#them. corporate decides its not worth it to keep anymore and then its just gone forever. its really fucked

[dawnblade]

.

[hoe-doroki]

steel and lace

minors do not interact

warnings: 18+, anal play, sex toys, voyeuristic fantasy, scratching, creampie

pairing: bakugou x fem!reader

wc: 3.8k

summary: The only one who manages to get Bakugou’s birthday right is you.

a/n: This is my addition to the Bakugou Birthday Bash collab (masterlist). Many thanks to @lady-bakuhoe​ for helping me flesh out the ideas with this story!! You were integral to this idea, love! And additional thanks to @whats-her-quirk​ and @therealvalkyrie​ for beta reading <333

edit: I no longer write x reader but here’s my old masterlist - mobile | desktop

Bakugou never took work off on his birthday.

Never. Why would he? Villains didn’t give a shit that this was the day the old hag had unceremoniously had him evacuated into a hospital room however many years ago. They didn’t give a shit that his friends—who were also heroes who should be fucking working, by the way—wanna come over to his house and surprise him. As though his reconnaissance-trained ears weren’t as fucking fine tuned at hearing idiots on the other side of the door as theirs.

What villains should care about was that he was a year older, wiser, and fucking stronger, and he was going to kick all their asses. That was what he told all his idiot friends every year when they asked him if he was going to take off work.

Every year he regretted it.

The idiots he works with really must not care about hero work, because every year they want to send him out on a field post sugar crash from some store-bought cake with his name on it. Or buy him gifts that he’ll probably toss in the trash on the way home. He’s not being rude; he just doesn’t need junk that he never would have bought himself in the first place.

Everyone is always grinning at him, wishing him a happy birthday—as though he’s any goddamn happier to see their ugly mugs flapping their lips at him—and trying to start stupid-ass conversations. If he doesn’t like small talk normally, why would he want it on his birthday?

And the singing.

If people really wanted to wish him a happy birthday, they’d find a way to do it silently while doing some respectable fucking hero work. Make his day easier.

But no, none of that was what happened. So he should have just stayed home. Let the villains have a fucking field day on April 20th, and he could have his real gift killing them all tomorrow on the 21st.

But, unfortunately, he was a dumbass and had gone to work anyway, like he’d learned nothing from the last many years of antics. And the continued antics had got him a little pissy. And when he was pissed off, his heart rate increased, his breathing grew heavier, and, of course, he sweat.

Well. Guess what happened?

“Bakugou, I am currently paying to treat burns and fractures on three villains. Care to explain?”

Best Jeanist was sitting in his office chair, blinding sunlight streaming in behind him. Late afternoon sun—darker in color but way more resentful towards human eyes, apparently. It was reflecting off of all of the neighboring glass corporate buildings, making Bakugou squint behind his mask.

Bakugou shrugged, petulant as he stood behind his chair instead of sitting in it. “Overkill.”

Best Jeanist nodded. “Did you…lose control?”

“Tch,” Bakugou scoffed. As if he ever lost control. “Villains were weaker than I thought.”

Bakugou felt the stare of that one fucking eye and stood firm. He knew he was looking at a suspension, hopefully just for a day or two. It wasn’t like he’d done anything terrible. Villains got hurt sometimes, just like pros did, and they got their care and then they got their justice. It’s not like Bakugou was violent on purpose. Anymore. And Jeanist sure as hell knew that, so it wouldn’t take Bakugou off the field for more than a slap on the wrist. He probably wouldn’t even be technically suspended. Just chained by the fucking dick to his desk with some paperwork.

“Just…” Bakugou braced for it, narrowing his eyes but keeping his snarl to a minimum. “Just be more careful next time. Shower and go home—see you tomorrow.”

Bakugou’s jaw dropped. He closed it quickly, trying not to look like Dunce Face in front of his boss, but in all that was real and true what? He was just about to say something—he didn’t know what, probably something insubordinate—when Best Jeanist took out his own paperwork and waved him away.

“Happy birthday, Bakugou.”

Oh. So that was it.

Bakugou grit his teeth. Happy fucking birthday indeed.

It was nothing. His brain told him over and over again that it was fucking nothing. He hadn’t been punished, he hadn’t even really done anything wrong; he just hadn’t been squeaky clean up to fucking code. He could still show up for work tomorrow, business as usual. He should be tickled fucking pink.

But he wasn’t. Special treatment for being the birthday boy? What was he? Five years old and given a pass after stealing the chicken nuggets off Deku’s plate? Jesus Christ.

And if he was honest, he was mostly pissed at himself. Sure, he could blame how the weather always seemed to sprint from spring to summer around his birthday every year, strengthening his quirk. He could blame the villains for being weak enough that they had no business even stepping foot in his neighborhood. But losing control of his quirk even a little—and it had been a little—was fucking amateur and he’d have to pencil in some extra time at the gym. Maybe snatch Shitty Hair for some sparring, and, unfortunately, probably nab an extra therapy session and talk about this anger thing again.

At least walking instead of sitting on that stifling, crowded train car was doing him some good. Let him cool off a bit before he got home and you saw that something was wrong. He was nearly entirely relaxed by the time he got to his building’s lobby, even having the grace to nod at the concierge—who didn’t know it was his birthday, thank God—before heading up the elevator.

When he got off on his floor, it suddenly occurred to him that you might have done something truly repulsive, like inviting his friends over. He could imagine Shitty Hair’s shitty fucking hair sticking up from behind your sofa as he tried to hide before leaping up and yelling surprise.

Well, if that was the case, then the surprise was going to be him kicking all his dumb friends out of the apartment with one foot. Ain’t no way he was going to host a party on his birthday.

It turned out his worry was for nothing, though, because when he turned the knob—fully braced to punch out some teeth with his other hand—he was greeted with a totally bare apartment.

Like barren.

For starters, it was perfectly clean. Bakugou kept a tidy house normally, but this was certainly cleaner than he’d left it this morning. But more than that, there was nothing extra lying around. No stupid friends. No presents. No cake or even the smell of one. It was almost disconcerting.

No, it was a relief. A relief because he didn’t want any of that stuff. He’d had the slice of cake at work—and was slightly hangry now to show for it—and wasn’t interested in having another. And even though you’d choose better gifts than the extras at work would, it was nothing he couldn’t buy himself. So no, this was perfect. He was absolutely not disappointed. Maybe a bit confused. But not disappointed.

He took his shoes off and set his things on the small table by the door. Then he wandered into the kitchen, downed some water, and thought about what he might make for dinner. He might have expected that you and he would make dinner together or maybe even that you would have surprised him with something, but he didn’t mind doing it alone. It wasn’t like he’d learned to cook just to find a housewife someday to con into doing it all for him.

He decided to go to the bedroom first to plug in his phone. He was just sliding it out of his pocket when he opened the door, saw you, and stopped short.

You were on the bed—not in bed, but on it—wearing a black zip up with his signature orange x over the chest. You were on your knees with your legs spread wide, looking him dead in the eye with a deadly smirk on your face, painted in bright lipstick.

“New prototype. You like?”

The two of you had met when you were scouted from his parents’ business to design the clothing for his first merchandise line. He’d sworn off dating you from the beginning, because the last thing he wanted was to give the old hag anything to say about, firstly, her being at all responsible for finding  him a girlfriend or secondly, the fact that dating a fashion designer would mean he was dating his parents. He’d said fuck that to anyone who would listen.

But you’d gotten his brain from the beginning. Your designs were all sick from the sketch to mock up to the prototypes you always wore for him. Maybe he was a simple man for falling for a girl dressed in his colors, aiming to please him, but fuck it. You were talented, too smart for your own good, and pretty as hell.

So what? Now he had a dream girlfriend and one more reason to fight with his mom. Net positive for sure.

Still, that jacket wasn’t a prototype. That was from his first official line, no doubt, and he’d seen you wear it hundreds of times. He knew from here how much it would smell like detergent and how much like you.

You caught his eyes, raised your brows once, and then pulled the zip on the sweatshirt.

Underneath was nothing but lace and ribbon, contrasting the black and orange of the sweatshirt with moss green outlining your silhouette. The moss green from his gauntlets and his belt was caged around you in the thinnest strips of fabric, scraps of floral barely covering your breasts and pussy. The lingerie was an all-in-one, with the tiny bra connected to the panties by a few ribbons crossing over your belly. Not hiding a damn thing, but showing it off for all its worth.

“Fuck,” Bakugou groaned when the sweatshirt hit the bed, your arms still in the sleeves, but the look underneath now fully revealed to him. He could feel the blood going to his dick, just seeing you on display like that getting him up to half mast in seconds.

“Not a lot of coverage on this version,” you mused, sticking your thumb under a bra strap. “Maybe an edit for the second try?”

Bakugou growled, taking a step forward, but you weren’t done just yet.

“I was also thinking maybe full panties next time,” you said, turning around, sitting on your heels. The sweatshirt hung just below your ass, framing round cheeks that were caged by thin elastic crosses, and that was it. Not so much as a triangle of fabric to speak of. “Maybe write: Property of Dynamight on them? Or is that too much text?”

That was all it took for Bakugou to pounce. One arc of his fist had his shirt thrown with a smack to the floor and then his hands were on your shoulders, spinning you face up as he pushed you flat on the bed.

“You know I don’t like unnecessary words,” he growled.

And then he was kissing you, a hand running up the falke stockings pinned on your thighs as you pulled your arms out of the sweatshirt. One leg came up automatically to wrap around his hip, and Bakugou began rutting against your center, fully hard already. On his second grinding thrust, his pants snagged on the scrap of lace you were wearing. Wetness was already glistening on his trousers and he moved his thumb down to your core, groaning at what he felt.

“Crotchless panties?” he mumbled against your mouth. “You’re making this too easy, sweetheart.”

“Shouldn’t have to work so hard on your birthday,” you mewled.

There was a rumble in Bakugou’s throat, half scoff, half chuckle. “Yeah, remind me of that next year, will you?”

You were soaked already—the swipe of his thumb told you that much. Either you’d gotten really excited when he’d texted you that he was coming home early, or you’d…gotten yourself excited at some point after. Either way, it meant that foreplay could wait for round two.

He pulled his thumb away from your core and pressed it against your lip, smudging what lipstick had survived the kisses down your chin. You were half ruined already. You stuck your tongue out and licked at essence on his thumb before sucking it into your mouth, eyes wide as you looked up at him. Fuck, he could feel himself straining against his pants, grinding circles against your half-bare cunt for a spot of relief.

After you licked him clean, he took his hand back, leaving your mouth open and wanting as he began to fuss with the front of his pants. He caught your smudged lips again, holding your jaw with one hand as he pushed his pants down with the other. He pulled his lower half away from you, kicking off the pants—hadn’t bothered with boxers for the commute home—and let them slide off the edge of the bed.

“Ready?” he asked.

Your smile was big and you bit the tip of your tongue, nodding your head twice. That was all he needed. He grabbed his cock in his fist and slid it through your wetness just once, and then he pushed himself in.

Immediately, he felt the drag of something hard and angled against your lower wall right along his cock, pressing from tip to base as he slid home inside of you.

“Woah,” he groaned. “What the fuck?”

You giggled, the action making your walls flutter against him.

“Got myself a new toy,” you said coyly, wrapping your legs around his hips. “Promise you can get yourself something pretty on my birthday too.”

Bakugou reach a hand around your thigh, feeling the elastic garter pulled taut against the stockings that were rubbing so deliciously against his back and his hips. He grabbed a handful of your ass, and the tips of his fingers felt a rounded edge of warm metal slid just between your ass cheeks.

“You fucking naughty minx.” Bakugou grinned, showing all his teeth, rearing back out of you before thrusting back in, feeling the novel pressure of the toy on the way out and back.

No wonder you had been so wet to begin with. You must have lubed yourself up before putting in that butt plug—which wasn’t small, from what he could feel of it. He could imagine you, one leg up on the sink, ass sticking out as you fingered yourself, mouth dropping open when you inserted the toy. How cold it would have been when it first touched your pert little hole and how you’d gotten it all warm for him as you waited with your little secret for him to get home.

“It’s curved to hit prostates,” you gasped as Bakugou rocked hard, steady thrusts into you. “In case you’re interested.”

The thought, much to Bakugou’s surprise, sent a thrill right through his belly down to his dick. He couldn’t help but slam rapidly into you, making your eyes roll back. Fuck, was that something he wanted? It wasn’t something he’d ever thought about, and he didn’t have the mind right now to ponder it.

“God you feel so big.”

“You feel so tight, sweetheart,” Bakugou grunted, refusing to acknowledge the fresh heat that was on his cheeks after your previous comment. “Squeezing me from all sides.”

The butt plug left it so there was barely enough room in your pussy for his cock to pump in and out. The pressure was hard on one side, making him fucking twitch every time the head of his cock caught against it, leading him to opt for long, deep thrusts in and out of you. It was so good that he didn’t even care if the only present he got for his birthday was a little hunk of stainless steel halfway up your ass. He’d gotten home five minutes ago and already he could feel his balls tightening, threatening to bust a nut.

“Just think of it, Katsuki,” you said, your voice dreamy as he fucked you raw. “All the women wearing this set, thinking of you when they show it off for their partners. All wishing that you were the one fucking them. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, baby? But they’ll never have anything but their husband’s sad cock that they pretend is yours.”

“Fuck,” Bakugou growled, putting a hand on the headboard and nearly splintering it in his grip. You were riling him up and it made him want to press his palm flat against the burnished oak and let off his quirk, send shards flying. His hand was already drenched with more sweat than it should have been, just like with those villains earlier. Goddamn this time of year. He couldn’t help it; his quirk begged for it. He was in dire need of release of some kind, and it wasn’t like he could cum yet. He had to know how your pussy felt when it convulsed around him, ass cheeks tensing and squeezing that toy hard against his cock until he was spurting into you.

Bakugou let off a few crackling pops from his palm, moaning as relief filled him, the tension lessened for a moment. A faint smell of wood smoke spread through the room, slightly embittered by the resin blackening around his hand. One more scorch mark on the bed frame. You groaned underneath him, taken by the sight of Bakugou’s ever-tight control slipping for you. You knew he’d fuck you through the bed until the rest of the frame gave way if he wanted. You’d both be flat on a busted mattress and he’d keep going until he felt you clench around him.

“How’s that sound, Katsu?” you continued, your voice growing higher as Bakugou took his hand off the headboard and pressed four fingers, still sweaty and heated from his quirk, against the lace covering your clit. It was soaked through. “A-Ah, you’d like the idea of a woman home alone, dressed up just for you, fucking herself on the dildo she hides in the back of your closet, screaming out your name and hoping to God that her neighbors don’t hear?”

Bakugou couldn’t do the long, slow thrusts anymore. Your legs had grown tighter around his waist, your calves soft and silken against his ass as he kept his thrusts deep. The butt plug was rubbing against the base of his cock as he pounded into you, his fingers swiping over your clit with little finesse, but speed and steady pressure making up for it.

“But no matter…” you continued, the words coming out in little huffs as you panted with your head thrown back. Bakugou couldn’t resist leaning down and licking a line up the length of your neck, biting your earlobe when he got to the top, “no dildo, no matter how expensive, no matter how long and fat, will be good enough. The whole time…they’ll know they’re missing out. Oh, fuck.”

All of a sudden, your thighs were squeezing tight against his hip bones, arms thrown over his back and finger scratching hot lines that would mark him even more as yours tomorrow. Then you were gasping, walls squeezing and Bakugou fought against your grip to pull out just enough so that the metal toy was rubbing just over the cleft of his head with every convulsion.

He didn’t stand a chance. There was hardly any warning before he was cumming into you, streaks of his seed dribbling out of you. He couldn’t even pump himself through it; you were gripping him so tightly and, more than that, he didn’t want to move. Everything was white hot, so he just waited it out, barely moving save for where his hand was still rubbing over your clit.

Eventually you stopped him, grabbing his wrist just as the grip of your cunt loosened around him. Then you brought his hand, glistening with moisture, up to your mouth, and broadly laved your tongue from the base of his fingers to the tips, looking him dead in the eye. You then brought his hand down to your neck, and allowed him to streak the combined fluids across and down your décolletage.

Fuck—there was no way he was going to work on his birthday next year. He’d let villains overtake the city first.

“They’ll know they’re missing out,” you breathed, and it took Bakugou a second to figure out that you were continuing your voyeuristic fantasy from before, playing it out to the end, “They might even think they understand. But the only one who will truly know, is me.”

You smiled, your eyes and grin both heavy, sleepy, sated.

“Got that fucking right,” Bakugou said, pulling out of you, his cum already dripping down your ass. He eyed it, only catching a glimpse of the glinting metal plug before your legs fell to the bed, spread and limp. He smacked your hip lightly with one hand. “Roll over.”

In no mood to argue, you flipped willingly, ass up, plug still hidden from view. The lingerie was damp in some spots from where your wetness had spilled from your pussy. He leaned his mouth towards one of the strips of elastic stretching against the swell of your ass and bit. You gasped, back arching, and Katsuki smirked as he pulled away.

“A fucking lingerie line?”

A chuckle escaped your throat. “It was supposed to be a joke, but now…”

Katsuki pinched the elastic with his fingers and snapped it, watching the slight jiggle of your cheeks as you jolted. “No.”

“But Katsuki,” you whined.

“Mm,” he amended, as close to ‘maybe’ as you were going to get. You both could always talk about the idea—truly ridiculous idea—later. Katsuki put a hand on one cheek under the strips of lingerie and spread it.

There was the plug, a stainless steel handle. It was thin and shaped like an oblong donut, not like one of those cheap bejeweled things. This one, even just what he could see of it, screamed quality, and, for a moment, Bakugou wondered again what it would be like to wear. If you’d gotten it in, he sure as fuck could. And he did hold a certain anatomical advantage in using it.

He put his thumb and forefinger to the phalange and gave the toy a twist, pressing it just slightly deeper into your hole. You groaned, your voice low and deep in the pillow like when he gave you a back massage. He smirked and kept at it. Seemed this was a birthday gift for him after all.

“Katsu, don’t tease,” you moaned. “Sensitive.”

Bakugou, however, had no mercy. He flipped you over again, pulling a little yelp from you, and then picked you up bridal style, carrying you off the bed.

“Where are we going?” you asked, your voice suddenly much more awake.

“Shower,” he answered simply. He squeezed the meat of your upper thigh. Not quite your ass but close enough for the point to be made. “I’m not done with my present yet.”

[mcu-fan-fics-blog]

The Helping Hand

This is a Repost from my Ao3 I wanted to bring it to Tumblr. I hope you like it Its currently 5 chapters I will be uploading the rest throughout the rest of the week.

Word Count: 2400 approx

Summary: Y/N Krast Illegitimate Daughter of Tony Stark. Product of an unwanted teen pregnancy. What would Howard Stark be capable of doing to assure his sons future? What will happen when Tony meets our Beautiful, young, genius, rich philanthropist.

Tw: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Drug use, Drug addiction, Teen Pregnancy. (If there are any I missed please tell me.)

Ch.1

The Prodigal Child Returns Ch.2

Ch.3

While it is true that you had a very comfortable life it was definitely not easy or by any means a normal one. The first 11 years of your life were full of injustice, abuse, trauma, and all because your parents made it so. 

At one point you completely gave up… The things that happened to you, the things that they did to you were unforgivable. Howard tried to get you to talk about it, but you never let him know that part of you. You didn't tell him because you were scared he'd think you were broken, that you were not worth saving.  

You've never asked about your parents and quite frankly you've never wondered. They didn’t give a second thought when leaving you in a fucking hospital, why should you. Your scars are things you're not proud of; they are a reminder of how weak and vulnerable you used to be.

You were sleeping on the plane when suddenly you're there again. The Gordon house they had a son… he had issues and they knew it but did nothing about it. This was your repeating personal hell… when you least expected it you're being hit and yelled at. You feel like you can't run away fast enough. Your body is not letting you get away from him. 

When he finally reaches towards you, you jump awake from the nightmare. "Right on cue." you say to yourself. You wake up in a cold sweat. You look out your window to see the new york skyline. The pilot informs you that you'll be landing within the hour. The perks of having a jet to take you wherever you want no hassles. 

You haven't seen New York since Howard's funeral 3 years ago. Another thing you haven't seen since you left was your friends if you could still even call them that. Once you land you decide to go to your favorite coffee shop… if you missed one thing it was the coffee. 

As soon as you walk in the cashier notices you and she looks awestruck, dare you say angry. Jenna… 

"Are you going to say hi or are you just going to stare?" You say lifting your brow. She snaps out of her thoughts and smiles at you. "Y/N the regular? Or have you acquired new tastes?" You smirk at her and she makes her way around the counter basically throwing herself at you.

"Wow, easy there you're going to give me the wrong impression." She keeps hugging you nonetheless. "I missed you too!" you say as you return the hug. As soon as she pulls away she slapped you not holding back. "I spoke too soon didn't I?" You say to her. 

