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hellomynameisbisexual · 3 years

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Here's a shortlist of those who realized that I — a cis woman who'd identified as heterosexual for decades of life — was in fact actually bi, long before I realized it myself recently: my sister, all my friends, my boyfriend, and the TikTok algorithm.

On TikTok, the relationship between user and algorithm is uniquely (even sometimes uncannily) intimate. An app which seemingly contains as many multitudes of life experiences and niche communities as there are people in the world, we all start in the lowest common denominator of TikTok. Straight TikTok (as it's popularly dubbed) initially bombards your For You Page with the silly pet videos and viral teen dances that folks who don't use TikTok like to condescendingly reduce it to.

Quickly, though, TikTok begins reading your soul like some sort of divine digital oracle, prying open layers of your being never before known to your own conscious mind. The more you use it, the more tailored its content becomes to your deepest specificities, to the point where you get stuff that's so relatable that it can feel like a personal attack (in the best way) or (more dangerously) even a harmful trigger from lifelong traumas.

For example: I don't know what dark magic (read: privacy violations) immediately clued TikTok into the fact that I was half-Brazilian, but within days of first using it, Straight TikTok gave way to at first Portuguese-speaking then broader Latin TikTok. Feeling oddly seen (being white-passing and mostly American-raised, my Brazilian identity isn't often validated), I was liberal with the likes, knowing that engagement was the surefire way to go deeper down this identity-affirming corner of the social app.

TikTok made lots of assumptions from there, throwing me right down the boundless, beautiful, and oddest multiplicities of Alt TikTok, a counter to Straight TikTok's milquetoast mainstreamness.

Home to a wide spectrum of marginalized groups, I was giving out likes on my FYP like Oprah, smashing that heart button on every type of video: from TikTokers with disabilities, Black and Indigenous creators, political activists, body-stigma-busting fat women, and every glittering shade of the LGBTQ cornucopia. The faves were genuine, but also a way to support and help offset what I knew about the discriminatory biases in TikTok's algorithm.

My diverse range of likes started to get more specific by the minute, though. I wasn't just on general Black TikTok anymore, but Alt Cottagecore Middle-Class Black Girl TikTok (an actual label one creator gave her page's vibes). Then it was Queer Latina Roller Skating Girl TikTok, Women With Non-Hyperactive ADHD TikTok, and then a double whammy of Women Loving Women (WLW) TikTok alternating between beautiful lesbian couples and baby bisexuals.

Looking back at my history of likes, the transition from queer “ally” to “salivating simp” is almost imperceptible.

There was no one precise "aha" moment. I started getting "put a finger down" challenges that wouldn't reveal what you were putting a finger down for until the end. Then, 9-fingers deep (winkwink), I'd be congratulated for being 100% bisexual. Somewhere along the path of getting served multiple WLW Disney cosplays in a single day and even dom lesbian KinkTok roleplay — or whatever the fuck Bisexual Pirate TikTok is — deductive reasoning kind of spoke for itself.

But I will never forget the one video that was such a heat-seeking missile of a targeted attack that I was moved to finally text it to my group chat of WLW friends with a, "Wait, am I bi?" To which the overwhelming consensus was, "Magic 8 Ball says, 'Highly Likely.'"

Serendipitously posted during Pride Month, the video shows a girl shaking her head at the caption above her head, calling out confused and/or closeted queers who say shit like, "I think everyone is a LITTLE bisexual," to the tune of "Closer" by The Chainsmokers. When the lyrics land on the word "you," she points straight at the screen — at me — her finger and inquisitive look piercing my hopelessly bisexual soul like Cupid's goddamn arrow.

Oh no, the voice inside my head said, I have just been mercilessly perceived.

As someone who had, in fact, done feminist studies at a tiny liberal arts college with a gender gap of about 70 percent women, I'd of course dabbled. I've always been quick to bring up the Kinsey scale, to champion a true spectrum of sexuality, and to even declare (on multiple occasions) that I was, "straight, but would totally fuck that girl!"

Oh no, the voice inside my head returned, I've literally just been using extra words to say I was bi.

After consulting the expertise of my WLW friend group (whose mere existence, in retrospect, also should've clued me in on the flashing neon pink, purple, and blue flag of my raging bisexuality), I ran to my boyfriend to inform him of the "news."

"Yeah, baby, I know. We all know," he said kindly.

"How?!" I demanded.

Well for one, he pointed out, every time we came across a video of a hot girl while scrolling TikTok together, I'd without fail watch the whole way through, often more than once, regardless of content. (Apparently, straight girls do not tend to do this?) For another, I always breathlessly pointed out when we'd pass by a woman I found beautiful, often finding a way to send a compliment her way. ("I'm just a flirt!" I used to rationalize with a hand wave, "Obvs, I'm not actually sexually attracted to them!") Then, I guess, there were the TED Talk-like rants I'd subject him to about the thinly veiled queer relationship in Adventure Time between Princess Bubblegum and Marcelyne the Vampire Queen — which the cowards at Cartoon Network forced creators to keep as subtext!

