is a game about being pushed to the brink of madness and despair, searching for hope in a hopeless world, and trying to do something meaningful with your final few hours left.  

There is only a few facts pre-determined at the beginning of this game, but those facts are important: all of your characters will die. Over the course of the game, you will slowly blow out ten candles as your characters grow closer and closer too their doom.

However, the nature of that doom can be altered. I’ve seen it done for the Locked Tomb, for example, and you can set it in a modern world, a futuristic world, or a fantasy world if you like. If you want to hack this game for your group, I’d recommend playing out a scenario that involves characters that you don’t mind saying goodbye too - perhaps a catastrophe your party heard about, and you can role-play the last moments of some people they failed to save.

Firebrands Games

Mobile Zero Firebrands is a game about mech pilots getting into fights and falling in love, but more importantly, it’s a game that guides the group through mini-game-like scenes that are common tropes in various stories. The beginning scene and the end scene are usually pre-determined, but all of the other scenes happen in whatever order you prefer.

The original system has been hacked a number of times, so you might find a game or genre that works for you - perhaps you’d like to play pirates in One Particular Harbour, or gods and heroes in Divine || Mundane. You could play members of a religious order looking for a new leader in Hierophants, or look into the complicated lives of mages in Hearts of Magic. If you don’t find anything that works for your specific tastes that already exists, you could also hack the system to make it fit for your specific group.

Eat the Reich, by Rowan, Rook & Decard.

Eat the Reich is a tabletop roleplaying game in which you, a vampire commando, are coffin-dropped into occupied Paris and must cut a bloody swathe through nazi forces en route to your ultimate goal: drinking all of Adolf Hitler’s blood.

This over-the-top, ultra-violent game is designed to be played from beginning to end in one to three sessions of carnage, blood magic, meaningful flashbacks and hundreds upon hundreds of extremely dead fascists. It tells one story, it tells it loud, and it tells it brilliantly. Think Wolfenstein crossed with Danger 5 and you’re not far off the mark.

Eat the Reich both happens at a very specific point in time - WWII - and also has a mechanic that allows characters to flash-back to various points in their shared backstories in order to play through a high-action sequence while still getting to know the characters. Your vampires have been working together for a long time, and while Eat the Reich is meant to be rather fast, these flashbacks allow you to speed up that relationship-building by letting you fill the details in backwards.

Eat the Reich started out as a hack of Havoc Brigade, if I remember correctly, so the system is definitely hack-able: perhaps you can think of a big event that happened in your party’s past or even in another part of the world, and then design characters that represent folks who were behind the big event. I think this kind of game would work best for heists or high-stakes assassination - anything that expects your players to put their lives on the line for a big, sweet payoff.

Retrocausality, by Weird Age Games.

Retrocausality is a tabletop RPG about time travel adventures, in the vein of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure or Back to the Future.

It uses a rules-light, card-based system that lets you decide how time travel works. Whether you have a specific movie you want to emulate, you have Opinions on the Novikov self-consistency principle, or you prefer not to ask too many questions, Retrocausality can make it happen. Even better, the rules are so light you can use Retrocausality to run a time travel adventure in a different game. That's twice as much game.

Many of the examples shown in Retrocausality indicate that the time travellers you play will be messing with a timeline, and since the rules can be ported into a different game, that tells me that you could use this for any genre you like. This of course, means that you’re not just telling a story about your characters’ pasts - your characters are actually going back in time to a specific part of history.

I suppose you could use this to either bring your characters back to a time period before they were born, or maybe instead you’re interested in taking new heroes back to a point in time when your characters were doing something significant off-camera.

Houses of the Sun By Night, by Emily Zhu.

These are 13 houses of the underworld that the sun passes through at night.

These are 13 minigames you can play in specific situations, during your other games or on their own.

This is how the dead come back to life.

This series of games is explicitly designed to be hackable, with a setting that can be ripped apart if you like. The original setting is a nod to the underworld of Egyptian mythology, but the moments themselves can be zoomed in on a small moment or used to navigate a special event that may have big effects on the larger story. I think you can use some of the games in here to re-visit moments of your characters’ pasts, or reference events that may have happened to NPCs that the characters were not necessarily witness to.

If you want to learn more about this set of games, you can watch Aaron Voight’s review of the game on Youtube!

Other Games To Check Out

Feng Shui 2, by Atlas Games.

Time Travel Recommendation Post

[direwombat]

r: free animals (aka. jacob seed / sybille la roux / eli palmer) | far cry 5

You get what you came for, what you stayed for I only know how to satisfy your craving This is what you crave Know what you're made of, what you're made of Flesh and bones won't lie They won't lie Free animal, free animal My heart beats in patters to the broken sound Free animal, free animal You're the only one that can calm me down

made using @marissources template here!

[astercontrol]

I'm awake in the middle of the night still thinking about how Unusual the romantic subplot is in Tron 1982.

So, when I was growing up there was a formula most movies followed. If there was a romance, it would usually go like this:

Main character is single at the beginning. He's a regular guy, not particularly book-smart or serious or responsible, just a relatable dude. He likes women but doesn't currently have one in his life.

He meets the love interest. She's conventionally attractive, not particularly interesting personality-wise, and in most cases she's single too. If she has a guy of her own, he's clearly shown to be a Bad Guy.

Main Character and Love Interest fall in love. This follows one of a few common tropes. Usually either Instant-Mutual-Attraction-then-Fight-then-Makeup, or He-Likes-Her-She-Hates-Him-and-he-Persistently-Wins-Her-Over. If she has a boyfriend, this will involve a breakup and probably a fight where Main Character triumphs over him.

Then they live happily ever after, and the movie closes with the satisfaction of having shown the Relatable Regular Guy Getting The Girl because he's the Main Character and deserves it.

Now, contrast this with the love story in Tron, and see how I'm blown away:

Main Character is (sorta) the Regular Guy trope: he's said to be a computer genius, but too fun-loving and irresponsible to get very far in life with it.

Love Interest is conventionally attractive, yes, but more personality and intellect than you usually see, and also… she's NOT HIS love interest. She's his ex. And without any real animosity on either side! They're still friendly with each other, and she and her new boyfriend start events in motion by going to visit him and offer help.

New BF is an absolute NERD. He spends his leisure time at home balancing his checkbook with an abacus. The angriest we ever see him is when he gets told he can't go to WORK for a couple of days. Love Interest experienced Main Character's fun-loving immaturity and then picked someone on the absolute other end of the intellect and responsibility spectrum.

And they clearly are happy together! There is definite friendliness and flirtation between the exes, but her commitment is 100% to her new guy.

New Guy is the ONLY one who shows some real resentment about that previous relationship. And that evaporates in the course of that one visit to Main Character's place.

Now, even if you manage to ignore the rainbow flags decorating Main Character's apartment all over, and the seductive striptease that TOTALLY appears to be WORKING on New Boyfriend…

…even then, you're STILL left with a very unconventional scenario at this point, where Main Character has made ZERO progress toward breaking Love Interest up with her current guy-- and in fact has bonded with him to the point of getting him to agree to help with a crazy scheme that's gonna kickstart the main plot.

Which, of course, takes place in a world inside the computer system where the Programs written by people on the outside are living entities who share their faces and personality traits, and… this, too, messes with the usual course of the Romantic Subplot, in amazing ways.

Ex Love Interest and her New Guy have programs living inside the computer, and those two programs are also in an established relationship, although they've been separated by Guy Program getting captured, locked up and made to fight as a gladiator. When he escapes, with Main Character and another friend, he gets separated from them and thinks they've been killed and the first thing he does is find Her-- because 1. he is overwhelmingly in love with her and 2. she is the only one who knows the route and all the devices he'll need in order to get where he's trying to go.

Main Character is the only one who's entered this computer world. Ex and New Guy's real-world selves are on the outside, and from this point on, their part in the plot consists of New Guy having to be there to receive a communication from his Program. Which he does, like the best and most loyal friend, enabling a happy ending for the whole team.

Meanwhile, Main Character's involvement in any "love story" consists of one moment when he's in the computer system, alone with his Ex's Program and about to pull a stunt that might get him killed, and they kiss.

Now, she meets him at least halfway, and seems to be very much INTO this kiss, although it also seems that kissing is not a thing Programs usually do and she may not have any idea what it means to him.

So, I wouldn't say Main Character has noble intentions here. He's not sure he's going to survive, he's with someone who closely resembles his Ex that he still has Feelings for, he WANTS one last kiss from her and he can easily take advantage of the fact that she doesn't know what kissing even means. Definitely not his most ethical moment.

But her response shows just how free she is-- perhaps how free her entire world is-- from human hangups and taboos involving romance.

After clearly enjoying the kiss, she also clearly realizes that it's an expression of affection. Later, when she's reunited with her own partner, she immediately tries it out on him, to their mutual delight-- and with no sign of anger or guilt about how she learned it! She is ecstatic to be together with her soulmate again, but she also has only good things to say about Main Character's last moments in the system. From her perspective, all that happened with the kiss was "This weird awesome stranger showed me a new way to touch someone I love, and now we're gonna have so much fun with that!"

Back on the outside, Main Character doesn't "get the girl," or fight and triumph over the Other Man. Instead, he gets a scene reuniting with BOTH of them, in one big group hug.

Just IMAGINE if this had been the norm. If it'd been the sort of romantic subplot we all saw most commonly in our formative years, shaping our whole idea of how love works.

Just freaking IMAGINE.

[colourfullsims]

DAY 3 | It Takes Two (3/6)

Nina: Yeah, a little too late to be repentant now, Tucker: Tori's already booked to fly home tomorrow because of your little in the moment decision. But we'll get to you in a second. Over by the pool, Joey checks in with Manny about whether he's got a shot at capturing her affections this summer. From what I can tell, that's about to be a bit of an uphill battle for him. Though it looks like he's willing to put in the effort to prove that he's got what it takes to be Manny's main man! Not too far away, Tucker and Felicity talk romantic goals, to which Tucker seems to be less than interested in sharing, much to Fe's displeasure. I know we always say this isn't Friend Island, but Tucker probably would have been much better off saving Tori than putting himself in his worse case scenario. Eh, I'm sure he'll survive.

Next, we have one more couple to check in on as we zoom upstairs to the dressing rooms!

@queenofmyshuno @slothseasims @storiesbyjes2g @morrigan-sims

Beginning | Island Schedule | Previous | Next

Manny: So, what did you want to talk about?

Joey: Oh, nothing in particular.

Manny: Seriously? Then why the urgency?

Joey: Uh, well, I guess there was one thing. I thought we were clicking pretty well, you and I, even before today’s challenge. But you don’t seem too enthused over being coupled up with me. Guess I’m just a little confused.

Manny: Well, I would have thought that you would have at least asked me if I wanted to couple up with you before you decided for yourself. That would have been nice.

Joey: [chuckles] Alright, maybe I jumped the gun a bit, but can you blame me? Anyone would be a fool to pass up a beauty like you. And I’m not in the business of making a fool out of myself.

Manny: Uh-huh. Well, word of advice for next time: I’m not in the business of being someone’s conquest.

Manny: [in the DR] Tonight was shaping up to be a real win for me after everything that happened today, and now this. Joey really chose the worst time to go rogue. I know ultimately it doesn’t change too much for me: I’m still free to go and explore some other connections in the Villa. But it really sucks not being with who I really had my eye on.