"You didn't speak at all you asshole you said you were going to call. That was my only condition." You give her an apologetic look, but at the end of the day she understands. She goes back to the counter, prepares your drink, and hands it to you. "So what's new around here?" You ask, she simply sighs and leads you to a more secluded table. 

"Marissa and Rob broke up, lets see Angel moved to Washington he actually made it into politics I still can't believe it, and I, well I own the coffee shop now." She looks at you and smiles. "What about you, where did you go?"You tell her what you did where you went, all about David and Viv. "So how long are you staying here?" She asks. "I'm here to stay." You say. 

You finish catching up with Jenna a couple of hours later. You walk out with your drink in hand and immediately bump into someone. Your drink spilled all over you. "Shit… are you okay?" You say as you look up. Your eyes meet hers and you're hypnotized completely forgetting how to speak. 

"Yeah, are you it seems like that spilled all over you." She points out rather matter of factly pushing her deep red hair out of her face. "Well it would seem so… you know it wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't bumped into me." A smirk forming on her face.

"Bold of you to assume I bumped into you." She tells you, raising her eyebrow. You smile, extend your hand towards her and introduce yourself. "Y/N Krast and you…" she takes your hand and finishes your sentence. "Natalie, nice to meet you Y/N."

You chuckle lightly. "You say that because coffee isn't currently dripping into your bra." She huffs out a small laugh. "How could I ever make it up to you. I mean I would say dinner but that seems too soon." She says smirking. 

You smile and say "I'll see you around Natalie." You hand her your card and walk away. Not looking back you make your way to your old house. "And it begins you say to yourself as you enter your home."

What exactly is beginning you are unsure of but if you know one thing it's that they're all "going to pay." You were a kid and you'll never forget what you lived through.

The first night anywhere is extremely uncomfortable… for you at least. The jet lag didn't help you toss and turn all night. When you least expect the sun is out and you are pulled from your thoughts as your alarm rings. Great now you have to go to work on no sleep. 

You make it to the office on time… you left it in good hands. "Y/N? Long time no see, where were you?" You turn to see Logan, you meet him in the system, you gave him a chance when no one else would. "How's my company? It better not be in shambles." You say playfully he fakes an offended gasp. 

"Y/N it's doing great, I'd say that if we work a little harder SI might have some actual competition." You laugh, but the expression on his face doesn't change. He doesn't laugh with you. "Wait are you serious Logan?" He answers almost immediately "Yeah it’s crazy right!"

You and Logan spent the day going over your company's finances. "We are doing better than ever, and it's all thanks to you." You state. Logan takes your hand and says "Thanks to us, you might have been gone but you definitely helped." You smile. 

You hesitate but eventually cave. "Logan I need your help with something?" He looks at you, his posture turning serious, "What do you need?" He said almost immediately "You can say no and I will understand, but I need to know everything about the Gordon's." you say nearly a whisper that only Logan could hear. 

"Y/N why?" He simply asks with a calm demeanor. When you try to explain nothing comes out you just shrug. "I'll do it, but just be careful alright." Suddenly anger fills within you and you venomously spat "I'm not that kid anymore Logan I'm not scared of them if anything they should be scared of me."

Logan is quiet for a moment "I see… Is this why you came back?" Unsure of how to answer you shrug, and he walks towards you kneeling in front of you. "I'll follow you anywhere you know… they hurt you, hell they even hurt me." He grabs your shoulders making you look at him. "You'll have that file on your desk tomorrow… they deserve what's coming their way Y/N."

He leaves your office leaving you unsure but content with the fact that he understands why. Again you are pulled from your thoughts as your office phone starts to ring. "Y/N Krast who am I speaking to." You say somewhat confused as the call wasn't announced or scheduled. "Hi Y/N it’s Pepper Potts from Stark Industries." 

You almost drop the phone when you hear the words come out of the speaker. Pepper continues "I must confess Y/N you're not an easy person to get a hold of. Did you enjoy your sabbatical?" You're still at a loss for words but compose yourself quickly. "I did very much, forgive me but what is this call about?"

"Right, I am inviting you formally on Me and Tony's behalf to our annual Company investor and corporation cocktail party." Suddenly realization hits you in the face he wants to scope out the competition. "That seems great, when will it take place?" Pepper seems taken aback by your response quickly composing herself. 

"All the information will be emailed to you and how many passes would you like?" You quickly respond "Two would be perfect!" you say. "I'll look forward to meeting you Y/N." Pepper states. "As will I, and thank you for the invitation." You say and end the call cordially. 

As soon as the call is over you receive the information the cocktail party will literally be tonight! You run into Logan’s office startling him. “What's up… you look pale what happened?” He asked as he started to worry. You catch your breath and say “Stark wants to meet us. We were just invited to their annual Cocktail Party!” You say all in one breath you quickly add “And it’s tonight.”

As soon as Logan Processes your words he starts to pace back and forth. “Tony Stark… The Tony Stark wants to meet us? Y/N do you have any idea what this means?” He turns to you and you can see the eagerness in his eyes. “Of course I do Logan, but we’ve got to get ready to. We need to buy presentable clothes and talk strategy.”

“God this is a dream come true!” You move in front of him to prevent him from pacing and catch his attention. “Logan it’s not the time to get star struck okay… he’s still our competition we were invited for a reason and we’re going to make the best of it.” He slowly nods getting more serious, but you couldn’t help it, you’ve looked up to him most of your life. Almost screaming you said, “Fucking Tony Stark wants to meet us!” Logan just laughs and you join him.

The day goes by in a blur, you and Logan had a busy day starting off with wardrobe. You're rocking a beautiful red fitted dress with a slit that goes up your thigh. Logan of course wanted to compliment you and chose a traditional black tux. "You look amazing." He says. You smirk "I look hot. You're not looking too shabby either." You tell him, making him smile and blush a little. 

Later in the night you finally make it to Stark Tower. Presenting your passes to security outside they immediately let you in. "This place is amazing." Logan comments you only nod your head in agreement. As you make, your way to the party Logan takes your hand. 

You look at him… you both needed the reassurance. You continued walking hand in hand. You are greeted by a crowd of people drinking, talking, and having fun. This calms you a little as you are just one in a multitude of people. You and Logan make your way to the bar. You take a seat and sigh. You lean on Logan's shoulder as he orders you drinks. 

When you get your drinks you realize something but don't get that chance to mention it as Pepper and Tony walk up to you causing everything else to melt away. "You must be the infamous Y/N Krast and your Logan Smith." Tony points at both of you. You smile and say "Exactly." You say then directing your attention to Pepper. "It's nice to meet you, Pepper, you look amazing."

You and Logan shake their hands. "Y/N I must say you look stunning as well… and I'm so sorry for the short notice I'm glad you could both make it." You smile as if to say it was not a big inconvenience. Tony clears his throat catching your attention. "Well Y/N you must know that we are in direct competition." You nod unsure of where the conversation is heading. He continues. "I want to work hand in hand with you and your company. What do you say?" 

You smiled and turned to Logan who knew exactly what Tony wanted to do. "So this has nothing to do with the fact that Karst Industries is projected to surpass SI within months." You can tell you caught him off guard as he desperately tries to say something. "Logan and I would love to work with you, Tony. It would help both of us in the end." He looked relieved and pleased with your answer. 

"This merits some drinks." He calls to the bartender "Natasha bring some drinks over here." You turn to Natasha who is now walking towards you. And finally, all the pieces fall together you can't help but chuckle. "The Call… that's how you got my number, touché Pepper I've got to hand it to you." Pepper can only smirk at your comment, relieved that you're not angry or offended by it.

You greet Natasha. "Well, it's nice to see you again Natalie." She smiles and hands you all your drinks. "This is Logan, my business partner I've known him since forever." You introduce him to Natasha. This piqued Tony's curiosity asking "When did you two meet?"

"We met when I was 5 or 4 not quite sure." Pepper hummed and added. "Your parents must have been friends." You and Logan shuffle unconformable but you decided to answer. "Um… no actually me and Logan met in the foster system. It's okay though it's a part of us we are not ashamed of it." You stated quite confidently that you even surprised yourself. 

Natasha senses you and Logan are uncomfortable and change the subject. "So what did you do whilst you were on sabbatical?" You thanked her with your eyes and answered her question. "I went to Europe Sokovia to be exact I wanted to help so I moved there and opened a small practice." Tony jumps in again quite tactlessly asking "How old are you Y/N you seem young not offense." He quickly adds towards the end. 

You chuckle lightly and answer "I'm turning 22 in a couple of months." you say. He looks at Pepper concern flashing in his eyes and quickly dissipates as he notices you looking at him.

[the-coda-project]

The Coda Project | 1.02 - Inherit the Flames

After reuniting Tommy Collins with his family, Dean and Sam stop for the night in a town called Rifle.

They’re about two hours out of Blackwater Ridge, at a dumpy motel on the edge of a town called Rifle, and Dean’s been staring at the tree-print wallpaper for so long that he’s started detecting patterns in the branches.

A cheap plug-in air freshener in the bathroom has the whole place reeking of artificial pine. Between that and the walls, Dean’s starting to feel as though the wilderness they just barely managed to escape from has followed them here. Hell, maybe they didn’t escape. Maybe he’s still strung up in the mine; maybe the wendigo is still tossing him around like a ragdoll, scrambling his brains just enough that he’s dreaming of a motel that doesn’t exist.

Outside, an eighteen-wheeler passes on the I-70, close enough to make the windows rattle. Dean shifts in his bed as if a different position is going to be enough to distract him from how badly his ribs ache. His scratched-up neck feels raw as road rash.

No matter how hard he tries, sleep still feels so far out of the realm of possibility that he starts wondering how long he should lie here before he can cut his losses and call it.

But then Sam pipes up—“Hey, can I ask you something?”—from across the room, not bothering to check first if Dean’s awake, and immediately he wants to just keep feigning sleep until morning. He might have sought out his brother’s company only a couple of weeks ago, but right now, with the memory of Sam’s dismissive attitude toward helping the Collins family fresh in his mind, he doesn’t feel much like talking to him.

“Dean.”

He presses his eyes shut, ignoring the part of himself that’s berating him for being childish. Whether he can get to sleep or not, he’s too goddamn exhausted to talk about anything that isn’t life or death.

If he thought there was even a chance that his brother was angling to talk about Jessica, he’d be sitting up and listening in a heartbeat. But his tone is inquisitive, not hesitant, and Sam’s been so closed-lipped about his grief that Dean only knows how much her death is affecting him because of how loud and frequent his nightmares have been.

“Dean,” Sam says again, slightly louder. “I know you’re awake.”

With a huff, Dean tilts his head to squint at him across the gap between their lumpy mattresses. He grimaces as the motion pulls at the claw marks on his neck. He’ll be lucky if they don’t scar, but maybe it’d be better if they do. Maybe it’d help if he could see something visibly fucked up when he looks in the mirror. Maybe that would make it easier to explain away the revulsion he feels when he meets his own eyes.

“Dude, can it wait until after I get a solid four hours?”

Bullheaded as ever, Sam ignores the question, sitting up and tucking his shaggy hair back behind his ears. He looks twelve years old. Dean figures he always will, in some ways.

“Did something happen with Dad? Before he took off, I mean.”

“Like what?”

He’s not sure why he bothers asking Sam to clarify.

Maybe it’s just to buy himself some time; to give himself a second to come up with some version of the truth that doesn’t amount to Dad’s an overbearing, pigheaded prick, just like you’ve always said, and if I didn’t think he was in trouble right now I’d be glad to be rid of him for at least another month.

Even thinking it makes him guilty. Like he’s a bad son for being so angry with the guy. But he’s gotta believe that his actions are the important part here; proof that no matter how much he hates his dad sometimes, he still loves him enough to want to keep this family as connected as he can.

Still, a part of him is wondering if it’s really worth it anymore to keep up the act. If his clinging to John and clinging to Sam is just making things worse for all of them. Making John think he’ll put up with whatever he throws at him. Making Sam think he doesn’t care enough to take his side against John when he’s being unreasonable.

A part of him wonders—but it’s not a big enough part to win. The thought that something might have happened to him keeps him from letting the bile spill.

Because if they can’t find him—or worse, if they do find him but they’re too late—Dean doesn’t want Sam to have more reasons to be angry with a dead man than he’s already got.

It’s not as though Dean’s not used to keeping this shit locked down, anyway. There’ve been other disagreements, other fights, other circumstances over the years that he knows weren’t even close to being fair on him, but that’s just his life. It sucks, but it’s how it’s always been. No use complaining about it if it’s never gonna change, and after living this way for twenty-two of his twenty-six years, he sees no reason to consider change a possibility.

In the grand scheme of things, this particular incident doesn’t even make the top five list of awful things John’s put him through. The honors there go to that time with the shtriga, abandoning him at Sonny’s and then uprooting him as soon as he let himself get comfortable, the hunt he sent him on as a seventeenth birthday “present”, the night he told Sam not to bother coming back if he left for school, and the simple act of raising his kids into this shit in the first place.

This one might make it into the top ten, though. He hasn’t decided yet.

“Well,” Sam says, pulling him out of his thoughts. “You said you hadn’t heard from him in… what, three weeks before you got that message? Seems weird that it was so long, is all. You were on a hunt, he was on a hunt… it’s just weird that you weren’t checking in more often.”

Dean rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. There’s a water stain on the popcorn tile overhead that almost looks like a cactus if he looks at it the right way.

Christ, he could use some tequila right now. Maybe he can find them a case further south while they wait for some sign of John to turn up. Someplace warmer than the mountains in Colorado. Someplace where he can roll into town, waste a ghost, and then knock back a few drinks on a motel patio without having to talk to anyone at all.

“I mean, you usually check in more than that, right?” Sam goes on, and Dean sighs. He lifts one hand to rub at his brow.

“Yeah, usually.”

“So… what happened?”

“Nothing you gotta worry about,” he says, and immediately knows it was a mistake. Sam zeroes in on what Dean didn’t say just as intently as anyone else would focus on what he did.

Maybe he should go to law school after all—he’s already got the artful-conversational-trap shit down.

“You had a fight.”

“Sam—”

“No, c’mon Dean. You asked me to help you find him. If you had a fight before he left, that seems like it might be relevant.”

“It’s not.”

“So why won’t you just tell me?”

“It was nothing,” he insists. “Dad isn’t exactly Mr Congeniality, Sam. We fight all the time.”

“No, me and Dad fight all the time. The two of you are usually on the same page.”

Dean suppresses a snort and rolls onto his side, his back to Sam now as he looks at the narrow strip of moonlight edging past the thin motel curtains.

“You know I’ll just ask Dad when we find him if you don’t—“

“Jesus, Sam. It was nothing. Just a stupid disagreement about the hunt we were on. You know how he can get.”

“What was the hunt?”

“A witch in Louisiana. We had different ideas about what was going on, but it’s done, the witch is dead, and it doesn’t matter anymore. Okay?”

“That’s all?”

It’s not all.

Thanks to a botched salt-and-burn in Kentucky the previous month, things had already been tense well before they checked into a motel in Souffran, Louisiana. It only got worse when they ran into a woman Dean knew on their second day in town.

She’d been a civilian, last he’d seen her. Said she was a hunter now.

John had been ready to leave as soon as he found out she was already looking into it, but Dean wasn’t so eager.

It wasn’t that he thought Marisa was helpless—far from it, in fact. She’d been teaching capoeira when Dean met her in Texas a few months back. Had the thing terrorizing her students been corporeal, he has no doubt that she never would have needed any help in kicking its ass. But she was inexperienced as a hunter. Green as they come.

Dean didn’t love the idea of her taking on whatever was killing kids in Souffran alone.

When he told John as much, his dad just gave him a sly look, as if he thought the only reason Dean cared was because he was looking to get into Marisa’s pants. Dean wasn’t, for the record. As he saw it, it was his fault that she’d decided to try hunting on for size in the first place. He figured he owed it to her to back her up while she was still so new.

At first, all they’d had to go on was two kids who’d gone missing and turned up dead a week later without any visible injuries beyond a circular burn in the center of their chests; a girl named Lucy Parker who’d disappeared without a trace from her grandmother’s backyard yesterday but was yet to be found; and half a dozen wildly inconsistent reports of strange lights being seen in the swamp running along the north edge of town.

John had been convinced that they were dealing with a fi follet—a kind of malevolent will-‘o-the-wisp known to enact vengeance and drain the blood of children. When Dean disagreed with him, explaining to Marisa that the whole thing felt witchy to him, and pointing out that neither of the kids who’d died had shown any signs of blood loss, John got pigheaded and petty.

He called Dean arrogant. Accused him of acting like John was an idiot ever since they left Kentucky. Spat, “You spend one day showing a civvie the ropes and now you’re an expert, huh? Well go ahead, kid. Handle it on your own.”

And then he bailed.

Left Dean and Marisa to track down a missing eight year old on their own, and made Dean feel about three inches tall when he did it.

It took them almost a full two days to track the thing responsible. A witch, like Dean had thought, who’d been draining the kids of their life force in a desperate, last-ditch effort to stave off some sickness that was eating away at him. But the spell he’d been using was unstable and ineffective, and he’d been haggard and jittery when they found him in a rusty little shack out in the middle of nowhere.

Lucy Parker was right there with him in the room, suspended in mid-air by some unknown force as pale, flickering light leached from the center of her chest and down into a copper bowl on the floor beneath her. Her eyes were wide and rolled back to the whites. Her mouth was open as if she were screaming.

Marisa shot the witch point blank, right between the eyes, and Dean had darted forward to catch Lucy before she could hit the ground. He’d spent the entire time terrified that they were going to get to her too late; that she’d turn up dead before they could figure out where she’d been taken or how to deal with the thing that had taken her.

When she landed in his arms, he’d almost been sick when he felt how cold she was. How limp.

But after a second, she gasped, and coughed, and then she was clinging to him. Shaking.

He couldn’t put her down. She wouldn’t let Marisa take her.

He’d been forced leave the shack while Marisa dealt with the witch’s body and destroyed all the evidence before some local could stumble upon it, and when she’d emerged gray-faced and bloody half an hour later, with the crackle of fire just audible over the steady croak of frogs in the nearby water, he’d known that Marisa wasn’t going on any more hunts.

Lucy still refused to let go of him once they got back to the car, so he’d let Marisa drive them back to town, sitting in the back seat with the kid clinging to his side and sobbing snot into his jacket. He hadn’t even minded. If he didn’t think it would scare her more, he might have let himself cry out of sheer relief at finding her.

Late that night--once Lucy was back with her grandmother, and Marisa was on her way back to San Antonio, and Souffran was far enough in the rearview that it was safe to stop for the night--Dean had called John. He didn’t pick up.

Just sent Dean’s call straight to voicemail, then texted him coordinates for a poltergeist case near Mobile, Alabama an hour later. A few days after that, more coordinates directed him to the voodoo hunt in New Orleans.

So yeah, a witch in Louisiana is not all. Not by a long shot. He doesn’t tell Sam that, though. What would be the point?

“Yeah, that’s all,” he lies, still staring at the gap in the curtains. Another truck rumbles past, air brakes hissing as it slows to take the town exit. It’s so loud that he’s not sure that he’d manage to sleep here even if he wasn’t a headcase. “C’mon, I gotta crash, man.”

For a minute, it seems like Sam’s gonna keep at it. Like he’ll needle at Dean until he spills everything out onto the pilled carpet between them. How scared he is. How angry. How resentful. All the ugliest feelings that seem to be pressing up his throat and onto the back of his tongue like bile.

But he doesn’t. Just sighs, sounding as tired as Dean feels, and says, “Yeah, okay. Night, Dean.”

Dean grunts in reply, and Sam starts snoring after a half hour. Another half hour after that, his nightmares begin. Low, helpless murmurs of Jessica’s name and high-pitched whines of terror that stick in Dean’s chest like buckshot.

With dry eyes and an ever-present lump in his throat, Dean pushes out of bed and heads for the bathroom, taking the laptop as he goes.

If he’s lucky, he’ll find them a hunt before Sam wakes up. He can get them back on the road as soon as the sun rises. Keep them focused on something that isn’t the complete lack of leads on John.

If he’s not, maybe staying up will wear him out enough to sleep tomorrow. He’ll take what he can get.

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[border-spam]

Everything, and far sooner than Tyreen was ok with, mostly because Troy is so weird.

Ty had given her a basic breakdown on the twin’s first night on her ship once Sei got a drip into Troy and it was clear he wasn’t on death’s door anymore. The buggy ride back to her ship had been terrible, not knowing these kids yet hadn’t made hearing Tyreen’s wracking sobs or the rattle of Troy’s lungs any easier. She’d done her best to focus on driving, tuning her hearing to the crunch of the scorched dust under their wheels, and away from what the girl was saying to her brother as she leaned over him in the back seat. Ty was whispering as she braced his head on her lap, reassurances and mild threats that he better wake up, and Sei would have smiled at the love being showed if it wasn’t so personal. Listening in felt... intrusive. There was a very real chance he’d not be alive by the time they made it to her dock, she’d let Tyreen have this time with in private. It was between them, not her. She was just the fool who hadn’t sense enough to turn down a stray girl's pleads for help, and Sei was sure she was going to regret it.

