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#am I making a significant contribution to the company?

mctreeleth · 6 months

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They have this annual award at my work that is some corporate bullshit about recognising the employee who has made a significant contribution to the company and it's usually won by someone who is moving into a management role after being there for like a decade BUT while the winner is decided by the bosses the nominations are made by people working there and even though I have only been there 18 months and am decidedly not managing anything at all I found out today that apparently I got a half dozen different nominations so while I am almost certainly not going to win the actual award I have to imagine this means they will instead crown me Miss Congeniality and give me a tiara for being the friendliest most specialest girl in the factory.

#I got told like a week ago that I was nominated but there's usually like 40 people on the list #a lot of the time people make pacts to nominate each other #I assume for like resume reasons or something #I was not particularly invested in it on account of the aforementioned winner history #but today I actually asked who it was that nominated me #and it was apparently people from all over #am I making a significant contribution to the company?#no I don't give a fuck about the company #but I give a fuck about making cool things and being nice to people and helping people make cool things #I think that that is a lot more important than coming up with strategies to save the company $10k a year #oh and when I get back from holidays I am going to start agitating for them to start paying us the right amount of long service leave #so they are really going to love that #whoops I guess I COST you $100k a year by talking to the lawyers at the union and proving that you're not giving us our benefits #whoopsie daisy!

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nyuuronfly · 7 months

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On Rain World lore and it's implementation within the game.

This is kindof a random ramble I went on in a Discord chat and just feel like sharing elsewhere. (also note this is all primarily in reference to the original game, Survivor's story.)

I honestly think too many miss the forest for the trees a bit with RW, in terms of how important the lore is, if that makes sense. I talked with somebody about first-time experiences with the game and they said they'd watched a number of lore explanation videos on YT before starting, because of some reason along the lines of "I didn't trust the game to deliver its own story properly." To me this is almost saddening to hear because I really feel that misses the point of why the game has it's lore to begin with.

To me, while playing, any tidbits i learned about history or other information contributed to a feeling like the world I was navigating had a very real history that saturated it, yet one that I would be unable to grasp fully. It is an illusory feeling of realness, given how it is experienced. The game is mechanically not designed to incentivize collecting many information pearls, especially when in the original game you can literally just drop them off a cliff and lose them forever. You get the feeling often like you are bound to never be able to get everything, nor would you even probably want to put in the effort, so the illusion actually stays stronger because of that. Your mind wanders speculating about every little detail, whether intention truly existed behind it or not, because it feels like it did. You learned that it might have. Maintaining that illusion while playing I think is the primary reason they were included, not actually the experience of "knowing" the history. Rain World in general seems to have a thematic fixation on the simple idea that individuals have limited perspectives. Joar Jakobsson has said that one of the core ideas behind Rain World was to recreate the life of a "rat in Manhattan." That is to say, a creature that understands how to find food, hide, and live in a complex man-made structure, that cannot understand it's structuring purpose or why it was built. The very core issue of the iterators, is that the solution to the "great problem" intrinsically has to lie with knowledge that could only be obtained from "the other side." They are corporeal beings trying to know something that pertains to something outside corporeal reality. Yet pursuit of knowledge is very important to creatures like ourselves. Collecting any individual pearl is mostly an exercise in doing a lot just for little bits of knowledge. There is a lot of understanding of just how significant wanting to know more is, even something unimportant, when you are left in the dark the way you are in the game. Most information pearls you deliver are literally completely useless to know about, but they feel personally important, especially in how finding them relates to your connection to the iterators. My primary motivation to find pearls in my first play was to spend more time with Moon. On a very real emotional level, Moon felt like my only friend in the world while I played. On a mechanical level, she does literally nothing. But Rain World manages to operate on a very emotional, even instinctual level with how it's designed. I wanted to be in her company and have something to give her. Because I am alone, and lost. So something along those lines is why I felt saddened to hear the sentiment like Rain World somehow "fails" to deliver it's "story." The purpose of the game is not to find pearls and hear about some grand narrative. At it's core, Rain World is a game that's design was inspired by nature, and it's use of history within the world relates to us as a player the way history relates to us as people. It is relayed through people reading from records created by parties with their own perspectives, and connects us abstractly to a sensation that there is more out there than our own lives. That is a feeling you have as a player, and ultimately the true story that Rain World tells is the memories you have playing it. What you did, saw, and felt. The same as how our story is that of our own lives. That is the purpose of the game.

#rain world #just rambling

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sunbloomdew · 11 months

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Love Confessions in the Baxter DLC

The sequel! Monochrome obsession continues. Part 2/3

Part 1 "The Wedding Confession"

Welcome, or hello again! I played the Baxter DLC a couple of times and I like it a lot, so I wanted to ramble about some of my favourite parts. Specifically about love confessions in Baxter’s version of Step 4, because they are all very well written and make me feel good :3

Reading the first part of this "series" isn't necessary, the introduction is just a bit more thorough in the first post. Furthermore if you've read the first part it might seem like i'm repeating myself with certain points, since those moments share some similarities and i like to be meticulous.

It is time for the second confession and the last one that can be initiated by the player. If you don’t confess here and pick an option in which MC expresses hope of Baxter returning their feelings, you will later reach the moment where Baxter asks MC out himself. This confession is my personal favourite, so prepare for me losing my mind over every single detail.

Spoilers for Baxter DLC!

The confessions all happen after the wedding ceremony, so if you hadn't played to this point yet, i recommend skipping this post (and maybe coming back later, if you wanna chat about them with me)! I may not bring up every single line, but i think this post still covers a good part of what happens.

I call this confession, The Morning Confession, because it takes place on the morning after the wedding! Simple name but it does the job.

There is also another reason for this name, but i'll get to it later.

The wedding is over and most stuff had been cleaned up. MC returns with Baxter to his apartment, after accepting his invitation to stay with him until they have to come back to their home. The two have finally reunited and they aren’t ready to part ways yet.

During that evening, MC and Baxter share a moment by the fireplace in the lobby of the building. I wanted to dedicate some time to this moment, because I think it’s a valuable context to the confession. And aside from providing insight into the mind of Baxter Ward, I love the way it’s written. So sue me, i wanna talk about it.

Despite the fact that they have reconciled, Baxter’s reasoning behind his actions still isn’t fully clear to MC. While being in the company of other people made the lingering unease between them bearable, it still remains. They can't act casually, as if nothing had happened, as if the years hadn’t been lost. So Baxter offers to clarify his point of view. “As sorry as I am, I don’t think I’ve been as open as I could have been” he says and well, that is the truth.

If the player chose to confess to Baxter before this conversation, this moment provides a deeper understanding of the character and explains his reluctance to accept the confession.

It is here by a fireplace – a fitting spot for another personal conversation, considering the duo's shared history – that Baxter reveals his innermost thoughts and fears. At his core, he believes he doesn’t contribute anything to any relationship, because he can't see his own value. And to him, if he doesn’t add anything, then he has no right to form and be in deep, mutually supportive relationships.

Baxter convinced himself that he doesn’t matter. That his only worth is in the entertainment he can provide or the help he can give. In his own words, he doesn’t know what it means to be significant to a person, just by being yourself. Which is why he doesn’t let people get close to him. He assumes that upon finding out that there is nothing more to him, they will leave. So it’s better to not let anybody get to know him, that way no one can be disappointed by his “true” self. He is unable to see that none of that is true because deep down, he thinks he is worthless as a person.

Those feelings about himself are something that have influenced Baxter’s decisions about relationships with other people, for example with Xavier. As the baker reveals later, they always felt that if Baxter had no reason to contact them again, he wouldn't. He kept himself away from others and believed that every connection he makes isn’t meant to last.

Still, Baxter wanted to create bonds with other people. And it terrified him.

He wanted to have that with MC, but he was too afraid to take that chance five years ago. It couldn't have worked out back then. Baxter had his assumptions about himself and others, and he held onto them strongly. It’s sad, but there was no way to make him change his ways back then. He was set on leaving no matter what would have happened.

This Baxter is different from the 19 year old who put his comfort above all else. During that conversation by the fireplace he is being vulnerable in ways he never allowed himself to be before. He tells MC that he missed them over those five years. That they made him feel wanted that summer, and as incredible as it felt, he couldn’t believe it would last. He makes it clear that it wasn’t any of MC’s actions that made him feel that way - he applied this mindset to every connection he made at that time.

It’s incredibly sad to witness his thoughts out in the open like that. I think Baxter’s struggles are something most of us can relate to in some way. Low self-esteem can make people withdraw from social situations and spiral into self-hatered. It’s terrible, to be so wrapped up in disliking yourself that you assume that nobody could ever like you. That you have no good qualities as a person, so you have to make up for them somehow. It can feel like it'll stay this way forever, and so there is no point in trying to connect with others.

However that is not true. In the end, Baxter came to understand this as well. He is worthy of love and friendship. He grew and learned from his past mistakes, and so can we.

He apologises to MC once again, and expresses deep regret over not staying in contact with them. And at last, MC can say that they actually know Baxter Alexander Ward.

I think this moment is really beautiful. It’s an apology without excuses, that provides an explanation. Baxter never had malicious intentions, but even so, his actions had hurt people who cared for him (and who he cared about), so he owns up to his mistakes and does his best to correct them.

Aside from being a really good moment of taking accountablity and being vulnerable with another person this conversation also sets the mood for the morning confession. The air is finally cleared. These two characters can finally show how much they value each other because there is mutual understanding and trust between them again. It will take some time to get to know each other after so long, but they are willing to try, and they know they can be honest.

After a day full of emotional revelations, Baxter and MC finally head to bed. Not only the characters, but the players can take a breath and prepare for what’s to come. And boy are we in for a treat.

The next day arrives and the players are given an option to sleep in as much as they want. What time MC wakes up will have an effect on dialogues and is one of the many examples of how the game lets us customize the protagonist however we want, even in the silliest ways. It is something i deeply appreciate about the Our Life series. The comfort level also changes the lines, for example MC's response to Baxter greeting them in the morning.

Eventually the sleeping beauty wakes up and the pair moves to the living room. Despite sleeping in for a while Baxter is still out of it and it’s so adorable (he's just like me fr).

I think the tone set for the confession is lovely. The atmosphere in the morning is relaxing and light and to me it feels like this is exactly what those characters needed. A new day has arrived, not only literally but figuratively for their relationship. There is no negative tension in the air, just the feeling of peace. They are clearly enjoying each other's company and it's great to finally have that again.