Joey: Next time? Does that mean I should be expecting this little arrangement to go on for a while?

Manny: Not even a little bit.

Manny: Look, you’re a fun guy, Joey. I’ll admit we have some good back and forth conversation-wise. For that reason alone, I’ll let you shoot your shot. But to be clear, I won’t be closing off any other people from getting to know me. So you better be ready to step up to the competition.

Joey: Hear you loud and clear! And don’t you worry - I intend to sweep you off your feet.

Joey: [in the DR] I’d say I haven’t done too bad for myself tonight! I traded in a controlling redhead for a sexy blonde, and so far, I couldn’t be happier. Manny might be playing a little hard to get right now, but I’m sure it won’t take too much to make her realize just how good we are together. As far as I’m concerned, what competition is there really against me?

---------------------------

Felicity: So! I already have an idea of what your career goals are, but tell me what it is you’re looking for here in the Villa. A future heiress to your culinary empire?

Tucker: [chuckles nervously] Not exactly. I’m not too concerned about my future girlfriend being that involved in my work. I think it’s healthy to have a little separation. I wouldn’t say that I have that many “expectations,” really. It all comes down to whether or not the chemistry is there between us. Everything else is just extra after that.

Felicity: Ahhh, I see. I sorta agree with you to an extent. I’ve definitely got my list of “must-haves,” but if a guy were to check off all my boxes but we had zero compatibility, there’s no way we’d last.

Felicity: [in the DR] I’m absolutely buzzing over the recoupling! I knew I had a pretty good shot from the get go, but nothing beats actually hearing Tucker call my name in front of everyone. And I must admit, it was satisfying seeing Manny stuck with my leftovers. [laughs] I just can’t wait to find out so much more about Tucker! He feels like the exact type of guy I’ve been searching for!

Felicity: So would you say I’m your usual type?

Tucker: I wouldn’t say I have a “type.” Like I said, it all comes down to the vibe. Felicity: Aw, come on. Physically you have to have a preference.

Tucker: Not at all. I consider what’s on the inside more important. But, I actually was hoping we could cut this short. I was hoping to pull a couple other people aside before turning in for the night.

Felicity: Uh, don’t you think that’s a little rude? We just coupled up. Before this morning, I hadn’t gotten any alone time with you, and you want to spend that time talking to other people?

Tucker: [sigh] Felicity, I’m not trying to be rude. I just--

Felicity: Just what? 

Tucker: …You’re right. I…I can always have my other chats tomorrow.

Felicity: Perfect! I knew you would understand! Now, back to your dating history… Tucker: [in the DR] You don’t have to tell me how stupid a move this was. In the moment, I thought it would be better to not recouple with Tori since I wasn’t feeling anything more than friendship. But compared to Felicity, I would much prefer to still be partnered up with Tori right now. Fe’s the exact type of girl I don’t deal with. How the fuck am I gonna play this one off?

[sunflowerdigs]

You've told us something that's probably never gonna happen. Could you give us an example of something that you think could happen with Roman and the Mencken storyline that would work for you? I love speculative scenarios.

At this late date (*shakes fist at Jesse*), if it were up to me, we'd get a scene between Roman and Mencken at the end of 4x07 to take us into 4x08. Regardless of whether their sexual relationship was revealed to the other siblings tonight or not, it's necessary for the audience to at least have a sense of how it works and what Roman is feeling in regards to Mencken so that his actions in 4x08 have that context. Shiv smiled at the end of 4x05, Kendall smiled at the end of 4x06 - I'd have Roman smiling in bed with Mencken at the end of 4x07 (maybe that scene would start with them...finishing up, and then Mencken turning over to sleep. Then Roman would smile - it would be a callback to Tern Haven when he woke up next to Tabitha looking troubled).

After that, I'd want to see Kendall/Shiv/Connor find out about Roman and Mencken in 4x08 when they fight over the election results. And I'd want it to be messy - you know Shiv can sling some homophobic insults when her temper is up (not the f-slur but things consistent with the homophobia she's shown all season). And then...idk, honestly.

A lot of the time when Roman fucks up, his phone is involved. Naomi in S2, dick pic in S3, text from Logan this season. So it seems likely that something from his phone might be used to expose how he allowed Mencken access to ATN broadcasts (and Joy might back that up by letting people know she got fired for speaking out against Mencken). Either way, their relationship isn't surviving Mencken losing the election. So, I guess that's where it would end.

To me, this is still plausible, but certainly not likely. Sadly, I feel the show has probably elected to pretend there was zero sexual tension between them ever and just go with Roman's motivation to steal the election for Mencken being a combination of Logan's death and Kendall winning big by telling a big lie in 4x06. Roman may think that if he lies big as well, there will be no consequences and he'll be able the secure his position by having an open line to the president.

[hexjulia]

ok i read the essay that apparently led to such a negative response that it popularised the term "climate doomerism". I don't think it's bad or even cynical at all, but i think dunking on it would appeal to an american politician involved in a "green new deal" because he criticises that specifically, by name. But some of what he said here is true i think, and even what i disagree with doesn't lead to cynism about whether it's worth doing anything, or not trying at all i think. Look,

"In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they’re good—because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.

[...]

And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for."

[power-chords]

Weird question, but how stringent are you about canon-compliancy in fanfic? (reading, not writing) Personally I find myself being more lenient about characterization/using creative license when something is written extraordinarily well and vice versa

Not weird at all! You’ve come to the right place. This is one of my favorite subjects of Highbrow Lowlife discourse.

Maybe this is just semantics, but I view “canon compliance” and good, faithful characterization as distinct but interrelated fanfiction mechanics. For me, “canon compliance” just denotes a level of structural alignment with the major plot beats and established events of the source text. Adherence to the “facts of the narrative,” so to speak. It has a strong relationship to good characterization, but I am willing to accommodate certain dramatic leaps provided that the characterization itself remains faithful — this is why canon-divergent or crossover AUs can be so enjoyable in the right hands, and terrible in the wrong ones.

One of the more striking realizations that has come from my renewed (resumed?) involvement in capital-f Fandom is that people do it in a way that is so far removed from what I would ever consider rewarding, LOL. Which sounds like a snotty prescriptivist value judgment but I swear it isn’t: at the end of the day, the beauty and fun of the activity is that everything is made up and the points don’t matter. Fandom is fundamentally Play, and there is no wrong way to Play so long as you’ve found a willing social group who are all in agreement about the rules of the game.

For some people, that game is using the characters in a given work as a set of attractive doll containers for the insertion of various OCs, or the fungible enactment of certain preferred fantasy scenarios. For me, this completely obliterates the appeal of transformative work. The object of my game is to successfully walk the tightrope between wish fulfillment and mimicry, and you “win” (albeit not in any zero-sum sense of the word) by tricking me, your reader, into believing that an often radically alternate version of events could substitute for or follow canon; that an “omitted scene” as written could slot seamlessly within its depicted chronology. Speaking as both a reader and writer, good fanfic is an exercise in expansion, a labor of love that colors within the negative spaces without scrawling outside the lines and over-writing the positive ones. I can be extraordinarily lenient with the nuts and bolts of canon compliance, provided the writer is skilled enough to earn that license to remodel (I’ll give you an example behind the cut).* What I cannot abide is lousy mimicry, poor characterization and discrepant style, any kind of authorial projection that is in clear opposition to the thematic and aesthetic spirit of the source material.

So what makes for winning mimicry in the pursuit of unlikely erotic situations? It’s a complex, infinitely variable formula, but there are some especially reactive ingredients that can combine for wonderfully harmonious chemistry, or else blow the whole thing to hell.

Decent writing, as in the basic meat-and-potatoes of prose, is essential. That is bare minimum viability. Nothing will make me back-click out of a fic faster than a clunky, half-assed introductory paragraph.

And there’s a reason you see that post doing the rounds on Tumblr all the time, the He Would Not Fucking Say That post. I am a student of the the Dialogue School of Fanfic Theory when it comes to reading and writing: nothing breaks immersion quite like Bad (Out-of-Character) Dialogue, and nothing heightens immersion like Good (In-Character) Dialogue. (Also kind of a misnomer, since this principle also extends to the art of the internal monologue and limited narration, but I’m making things up as I go along here, lol.) If a writer can make me hear these characters talking to each other and themselves in their own voices, in my own head, they’ve probably got me eating out of the palm of their hand. To make me believe that a character would behave in a way that the canon refuses to explore — usually quite staunchly! — I need a convincing demonstration of the process by which she talks herself into it.

This means not sanding off the points of prickly jerks and sociopaths, or having the unhinged, emotionally maladapted blorbos speak to each other like they’ve ever seen the inside of a therapist’s office. It means paying attention to the individual “Lego brick” idiosyncrasies of vocabulary, cadence, and rhythm, and taking care not to supplant an excess of your own (way harder than it seems!). It means acknowledging that certain characters will simply never ever fucking ever say “I love you” — so what do they say instead? How do they act instead? And therein lies the pleasure and surprise of finding out.

*Here are a couple of sterling examples from one of my favorite fic writers, scioscribe. (A legend. One of the greats.) The first is from a True Detective fic, possibly my favorite True Detective fic, one of those changed-my-brain-chemistry total package reading experiences that is soup-to-nuts spectacular. It opens right up with a snippet of totally authentic dialogue that takes you right into the world of the television series:

“What kind of anything we talking here?” Marty said. “I give him flowers and he blows me?”

“Pretty son-of-a-bitch like you,” Campbell said, “I’m sure he’d do it without the flowers.”

He put his hand on Campbell’s chest and blocked him as they rounded the corner. “I just want to know what I’m getting into here. If this guy’s Pandora’s box—”

“He’s not Pandora’s anything, he’s a junkie burnout. The way it sounds to me is he fucked the dog years back and so now he’s on loan, long-term, to whoever wants him. Simple enough?”

“Sounds like a raw deal for him.”

“Don’t worry,” Campbell said. “After you meet him, you’re gonna think he deserves plenty worse. The guy’s an asshole.”

He stepped around Marty and opened the door to the box. “Marty, meet Crash. Crash, Detective Hart.”

Crash looked about how Marty would have expected somebody named Crash to look. Scorpion jacket. Sharp-faced, like somebody’d been using his profile to cut lines of cocaine. And he had those junkie eyes, half float and half need. Aside from that he mostly looked like the end of some made-for-TV movie about a James Dean-kind-of Hollywood star, after the drugs had run their course and left the matinee idol bit a little ravaged, which was to say he was either good-looking or had been before and Marty couldn’t quite tell which.

“Charmed, motherfucker,” Crash said.

“Yeah, charmed,” Marty said.

The next is the exact same flawless form, used in this instance to rope you right into a combination of existing universes that you would never expect to play so happily together. In fact, I doubt I need to tell you exactly what two universes they are; I can just serve you up a sample of the dialogue:

“Every day,” Elle continued, “we boldly go out to face strange new corners of the galaxy, and you look your best, and what do I look like? A blonde satsuma.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“In civilian clothes, I am a force to be reckoned with. I can even make the dress uniforms work. But this—” Elle moved her hand up and down incredulously, indicating the soft, command gold fabric of her standard Starfleet gear. “I look pasty. And orange. At the same time. Something has got to be done about this.”