Once he was finally stable hours later, she’d insisted the girl level with her. The amount of charity she was willing to offer strangers was nearing its limit, it was time for Tyreen to justify why Sei should continue being hospitable when she’d done what she’d been begged to, now that Troy was going to make it. Ty slumped on the floor next to the wall cot where he slept, and sniffled between tears that they weren’t from Pandora. That they hadn’t been prepared for any of this and how quickly things had gone wrong. She’d said all she had now was her brother, whimpered through hiccups that she’d nearly lost him too because she hadn’t been able to help when he got sick, and promised she’d pay her back somehow if they could stay just a few more days. Sei had sighed, rubbing at her forehead tiredly as she felt a headache mull behind her eyes. Painfully aware that two dirty, sick kids with nowhere to go and no one to fall back on were people she’d never be able to forgive herself for turning away, she’d told Ty just to go to fucking sleep. They’d discuss it tomorrow, and that she hoped Tyreen was aware just how lucky she really was to have run into someone stupid enough to give them a chance... that they would need to earn their keep.

That dynamic became the norm even after Troy woke up. Ty did all the talking, while Troy said nothing for weeks. His fearful silence around her in the crew quarters or the way he’d pretend to be asleep and refuse to make eye contact had left Seifa worrying he may be mute; a real possibility considering how often you’d come across folk with selective communication on Pandora. When she brought it up with Ty eventually, she laughed, then waved her hand dismissively. Nah, he wasn’t mute, she’d scoffed. He was just an awkward tool.

Sei would hear them discussing things in muffled voices behind closed doors, but he remained silent around her, eyes wide as he’d pick at the threadbare hem of his sweater and nod yes or no responses politely. 

She would never have thought it would be him that would tell her everything.

Ty had opened up plenty in those first few weeks, especially once she’d decided Seifa could be trusted after not changing how she treated either when Troy’s Siren status had been noted by the medic he’d needed. Tyreen had been adamant at first that they couldn’t trust doctors, that letting anyone know what she and Troy were would be a deadly mistake, but Sei had sworn her “friend” would keep them both under wraps and helped the younger woman understand her brother needed help. She’d been right, Troy’s condition had improved, they hadn’t been sold to a corporation, and Ty blossomed into being genuinely chatty instead of suspiciously reserved.

A happy Tyreen was all confidence and NO subtlety, she’d make huge broad statements like how they were from a “A little backwater planet, oh you wouldn’t have heard of it...” whoever she learned it from was a rampant bullshitter who relied on being boisterous, not believable, and Sei would smirk as she sipped from her coffee, nodding along with Tyreen's clumsy attempts to lie about how they moved here to be stars, taking notes on what she'd need to teach this woman if she was going to have a chance. “Stars...” she’d replied, the twinkle in her eye betraying her amusement at the entire scene Ty had just worked so hard on, “Stars don't wear pants with the asses near tore out of em, Tyreen. You got a lot of work to do, and you gotta start from the ground, love." By the end of the month Ty was raring for opportunity to get off the ship, while Troy was just about mobile, still weak enough to not be able to stand for long. It had been painfully clear his physical condition was poor, the virus that had nearly killed him in their first week on the planet would have been shrugged off as a head-cold by most natives, but weeks later and you could still hear the rattle in his lungs and see the tremor in his hand. Ty had been accompanying Sei on small trade-offs, chores, sales approaches, and was confident enough to beg for the chance to run tasks alone. Said it was a ”Great opportunity to learn the ropes!”, insisted with practiced charisma that it would help teach her to handle herself around Pandorans, and Seifa had wholeheartedly agreed. She’d been on an errand planet side, picking up some carbon buffers from a friend of a friend when Troy had finally spoke.

He’d arrived silently to the table for the meal Sei had called into the cabin quarters to let him know would be up soon, and sat slumped, staring down at the food while Seifa tried to fill the heavy quiet with idle chatter as she prepped her own. ”Any word from Tyreen yet?” -silence, just the brush of cloth behind her as he shifted in his chair- ”She’ll be fine you know, been doing great with me, natural liar! Plays them like cards, heh-heh” She’d turned to sit with her meal and paused mid step as she saw the state he was in, at the exhaustion in his expression as he awkwardly hunched over the little table. He looked shattered, scruffy hair framing the dark rings under his tired eyes, staring quietly at the untouched food in front of him. Sei decided it would be worth gambling a different approach as she lowered herself into her seat.

“Ahhh.. sorry Troy” she’d sighed, resting her cheek on her hand as she leaned on the table and tilted her cup towards him in apology. “I’m boring you, huh. My company must be pretty terrible then, I’m getting rusty...” He’d turned quickly at the theatrically melancholy in her tone and fidgeted as his eyes flickered between hers and the plate in front of him, clearly alarmed and unsure how to respond. She waited, lifting the cup to hide her smile as the massive man in front of her squirmed like a child, before he finally stuttered out a choked:

“N-no. No. It’s not you. You’re .. fine.” There it was. Now they were getting somewhere, he’d taken the bait exactly as she hoped. Looks like letting others down was a weak-point, and she stored that away mentally for the future. 

His voice was softer than she would have expected, crackly from misuse and a still raw throat, but it was something. Now she had to get him to keep going. She’d flashed a friendly grin at him, eyes narrowing as she beckoned with a finger for him to continue. He’d turned to the food again, and his shoulders sunk as the worry on his face was replaced with the same sadness from before, hand shaking slightly as he rested it by the plate. “It’s n-not you. It’s the food. We... we had something like this at home..” He’d paused for a moment then, looking to her shyly for reassurance that it was ok to be talking to her at all, and when he was met with a nod and gentle smile, he started again... and did not stop for half an hour.

Everything. Things she would never have imagined asking about, things someone else would consider intensely private, he spilled in one long, shocking monologue. It felt like he’d been bottling this for god knows how long, and she hadn’t had a clue how to respond as she sat next to him, trying to keep her expression blank and hide how disturbing the things he was calmly explaining were to her.

Leda, Typhon, Nekrotafeyo, the accident with Tyreen, how dad had just thought him a freak but become overwhelmingly controlling and smothering of Ty after mom, how sick he’d been, how she’d tricked him into coming here and he should have known better but he never seems to learn, how hungry he was deep in his bones all the time, how he desperately didn’t want to be here but can’t leave, how much he loves his sister but doesn’t know what to do, everything.

He’d spoke till his voice was cracking and hoarse from misuse, and that was the only thing that had stopped him from continuing, coughing quietly as he stared at the cold food. If Seifa’s reaction was something he noticed, he wasn’t phased by it, and she’d sat in the terrible silence next to him, struggling to think of what the hell she was meant to say.

“That’s rough, buddy.” wasn’t going to cut it. There was no way she could have been prepared for everything he’d just shared so freely, like it was some mundane chat between close friends and not the kind of secrets a normal person would have the self preservation to know not to blurt out to a near stranger. Words were failing her, so she awkwardly extended a hand and rested it above the hollow of his shoulder, stroking her thumb over the ridge of his collarbone in a comforting gesture, and hoped that any kind of reassurance she could offer right now would lessen how vulnerable the moment was. He’d not reacted, still gazing down at the untouched meal, then timidly cleared his throat and shifted his eyes slowly to meet hers from under his brow. “I.. I don’t think I can eat this” he’d whispered as his voice hitched nervously. “I’m going to go back to sleep. Thanks though.... S-sorry again.” He’d stood and nodded gratitude to her, before quietly lumbering out of the room she remained sitting in shock in, the cold coffee still in the cup held by her mouth. Tyreen had a lot of explaining to do when she got back, and Sei didn’t make it easy.

Asks are Open!

[mieczyhale]

you know what i could go for?? [late night ramble journey ahead // i did not re-read this so who knows!!]

an in-depth fic about klaus’s ten months in vietnam.. but with ben there. klaus getting pants and a gun shoved at him and ben is just as confused and freaked out. klaus finding out where they are, or ben finding out and telling him. klaus meeting dave and ben is sitting next to him, side eyeing dave because who is this soldier and why did he come all the way from the back of the bus to introduce himself. ben sees it / can tell when klaus shoves the briefcase under their seat right after and ben’s just like ‘are you fucking kidding me??’ and of course klaus would make stupid decisions because of an attractive man with a sweet smile. so he’s exasperated but also concerned because it’s 1968 and people like klaus are treated even worse now than they are in 2019, way worse, and all of these men are probably straight - dave included. and if any of them are gay they’re not gonna say anything let alone act on it. it wouldn’t be worth it. klaus could get himself hurt or killed just for being himself, if he acts too.. well.. himself after that he stays by klaus’s side more than he did in their own time, which is really saying something. offers advice and wisdom like he always has. he warns him about snipers and mines and bullets and in turn klaus warns his squad. ben can’t lie - it feels pretty fucking good to be responsible for saving lives without having to take any. he still wishes klaus would just try the briefcase, he has it, but at some point he stops pushing. because he does think klaus needs to go back and soon but everytime he brings it up klaus gets defensive and angry - he can do what he wants. he has friends here now. he has a family that actually likes him. that actually cares. he’s considered useful and important and he’s on drugs!! he can get high and none of them think any less of him for it. why can’t ben see that maybe this is where he belongs?? maybe the middle of the fucking vietnam war is where he fits?? and it’s not like he has anyone or anything back home. the only thing he could have missed is ben and ben’s with him in 1968 so there’s literally nothing. and ben wants to yell back, he wants to argue that there’s plenty for klaus to go back to, but he’s realizing that klaus.. might be right. and that hurts. and of course pisses ben off but it hurts because nobody should have to travel back in time and fight in a pointless war to find basic respect, especially not klaus. klaus who has been through enough - who deserves good things more than anyone ben knows. so after that conversation he doesn’t bring it up anymore. he looks at it sometimes, and thinks about their siblings, how they just gained their missing brother only to lose another, how are they doing? have they noticed klaus is missing yet? did they see the motel room?? did they know that all of that blood was klaus’s?? (shh patch didn’t die, hazel and cha cha escaped by knocking her out but she lives because i said so. diego shows up and finds her, freaks out at first but is relieved that she’s fine. he manages to get her to wake up and she tells him that klaus was there. he was hurt, very very hurt, but he got away. she doesn’t know where he went, he crawled through the vent, and he’s gone, diego. you need to find him - he needs a hospital. ahem anyway) ben thinks on these things and it never takes him long to get disgusted looking at it because it contains, in a way, their family. and he thinks he knows the answers. he gets to a point where he decides he wouldn’t be upset if they never had to see those jackasses again. his loyalties lie with klaus, after 13 years together there’s no way they wouldnt be. and if doing what’s best for klaus, doing what makes klaus happy, is staying right where they’ve found themselves than he can deal with it. that’s where he ends up anyway but its definitely not a quick or easy point to reach. he’s there for every battle, all the days of marching, watching klaus kill people and knowing how badly it’s affecting his brother and yet he doesn’t stop. he doesn’t pull back without orders, doesn’t put his gun down until he knows his squad is safe. and that fierceness grows as he gets closer to dave. ben doesn’t know what to think of dave at first, probably doesn’t trust him - knowing every man klaus has ever found attractive or had a “relationship” with before - but ben literally watches this - admittedly handsome - soldier boy fall in love with klaus, and klaus with him. ben witnesses the disco. the private conversation - from a distance, he’s doesn’t feel quite right listening in and he can still see them. the way they look at each other. how gently dave approaches every moment with klaus - the hand on his cheek, their first kiss (which he WILL tease klaus about later) when they head back to the hotel that was booked for all the guys for r&r, ben decides to wander saigon instead because he’s pretty sure he knows where things are going to go considering klaus and dave are roommates (oh my god they were roommates) by the time he gets back they’re both passed out (in the same bed. as he expected) from that day forward klaus is happy, genuinely happy in a way ben can’t remember him ever being, and dave has of course gained ben’s full approval (especially when klaus tells dave about the ghosts and dave believes him. even turns to where klaus is pointing at ben and tells ben that he’s happy that klaus has at least one good sibling, that he’s happy to know ben is there. when dave knows ben is there he always greets him. it’s not anything that grand really but it means a lot to ben. and when klaus finally tells him about the time travel, a little later on, dave believes him then too. said it made sense because he always thought there was no way someone as incredible as klaus could’ve come from the same place as he himself - let alone the same time. it never seemed to.. fit) SO ben is a fan. and he stays by both their sides - keeping them alive as best he can - along with a few other ghosts who are coherent, previous members of the 173rd, who pass things on to ben when klaus is too high. they talk, as long as no one but dave is around - dave who adapts pretty easily to klaus holding a whole conversation with someone he can’t see or hear. and ben.. stays ben. the only thing being in the war really changes is the way he views their siblings and he now has one other live person that he can “talk” to. eventually, almost 11 months in, they find out they’re getting sent to the frontlines. even closer to the danger. and klaus has a bad feeling. this is when ben brings up the briefcase again, hesitantly, and before klaus goes off reminds him that they could take dave with them. if he wanted to go. klaus can return to their time, to relative safety, and still have dave. it’s no longer a ‘one or the other’ situation. all they have to do is get dave to say ‘yes’. he says it very quickly of course (if you think i’d let dave die you’re out of your goddamn mind) he can be tough and feral when he needs to be, when pushed if klaus is in danger but he isn’t a killer, he doesn’t want to be a killer, he wants out. but he also wants a life with klaus and while they talked about going back to the states in.. well.. dave’s time and getting a little house and all that - doing that in 2019 sounds much better. especially after the night klaus told him softly about how things were different for lgbtq+ people, how they could hold hands and be as out as they wanted. get married. adopt. all things dave spent his whole life believing he’d never be allowed to have. so they do it - right then. klaus pulls out the briefcase and they gather the few things they wanted to keep and in a bright light they’re gone. (maybe they said something, or goodbye, to each squadmate before leaving. maybe they didnt and it hurt but if they waited around to get through everyone it would be too late to run) AND OH!! they take the ghost soldiers with them / the ghost soldiers find them in 2019, because i’m a slut for klaus having good ghosts, friend ghosts, who - even if they died horribly, are still the same person they were alive. and maybe sometimes they look like their deaths and sometimes they can look normal - ben teaching the soldiers how to be ghosts?? including how to appear as you were; whole, no holes or blood or missing limbs or chunks of head blown off. they’re all grateful and so is klaus. tho listen: he still gets high because i fucking said so - however, at least until the world is saved, he sticks to cigarettes and - for sleeping purposes - pot, dave does as well. because dave isnt a square. maybe he sticks to that path afterwards. maybe not. i for one support everything except 100% sobriety 100% of the time in this instance  anyway: later on when klaus can make ben corporeal for any amount of time he wants ben tells their siblings about the real life romantic drama he got to watch close up, from their first meeting all the way to the return to 2019. he also mentions a lot of things about the war, the sights and sounds of senseless murder - something their brother and his boyfriend were forced to take part in - the wounds they had to deal with, heal through. klaus and dave definitely have some scars. the fear. and that’s after telling them about hazel and cha cha and the almost two days they had klaus and nobody noticed. (maybe klaus lets his siblings meet the other soldiers, maybe not. maybe he lets them wander the mansion corporeal to scare the shit out of people. who knows) ben wants to make their siblings feel bad. he wants them to hurt and feel guilty. it’s the very least they deserve he thinks, when it’s all said and done. he hasn’t been able to say anything to them for 13 years and he’s got a lot of things built up - but gotta say, the last year (five-ish days?? starting at ep.1) have really taken the whole goddamn cake. klaus is embarrassed and shocked and actually quite touched that little benny is really going feral for the first time - though he keeps trying to tell him none of it is a big deal. he doesnt like confrontation. dave however is extremely pleased by the whole thing. klaus kept saying he and ben would get along if they ever got to meet and he was right. ben had, with a serious face, dubbed them the klaus hargreeves love & protection squad (bc dave doesnt know what the fuck even a ‘meem’ is yet) and that’s that. they make up a handshake and everything. klaus has never felt so loved. 

aaand eventually klaus and dave and ben (because of course he’s invited) do get that little house away from the city - someplace with few to no ghosts. someplace they can make their home. they make sure it has a room they can make up for ben even though he doesnt sleep (he still deserves his own space. a place to get away from them if he wants. somewhere to put his books and such. ben doesnt get emotional about that at all. absolutely not.) and they get pets and klaus gardens and ben reads books about gardening so he can help and dave works (mechanic is always a good time. or bookstore owner!! coffee shop?? listen. those may or may not be my favorite aus) and maybe the siblings get to visit and maybe they mend things and bond or whatever idk THE POINT IS:: Ben is a good brother and i think the idea of him going through vietnam with klaus is interesting and if someone with more ideas/thoughts ever wrote this i would be on that like cheese on broccoli honestly. THE SECOND POINT IS:: Klaus and Dave deserve to be happy and have the life they dreamed about together and if they shared their home with anyone it would be the Bentacles SO… OKAY…  that definitely did it’s own thing but i really really genuinely love thinking about what those months would have been like with ben there - what he would have thought or said or done about things yknow?? and how that would have affected klaus/changed things. i didnt give a lot of examples in this because my brain didn’t want to stay on track (as if it ever does) but it’s 1:30 in the morning and im so fucking tired lsdfd;lk if you actually read this.. first of all: im sorry. second of all: thank you. and literally if anyone ever wrote something about this topic (not like.. this post specifically, just the ben in vietnam plot) and nobody important dies i’ll love you and give you a lil smooch on the noggin  s m ooch. smooches. you know who likes smooches?? klaus. you know who deserves smooches?? klaus. you know who’s getting smooches?? THAT’S RIGHT. KLAUS. because dave has a degree in giving them and he can’t let that education go to waste amiright??

this post.. may or may not have been brought to you by wine as well.. 

ope

[zampanobra]

An Elegy For Cyberpunk

The genre isn't gone, but the silver lining sure is.

William Gibson's Neuromancer is one of those books that I can't remember ever not having read. But I do remember that it wasn't long after I read it that I was introduced to Shadowrun, which quickly supplanted D&D as my go-to RPG. I'm not sure how well I understood what was going on in the plot, and was probably too young to understand a lot of what was going on. (Later on, when I started to understand self-loathing, it made a lot more sense.)

Even then, I loved the world, the technology, and the aesthetic. Gibson is fantastic at showing an entire scene through a couple of hints. He doesn't lean into a lot of what we've come to think of as "cyberpunk" aesthetic, and I prefer his much more understated settings more than a lot of his more over-the-top progeny.

Aside from how it looks, though, a common trope is its focus on people on the fringes of society--the "low life" going along with the "high tech." It's not always criminals, although these lines get a tad blurry due to the increasing corporate dominance that is another common trope of the setting. This is even more the case in the Shadowrun RPG, where your characters ("runners") are mercenaries for hire by all the corporations vying for an edge, where law enforcement has itself been privatized, and where governments' roles in their citizens' daily lives are steadily eroding. (Although a dragon is elected president of one of the major North American countries, so there is that.)

Those familiar with this setting and the tropes associated with it may have raised an eyebrow when I said that there was a silver lining associated with cyberpunk. I'd even venture to say there's an actual optimism in many of these stories.

The Cyber Trickles Downhill

There's a public intellectual of sorts named Eliezer Yudkowsky who started a ~~cult~~ website called LessWrong, and who talks a lot about technology, science, and what-not. He has various "laws" attributed to him, one of which is that "Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point." The idea is that, over time, increasingly powerful technology will be in the hands of everyday people. It's kind of like the cliché about how we all walk around with smartphones that are orders of magnitude more powerful and capable than the computers used to send people to the Moon.

Unfortunately, this is not how it generally works out. When better computers and connectivity end up in people's hands, so does a great deal of capture: DRM, surveillance (both corporate and governmental), monopolization, and more recently the move to software-as-a-service (where you have to pay a subscription to keep using something on your personal devices). You can get around much of these, but only but devoting significant time and effort to doing so, and you may often have to do without some aspects of those services. It's rarely going to be as convenient as the more intrusive version, and in some cases you may be outright prevented from communicating with people without using it. And this is without getting into situations where your information is turned over to third parties without your even having an option. In my own life, two of our doctors' offices use third-party portals that include some aspect of record keeping, schools and daycare facilities use them, and I'm of course subject to any of the national things like credit reporting agencies.

Meanwhile, things like artificial limbs and the like have generally made their greatest advances in times of war. Prosthetics in at least some form go back to Ancient Egypt, but a formal industry focused on their production would not come into being until far later. In the United States, it was the Civil War that would drastically increase demand, with thousands of amputees surviving the war and seeking prosthetic limbs: one study estimated that 70,000 men lost limbs during the war. Part of this was the development of the Minié ball, a more modern bullet that caused more irregular wounds to flesh and was heavy enough to shatter bone. Medical science being what it was, doctors generally decided that amputation was a better approach than trying to piece the patient's body back together. After the war, the federal government created the means for the prosthetic boom by agreeing to provide prosthetics for any veteran who needed them.