This is only my opinion, but the way this moment feels is exactly why i like it more than the wedding confession. The previous confession is meant to feel rushed, high on emotions and full of determination to declare the feelings right away. MC feels like they have to be upfront about their feelings in that moment so they confess. I do enjoy this type of tension, but i simply prefer this kind of setting. As much as i love convincing Baxter to truly express his feelings by shooting down the reasons not to date him (it's so intense and dramatic! absolutely amazing) i find that i like this quiet admission of feelings more.

While it might not be that intense as the moment right after the wedding, there is still this nagging feeling that urges MC not to wait any longer. They love that they are included in this private corner of Baxter's life and they wish they could have been before. It's this feeling of not wanting to lose any more time, that makes them think about confessing then and there.

And so, the player is presented with a choice:

It is time to confess! Hallelujah.

Just like in the wedding confession we can pick the way we want to confess - with words or with a gesture. If we pick the third option you lose the chance to confess yourself. Instead Baxter will do this when the time comes.

Upon choosing one of the ways to confess, MC has the same internal monologue they do in the wedding confession. I've already shared my thoughts about it in the previous post, but i'll just say here that it's a very nice scene. They reminisce about their relationship with Baxter as a whole, eventually coming to the conclusion, that they can hold on to him.

After the monologue ends, the player has a chance to reaffirm their decision, as they did in the previous confession.

If you back out, MC thinks that they can be together just not in the way they'd want to. They are afraid of confessing, in case they ruin what they just got back and make Baxter run away.

But, if you reaffirm your decision, you get my personal favourite confession scene. Let's get right into it!

I mentioned in Part 1 that Baxter reacts to MC's silence, as they reminisce about their relationship. I find it a little funny when i imagine them just sitting in silence and staring intensely for a while. Kinda like when magical girls have their transformations and the bad guys don't do anything to interrupt them. MC monologuing definitely gives off the same energy. Writing inner monologues is tricky like that.

During the wedding confession Baxter is anxious and worried, waiting to receive MC's verdict. Do they welcome him back to their life? Or do they reject him (even though there is no such option in the game)?. It's stressful and the prolonged silence makes Baxter slowly come back to his usual behaviour to protect himself, in case his vulnerability was the wrong move.

This isn't the case here. His reaction is wildly different. There is no tension or stress, just curiosity and anticipation. Instead of being nervous he is very smug, clearly knowing or at least suspecting what MC is thinking about. I gotta say, when i first picked this option i was stunned. I did NOT expect him to act in this way, but it was a pleasant surprise. Mr. Ward is very perceptive and i love this confident attitude of his.

MC asks him what is on his mind, and he comes back to reality. Baxter encourages them to continue, but they insist he tells them what's going on. And that's what he does. He says that he was remembering a "funny story". Then he asks MC if they want to know something absolutely embarrassing. With that kind of an opening, how could they refuse?

Baxter tells them that Jude and Scott attempted to speak to him about his and MC's... situation. He was surprised that they noticed he was sad and wanted to help him, when he was supposed to be doing that with their relationship. I think it was his feelings of inferiority that made him feel that way.

Moving on, the reason he brought that up wasn't to draw attention to how his poor relationship management skills made others concerned for him. But rather to point out, that the men knew, that MC is important to Baxter. Baxter states that he was grateful they met and despite ending their relationship five years ago, he was never sorry he knew MC. He is kinda chaotic with his admission, one second bringing up the chat with the grooms and the other expressing his affection for MC.

Understandably, it makes MC confused. They thought they were the one leading the dance - or the conversation in this case - but clearly now it's Baxter doing that (i mean he is a professional). Even so, he isn't as good with his words as usual and doesn't quite manage to convey what he wants to MC.

He thanks MC for letting him "ramble" for so long and stands up. Shit's getting real. We're about to enter the boss fight.

He moves to sit on the edge of the coffee table, which puts him at the eye level with MC, only closer than before. And then this silly man leans closer acting all calm and confident. Dude. Please. Everytime i play this moment i lose my precious ability to formulate thoughts, not to mention actual sentences. Because. Oh my god.

And then he hits you with THAT. He absolutely knew what MC was thinking about and he is having a lot of fun with teasing them. They realize that he caught on to what was going on and figure that at least it makes it easier to confess. The dialogue varies in this place because of the comfort level - these are their thoughts on the Direct setting. They also think about how hard would it be to tell him they liked him before he opened up to them. I find it pretty funny, because it’s clearly a tiny poke, towards players who did confess right after the wedding and faced this struggle. When you’re replaying those moments it does make you chuckle.

Now we can finally confess our feelings! When doing that verbally there are a couple of options to choose from, as in the case of the wedding confession. One of the options is: "Could I consider all the time we spent together a date?" and you already know i love this one. It's playful, it's a reference to when Baxter asked MC out five years ago, it's perfect. There is no contender, i always choose it.

...Is what i would say, but i actually always choose the option to confess with a kiss during this feelings reveal.

Confessing with a kiss looks a bit different from the first confession. This time there aren't multiple options to choose where we want to kiss him, MC goes straight (or is it?) for the lips. And the way that kiss is described is everything to me. I'm an absolute sucker for kissing scenes and this one is just so, so, so good! I cannot find fitting words in english (and neither can i in polish) so i'll just drop one screenshot from it and move along before i combust.

It's so tender and sweet and adorable please-

While Baxter was acting super confident and cocky, the second MC declares their love for him/moves to kiss him he turns into a shy, blushing mess. Despite knowing or at least suspecting what MC was about to do he is still caught of guard. I think that his reaction is absolutely adorable. Baxter doesn't blush a lot, so it's always a treat when he does.

We can choose to tell Baxter, that MC wanted to be with him even five years ago and this stuns him again.

Now that MC have confessed their love they're waiting for Baxter to respond. But GOD, is he struggling. It's the first time Baxter is so flustered and it makes me so giddy. He allows himself to show how much MC means to him and holy shit, this man cannot look at them for too long because he will just blush even harder.

From the way he is acting it's already clear that he reciprocates MC's feelings. But the fact that he gets so shy? Stole my heart, sir how dare you be so cute.

Of course, Baxter Ward cannot stay flustered for long and he eventually recovers. Damn it.

His response to the confession is so sweet. He basically says "my turn" and tells MC all the things he loves about being with them, how they made him feel and how much he appreciates them. There is still a moment of self-loathing, when Baxter regrets trying to keep MC out of his life- twice. He is surprised that MC still has feelings for him, still wants to be with him despite all the pain he caused them.

He still brings up all the potential reasons why this could be a bad idea. Limited connections, his current financial situation and his past ways of managing relationships. But unlike in the Wedding Confession, here those aren't statements for MC to refute. I'd say they are less of a warning for MC and more of an expose of himself, to be sure that he revealed everything he considers a flaw before accepting their confession. "By all accounts, I shouldn't be doing this. But I am." - those are his words. Even if he still has his doubts, he isn't going to turn MC down anymore. If he let them go now, in fear of potentially not being enough in this relationship, he would regret it.

And so that is his response: "If you'll have me you will have me." Don't mind if i do- yoink.

While he calmed down a bit for this admission, he gets flustered yet again. It's so adorable to see him be so affected by MC and this situation.

Baxter says that it was easier asking MC out himself all those years ago. He is still so out of it that he voices out loud that he has no idea what to do now. His usual grace and poise are still on leave it seems. He follows it up with that it would be the best if he switched from sitting on the coffee table to somewhere with a backrest, just in case. Dude. Baxter is so strongly impacted by this confession that he is fully aware that there is a possiblity that he will just topple down. I'm melting, it's so cute!

He moves to the couch and MC joins him over there. Once Baxter calms down a bit, he says he is starting to "remember some possiblities" and the two kiss again. I can't even begin describe how much i love the way the kissing moments are written. They're amazing and i'm losing my mind.

The last question Baxter has is if his feelings were obvious to MC. He recounts when Jude asked him point-blank if he was still 'into' MC - we get a couple of dialogue answers to pick, either reacting to Jude even asking about it or answering Baxter's question.

And that is the end of this confession! Baxter overcomes his sheepishness at last, no longer blushing intensely. Quite a shame, but i think we all love his usual charming self as well.

There are no more reservations about showing his true feelings. The pair has been reunited after five years and are finally ready to start a long-term relationship. Good for them <3

Baxter shares one last thought at the end of this long conversation:

And yes, this is the other reason why i call this confession the Morning Confession specifically! It's entirely because of Baxter pointing it out. And because he is so surprised about this turn of events.

The second part is finally over! I worked on it during those two weeks (holy fuck, why) it took me to post it. I'm a bit bummed it took me this long to finish it, but i did my best <3

This part is definitely longer than the first, the brainrot got to me. I haven't started the third part yet but i already replayed the last confession scene and honestly? I forgot how good it was compared to the other two! Shame on me, truly.

See you in the third part! Peace out~

Part 1

#baxter ward #our life beginnings & always #olba baxter #baxter dlc #olba #our life beginnings and always #our life #gamer hours #sunbloom talks #gb patch games

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palestinian-fundraising · 17 days

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PLEASE READ AND REBLOG🇵🇸

Help Mahmoud and his family

Message from the creator:

Hello friends,

we are from Gaza.

As a result of the Israeli genocide launched by the occupation on the Gaza Strip, we were exposed to all the evils of life, including bombing, destruction, starvation, displacement, exploitation and exorbitantly high prices. We ask you, our friends all over the world, to ask for support and assistance in what you can do for us.

Mahmoud is a 27 year old Palestinian living in Gaza with a family of 8 currently in Rafah.Right now, Mahmoud is currently trying everything possible to save his family and give them a new chance in changing their lives by evacuating the genocide.

Currently, he is in Rafah with 8 of his immediate relatives and most of them are young children. Please help Mahmoud and his family. Mahmoud’s mother is very sick and is suffering from injuries along with the rest of his siblings.

Mahmoud and his family are currently displaced and they are suffering from many things such as sickness, limited food, and homelessness, and many other things in Rafah.

Please assist me and get this family safely into Egypt because Mahmoud also has a brother living in Egypt, Ahmad, waiting for their safety and arrival.

A message from Mahmoud himself; “My name is Mahmoud Kamel, and I am a Palestinian born and raise in Gaza. I am currently located in Rafah with my family which consists of my mother, father, and 5 siblings who are just little kids. My siblings have always told me what their future dream aspirations were, such as becoming an astronaut or firefighter but now all they dream of is being alive and seeing what the future holds for them. I remember celebrating my birthday, October 7th, with my family and enjoying each others company, and then suddenly all was gone, and so was my hope for the future.