Both spectacular fics, so go read 'em if you're up for it. :)

[brilliantweb3]

Gambling on the Titanic sub sucks, but leave moral outrage in Web2

They say crypto traders are mentally unstable degenerate gamblers. Nihilists profiteering from others’ misfortune in a sadistic zero-sum game, providing no value to society. So, when you hear that Polymarket, the blockchain prediction market (read: Web3 bookie), facilitated bets on whether the lost Titanic-hunting sub would be found before its oxygen runs out — it sounds about right. Decentralized prediction markets (DPMs) like Polychain were some of the earliest smart contract use cases. Augur was the first on Ethereum, having crowdfunded about one year after the blockchain launched in 2014. These platforms are a little bit like bitcoin ATMs when it comes to capturing mainstream attention. Physical cash machines are a widely understood concept, and so is betting on world events like the SuperBowl or US presidential races. The idea of a seedy crypto gambling den easily translates. DPMs are pretty much that, except the den is the Ethereum blockchain and nobody runs that, so the cops can’t shut it down (or the morality police). When Twitter found out, some onlookers hated the idea. These platforms let users open prediction markets about any topic whatsoever, with no permission necessary. Smart contracts maintain the odds and settle bets, in cryptocurrency, with no dodgy middlemen and most importantly — no censorship. Like all interesting software, Augur’s limits were quickly tested after its launch in 2018 — by very dramatic assassination markets.  One minute, you’re cheekily betting that the queen would live until 2025. The next, you’ve essentially put out a hit on a royal family member — someone could take the opposite side, kill them, and win the bet.  In that case, your bet would be the bounty (alongside anyone else’s that believed the queen would live).  Resourceful assassins could even, hypothetically, trawl prediction markets for celebrities with loads of cash and bet on their life expectancy with a mind to cut those lives short — and then take all the ETH. Donald Trump, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos have all had their own life/death prediction markets on Augur. Augur has never inspired any real-life assassinations, but Polymarket’s Titanic sub market is a 2023 iteration of the same scenario, just on Polygon. Crypto edgelords betting on whether people would die. Because these bets take place on apps such as Polymarket and Augur that serve as conduits for blockchain activity, censorship of betting terms is a very tricky subject.  These platforms are commonly known as “decentralized apps,” as their associated smart contracts exist on chain, but they still rely on centralized front-end apps often maintained by a company or software studio. Without these apps, users would need to code their own so-called “raw” transactions to be added to the blockchain.  But while the apps themselves are censorable — Polymarket developers really could figure out ways to censor its app for any input involving “death,” or “die” or “live,” just like Augur could’ve done — those efforts would surely go to waste due to the stubborn ingenuity of the internet. At risk of “free speech” cliches, it’s a waste of time to fixate on all the deplorable ways decentralized tech can be used, especially for those even remotely interested in supporting the concept of permissionless systems. If you can censor prediction markets, you can censor the money, rendering this whole crazy endeavor entirely moot. The Polymarket backlash shows a demand for censorship at the app level which almost completely nullifies the promise and benefits of these protocols.  Censoring apps of any kind — be they gambling, social media or Ponzi game — for activity we don’t like is a very Web2 solution to a Web3 “problem” that can’t be solved. Get our news the fastest way possible. Join us on W3W Web3 CRM and follow us on https://w3w.ai/

[tmuobradb]

CEID- 100 - Module 5

Disinformation:

An example of disinformation I found on the internet occurred way back in 2016, and this was when a Pizza shop was falsely accused of a pedophile sex ring involving Hilary Clinton. There were multiple tweets about these accusations which had no proof whatsoever, rather were just made to spread fake news about an upcoming candidate for the presidential election in the US. Slowly but surely these tweets caught fire and the attention of many, which raised many questions and eyebrows about this pizza place and its connections to the pedophilia of children. Thus on December 4, 2016, a shooter entered the Pizza shop to investigate the scene with a rifle. Fortunately, no harm was done in terms of physical violence, as not only was he arrested, but the allegations were completely false. But it was a close scenario where people could have gotten hurt over something they had zero knowledge about.  Thus people on the internet must be careful and very suspicious of all information read on the web, especially when it contains no proof whatsoever, political people and an unverified source tweet it.

Misinformation:

Recently in the Football World, one of the most sought-after players has come under a wave of rumours and information that has been leaked by sources. After just signing a new contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the player is looking to force a move away from his current club after being “unhappy”. According to the reports, Kylian Mbappe feels like he has made a “mistake” and that “promises” have been broken, which were made when he signed that contract. However, just recently multiple people have come out that are very close to Mbappe and have stated that these are just all lies and rumours. Even Mbappe has gotten into the mix, as the whole footballing world erupted hearing these rumours, and during the Ballan Dor ceremony that was just recently hosted, he stated that these are all just lies and that he is very happy at Paris Saint Germain. This is an example of Misinformation, and it happens every day, especially for people of higher “value” such as athletes, politicians, etc. It is very hard to identify when this information is true and when it is not unless the actual person or place this type of information comes out and states the opposite. However, by finding and following the right journalists, media members, etc that hold high credibility and are usually right, you will decrease the chance of reading misinformation. 

Mal-information:

One example I believe fits in Mal- information is one that was on all social media platforms and that has gone viral. And that was the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard Case, which was broadcasted on almost every single platform at the time, and has racked in hundreds of millions of views together. During this case, both sides had great deals of information that was, in reality, true, however in the bigger picture. Both sides would cut off specific pieces of information, and use those against the other to win the case. However, even if both Johnny and Amber used these tactics, one thing stood out to me which was proven false, and that was the alleged Johnny Depp physical violence on Amber Heard. Amber Heard “leaked” the videos back in 2015 talking about how Johnny had physically hurt her and left multiple marks on her face and body. At the time there was no proof or evidence that Johnny could use to defend himself, which caused a social media backlash, and Johnny was taken to court and was “canceled” However, just recently Johnny Depp used both the social media platform and the all the evidence we able to get to show in court that although Johnny did do some disturbing things and did show acts of violence, he never physically touched Amber Heard violently, and that was proven through multiple pieces of evidence (For all we know). Thus it is important to always look at all the evidence that is there to offer, and not to jump to conclusions right away before official hearings and information come out. This is quite hard to do in today's age and social media, where things go viral in a matter of minutes and everyone talks about it.

Link:

[race-week]

Question: how can Lewis still win the championship?

Many say it’s over now. Some say he can still make it.

How? If he doesn’t win Brasil? How can he still win?

I mean for the championship to be over at this point, after today one driver needs to have a 79 point lead, which is not mathematically possible, the gap is currently 21 points.

For it to be sealed in Qatar the gap needs to be 53 points, it’s possible but that involves Lewis scoring no points in either race.

The thing is, there could easily still be reliability issues for either party or crashes etc so to write it off now is kind of unnecessary. That is how he can still win.

I’m sorry but I don’t have the mental capacity to write out every possible race scenario and figure them all out, someone on Reddit calculated it and there was still a 20% chance of Lewis winning the championship, so not zero like people are saying.

[unholyplumpprincess]

Won’t Say I’m In Love

A commission for Anonymous with a trans dude and Loba!

Summary: In which reader is Loba's sugar baby/friend with benefit who she loves to shower gifts upon. When reader starts expressing interest and complimenting her, realizing she gets flustered when the attention is turned to her, it makes courting her and making it. Obvious they'd like more a little more difficult. Nothing that can't be solved with a little bump n grind, right?...Right?

Reblogs > Likes. It costs zero dollars to reblog :D

Minors and ageless blogs dni or you will be blocked!

Fandom: Apex Legends

Relationship: Loba Andrade/Reader

Warnings: R18+/NSFT, Loba is a trans woman and her bits are referred to as cock/dick, Reader is a trans man with top surgery and no bottom surgery and parts are referred to as cock/dick/hole, reader is penetrated, sugar mommy relationship BUT WITHOUT THE MOMMY INVOLVED, FWB to romance, talk of transitioning and the stuff that comes with it, Loba nuts in ya, aaaand fluff!

Words: 5.1k

_______________

Loba, to you, was everything.

Perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch. But in times like this, you can’t imagine her out of your life. Not when her smile is etched into your memory, dimples on her cheeks and pearly whites reminding you of a wolf’s. Or how her eyes narrow dangerously when you tease her, a smile playing on her lips as she coos to you to hand over the last treat in the kitchen before you run squealing after you shove it in your mouth. Loba, hot on your heels.

Life with her came natural after being in each other’s good graces for so long.

Well.

If you called ‘fuck buddies where she buys you things all the time’ good graces. A certified sugar mama.

~Rest under the cut~

Your meeting had been a business strict one at first. She was the girl people went to when things were stolen from them or they had specific desires. In your case, a precious family heirloom had been stolen from you by Hammond. That family member that had been working on cracking a code to work into their system had mysteriously disappeared, leaving you with a precious family ring that you cherished. Yet, somehow, it had gone missing, the only lead being of a ripped jacket by the window with an H symbol on it.

Loba was a person you’d heard of who could get anything from anyone, and when you’d found her, given her all the details and your own sob story. She’d hummed, drawing her manicured fingers across your cheeks and cooed about how pretty a gem you were yourself. When your cheeks had flared red, she’d smirked, patted your cheek and told you that it would be done within the week. Since she was going that way anyway.

When you’d received an anonymous text fit with a wolf emoji, you’d hurried quickly over to the underground area where she’d resided. The neon red lights had looked beautiful on her, made her look dangerous in the alleyway where she’d sat upon a box as if it were a throne. You thanked her a million times over, offering money, even some other jewelry that you’d been given that you had no need for. Yet you knew it was expensive.  

Loba had refused, and instead had risen from her spot where she’d been sitting. Circling you like you were prey and making a mention about how she knew you were struggling to keep your apartment going, how it would be dangerous for you to go back. Not knowing how or why she brought it up, at first you bristled, holding the ring close to your chest in fear she would take it.

But, instead, she offers you her gloved hand, a smile on her face and a tilt to her head. “As I told you when you had arrived, you are a beautiful gem yourself. I could take care of you. Would you like to be the new addition to my collection?”

At first, you’d been flustered, a little shocked, and suspicious. But now? Now it all made sense.

Loba loved to shower you in gifts and compliments. She’d always called you the prized jewel of her collection. A collection that you’d seen and wandered through numerous times by now. Of golds, silvers, diamonds, arts, priceless artifacts, all the riches in the world for the woman who had everything. And she had almost everything. Including a found family.

With Loba, you, and Jaime? You were your own family. The trio out in the world with a home base and all the riches you could have ever wanted- thanks to Loba, that is. Not that it was hard for her, one of the best thieves in the world. Her jump bracelet made that much so easy. And she always loved to gift you things from her finding that she thought you would look pretty in.

Whatever you wanted.

The first time she’d offered you something, a beautiful pearl choker, you’d kind of laughed with a flushed face. No one had ever gifted you jewelry before, let alone been delighted TO give you it. But when you reached for it, she teased you, holding it just out of reach and said she’d like to put it on you. Resulting with her manicured fingers lightly brushing your skin as she stood in front of you, hitching it behind your neck with ease and gently curling a finger underneath the front.