One veteran, James Hanger (who had himself lost most of a leg) was dissatisfied with the available options, and so developed an artificial leg that hinged and was shaped more like a human leg. He went on to establish the American Artificial Limb Company after the war (which still exists as Hanger, Inc.). Mass production of artificial limbs wouldn't come about for another 60 years or so. Nonetheless, this next development was again spawned by the same combination of factors: a massive conflict leaving thousands upon thousands of amputees (World War I in this case) combined with the federal government providing the money. (War is, indeed, a racket.)

Little seems to have changed into the present, when it's now the perpetual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with military-oriented welfare programs being the only ones not under constant attack by austerity.

So it is that cyberpunk's dream of widespread limb replacements seems unlikely without coming on the heels of years of additional thousands of traumatic amputees and billions of dollars in subsidies. Under our current system, after all, there is no incentive to continue improvements to artificial limbs without government footing the bill, and the government in turn seems largely unwilling to pay attention to the needs of its citizens that don't have any connection to the military.

The other technologies that epitomize the cyberpunk genre are equally captured. All the improvements to computer technology in the world don't help without the infrastructure to connect them to each other, and service providers have made sure that they can maintain their monopolies (the lucky few have two options). So it is that we get things like data caps, which Comcast introduced for its customers just a few days ago as of this writing, during a time of pandemic when more and more people are reliant on broadband internet access to work and go to school.

In a similar vein, computer and communications technology has become only selectively easier to use. The basics are much simpler, to be sure, but the kinds of things depicted in cyberpunk--hacking and maintaining some semblance of privacy to name two prime examples--are harder and harder. Privacy in particular requires a near constant battle against the hydra of corporate interests that are constantly trying to chip away at it. And not just in terms of taking data itself, but even the expectation of privacy.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube--they're all predicated on making us share. And of course we do exactly that. Why wouldn't we? We have an innate need for community and connection. But just as advertisers long ago figured out that they could turn our own wiring against us, so-called social networks (anti-social networks?) took our desire for connecting with other people and purified it until it became a freebase. It's difficult to avoid and even harder to quit.

It takes money, knowledge, and work to even slightly escape, and even then it's not really possible unless you happen to only interact with similar privacy-minded folk or cut yourself off from society entirely. It takes almost nothing to be entirely mapped.

Meanwhile, the task is made that much harder by the fact that it's not entirely clear why our data is worth anything. The conventional wisdom is that it's for targeted advertising, but I have to wonder if that's actually worth anything anymore. Then again, it could be completely ineffective but still something companies want to do, since marketing believes that someone has to see a product multiple times before they'll actually seek it out. Plus, there's always the possibility of Facebook et al. cooking the books, as they did in the case of view counts on videos some years back.

Regardless, this lack of knowledge makes it harder for us, because we can't target our defenses. We don't have a clear idea of what's valuable and what isn't, what data is already out there and what data is still being sought. We can't, for example, make digital chaff to flood the collectors with junk.

Chains of Chrome

I'm told that essays should have some part of the author in them, and I can't help but notice that this approach--intertwining personal anecdote with the overall point--is used all over the world. Maybe it's a matter of not getting outside my own writing, but it seems to me that simply what I'm writing and how says more about me than talking about the smells in the bookstore where I bought my first copy of Neuromancer, or some story about my relationship with the friend who introduced me to Blade Runner. I personally have more faith in readers than that.

Having written what I have already, is it really surprising to know that what draws me to the genre more than anything is freedom? It may seem strange to associate freedom with the extremely powerful corporate entities and material conditions of most cyberpunk. But notice, these stories don't focus on the corporate bureaucrat trapped in a structure they'll never escape. Instead, it's the technologically-enhanced ronin, whether their particular weapons are blades or computer viruses. They ultimately answer to no one but themselves, and can generally find a way to live their own lives within the cracks in the business edifice. Sure, drama demands that this not always be true in some way, even if it's as simple as the criminal's reputation.

It's not difficult, then, to see the appeal. I have no skills to sell even if there were still a market for such things (instead of credentials). Mercenaries are rightly outcast, since chances are they'll be put to worse use than even a state-sponsored military. There's a reason that Blackwater has had to change its name two or three times by now.

Cyberpunk allows us all of the freedom of a new frontier by finding that frontier within an existing structure. Its characters aren't constrained the way we are in our daily lives, and can overcome both human nature and human society through the technology available to them. What is now considered experimental or only the purview of DARPA is to them a child's toy, with far better ready for purchase on the streetcorner.

In many ways, cyberpunk is a product of its time, when technology seemed to offer at least as much possibility as threat. Now, we don't really trust technology to be enough. We see the slow-motion apocalypse of climate change and don't believe that we can invent our way out of it; recognizing that even if the device existed, someone would figure out how to capture its benefits. I'm not sure it'll be anything so stark as having clean cities and then a burned wasteland surrounding them, but we'll only be saved to the extent that we're useful.

Cyberpunk showed us an increasing commodification of our lives, but even those imaginations couldn't foresee the degree to which this would be true, while they simultaneously underestimated its subtlety. The trackers on every website that form pieces of the economic puzzle that is ourselves feel too small to fight, and so we sell ourselves in a thousand pieces. Even being a corporate spy in a future dystopia is more honest.

[rohad93]

Authority Online: Ch 4

God, she was tired.

Three and a half hours was definitely not enough sleep.

Sky didn’t mention it, but she seemed to notice how tired she was and picked up the slack, not that even as tired as she was she let herself fall too much behind. Luckily there weren’t any large or high priority orders due for a few days. She’d just need to make sure to go to bed at the proper time tonight. 

Now if she could just stop yawning.

The bakery was crowded at lunch time, keeping her busy for several hours with restocking the displays and starting new batches in the back, while helping Sky ring up and hand out orders. 

The day simultaneously seemed to both drag and fly by. 

It wasn’t until later in the afternoon when the lunch rush had gone that she realized she had never replied to Jaune’s last message or said she was getting off last night.

Hopefully, she didn't think that she didn't want to talk to her anymore, she most certainly did. She had a hard time remembering the last time she had been so genuinely interested in everything someone had to say. 

With Sky watching the front, she had a spare minute. She walked over to her laptop, sitting open on the far counter and pulled up the site to see she had a few new messages from some new people which she ignored, in favor of opening her chat with the blonde lawyer, her last message still sitting, unanswered. 

She quickly typed out a message and closed the site the second it confirmed it was sent and focused on the orders she needed to be working on.

When Steven and Rose walked through the kitchen after school she could tell by the way Rose was looking at her that she knew something was up. 

“You look… really tired…” She frowned after sending Steven upstairs with a juice box and a cookie. 

“I only got three hours of sleep last night,” she admitted, turning around to flour a set of round cake pans for the birthday cake order they were starting.

“You usually go to bed before Steven, what were you doing up so late?” she teased. An exaggeration of course, but not by as much as she would have liked. 

“I got carried away… sketching out some designs and working on a recipe for something I want to try out in the store,” she lied.

“Well, you better go to bed on time tonight, young lady.” Rose wagged a finger at her with a laugh before stealing a cookie for herself and going upstairs.

Celeste relaxed once the kindergarten teacher had vanished up the stairwell. 

She didn’t want to tell Rose she had stayed up much too late talking to a woman on the dating site. She’d get herself all worked up about it, and really, there was nothing to be worked up about. They had talked for a while. A very nice talk, in her opinion, but hardly anything worth mentioning. Especially to her sister, who would blow it out of proportion. 

She’d always been the more excitable one. 

~ ~ ~ ~ 

How many cups of coffee had she had this morning? Jaune wondered to herself as she filled up her empty mug for probably the sixth time before sitting herself back at her desk and opening her email 

She’d finally switched off her computer at midnight but had ended up lying awake for a while, thinking about her new… acquaintance.

She thought for a long while, trying to remember the last time she’s had such a personable conversation with anyone. Most days her mother was the only one she could trust to be frank with her, though that came with its drawbacks. 

Criticism and theatrics, usually. 

Her mother loved her, even if it was in her own strange, dramatic way… that could drive Jaune up a wall. 

It was just nice to have an actual conversation with someone who didn’t have expectations of her. 

Unlike every other conversation, phone call, or email she had.

Like the email she was looking at right now, from an irate woman she had declined to represent last week for breaking her probation. 

The firm didn’t even do criminal law. They specialized in corporate, family, and commercial law. Something this woman refused to understand, but Jaune could easily understand how this woman could be arrested and unknowingly break nearly all the stipulations that came with her probation.

She grunted to herself and deleted the email before even reaching the end. She had already been more than clear in her last email that she didn’t practice criminal law and couldn’t help her, even going as far as to recommend a colleague that could.  

She rolled her eyes and took a long drink of plain black coffee. She still had a few hours left before they closed up for the day and she actually had most of her things in order. She just needed to drop a few certified letters into the mail for a few clients with their updated contracts. She’d hand them off to Daisy in a bit.

Clearing her work email of all the most pertinent documents she switched to her personal email where she had a few emails alerting her to messages. 

She hummed and opened the website, seeing several new ones, which didn’t interest her in the slightest. She scrolled through the list till her eyes fell on her conversation with Celestine and saw it highlighted, alerting her to a new message.

She tapped it, not at all eagerly eagerly... 

”I’m sorry for suddenly disappearing last night, I didn’t realize how late it was. I have to be up at 3:30 am to get things in the shop started.” 

She cringed inside at the idea of getting up that early. six was quite early enough for her, though she had a tendency to keep late hours as it was. 

She also realized that meant she had only slept about three hours and Jaune felt strangely guilty about that.   

She hit reply and sipped on her coffee as she mulled over her response before she started typing, hitting send just as Daisy popped her head into the office. 

“Ms. Roche?”

“What is it, Daisy?” she asked, a brow hiked up at her PA’s nervous expression.

“Um, Mrs. Roche is here to see you...” 

Jaune sighed and took a deep swig of her coffee as she stood from her desk, closing her laptop.

“Send her in,” she grunted, vaguely wishing she had some whiskey to add to this cup.  

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Celeste didn’t get a chance to check her computer until she was doing her last walk-through of the kitchen, turning off lights, double checking that everything was as she would need it in the morning. 

She went over to pick up the device once she was satisfied with the state of the kitchen and noticed the little red circle on one of the tabs indicating that she had a message. 

She may or may not have walked a bit faster up the stairs than usual with the device tucked securely beneath her arm. 

She sat it on the coffee table while she changed and heated up leftovers from the night before. Once she was sitting on the couch, plate atop one knee, she opened up her messages, finding Jaune’s reply to her earlier message. 

“I lost track of the time myself, but I apologize for keeping you so long. I don’t have to be awake as early and keep late hours often, usually working.”  

Celeste smiled to herself as she read the message, taking a bite of her dinner. And reaching to hit reply, fork hanging out of her mouth as she started to type but paused, unsure before finishing the message and hitting send, hesitating only a second. 

~ ~ ~ 

Jaune yawned as she laid in bed, flipping through the channels on the tv, not really paying attention to anything going on on the screen, eyes slowly starting to close when the open laptop lying next to her on the bed dinged and her eyes popped open. She pulled the computer closer and opened her ongoing chat with Celestine. 

“Don’t apologize, I enjoyed talking with you. I’ll survive one night. ”

Jaune would never admit to the sudden dip in her stomach as she read the message. Sitting up she set it on her lap and started typing. 

~ ~ ~ 

On Friday morning Jaune sat in her office, staring at her phone and the open text field where she had typed a short message.

Her foot tapped anxiously on the floor, she had a meeting in five minutes and had spent the last fifteen trying to decide if she was going to send this message or not. 

She huffed to herself, this was ridiculous. She was thirty-three not sixteen... 

Yet her thumb continued to hover uncertainly over the send button.

Daisy popped her head into the door, alerting her that it was time for her meeting.

“I’ll be there in a moment,” she mumbled before Daisy left.

She stood and finally smashed her thumb against the send button before slipping the device into her pocket and straightening her blazer before leaving her office. Trying to ignore the tingling nerves under her skin.  

~ ~ ~

She felt her phone vibrate in her pocket but ignored it as she finished drizzling chocolate over little squares of butterscotch fudge. 

Butterscotch bites.

She smiled to herself at the perfect little squares. Her signature creation, and the shop's name sake. 

When she was satisfied she took the tray out front for Sky to fill the display case before finally pulling her phone out of her pocket as she walked back into the kitchen. Smiling involuntarily to herself when she saw the notification from the Authority app. A message from Jaune. 

With a flick of her thumb the app opened and she hit the message. 

“Would you like to meet?  

Celeste stopped, staring at the message for the better part of five minutes. Honestly, the oven could have burst into flames and it was a toss up on whether or not she would notice as she stared hard at her phone. 

Jaune wanted to meet.

The prospect was both exciting and terrifying at the same time. 

It would be a lie to say she wasn’t very curious about what the woman would be like in person, she wanted to meet but, well, nervous was one way of putting it.

Not only because she couldn’t hide behind her screen and carefully think about what she wanted to say but also that this woman she was growing rather fond of might not be what she expected.

She pursed her lips and stared down at her phone.

“Hey, Celeste!” 

The baker nearly jumped out of her skin at the close greeting, whipping around to find her brother in law grinning sheepishly at her.

“Sorry! Sorry.” Greg waved a hand. “I didn’t mean to startle ya.” 

“It’s alright, Greg. I didn’t hear you come down is all. Where are you headed?” she asked, slipping her phone into the pocket of her apron.  

“I got a gig tonight at that new club that just opened last week, I gotta go setup all the sound stuff though, make sure it’s ready.” He grinned.

“Hopefully it goes well.” She smiled at the thirty year old guitar player. His hair was starting to thin on the top, though it was longer than hers in the back. 

“Heh, me too…” He scratched the back of his head, looking off to the side. “Are you okay?” He suddenly asked, looking back at her.

“Me?” She blinked.

“Yeah, you looked almost sick there, staring at your phone, everything okay?” He looked genuinely concerned and it was times like this that Celeste could see some of what made her sister fall so in love with the man. He was a big goofball but he was sincere and caring to a fault.

She bit her lip, considering.

“Can I tell you something, Greg?” She finally asked.

“Of course!”

“Did Rose tell you about signing me up on an online dating site?” 

“Oh, yeah. Still no luck?” He frowned.

“Actually, no, I’ve been talking to someone all week. She’s a very nice lawyer, actually.” The corners of her mouth twitched upward. 

“That’s great, right?” He didn’t seem sure with the way she had been looking at her phone.

“Yes, but… she wants to meet,” she explained.

“Afraid she might be a serial killer?”  

“What!? No! I just… I’m growing rather fond of her, truth be told, I’m afraid it may not be like I imagine…,” she confessed.

“Well, the way I see it, you can either take a chance, and maybe you’ll be disappointed, or not meet her, and never know." He shrugged, but smiled reassuringly at her.

She laughed under her breath and smiled.

“Straight to the point, eh? Thank you, Greg.” She smiled.

“No prob.” He grinned as he started for the front, but stopped when she reached out, setting a hand on his shoulder.

“Oh, Greg? I hate to ask this of you, but please, don’t tell Rose about this… You know how she gets and there’s really nothing to tell her at this point.” 

“Ehhh, yeah. She’s been kind of excitable about it since she told me… You got it.” He shot her a finger gun before walking out.  

She could hear him greet Sky before the bell above the front door jingled, signaling his departure.  

She pulled out her phone and opened Jaune’s still unanswered message.

~ ~ ~ 

“I need you to send a copy of this cease and desist out immediately to the client and their supplier." Jaune handed a folder over to Daisy, who was trailing behind her back to her office, taking rapid fire notes on her tablet as her boss rattled off a list of people, what they needed and when they needed it.

She felt her phone vibrate in her slacks pocket and grunted. Her mother had sent her three text messages in as many minutes, asking if she'd like to have dinner with her. Though she promised it would be just the two of them.

She dug the device out of her pocket, intent on telling her mother that she would call her after work but paused, seeing the notification from the authority app made her pause midstep. 

 Causing Daisy to slam right into her back. She just barely managed to keep hold of the device and stay on her feet.

"I-I'm so sorry Ms. Roche, I.."

Jaune was barely listening though.

"It's fine, Daisy, just take those documents, I need to take this," she mumbled distractedly before walking quickly to her office and sitting at her desk when the message finally popped up.

“I’d like that. Do you like coffee?” 

Jaune glanced at the empty to go cup of coffee sitting on her desk, next to her empty coffee cup and she knew if she looked in the wastebasket by her desk there would be a few other used to go cups.

Like or need? 

The jury was still out on that one.

She settled for a simple ‘yes’. 

[a-magpie-witchling]

Depression repellent soap!

TW: mentions of depression and suicide thoughts/attempts

This post is dedicated to my friends who are still struggling. Mama Rami loves you, deeply and truly. Keep fighting.

I’ll document briefly my experience living with depression since I was a toddler in italics. If you’d rather just skip this part and get to the soap, I get it. I’ll mark it with a title.

I feel I need to say something before just throwing out there a magickal aid to keep depression at bay. First of all, remember this is NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ACTUAL MEDICAL TREATMENT. Magick is a little boost. A push. It won’t change anything unless you complement it with corporeal actions.

So as you may or may not know, I’ve been struggling with depression since basically my birth. One of my earliest memories is of a suicide attempt at age 4.

Lately my life is finally looking bright. I found a job I love that pays like shit, but hey, it’s mine, I’m great at it, and it makes me happy.

My love life is a drag but I feel really good about it. I always basically jumped from one relationship to another and now I’m close to two years of being single and it’s been a very good couple of years.

However, this doesn’t mean my depression doesn’t like coming and going. I try to keep myself away from a maniac episode, but I’ve been exercising and having fun. I’m not “cured”, nor I’ll ever be. But the future, maybe for the first time ever, looks promising.

I had hit rock bottom something close to three years ago. I was keeping a calendar recording all my suicidal impulses, as some sort of countdown.

And that’s when I decided I could either get help, or die.

I never really believed in therapy. All psychologists and psychiatrists always only seemed to me like morons who didn’t really help AT ALL and just sat there milking money from me or my insurance.

In what could have been my final hours, I decided that if everything was lost already, so why not try one last time? I mean, I had already decided to kill myself, had chosen the perfect method, had timed the perfect moment. I had a couple of days left. Why not try to get professional help at least one last time?

The last psychiatrist I saw prescribed me prozac.

It changed my life.

I won’t go deeply into detail. After all, you know what happened. I’m clearly not gone (or am I!? zombie blogging hurr durr) and although things might not be “objectively” better...

My life is good... My life is so very, mundanely, good.

I sang in the car today coming back from work and I stood under the sun and I smiled to myself.

I feel things. I feel bad and happy things. But I can FEEL.

I know they always say the same, that “life gets better”. That’s not true. Life sometimes is objectively shit. But we... we get better. We see the same cesspool of hypocrisy and don’t think it’s pointless. We feel we can make it through today, that we have the energy to spare, to live.

Find help. Reach out. There are people who want to help you. We want you to live and not just breathing in and out until you can’t anymore, we want you to live for real. There’s a good life waiting for you.

Don’t be afraid of using medication to balance your brain chemistry. 

You’ll get better.

Today I found a shard of blue glass and I thought it was pretty and kept it in my pocket.

It was just a shard of blue glass but I found it beautiful and worth having.

With its million small good moments in the storm of all things awful...

Life is still worth living.

Some days, however, I’m more tired than usual. And I’m not ashamed to say I need a little boost. I won’t pretend depression isn’t a ghost that haunts you. Some days I don’t have the strength to realize how beautiful my little miracles are.

I’m no longer on prozac, so my brain is on its own to keep its balance.

Of course, a little magick always helps.

How to make my depression repellent revitalizing soap

You’ll need:

A bar of soap of your preferred scent that you associate with happiness, energy, strength, etc.

Sun water.

Rose water.

A yellow candle.

An orange candle.

Crystals or stones you associate with your preferred intent: I used unakite (I associate it with spring and I did this ritual during Ostara), pink quartz (self love), amethyst (balance), clear quartz (purification), Himalayan pink salt (purification), rhodochrosite (vitality and self love). I also highly recommend you use citrine since it’s associated with sun and happiness.

Something to carve the soap with, like a nail or a knife.

One of these sigils by @sigilathenaeum​ I personally used this one:

Let’s get started.

So you can basically skip the whole process and step straight into the carving part, forget about the waters and whatnot, choose different crystals or not choose to use them at all, simply carve and we’re good to go. But I insist this is the most important step:

1) Choose the right soap.