And, well, when you lay it all out like that...

But my TikTok-fueled bisexual awakening might actually speak less to the omnipotence of the app's algorithm, and more to how heteronormativity is truly one helluva drug.

Sure, TikTok bombarded me with the thirst traps of my exact type of domineering masc lady queers, who reduced me to a puddle of drool I could no longer deny. But I also recalled a pivotal moment in college when I briefly questioned my heterosexuality, only to have a lesbian friend roll her eyes and chastise me for being one of those straight girls who leads Actual Queer Women on. I figured she must know better. So I never pursued any of my lady crushes in college, which meant I never experimented much sexually, which made me conclude that I couldn't call myself bisexual if I'd never had actual sex with a woman. I also didn't really enjoy lesbian porn much, though the fact that I'd often find myself fixating on the woman during heterosexual porn should've clued me into that probably coming more from how mainstream lesbian porn is designed for straight men.

The ubiquity of heterormativity, even when unwittingly perpetrated by members of the queer community, is such an effective self-sustaining cycle. Aside from being met with queer-gating (something I've since learned bi folks often experience), I had a hard time identifying my attraction to women as genuine attraction, simply because it felt different to how I was attracted to men.

Heteronormativity is truly one helluva drug.

So much of women's sexuality — of my sexuality — can feel defined by that carnivorous kind of validation you get from men. I met no societal resistance in fully embodying and exploring my desire for men, either (which, to be clear, was and is insatiable slut levels of wanting that peen.) But in retrospect, I wonder how many men I slept with not because I was truly attracted to them, but because I got off on how much they wanted me.

My attraction to women comes with a different texture of eroticism. With women (and bare with a baby bi, here), the attraction feels more shared, more mutual, more tender rather than possessive. It's no less raw or hot or all-consuming, don't get me wrong. But for me at least, it comes more from a place of equality rather than just power play. I love the way women seem to see right through me, to know me, without us really needing to say a word.

I am still, as it turns out, a sexual submissive through-and-through, regardless of what gender my would-be partner is. But, ignorantly and unknowingly, I'd been limiting my concept of who could embody dominant sexual personas to cis men. But when TikTok sent me down that glorious rabbit hole of masc women (who know exactly what they're doing, btw), I realized my attraction was not to men, but a certain type of masculinity. It didn't matter which body or genitalia that presentation came with.

There is something about TikTok that feels particularly suited to these journeys of sexual self-discovery and, in the case of women loving women, I don't think it's just the prescient algorithm. The short-form video format lends itself to lightning bolt-like jolts of soul-bearing nakedness, with the POV camera angles bucking conventions of the male gaze, which entrenches the language of film and TV in heterosexual male desire.

In fairness to me, I'm far from the only one who missed their inner gay for a long time — only to have her pop out like a queer jack-in-the-box throughout a near year-long quarantine that led many of us to join TikTok. There was the baby bi mom, and scores of others who no longer had to publicly perform their heterosexuality during lockdown — only to realize that, hey, maybe I'm not heterosexual at all?

Flooded with video after video affirming my suspicions, reflecting my exact experiences as they happened to others, the change in my sexual identity was so normalized on TikTok that I didn't even feel like I needed to formally "come out." I thought this safe home I'd found to foster my baby bisexuality online would extend into the real world.

But I was in for a rude awakening.

Testing out my bisexuality on other platforms, casually referring to it on Twitter, posting pictures of myself decked out in a rainbow skate outfit (which I bought before realizing I was queer), I received nothing but unquestioning support and validation. Eventually, I realized I should probably let some members of my family know before they learned through one of these posts, though.

Daunted by the idea of trying to tell my Latina Catholic mother and Swiss Army veteran father (who's had a crass running joke about me being a "lesbian" ever since I first declared myself a feminist at age 12), I chose the sibling closest to me. Seeing as how gender studies was one of her majors in college too, I thought it was a shoo-in. I sent an off-handed, joke-y but serious, "btw I'm bi now!" text, believing that's all that would be needed to receive the same nonchalant acceptance I found online.

It was not.

I didn't receive a response for two days. Hurt and panicked by what was potentially my first mild experience of homophobia, I called them out. They responded by insisting we need to have a phone call for such "serious" conversations. As I calmly tried to express my hurt on said call, I was told my text had been enough to make this sibling worry about my mental wellbeing. They said I should be more understanding of why it'd be hard for them to (and I'm paraphrasing) "think you were one way for twenty-eight years" before having to contend with me deciding I was now "something else."