She’d tugged you closer that day as your face burned, head tipped up to look at her. Loba had already been tall, but when she wore heels it was even worse with you. Yet, she’d grinned, tilted her head, eyes flickering down to your lips and murmured, “Do I get a little gift in return?” With such softness, eyes twinkling with mischief.

It wasn’t as if you two hadn’t been playing essentially gay chicken this entire time. You were obviously sexually into her, as she was to you. So, with your lips quivering, you’d nodded, murmuring back, “Anything you want.”

“That’s what I like to hear, sweetheart.” She’d cooed before pressing the softest kiss upon your lips and leaving you wanting more as she pulled back and gently patted your cheek.

And you were left to watch her saunter off, eyes falling to her ass without thinking about it and your fingers touching your lips where you felt the slickness of her gloss lingering.

From there, the teasing escalated. Until your relationship developed more into a ‘friends with benefits’ situation or even a ‘sugar mommy’ situation. Sans the calling her mommy part, wasn’t really your thing. She gave you gifts, showered you in them really, and in return you two had some killer sex. You figured it was a win all around for you.

When you got pretty things to adorn your body with, and you got to hold onto a headboard with your head thrown back as her mouth made quick work of you. Where was the loss in that scenario? Well, maybe the lipstick stains on your inner thighs or...or...

Or maybe you knew exactly what it was. Because after time went on, your sexual feelings finally revealed themselves to actually be disguised romantic feelings. Cracking open like pouring light whenever she walked into the room and you had to push them down and swallow your pride.

That’s where your loss was.

It had started pretty small a few months ago. You just started to notice different ways Loba dressed, or how she had her hair some days. Some days her makeup would change and you would compliment it genuinely, only to have her black lipstick covered lips playfully smirk your way and offer for you to try it out personally.

Hey, you weren’t complaining about walking around with a kiss print on your neck or cheek.

But you were mentally complaining about how fast your heart had beat at such a simple action. How you’d touched your cheek when she wasn’t looking and smiled to yourself like you were some sort of schoolboy incapable of reeling in your crush.

You mentally groaned to yourself. You were NOT about to ruin anything for her.

Loba, you thought, deserved love and happiness. You contemplated that maybe...just maybe you could be the one to give that to her. But, you knew her, you knew her very well for that matter. If affection was genuine, she’d become flustered and nervous and try to find a way to turn it sexual or into a flirt. She could flirt her way through anything, but if you so much as tucked her hair behind her ear and told her she looked pretty that day, she’d almost choke and try to turn the situation back.

You tried to give back what she gave you, trying to adore her, only to have her try and hide her flustered appearance by trying to flirt you up. Or slamming you against a wall and cooing about how you were pushing her buttons.

She was good at hiding her emotions in a way you wouldn’t expect her to. Instead of shying off or shutting down, Loba had learned to laugh her way out of situations and compliment you. Pinching your cheek and calling you sweet. The love- the romance she’d been deprived of didn’t go unknown to you. She didn’t trust easily, and she was happy with you and Jaime being her family.

At least, that’s as far as you knew.

What you didn’t know is that her feelings matched your own. That every extra glance you stole her way, she noticed and tried not to think anything of. But sometimes, sometimes when she was fucking you, she imagined you holding on tight to her and murmuring sweet nothings. Or instead of coming to her room for a ‘nightly visit’, that you’d spend the night and let her hold you quietly in her arms and wake up to see you just the same.

Mutual feelings that neither of you knew the other had.

Eventually you figured you needed to own up to it. And that’s what you were trying to plan right now. It’s with a breath that you come to the decision that maybe you could...show her instead.

Yeah, yeah that sounded better.

So, when Loba comes home tonight, smiling brightly as she swings a beautiful diamond necklace around a finger and announcing to you and Jaime, “Mama’s home, boys! Did you miss me?” With fondness in her voice and her eyes flicking over you to hint that she had a gift for you- that is when you decide now is a good time to strike.

After dinner is had and Loba has put her necklace in a beautiful glass case to admire it, you come towards her little den area. It was a big, rounded room, wall to wall full of her jewels and findings. Ranging from pearl necklaces to priceless artifacts. Beautiful art pieces were hung on the walls all around it with lights to ensure that the jewels down below would glitter and gleam in any lighting. You rest yourself on the doorway as you watch her, admiring her from afar as she looks to the sparkling necklace with glee in her eyes.

“Ah, so beautiful. Don’t you think?” Loba sighs at her necklace, before her eyes flick up to you in the doorway. Her eyes sparkle with that same look from earlier, mischief dancing in them as she saunters up to you slowly. As if a predator with its prey. You’d lie if you said your heart didn’t skip three beats.

“Yeah, I think you are, actually.” You coyly respond, going so far as to flutter your lashes as she rests an arm beside your head. Her grin is amused, rolling her eyes and using her free hand to gently grab your chin, tilting your head this way and that. Always inspecting you.

Her prized possession.

“Ha-ha, very cute. How many times have you tried that one, love?” She teases, tapping her manicured nail on your cheek twice. You smile fondly at the nickname, pretending it didn’t make you near about squirm out of your spot. But your heart lurches in your chest when she speaks much softer, tracing along your jawline with her fingertips. “I have a gift for you.”

“I was going to tell you the same thing.”

That piques Loba’s interest, her mischievous look pausing for surprise to overtake her features. Her glossy lips part in surprise, her eyes moving from the stare on your lips to flick up to your eyes as her brows furrow briefly.

She looked adorable.  

Fuck.

“A gift? For me? Isn’t that my job?” Loba laughs a bit, taking a step back and cocking her head, her long braids following. She looked just like a puppy. You swallow down your racing heartbeat as you try to figure out how to bring it up.

“Later- in the bedroom.” You promise. A familiar phrase that makes her pupils widen, a smirk falling to her face instead, a bit more confidence to her purr as she affectionately pinches your cheek.

“I eagerly await your acquaintance tonight, then. But, for now, let me show you the ring I found you, darling!”

You’re going to die.

--

The ring she’d found you had been gorgeous- she'd yet to gift you a ring yet. Loba once had said that seemed a little too intimate of a gift. You never asked why, but now that you’ve been gifted one, looking at the gold band with a beautiful simple style with three gems in each twirl of its vine-like look.

Well, you can’t help but think either she’s gotten used to you or maybe...maybe it had a purpose.  

Either way, it helps you feel more confident about what you’re going to try tonight. Walking with a bit more confidence as you head to her bedroom. You hardly have the time to knock before she’s opening the door, yanking you inside, and pushing you against the door to kiss you.

Loba is stripped down for the night. Her twin braids traded to let her curly hair down, the ombre look towards the tips of her bright red hair reaching about mid-back and splaying around her beautifully. Her outfit has been swapped to something a bit more practical of a black lacy bralette and stretchy short shorts, revealing her long legs and the beautiful vine-like tattoos with flowers curling on her outer thighs, edging up her hips to her waist.

Your hands come up, but are immediately caught by her. Her fingers lace in yours, pulling your hands to rest beside your head against the door as you moan into her mouth. Your reward is a soft laugh, her teeth nipping your bottom lip before trailing her glossy, full lips over your chin, down your jawline to your neck.

“Wait, wait-” You manage to breathe out when her lips press to the length of your neck. Immediately Loba pauses, releasing your hands and backing up. Concern and confusion in her eyes, but you quickly let out a laugh, “No, no, I mean- I want to try something different tonight...if that’s okay?”

“What like- bondage?”  

You about choke, head thunking back against the door as feeling your cheeks warm as you try to think of how to word it. It’s kinda of hard when she’s now idly kissing at your neck, lips parting to suckle on a sensitive spot of yours that makes your hips jerk. But you manage to breathe it out, “I want to take care of you tonight.”

Then it’s Loba’s turn to choke. Pulling back away from her spot to give you a curious look, if flustered. Her own face is red, looking apprehensive about the idea, but you quickly add in. “If you don’t like it, truly don’t like it, we’ll stop immediately, okay? I promise.”

And then you have her. Just with that extra security.

“You better make it worth my while.” She huffs almost in an embarrassed tone. But her voice is playful, despite the way you notice how she swallows and her smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. And you know it isn’t the fact she doesn’t want it, it’s because she’s used to being in control. And not that you don’t like her taking control of you but...

Sometimes you just wanted to treat her right. Show her how much she meant to you.

You suppose sex was better than trying to sit her down for a conversation and talk about your feelings with eye contact involved and your running mouth.

You start gentle with her, leading her to the bed and guiding her to lie down. You start with something simple as a makeout session. Straddling her hips so she can feel the heat of your body through your sweatpants and t-shirt. You lean into her, cupping her cheek and pushing her hair from her face as you kiss her so gently, stroking your thumb over her cheekbone. You make sure not to let her guide the kiss, but let her grab your hips, feeling her fingers slide under the waistband to touch your skin.

When you lick into Loba’s mouth, her breath hitches, her hips coming up to press against you and you follow the motion by pressing down to give her some pressure. Your own breath is shaky when her hands slide down to your ass under your pants, tugging you gently to get you to grind.

Control- normally you’d follow like the good boy she’d claimed you to be but...

You immediately part from the kiss, delighting quietly in how she whines. However, delighting even more when her eyes shoot open and she whines louder when you take her hands and pull them above her head. You interlock your fingers, hovering your lips just out of reach when she tries to lean up and get at you again, but realizing quickly that she can’t. Loba groans.

It’s quiet submission when her head rests back on the pillow, a shaky breath leaving her lips as her eyes fall to your mouth. She pouts her prettiest when you give her a look, huffing under you and rolling her eyes. “What? Do you want me to say ‘please’?”

“It’s a start to getting what you want, Ms. Andrade, don’t you think?” You tease in a mocking tone, causing her eyes to narrow up at you. There’s another huff from her, her fingers flexing in a nervous way in your grip. You wait patiently above her, eyes sparkling with mischief.  

“Pl-...” Loba pauses, swallowing before shakily exhaling through her nose. Her eyes flicker to the side as if flustered, rolling upwards as if trying to will herself to speak. You try to ignore the way you feel her cock jerk under your ass, but you can’t ignore the pride you feel knowing she liked this.

“Please, please do something more. Please don’t tease me? Aren’t I good to you, baby?” She begs her prettiest, ending it with a shaky noise, her cheeks flushed red and her lips pulling into a pretty pout that you can’t help but kiss to soothe away her embarrassment.

You murmur sweet nothings against her mouth that you hope she doesn’t catch as you kiss your way down her neck. You only need to scoot down her body a little, moving to fit between her legs rather than straddle her.

You let her hands go, watching with delight as they stay right where you put them as your own pull up her bralette to reveal her chest. She’s got nice breasts, rounded and about a C cup. You know from her talking about it that she’d gotten them filled in the past, all decorated with pretty silver barbells through each nipple and her underbreast tattoo curling between her chest.

You press your mouth at the freckles dotting the upper edges of her breasts, nosing your way down the path of her flesh until you can gingerly cup her breast. You relish the way her breath hitches in anticipation when you mouth at her nipple, pressing soft, fluttering, wet kisses until she whines softly under her breath.  

She really can’t blame you for drawing it out, right? For adoring every inch of her? You’d never been able to seen her like this before, how she squirms, trying to be good underneath you and not take over. It’s the best you could have asked of her. To try.