I had many ambitions and dreams that are now lost due to everything that has happened in Gaza. The only thing I have now is the hope of the safety for me and most importantly, my family. With your help, I want to put my family in a safe and secure environment.”

Amidst everything that is happening in Rafah, Mahmoud is still trying to make his siblings happy. They are very strong kids and they hope for a future and to see Palestine free once again.

Mahmoud and his family has suffered due to injuries from the bombing, starvation, lack of food and water, and lack of shelter. Just recently, they found a camp to shelter them from the cold.

We would love if you could them in any way possible, sharing and donating. All of the money will be sent to Mahmoud so he can evacuate himself and his family to Egypt.Thank you for taking the time into looking at this Gofundme and thank you for your prayers and donations.

Please take a chance to view Mahmoud’s Instagram where he is currently updating his and other people’s day to day life in Rafah! Through the instagram you will not only see the lives of the people and children in rafah but how your help impacts them. Not only are you helping and putting a smile on Mahmoud’s family you would also put a smile on others face in Gaza amidst the hardship and what we have seen.

Mahmoud’s Instagram

Your generosity can change the future of many lives no matter how small and you will help them survive and save the last peace of hope .your contribution, no matter how small, can make a significant impact. Thank you.

the donations you make will go to mahmoud and his family evacuation and also some donations will go to people in gaza

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itsror9 · 30 days

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“Hello! My name is Ameer Azara, I am raising funds for my family in Gaza. My family and I are seeking your kindness so that we can evacuate to a safe place and complete our lives, our dreams, and live in peace.

The situation has become increasingly dire. Everything has changed, turned to ashes. Streets, buildings and people are all ash now. We have already been displaced within Gaza three times. The first time from our home, a large part of which was destroyed and is not fit for living, to refugee schools in central Gaza, the second time to Rafah without shelter, electricity, food and clean water.

Meet my family which consists of six people.

Ameer (me): I was working as a digital marketer in an advertising company. They destroyed my work office, my essential equipment, and the company I was working for.

Ahmed (father) & Asmaa (mother): My father used to work as a teacher at the UNRWA and had a family business (a grocery shop). The shop and his car were bombed during the war. My mother is a housewife.

Aya (sister): Aya is studying architecture. She studied for two years and has 3 years left to complete her studies. She was forced to stop studying due to her university being bombed. Her dream is to complete a bachelor's degree study and work in her field of specialization. She lost her laptop and engineering study tools that she used during her studies.

Afnan & Rafef (sisters): Afnan was in her last year of high school and was preparing to go to university to fulfill her dream of studying dentistry. Rafef is still a child in elementary school. She dreams to grow up in peace and complete her studies.

Ibrahim (brother): He is an international student studying in Hungary. He finds himself very far from our family, feeling helpless because he cannot help us through the hardships of the ongoing crisis in Gaza.

I have initiated this GoFundMe campaign to raise $45,000 to facilitate my family's evacuation to Egypt. Here's a breakdown of the funds:

$3,000 for Immediate Support: This portion will go towards providing immediate assistance to my family. It will cover their basic needs for accommodation, food, and other essentials during the transitional period.

$42,000 for Permits and Crossing Fees: The bulk of the funds, $42,000, is crucial to cover the expenses associated with obtaining permits to leave Gaza and the crossing fees required at the Egypt-Gaza border in Rafah. This amount breaks down to $7,000 per person.

Your support matters: Your donation, no matter how small, will make a significant impact and contribute to reuniting my family in a safe environment.

Please share this campaign with your friends, family, and colleagues to help us reach our goal and bring my family to safety. Your support means a lot to me, and I am grateful for any assistance you can provide during this challenging time.”

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downstarr · 4 months

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The King and The Hobbit

I've ventured into a new fandom with a short piece that imagined Thorin survived The Battle of the Five Armies.

The King and the Hobbit (3928 words) by downstar Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield Characters: Thorin Oakenshield, Bilbo Baggins Additional Tags: Fix-It, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Canon, Thorin Oakenshield Lives, First Time, POV Bilbo Baggins, Dwarves in the Shire, The Shire (Tolkien), Bag End (Tolkien), Love Confessions, Declarations Of Love, Friends to Lovers, Post-Hobbit, Dwarf/Hobbit Relationship(s), Non-Graphic Smut, Bottom Bilbo Baggins, Top Thorin Oakenshield, My First Work in This Fandom, bagginshield Summary: Several months after The Battle of the Five Armies, the dwarves travel to the Shire to celebrate Bilbo's birthday. One dwarf in particular arrives ahead of his company to reconnect with Bilbo. --- I recently did a marathon rewatch of LoTR and The Hobbit movies. I hadn't realized on first viewing how close to being canonical Thorin and Bilbo's love came. Thought I'd try my hand at this fandom and do a little Thorin lives piece. It was great fun to try out a new world and new voices. With apologies if I made any canon errors! I am a pretty casual Tolkien fan.

EXCERPT:

It was two days before the 53rd birthday of Bilbo Baggins, and the dwarves of Erebor were on their way.

As much as the Hobbits of the Shire did not approve of Bilbo’s wandering ways, his contributions during The Battle of the Five Armies and the retaking of Erebor from the dragon Smaug were already passing into the realm of legend. So, plans had been underway for weeks to celebrate his birthday with a lavish party.

Reservations about his improper adventuring aside, what hobbit doesn’t love an excuse to throw a feast?

Bilbo accepted the honour reluctantly, and only on the condition that the dwarves with whom he’d shared the quest would be invited. That nearly derailed the whole thing then and there, but after a bit of squabbling and peacemaking, the council agreed to the conditions.

Bilbo had spent the last week bustling around Bag End, preparing for his visitors whose presence he felt was far more significant than his own turning of the year. It was no trivial matter to travel from Erebor to the Shire, even though the journey could be made in relative peace and safety - unlike their original quest. So he was aware of what a great honour it was for his friends to make the journey.

At the best of times, Bilbo could be full of nervous energy. It had been hard enough to keep up his facade as an ordinary, respectable Hobbit when he hadn’t gone off on an adventure. But now that the residents of the Shire knew that his respectability had been a facade, they looked at him even more askance. That, in turn, had made him even more self-aware, especially as it felt like the entire Shire was attending his birthday party. There was admiration and awe in the way the Shirefolk looked at him, as well. Just because a Hobbit didn’t want to go off fighting dragons themselves didn’t mean they didn’t admire his courage.

Admiration felt almost more awkward than disapproval to Bilbo. But he’d slowly been learning to lean into the attention. Still, he felt very relieved and excited that his dwarven friends would be attending as well. And one friend in particular.

Bilbo was just finishing stowing away the most valuable pieces of silver and sentimental knickknacks when there was a knock on his door.

As Hobbits tended to be very well-mannered about not dropping by unannounced so late, Bilbo convinced himself he’d imagined the knock and went right back to his tidying up.

The knock came again, this time harder and unmistakable.

Bilbo crept cautiously from the kitchen toward the entryway, peering around the corner and doing a little halt-step. The movement of a shadow outside the window convinced him there was indeed someone out there. He twitched his nose, flickered his fingers, then cautiously stepped forward to pull open the door.

The figure was broad-shouldered and heavily cloaked, and no hobbit.

A moment of fear spiked down Bilbo’s spine. His adventure had shown him the wide word, but it had also made him much more aware of the mortal danger that most hobbits had the good fortune to never see. He started to reach for Sting, which hung just behind an old coat he kept by the door.

“You look upon me as an enemy, Bilbo Baggins. Surely these few months haven’t changed things between us so much.”

Bilbo immediately stopped reaching for his sword. The spike of fear turned to joy. “Thorin?!”

The bulky figure passed into the light of Bilbo’s entryway, revealing the most welcome face of the King Under the Mountain. Thorin smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling. “You sound surprised. Did you not invite us? Shall I go?” He motioned behind him.

Bilbo stood there staring at Thorin. They hadn’t seen each other in many, many months. When he’d left Erebor, Thorin was still under the care of Tauriel, whose Elven healing had saved him a mere breath from death’s door. Even then, his recovery had been long and slow, and Bilbo wasn’t certain that the King of Erebor would have the strength to make the journey to the Shire.

But now, here he was, standing right in front of him. Bilbo stared at him, and as he did, familiar, confusing feelings bubbled to the surface. He was somehow more handsome and noble than even his memory. He looked hale and healthy, though one hand held a silver-topped cane.

“Well?” asked Thorin with a roll of amused thunder in his tone. “Can I come in? I won’t do you the dishonour of pushing my way in uninvited as my kin and I once did.”

“Oh yes! Yes of course. You are most welcome. Most welcome, indeed. Come, come,” Bilbo reached out to catch Thorin’s arm and pull him inside. He looked past him and stepped out onto the porch. He’d expected a gaggle of dwarves to be in Thorin’s company, but the lane was quiet save for the singing of cicadas. “You’re alone?”

“I left my company behind in Bree, where they will stay for the night. They will make their way here tomorrow. But I wanted to come ahead, to see you before the madness of the celebration to come.”

Bilbo closed the rounded door and found himself staring at Thorin again. He wore a travelling cloak, but as the weather was still mild, it was not rimmed in fur. Even without that added bulk, the broad set of his shoulders was apparent.

Bilbo reached for the cloak, and Thorin shrugged it off into his hands. He staggered under the weight of it. “Please, come in. Have a seat. I’ll make us some tea. Are you hungry?” He bustled off and gently set the heavy cloak on an armchair, then made his way back to the kitchen. He rocked on his feet, his whole body humming with unexpected excitement and a touch of nerves.

Thorin rested his cane against the wall. He stood a bit askance and it was clear he was favouring the side where the orc blade had cut him clean through and nearly taken his life. “I wish nothing of you but your company, Bilbo. But…” he grinned softly, “...a cup of tea would not go amiss.”

“Right! I’ll get right on that. I’ve got some lovely cakes as well. The food is quite horrible in Bree. You’re probably dying for a bit of proper food after so long on the road. I’ll…”

Bilbo’s bustling was stopped in its tracks when Thorin caught his arm.

Continue reading on Ao3

#fanfic #fanfiction #ao3 #the hobbit #thorin x bilbo #bilbo baggins #the hobbit bilbo #thorin oakenshield #bagginshield #fix it fic #thorin fic #the shire #hobbits #bag end #fic rec #the hobbit fic #thilbo #bilbo x thorin

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hpalways · 1 year

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Field of Academia || Alhaitham

Fandom: Genshin Impact

Character: Alhaitham x Reader

Warnings: None

As a young scholar studying at the Sumeru Akademiya, you were fascinated by the intellectual prowess of Alhaitham, the Akademiya's Scribe. His unmatched intellect and sharp wit drew you in, and you found yourself seeking his guidance and advice on all matters of academia.