But I wasn't "something else," I tried to explain, voice shaking. I hadn't knowingly been deceiving or hiding this part of me. I'd simply discovered a more appropriate label. But it was like we were speaking different languages. Other family members were more accepting, thankfully. There are many ways I'm exceptionally lucky, my IRL environment as supportive as Baby Bi TikTok. Namely, I'm in a loving relationship with a man who never once mistook any of it as a threat, instead giving me all the space in the world to understand this new facet of my sexuality.

I don't have it all figured out yet. But at least when someone asks if I listen to Girl in Red on social media, I know to answer with a resounding, "Yes," even though I've never listened to a single one of her songs. And for now, that's enough.

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liskantope · 3 years

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Hopefully this will be my last-ever post complaining about what someone said on social media, because current events are simmering down and once they’ve reached a moderate enough hum I’m going to redouble my previous efforts to stay away from it. But the particular interaction I’m going to describe seems to have furthered my progress slightly in understanding why so many people shout their views in the way that they do and how I should learn to better accept it.

One of my “closest” Facebook friends for over a decade, whose life’s passion nowadays revolves around anti-racist work (mainly in childhood education; she is white) posted a few hours after Biden’s victory was officially called last Saturday to preach that white Biden-voters shouldn’t claim any of the credit for his victory because it was BIPOC and particularly black women who carried this election (her justification for why they “carried us” was that as a demographic group most of them voted for Biden while as a demographic group a majority of white people voted for Trump), and that nothing will be better now except for who is in the White House because “whiteness and white supremacy have not disappeared” and that “your” responsibility is not diminished and “you” are not absolved as a good white person. She ended with an exhortation to bow down and “bend your knees” to BIPOC for “saving our asses”.

(Just realized looking back at her post to write this one that the phrasing was not “bend the knee” as I repeatedly misread at the time, assuming that it was a direct reference to Game of Thrones of which I know she’s a fan, and having recently listened to this insightful 8-minute Sam Harris podcast episode which used the phrase. This is slightly unfortunate since it was the obnoxiousness of that particular phrasing which tipped me over to acting against my better judgment in not just ignoring this like I have with so many dozens of other statements. I still find it obnoxious, though, and sanctimonious, and terrible messaging, and using poor arguments about causation, and reflecting an insistence on viewing as much as possible in terms of race at all times, and the epitome of identity politics.)

So yeah, after waiting a couple of days, I broke my usual silence and wrote a very polite but argumentative response that turned out to be enough paragraphs to make me feel a little embarrassed that I would take that much of my time on it. I knew there was virtually no chance of convincing her of anything substantial, but I figured just maybe some insight into how foreign and alienating this “you are responsible for what everyone of your color does and are never good enough and have to kneel in deference to those of a color which is” messaging is bound to be to anyone who’s less in an academic bubble than we are (which is, like, most people). I made the point that individual BIPOC didn’t contribute any more than individual white people did to Biden’s victory and that if we’re going to judge blocs of voters according to race we should be blaming Cuban-Americans for Biden’s loss in Florida, and that in fact Trump gained votes from among BIPOC and lost white male votes since four years ago. I wrote that implying that the only salient feature of us individuals is race is exactly what people complain about when they use the term “identity politics” and that the results of this election suggest that maybe we’re doing something wrong with our messaging.

It wasn’t a disaster. I got a very cordial response which completely avoided ad hominem and at least engaged the points I had made while clarifying her views. I didn’t find the supposed rebuttals of my points at all convincing, of course. For instance, my complaint about treating individual voters as merely people of a certain color was met with “It’s important in anti-racist scholarship to be able to analyze demographic trends in terms of race” (I would... never disagree with this?) and that focusing on individuals allows people to only look at their own actions and those of their friends and feel too good about themselves. She also expressed skepticism about my statistics about where Trump gained/lost support, which I was able to back up with a quick Google search which pulled up a Vox article among others (I thought it was only the insufficiently committed white liberals like me who sucked at Googling?). But her own views, while still resting on axioms I fundamentally differ on, just sounded a lot more reasonable when restated? E.g. “Moments like this shouldn’t be centered on whiteness” and “the ‘good white liberals’ should be aware that they aren’t as a big of a demographic in our race as they should be” (I don’t know any white liberal who would disagree or who doesn’t realize that white people vote majority Republican or is okay with that?) and that the bowing and bending the knee was not “a literal statement” but simply meant to convey that we should greatly respect how BIPOC voters contribute. She ended with providing a long list of anti-racist activists (the only one of whom I’m familiar with is Ally Henny, who I mainly remember for statements about how I’m encased in so many layers of racism that I would never be able to peel them off if I spent my whole lifetime doing nothing but trying) as a “starting point” of study.

I replied thanking her for pointing me to sources and agreeing with her implication that I should read more with a mind towards understanding what they’re saying before spouting off any more opinions. (Guess I have to make good on that promise now.) I made clear that I see a difference between her restatements and the way she worded things in her original post and suggested that some of this might even be on me for interpreting these kinds of posts more as logical arguments when they should be understood in a slightly more poetic manner. I gently gestured towards my suspicion that the current scholarship in this area might reflect a university culture (which I am very much a part of) more than the concrete priorities and concerns of the majority of people of color, although I’m in no position to positively claim anything about this. I got no response.