You smile against her skin before you take her nipple into your mouth and begin suckling. Letting your tongue flick back and forth over it to feel the shape of her barbell idly. Loba’s sounds are soft, gentle little sighs as her hips gently press up against you to get some pressure. You hum against her in reply when her hand rests in your hair, gently stroking and pressing to encourage you to touch her more.

A moan escapes her lips when you let your teeth gingerly scrape across the sensitive flesh, coming off of her with a wet pop. You nuzzle between her chest with a soft sigh of, “You’re so beautiful.” Your tone dripping with honesty as you kiss down her ribcage, towards her abdomen.

Normally she’s talkative during sessions like this, liking to pull your hair and show you who’s in charge. But now when you look up, all you can see is her head turned to the side, her cheeks red and her lips parted to shallowly breathe. You’ve never felt prouder of yourself.

When you reach the waistband of her short, you peer up at her under your lashes, gently tugging at the band. “Can I take these off?”

“Please.” She replies, completely unprompted with a shaky breath following and her eyes peering open to look down at you. Her gaze makes you feel hot, your chest bursting with adoration that you can only hope your eyes mimic.

You gently pull them off and toss them to the side. You move to sit up on your knees, gently rubbing at her thighs as your eyes flicker to her cock. She was about six inches long and uncut with foreskin only reaching just under the head. She’d shared with you that she was thankful that the future medical technology allowed her to decide the option on being able to get hard and remain fertile. Just as you’d shared you were thankful that getting top surgery had become less dangerous over so many years in the making.

Small things to share with her in those quiet moments you two could relate to each other.

Now, you run a hand along her inner thigh, sliding over her shaved mound as you quietly ask, “What are your feelings on penetrating me today?” To let her know in turn you wanted that. Of course, if she didn’t, you’d happily find your favorite cock and strap it in.

“Please,” She says again, practically music to your ears by now. “I want to be inside you- let me touch you, little pup, please? I’ll be on my best behavior.” Loba’s voice is near desperate as she looks down at you. Sitting up on her elbows to see you better. Your face flushes at the nickname, almost tempted to scold her for it, but the way she looks at you...

Her eyes are full of something you’ve seen before. Never taking the time to see. Adoration. Her pupils are blown wide, her lips parted and her eyes roaming across your frame before coming back to your eyes. Her brows furrow briefly, this desperate look crossing her face as she tries again, “Let me see your cock, baby, let me taste you?”  

It’s filth. Yet she sounds so fucking soft when she says it that you can’t help but swallow down a whine.

In a matter of moments, you’re stripping from your clothing. Your sweatpants get tossed with your shirt, but before you can get to your underwear Loba is already helping you out of it. Her fingers eagerly grab your hips, but she learns quickly because she doesn’t pull you. Letting you move your own body until your thighs can frame her face.

You reach down to pull on your mound, exposing your cock to her. You’re hard already, your hole drooling with slick from the excitement from seeing her so open earlier. Loba knows how you like it, hooking her arms around your thighs to hold you as her eyes go half lidded to watch your face. You swallow thickly, biting your bottom lip as her tongue runs from your hole, up to the underside of your dick in a fluid swipe.

Kitten licks like that repeat a few times, being mindful of how sensitive your engorged cock could be right off the bat. You shakily exhale through your nose when her lips part, letting the piercing on her tongue rest on the underside of your clit and her breath fanning across you hotly.

When she finally takes you into her mouth, you let out a moan and use your free hand to rest in her hair. The smile you feel against your wet flesh should make you flustered, but not as much as when she looks up at you under her lashes with such adoration. She lets you take the reins, gently humping against her mouth and taking things at your pace. It’s the most control you’ve had in a while, but your mouth starts working before you can even think, “Fuck- you’re so beautiful, babe.”

The blush that reddens her cheeks fuels both her own motions and your mouth as you moan low in your throat just to hear her moan low back at you in turn as she licks up your cock. “Good- good that feels s...so good-” You don’t expect her to react so well to your voice, let alone praise. But you feel her nails dig into your thighs, able to see the way she parts her lips, glossy now from your slick and seeing it stick to her tongue-

It’s too much.

There’s almost a rush as you squirm out of her grasp to move down to her lap to straddle her again. You’d tell her to finger you, but one look at her nails proves why that’s a hassle. Thankfully when you sink your own fingers into yourself, you find your walls are wet and pliant. But for good measure you still ask her for the lube to prep her own cock. Stroking her cock whilst you rest on her thighs, able to watch her eyes flutter and how her fingers twist into the pillow she’s got her head on.  

“Ready?” You ask, pulling yourself closer so you can slide your cock against hers, sandwiching it between your sex to grind back and forth against her. Loba quickly nods, her hands moving to grab your hips and squeezing eagerly, but you hum again. “I asked you a question.”

“Yes! Yes, yes, baby- yes, I want it, I want you, please!” Loba all but whines, her look frantic again as she gently pulls you. You follow the motion, lining her up before sliding down onto her with a gasp.

Loba’s reaction is immediate, always so sensitive when you envelop her. She’s got her nails pressing into your hips, her face contorted and her head tossed to the side with pure pleasure written across her features. It makes you feel proud that you could just do that with your body, that you’re the one making her look like that.

Your emotions are swelling up in your chest.

You push them down for the sake of resting your hands on top of hers on your body. Squeezing them and feeling your heart race when she maneuvers so her fingers can intertwine with yours. Your breath hitches, but that can easily be passed off for your hips grinding on their own, grinding your fat cock against her mound and feeling the way she shifts in you.

Her soft moan and the way her fingers squeeze yours make you dizzy.

Don’t think about it, you remind yourself.

Your breath quickens as you lean forward and begin riding her. Only pulling yourself up an inch or two and sliding yourself back down onto her cock. Your toes curl, squeezing her hands a bit tighter and about whining when she starts to pull her hands back. But you figure out why when she holds them up at about her waist level, lacing your fingers with hers to give you more leverage to fuck yourself onto her.

Don’t think about it, you again think to yourself, your brain clouded with lust and adoration.

“You’re so handsome,” Loba mumbles out, and when you finally urge yourself to flutter open your eyes, she’s looking at you. She’s panting softly, brows furrowed in a look of pleasure. You swallow the whimper in your throat so you can instead move yourself to almost lie on top of her. Letting her hands go to rest your arms on either side of her head and bringing her into a kiss.

Her hands slide over your body then, sliding down your sides to your hips, to your ass to graciously grab as you fuck yourself onto her. You moan into her mouth, feeling her follow the motion with her own soft noise in her throat.

Don’t think about it, you try so desperately to tell yourself as the knot forms in your stomach.

You have to break the kiss, tucking yourself into her neck. Loba is holding onto you now, her hands resting flat on your back and dragging her nails down your skin. You whine into her ear as your inner walls clench, your cock humping against her shaved mound and keeping your body extremely interested. It comes tumbling out before you can think of it, “Fuck- fuck, fuck, shit- Loba, Loba-”

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it-

“I love you-” Loba whines in your ear, causing your heart to near about beat out of your chest thinking you’d imagined it. But you feel her lips move against your neck next time, “I love you. Let me- ah- let me cum inside you, baby, please, please, please-”

It’s all a blur. The way your chest pounds and how hard you cum. You can hear her cumming not soon after you, her nails sinking into your back and her teeth sinking into your shoulder to quiet down her beautiful moans. You think you’re dehydrated, your brain must have lost oxygen at some point- but you felt it. You heard it.

As you two are coming down, you urge yourself to sit up in her lap. Watching as her hand slides through her hair to push the strands from her face, how her chest rises and falls with her breaths, trying to make it out in your head as you open and close your mouth like a fish.

“What?” She laughs, reaching up to gently cup your cheek. “You weren’t going to say it, I figured--”  

“You knew?!” You cry out, flustered and feeling your own face heat up in embarrassment- yet relief floods your chest.

“I had a feeling.”

“A feeling?!” You cry out again, this time more distraught. But it quickly dies down when her thumb brushes along your cheek bone, urging you to lean into her touch and settle down. Though you see the look in her eyes of almost uncertainty- worry perhaps.  

With a shaky breath, you turn and kiss her palm. “I...I love you as well, ya know?”

“I know, baby.”

“Don’t be so smug about it!”

Her melodic laugh is quickly smothered by the pillow you throw in her face, only for you to nearly get knocked off her lap when she takes it and throws it right back at you with a victorious cry.

Fuck you love her.

[halothenthehorns]

All in the Family

Chapter 53: Cat, Rat, and Dog

There was a short, bumpy slide down his rump before he was left sprawling in a pile of dirt in a dark tunnel as their next destination. Sirius tried to sit up and then grunted in further pain as several more people came tumbling down on top of him.

Maneuvering and cursing helped sort it out, mainly the second, and soon they all found themselves able to hunch over uncomfortably, but they'd been in worse places recently. He didn't even need Evans to light her wand to tell him where they were though, he'd know this secret passage as well as his own dorm room. The sharp windy breeze discernible above his head, the faint, musty odor of blood and dust ahead, the way the path was slightly less well worn than any of the other hidden tunnels they'd ever found, though that was quickly being changed the longer the Marauders knew about it. They were underneath the Whomping Willow.

He didn't need Remus' soft little whimper of worry, James subtly stepping between Moony and everyone, or Peter's awkward shuffling backing away from everyone to know why this put them in such an awkward position. The only conceivable reason to them why Harry would be down here, is that one of the Marauder's had taken him down here for some reason. Neither of the present two seemed to have much of a good reason.

Waiting at the end of the slope was the now dusty purple book, sitting innocently with the pages now smattered and crumpled from so many people kicking and landing on it as they went past. Sirius swallowed a bit of bile as he went to pick it up, but he ignored his hand shaking as he met Remus' eyes and tried to concoct a plan for the worst.

If, and it was still a very big if to him, Harry was somehow down here because he found out about Moony and had some cockamamie idea about seeing it, the three friends in this time would have to do a hell of a lot of covering up for their Remus now to make sure none knew the wiser it wasn't true now. He gazed down at the chapter title for too long, Frank began laughing at what the hold up was. As an experiment, he tried to laugh and summarize the odd chapter title, just telling everyone else it was a bunch of animal names, but no more words appeared until he finally said Cat, Rat, and Dog.

He couldn't fake it. He didn't know a way how to talk them out of this one.

It didn't start out with any good omens, what with Buckbeak being unjustly killed and the poor trio's reaction. Then Scabbers started going nuts, the reason being quickly revealed Crookshanks was still after him. Still he could hardly spare any of it a thought as the tunnel subtly shifted in size around them, though he really couldn't care less now he could stand up straight instead of hunched over the book.

Then the dog arrived.

He startled so hard he scraped his head against the ceiling, causing a slight dust cloud around him and pouring over the book. He took the temporary coughing fit this caused amongst the others to gaze at his friends in pleading silence to tell him he'd read that wrong, but their shadowed eyes gave nothing away.

Sirius had started this worried about how Moony's involvement was going to get dragged into this and what potential secrets was going to come of that, now a whole new scenario was playing out behind his mind's eye. The deranged animal he'd become in Azkaban, sapping away his humanity and leaving him with one animal urge left to kill, somehow being directed on one he'd so love.

A puddle of sick was there at his feet, and he didn't even remember doing it. His throat still burned, his stomach rolled and threatened to continue any moment, but all he felt was the horror his mind had latched onto and wouldn't let go. He'd gifted himself this animal form to save Moony, now it would be the death of James- Harry- James-

"It's alright Padfoot-"

"Let it out mate."