Over time, your admiration for Alhaitham grew into something more, and you found yourself drawn to him in ways that you couldn't explain. However, Alhaitham's uncompromising views on rationality and truth made it difficult for you to connect with him on a personal level. He was distant and cold, seemingly more concerned with the pursuit of knowledge than the affections of others.

Despite this, you found yourself pining over him, longing for his attention and affection. You would often catch yourself staring at him during lectures or daydreaming about him in your studies. You knew that your feelings for him were irrational, but you couldn't help but feel drawn to him.

One day, while you were lost in thought, Alhaitham approached you. You were surprised to see him so close, as he had never shown much interest in your company before.

"May I have a word with you?" he asked, his piercing gaze fixed on you.

You nodded, feeling nervous but also excited at the prospect of having his undivided attention.

"I have noticed that you have been following my work closely," he said, his tone cool and measured. "I must say, I am impressed by your dedication to the pursuit of knowledge."

You felt a rush of warmth flood through you at his words. It was the closest thing to a compliment that you had ever heard from him.

"Thank you, Alhaitham," you replied, your heart pounding in your chest.

For a moment, the two of you stood in silence, each lost in thought. You wondered if he had any inkling of your feelings for him, or if he was simply making polite conversation.

Then, suddenly, Alhaitham spoke again.

"I know that I can be difficult to approach at times," he said, his voice softer now. "But I want you to know that I value your insights and opinions. Your perspective is unique, and I believe that we could learn a lot from each other."

You felt a surge of hope rise in your chest. Was he really saying what you thought he was saying?

"Would you like to work with me on a research project?" he asked, his gaze intense. "I believe that together, we could make significant contributions to the field of academia."

You felt a smile spread across your face, unable to contain your joy.

"Yes, Alhaitham," you replied eagerly. "I would love to work with you."

As the two of you walked away, you couldn't help but feel that this was just the beginning of something special. Alhaitham may be difficult to understand, but you knew that there was something special between the two of you, and you were excited to explore it further.

#genshin impact #Genshin #alhaitham #alhaitham x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact drabble #genshin alhaitham #alhaitham x you #x reader #reader insert #fluff #cute

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soon-palestine · 27 days

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My name is Abdullah Mohammed, and I am a father of three children, with my pregnant wife in the sixth month, along with my parents and younger brother. We are all enduring the harsh and deplorable conditions of war. The challenges began the moment the war erupted on October 7th, forcing us to flee our home with family members to different locations, a situation known as displacement. We have been constantly on the move, seeking refuge in vehicles and trucks, navigating the harsh reality of bombardments, clinging to life.

I lost my recently built apartment, and unfinished payments are still pending, just months before the war started. Additionally, I lost my local job as a graphic design trainer, and my remote work as a graphic designer with international companies suffered due to the challenges posed by the ongoing conflict. After 150 days of war, I lost clients as I couldn't deliver their projects with the same efficiency as before.

I am in need of financial support to initially travel to Egypt, where a coordination process facilitates the travel arrangements. The cost of this coordination is $5000 for adults and $2500 for each child. With three children, my pregnant wife, as well as my parents and younger brother, the total cost amounts to approximately $27,000. Currently, I am putting in tremendous effort, working in any available opportunity, to accumulate as much money as possible to assist my family in their travel endeavors.

Moreover, to start a new life, I require a small amount to rent a house until I can regain stable employment and begin saving money to face life's challenges. I am an experienced graphic designer capable of providing professional services in designing commercial advertisements, brand logos, and signs. I am adaptable to work under any circumstances, and I am reaching out for your support to rebuild my life and that of my family. Your contribution will make a significant impact in overcoming these challenges, especially with my pregnant wife in the sixth month and the presence of my parents and younger brother.

#palestine #gaza #free palestine

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rhaenys-queenofkhyrulzz · 21 days

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BangSeon Corporate/Chaebol AU

Was looking through the divine google doc of unfinished wips yesterday and came upon my plan for a chaebol au fic. Since I couldn't get the idea out of my head, 5 1/2 hours of poor time management later, this art was born:

ignore the 2016 eyebrows my dears 🙈

Initially, the idea behind the fic was to have Seon-ho secretly form an alliance with Bang-won—one of the top candidates for the CEO Position in Yi Group—to take down Nam Group—Yi Group’s prime competitor—which is headed by none other than Nam Jeon.

Of course, Bang-won isn't trusting of Seon-ho at first (Mainly because when they first met, Seon-ho had broken into his apartment to steal some documents from him. Oh. And he had a knife. So definitely not a good first impression). But he accepts his help in exchange for giving him access to specific documents & not calling up his armed security right away ('cause honestly like hell Bang-won is gonna let his little half-brother take that CEO Position from him). By working together with Seon-ho, he'll make a significant contribution to the company's future. The board will most definitely back him as the next leader.

A few months go by as they work on their plan. The more time they spend together, they realise that each other's presence is equally as infuriating as it is arousing.

At some point, they're both invited to some high society dinner along with their families but they were SO not expecting to see each other there. Bang-won sees Seon-ho out of his usual dark hoodies and sweats for the first time and his brain short-circuits. Though, he is a bit pissed off that Seon-ho didn’t tell him he’d be there. Seon-ho shares the sentiment. They have to pretend they don't know each other as if they haven’t spent the last 3 months working together on their plan.

Bang-won suggests they go chat somewhere more private do they duck into the first empty room they can find. As soon as the door closes, Bang-won cornering Seon-ho against the wall.

Words burst out of his throat before he can stop himself. “What the hell are you doing here?"

Seon-ho pushes forward and into his personal space. “I was invited dumbass.”

“You’ll blow our cover.”

“If I recall, you’re the one who asked to speak to me here."

Bang-won laughs, mirthless and condescending. "Because you were talking to the damn man we've been looking into since we started this thing. Wasn't it obvious how fucking stupid that was of you?"

"Oh I'm the stupid one, now am I?!" Seon-ho juts his chin forward and then there are barely inches between their faces. "God you’re so infuriating sometimes I just want to-”

“to what?”

Cue both internal monologues of their Anthony Bridgerton feels aka bane of my existence talk.

And then their lips are smashing together in a kiss. Heated make out session, hand fisting in shirt, teeth clacking. Both trying to devour the other basically.

1 gratuitous minute later, there's a knock at the door making them spring apart.

The rest of the plans are just plot stuff. Hope you enjoyed!

#mctna #my art #fan art #mctna fanart #my country the new age #nam seon ho #yi bang won #bangseon #I know I said ignore the eyebrows but ignore their 70s gangster style too 😭#fic ideas

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cliozaur · 10 months

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This one is really long, so I’ll start with the best part — the most stylish and iconic entrance: “'Would you like my hat?'…/All wheeled round. It was Javert.” This cop does indeed possess a sense of humour! And Javert’s entrance is intertwined with a series of coincidences. In fact, the entire book is teeming with coincidences, it sometimes feels as though Hugo is abusing them, yet this is an integral element of his writing style. Through sheer happenstance, Éponine scribbled "The bobbies are here" to showcase her writing prowess, by a mere stroke of luck, Marius in his stunned state recollected this piece of paper, and through yet another twist of fate, the police happened to arrive just minutes later without even being summoned! I adore the way the genre of the Gorbeau house scene transitions from horror to melodrama (with Marius' moral struggles), then to farce (with the bandits' chaotic antics and poor planning), and finally to comedy with Javert's entrance.

The bandits don't exactly shine in this chapter! While they initially appeared menacing upon their arrival (and there are three more in this chapter) this aura quickly dissipates as they start to act. Their actions are too chaotic, too disorganized, too unprepared for the challenges posed by Valjean’s courage and strength. A trio from the Patron-Minette quartet joins the fray, all brandishing (symbolic?) weapons. I am somewhat taken aback with Claquesous’ “enormous key stolen from the door of some prison.” Wow! Just wow! (on one of the illustrations - at the end of this post - it's grotesquely enormous) They lost Montparnasse along the way (he preferred the company of Éponine over joining the group of idiots assembled at the Gorbeau hovel). Their willingness to accept Thénardier as their leader and trust him with all the planning suggests that indeed, it’s a low season for crime and they are desperate.

Thénardier never shuts up in this chapter, he rants and rants. I was utterly outraged when he spoke of Cosette as a lost source of income. Well, he mentioned believing that she “belonged to rich people” and that he “might have extracted enough to live on all my life!” However, given that Cosette did not, in fact, belong to rich people, and considering how he used his own daughters for soliciting out, we can only imagine HOW he might have used Cosette to extract income from her. What a terrible alternative! Yet, he is once again telling some reasonable things about the plight of the poor, such as: “We, it is we who are thermometers. We don’t need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the Tour de l’Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold; we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our hearts, and we say: ‘There is no God!’”

I'm not inclined to delve into Marius' hesitations and quasi-moral dilemma at this moment. Despite my sympathies toward him, he did come across as rather insufferable here. But I like the fact that he was proud of Jean Valjean. Nonetheless, his contribution was rather minimal, with the sole positive action being the toss of Éponine's note into the neighbour’s room.

Valjean is truly amazing here. He is calm, unperturbed, inventive, and displays remarkable sangfroid. A real icon of stoicism. And I have a feeling that his shocking act of burning his right hand with the red-hot chisel is a clear allusion to the legend of Scaevola, a tale of significance to certain stoics. The emphasis Hugo places on Valjean gripping the chisel in his left hand assures me that my assumption is not unfounded. And I so much wish Hugo had afforded us even a fleeting glimpse into Valjean’s mind during this juncture! While we are privy to every trifling notion crossing Marius' thoughts, at this pivotal juncture in the narrative, we remain largely ignorant of Valjean's inner musings. It’s such a pity. But, at the same time, it makes him so mysterious.

Claquesous' enormous key:

#les mis letters #lm 3.8.20 #les miserables #jean valjean #javert #thenardier #eponine #patron minette #claquesous #montparnasse #marius pontmercy #cosette

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revolutionarywomen-5781 · 2 years

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News Flash: FLR Movie Finding Love

THE NEXT SHOOT

The screenplay is done and I am very excited to announce the next scene that we will be shooting in our effort to find investors for the full film. It's the scene I refer to as "The Ritual" where Renee and her cohort of dominant women take Butler through a ritual of submission and acceptance.