I shit you not, I spent 20 minutes in the hygiene aisle in the supermarket choosing the right soap. Pick one that’s gonna represent exactly what you feel you need to keep your depression at bay. There are dozens of possible scent and color combinations, pick THE RIGHT ONE. Try to make this budget friendly too, because sadly this soap will run out eventually (although I have a little trick to prevent that) and you’ll probably have to get more.

I personally chose a delicious orange and lemon glycerin soap. It was like $1 and smells amazing.

I had never performed a spell for myself before this one, but I’ve made this soap for other people with other issues before. If you’re gonna be adapting this spell to prevent anxiety I’d recommend something like lavender scent. If recovering from trauma, eucalyptus, mint or aloe are good options. A bad break up or need a self-love boost? Rose or floral scents. Feeling unsafe? Cinnamon or spice.

However, the most important thing is that you like the scent! No, more than that. 

IT’S IMPORTANT THAT YOU LOVE HOW THIS SOAP SMELLS ON YOUR SKIN. It’ll be a protective layer that’ll cover your whole body. Make sure you like it!

2) Carve the sigil in the soap bar, not too deep.

I used a nail, but a needle, a knife, even a pencil, they can all work. Soap is really easy to work with!

3) If you care about moon phases, I’d recommend you perform this spell under the waxing crescent phase (after the new moon, when it starts shining again, it represents growth and improvement) or the full moon (it represents plenitude and prosperity). 

4) Perform the spell.

Anoint your candles and cast your circle if that’s your thing, light them. Align the crystals and stones around the bar. You can carve the soap at this moment, but I personally did it beforehand. Place the crystals over the soap. Rub a drop of rose water and/or sun water around the bar. I used my crystal bell to bring lightness and joy into my soap. Do your thing, you know how this works. Intent, chanting if you want it. Do it for as long as you feel you must. REMEMBER TO GROUND AFTER PERFORMING ANY SORT OF SPELL.

5) Try it out.

When you use the soap, the sigil will be erased because of the water and the friction. It’ll melt into your skin and into the soap. If you don’t use a glycerin soap, it could take one or two baths, but eventually it’ll settle there completely.

6) When you need it.

Use this soap when you feel you need it. If you need it every time you shower, use it. If you feel you need it once a month, that’s alright. 

7) Do it as many times as you need to... or not!

WHEN YOUR BAR IS ABOUT TO RUN OUT, MY TRICK IS GETTING THE SAME KIND OF SOAP (you don’t have to, I’m just picky like that) AND FUSE THE LITTLE BIT YOU HAVE WITH THE NEW BAR. This will transfer all the properties to the new bar without needing to repeat the spell every time.

8) Store it.

Keep your soap somewhere dry. If you don’t have a soap case, you can use just a regular plastic bag.

9) Remember to wash behind your ears.

Happy cleansing!

PLEASE REBLOG. IF NOT YOU, SOMEONE ELSE COULD NEED IT.

-Semiramis, the Magpie Witchling

[orbemnews]

Why Buy a Yacht When You Can Buy a Newspaper? Billionaires have had a pretty good pandemic. There are more of them than there were a year ago, even as the crisis has exacerbated inequality. But scrutiny has followed these ballooning fortunes. Policymakers are debating new taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. Even their philanthropy has come under increasing criticism as an exercise of power as much as generosity. One arena in which the billionaires can still win plaudits as civic-minded saviors is buying the metropolitan daily newspaper. The local business leader might not have seemed like such a salvation a quarter century ago, before Craigslist, Google and Facebook began divvying up newspapers’ fat ad revenues. Generally, the neighborhood billionaires are considered worth a careful look by the paper’s investigative unit. But a lot of papers don’t even have an investigative unit anymore, and the priority is survival. This media landscape nudged newspaper ownership from the vanity column toward the philanthropy side of the ledger. Paying for a few more reporters and to fix the coffee machine can earn you acclaim for a lot less effort than, say, spending two decades building the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The latest example comes in the form of a $680 million bid by Hansjörg Wyss, a little-known Swiss billionaire, and Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a Maryland hotel magnate, for Tribune Publishing and its roster of storied broadsheets and tabloids like The Chicago Tribune, The Daily News and The Baltimore Sun. Should Mr. Wyss and Mr. Bainum succeed in snatching Tribune away from Alden Global Capital, whose bid for the company had already won the backing of Tribune’s board, the purchase will represent the latest example of a more than decade-long quest by some of America’s ultrawealthy to prop up a crumbling pillar of democracy. If there was a signal year in this development, it came in 2013. That is when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post and the Red Sox’ owner, John Henry, bought The Boston Globe. “I invested in The Globe because I believe deeply in the future of this great community, and The Globe should play a vital role in determining that future,” Mr. Henry wrote at the time. Mr. Bezos and Marty Baron, the recently retired editor of The Post, famously led a revival of the paper to its former glory. And after a somewhat rockier start, experts said that Mr. Henry and his wife, Linda Pizzuti Henry, the chief executive officer of Boston Globe Media Partners, have gone a long way toward restoring that paper as well. Across the country, for Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the physician and billionaire who bought The Los Angeles Times in 2018, it hasn’t always gone smoothly. But few prefer the alternative of hedge-fund ownership. “There’s not a doubt in my mind that The Los Angeles Times is in a better place today than if Tribune had held on to it these last three years or so,” said Norman Pearlstine, who served as executive editor for two years after Dr. Soon-Shiong’s purchase and still serves as a senior adviser. “I don’t think that’s open to debate or dispute.” From Utah to Minnesota and from Long Island to the Berkshires, local grandees have decided that a newspaper is an essential part of the civic fabric. Their track records as owners are somewhat mixed, but mixed in this case is better than the alternative. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released a report last year showing that in the previous 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers disappeared, leaving behind what they called “news deserts.” The 2020 report was an update of a similar one from 2018, but just in those two years another 300 newspapers died, taking 6,000 journalism jobs with them. “I don’t think anybody in the news business even has rose colored glasses anymore,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, a nonprofit journalism advocacy group. “They took them off a few years ago, and they don’t know where they are.” “The advantage of a local owner who cares about the community is that they in theory can give you runway and also say, ‘Operate at break-even on a cash-flow basis and you’re good,’” said Mr. Rosenstiel. For instance, Glen Taylor, a Minnesota billionaire who owns the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is not showering the newsroom with money, said Michael Klingensmith, publisher and chief executive of the paper. “The understanding we have with Glen is that if we generate cash, it’s ours to keep but he’s not interested in investing more,” he said. “He expects the business to be completely self-sufficient.” Today in Business Updated  April 9, 2021, 3:29 p.m. ET But at 240 staffers, the newsroom is as big as it was when Mr. Klingensmith arrived in 2010, something relatively few papers can boast of over the same period. The Star Tribune’s goal was to reach 100,000 digital subscribers by the end of last year, and it hit that mark by May. And the paper just won a prestigious Polk Award for its coverage of the killing of George Floyd and the aftermath. “The communities that have papers owned by very wealthy people in general have fared much better because they stayed the course with large newsrooms,” said Ken Doctor, on hiatus as a media industry analyst to work as C.E.O. and founder of Lookout Local, which is trying to revive the local news business in smaller markets, starting in Santa Cruz, Calif. Hedge funds, by contrast, have expected as much as 20 percent of revenue a year from their properties, which can often be achieved only by stripping papers of reporters and editors for short-term gain. Alden has made deep cuts at many of its MediaNews Group publications, including The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News. Alden argues that it is rescuing papers that might otherwise have gone out of business in the past two decades. And a billionaire buyer is far from a panacea for the industry’s ills. “It’s not just, go find yourself a rich guy. It’s the right rich person. There are lots of people with lots of money. A lot of them shouldn’t run newspaper companies,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the former editor of The Chicago Tribune. “Sam Zell is Exhibit A. So be careful who you ask.” Mr. Zell, the real estate maverick and billionaire whose nickname is “the grave dancer,” took Tribune Publishing private in a leveraged buyout in 2007. The company filed for bankruptcy the next year. His brief tenure helped set in motion the events leading to the Alden Capital bid. Other rescuers have come and gone. There was a time when Warren Buffett looked like a potential savior for newspapers, investing in them through his company, Berkshire Hathaway. He has since beaten a retreat from the industry. And there have even been reports that Dr. Soon-Shiong has explored a sale of The Los Angeles Times (which he has denied). “The great fear of every billionaire is that by owning a newspaper they will become a millionaire,” said Mr. Rosenstiel. Elizabeth Green, co-founder and chief executive at Chalkbeat, a nonprofit education news organization with 30 reporters in eight cities around the country, said that rescuing a dozen metro dailies that are “obviously shells of their former selves” was never going to be enough to turn around the local news business. “Even these attempts are still preserving institutions that were always flawed and not leaning into the new information economy and how we all consume and learn and pay for things,” said Ms. Green, who also co-founded the American Journalism Project, which is working to create a network of nonprofit outlets. Ms. Green is not alone in her belief that the future of American journalism lies in new forms of journalism, often as nonprofits. The American Journalism Project received funding from the Houston philanthropists Laura and John Arnold, the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, which also bought The Atlantic. Herbert and Marion Sandler, who built one of the country’s largest savings and loans, gave money to start ProPublica. “We’re seeing a lot of growth of relatively small nonprofits that are now part of what I would call the philanthropic journalistic complex,” said Mr. Doctor. “The question really isn’t corporate structure, nonprofit or profit, the question is money and time.” The scion of a wealthy Utah family, Paul Huntsman, bought The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah from a hedge fund in 2016. Circulation fell by half, ad revenue plummeted and he cut more than a third of the journalists. He has since turned it into the first metropolitan daily operating as a nonprofit. After the cable television entrepreneur H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest bought The Philadelphia Inquirer, he set up a hybrid structure. The paper is run as a for-profit, public benefit corporation, but it belongs to a nonprofit called the Lenfest Institute. The complex structure is meant to maintain editorial independence and maximum flexibility to run as a business while also encouraging philanthropic support. Of the $7 million that Lenfest gave to supplement The Inquirer’s revenue from subscribers and advertisers in 2020, only $2 million of it came from the institute, while the remaining $5 million came from a broad array of national, local, institutional and independent donors, said Jim Friedlich, executive director and chief executive of Lenfest. “I think philosophically, we’ve long accepted that we have no museums or opera houses without philanthropic support,” said Ms. Lipinski. “I think journalism deserves the same consideration.” Mr. Bainum has said he plans to establish a nonprofit group that would buy The Sun and two other Tribune-owned Maryland newspapers if he and Mr. Wyss succeed in their bid. “These buyers range across the political spectrum, and on the surface have little in common except their wealth,” said Mr. Friedlich. “Each seems to feel that American democracy is sailing through choppy waters, and they’ve decided to buy a newspaper instead of a yacht.” Source link Orbem News #buy #Newspaper #yacht

[tessatechaitea]

Aquaman #1

In 1994, Aquaman was reduced to playing at State Fairs with only 1/3 of his original band.

It's as if the cover artist was only told that Aquaman would have long hair in this series three minutes before the cover was due. Or maybe Aquaman's insane hair is simply there to distract from whatever the fuck is going on with his legs. I know he loses a hand in this series but I didn't know he started off missing his left leg below the terribly misshapen thigh. Don't look so shocked that I own an Aquaman comic book! Think of it more as owning a Peter David comic book. And even Peter David couldn't keep me reading Aquaman because I only have two issues of this series. Cue King Beauregard linking to Ookla the Mok's song, "Arthur Curry," in the Disqus comment section. It's seems crazy to me that Aquaman has the worst costume of any major DC hero and yet he doesn't wear his underwear on the outside. Think about how unappealing the 1986 camouflage Aquaman suit must have been if editorial decided to go back to this orange and green eyesore? If I had been editing this comic book in 1994, I would have put this copy on the cover: "This isn't your father's Aquaman! This Aquaman is your father!" How did "long hair on an old guy with a full beard" translate into "Aquaman is super cool now, kids!"? I probably should just put this comic book back in its protective casing rather than read it since it's one of the few comic books I own that might be worth something. It's definitely in mint condition (or near mint since, you know, I breathed on it), probably because I never actually read it. I don't know for sure that I read it but it is an Aquaman comic book so Vegas is giving pretty shitty odds on my having read it. Unless I mean good odds? Which odds are good and which odds are bad? I would say shitty odds are things like winning one dollar for every five dollars bet. But that just means the odds of winning are good so that probably means they're good odds, right? So maybe read the opposite of what I wrote in that Vegas odds sentence.

"They" have never had a wet dream, apparently.

That previous caption might sound like I've eaten my own semen while having a wet dream but I totally didn't. That previous sentence might sound like I'm protesting too much but I don't know what that means and, anyway, you tasted your semen during your wet dream! Aquaman hopes he's dreaming but he can feel and taste and smell and remember and read, so he's pretty sure he's about to die. The way I know I'm dreaming is that when a dream becomes increasingly uncomfortable or horrific, I often think, "You know what? I bet this is just a dream!" And then I wake up. Which is totally a mistake! I need to train my brain to stop waking up once I realize I'm dreaming and start taking control of the dream. Although I'm not sure how enjoyable a dream would be if I were consciously in control of it. Then it's not a realy dream anymore and it just becomes an IMAX daydream. The great thing about dreams is that they're surprising. It's the only way a person can truly surprise themselves. Hallucinogenics help a bit but you're still in some kind of control. I once thought I invented comic books and that Jupiter was following me around a strip club parking lot while on mushrooms but I've never fucked a vampire as the sun rose and turned her to dust while I orgasmed like I've done in my dreams! Hey, some of my dreams might be problematic or completely gross but I didn't approve them! Like the one where I murdered the old lady so I could live in her house but I didn't want things to seem too suspicious by covering it up so I just propped her corpse up in the corner of the living room. Or the time a friend made me a personalized flavor of Moon Pie called "Murdered Baby's Soul." Dreams are like presidential campaign ads that don't have the candidate saying, "I approve this ad!", at the end of it.

Aquaman was dreaming. Also, he sleeps in a regular bed with sheets and blankets in a cave under the ocean. I would have had him sleeping in a giant clam shell with a manta ray comforter.

Garth visits Aquaman in his cave which isn't full of water so I guess the bed is forgivable. But it doesn't explain why Aquaman was floating over the bed tangled in his sheets. Maybe that will be explained in the post-Zero Hour continuity. Aquaman hasn't been seen in weeks and hasn't been answering his JL pager (Ha ha! Old technology! So funny!) so Aqualad has gone looking for him. He finds Aquaman sitting in his own filth and coral. He probably heard one too many jokes about speaking with fish and he's had it with topsiders.

Aquacave?! Guess who has Bat-Penis envy!

Garth was worried about Arthur and has come to help him which is why he begins screaming at him and pushing him around. I know being berated and treated like shit is the only way I've ever gotten any kind of breakthroughs in therapy. Garth and Arthur get in a fight and the art confirms that the cave is definitely filled with water. So that bed really doesn't make any fucking sense at all. At least it confirms that Aquaman isn't possessed by the devil. After Garth gets his ass kicked, Aquaman begins to feel better and is ready to go on an adventure with Aqualad. Oh, so that was Aqualad's plan! Smart kid whose willing to take a severe beating from a friend just to put a smile on their face. I never would have thought of that. I would have thought, "My friend is really feeling down! I should be empathetic and compassionate while listening to them vent their problems!" But now Peter David has taught me another way. Punch my depressed friends in the face so that they can have a good time fighting back! This is a game changer! Aqualad is on a military mission for the United States Government. A nuclear submarine has been sunk and it's lying too low on the ocean's bottom for the military to deal with it. For some reason, they think Aquaman, being the water guy, can handle a submarine leaking radioactive material. I'm just going to assume Superman was still dead at this point and Batman's back was still broken. I don't know why Wonder Woman wouldn't have been tasked for this mission unless it's just because the U.S. military is full of sexist jerks. Aquaman and Aqualad begin to investigate the ship when they're attacked by Lupo the Butcher.

Does Garth die?! That would make this Aquaman series cool!

Murder Chef was the one who requested Aquaman be sent on this mission. If the military didn't acquiesce, he was going to blow the nuclear submarine apart. I knew it was fucking suspicious that the military asked Aquaman for help! Even Aquaman should have known better! Aquaman is captured by Murder Chef who introduces himself as Charybdis. He wants Aquaman for his life force or something. Previous to capturing Aquaman, he's been draining Dolphin of her life force. I don't know anything about Dolphin except that she had nice nipples in her Who's Who entry. Let me dig it out and show you.

That diver just came in his scuba suit.

Don't be surprised or creeped out that this fact was lurking in my memory. I grew up in the pre-Internet era! You had to find sexually stimulating material wherever you could! And you were fucking grateful for it! This was as great a find as the succubus or the Type V demon in the D&D Monster Manual. Hell, I even jerked off to the Caryatid Columns in Fiend Folio! Aquaman #1 Rating: B. I might have given this issue an A+ but Dolphin lacked the visible nipples I'm used to her character exhibiting. But this issue still gets a worthy B because Garth was left bleeding in the ocean while the sharks circled. He's totally going to die, right? Although I never purchased Issue #3 so I'm guessing I was disappointed that Garth didn't die. Still, you'd think Aquaman losing his hand (spoiler for next issue!) would have kept me intrigued. I bet in 1994, I read this series and was all, "Fucking Aquaman! Like anybody actually cares about the environment! Fucking virtue signaler! [Sorry I Coined the Term "Manic Pixie Dream Virtue Signaler" in 1994 by Me] His excess of caring makes me love oil and corporations now! It's his fault I'm such a selfish asshole!" Man, I was pretty cool in 1994. Now I'm almost 100% pure virtue signaler! Oh, Aquaman! I judged thee by my youth alone and could not see past your idiotic power to speak with fish to lay my sight upon the wisdom of your passionate defense of our only world!

[crooked-tarot-rp]