Anyway, in writing my last response, a little more clicked into place for me about a different lens through which I should process all the behavior that drives me nuts in a written context online (I mainly mean social media but am being even broader than that). This is going to sound condescending but ironically it might help me to have a less condescending attitude?

The fact is -- and I just have to accept this -- that making efforts to be nuanced and to “meet people who disagree where they are at” and to aim for the truth but no farther than the truth are simply not highly-valued principles for most people (social media -users and otherwise). They may kinda-sorta agree in the abstract with these principles, but in practice they hold a much lower status than the principles of conveying anger and strong words as a sign of commitment towards Fighting Evil. Some people I know do have an “argumentation value system” closer to mine, and I know who those people are -- it really shows in what they write online. But those people are a fairly small minority.

And this alien “argumentation value system” isn’t something that really shows in casual real-life interactions very plainly at all (which of course is what almost all human interactions were up until 10-15 years ago), while in contrast social media is an environment that augments its effect.

The sooner I accept this, the more moderation I’ll be able to manage in my negative reactions. I can remind myself that there’s less fundamental disagreement on most actual issues between me and the people I know: we instead disagree on a sort of meta-level issue of how one’s views should be presented. And that issue, taken by itself, seems somehow like something more minor. I wrote a few months ago about how knowing what so many people in my life write publicly oftentimes interferes with my capacity to view them as potential intimate friends/partners. Maybe I can be a little more accepting when I recognize that the things they write which turn me off perhaps don’t come from a place of such irrationality as I thought, that the differences in our ways of thinking might not be quite so fundamental (although this differing system of values for argumentation still strikes me as something that could badly affect a marriage, say). And in the practical short term, I can ignore things that bother me more easily in the future -- instead of feeling like I’m on a tilted playing field where everyone else gets to vent without inhibition while I have to carefully monitor and qualify everything I say, I can try to just round a lot of this off in terms of different preferred writing styles and somehow that bothers me less?

A similar underlying principle holds for the things that annoy me on dating profiles, what with the collective obsession with dogs and boasts of being “fluent in sarcasm” and so on. This probably doesn’t reflect much about the way the creators of these profiles actually are as humans in real life. Not that many single women really view their dogs as the most interesting thing that ever was or will be about their lives. They just choose to have a certain style of exposition about themselves because of peculiarities of the environment of online dating sites/apps, where showing enthusiasm and individuality in some way seems to pay and the topic of dogs would seem like a pretty safe place to direct this performed enthusiasm. Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t demonstrate some aspect of incompatibility with me or that I’m not going to be more instantly attracted to those with profiles that have more refreshing things to say than stuff about how amazing dogs are or of those who *gasp* actually prefer cats or *deeper gasp* prefer not to have pets at all. But it means that I can read the dogs-and-sarcasm-enthusiast profiles a little more charitably maybe?

This slightly altered mindset is a far from perfect solution, but I think it helps. A lasting three-quarters-of-the-way disconnect from social media entirely still needs to be a goal at this point.

#Social media #better decision 2020 #social justice #online dating #pets

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ashandboneca · 5 years

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Unsolicited Criticism

So a few years ago, I dealt with some criticism in my personal life over my choices. I’m a NB queer witch who is (not legally) married to two people. It was a bit of a thing, but it has ended my relationship with an extended family member. I had some other things happening in another sect of my more immediate family that I did not agree with, but I held my tongue (because it’s none of my business) which was kind of weird as well.

So I got to thinking, because I like to take things like people being assholes and turn it into a lesson that can apply to other people and other situations. There should be a way to turn something wretched into something you can learn from. It’s not about putting a positive spin on things - sometimes, things just suck and there is no turning that frown upside-down. It’s about taking the situation, removing the emotion from it, and using it as a blueprint for other, similar situations so you can have a plan for how to deal with these things that crop up in the future.

I thought it might be a good thing to talk about dealing with unsolicited criticism and opinions about your choices, your life, and your craft.

I really believe that the choices we make in this life are ours to make. I think too many people are willing to stick their noses into things they have no business being wrapped up in, and it causes more grief than it is worth. Everyone feels their opinion is valid, important, and needed. This is not always the case.

People should ask themselves these four questions before the open their mouths/type away on their keyboards:

- is it true?

- is it kind?

- is it needed?

- is it something I need to say?

Opinions or criticism should have some grain of truth to them. They should be constructive (aka kind). They should be necessary - and actually necessary, not just because you feel ‘it’s the right thing to say’, and it should be something that you feel you are required to impart to the party receiving it.

How do you know if it fulfills these simple requirements?