I am excited to announce that we will be working closely with the SMC: The Service of Mankind Church, a real FemDom Church which was founded in 1979 in California, in order to recreate one of their official rituals on film for the first time! (These images are taken from the Essemian Manifesto, and you can read excerpts here: https://darkside-goddess.org/A_Excerpts.htmL) This will become a stand alone short submitted to festivals and it will end up in the finished feature. I have the pleasure of working with MaitresseX, the current acting Priestess, in order to make this a beautiful and authentic ritual happen. As it turns out, Renee's Butler was a card carrying member some 30 years ago.

The historical significance of this short, along with the lushness and emotional and spiritual depth this scene will add to our movie is something I am very proud to be a part of! I am deeply moved and grateful that the SMC has allowed us to include them in our project.

I have set a crowdfunding goal to make this all happen with the kind of visual grace and beauty I want. We have raised over $45,000 so far, most of which has been spent on the first scene as well as marketing, attending film markets to find investors, and overhead. When we reach around $75K I will give this shoot the green light and set everything in motion.

Help make it happen by contributing below! And if you want to be an investor with $20K or more and get a return on your contribution, reply to this e-mail for the full investment package!

CONTRIBUTE HERE

Meanwhile, I have gathered a group of dominant women from all around the globe to further expand The Company. Don't know what The Company is? You'll find out more by listening to Obedient Love podcasts #19, 22 and 23, as well as find the clues that you will need in order to join us, in one of my hypno podcasts.

I'm waiting for more of you to figure out how to get your key to unlock this new experience of submission. The clues are quite obvious if you only explore... what are you waiting for?

Available on all your favorite podcast apps as well as YouTube: https://obedientlove.podbean.com/ https://www.youtube.com/ViolaVoltairine

Already know the numeric passcode and five word passphrase? Respond with the same to this email to get your full application to join as a submissive member of The Company. Dominant Women, there's no passcode needed for you, just contact me to express your interest.

From a new woman member of our organization: "Viola! This is Fucking Amazing! I was trembling and crying as I was reading through the description [of the Company]. This is something I've desired for a long time! Thank you for being the woman that created this!"

xo, Ms. V. CONTRIBUTE HERE My subs and I journal almost every day at cathexishouse.com. And I create video lessons on how to become the best submissive you could possibly be! Take my FREE three-day FLR class for men here: http://obedient.love/

#gynarchy #female led marriage #female led relationship #submission #mistress and slave #female supermacy

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blackpearlblast · 4 months

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Was gonna reblog the post to ask but now I can't soo I'll just ask here:

I'm genuinely confused how Nintendo licensing some company to open a store in Israel back in 2019 equates to them supporting Israel? Especially if Nintendo themselves don't even consider the store official.

In addition, I believe the BDS have gone on record to state that you should only boycott what they've officially announced boycotts for, as boycotting things willy-nilly won't work in the long-term if there is not a dedicated effort behind it.

you're right that BDS isn't about individual consumer boycotts and the BDS targeted boycotts will Always be most important. however, BDS does not say that people cannot or should not engage in their own consumer boycotts.

"Many people are personally boycotting brands that have stated support for apartheid Israel, and that’s great – but we want to stress that consumer boycotts are most effective when taken as a collective action, and BDS isn’t just about consumer boycotts." -BDS Guide to Strategic Campaigning for Palestinian Rights

the BDS movement has also recognized some of the organic boycotts that have shown up since oct. 7th, such as the mcdonald's and wix boycotts. (source)

in my post i tried to explain the reason that boycotting nintendo was important for me, personally, and might be something other people would want to do based on the information i had found, was that i frankly don't usually purchase most of the products on the BDS list anyway. my post wasn't meant to declare nintendo a strategic target for boycotting and i apologize if that was what anyone took away from it. my point was, for those of us who games are a significant hobby and we tend to spend money on games as opposed to any of the BDS list targets, we might want to be aware of what one of the major game companies is supporting so we can withdraw or limit our spending on their products. i am not trying to call an organized boycott on nintendo, only make information available.

i'm still trying to piece together the timeline on what happened with the tel aviv location and why it was announced as a landmark, official location but no longer seems officially recognized by nintendo. it's possible that nintendo realized the controversy of opening an israeli location and hoped to dodge that controversy by letting a different company manage the location and letting it essentially fall by the wayside. i don't know! i do know that it is using official nintendo branding and they are profiting from that. there are multiple kinds of ways a company can support israel, in this case i mean that they are economically invested/in a mutually beneficial economic relationship. trying to sever economic ties between companies and israel is part of trying to get the company to divest from israel. it basically makes it clear that doing business with an apartheid state is unprofitable and isolates and puts further pressure on israel. (once again, this is the case with Larger scale boycotts. just trying to explain the strategy behind why people might boycott companies who "just" do business in israel without directly contributing to the larger human rights issues.)

#received #i hope this is coherent i am once again really sick today *___*#basically BDS and organic consumer boycotts are not the same thing but as long as BDS takes priority it's not an issue for there to be #organic consumer boycotts especially if it's something that (like for me) has a bigger presence in my life than a lot of the BDS targets #which i am also still avoiding

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uncloseted · 4 months

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Can you ever ask work if you can be taken off a task? I work in an office doing customer support parttime while studying fulltime. At work they've got me also supporting a new product that is poorly document and I've had no training in (its a third party software). I'm stressed out every day because I have no idea what I'm doing. I want to go back to only doing my old tasks. I voice how hard it is but my boss wont help because they don't know anymore than I do. I don't know what to do but quit

You definitely can ask to be taken off a task, but the way you go about it has to be incredibly polite, and you have to be prepared for the possibility that they'll leave you on the task anyway.

You might say something like, "I really appreciate the opportunity to work on this task and the fact that you trust me to complete it. However, I think it would be best for the project if I was released from this task. As this is a new product that I have not been trained in, I am concerned that I am not properly equipped to fulfill the client's needs. I believe there may be other projects within the company that would allow me to make a more significant contribution."

It's definitely not a great situation to be in, but if you've voiced these concerns to your boss in the past, they shouldn't be surprised when you make this request. That said, if the product is poorly documented and you weren't provided with training, it's possible that nobody knows how to use it, and so they might keep you on the project anyway. If that's the case, your options are basically to fumble your way through it, try to find someone who does know how to use it, or to quit.

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coongdaks · 2 months

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My work immersion experience spanned over a period of two weeks. During this time, I was assigned to Perfect Clean that prided itself on its inclusive and supportive work environment. From the moment I stepped into the office, I was met with warmth and acceptance. This immediate feeling of comfort allowed me to adapt quickly to the new environment and focus on learning and contributing to the best of my abilities. The company's culture played a significant role in making my work immersion experience a comfortable one. The atmosphere was collaborative, with open communication and mutual respect among all employees. My workmates, from the management to my fellow interns, were supportive and approachable. They were always ready to lend a helping hand or offer a word of advice. This positive environment fostered a sense of belonging and made my journey more enjoyable. My daily responsibilities varied, providing me with a well-rounded experience. I was involved in paper filling, scanning and so on. This broad exposure allowed me to gain a comprehensive understanding of the business operations and enhanced my versatility.The work immersion program was an enriching learning experience. I developed technical skills related to my field of study and soft skills such as communication, teamwork, and problem-solving. The practical experience also helped me understand the theoretical concepts better, bridging the gap between classroom learning and real-world application.Reflecting on my work immersion experience, I am grateful for the comfortable and supportive environment that facilitated my learning and growth. The experience has equipped me with valuable skills and insights, preparing me for my future career. It has also instilled in me the importance of a positive work culture in enhancing productivity and job satisfaction.

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surveillance-capitalism · 9 months

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Link without paywall:

And a copypaste for good measure:

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Of course, Musk could do so. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. “It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ”

In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.”

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

Typically, such a negotiation would be handled by the Pentagon’s acquisitions department. But Musk had become more than just a vender like Boeing, Lockheed, or other defense-industry behemoths. On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was deferential. According to unclassified talking points for the call, he thanked Musk for his efforts in Ukraine, acknowledged the steep costs he’d incurred, and pleaded for even a few weeks to devise a contract. “If you cut this off, it doesn’t end the war,” Kahl recalled telling Musk.

Musk wasn’t immediately convinced. “My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’ ” Musk told Kahl that the vivid illustration of how technology he had designed for peaceful ends was being used to wage war gave him pause.

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

The terms of the Starlink deal have not been made public. Ukrainian officials say that they have not faced further service interruptions. But Musk has continued to express ambivalence about how the technology is being used, and where it can be deployed. In February, he tweeted, “We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” He said, as he had told Kahl, that he was sincerely attempting to navigate the moral dilemmas of his role: “We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”

Musk’s hesitation aligns with his pragmatic interests. A facility in Shanghai produces half of all Tesla cars, and Musk depends on the good will of officials in China, which has lent support to Russia in the conflict. Musk recently acknowledged to the Financial Times that Beijing disapproves of his decision to provide Internet service to Ukraine and has sought assurances that he would not deploy similar technology in China. In the same interview, he responded to questions about China’s efforts to assert control over Taiwan by floating another peace plan. Taiwan, he suggested, could become a jointly controlled administrative zone, an outcome that Taiwanese leaders see as ending the country’s independence. During a trip to Beijing this spring, Musk was welcomed with what Reuters summarized as “flattery and feasts.” He met with senior officials, including China’s foreign minister, and posed for the kinds of awkwardly smiling formal photos that are more typical of world leaders.

National-security officials I spoke with had a range of views on the government’s balance of power with Musk. He maintains good relationships with some of them, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the two men met, several years ago, when Milley was the chief of staff of the Army, they have discussed “technology applications to warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous machines,” Milley told me. “He has insight that helped shape my thoughts on the fundamental change in the character of war and the modernization of the U.S. military.” During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. But other officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

One summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Musk and his friend Theo Taoushiani took Taoushiani’s father’s car for an illicit drive. Musk and Taoushiani were both in their mid-teens, and lived about a mile apart in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had a driver’s license, or permission from Taoushiani’s father. But they were passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans, and a new module—a fresh scenario in the game—had just been released. Taoushiani took the wheel for the twenty-minute drive to the Sandton City mall. “Elon was my co-pilot,” Taoushiani told me. “We went under the cover of darkness.” At the mall, they found that they didn’t have enough money. But Musk promised a salesperson that they would return the next day with the rest, and dropped the name of a well-known Greek restaurant owned by Taoushiani’s family. “Elon had the gift of the gab,” Taoushiani said. “He’s very persuasive, and he’s quite dogged in his determination.” The two went home with the module.

Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, and he and his younger brother, Kimbal, and his younger sister, Tosca, grew up under apartheid. Musk’s mother, Maye, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young, and the children initially stayed with Maye. She has said that Errol was physically abusive toward her. “He would hit me when the kids were around,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.” By the mid-eighties, Musk had moved in with his father—a decision that he has said was motivated by concern for his father’s loneliness, and which he came to regret. Musk, usually impassive in interviews, cried openly when he told Rolling Stone about the years that followed, in which, he said, his father psychologically tortured him, in ways that he declined to specify. “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” Taoushiani recalled witnessing Errol “chastise Elon a lot. Maybe belittle him.” (Errol Musk has denied allegations that he was abusive to Maye or to his children.) Musk has also said that he was violently bullied at school. Though he is now six feet one, with a broad-shouldered build, he was “much, much smaller back in school,” Taoushiani told me. “He wasn’t very social.”

Musk has said that he has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of what is now known as autism-spectrum disorder, which is characterized by difficulty with social interactions. As a child, he would sometimes fall into trancelike states of deep thought, during which he was so unresponsive that his mother eventually took him to a doctor to check his hearing. Musk’s quiet side persists—in my own interactions with him, I have found him to be thoughtful and measured. (Musk declined to answer questions for this story.) He can also be, as he joked during a stilted “Saturday Night Live” monologue, “pretty good at running human, in emulation mode.”

Musk escaped into science fiction and video games. “One of the reasons I got into technology, maybe the reason, was video games,” he said at a gaming-industry convention several years ago. In his early teens, Musk coded an eight-bit shooter game in the style of Space Invaders called Blastar, whose title screen, in a novelistic flourish, credits him as “E. R. Musk.” The premise was basic: “MISSION: DESTROY ALIEN FREIGHTER CARRYING DEADLY HYDROGEN BOMBS AND STATUS BEAM MACHINES.” But it won recognition from a South African trade magazine, which published the game’s hundred and sixty-seven lines of code and paid Musk a small sum.

Musk often talks about his science-fiction influences. Some have manifested in straightforward ways: he has connected his love of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels, whose characters grapple with a mathematically precise prediction of their civilization’s collapse, to his obsession with insuring human survival beyond Earth. But some of Musk’s touchstones present ironies. He has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody. In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels and radio plays, the latter of which were broadcast in South Africa during Musk’s childhood, a narcissistic playboy becomes the president of the galaxy, and Earth is demolished to make way for a space transit route. Musk is also an avowed fan of Deus Ex, a role-playing first-person-shooter video game that he has brought up when discussing his company Neuralink, which aspires to invent ability-enhancing body modifications like those featured in the game. During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace Covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the protagonist of the game, which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.

In 1999, Musk stood outside his Bay Area home to accept the delivery of a million-dollar McLaren F1 sports car. He was in his late twenties, and wearing an oversized brown blazer. “Some could interpret purchasing this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he told a CNN news crew. Then he beamed, saying that there were only about sixty such cars in the world. “My values may have changed,” he added, “but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.” Musk’s fiancée, a Canadian writer named Justine Wilson, seemed more aware. “It’s a million-dollar car. It’s decadent,” she said. “My fear is that we become spoiled brats. That we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.” The McLaren, she observed, was “the perfect car for Silicon Valley.”

Musk had moved to Canada when he was in his late teens, and met Wilson when they both attended Queen’s University, in Ontario. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. In 1995, the early days of the World Wide Web, he and Kimbal founded a company that came to be called Zip2, an online city directory that they sold to newspapers. Musk has often described the company’s humble origins, saying that he and his brother lived and worked in a small studio apartment, showering at a nearby Y.M.C.A. and eating at Jack in the Box. (Errol at one point gave his sons twenty-eight thousand dollars. Musk, who has a tendency to fuss over questions of credit, has stated that his father’s contribution came “much later,” in a round of funding that “would’ve happened anyway.”) At Zip2, Musk developed what he describes as his “hard-core” work style; even after he had his own apartment, he often slept on a beanbag at the office. But, in the end, the company’s investors stripped him of his leadership role and installed a more experienced chief executive. Musk believed that the startup should have been targeting not just newspapers but consumers. Investors pursued a more modest vision instead. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for three hundred and seven million dollars, earning Musk more than twenty million dollars.

Justine and Musk married the following year. After their first child died at ten weeks, from sudden infant death syndrome, the couple dealt with the tragedy in very different ways. Justine, by her account, grieved openly; Musk later told one of his biographers, Ashlee Vance, that “wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.” After pursuing I.V.F. treatment, the couple had twins, then triplets. (Musk now has at least nine children with three different women, and has said that he is doing his part to address one of his pet issues, the risk of population collapse; demographers are skeptical about the matter.) Justine wrote in an essay for Marie Claire that their relationship eventually buckled under the weight of Musk’s obsession with work and his controlling tendencies, which began with him insisting, as they danced at their wedding, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” A messy divorce ensued, leading to a legal dispute over their postnuptial financial agreement, which was settled years later. “He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa,” Justine wrote. “The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.” (Musk wrote a response to Justine’s account in Business Insider, discussing the financial dispute, but he did not address Justine’s characterizations of his behavior.)

After Musk left Zip2, he poured some twelve million dollars, a majority of his wealth, into another startup, an online bank called X.com. It was the first instance of his obsession with the letter “X,” which has now appeared in the names of his companies, his products, and his son with the artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. The bank also marked the beginning of a long and so far unfulfilled quest—recently revived in his effort to reinvent Twitter—to create an “everything app,” incorporating a payment system. In 2000, X.com merged with a competing online-payments startup, Confinity, co-founded by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel. In events that have since become Silicon Valley lore, Musk and Thiel battled for control of the company. Various accounts apportion blame differently. Hoffman told me, citing the story as an example of Musk’s disingenuousness, that Musk had pushed for the merger by highlighting the leadership of his company’s seasoned executive, only to force out the executive and place himself in the top role. “A merger like this, you’re doing a marriage,” Hoffman said. “And it’s, like, ‘I was lying to you intensely while we were dating. Now that we’re married, let me tell you about the herpes.’ ” People who have worked with Musk often describe him as controlling. One said, “In the areas he wants to compete in, he has a very hard time sharing the spotlight, or not being the center of attention.” In the fall of 2000, another coup, executed while Musk was on a long-delayed honeymoon with Justine, overthrew Musk and installed Thiel as the company’s head. Two years later, eBay acquired the company, by then called PayPal, for $1.5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the PayPal saga happened at its outset. In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows. “This isn’t insured,” Musk told Thiel. Musk’s critics have used the story to illustrate his reckless showboating, but it also underscores how often Musk has been rewarded for that behavior: he repaired the McLaren, drove it for several more years, then reportedly sold it at a profit. Musk delights in telling the story, lingering on the risk to his life. In one interview, asked whether there were parallels with his approach to building companies, Musk said, “I hope not.” Appearing to consider the idea, he added, “Watch this. Yeah, that could be awkward with a rocket launch.”

Of all Musk’s enterprises, SpaceX may be the one that most fundamentally reflects his appetite for risk. Staff at SpaceX’s Starship facility, in Boca Chica, Texas, spent December of 2020 preparing for the launch of a rocket known as SN8, then the newest prototype in the company’s Starship program, which it hopes will eventually transport humans to orbit, to the moon, and, in the mission Musk speaks about with the most passion, to Mars. The F.A.A. had approved an initial launch date for the rocket. But an engine issue forced SpaceX to delay by a day. By then, the weather had shifted. On the new day, the F.A.A. told SpaceX that, according to its model of the wind’s speed and direction, if the rocket exploded it could create a blast wave that risked damaging the windows of nearby houses. A series of tense meetings followed, with SpaceX presenting its own modelling to establish that the launch was safe, and the F.A.A. refusing to grant permission. Wayne Monteith, then the head of the agency’s space division, was leaving an event at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when he received a frustrated call from Musk. “Look, you cannot launch,” Monteith told him. “You’re not cleared to launch.” Musk acknowledged the order.

Musk was on site in Boca Chica when SpaceX launched anyway. The rocket achieved liftoff and successfully performed several maneuvers intended to rehearse those of an eventual manned Starship. But, on landing, the SN8 came in too fast, and exploded on impact. (No windows were damaged.) The next day, Musk visited the crash site. In a picture taken that day, Musk stands next to the twisted steel of the rocket, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, looking determined, his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. His tweets about the explosion were celebratory, not apologetic. “He has a long history of launching and blowing up rockets. And then he puts out videos of all the rockets that he’s blown up. And like half of America thinks it’s really cool,” the former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told me. “He has a different set of rules.”

Hans Koenigsmann, then SpaceX’s vice-president for flight reliability, started working on a customary report to the F.A.A. about the launch. Koenigsmann told me that he felt pressure to minimize focus on the launch process and Musk’s role in it. “I sensed that he wanted it taken out,” Koenigsmann said. “I disagreed, and in the end we wound up with a very different version from what was originally intended.” Eventually, Koenigsmann was told not to write a report at all, and a letter was sent to the F.A.A. instead. The agency, meanwhile, opened its own investigation. Monteith told me that he agreed with Musk that the F.A.A. had been conservative about a situation that presented little statistical risk of casualties, but he was nevertheless troubled. “We had safety folks who were very upset about it,” Monteith recalled. In a series of letters to SpaceX, Monteith accused the company of relying on data “hastily developed to meet a launch window,” launching “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ ” and exhibiting “a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture.” In its responses, SpaceX proposed various safety reforms, but also pushed back, complaining that the F.A.A.’s weather model was unreliable and suggesting that the agency had been resistant to discussions about improving it. (SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

The following March, Steve Dickson, then the F.A.A.’s administrator, called Musk. The two men spoke for thirty minutes. Like Kahl, Dickson was deferential, thanking Musk for his role in transforming the commercial space sector and acknowledging that SpaceX was taking steps to make its launches less risky. But Dickson, an F.A.A. spokesperson said in a statement, “made it clear that the FAA expects SpaceX to develop and foster a robust safety culture that stresses adherence to FAA rules.” Dickson had navigated such conversations before, including with Boeing after two 737 max aircraft crashed. But this situation presented a thornier challenge. “It’s not every day that the F.A.A. administrator releases a statement about a phone call that they have with the C.E.O. or the head of an aerospace company,” an official at the agency told me. “That kind of gets into the soft pressure, public pressure that you don’t do unless you are trying to change the incentive structure.”