In Which Kuribu are Discussed

The door was there, mocking him. It was a reminder of everything he had worked to avoid. He had never wanted to step through this particular type of door. He’d always been nervous about them, prisons. Who could possibly say why? It wasn’t as if he were a swindler of swindlers, the man who was a confidence man to fellow con-men. It wasn’t as if this was the exact type of situation he never, ever ever wanted to find himself in at any point. And yet here he was, about to walk through this door to see someone else that had managed to get themself into the same mess Tarot had more or less feared he would wind up in for the past--well, really ever since the Calamity. He sighed and murmured the bruised statement that had tumbled its way through the ages; “What would it hurt?” And then​ he was through the threshold and looking at the bound and gagged and--they really had done a number on him, hadn’t they? Or rather, hadn’t he. That was the thing, wasn’t it? Mountain wasn’t here because of anything or anyone but himself but--and this was what Tarot half-suspected ever since the nasty bit with Rysswilf--Mountain’s punishment wasn’t imposed by the law or the Company or anyone. No one but himself. Mountain was many things but Tarot had a solid and sneaking suspicion that the man was not the kind to take undue punishment. The Agents were his responsibility but Mountain also was very good at avoiding damage or blame when he wanted to avoid it. This was--it had to be--something more. Self-flageralation, he believed it was called in Ishgardian circles. As the door shut behind him, Tarot looked at the Roe in silence, doing his best to try and pick what to say exactly. What was there to say? He could always go with the tried and true ‘I told you so’ but that would be expected and a bit boring. Maybe something like, ‘I won’t take up too much of your time since I can see you’re a bit tied up at the moment’ but he felt that somehow that would come back later to haunt him. That left--ah yes, this would do nicely. “You know, in Amdapor, there’s a several constructs that are interesting. You’ve probably read about them, but they’re called kuribu which some people think are actually creatures themselves. Pretty looking, which is probably why people made statues of them that can kill a man with Cure. Anyroad, I did some digging and apparently, kuribu are sort of the opposite of Voidsent. Holy and goodly and protectors and all that.” Tarot made his way forward towards the bound and stricken Mountain as he spoke, drawing close but not too close. Respect was important in situations like this. There’s a few stories of them coming into contact with mortals to grant them a second chance--another go at things. They also swoop in sometimes at the last minute and save the hero’s life or blast the evil-doers into dust or whatever.” Honestly it was a loose translation since in most cases this was guesswork done by scholars on translations but it sounded pretty good right now. “The thing is, Blue, they’re supposed to be in touch with Hydaelyn herself--or the gods or whatever--” he repeated the ‘whatever’ to drive home that this wasn’t much to him. His tone was conversational, the sort of tone you used while speculating with a companion if there was a meaning to the universe while you were preparing to indulge in your third or fourth hit of a questionable substance. “And like I said, they come in and tell the hero that they’re all free and clear and redeemed and able to continue on with their story.” He folded his arms and looked at the ex-Director with a smile that went unseen but no doubt was felt. ‘Trust me’ said this particular smile. “So I just want you to think about that while I reminisce for a bit.” He took a seat on the floor, folding his legs up and giving the ceiling an appraising glance. He had lived for this moment--the chance to sit and tell Mountain, Big Blue, everything he thought about him. How he thought he was a worse swindler and crook than even Crooked Tarot--how he’d actually been a bit jealous that he’d managed to schnooker everyone for so long. That he, Tarot, had the high ground on this point since he, Tarot, had been honest. He told people he was tricky and yet they still trusted him. But that was because he--well, he wasn’t Mountain. Dissimilar eyes glanced up at the Roe and he considered his options. “You have to know that people would start to see a pattern, Blue. Ever since the Corporation you’ve been doing this--this awful little circle of climbing up and falling down.” He traced the circle with his finger a few times to exercise the point. “You were in charge, you have a slip-up and get knocked down, you get up again and say, for all intents and purposes, no one’s ever gonna keep you down.” He leaned forward, murmuring quietly, “But we know different. You will get knocked down again but it always happens. The Corporation, Rysswilf and now this. You can go on and on about the Company. You can rail and rant and smoulder and be smug until you’re blue in the face but I don’t think that’s all there is to this.” He felt his features soften as he sat back again, fingers idly playing with the hem of his pant legs. “You’re doing this because of you. That’s what I think. I think you--feel this is necessary for yourself. I have a few guesses why but the truth is the ‘Why’ doesn’t matter in the long run.” His voice dropped off again, quiet and almost introspective. “You did help me though. Because of you, I started to see where my train of thought was going off the rails.” Gold-tinged eye turning up, he leaned back and planted his hands on the ground behind him. “You can’t treat people like they’re anything but people. That’s what I learned from you. Also that you can’t make happiness for others. You can give them all the pieces--blankets and food and medicine. Roof over their heads. But the moment you start actually trying to make their happiness and tell them what’s good for them is when things turn bad. You stop seeing people as people that that’s...probably about as evil as it gets.” And he had been like that; he had gone those first few years so set on buying whatever he thought people wanted or needed--deciding what they required rather than letting them figure it out for themselves. How many times had he insisted on giving them something because ‘he thought it best’ instead of what was called for? How many lives had he made more difficult because of it? Tarot wasn’t sure but he was definitely sure he had picked up right quick that it was wrong when he saw how it turned out in the end. “It’s like--see I was thinking that it’s like this. How do you make sure someone really does live happy ever after when they fall in love and get married? You’d have to cut their heads off at the altar. You can’t realistically do it. So I did the math and figured that the same thing applies with the Company. I could sit there and play the books and scrap numbers and sweat coins and try to push things in the way I thought best--thankfully it never got so bad as to make people miserable. But it still was wrong.” It was as bad as not trusting people. As bad as looking at them as children or pawns and just extensions of a property. “I really, really hope we can put the Corporation behind us, Blue. The way they did things and the way they treated us--and the Company and the people in it. So! That’s why I’m here!” He slapped his hands on his thighs and stood up quickly (not too quickly) and grinned that smile of his. “I’m here to play kuribu to your--well, oubliette-bound self. I’m going to put money that when you come back--if you come back after you’re out of here--that you’re going find the company a turbulent place. All kinds of questions and people wanting answers. Probably even demanding them, which is always fun. But if you need it--and I do mean it since I’m sick of the whole ‘I can do good all by myself’ attitude that most everyone in the higher echelons seems to have in this Company anymore--then my door is open. I could always use someone to work with me in piecing out the dig sites and sussing out treasure and finding things worth finding so other people don’t find them first. Not an underling, mind you. Just a partner...well, Junior Partner to start. Moggie will review your work ethic and then consider you for promotion after your initial probationary period is up.” He stretched, the tone returning to the calm and casual one he’d been using before. “You have people hereabouts that want to try and see your face, Blue. I promise that the majority of them probably will be alright with what they see if you showed them.” He held up his fingers in a weird little salute, “Mogsguard’s Honor.” @astralagents

[jeff-rosenstock-paper-blog]

Jeff Rosenstock, Bandcamp, and “Pay-What-You-Want”: A Better Indicator Than In Rainbows

In Rainbows: A Retrospective

In 2007, Radiohead shook the music industry by releasing their new album In Rainbows as a free download on their website.  Fans could still donate as much as they felt the album was worth, but this “pay-what-you-want” model was seen to be revolutionary in the face of piracy, label control, and the growing ideal of “free music.”  For the first time, the majority of the music world was exposed to a new way for artists to deliver music in the digital age.

As the first major album to use the “pay-what-you-want” model, it’s easy to shape In Rainbows as a revolutionary release that helped predict our current scene where many independent bands do something similar via sites like Bandcamp.  However, when discussing the viability of this model, In Rainbows is a poor case study for how well it would work for smaller bands.  Although it was the first time many had heard of the concept, it’s hard to overlook that Radiohead is the kind of band that’s just too big to fail.  Their past albums OK Computer and Kid A are widely regarded as two of the greatest albums of all time, while Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief, the albums that preceded In Rainbows, sold nearly a million copies each.  They’re one of the most widely respected contemporary bands with a rabid fanbase – their albums are going to sell just fine regardless.  Although In Rainbows outsold both these albums – 3 million sales after one year, 1.85 million of which were physical copies – it was unlikely to ever fail simply based on the band’s massive popularity.

This distance from the thousands and thousands of smaller bands didn’t go without criticism.  Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth denounced it, noting that “It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn’t catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don’t sell as many records as them.  It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever.”  A similar editorial in The Guardian asks “But can [a smaller act] make a living from music in an age when music is free?”  Even Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s frontman, admits this was just an experiment: “It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else…But it only works for us because of where we are.”  He goes on to say that “If you’re an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment” to engage with the industry and major record labels.  In contrast, those who have been in the industry for a while have a solid footing to work with.

A Better Case Study

With all this in mind, it’s clear that despite In Rainbows bringing the “pay-what-you-want” model to the mainstream attention, it is not the proper case study to consider how well it could work for smaller independent artists.  Thankfully, there is someone else we can examine: someone who’s been releasing music for free through a digital label for years, even predating In Rainbows.

Meet Jeff Rosenstock, a punk musician from Long Island.  Rosenstock was originally in the punk band Arrogant Sons of Bitches, but broke up the band after they started to face differences in their business ethics.  He went on to form Bomb the Music Industry!, a punk collective that focused on keeping the music free and affordable for their fans.  Most notably, the band released all their music for free online using Rosenstock’s new label Quote Unquote Records.  Quote Unquote calls itself the “first ever donation based record label,” giving users the option to donate what they think the album is worth through Paypal.  This model extended into their live performances, which were strictly all ages shows with ticket prices capped at $10 to keep them affordable.  Fans could bring blank CDs and T-shirts to get free physical versions of albums and handmade shirts at concerts.  

The recent documentary on Bomb the Music Industry!, Never Get Tired, traces the origins of this pay-what-you-want model through Rosenstock’s childhood.  He discusses being a teenager during Napster’s peak and how having a mass collection of free music online helped him and other teenagers explore the music they otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to.  He also cites Fugazi as an influence for this DIY (do it yourself) ethic, an older band who also fought for affordable ticket prices and relied on word-of-mouth promotion rather than turning to larger record labels.  Together, these influences drove Rosenstock to release his music for free and limit merch sales at shows in favor of donations.

The influence of Napster seeps into the overall mission and goals of Quote Unquote Records – the idea is to get heard, not immediately sold.  The label’s website says “We have simple goals which is to put out good music, put out fun music and help our artists get heard…While some people who are very uncomfortable with embracing a new technology swear that this is going to kill rock and roll, I have seen first hand that it helps bands increase their audience and allows fans to discover tons of great bands.  Then, usually at a show, people will buy a CD or something if the band is really good.”  This is very different from what Radiohead were doing.  Quote Unquote Records is focused on small bands who need exposure getting found through the Internet.  One band in Never Get Tired noted that no one was showing up to their shows until Rosenstock put their music online and advertised them.  Suddenly, their shows had over a hundred kids who knew the words to their songs.  Meanwhile, everyone’s heard of Radiohead.  No one needs a reminder that they still exist and still write incredible music.

Amazingly, Quote Unquote Records worked, and Bomb the Music Industry! survived from 2006 until their farewell show in 2012.  None of them ever made enough money to live solely off of the band – in Never Get Tired, Rosenstock talks about day jobs including driving trucks to deliver set pieces for a Nicki Minaj video – but it was enough to live off of during tours.  They never became rock superstars, but they weren’t exactly wallowing in poverty, either.  The point was always to just get the music out there.  In a 2010 interview with Jewcy, Rosenstock reveals, “Most people don’t donate, but the people who do usually donate more than the asking price.  People sometimes donate 50 or 100 bucks.  At the same time 20,000 people downloaded [the album] Scrambles in the first month and we got 70 donations.  But, I don’t really give a shit, because that means 20,000 people downloaded a record I wrote, and some of them might have liked it and that was the whole point.”  So long as the music got out there and people showed up to shows (which they did), the band survived just fine.

In a 2015 Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”), Rosenstock comments on this relative success: “…I could just record stuff for free, throw it on the Internet, and people would hear it.  When I started Quote Unquote, I just wanted people to hear other bands…And luckily I’ve had a few bands (Cheap Girls, Laura Stevenson and The Riot Before…) who have gone on to be pretty successful after getting their music out there to anyone who wants to hear it.  So if there’s some huge roadblock that people who don’t release music this way are AVOIDING, well, I just don’t know about it.  This shit seems pretty rad to me.”  Here, we see that not only is the pay-what-you-want model viable, but several of the artists who started with Quote Unquote went onto become well-known figures in the industry.

In addition to his business practices, Rosenstock’s views on the music industry have always played a prominent role in his art.  Clearly, Bomb the Music Industry! takes its name from this ethos, but this theme sneaks up in his lyrics as well.  “All Ages Shows” ends with the plea “My friends ain’t all that bad / We play all ages shows / And we’ll start on time if you decide to go,” emphasizing the moral value of all ages shows.  Most prominently, his 2016 solo release WORRY. emphasizes his anxiety over corporations latching onto and monetizing the culture he helped to develop.  “Festival Song” outlines this best with the scathing verse:

Take a long look at the billboards That smother the air ‘til you can’t ignore ‘em And glamorize department store crust-punk-chic ‘Cause Satan’s trending up and it’s fashion week But this is not a movement, it’s just careful entertainment For an easy demographic in our sweatshop denim jackets And we’ll wonder, “What just happened?!” When the world becomes Manhattan Where the banks steal the apartments just to render them abandoned

When asked about “Festival Song,” Rosenstock claims he’s not “trying to call anybody a sell-out,” but rather is concerned with the modern mentality of accepting corporations’ roles in music: “I just feel like people, at this point, don’t think that you can do it another way anymore…Do something on your own and do something that you like.  If you don’t want to be involved in that, don’t be involved in that.”  Beyond skewering corporations for capitalizing on punk culture for the sake of money and popularity, the fact that this came out in 2016 emphasizes Rosenstock’s lifelong commitment to his views.  WORRY. was, like everything else Rosenstock’s done, released for free on Quote Unquote Records (with additional distribution handled by label SideOneDummy).  The fact that so little has changed in ten years in Rosenstock’s practices while he continues to fight for the little guy in his art lends him a perfect level of credibility for his fans to crowd around.

Rosenstock’s Model and Bandcamp Today

It’s clear that Jeff Rosenstock is a better model for examining the success of pay-what-you-want in the digital age, and the best place to see its viability for small acts is the website Bandcamp.  Launched in 2008, this online music store allows any artist to upload their music for streaming and for purchasing at prices set by the artist, including a pay-what-you-want option.  The pricing scheme is simple: Bandcamp takes a 15% cut of whatever fans donate, while the artist pockets the rest.  No middle-man record labels are in the way here.  Many budding artists will go for the pay-what-you-want model, focusing on getting their music heard rather than sold in the hopes of awareness and eventually live ticket and physical merch sales.  Sound familiar?  Whether or not the founders of Bandcamp were directly inspired by Rosenstock or Radiohead, it’s clear that the model is much more in line with what Quote Unquote Records was always doing with smaller bands versus the behemoth Radiohead trying out a little experiment.

Interestingly enough, Rosenstock commented on Bandcamp during their early years in 2010: “You have Bandcamp which is a website where anyone can put up anything, and it’s got more options than Quote Unquote does…I don’t know if I see it as something a major label could adopt as their idea for everything.”  What’s amazing is that certain labels have ended up involved in Bandcamp.  In 2014, the site launched Bandcamp for Labels, meaning full record labels have since adopted Bandcamp’s online store for distribution and promotion.  Of course, you’re not going to find the big hitters like Atlantic on here, but many of the most notable independent labels take part in Bandcamp.  This includes Sub-Pop, ANTI-, Epitaph, and more.  None of these are slouches – they’re all very prominent in the independent music scene, and their adoption of Bandcamp proves even larger labels are interested in this type of platform.

There’s reason to believe Bandcamp is succeeding.  When describing their sales for 2016, the site announced “Digital album sales grew 20%, tracks 23%, and merch 34%” compared to the last year, despite the record business only growing 3% in 2016.  Obviously, Bandcamp’s numbers are inflated simply because more people became more aware of the site, leading to more sales, but it’s remarkable that their business practices are still able to thrive in the modern era.  There are also claims that Bandcamp is reducing piracy.  Back in 2012, the site wrote an editorial “Cheaper Than Free” which revealed that people who were Googling specifically for free torrents or Mediafire downloads would come across Bandcamp and purchase albums from there.  The site views this “as proof that Bandcamp can effectively compete with filesharing and other free distribution platforms by a) giving fans a clear, easy way to directly support the artist, and b) offering them a better user experience.”

It seems that Bandcamp can do no wrong, but there is one possible criticism towards the site.  Last summer, the site significantly expanded its editorial department to focus on “Bandcamp Daily,” which brings daily highlights to various acts and scenes around the site.  This could be viewed as a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, these acts are getting a level of exposure that otherwise wouldn’t be possible, which is wonderful for them.  On the other hand, Ben Ratliff argued in a New York Times editorial that this could ruin the neutrality of the site: “People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp.  But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking?”  Rosenstock’s Quote Unquote Records was meant to be a place where people could poke around and find the music they wanted for free, a promise Bandcamp certainly helps to deliver today, but the threat of tastemaking could ruin the perfect music democracy Rosenstock and Bandcamp both strive for.

This is still a very minor criticism, however.  The current success of Bandcamp proves that artists and fans appreciate interacting with each other financially with as few middle-men in between as possible, especially when artists can set their own prices and release music for free if they wish.  Fans can stream and search through archives of music and have shown to be willing to pay artists under this model.  Rosenstock’s early dreams of free music using the Internet for exposure while giving fans more options to support their favorite artists are an actual reality today.  That’s a much more significant parallel than anything Radiohead ever did for free music.

[jobsearchtips02]

Why SpaceX keeps sending out a senior executive to a tiny Texas beach town

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SpaceX, the rocket business established by Elon Musk, is attempting to construct a personal spaceport in Boca Chica at the southern suggestion of Texas and one day launch missions to Mars from the website utilizing a system called Starship.

A senior executive at SpaceX is visiting holdout property owners in individual to attempt and convince them to sell to the rocket company.

It’s not every day that a senior authorities at SpaceX calls you up, asks you to offer your home to the rocket company founded by the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, and explains that your property may one day become part of a Mars spaceport.

But that call just recently came for Maria Tip, who lives full time with her spouse, Ray, in Boca Chica: a lobe of coastal prairie at the southern tip of Texas that’s remote and abundant with wildlife. The Guidelines live nearby to a formerly quiet hamlet of numerous lots homes that residents call Boca Chica Town. The nearby inhabited area is Brownsville, which is a 30- minute drive west and where approximately half the population lives below the poverty line.

When Maria Guideline took SpaceX’s call on January 7, the official she talked to was Dave Finlay, the business’s senior director of financing and now, apparently, South Texas real-estate dealmaker. She stated their conversation lasted about two hours.

His overture came after years of relative silence from SpaceX and in the middle of disquieting uncertainty the Pointers felt about their future. The couple told Company Expert they had actually planned to grow old and die in their customized house– however SpaceX’s arrival in September 2014 put a giant question mark on everything. Should they remain? Should they go? Should they spend cash to improve their property or perhaps make repair work?

Finlay sugarcoated nothing about the danger of trying to cling to Boca Chica, Maria Pointer stated, including that he addressed years’ worth of bottled-up questions, fears, and aggravations. After the call with Finlay, she felt relieved– and later on chose it was time to leave.

” He’s a real pleasant guy who has actually enlightened all of us,” she stated of Finlay. “The minute he began shining a light on things, I began having closure.”

Finlay didn’t stop with call, however. Every other week or two, from January through February, he has actually traveled about 1,400 miles to the area from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, frequently for days, to knock on the doors of residents and make personal sees.

Finlay’s objective is not to make friends. Rather, it is to encourage everyone to accept a buyout deal that SpaceX drifted to location property owners in September– which lots of had not consented to months later on– prior to Musk “loses his patience,” Finlay told several locals.

Finlay’s method seems working. According to Company Expert’s reporting, more than half of the remaining homes in Boca Chica have actually now sold to SpaceX, including the Pointers’, or are near to or in closing. The rest are in other phases of dealmaking.

Key to transforming some citizens has actually been listening to them about, and even owning up to, mistakes of the past.

” They truly require these houses. They’re being very absurd,” one resident who just recently sold to SpaceX said. “As smart as they have to do with technological stuff, they’re not wise about individuals.”

The local, whose identity Service Insider verified, spoke on the condition of privacy to keep their personal privacy.

Life in SpaceX’s ‘corporate shadow’

Satellite-tracking antennas in South Texas.

Dave Mosher/Business Insider

Turning Boca Chica into a personal spaceport was an imagine Musk’s as early as2011 That’s when he had SpaceX workers call the workplace of then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry about introducing a lots commercial satellite missions a year from the site. Not long afterward, according to The Dallas Morning News, Musk met authorities from the state and Cameron County, where Boca Chica is, and promoted incentives to bring SpaceX there.

The Tips and a number of their next-door neighbors questioned the business would in fact land in Boca Chica when news about SpaceX’s interest broke in April 2012 There seemed to be far more suitable areas dad north in Texas– ones without a cluster of senior citizens spending time– they said, along with in Georgia, Puerto Rico, Florida, and a number of other places SpaceX was hunting.

However in Texas, SpaceX spent hundreds of countless dollars in lobbying, contributed tens of thousands of dollars to key authorities’ projects, and even paid for politicians to visit its headquarters, according to The Dallas Early Morning News.

Government officials eventually approved a bundle worth $15 million in tax breaks and job-creation rewards in2013 SpaceX then won federal, state, and regional approval in July 2014 to build a spaceport. The rocket company finally broke ground in September 2014.

” At the extremely, really starting, I saw surveyors outside our windows. I thought, ‘Oh god, individuals here are going to burn me on a cross if I’m not with SpaceX,'” Maria Pointer stated. Therefore began what she has consistently explained over the years as the beginning of “life in a business shadow” or a “business footprint.”

The company’s existence broadened quickly. SpaceX bulldozed lawns and cacti next to the Pointers’ home to set up a busy barbwire-fenced work yard. The business also trucked in adequate dirt to bury an American football field 13 stories deep and dumped it atop squishy soil near Boca Chica Beach to assist compact it into a launchpad structure. A couple of homes SpaceX acquired early on became workshops, storage websites, and shipment centers. Towering spacecraft-tracking antennas from NASA’s old space-shuttle program settled in next to an old corner store.

SpaceX may have used to purchase the town early on, however that did not take place– locals state they connected with few if any deals at that time.

” They do not approach you, you approach them,” a resident informed Company Expert in2019 Celia Johnson, a Brownsville native and Boca Chica homeowner since 1992, said she provided to sell her rental house to SpaceX a couple of years ago for about $150,000 but the company decreased.

In 2015, some in the town tried to open a dialog by asking SpaceX to hold private conferences.

However SpaceX rocket failures in 2015 and 2016, along with weaker-than-expected need for the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launchers– which were expected to fly industrial objectives monthly from Boca Chica– ground launch-site development almost to a halt.

” They did not like to answer any questions,” Sam Clauson informed Organisation Expert in April, when he was still a part-time citizen.

Starhopper’s final launch on August27

Elon Musk/SpaceX; Twitter SpaceX-owned homes became crash pads for employees, and the company even turned one into a recreation center with a bar, the confidential local said.

Cameron County ultimately started closing off areas of Highway 4– the only roadway out to Boca Chica– to permit SpaceX to move devices and conduct rocket tests.

Today, advancement work continues to speed up as Musk invests more time in Boca Chica to oversee SpaceX’s advancement of the Starship launch system, upon which the business’s future success may hinge.

” We can’t sleep anymore.

In The Middle Of all of this work, SpaceX’s attitude to the town shifted, changing from relative silence into a seemingly generous plea for everybody to offer their houses in the name of safety– and to do it rapidly.