Firstly, and always, you need to look at where the criticism/opinion is coming from. Is it someone you trust, or whose opinion you value? Is it some random stranger? Why do you think they are saying what they are saying? Have you decided to become a drug mule or join a crime family, or did you just get your hair cut short or paint your bedroom? Most times, when these things are coming from trusted people, like family members, they are coming from a place of love. Most times. Because they are family, there is a certain expectation that their opinion carries more weight. When your old Christian aunt is telling you that you are going to hell because if your beliefs, it could be coming from a place of love. It could also be coming from a place of condescension. Maybe auntie thinks your beliefs are stupid, or silly, of that you aren’t capable of making your own decisions? The key is learning to interpret the tone of their concern, and act accordingly.

My old Catholic grandmother, gentle soul that she is, told me at 14 that I was going to hell because I would not get confirmed. It was so matter of fact, with not a lick of condescension. She merely said she would pray for me, hugged me, and we both moved on with our lives. It came from a place of love. Previous drama came from a place of condescension and foolishness, and it was rebuked.

Secondly, use your own critical thinking skills and judgement to determine if the criticism/opinion holds any merit. Sometimes people around us try to present us with situations that we may be otherwise blind to. Maybe you’re culturally appropriating something and it’s offensive to the people around you and to that group. Maybe something you present online or in person is actually super racist. Maybe your practice includes some manner of hurtful or harmful practice, and people are concerned for your wellbeing. Maybe you’re mentally ill, and off your meds, and people are concerned for you. We can’t always see things that are right in front of us, and sometimes it takes an outside observer to clue us into what we may be missing. There are valid points in being criticized - we often learn from it in a beneficial way if it is constructive and seeks to better you as a person. Hell, a large portion of my schooling was learning to take constructive criticism, which is super important as an artist who works commercially. Not everyone is going to like what you present, or agree with your own opinions.

Thirdly, you have to realize that you have every right to disagree or rebuke the criticism/opinion. If someone is disagreeing with how you are practicing, you have every right to tell them to go pound sand. Depending on the source, you should be able to decide how you want to act. It also depends on how forceful or backward the opinion is - if the person is family but is holding a bigoted and hurtful opinion, you have every right to disagree with what they are saying, and explain to them how they are incorrect. Opinions are not factual - they are not immovable, or static. They are moveable and should be ever evolving. If they then refuse to alter their opinion, and choose to continue to hold a hurtful viewpoint - for example, they’re racist, homophobic, bigoted, sizeist, etc - you can make the choice to be willing to accept that as a part of who they choose to be, or move on in life without them.

Now, I have a pretty strict policy on just cutting people out of my life. Part of that reason being I spent a large portion of my life being a doormat and letting people treat me poorly. I decided a long time ago that life was better spent with those who can respect me and love me rather than out of obligation. Life is too short for bullshit. I know I am a good person who deserves to be treated with the dignity and respect I seek to treat others with. I will not lower my standards to expect any less. Second chances are given, but if someone wounds me badly enough, no amount of 'I’m sorry’ is gonna cut it. I can always forgive, but I have the memory of an elephant and I will never forget. (Short version: I know I’m a good person, and if you treat me like crap I will cut you.)

How you choose to proceed is your choice. Always know that as an adult, you have the choice to have a relationship of your choosing with family or friends. Some families suck, some people have had abusive upbringings or have been kicked out by parents, and it’s not feasible to maintain a relationship. There is no obligation - no one owes anyone anything. You owe your parents nothing - the gratitude for bringing you into the world and raising you is fine, but that was a choice they made in having you. Realizing that is liberating, and can also set you up to address issues and problems that could be hurting your relationship with family. It can help to form real and lasting bonds built on mutual respect and equal footing. The same goes with friends - they are people you choose to surround yourself with. How and what relationship you choose to have with them is just that - your choice. The quote 'the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’ comes to mind - we often build secondary families outside of our blood relations who we often have stronger bonds with because we can choose those people based on their merits and that they closely align with our own sensibilities. I have relatives that are crazy conservative, pro-life nut jobs, I have an aunt who physically and emotionally abused me as a child. I actively make the choice to disavow those people because we have no common ground to stand on - we are so vastly different there is no way to reconcile it. We are blood, but we are not family, if you get what I’m saying.

I should also point out that not every opinion should be aired. Sometimes, there are things you just need to keep to yourself. Yeah, okay, Susie’s hair does look like it was cut with a weed whacker, but telling her that will only hurt her and serves no purpose other than to be judgemental - maybe Susie likes her hair like that. Assuming you know better than Susie makes you a dick, because Susie is her own person and can do whatever she goddamn pleases with her hair. Maybe Joe’s altar looks tacky and cheap - still not your place to comment, because that’s Joe’s space and has nothing to do with you. Unless it involves the serious well being of someone or involves you directly, it may serve better to keep your opinions to yourself.