The F.A.A. issued no fine, though it grounded SpaceX for two months. “I didn’t see that a fine would make any difference,” Monteith told me. “He could pull that out of his pocket. However, not allowing launches, that would get the attention of a company that prides itself on being able to iterate and go fast.” Musk has continued to complain about the agency. After it postponed another launch, he tweeted, “The FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.” He added, “Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

Musk has been fixated on space since his childhood. The idea for SpaceX came about after his exile from PayPal. “I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go” to Mars, Musk told Wired, in 2012. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing.” In 2001, he connected with space-exploration enthusiasts, and even travelled to Russia in an unsuccessful bid to buy missiles to use as rockets. The next year, he moved to Los Angeles, closer to California’s aerospace industry, and ultimately he pulled together a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and founded SpaceX, to make his own rockets. Private rocket launches date back to the eighties, but no one had attempted anything on the scale that Musk envisioned, and it proved to be more difficult and expensive than he had anticipated. Musk has said that, by 2008, the company was nearly bankrupt, and that, after putting much of his wealth into SpaceX and Tesla, he wasn’t far behind. “That was definitely the worst year of my life,” he said in an interview on “60 Minutes.” SpaceX’s first three launches had failed, and there was no budget for another. “I had no more money left,” Musk told Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, years later. “We managed to put together enough spare parts to do a fourth launch.” Had that failed, he added, “SpaceX would have died.” The launch was successful, and NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. In 2020, the company flew its first manned mission there—ending nearly a decade of American reliance on Russian craft for the task. SpaceX now launches more satellites than any other private company, with four thousand five hundred and nineteen in orbit as of July, occupying many of Earth’s orbital routes. “Once the carrying capacity of an orbit is maxed out, you’ve basically blocked everyone from trying to compete in that market,” Bridenstine told me.

There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies. “The U.S. government is in massive catch-up to build a more resilient space architecture,” Kahl, the former Pentagon Under-Secretary, told me. “And that only works if you can leverage the explosion of commercial space.” Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”

Even Musk’s critics concede that his tendency to push against constraints has helped catalyze SpaceX’s success. A number of officials suggested to me that, despite the tensions related to the company, it has made government bureaucracies nimbler. “When SpaceX and NASA work together, we work closer to optimal speed,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told me. Still, some figures in the aerospace world, even ones who think that Musk’s rockets are basically safe, fear that concentrating so much power in private companies, with so few restraints, invites tragedy. “At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”

In early 2022, Steven Cliff, then the deputy administrator of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, learned that potentially tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles had a feature that he found concerning. For years, Tesla has been working to create a totally self-driving car, a long-standing ambition of Musk’s. Now Cliff was told that a version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, an experimental feature that lets the cars navigate with little intervention from a driver, permitted cars to roll through stop signs, at up to about six miles an hour. This was clearly illegal. Cliff’s enforcement team contacted Tesla, and, in several meetings, a surprising conversation about safety and artificial intelligence played out. Representatives for Tesla seemed confused. Their response, as Cliff recalled, was “That’s what humans do all the time. Show us the data, why it’s unsafe.” N.H.T.S.A. officials told Tesla that, regardless of human compliance, “you should not be able to program a computer to break the law for you.” They demanded that Tesla update all the affected cars, removing the feature—a recall, in industry terms, albeit a digital one. “There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Cliff told me. “Like, at midnight on the very last day, they blinked and ended up recalling the rolling-stop feature.” (Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)

Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004, a year after it was incorporated. (He has spent years defending the formative nature of his role and was eventually, in a legal settlement, one of several people granted permission to use the term “co-founder.”) Musk was again entering a market bound by entrenched private interests and stringent regulation, which opened him up to more clashes with regulators. Some of the skirmishes were trivial. Tesla for a time included in its vehicles the ability to replace the humming noises that electric cars must emit—since their engines make little sound—with goat bleats, farting, or a sound of the owner’s choice. “We’re, like, ‘No, that’s not compliant with the regulations, don’t be stupid,’ ” Cliff told me. Tesla argued with regulators for more than a year, according to an N.H.T.S.A. safety report. Nine days after the rolling-stop recall, the company pulled the noises, too. On Twitter, Musk wrote, “The fun police made us do it (sigh).”

“It’s a little like Mom and Dad and children. Like, How far can I push Mom and Dad until they push back?” Cliff said. “And that’s not a recipe for a strong safety culture.”

The fart debate had low stakes; the over-all safety of the cars is a far greater matter. Tesla has repeatedly said that Autopilot, a more limited technology than Full Self-Driving, is safer than a human driver. Last year, Musk added that he would be “shocked” if Full Self-Driving didn’t become safer than human drivers by the end of the year. But he has never made public the data needed to fully corroborate those claims. In recent months, new crash numbers from the N.H.T.S.A., which were first reported by the Washington Post, have shown an uptick in accidents—and fatalities—involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Tesla has been secretive about the specifics. A person at the N.H.T.S.A. told me that the company instructed the agency to redact specifics about whether driver-assistance software was in use during crashes. (By law, regulators must abide by such requests for confidentiality, unless they decide to contest them in court.) Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, recently said that there were “concerns” about the marketing of Autopilot. Cliff told me he had seen data that showed Teslas were involved in “a disproportionate number of crashes involving emergency vehicles,” though he said that the agency had not yet determined whether the technology or the human drivers was the cause. In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said, “Multiple investigations remain open.”

Officials who have worked at OSHA and at an equivalent California agency told me that Musk’s influence, and his attitude about regulation, had made their jobs difficult. The Biden Administration, which is urgently trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, has concluded that it needs to work with Musk, because of his dominant position in the electric-car market. And Musk’s personal wealth dwarfs the entire budget of OSHA, which is tasked with monitoring the conditions in his workplaces. “You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.” Garrett Brown, a former field-compliance inspector at California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, added, “We have a bad health-and-safety situation throughout the country. And it’s worse in companies run by people like Elon Musk, who was ideologically opposed to the idea of government enforcement of public-health regulations.”

In March, 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Musk e-mailed Tesla employees, telling them that he intended to violate orders and show up at work, and downplaying the significance of COVID-19. Soon after, he lost an initial fight to keep a factory in Alameda County—Tesla’s most productive in the U.S.—open. That April, after county officials extended shelter-in-place orders, Musk was on a conference call with outside financial analysts. His rhetoric became nakedly political, to an extent that would have been uncharacteristic just a few years earlier. “I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights,” he told the analysts, speaking of the lockdowns. “What the fuck?” he added. “It’s an outrage. An outrage. . . . This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddam freedom.” The pandemic seems to have sparked a pronounced shift in Musk. The lockdowns represented an example of what Hoffman told me Musk considered to be a cardinal sin: “getting in the way of the mission.”

The following month, Musk sent a series of vitriolic tweets, threatening to file suit against Alameda County, to move Tesla’s headquarters, and to flout the rules and reopen his factory, all of which he eventually did. The county essentially rubber-stamped the reopening soon afterward—a far cry from what Musk had invited. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he had tweeted, at the height of his frustration. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Musk has, for much of his public life, presented himself as a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal,” he told the technology reporter Kara Swisher in 2020. “And then economically right of center, maybe, or center.” He has said that he donated to Hillary Clinton, and voted for both her and Joe Biden. But, in recent years, the more radical perspective that characterized his diatribes about Covid has come to the fore. In March, 2022, Twitter restricted the account of the satirical Web site the Babylon Bee, after the site misgendered a government official. The next day, in texts later disclosed during the Twitter-acquisition process, Musk’s contact “TJ” (identified by Bloomberg as his ex-wife Talulah Riley) expressed frustration with the development and urged him to purchase Twitter to “fight woke-ism.” The following week, Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter respected free speech and, in a phone call to the Babylon Bee’s C.E.O., joked about buying the platform. Finally, in April, 2022, he offered forty-four billion dollars for the company. Almost immediately, he tried to back out of the deal, prompting Twitter to sue. After months of legal proceedings, Musk resumed the acquisition process, and in October he assumed control of the company.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

When Musk arrived at Twitter, he immediately gutted the company’s staff, reducing the number of employees by about fifty per cent. One person who kept his job was Yoel Roth, the company’s head of trust and safety. Roth, who is in his mid-thirties, is gay, Jewish, and liberal. His department was responsible for determining Twitter’s rules; during the Trump Administration, he became embroiled in the culture wars. After the company began rolling out a new fact-checking policy that labelled two of Trump’s tweets as misinformation, Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s aide, went on “Fox & Friends” and read out Roth’s full name and spelled his username, adding, “He’s about to get more followers.” Trump then held up a New York Post cover mocking Roth, and Twitter users began recirculating tweets that Roth had written criticizing conservative candidates.

But when Musk took over he resisted calls to fire Roth. “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” he tweeted in October, 2022. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” That evening, Roth messaged Musk on Signal, thanking him. Musk responded, “You have my full support,” and, the next day, he followed up with a screenshot of a tweet from Roth that described Mitch McConnell as “a bag of farts.” Musk added, “Haha, I totally agree.”

But the cuts that Musk had instituted quickly took a toll on the company. Employees had been informed of their termination via brusque, impersonal e-mails—Musk is now being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by employees who say that they are owed additional severance pay—and the remaining staffers were abruptly ordered to return to work in person. Twitter’s business model was also in question, since Musk had alienated advertisers and invited a flood of fake accounts by reinventing the platform’s verification process. On November 10th, Roth sent a brief resignation e-mail. When his departure became public, Musk texted, asking to talk. “I[t] would mean a lot if you would consider remaining at Twitter,” he wrote. The two spoke that night, and Roth declined to return. Days later, he published an Op-Ed in the Times, questioning the future of user safety on the platform. (Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.)

Soon afterward, Musk replied to a Twitter user surfacing a 2010 tweet from Roth, in which he’d shared a link to a Salon article about a teacher’s being charged with having sex with an eighteen-year-old student and asked, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?”

“That explains a lot,” Musk tweeted in reply. Minutes later, he posted an image showing a portion of Roth’s doctoral dissertation, which focussed on the gay-hookup app Grindr and its user data. In the excerpt, Roth argued that such platforms will inevitably be used by people under eighteen, so they should do more to keep those individuals safe. “Looks like Yoel is in favor of children being able to access adult internet services,” Musk wrote.

The attack fit a pattern: Musk’s trolling has increasingly taken on the vernacular of hard-right social media, in which grooming, pedophilia, and human trafficking are associated with liberalism. In 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team was trapped in a cave, Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.” (Unsworth sued Musk for defamation, characterizing the harassment he received from Musk’s followers as “a life sentence without parole.” A judge ruled in favor of Musk, who argued that he hadn’t been accusing Unsworth of actual pedophilia, just trying to insult him.)