On September 12, the business sent out every house owner in the hamlet a buyout deal letter via the real-estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, or JLL. Many bristled at the offer’s preliminary two-week deadline (which was later on relaxed). The offer offered 3 times a base appraisal, some homeowners explained the appraisal as a “lowball” and “bulls–.” And even with a three-times deal, according to nearly all the homeowners we spoke to, the funds wouldn’t compensate for “a like residential or commercial property” in a likewise remote low-tax location within a stone’s toss of an undeveloped and beautiful public beach.

So 2 weeks later on, while Musk remained in town to present progress on Starship, the CEO met with villagers throughout a quick and “awkward” conference Guests said the group “made it clear we were not delighted” and didn’t “play nice” with the billionaire CEO.

That meeting brought something of a turning point, though: Musk stated that while the three-times figure was nonnegotiable, the base appraisal worth was undoubtedly versatile. This encouraged some citizens to offer in the following months as they discovered methods with JLL to increase the on-paper worth of their properties.

However, as numerous as 15 property owners had their independent appraisals rejected. And as the weeks wore on with slow momentum on sales, numerous villagers burnt out of dealing with JLL and requested to work straight with SpaceX.

The rocket business dispatched Finlay to coax villagers to turn over their secrets before the county might attempt some legal remedy to require them out. (Company Expert asked for an interview with County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., however his workplace said the judge was traveling for work and unavailable to talk to till mid-February.)

‘ My objective is to provide any assistance that I can’

Weems Roadway is the primary path through Boca Chica Town, Texas, and was unpaved till SpaceX showed up.

Dave Mosher/Business Insider

Finlay appears an odd choice for the job based on his LinkedIn profile

However SpaceX decided on the individual for the task, Musk desired everyone gone by March 31, citizens said representatives from both JLL and SpaceX told them.

Finlay started outreach to residents as soon as December, beginning with those who had reached an impasse in negotiations with JLL.

” I operate at SpaceX in California and would truly value the chance to go over the SpaceX offer to acquire your property,” Finlay told a local in an e-mail sent the morning of January 3. “My goal is to offer any assistance that I can.”

The resident responded that SpaceX’s deal “would not even come close to permitting us to acquire another property anywhere else close sufficient to the beach for us.”

In his reaction two days later on, Finlay took a conciliatory tone.

” I am really happy to work with you to fix any error in your evaluated worth that drives the $ quantity of the purchase offer,” he wrote. “My objective is to make it as precise as possible and if any errors were made we will repair them. I will be in the Town all the time on Monday must you want to fulfill personally– I ‘d like to check out any opportunities I may have to help you.”

A model of SpaceX’s Starship envisioned behind a home in Boca Chica Town on September28

Loren Elliott/Getty Images

Finlay physically showed up on January 13 to walk the neighborhood. He spent hours that week with some locals, like the Tips, and returned in following weeks to pick up where he left off and work on other holdouts.

” Finlay was a reprieve, the last resort that provided us any kind of voice,” Maria Guideline stated, adding that Finlay asked forgiveness for the tension caused to her and her other half over the years by the company’s presence.

Dave Cohen is another (now-former) homeowner who offered after being approached directly by Finlay.

” I found Dave Finlay a satisfaction to talk to.

According to Service Insider’s reporting, citizens have actually been paid near to $100,000 on the low end to more than $1 million for their residential or commercial properties on the high end. Both Maria and Ray Tip said they’ve ended up being fans of what Musk and SpaceX are doing and wish to leave however that getting retiree-age people like themselves out of the way is “harder than throwing cash at the issue.”

” We have actually got to find a home, relocation, get surgery, and relative pass away in the middle of all this,” Maria said, describing the passing of her previous husband and the dad of her kids in 2019.

Johnson expressed comparable thoughts but said she still questioned what SpaceX was thinking by picking the town location for its main office.

” It’s not that I do not like development or SpaceX, either. It’s just that there’s hundreds and hundreds and numerous acres here,” Johnson said. “Why they picked our area to build whatever is beyond me.”

The confidential local stated Finlay even hired a real-estate agent to help one household discover a “like” house in another part of Texas.

Whatever SpaceX decides to do, however, the company may quickly discover itself in a bind: Some homeowners told Organisation Expert that they no longer answered Finlay’s calls, texts, or e-mails.

The citizen stated her household had “no interest” in selling to SpaceX– not even for millions of dollars– and added that she was prepared to go to court over their house.

Do you have a story to share about the spaceflight industry?

ENJOY: Why SpaceX is attempting to buy out a little Texas town

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from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/why-spacex-keeps-sending-out-a-senior-executive-to-a-tiny-texas-beach-town/

[altusfl]

1. Welcome to My Alternate History of the USFL

“If GOD had wanted football in the Spring, he wouldn’t have created baseball.”

---Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey Generals,  a team in the United States Football League, a spring football league.

Trump made that statement to the media as part of an active campaign to discredit the idea of spring-time professional football.  

Trump’s fellow USFL owners were content with the spring when Trump finally got around to buying into the league prior to its second season, so Trump wanted to create momentum for a move to the fall.  So he went to the media.

As a teenager I remember thinking, “Doesn’t he realize that he is hurting the businesses of all of his fellow owners?”

The thoughts of children.... 

About a year ago I decided to write an alternate history of the United States Football League after reading a post by Allen Bertsche (a.k.a. “Wide Right”) who wrote an alternative history of the USFL, beginning after the 1984 season that I thought was quite inspiring.

I have long thought the USFL had a shot if Donald Trump and Eddie Einhorn had not taken the league off a cliff.  

I have read a ton of articles, websites, and books about the USFL.

After reading Mr. Bertsche’s writing I became even more convinced that the league walked away from a viable product specifically due to that vote.

Survival may have been surprisingly possible

Now some of Allen’s premises I found to be very, very unlikely, but as I read, I was sucked into the fact that his contentions overall didn’t seem all that unreasonable.

I wasn’t prepared for that.

I couldn’t escape the underlying premise that had some minor actions changed for the USFL — even after what I had always considered “the point of no return” — the 1984 season — the league could have been saved.

Some of his ideas about which players might head to the USFL after 1984 are incredibly insightful and, if things had unfolded in a different manner, probably would have happened. So from time to time in my chronology, you’ll see some parallels to his timeline as I steal / plagiarize certain things from his chronology. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Mr. Bertsche.)

I began to write and soon my normal blog, The Sports Minority Report, was filled to the brim with posts about this alternate timeline for the USFL.  

Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to move it to the dedicated blog you are reading now.

........

This may be all you want to read in this first post. Things get moving and shaking in post #2.

To get there, you can skip to the end of this article.  On every page there is a link to the next piece of this alternate history.

The rest of this post is an FAQ.

Q: You had this formatted differently in the old blog...Why reformat everything?

A: I have tried to cut the articles into more bite sized pieces here with each post covering a specific subject.

My goal was to paint a three dimensional picture of what could have been if people with interests contrary to running Spring football teams didn’t convince the struggling USFL owners to jump off a cliff, taking down several solid franchises.

One of my goals was to show that this wasn’t just a non-viable idea.   This was a typical business with struggles, that a pair of corporate raiders skunked.

But in fleshing that out, I ended up with posts that were just too long.

I have tried to make this more reader friendly by “chunking” it more by main ideas.  

Doing so also makes it easier for me to write future seasons as the membership swells.

Q: “Who cares about the USFL?  It was bush league football.”

A: I do for one, and No... it really wasn’t.

A lot of USFL superstars went to the NFL after the league ended and those superstars dominated there too on their way to Hall of Fame careers.

I think the USFL was on a better than parallel development path to the one the American Football League took.  And the Jets beat the NFL’s champ in Superbowl III!

The USFL had a LOT more star talent, and a lot more talent overall than the AFL, much earlier in their existence. If you look around you will find that no one disputes that point..

And a lot of that was due to George Allen.  Allen organized tryouts all over the nation.  He was a bit gluttonous (signing ----no joke --- about 350 players who flashed in his workout to contracts to his initial Chicago Blitz team, lol...) but a ton of those players made it on to USFL rosters in year one.

The league started in year one with a talent level leagues like the XFL and UFL couldn’t touch.

I read a news article written by Hall of Fame Pittsburgh WR turned TV analyst Lynn Swann published after the USFL’s initial season.  Swann had just recently retired from the NFL after the 1982 season. 

After watching the USFL’s first season, the difference he saw in terms of level of play with the USFL was that the new league had little depth at that point compared to NFL rosters and they played with more simplistic coverage schemes to cover a lack of secondary talent and depth. 

That said, Swann said that several USFL teams’ starting lineups could compete with NFL teams.  

Given Swann’s comments , I feel safe in saying good USFL teams would not have dominated in the NFL, but it is fairly likely at least the top 4 teams in year one (Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston) could have beaten a fair number of NFL teams.  

They might have been 6-9 win teams in the NFL...even with their lack of depth.

And the USFL’s talent level improved every year. 

A lot of USFL players have made the comment that in year one maybe a third of team’s starting lineup were legitimate pro players. By year two, it might be 2/3 of their starting roster.  By year 3 the entire starting units were legitimate pros.

(I think you can look at this as the natural payoff to having a league worth of players spending two paid offseasons training and improving their games under the supervision of quality coaches. Everyone with talent gets better with practice.)

Now the NFL HAD more talent, but you need to wrap your head around what that really means...

Something like 3% of Division I-A players will ever play for an NFL team.

With the USFL around, that number swelled to about 5%.

Do you really think a team comprised of players from the 4th and 5th percentile could not beat a team comprised from the top 3%?  That is Oklahoma beating Texas or Michigan State beating Michigan or Auburn beating Alabama. 

It happens all the time.

A lot of NFL coaches will tell you that the guys they cut in the final cut are just as talented as the backups they keep on the roster.

If you think about it, that makes a ton of sense.   A coach might keep a guy on the roster who he trusts over a guy with more talent who he can’t trust. 

The USFL starting lineups were made of those guys, with a sprinkle of high profile 1%ers.

One only has to look at the Superbowl III champion Jets to see what those kinds of guys can do against the “elite” if given 4-5 years of on the job football training.

At that 5% level, it is all about how you select and coach the talent.

A skilled solid NFL receiver might be a lower to mid tier star in the USFL ....if he landed with a coach who would maximize his talent.  

Jim Kelly’s Run and Shoot offense dominated USFL secondaries by flooding the field with what the NFL at the time would have considered 3rd or 4th WRs.  In the cookie cutter NFL world where everyone ran pro set offenses, those tiny receivers were a dime a dozen.

But then Jim Kelly explodes and one of his receivers (Ricky Sanders) goes to the NFL and dominates.

A sound NFL QB might be a star in the USFL because in the USFL’s early years the league’s secondary talent was a half step slower, turning NFL INTs into USFL completions.

That isn’t to say that the real superstars of the USFL --- Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Reggie White, etc. ---- the 1%ers wouldn’t also be superstars in the NFL. 

It is important to get that.  AND that the USFL was catching up to the NFL’s level of play faster than the AFL did.

It was legitimately a pro league.  And that’s why people like myself still like thinking about it to this day.

Disclaimers

Alternate timelines involve a lot of wishful thinking and optimal decision making.  It is easy to get lost in that. 

I’ve tried to keep the sheer optimism to a minimum, and instead have focused on strategies that involved people might have employed if things had gone slightly differently.  

But things go better for the USFL if they stay in the spring.

The money increases geometrically as new principles become involved and frankly the league gets better at being a league. It matches and then surpasses their spending rate, much as the AFL did.

The way to view this in writing it, is as if I have “tuned in” to an alternate timeline where the USFL made a couple optimal decisions early on, and now I am just reporting what happened.

I have made every effort to write this “organically”.  I tried to make it realistic, with bumps and flubs along the way based on my perceptions of the owners, coaches, and front office personnel. 

Principles on this chronology make pointed stances only to back off them a year later when the circumstances change.  

That is how the USFL was.

Just like in the first two seasons where the LA Express, then the expansion Pittburgh Maulers franchise, both skipped on Dan Marino ---- opportunities are missed in my timeline when the principles involved would actively pass on a great option.

You’ll see years where the conditions financially are rough for USFL owners. You’ll see them really pass for the most part on name prospects, resigned to sign rookies who will take the league minimum or backups on other teams.

One of the reasons I keep writing entries is that I am absolutely taken with how many top college players the survival of this league could have employed. 

And how few it hurts. With the exception of Brett Farve. (Poor, poor Brett Farve....But that season is very far up the list.)

Three areas with big mistakes

This blog is setup to trace this league into late 80′s and beyond. That created a lot of hugely time consuming issues.

I curse myself for adding annual breakdowns of notable players on each team’s rosters.  I have players on multiple rosters here and there. I have to have those lists to keep the players straight, but it is a major pain to fix a misplaced or duplicate player over several seasons.

I also have some of these guys playing WAAAAY too long.  Some of these guys were on their last legs when the league started and wouldn’t be backups or starters even in 1985.  I don’t think those guys retiring dramatically change how I would think the teams would finish.  Most teams maybe had 1 or 2 old difference makers and I caught those.  George Allens team had many and I think I had that team basically getting old overnight.

What I am more talking about are the middling starters and notable backups that were old. I will fix that in time.

Stadium capacities are also an area where I may have mistakes here or there.  I have made every effort to get the stadiums capacities right for the years, but human errors occur.

Also as the league survives their home stadiums would be updated or in certain situations, like San Antonio, replaced. 

I have tried to show that. 

Reallocation

Every time there is expansion, players are reallocated.   As I was doing this I noticed that sometimes I reallocated players a couple times.  At first I thought that was just lazy and bad writing. (and admittedly some of it may be...)

But I thought about reallocation in real leagues and you see the same thing occurring. 

There are “types” of players who are just more likely to get reallocated in real life and in alternate timelines.

When you are building a team via an allocation draft, you generally want players from the following categories:

1) The one year, older, expensive guy.  A name player past his prime your fans know and can cheer for.  If the allocation requires teams to take on salary, this guy may have one expensive year remaining and he may be picked exclusively for that reason and not for how he played.

2) The cheap guy with minimal talent but a great attitude, work ethic, and techniques.  The idea is that you are going to draft and sign talented players that will steal these guys’ jobs.  You want as many of these guys as possible to create that kind of environment.  You want to see your system being executed right, even if your players have marginal talent.

3) The cheap young guy with great raw talent that hasn’t been tapped either due to lack of playing time, a bad system fit, or poor coaching. 

I have tried to apply that. 

That is why I have a guy like WR Neil Bahlholm who tied for 9th in the league in receptions in year 1 with 63, getting reallocated a few times. Bahlholm averaged 11.2 yards on those catches. He was a BYU product at a time when BYU was cranking out a lot of very polished slow white receivers with great hands.

He hits me as a category 2 guy.

If you catch 63 passes in any league and aren’t on crack, teams will give you the benefit of the doubt. 

Some transactions may or may not make sense at first glance

I have far too much pro football minutia in my head.  It is booth a boon and a hindrance in writing this.  It is a big factor in transactions and injury assessments.

Arizona Wrangler coach George Allen had a method. He ran a 4-3 defense he filled with veterans who didn’t make mistakes that he would stock with defensive linemen who could pass rush playing from multiple positions in order to protect his team from injuries.

I feel confident in saying if George Allen left the league and came back at some point he would build a team using that same model.  Now did I chose the right kind of defensive linemen? I don’t know, but I have tried to use a logic path that might make sense for George Allen.

I have former Atlanta Falcons coach Leeman Bennett coaching a USFL team. At one point that team needs a RB.  When Leeman Bennett was the head coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay team, the Bucs brought in RB Vagas Ferguson.  I had Vagas Ferguson backing up on another USFL team, so I assumed Ferguson was Bennett’s kind of back, so I had him move to Bennett’s team.

While some of the moves I list are not as well thought out as that, There are a lot of moves that have an unstated logic behind them.

I know that Brian Bosworth had a degenerative shoulder condition that pretty much destroyed his pro career.  I write about Bosworth assuming you all know that and don’t think, “well, if he played in a lesser league he wouldn’t have incurred that problem.”  

No, not the case.  He was going down anyway. Regardless of the pro league he had about 2 years of painful tackles in him before he’d have to retire.

Now Syracuse NT Ted Gregory was a great college player who had a damaged knee when he was drafted by the NFL Broncos in the first round.  The NFL has no patience for that.  They have too much invested for a #1 pick to not show anything for a year and a half.  Bring on the next guy.  And no other NFL team is chomping at the bit for a damaged player who his team was embarrassed about drafting. His career was done.

In the USFL could he have rehabbed his knee and been at least a backup? I can’t say, but I can’t write it off as impossible. If he could play at some point, a USFL team would take him. So I have him kicking around on the roster of the USFL team that drafted him for a few years.

You may wonder why I assume some other players who had injuries that killed their NFL careers would not have ended up playing in the USFL.  

It is because some injuries that ended careers prevented the players from ever playing like they could while other  injuries just prevented the player from ever getting another contract.  There is a big difference. 

Draft day Busts and player movement between leagues

This is a hot button of mine.  I get annoyed when people pronounce a player a bust. 

To me, a bust is a player who doesn’t work at the game for whatever reason.

Oakland QB Demarcus Russell got fat and didn’t get back into shape.  He was a bust.  (I hear much of the problem with him was that he had a father figure Ray Ray Russell who died and it messed with his head. I am sorry for him having to go through that, but at the end of the day he didn’t do what he needed to succeed.  Bust.)

Oakland QB Todd Marinovich had a drug problem. (Probably in no small part due to his parents divorce messing with his head. Again, sad, but still a bust.)

San Diego QB Ryan Leaf fucked up his wrist on his throwing arm big time in his NFL rookie season.  Ryan Leaf may have been immature.  He may have been a crap leader,  but he wasn’t a bust.  I saw him play a lot when he was trying a comeback with Dallas and you could see flashes of why teams loved him.  If he doesn’t fuck up his wrist losing consistent accuracy, he is Jeff George.  Still an asshole, but nobody is calling him a bust.

Oakland Raider Bob Buczkowski had a ridiculous 2 year run of injuries after the Raiders drafted him.   Were some of those “out of shape” injuries?  I don’t know, but I am not really comfortable hanging him with the bust tab either.  He could have just been the victim of a horrible run of bad luck.

Denver first round pick QB Tommy Maddox came into the league early and predictably washed out.  Then he matured, got a fresh start in the XFL where he could display his talent and then became a successful starting QB in Pittsburgh for a few years. 

So was he a bust or wasn’t he? I would say he totally was a bust.  ....But he got better.

Steve Young was was one of like 7 first round prospects signed by the LA Express that year for the media attention.  He was a hard to contain player in the USFL, but his passing was a major disappointment vs. his collegiate excellence.  Probably he was a bad fit in John Hadl’s offense. He went on to Tampa Bay and stunk up the joint.  He worked hard but he was just bad. Then he lands in a system that accentuates his skills in San Francisco and becomes a Hall of Famer.

You could argue he was kind of a bust in the USFL and became an NFL hall of famer.  How does that fit in your world view?

The problem with calling someone a bust is that you are lumping too many reasons together so you can have a quick one word description on why your pick didn’t work out.

The NFL has a real knack of drafting good players and slotting them in to systems where they don’t fit.  

They draft a 6′7″ edge rusher to play inside linebacker.  

They draft a 6′3″ 280 lb 3-4 DE who never had more than 7 sacks in a season in college, but they think he will be a terror as a 4-3 DE in the pros because he runs a 4.7 forty ---- even though he doesn’t show any pass rushing technique on film.

They draft killer collegiate 5′10″ safeties who run 4.4s and can tackle, play the ball in the air and pick off passes but can’t cover at all and NFL coaches want to make them all CBs. 

A startup league like the USFL needed to hit on every player they gave big money to, so for the most part they made damned sure the player had a proven history of executing what they needed him to do.  If they don’t think he will work out, they pick someone else.

They don’t have the luxury of an unlimited budget. 

The NFL generally has a pretty hard divide between coaching and personnel.  Coaches get players they can’t stand all they time.  And they bury them thinking, “I’ll get a better replacement next year.”

In the USFL the staffs were smaller and they had a territorial player acquisition system so they didn’t have to scout the whole country.  The coaches were much more involved and their coaching regimes had much shorter leashes, so you had a lot less of that.

It is an entirely different mindset.

All of this adds up to the fact that the USFL was well suited to “rehab” “NFL busts” and I would argue to successfully develop the college talent they signed..  

Why would USFL teams sign NFL players?

In the early days of the USFL,  the league would sign former NFL players to fairly big deals.  They never seemed to get as much out of that payout as when they signed collegiate players.

And it was part of why their spending went out of control.

In writing this, I tried to put myself in the shoes of each USFL GM.  There are years where they just don’t have any money and they league signs almost no NFL rejects.  Then there are expansion years where expansion teams suck up excess talent and NFL players get signed.

I have tried to list it when it “makes sense” for a team to do it.  For example when former TCU star RB Kenneth Davis became a free agent, Buffalo offered him the most money among NFL teams.  I am sure he didn’t want to play in Buffalo, but as I was looking through USFL teams, there was no team at the time that it made sense for them to pursue Davis, even though Davis totally could have been at least an 800 yard rusher in the USFL.