In the case of this criticism coming from an outside, anonymous source - I normally evaluate it, but often ignore it. It is hard to make personal judgements on someone without knowing who they are. If the person is actually making a really good point, even if it contrary to how I feel, I will take it under consideration and use my critical thinking to evaluate its usefulness. I try to approach all of my problems in a logical, matter-of-fact way. I often try and put myself in someone else’s shoes - like if I was an outside observer in the situation, how would I react? If you remove the emotion from the situation, and look at the words said and the intention behind them, you can get a fairly clear sense of what you should do.

I’m not advocating cut and run - not even remotely. I am advocating personal choice, and telling you that if you are an adult, it is okay to make that choice if it is better for your wellbeing overall. Don’t keep people around out of obligation - it serves neither of you any purpose, and just builds resentment. It breeds guilt and doubt. Cut the ties, move on, and maybe someday you can get to a point of reconciliation and trust again - people grow and change as life and circumstances change.

When you are expressing your own opinions, remember those four points - is it true, kind, needed, and are you the vehicle to impart it? It makes conversations and discussions a lot more functional, that’s for sure. Anything that can make socially awkward people communicate effectively deserves a high five or self five.

#ash and bone #ashandbone.ca #witchcraft #traditional witchcraft #heathenry #the crooked path

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thezodiaczone · 6 years

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March Forecast for Capricorn

What’s the big idea, Capricorn? Well, you’ve got a bounty of them this month, as the Sun springs through Pisces and your third house of communication and knowledge until March 20. You’re hungry for new info and experiences, and you could have rich conversations that open your eyes to new ways of thinking. Kindred spirits can crop up, especially near the March 17 Pisces new moon. Explore ways you might collaborate on a small project to test your synergy.

The third house rules siblings, neighbors and the people you interact with in your daily goings-on. Make an effort to be more present as you pick up your latte, groceries and dry cleaning. Looking to spread the word or connect with like-minded people? Scout options locally while the Sun is heating up this social sector. From friends to culture to business, the novelty you’re seeking could be practically in your own backyard.

The month also begins with an eye-opening full moon—the first of TWO this month—this one in Virgo and your ninth house of travel, inspiration, learning and growth. You could get a huge download around your higher purpose. A visionary idea you’ve been tinkering with for the past six months could come together with a flourish.

Like January, March is bookended by full moons on the first and last days. Two planets, Mercury and Jupiter, will also turn retrograde, a course reversal that can bring some chaos but also some much-needed clarity. If you’ve been reeling from the eclipses of January 31 and February 15, March could help you start to make sense of it all. This year has sent most of us off to the races. There hasn’t been a lot of quiet moments to work through all the energy that’s gotten stirred up. You KNOW it’s time for a change… but what, how, when and where? Use these planetary slowdowns—and the illuminating double dose of full moon insight—to chart your course.

Do pace yourself for the first half of the month through it all. Energizer Mars is in low-power mode as it travels through Sagittarius and your restful twelfth house. The silver lining? Once the red planets zips into Capricorn for the first time since October 2016, you’ll be a walking magnet, exuding sex appeal, charisma and life-force energy. (Yeah baby!) Mark your calendar for your cosmic reawakening, as Mars marches through your sign from March 17 to May 16.

This highly individualistic phase will coincide with expansive Jupiter’s retrograde through Scorpio and your eleventh house of group activity from March 8 to July 10. While it’s been a blast, you could probably use a break from the recent whirlwind of parties, online action and overall “people energy.”

Your sign needs time to yourself, and ever since enthusiastic Jupiter bounced into Scorpio back on October 10, 2017, you probably haven’t gotten much of that sacred solitude. Just in time, Jupiter downshifts, giving you the green light to focus on Numero Uno and your ambitious solo endeavors.

Jupiter stays in Scorpio until November 8, 2018—a visit that only comes around every 12 years. During this four-month pause period, you might step back from a group, evaluate friendships from a distance or pump the brakes on a fast-moving team project. Since the eleventh house rules technology, a “social media diet” might be the kind of spring cleaning your soul is craving. Retrogrades rule the past, and this is an ideal time for your nostalgic sign to reconnect with old friends—both digitally and IRL—or to revisit a back-burnered collaboration. You’ll come back to play Mayor Capricorn again in July.

On March 20, the Sun dips into Aries and your fourth house of home, family and emotional foundations, turning the lens to your private life. Carve out time for close friends and relatives, and indulge in some well-deserved nurturing. But that comes with a warning label: Communication planet Mercury turns retrograde in Aries, which could pull some old family baggage down from the mental attic—mama drama in particular. There could be miscommunications and fighting at Chateau Capricorn, so take extra precautions to ease the tension, even if an air-clearing fight HAS to erupt. If you’re thinking of investing in new appliances or home electronics, research them thoroughly before you buy. (Of course, if your fridge or stove suddenly takes its last breath, you may not be able to ride out the retrograde.)