"How hard did he hit his head? Did he give himself a concussion?"

It all swam before him like he was seeing the three from underwater, he was afraid to clear his gaze and find out what was holding him upright, but James was there. His best friend was undeniably keeping him on his feet, not the wall. Remus and Peter were promising in every way but words that no matter what that monster of their future did they weren't going to pin the blame on him now. Even Regulus was bouncing on the heels of his feet and eyeing him in concern rather than criticizing anything for once. He should feel safer than ever, but he didn't know how to shake loose the terror lodged in him, had zero faith he could say the words that he'd killed his godson.

Wormtail finally took pity on him, and after several Evanesco spells to pick the book back up, gave them all a confident smile he could somehow make this easier on everyone if he was the one to say it.

The madness didn't sound much better coming from him, as Ron was somehow grabbed instead and dragged along into this very tunnel. Sirius could swear he could identify the very streaks of blood in the dark lighting. It didn't work the sanity back into his favor any. That wild animal seemed determined to kill and had just grabbed the wrong kid. Did that mean something of him had spared Harry at the last second, or was he so gone he couldn't even be bothered to care anymore.

He tried to fight that off, surely if students had been attacked and killed all year they would have heard of it! Was this the first time then, and he'd been building up to it?

Harry and Hermione went after them, to no one's surprise, but too late the Marauders misunderstood the look of dawning determination the four outsiders had on the Marauders.

Potter didn't make a joke about saving another redhead in distress with a salacious look at Lily, Lupin wasn't hovering in the background with suppressed laughter but was now the one with a supporting hand on his friends shoulder and trying to whisper words of comfort for no one else's ears. Pettigrew was reading like an ancy toddler, his voice stopping to squeak uncomfortably every time he stopped for breath.

Of course they'd be worried about Potter's kid, that wasn't unreasonable as they'd all made it clear from the beginning they'd been invested in this future and Harry. Their distress over Black's fate of being an escaped madman had also been perfectly reasonable, if a little blind to some of them early on. Now with time on their side they'd finally conceded maybe all of Black's actions weren't so black and white, and it wasn't Potter being comforted for the fate of his child they were watching.

The idea, the unbelievable, illegal, but slow forming understanding had hardly taken root before it was slapped in their faces. Sirius Black was an unregistered animagus, and his friends knew it.

"You idiot," Regulus told him with pure sincerity. He would have decked him if his brother didn't look so miserable already.

Sirius was exhausted. He'd spent countless hours now being hurtled through someone else's life with company he wouldn't have asked for, now he'd been living through countless hours believing himself a madman and a murderer which finally seemed irrevocably true. He didn't know what would happen to him if this secret was told, but surely a fine at the worst, which still wasn't as bad as Moony's secret being revealed. He was tired, so he didn't deny it.

"I don't understand," Frank muttered, looking between the four. "You must have a reason for doing this, even you lot know this is more than breaking a school rule for kicks. What possible reason-"

"He doesn't have to explain himself to you even if he did know," James snapped, his every breath trembling with nerves. The nightmarish image of Sirius dragging Ron off, his own self congratulatory words Harry would follow wasn't adding up to him. If he'd wanted to kill Harry than he'd had opportunity enough, something else was going on here, and he was already getting a headache trying to follow along, let alone fending off their prying questions.

It fooled no one. They all knew now, and no one was sure how to go forward with the information.

Sirius couldn't stand there any longer, avoiding their eyes, doing nothing. So he snatched the book back from Wormtail as he took another trembling breath, reading out in his own harsh tongue the tussle between him and Harry, the thirteen year old kid actually winning with the help of his friends and then considering murdering him. He almost wished Harry would, put him out of his misery those dementors had trapped inside him.

Then Remus was there, offering backup Sirius had never asked for but always seemed to find when he least expected it. Sirius wanted to fall into his arms now, sob in gratitude he wasn't alone in this future and Moony was still there for him, something still made sense. The only thing stopping him was the fear of drawing attention back to Moony, the one Marauder who had another illegal secret much more dangerous to have the spotlight on, in a house they were far too close to, with a night ahead they had no absolutes about.

It was all in vain as Hermione ousted him, after he'd finally been able to get his feet under him. Sirius took a deep breath, threw back his shoulders, and dug into every bit of collective knowledge he'd acquired over the past sixteen years of his life as he turned to Remus and said, "and I thought I was the monster in there."

It was there for just a second, the flicker of hurt, the shadow of true fear at those words finally being flung in his face, but he also knew Sirius. He'd seen the true look of disgust on his face directed at other students for whispering about werewolves after they'd come up in a lesson. He'd heard the true tones of unforgivable loathing every time he looked at Snape. This was Padfoot covering Moony's tail and leaving his own hanging. There was every chance it wasn't going to work, but he smiled at him all the same for trying.

James slugged Sirius in the shoulder and called him a jerk, trying his hardest to sound like he didn't mean it. Peter had perfected the art of an awkward laugh and shuffled even farther away, keeping his hands behind his back to now show them trembling with nerves at being caught.

It might have actually worked, had they not spent every other available moment defending one of their own against another equally radical claim. Now, their blasé brushing of this off just gave other moments a chance to make a lot more sense.

Frank recoiled, waiting for his life to flash before his eyes as he realized the danger they'd been in without even realizing it. He went back and counted, almost kicked himself for each clue he'd overlooked. What being an illegal animagus had to do with it, or even if the two were cause and effect he still wasn't sure, but he grabbed Alice's hand and began trying to pull her as far away up the tunnel from the rest of this insanity as he could. They hadn't asked for this.

Alice jerked her hand away with a scowl at her boyfriend, she hadn't grown up with the prejudices she knew most purebloods had gained. Her mum was an auror, she was descended from the first set to have ever gotten the job. She knew from countless stories what it felt like to be victim and hero, and right now she saw Remus Lupin, hovering terrified behind his friends, as an innocent person just like her.

"Frank!" She protested as he hesitated. He didn't continue backing away, but he didn't look much ashamed for his automatic reaction, nor her tone.

"You don't want to hear the stories my mum's told me about werewolves-"

"Your mum sounds like a paranoid git the more I hear about her," Alice crossed her arms in frustration. "I've heard things from my parents too, and they're not just stories. Those poor creatures live in poverty, most of them just kill to survive-"

"Oi! Do you two mind having this conversation like he's in the room," Sirius Black took a dangerous step towards the pair, even in the near darkness they could see the anger coming off of him, as Lupin shuffled even farther away from all present in shame.

Sirius regretted his outburst at once. Five years of ignoring other kids whispered comments about this and he'd caved now, but he couldn't just shoot a hex at them and laugh it off like his usual prank, Remus couldn't just pull him along to the next class muttering to him how much it didn't matter.

Peter, to his credit, still tried as he piped up, "yeah, how would you like it if we started laughing about how your future turns out? Oh wait, we don't even know yet!"

"Oh don't kid yourself Peter," Regulus rolled his eyes. "The man himself hasn't even denied it, and you lot are actually terrible liars." He was slightly paler under his dark hair than usual, his eyes remaining trained untrusting on the outed party, and every terrible lesson he'd ever been through with his father over dark creatures was playing back through his mind, but for once in his life Regulus was trying to drown out every outside voice but his own.

He wasn't sure how much he could trust Sirius over his own parents, he'd thought his brother had never lied to him but now even that was wrong. Now all he had left to feel were the two contradictions of his life, the lies of You-Know-Who's heritage and his own. If he'd been wrong about that all his life, what else was he wrong in assuming straight from his parents?

Lily wondered if she was going to be sick. Her first thought was that it made a horrible kind of sense, the cruel lot of friends had found each other, of course Potter and Black would accept a werewolf as a friend considering they showed no mercy to their own victims of those horrible degrading acts they called pranks.

She looked again though, really looked at them. Remus Lupin was a scared, pale teenager watching those around him take in this news as he hovered behind his friends. No 'monster' could ever look that vulnerable and be a pure killer. Peter Pettigrew was looking between them and his friends, like he was waiting for a signal what was going to happen next. He still trusted his friends to make that decision so he could go along, while those horrible friends of Severus', even Sev of late followed blindly with the first thing they were told by their superiors without thinking twice about it. Sirius Black was being accused of murder, now of his best friends son, and he still stood right beside him as if at any moment he was going to be that killer for his friends. James Potter stood as their center, every bit their good influence as he was the bad.

Silence like none before lay thick in the air, each person waiting for someone else to make the next move. Sirius reacted first, it was his sanity on the line here, and now with Remus involuntarily being thrown into the mix in this future, it was both their lives on the line. He snatched the book away from Peter and read in a blur. He wished his future self would give Professor Lupin a kick for tottering on about Sirius dragging two people into this passage, about focusing on Ron's pet of all things.

He cursed the man having to over explain everything now of all times as none of it was making any sense. How was any of this helping?

The mental tirade came to a halt as Sirius Black, the escaped prisoner of Azkaban, finally answered who had done these true crimes all along. Peter Pettigrew.

[startwithbrooklyn]

THE GREAT ND REWATCH OF 2021 / SEPTEMBER 28-29, 2019 // the bonny scot

posting this a day later than normal because this is one of the rare episodes that shows a passage of time from one day to the next yayy love that for them

-wonder what filming these beginning sexy scenes is like for them in real life

-sooooo can lucy see nancys sexy dream? is she judging? does this mean she likes nancy with owen or nick more? or is she trying to tell nancy that her sex dreams are irrelevant to the mystery at hand and she needs to focus?

-seeing people in the ✨prison chair✨: gomber, carson, karen (voting for josh s3 just saying)

-completely ignores carson's question about herself typical nance

-"or maybe i did stumble across a knife" its like hes trying to make the case against him look plausible while attempting to maintain innocence. this is a slippery slope for carson to try and encourage her to keep her pacified + hide the truth while also trying to keep her from getting involved bc hudsons

-"genetics gets you in the door" aaaaand then she walks in to everetts office to meet him and crashes their family dinner

-ok who tf is dawn and why is she in charge here

-this guidance counselor of nicks is my favorite person

-"i admire your allergy to pleasantries" bess and nancy both have reveals to big families but nancy does not have the graceful, accepting reveal to her rich family like bess does at this lunch. nancys reveal is messy, cold, bloodstained and sticky-fingered, not nice in any way whatsoever. and this little chat with everett (bit of a parallel to lucy's) just highlights how nancy is always bad at bargaining with her grandparents*- always trying to fight on their level but giving up her equal hand bc she doesnt know how to hide it when they bring up something she doesnt know. like confronting celia at the masque: she was so confident with her theory and what she knew, but then we got a "what does that mean?" like. the instant you say that, you lose. and she walked right into the "yes i do have someone, hes in jail" 🤦🏼‍♀️ even in the car with ryan at the end of s1, he literally just fucking leaves her there. like 🤷🏼‍♀️ what did u think was gonna happen sis?? for all she can predict how past things lead to present circumstances shes fucking awful at seeing the direct future *(grandparents except for patrice bc her dementia makes her inaccessable)

-lmaooooo this awko ass portrait...i get the empty space is for nance but who on earth thought this was a good pic??