I have tried to honor “supply and demand” in that way.

Defections in year 2

In our world, a number of notable names would walk away from the USFL in year 2 as the owners moved towards playing in the fall.  

New Orleans offensive Coordinator Jim Fassel, who had coached in the WFL, bolted for the University of Utah.   Players like Michigan RB Ken Lacy, Arizona CB Frank Minnefield, and others took off for the NFL.

This timeline is one where the decision not to move stops a lot of that movement dead in its tracks.

Retirements, draft nightmares, and deaths

People die.  I am saddened as I write this that so many of the people I write about who made the USFL great (or might have down the road), are in jail or dead, often tragically. 

I can’t help but wonder if they had had a consistent career the lasted for 4-15 years, helping them mature through their wild youth and putting a little money in their pockets if their lives would have taken a different path. 

I can’t help but wonder if X player who flamed out in the NFL because he was drafted by a coach with an ill fitting scheme, or by a GM over the objections of his coach, or landed on a team with a bad position coach might have had an amazing life after playing in the USFL.

But that was taken from them and US, the fans. 

And frankly, at times in my writing I have probably ignorantly listed people who may have died by that point. 

There were probably backups who I mention as hanging around for future years who may have died in car accidents or other ways and their stories simply aren’t recorded on the sources I used.  To them and their families, I apologize. 

I hope people get that this is my love letter to those players, the people who made the USFL.  It is me screaming out to the world that what they built was fantastic and could easily have lasted. 

Re-Writes

I’ve re-written this a few times, consider this version 3.0.

If, from a logical standpoint, I’ve totally missed the mark at certain points in your opinion, please let me know and I’ll incorporate it into version 4.0, when I write that at some point down the road.

The role of a USFL Commissioner

Chet Simmons, the league’s first commissioner was concerned with building consensus. He was seen as a weak commissioner by the owners.  They would eventually make that perception reality by creating committees that took away Simmons’ various powers.

Harry Usher, the league’s second commissioner, was hired specifically because Simmons was seen as a weak leader.  The expectations were Usher would lead.

I have Harry Usher turning to Peter Hadhazy in an early incident in the Usher tenure, that working, and Usher going back to the well time after time.    (I credit Hadhazy with seeing my own view that a bigger league is better/ more leikely to survive, but I have no idea if he thought that way. The league was pretty much imploding in our timeline when Usher took over, due to the vote to play in the fall. He plays a much larger role in this alternate timeline where it wasn’t .)

So at a point you’ll see decisions coming “top down” more than they were in our timeline.

High concept struggles

What Key Moment?

The USFL had several 'key moments’ that could have dramatically changed the direction of the league. An early one was the decision by David Dixon not to start a franchise himself.  If Dixon had “skin” in the league, his sway over the other owners would have been much more pronounced and they likely would not have gotten as deeply into financial trouble as they did in the first season.

That in turn might have kept several financially conservative owners in the league following that first season.

But the decision most USFL fans look at as the point of no return was the 1984 vote to start playing in the fall beginning in the 1986 season.  

Championed by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump and Chicago “franchise” “owner” Eddie Einhorn, that vote is the moment where several former USFL stars say they knew the league was dead.  

That is the moment that my 13 year old heart broke because I knew the league was a dead man walking.

Over the years I have found that most USFL players appear to blame Trump for the league’s demise and over the years some high profile owners like Houston’s Jerry Argovitz have come to publicly concede that point.

A sadder, wiser Ted Diethrich, second owner of the Arizona Wranglers, would say many years later, “I think it [agreeing with Trump and Einhorn to move to a fall schedule in 1986] was a big mistake. When that decision was made, the course for this was charted....and it was going to be a wreck.”

Both Diethrich and Argovitz are named in books on the subject as having voted to play the 1986 season in the fall.

The league would never play that 1986 fall season.  

Shortly before the season was to start, a lawsuit by a former player against the Tampa Bay Bandits for back pay would cause the Tampa Bay Bandits’ equipment to be seized.  Down one team, the league would be inclined to press on, but they would turn to their surviving leader Donald Trump and Trump would advise them he changed his mind.  Again.

He would not field his all-star merged New Jersey team with the league’s two superstars, RB Herschel Walker and QB Jim Kelly.

With no team in New Jersey, there was no hope for TV money.  Trump had pulled the plug on the league. 

The rest of the owners quit...

Why focus on the 1984 vote?

That 1984 vote is the key moment I address in this blog.

The 1984 vote boils down to the league deciding A) if they wanted to continue to run things like struggling businesses shy of their break even point or B) just treat the entire endeavor like a game of poker with the NFL, pushing in all their chips?  

The USFL was not doomed to fail. Not everyone was broke.

What is lost on most people is that only about 1/3 of the league was financially distressed.  These owners were looking for a magic bullet solution to fix their issues. They were susceptible to Trump and Eddie Einhorn’s pro-fall bullshit. (And in a lot of cases it was described as intentionally fabricated bullshit.) 

These struggling owners outvoted the owners with the most financially solid positions, forcing the league out of several well performing markets, creating a “lame duck” final spring season when the fans stopped paying attention, and dramatically weakening the league.  

In the lame duck season, the league would see attendance totally collapse to franchise failure levels in all of their teams in the western half the US as westerners wrote off the league as dead.

This blog answers the question, “What if the owners who had the USFL’s prospering teams won that vote?”

The over extended league owners chose ‘B’.  This blog is about what would have happened if they had chosen ‘A’.

The USFL was not a harmonious group activity

Every owner had their own agenda that they put ahead of the best interest of the league.  It is crazy, but yeah, they did.

I’ve tried to retain that too, even if I had the pro-spring teams “win” the key “play in the fall” vote.

The USFL owners frankly flocked to Alphas who generated money. This made Einhorn a big player in our reality and is something that plays a big role in this alternate history.

Bigger is better

Conceptually the biggest stretches I’ve taken are assuming that the league would generally support a “bigger (more teams) is better” philosophy in terms of survival if they were choosing good TV Markets.  

This is definitely contrary to most people’s thinking.  The 1970′s World Football League would have had a much better chance at survival if they hadn’t started each of their seasons with 12 teams. (They had a lot of problems.)

But the USFL was a different beast.  Their plan eliminated most of the mistakes that sunk the WFL.  They had the potential of TV paying them at quite a good rate for stringing together big media markets.

I contend for the USFL business model, more big market teams was better.  It created more TV attraction. It created protection if a team failed.

I think that just makes sense, but it is at best a “neutral position” in terms of the PERSONAL investments of each team owner.  (ie. More mouths to feed means slightly less revenue, potentially even with expansion fees, and can put the league at risk if non-viable locations are chosen or if teams are very poorly run, but on the other hand expansion does create more wins for established teams and wins can help a team survive.)  

Player retirements, injuries, and lost opportunities

In real terms, most players retire when no one will pay them to play anymore.  Some retire due to injuries.  That is a real problem in writing this.  

Marcus Dupree was probably the second most talented RB in the USFL behind Herschel Walker and the 3rd most talented back in football at the time behind Eric Dickerson. (I am only talking talent here, Kelvin Bryant fans....)

His team moved to Portland where the the turf was horrifically unsafe.  Dupree blew out a knee and his USFL career was over.  If the vote to move to the fall fails, Dupree’s team stays in New Orleans and he never blows out his knee on that Portland turf.  

Would he blow out his knee somewhere else?  Can I predict that?  Should I?  I had to think, “No,the other turfs were good, so he probably would not.”  So in that, I am being very optimistic about the health of players in the USFL.

Ken Talton ran for a 1000 yards for Birmingham in year 1.  He had talent, was trusted, and given plenty of opportunities.  That happens for talented unknown pros when the league is growing. 

Then he was replaced by Joe Cribbs as Birtmingham’s primary rushing threat in year 2 and only ran for like 150 yards.  He was 28.  He didn’t play in year 3.  Did he piss someone off in Birmingham?  RBs fall off around that age... Did it happen to him?  Or did the contraction of the league cause him and several other solid players to be forced into retirement?

I think the later is more likely.

Ken Talton may have played and carried the ball for several more years if the league survived and the number of teams was growing instead of shrinking. 

Eventually teams take a hard look at a player’s age.  A lot of older players can still play at a high level for 1-3 more years at that point but teams get scared of their age (and their salary demands) and go for younger players.  

Other teams assume the players have less in the tank or they wouldn’t have been let go. Or they assume (sometimes correctly) that the player’s salary demands might be cost prohibitive.

What I am getting at is that a lot of players retire with “meat left on the bone” of their playing career.  That is increased when the league is contracting and jobs are going away like the USFL in year 3.

Also, it is plainly obvious that the NFL blackballed most USFL players. There were simply too many good starters in the USFL who never got a legit opportunity when the league went down.

The level of play in the USFL was legitimately lower than in the NFL overall, but really what happened to a lot of these players --- like Oakland star WR Fred Banks --- is they went from a team that trusted them and used them correctly to a team where they had no trust equity, in a league that really kind of wanted USFL players to fail overall.  

If the USFL survives,  If USFL guys stay with their USFL teams, they likely have careers that mirror NFL starters in terms of consistency of play and length of careers.

So you will see that in my work.

It doesn’t mean that they would be stars in the NFL if they were stars in the USFL, but it is still pretty darned prestigious company.

But I say this only to explain the logic behind why, in this blog, you will see players playing longer than they did and often at higher levels than you might expect if your only knowledge of them is looking at their NFL stats.

With that said, lets get into this...

Click here to continue to the next post

[deniseyallen]

On Senate Floor, Portman Discusses How Tax Reform is Already Helping Ohio Workers & Families

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) delivered remarks on the Senate floor today to discuss how tax reform is already helping Ohio families and workers. Portman detailed how the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act is already delivering on the two main goals Portman and others had when crafting the legislation: to encourage economic growth and investment, and to put more money in the pockets of American families. The proof, said Portman, is in what’s happening at Ohio companies like the Sheffer Corporation in Cincinnati and at Ohio’s major-private sector companies that are announcing more investment in plants and equipment, wage increases, bonuses, higher 401(k) matches, and more.

Transcript of his speech can be found below and a video can be found here.

“I come before you today to talk about the historic tax reform legislation that was passed here in the United States Congress, signed into law by the president at the end of the year, and talk a little bit about what we’ve learned since then, even in the last week. We created this legislation, you’ll recall, with two goals in mind. One was to provide middle-class tax relief to families. The other was to provide our businesses and our workers with a more competitive tax code. This is something that became very clear to all of us as we looked at it that, unfortunately, we were asking our workers here in America to compete with one arm tied behind their backs because of our tax code. 

“It’s been a couple months now since this legislation became law, and both of those two goals that we set out to accomplish are being achieved. It’s already happening. In January, the Internal Revenue Service updated its tables for withholding. In other words, they went to employers and said, because of the tax cut, you should withhold less money in every paycheck. So that’s happening. And the Treasury Department tells us that 90 percent of American workers, 90 percent, are having their withholding changed in a way that’s positive for them, meaning that Uncle Sam is taking less out of their paychecks. So people are already starting to see that. Tomorrow is Friday, another payday. You’re probably going to see that in your paycheck tomorrow or a week from tomorrow if you haven’t already seen it. And that means that people are actually getting relief directly for themselves and their families. This is more take-home pay for folks that enables people to have a little better family budget. With higher health care costs and other costs for years and years, no salary increase, having a little more in the family budget is really important to folks and is making a lot of difference. 

“In Ohio for a family of four at the median income level, which is about $70,000 a year, this [tax reform law] means about a $2,000 a year savings. That’s significant for people. Having talked to a lot of constituents who are beginning to see this, they’re realizing they now have a little more money for retirement, maybe for health care, maybe to help their kids or their grandkids. So that’s good. There’s something else that’s in the bill that hasn’t gotten as much attention. That’s the fact that there were three million Americans who were paying taxes previously, had income tax liability, who do not now. Why? Because when you lower the tax rate, some of these people who are typically working poor, in other words they’re working but they’re not making much in income, they have the ability now to get out from under taxes altogether. This also encourages more people to go to work, to not be dependent on the government programs, but to go to work if you have the lower tax rate at the lower end of the economic scale. So this is good, too. This is in this tax legislation. More than three million people not having tax liability anymore. 

“Part of it is because of the lower rates we talked about. Again, the proof is in the paycheck on that one. But part of it is also because in this legislation, we double the standard deduction but also double the child tax credit and make it more refundable than it already is. So that’s happening. It’s working. And that goal is already being achieved not by this Congress but by the people we represent, the American people and families across this great country. So we’re happy to see that. 

“The second part of this is that a more competitive business code is benefiting workers very directly. And this is something you’re hearing about just about every day. Now, more than 300 businesses have made announcements saying, ‘You know what? We’re going to give people a bonus because of the tax reform legislation’ or ‘we’re going to give our employees a little higher starting wage. We’re going to put more in the 401(k), or more in the defined benefit pension plan or maybe we’re going to give a little more to charity. Or maybe we’re going to invest more in equipment and tools so that people can be more productive because productivity we know is key to getting wages up and improving the economy.’ We’re hearing this across the board all over the country. I’ve seen this in Ohio. I’ve been to companies in my hometown of Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Cleveland just in the last month, where I’ve gone and visited with these companies while they are making announcements and talked to the employees, at a town hall meeting setting where they have the opportunity to have a back and forth as to what this tax reform measure means to them. It means direct tax cuts for them—as it does for, again, about 90 percent of American workers—but on top of on top of that, it means that because these businesses have the ability to be more competitive, it makes [workers] more competitive. They are already getting some of the benefits from that. 

“Last week I joined President Trump in Cincinnati at one of these companies. It’s called the Sheffer Corporation. It’s a small manufacturing business. They have decided to make investments in their plant and equipment. That’s going to help make them more competitive and make their workers more productive. They compete globally. It’s an incredible company. They make cylinders and they make them this big and they make huge ones and they compete all around the world. They are doing a great job. Frankly, this tax reform bill really helped them. On top of the investment they are making, they are also making a direct investment in their employees. Every employee of the 126 people who worked there got a $1,000 bonus check after the tax legislation was signed into law. It’s helping them. The company president, Jeff Norris, he said just before the visit we had earlier this week, he said for some people in Washington that’s ‘crumbs,’ referring to how some people have called this ‘crumbs’ of getting this tax relief. But he said for the Sheffer people, we consider it ‘fine dining.’ Another way to put it is, this makes a difference to the people and their lives and their families. 

“This is part of the legislation that resulted from lowering the tax rate. Of the developed countries around the world, the countries that are industrialized, we had  the highest statutory tax rate of all the countries, so our 35 percent rate was higher than places in Europe, places in Asia, Latin America, and so on, so we were getting higher than our competitors, in Mexico and so on. That’s one reason people were choosing to shift overseas, to take literally the company and move it overseas. That’s called an inversion. Last year, we were told that three times as many American companies were bought by foreign companies as the other way around. Think about that. Three times as many American companies were bought by a foreign company, largely driven by this tax code. 

“We have also heard from Ernst and Young—which is a big accounting firm—they did an analysis and said 4,700 American companies became foreign companies over the past ten years or so because of the tax code. And if you had the kind of code we just put in place with this legislation that was passed here, those companies would still be American companies. That’s 4,700 companies. That’s a lot of people, a lot of investment. We studied this in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a bipartisan investigation. We looked at what happens when these companies go overseas. No surprise probably to you, they take their jobs and investment with them. So when a company pulls up stakes here and goes overseas, it’s not just about moving a corporate headquarters. We found it’s also about having less employment here directly but also indirectly because companies that supply them, contractors, have less employment, and they also make their investments increasingly overseas. 

“We also found as we studied this thing that companies were actually taking their money that they made overseas and keeping it all overseas rather than bringing it back here and repatriating it, even though they were U.S. companies. So this is something that we studied as part of a bipartisan Senate Finance Committee working group that I co-chaired with Senator Chuck Schumer, and we found that unless you lower this rate and go to a more competitive international system, you weren’t going to get that money back. So part of what this will do is what we talked about in terms of improving the lives of workers here in America, part of what it does is it repatriates, brings back some of that money that is stuck overseas—the so-called lockout effect—and brings it back here. How much is that? Well, economists think it’s somewhere around $3 trillion. Some say more. Apple, you might have seen recently, announced they were bringing hundreds of billions back here, repatriating that money here. They are also going to pay I think about $38 billion in taxes to the U.S. Treasury, but that’s worth it to them to bring that money back. We want them to bring the money here. Why? We don’t want them to invest it overseas in a R&D facility there or a factory there. We want it invested here, right? So that’s what this tax reform does. That’s why I think some of what we have heard—as exciting as it is for these workers and for companies to make these decisions that help people right now is really important—I think the bigger investments we’re going to hear down the line, which is when the next time a big American company that has a global business says ‘where am I going to put my factory, where am I going to do my research and development?’ They’re going to say ‘we’re going to do it here in America.’ That’s what’s really exciting to me.

“Let’s get back to the business of making things in this country. Let’s get back to having wages that are going up consistently rather than the relatively flat wages we have seen over the past couple of decades, and let’s see a renewal of hope and opportunity here. I think this is exciting. I think we’ll see more of it. 

“Just in the past week, by the way, we have seen seven more major companies announce higher compensation for their employees. CVS, in the last week, Tyson in the last week, Chipotle, Best Buy, Charter Communications, Lowe’s, FedEx. That’s just in the last week. In total, these companies have 1.3 million employees who are now going to benefit—on top of all the other 300 announcements that we talked about earlier—they are going to benefit from increased investments these businesses are able to make because of this new tax reform. This is good news. It’s good news for the people I represent. 

“In Ohio, some of our larger employers have already made their announcements. Fifth Third Bank, headquartered in Cincinnati, employs 8,800 Ohioans. They announced they are going to raise their base wage for entry level people, and they will give $1,000 bonuses to all their 13,500 employees. Nationwide Insurance, headquartered in Columbus, has 15,000 Ohioans employed. They will increase 401(k) matches, so the match that they give to people’s 401(k) contributions will increase. That’s great for retirement savings. They will do that for 33,000 employees around the country. They are also going to give $1,000 bonuses to 29,000 of their employees. JPMorgan, probably the third biggest employer in Ohio now of all the private sector employers, they have about 21,000 Ohioans that they employ. Many are in the Columbus area. Some of you know that because they are a huge presence in Polaris, north of Columbus. They have announced they are going to add 4,000 new jobs, raise their base wage for 22,000 employees, increase their charitable donations and increase their small business lending, they say all because of this tax reform legislation. So that’s good news. Our biggest employer in Ohio is Walmart. It may be in your state, too. 50,000 Ohioans work for Walmart. They have announced they will raise their base wage for all hourly employees, distribute $1,000 bonuses, expand maternity and parental leave opportunities, and increase funds for employee adoption expenses. That’s our largest employer. Other Ohio employers who have announced something include Fiat-Chrysler and their jeep plant up in Toledo, which we are so proud of, Home Depot, Lowe’s, AT&T, they have all announced increased investments in their operations and workers as a result of the tax reform. 

“So I’m excited about this. It is actually working in a way that many of us had hoped it would and said it would, but really there have been more announcements even than I think the most optimistic tax reform advocates expected. And again, I think we’re going to see a lot more over time because ultimately this is about making the United States a better place to do business. By the way, some of these companies are not American companies. They are foreign companies that choose to invest in America. And foreign direct investment is something we encourage because that brings more jobs here to this country. So if a company like Honda, which is a big auto employer in Ohio, chooses to invest more in Ohio rather than in Japan or China or Germany or elsewhere, because of this tax reform legislation, that’s also important. You’re going to see more and more of that happening in my view because, again, they are looking at the lower rates, they are looking at the ability to expense what they have purchased in terms of plant and equipment more quickly. This immediate expensing is really important in this legislation for companies like that, manufacturers. So this is not just about American companies staying here rather than going overseas. It’s also about foreign companies choosing to come here and hire American workers, which is also good for us. So I’m hoping that a combination of this tax reform, what’s being done on the regulatory front to make regulations better, for particularly smaller businesses who were feeling a lot of that burden, will help American hard work and ingenuity, and rewarding that ingenuity will help America be able to compete in this global marketplace in ways that we haven’t done for many, many years. 

“The historic tax reform is basically putting America back in a position where people are now going to look to us again and say ‘America is kind of a model that I want to follow.’ You know, the American free enterprise system and the system where if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead, you can achieve your dream in life, that was something some people were beginning to question. Now I think it helps to polish our image, which had become somewhat tarnished as wages had been flat. We were kind of stuck in low economic growth, 1.5 percent to 2 percent growth. Now I think we have the opportunity to break out more and to be that beacon of hope and opportunity for the rest of the world, and most importantly to be able to give people the opportunity to achieve their American dream, whatever it is.”

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  from Rob Portman http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=8B2EDD4E-D86C-4610-A0DE-A911FC3C8F88