On the upside, this could be a rich cycle for creative exploration—or to finally deal with some childhood issues you’ve avoided. Pro tip: You’ll need to layer in time for those pursuits since Mars in Capricorn is sure to keep you on your toes. Your recipe for success is to work hard, play hard AND rest hard. You could easily distract yourself by staying busy, which can (mercifully) keep you from drowning in the emotion ocean. But take time to feel your feelings. Mars is a physical planet, and while it’s in your sign, you’ll benefit even more than usual from regular exercise. Stay active and move any stuck sensations out of your body.

The month ends with a triumphant Libra full moon on March 31, which beams into your tenth house of career, leadership and success. An ambitious undertaking launched over the past six months could reach a significant turning point—or a much-needed ending. You might decide to take a leap of faith (spurred by this month’s first full moon) and pursue a whole new career path. Or you might finally see how to turn your grand plans into actionable steps and achievable goals.

Love & Romance

Love rules, but this month, autonomy will be just as big a turn-on! When amorous Venus fist-bumps frisky and freedom-loving Jupiter on March 1, you may need more breathing room. Add in the liberated vibes of the Virgo full moon in your independent ninth house that same day, and nobody can hold you back! Sparks could fly with someone from another background or culture, or a long-distance attraction could heat up. Under this starscape, independence is an aphrodisiac.

Have your fun, but do your (higher) self a favor by considering what might be underlying these wanderlust-y feelings. With probing Mars in Sagittarius and your twelfth house of introspection until March 17, you can download valuable insights about some old, buried issues and process some heavy emotions. Of course, we’re talking about passionate Mars, so you could also act on a secret desire or embark on a clandestine affair. The thing you want to watch out for, with this hazy zone lit up, is falling prey to fantasy, distortion and projection and acting out of insecurity or compulsion rather than self-directed feelings.

A wave of nostalgia could wash over you when Venus flits through Aries and your sentimental fourth house from March 6 to 31. This could make you even more sensitive, but on the upside, it’s a good time to deepen bonds.

You’ll shake off the remnants of any heavy vibes when Mars enters Capricorn on March 17 and restores your swagger until (at least) May 16. During this biannual visit, you’ll be exuding charisma and magnetic hotness. Without even trying, you could attract new fans and admirers. Whatever you’re selling, they’re queuing up to buy!

And, back to where we started, this impassioned transit can also make you want to sow some wild oats, so if you’re coupled up, watch out. Beware that acting too frisky can stir up distrust, and your partner might feel jealous, hurt and abandoned. So unless you WANT that, think before you wink.

Key Dates

March 13: Venus-Saturn Square No way around it: This is a tough one-day transit. If you can’t hide out in the bunker all day, brace yourself for some emotional bruising or a pervasive pessimism. You may feel overly sensitive and thus self-protective, making it the perfectly wrong day to share from your heart. This too shall pass, but until it does, stay humble, and remember that other people may be feeling the same way.

Money & Career

You’ve got a lot of big ideas swirling around, but do you have the energy to pull them off? Normally, that answer would be a resounding “yes” for you, Cap. But with Mars, the planet of drive, in your restful twelfth house until March 17, motivation could be in short supply. Mars has been in Sagittarius since January 26, and since then, many Capricorns have been working behind the scenes or navigating intense personal issues that have made it difficult to focus. You may have felt unsupported at work or even sabotaged by a competitive person. Or maybe you just couldn’t generate the full-bodied excitement for a project, no matter how intriguing it sounded. That’s okay, Capricorn: Pace yourself and stay out of the workaholic fray. Conserve your energy for better times, which will arrive in the second half of March.

You’ll have the steam to start executing on March 17, when the red planet blazes into Capricorn, jolting you into action for two solid months. (Hello, willpower and drive—it’s good to have ya back.) Between now and May 16, you’ll be a Sea Goat on a mission, with your full power and charisma at your fingertips to make up for lost time. Jot down your brilliant gems while the Sun’s in Pisces and your intellectual third house until March 20—but don’t force yourself to DO anything until Mars makes its homecoming.

Even then, it’s slow and steady FTW. Mercury, the planet of technology, communication and travel, will be retrograde from March 22 to April 15. With Mercury gone rogue in your home and family sector, there could be disruptions to quell in your personal life. Set firm boundaries with loved ones and delegate so you’re not feeling burdened to handle it all alone.

If you have a home office, this is a good time to declutter and streamline. Make sure you have a proper working space—without roommates interrupting your flow or kids and pets clamoring for your attention.

Key Dates

March 2: Mercury-Jupiter Trine With the expressive planet in your communication center, you’ll have a clear mind and quicksilver wit. And thanks to a supportive assist from amplifying Jupiter, you’ll be able to persuade the decision makers to give your grand plan the go-ahead. If you have to do some hardcore negotiating, stick to your guns, and you’ll be irresistible.