-LISBETH 🥺💙

-"will u help the claw for me?" george struggles financially to keep her livelihood while nancy is somehow shown as being taken care of even when her parent is incarcerated; both nancy and george live in single parent homes now with mention of both medical debt and george being breadwinner yet nancy has no struggles while george does. (i wonder if ryan had been able to help george here how the story would have changed)

-"when it comes to following people around without their knowledge or consent i am somewhat of a repeat offender" 😂😂😂

-"he wasnt endgame after all" BESS lmaoooo

-"...okay." lmaoooo i fuckin love owen

-i was hoping the girls' faces would be more shocked like with a glance to owen but they just....werent

-"we're the good guys" <---- this statement is soooo interesting in terms of how they structure the show and how the characters see themselves (its an interesting contrast with the more definitive good vs evil with things that are both clearly good and clearly evil but theres also a lot of moral grey area here, the show is kinda swamped in it. are nancy and crew the good guys? are they the bad guys in someone else's story? concerns.)

-"i'd call it more than just stuff" like why did u concede that??? and then the shit about oof that didnt sound like a compliment lmaoooooo why does she suck at arguing?? she and owen wouldnt work long term bc theyre so similar (as mentioned later on)

-i LOVE george slowly falling in love with nick here- hence how upset she gets when nick bails on her for nancy later (which is totally justified!!!)

-i am LIVING for the little nod this driver guy gives bess when she turns back around all nervous 😂

-"i do like buying things" i would so say that too tbh

-"you'd have plenty to talk about" LMFAOOOOOOO SHE KNOWS "marvins dont marry drivers" so diana is totally fine with the gay its just the poor she has a problem with 😂💙fuckin love that

-love how nancy just casually ruins everything for nick/george lmaooo

-"i have seen you at your best, nancy, and there is nothing like it." 🥴😳 i love this still-in-love look nancy gives him thats so strong he had to change the subject

-so is haunting time 11 pm? from that clock of bashiir's?

-how do NO neighbors notice this fucking water and shit

-these are TOTALLY AWFUL fake screams from the bonny scot crew 😭

-"i know well enough not to get involved when he's in play" both carson and ryan avoid engaging with everett even though nancy is willing to do so armed with less info and more balls/ but "could i trust him" and ryan says yes lmaooooo NO honey + that makes ryan 0/2 for helping the girls when they ask this ep

-"find a project of your own" and he does, with his youth center 🙏🏻💙 what s2 foreshadowing!

-"god i wish i still drank" 😂😂😂

-"she is darling." 💙👌🏻

-okay wtf is mirror bay??

-i really wonder about the extent of celia x sebastians relationship here. did she truly care about him or was it just secret and exciting sex? also would love more hints of diana vs celia moments like these. celia doesnt even look upset. i mean shes had time to deal but like wtf. and who exactly is sebastian to diana? not her husband? like damn what if he was. somehow i doubt she'd talk about him diddling celia if diana was disrespected also

-i wonder if celia being so invested in dna testing nancy was bc everrett dna tested ryan to make sure he was his bc of sebastian / other men (which would be totally valid on his part!! but wouldnt it be funny as fuck if ryan wasnt his 😂)

-what a neat hiding place in this frame lmaooo who put that in for them tho? like how do u go about ordering that

-"you certainly are your fathers daughter" this quote is doubly ironic and foreshadowy bc theyre referencing carson here as being a useful hudson attaché but nancy is playing everett just like ryan played celia about putting his house up (but TRIPLY ironic bc carson pulls off the long con of hiding nancy from the hudsons right under their noses this whole time!) the one time nancy is successful against them

-that bess/lisbeth look while lisbeth does something badass (+diana reassessing now that lisbeth has been revealed to be useful)

-"almost as fun as a real fight" why do i believe him? lmaoooo a bit weird that he would enjoy a fight w a partner, but i also think this is an acknowledgement of nancy being an "opponent" who exists at his level. but i also love the "let me take you out" as a direct mirror of her relationship with nick, where she avoids the public acknowledgment/"going out" but prefers the more subtle/hidden arrangements of staying in. but as shown with later eps, owen is way more capable of meeting nancy where shes at, which is so important to her + the only way of getting close to nancy. (the only foil is ace who somehow is able to do both)

-"not always about a guy" <---- this could have been such a powerful statement if the show had thought having nancy end up alone/choose herself instead of pitting her between love interests (nick, owen, gil, even potentially ace, in only 2 seasons) was a more worthy stance to take ; as an aro/ace person i cant tell you how much i would kill to see just one female protag choose herself over a man. and its more realistic to end up alone than have a happy ending anyway, for all that these shows try to be as "real" and gritty grimdark as possible

-"is that what you want?" this is an interesting question to his mother- like maybe he senses her unhappiness? combined with his issues with his father- still trying to look out for his mom? either way it's sweet. (it could also potentially work as foreshadowing of something happening to her, but i think that was played with but then diverted when it was revealed who really killed her) "i think its time i steer this ship" still kind of patriarchal tho. i get that its him coming into his own as a dad technically but still. i also like how he calls her "mother" and not mom

-love that old white people thumbs up at george asking about his clams 👍🏻

-okay fuck dawn tho lmfaoooo

-"stressful dinner huh?" 😂 i fucking love lisbeth so much why didnt they bring her back (wouldnt it be Fucking Hilarious if they brought lisbeth back to bounce bess on her expired visa since the marvins kicked her out and didnt fix it lmaoooooo)

-BESS IS A TOP lmaooooooo i fuckin knew it

-nick says "you can pay me back" wonder if thats gonna come back in s3 considering their "marital problems" (also, those bonds are sosus lmfaoooo if any single person cashing those was looked at sideways they'd confess in 2 seconds that some random guy is handing out bearer bonds they dont even make anymore with absolutely zero proof as to how he got them)

-"you wanna finish what you started?" 👀 (dont mind if i do)

-"i need my dad back" parallels s2 when she asks him to come home

-parent politics: "you are taking your life in your hands / no, i'm putting it in yours" vs "i know well enough not to get involved when hes in play" both carson and ryan try to dissuade nancy from pursuing her pulling this con on everett but go about it different ways: carson is wildly concerned with nancys physical wellbeing but ryan appears to be leaning more towards weighing the odds for her/ like a "you cant win so cut your losses/dont try" scenario which interestingly might have more weight with nancy; its easy for her to brush aside carson's worrying like second nature but nancy has been established to be a determined winner, and ryan speaks to her here like shes a beginners luck prodigy at a blackjack table by encouraging her to keep her record clean by not dealing in this next round. of course she herself admits shes incapable of not dealing in ie "you know me better than that" but i have lots more thoughts on how effective ryans approaches to nancy can be sometimes (saving for the reveal ep 🙏🏻)

-wonder what all carson knows about the hudsons? + that look on his face when he hangs up... wonder if he was just lying to her about knowing anything or just ashamed at having to admit bad things hes done for them

-love nick & bashiir waiting together 🙏🏻💙+ nicks very strong and pointed "good night" as a means of ending his convo w nancy on his terms (gotta reinforce those boundaries man!)

and lastly

-celia + that gossip girl moment when she just throws the whole phone away 😂(wonder if she was just talking to "gus" or whoever that guy was. keep forgetting the bobbseys' dad is in prison too, wonder if he'll feature in s3)

[nickward]

Do you feel like if just one of your songs blows up on tiktok, all your problems will be solved?

The opposite lol. I have zero desire to have the tik tok come up. It just seems so hard to sustain, and also – if I have imposter syndrome now (being self-made), then I can't even imagine if I literally had a song go viral, due to some algorithm happening to work in my favour. I know artists/bands who have had songs blow up on the platform and it seems like more of a burden than a blessing to be honest. Labels get involved and force you to engage with the platform more etc. Also it skews your idea of who your organic audience/following is, compared to how many people are passive streamers from tik tok.

There was definitely a period where I felt a bit of peer pressure to get into it (I even made an account), but over time I've realised that I just want that slower, organic growth. I don't care if it takes me years! That way, you're connecting with people over the music and the story, not just the virality or trend it's attached to. I may be completely wrong though. If I looked through a list of my favourite artists, most/none of them are on tik tok - because the music is strong enough on its own that it doesn't need that viral boost.

There was a whole year of my life (2019!) when I was obsessed with trying to make a hit song and I ended up making absolute garbage and not much of it. It was miserable. It was only when I started making the first EP that I just gave up on that idea. Not to say that I'm done making pop music - I'm just done making music for anyone else but myself. I also understand that it's coming from a place of privilege - to not worry about making a living off music (right now). I'm still living at home and I work in hospitality at the moment - thinking of quitting soon though.

I watched a Ted Talk a while ago where JGL said "If you make art for the goal of getting attention - you will never be creatively fulfilled". That stuck with me hard and I think it's relevant to this question.

The main issue is when people compromise their art for the possibility of tik tok success. There are literal musical formulas that people follow to try make hits on the platform. Either that, or people just force random features/remixes with already established tik tok artists. That's when it becomes a problem, I think. I don't think music should be created with the assumed idea of success. It's pretty see-through when artist has designed a rollout or project around the idea of tik tok. I think it's holding Aussie music back right now. Prioritising trend-based success over innovation. That JGL quote is so true.

The idea of fulfilment runs even deeper than that I think. I've met incredibly successful artists who never had that "itch" scratched by success. It's the human condition to always want something more. I think it's especially prevalent in artists. A big void that may never be filled by music or success. It's more about internal success and fulfilment. I definitely see this happening to me in the hypothetical scenario that I am successful. None of the wins are ever enough. It's always 'onto the next thing'.

Okay, I may sound very old and bitter and boomer so please take this all with a grain of salt. Do whatever you want! If you want that tik tok come up then good for you - there's no objective reason why you should or shouldn't. it's just up to you! These are just my takes. This turned into a mini-rant but I just have a lot of opinions about it! Also as a musician, this convo comes up a lot. I can't help but relate to the theory of 'what goes up must come down'. It's also worth noting that some people don't choose to have a tik tok song. Sometimes it's an accident, and their 8-minute bedroom dance track from 2017 is suddenly a viral hit. Also there might come a day when I take back all of this and just roll with it. Maybe it's better to adapt to the modern industry rather than possibly get left behind. Big questions.

This is terribly written and formatted but it's a stream of consciousness joint. Great question!

[thecarbuying-agency]

The Car Buying Agency | Top 10 Car Buying Mistakes

The Car Buying Agency — Lots of people buy a new car, and then regret their purchase soon thereafter. If you don’t take a lot of precautions, you will be a car buying victim instead of a smart buyer. So, here are the top ten mistakes that buyers make when shopping for a new car. These mistakes are not listed in order of importance…but don’t miss the message in every mistake.

1. Impulse buying | The Car Buying Agency

An impulse is an emotion. The worst reason to buy a car is emotion. Car sales people are taught that they must try everything they can to sell you a car during your first visit. Statistically, they know that if they don’t, they won’t get a second chance. If you pull into a dealer lot to just “kick a few tires,” but you have not sworn to yourself that you will not buy on that visit, you’re doomed. Don’t say things like “I love this car” or “I’ve got to have this car.” Don’t get your emotions involved in this buying decision. If you’re talking too much, the car salesman will read that as buying signals. And salesmen are much better at clubbing you with your own buying signals than you are at resisting them.

Tons of people make impulse car purchases. You cannot do your research and wise shopping if you make an impulse buy.