Musk’s tweet about Roth got nearly seventeen thousand quote tweets and retweets. “The moment that it went from being a moderation conversation to being a Pizzagate conversation, the risk level changed,” Roth told me. “I spent my career looking at the absolute worst things that the Internet could do to people. Certainly, worse things have happened to people. But this is probably up there.” Roth and his husband were forced to flee their house, a two-bedroom in El Cerrito, California, that they’d purchased just two years earlier. “And then as we are, like, packing our stuff and leaving and getting the dog loaded into the car and whatever, like, the Daily Mail publishes an article that gives people more or less a map to my house,” Roth said. “At that point, we’re, like, ‘Oh, we’re leaving this house potentially for the last time.’ ”

This summer, Twitter’s cheerful blue bird logo came down from the roof of the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, and was replaced with a strobing “X.” The new entity is a marriage between two parts of Musk. There’s his career-long quest to create an everything app—integrating services ranging from communication to banking and shopping, and emulating products, like WeChat, that are popular in Asia. Sitting alongside that pragmatic goal is a newer, more confusing side of Musk, embodied by his desire to take back the town square from what he sees as woke discourse. Twitter has become a private company, so it’s difficult to assess its finances, but numerous prominent advertisers have departed, and Meta recently launched Threads, a competitor that shamelessly emulates the old Twitter, and broke records for downloads. Musk threatened to sue, then challenged Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and C.E.O., to a cage match, pledging to live-stream it and donate the proceeds to charity. (Zuckerberg has accepted. Musk has delayed committing to a date, citing a back injury.) The illuminated sign atop X’s headquarters, after complaints to the Department of Building Inspection, came down as quickly as it had gone up.

Some of Musk’s associates connected his erratic behavior to efforts to self-medicate. Musk, who says he now spends much of his time in a modest house in the wetlands of South Texas, near a SpaceX facility, confessed, in an interview last year, “I feel quite lonely.” He has said that his career consists of “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” One close colleague told me, “His life just sucks. It’s so stressful. He’s just so dedicated to these companies. He goes to sleep and wakes up answering e-mails. Ninety-nine per cent of people will never know someone that obsessed, and with that high a tolerance for sacrifice in their personal life.”

In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, there’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, it can cause big problems.”

On July 12th, Musk announced xAI, his entry into a field that promises to alter much about life as we know it. He tweeted an image of the new company’s Web site, featuring a characteristically theatrical mission statement: the firm’s goal, he said, was “to understand the true nature of the universe.” In the image, Musk highlighted the date and explained its significance. “7 + 12 + 23 = 42,” the text read. “42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” It was a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In the series, an immensely complex artificial intelligence is asked to answer that question and, after computing for millions of years, answers with Adams’s most famous punch line: 42. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is,” the computer says. Earth itself, and all the organisms on it, are ultimately revealed to be a still larger computer, built to clarify the question. Adams does not portray this satirical vision as positive. Musk’s announcement suggested more optimism: “Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part.”

Musk has been involved in artificial intelligence for years. In 2015, he was one of a handful of tech leaders, including Hoffman and Thiel, who funded OpenAI, then a nonprofit initiative. (It now has a for-profit subsidiary.) OpenAI had a less grandiose and more cautious mission statement than xAI’s: to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” In the first few years of OpenAI, Musk grew unhappy with the company. He said that his efforts at Tesla to incorporate A.I. created a conflict of interest, and several people involved told me that this was true. However, they also said that Musk was frustrated by his lack of control and, as Semafor reported earlier this year, that he had attempted to take over OpenAI. Musk still defends his centrality to the company’s origins, stressing his financial contributions in its fledgling days. (The exact figures are unclear: Musk has given estimates that range from fifty million to a hundred million dollars.) Throughout his involvement, Musk seemed preoccupied with control, credit, and rivalries. He made incendiary remarks about Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind A.I. initiative, and, later, about Microsoft’s competing effort. He thought that OpenAI wasn’t sufficiently competitive, at one point telling colleagues that it had a “0%” chance of “being relevant.” Musk left the company in 2018, reneging on a commitment to further fund OpenAI, one of the individuals involved told me. “Basically, he goes, ‘You’re all a bunch of jackasses,’ and he leaves,” Hoffman said. The withdrawal was devastating. “It was very tough,” Altman, the head of OpenAI, said. “I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding.” OpenAI went on to become a leader in the field, introducing ChatGPT last year. Musk has made a habit of trashing the company, wondering repeatedly, in public interviews, why he hasn’t received a return on his investment, given the company’s for-profit arm. “If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted recently.

It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry. Several entrepreneurs who have co-founded businesses with Musk suggested that the arrival of Google and Microsoft in the field had made it a new brass ring, as space and electric vehicles had been earlier. Musk has maintained that he is motivated by his fear of the technology’s destructive potential. In a podcast earlier this year, Ari Emanuel, the head of the Hollywood agency W.M.E., recalled Musk joking about an A.I.-dominated future. “Ari, do you have dogs?” Musk asked him. “Well, here’s what A.I. is to you. You’re the dog.” In March, Musk, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced A.I. technology. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” the letter said. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”

Yet in the period during which Musk endorsed a pause, he was working to build xAI, recruiting from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation, contacting leadership at Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips used in A.I. The month the letter was distributed, Musk completed the registrations for xAI. He has said little about how the company will differ from preëxisting A.I. initiatives, but generally has framed it in terms of competition. “I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game of course,” he told the Washington Post. “That third option hopefully does more good than harm.” Through A.I. research and development already under way at Tesla, and the trove of data he now commands through Twitter (which he recently barred OpenAI from scraping in order to train its chatbots), he may have some advantage, as he applies his sensibilities and his world view to that race. Hoffman told me, “His whole approach to A.I. is: A.I. can only be saved if I deliver, if I build it.” As humanity creates A.I. in its own image, Hoffman argued, the principles and priorities of the leaders in the field will matter: “We want the construction of this to be not people with Messiah complexes.”

At one point in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Adams introduces the architects of the Earth supercomputer. They’re powerful beings who have been living among us, disguised as mice. At first, they were motivated by simple curiosity. But seeking the question made them famous, and they began considering talk-show and lecture deals. In the end, Earth is demolished in the name of commerce, and their path to existential clarity along with it. The mice greet this with a shrug, mouth vague platitudes, and go on the talk-show circuit anyway. Musk isn’t peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show—or, better yet, to be the show himself.

In the open letter, alongside questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence was one that reflects on the sectors of government and industry that Musk has come to shape. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” he and his fellow-entrepreneurs wrote. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Published in the print edition of the August 28, 2023, issue.

#Elon Musk #Ronan Farrow #the new yorker #SpaceX #tesla #starlink #ukraine #twitter #lllllinks

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irregularcollapse · 8 months

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just downloaded the epub of eiat and was reminded of how awesome and amazing you are as like. an Author, capital A. the whole construction is so masterful and i’m so grateful to have witnessed the whole thing build up to what it is. not just the masterful writing and obviously meticulous typeset, but the community of people who love this work. the final chapter can put on my birthday so i’m going to post my adoring comment sobbing about this fics end as soon as i have time to read. thank you forever and always for something that saw me every wednesday like a close and adoring friend through an incredibly tough period of my life!

omg my King

This is the most insanely kind comment, I barely even know what to address first. I guess the most important thing is thank you so much, and I am incredibly flattered and humbled that my writing was such a constant thing for you at a hard time! After all, that's why so many writers write---to share the feeling that writing gives to us.

I guess that hits on why I write fic and share it at all, actually. It's something you've mentioned here: that sense of community. I write to connect with people, to share stories, hopefully to entertain and bring people enjoyment. Getting responses from people like you is such a huge part of feeling part of something, of knowing that what I create means something.

The process of making EIAT was really helpful for me in a lot of ways. It truly cemented something that I've been thinking for a while, which is that traditional publishing just isn't the route I want to go down. I'm not interested in reaching a huge audience; I much prefer this sense of togetherness created when like-hearted people respond to and gather around a creative work.

I put in the effort that I do (and do insanely over-the-top things like learning typesetting, and teaching myself how to sort-of format a reflowable ePub) because I want what I make to be good for the people who find it. I want you all to know that it's for all of you, and myself, and anyone else who finds their way to what I make.

Writing is such a strange creative pursuit. It makes me think of something Miranda July said about film-making:

I thought moviemaking would only really become an artform if anyone could access it, the way anyone can paint or sing or write. Mediums don’t suffer from being available, they evolve. If movies always need a company behind them, they will never really be an art.

What I disagree with her about is, while it's true that writing is a highly accessible medium (it is low-cost, can be done by analogue or digital means, can even be dictated orally exactly as intended), that doesn't mean it's an accessible artform. The divide between amateur and professional is largely what seems to dictate whether someone is seen as a writer (hobbyist) or author (artist).

I dislike a lot of things about the publishing industry. I dislike that authors are increasingly being turned into brands. I dislike that books are being advertised on the basis of their building blocks instead of their execution. I dislike that a social media following is becoming a significant contributing factor to whether a writer's manuscript will get read. I dislike censorship being passed off as editing; I dislike the concept of book "trends;" I dislike that "representation" is becoming a marketing buzzword instead of a crucial storytelling consideration.

However, I love books. I love everything about them, from the conceptual to the physical, from the narrative to the object. What I realised, while working on EIAT, is that I don't need a publisher to be able to make them. In a super-pretentious summation of what I mean, I guess my intention is to reclaim books as an artform, and to demonstrate to anyone who finds my work that you can too.

That's why I've decided to do it all myself (with some necessary proofreading/editing help, hello M I love you sooooooo much), from the planning to the writing to the formatting to the binding. EIAT has been like a trial run of it all, and I can't tell you how creatively fulfilling it has been. I can't wait to actually start and finish work on my own bound copy---to hold this thing in my hands and know that I made it, completely, from the beginning to the end. It will be entirely my vision as I want it to be.

This has turned into a bit of a rambling reply but I sort of just wanted to explain that like. I am so incredibly stoked that you (and other readers like you!!) have enjoyed what I've done so much. I really only want to create lovely things for other people to enjoy, so knowing that I've done that is all I need <3 Thank you again, for this message. You've absolutely made my day!

#asks #anonymous #my writing #even in another time fic #i can't WAIT to start sharing the next one with you all omg #and my original novel(s)!!#i'm hoping to have the current fic WIP done by november (lol)#so then i can try out nanowrimo for my original work #WE SHALL SEE HMMM

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