2. Lack of research

Goes hand in hand with an impulse buy. You need to go online and research about cars, including:

a. safety

b. recalls

c. resale value

d. maintenance and repairs

e. range of car prices for the make and model you want

The Car Buying Agency | Research will give you the information you need to make an informed decision.

3. Unrealistic about your car needs

Many car shoppers grossly overestimate their needs. Instead of buying a car that reflects their actual driving experience, they buy a vehicle that feeds their future plans or perceived future needs. For instance, a buyer who plans to own a boat and trailer may buy an SUV or heavy pickup. But he does not own the boat YET. Overall, it’s best to buy a vehicle for your present needs, not your future desires.

4. Not calculating the true cost of a hybrid

Hybrid vehicles, like the Prius, are priced far above a regular gas or diesel. When you subtract the cost of the regular vehicle from the hybrid price, you’ll see the premium you pay for the hybrid. Now, will the fuel savings pay for themselves over the number of months you own the vehicle? Hardly ever! Most times you’ll pay more overall for a hybrid vehicle. Gas and diesel vehicles are becoming more and more efficient. Remember, over 50% of the vehicles in all of Europe have diesel engines, and it’s been that way for 50 years. Must be a reason, eh?

5. Not shopping for car insurance before the car purchase

Here’s a big no-no. How many times have you called your insurance agent and gotten a quote on the car you WANT to buy? If you’re upgrading from an average car to a different kind of car…like going from a Toyota Altima to a Corvette…the increase in insurance premiums could make the new car purchase unaffordable. Unfortunately, most people find this out AFTER they buy that shiny new car. But just going from an older car to a new car could drastically increase your insurance costs. What if your old car didn’t have collision coverage, but your new car will? That could mean hundreds of dollars in added premiums.

6. Talking trade-in during negotiations for the new car purchase

Don’t include trade-in for your old car in the new car deal. It’s too easy for the car dealer to structure your deal to look like you’re getting much more for your trade-in. Make your car deal apart from any trade-in consideration. Then, get the trade-in offer and deduct it from the total. Also give serious consideration to selling your old car yourself. You’ll get much more money for your old car.

7. Dealer financing | The Car Buying Agency

This is a mine field, and the dealers have set the mines in your path. The most dangerous place in a dealership is the Finance and Insurance (F&I) office. The F&I office accounts for a big percentage of the total profits of a dealership. You must be wary of every offer here…financing, warranty, insurances like life insurance that pays off your loan balance. I recommend that you decline everything offered from an F&I office except a low interest rate on a loan of no more than 36 months.

8. Not buying at the end of the month and end of the year.

At the end of the month…any month…the salesmen and dealership are trying to maximize their bonuses and incomes. You’ll get your best deals if you buy in the last couple days of the month. The same goes for end-of-year purchases. Dealerships are desperately trying to get rid of last year’s models, and finish the year strongly. So, when’s the absolute best time to buy a car? The last couple of days in December of any year. You can hardly lose if you’re a smart buyer.

9. Leasing a car

Do you know why you see so many auto ads on TV that feature low lease payments? Because the car companies and dealers make a TON of money on a lease…far more then when they just sell a car. The lease agreement you sign is written totally in favor of the lease company. You never own the car, you only rent it for a number of months. You are responsible for maintenance and insuring the car. Plus, your lease limits you to a certain maximum number of miles driven. If you exceed the limits, the mileage penalties are staggering. I’ve looked at leases every time I’ve bought a car since the early 80s, and I’ve never once found a scenario in which I could come out ahead with a lease.

10. New vs. Used. | The Car Buying Agency

Most people do not need a brand new car. When you buy a new car, you get hammered on depreciation in the first year. Sometimes the value of your car drops as much as 20% the moment you drive your new ride off the dealer lot. The car lots are jammed with excellent used cars. You can save a bunch of money by buying a used car. But you won’t know that for sure unless you do some research. Compare the TOTAL cost of a new car versus the used car, including finance costs, maintenance and insurance. Most times, the used car will win…even when dealers offer zero percent car loans.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

* * * *

Joohn Choe

Did you know that half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level?

It's a constraint on victory outcomes in counter-disinformation work; it's a problem when you declare war on things like QAnon or the Republican industrial lie complex.

It arises when you use a technique from military planners called "thinking backwards".

This doesn't mean "be old-school and nostalgic" (I mean, you'd think), it means "start from the outcome and work backwards".

Illiteracy turns out to be a problem when you consider the basic problem of active measures defense as an exercise in thinking backwards. You get new solutions and new problems; illiteracy, and being literate but not reading, or alliteracy (irritatingly not a word in spell-check), are some of those problems.

First, let's talk about the outcome.

The fundamental problem with disinformation studies is that you can't define what disinformation is unless you take a stance on what information is, and how it's used in society.

It's meaningless to point your finger and say "liar!" as we are wont to do in this field if you're not even clear on what role that should play in society, or how things are supposed to work normally. You can't diagnose a dysfunction in how society produces and consumes information if you don't even have a view on how it functions.

You need to have a defensible, testable theory of how America's information economy operates normally if you are going to put yourself forward as some authority on how it's functioning abnormally. You cannot be a counter-disinformation operator without being a philosopher, and to some extent, a systems theorist and, increasingly, I'd argue, an aestheticist (as in "studies aesthetics", not "aesthetician who does your nails").

This is incredibly basic. I still find it odd that even very professional people and companies in this field don't grapple with this issue. Even the data is meaningless, no matter how impressively objective it is, if you're lacking that kind of context; you end up having anomalies with no baseline, like an endless stream of singleton events.

That's no way to run a railroad, like the old saying goes.

So, back when I had a startup, with advisors, I talked to one of them who actually taught a class at Berkeley on startups about this crazy recording of a Federal crime I'd gotten in Alabama, and I asked for advice for what to do about it in terms of the fight against disinformation.

The answer he gave ended up being a lead-in to thinking about this in a systems-oriented, long-terms sustainable kind of way. I still come back to it as a recurrent point in shaping outcome scenarios.

He suggested, first off, in this sort of infuriatingly wise way that he has (he's an old Asian dude, so) that you have to ask, first: is zero percent really possible?

What kind of victory state are you after, if this is actually a lie that involves disinformation on the scale that you observe it?

He argued that you have to fit disinformation into a place with other aspects of how we talk to each other. On his account, there was potentially value in giving people the ability to create and pass on value in determining what was disinformation and what wasn't, and it verged into a discussion of a crypto-currency based anti-disinformation app that I ended up not really wanting to do.

Credit where credit is due, though: his argument about the achievability of zero percent disinformation made a lot of sense.

The outcome state we're after can't be "zero active measures" and "zero disinformation". Not only is that unrealistic, if you even did manage to achieve that, you'd have North Korea. They have no problem with differing versions of state truth and reality, because everything is state truth that excludes reality.

Diversity in viewpoints is one of our strengths as a country, too; reducing everything down to one version of truth, even as generous as the boundaries might be on that, would inevitably end up flattening society. Like, no one wants "information socialism", that just... sounds bad.

You could argue that disinformation is a flipside of a coin, actually. Disinformation is in a state of mutual entailment with socially accepted official truth; there can't be one without the other, in one way of looking at it. And that's what I think my advisor was getting at.

It's like that old cliché about "tHe sIgN fOr cRiSiS aNd ChAngE ArE tEh sAmE iN cHiNeSe" which is like, you understand, up there with Sun Tzu quotes and "your people are so hard-working!" as far as Things I Ain't 'Bout As An Asian Person, You Feel Me Though (the game show!).

And don't even get me started on people ripping off strategy ideas from theorists of Chinese stick-poking and rock-throwing warfare.

In a normal time, you could say that there's a balance between disinformation and truth, and truth is usually the winning side on that, because normally, the President and the ruling party aren't active sources of disinformation with the veneer of authority on it.

We're getting out of a period of time in which that balance was badly, badly disrupted on the side of disinformation. The kind of abnormalities we see as a society - from the Capitol insurrection to how weird people around us are, compared to what they were like in 2015 - those can all be seen as stemming from that state of imbalance.

The outcome, the advisor argued, was fundamentally about balance. Not about destroying disinformation, or striking it until it wasn't a problem; the paradigm was rebalancing, he argued.

Winning isn't reducing disinformation to zero. It's achieving a new balance between disinformation and truth where the boundary favors truth more.

Almost every victory state for "The War On Disinformation" boils down to that, actually.

If you see it as rebalancing, then new ways of achieving achieving victory by restoring balance open up.

For starters, you could add to the flow of information coming out; you could even make oppositional truth part of it. That's really what "fact-checking" is on social media - Politifact and LeadStories aren't "fact-checkers", because fact-checkers are people at media institutions who run quality control on news, and they are not that. They pick and choose what stories to oppose, at times seemingly arbitrarily, at times politically, and calling them "fact-checkers" hides the essentially subjective nature of that practice.

You could create personal truth, give people new ways to be, new role models to emulate and new social roles to fulfill - "offensive fact-checker", "Nazi-hunter", "deplatformer", and the like. And you could even amplify it and try to drown out the misleadingly framed truth, and the outright mistruths, coming out of the disinformation industry.

You could mobilize the truth to create political crises, and work to reset the boundary on allowable lies. This is the core methodology of an activist, it's creating strategic dilemmas for institutions based on public perception and the pressure to do the right thing.

Outcome-focused political activism, where you're trying to get a specific candidate elected or voted out of office, is one way of specifically mobilizing the truth, instead of just sitting on ass and feeling good about having it (this is common, I'd argue). We can not only reduce disinformation better - interdict it better, ban it better, find it better, track it better - we can also get better at producing alternative presentations and modes of appeal for truth.

The problem with all these solution scenarios, though, and the area that I see where we could really stand to improve, and maybe even something that I'd work on for a minute, is our culture.

I'd argue we just don't have the kind of intellectual culture that supports a lot of these solutions. We can't, not with fundamental adult literacy the way it is; not with the state of the public intellectual the way it is.

There was a point around 2015 when people were declaring a crisis of the French public intellectual tradition; since Henri-Levy, basically, Pierre Bourdieu if you count him, there just haven't been globally notable, famous French philosophers like there used to be. That traces to any number of factors with them, but a lot of them are factors we share, like the ever-wider spread of spectacular culture and its increasing efficacy at exploiting us, drawing us into addiction loops, even, with social media and "binge-watching" TV shows.

I'd argue that the best counter-disinformational solutions we have right now come down to art and aesthetics, actually, because we are so bad as a culture at reading.

Militarized truth, and grassroots truth, and offensive truth, are forms of rebalancing between disinformation and truth, yes, but it's a reactionary, almost frantic kind of truth. The jobs that it gives people, the roles that it puts people into - content moderator, offensive fact-checker - eat people up in the long run because they're in a race against disinformation, and disinformation keeps winning.

And it ends up repeating the basic problem of piling truth upon truth without mobilizing it, positioning it in a way to get through to people.

If it takes a pretty image and a witty notion to introject a critical idea into someone's head; if it takes a song and a dance, even, to get someone to have a bullshit filter... I say, do it.

Call it less "Art of War', more "War of Art".

---

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

https://www.politico.eu/.../decline-of-french.../

https://www.wyliecomm.com/.../whats-the-latest-u-s.../