Love Days: 20, 25 Money Days: 31, 13 Luck Days: 1, 11 Off Days: 23, 27, 9

#capricorn #monthly forecast #astrology #horoscope #zodiac #capricorn monthly

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askguyslikeus · 7 years

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((thank you to guest writer @hurricanesunny !!!))

Michael backspaces on the seventh text he’s typed out since getting here twenty minutes ago. That, of course, doesn’t include the panicked phone call in the parking lot that he ended on the second ring or the three blurry Snaps of the sidewalk that he deleted, but who’s really counting?

See, Michael doesn’t want to text Jeremy. That’s important to understand here. He had already made a pretty big deal out of being cool with the whole thing when they had both received their orientation packets a while back. So Jeremy and Jake ended up having theirs together last week. Michael, on the the other hand, got stuck in the M-Z group by himself. No biggie. This is life just helping a bro out. He can totally handle it.

Give it up for Michael’s big, fat mouth. It’s okay, though! It totally is, because Michael has a plan. He’s already circled the classes he wants. The paperwork in his lap is a little wrinkled from him gripping it too tightly, but it’s completely filled out. The inevitable pow-wow with his guidance counselor is gonna be smooth sailing. Michael’s also memorized the campus map so he doesn’t have to ask anyone for directions if he gets lost on the tour, but he also downloaded the PDF on his phone and stuck an extra copy from the help desk in his back pocket just in case. During the drive up here, he only listened to the slowest of jams. A mix, specifically, that Jeremy had awkwardly handed him last night in hopes that it would maybe make up for his absence. When Michael got here, he immediately took the corner seat, back row. Hood up, headphones on, music off. Classic stoner diversion. All day he’ll just tail behind, make no eye contact, and get into the classes he’s been banking on since his early acceptance.

But then Michael looks up from the day’s itinerary to see that his plan’s about to be dragged out back, shot twice, then set on fire just for good measure.

“Dude, this freakin’ blows.”

Someone, a girl Michael’s never seen before, flops down next to him. She drops her knapsack, worn and littered with keychains, on the floor and gives it one swift kick under her chair. Her eyes briefly leave Michael’s to look up and blow a strand of hair out of her face. He continues to stare as she starts rummaging through her sweater pockets. With an entire conference room of empty seats to choose from, this girl decides to go ahead and take the one right next to him.

Life’s definitely not on his side today.

Michael flinches as a plastic baggy is shoved in his face. He blinks, trying to focus on it. The girl shakes the bag a little, causing the colorful contents inside to dance.

“Gummy bear?”

As if to demonstrate, she rips one in half between her teeth. Her eye contact doesn’t waver, which makes Michael vaguely feel like he’s the gummy bear in this particular situation. He swallows hard, reluctantly pushing his headphones down around his neck. Not like he was listening to anything anyway. The girl tilts her head. C’mon, Mell. Use your big boy words.

“My, uh, mom told me not to take candy from strangers,” he eventually chokes out. Smooth. The girl snorts. Whatever panic Michael just puked up on the floor must’ve been buried beneath what sounds like a pretty chill comeback. Still, he wouldn’t be surprised if she decided to cut her losses now and move on. It’s what people do, and it’s only going to get uglier from here. But right on societal cue, the girl shoots her other hand out to remedy the situation.

“PJ. You?”

Michael considers himself a pretty observant guy, at least when he’s able to hit the brakes on his runaway thoughts long enough to put the talent to good use. So whenever he starts to get a little too freaked by situations like this, he tries to identify things about the other person that remind him of his friends. It helps thinking of them anyway, like he’s not actually braving the social storm alone, but it also reminds him that not every interaction is necessarily unknown territory.

Take this girl, for example.

As Michael glances from her hand to her face, she wiggles her fingers and snorts again. It’s loud. Unapologetic. Her scrunched up nose, freckles and all, screams Christine. And Christine isn’t scary, right?

Right.

“Michael,” he answers slowly, wiping his palm on the front of his jeans before giving her hand one short shake. Her hand is small in his, but her grip is deadly. He’s almost afraid she won’t let go. “What's it stand for?”

“Whuzzat?” She’s already shoving another handful of gummy bears into her mouth, seemingly forgetting her earlier offer. It’s cool, though. Michael doesn’t think he could keep anything down right now.

“PJ. Like… are those your initials or something? First and last?” Michael makes a face. “Shit, no, you would’ve been in the other group then.“ His high school teachers were totally right. His 3.96 GPA is doing him wonders in the real world. “So… it’s your first two?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” PJ hums. She lifts the bag over her head and tilts it to catch the last few bears in her mouth. “Maybe I did miss last week. Maybe it’s my middle initial. Mayhaps,” she wiggles her eyebrows, “I don’t have a last name at all.”

“So you’re named PJ. Just… PJ.”

“Alright, alright.” PJ waves her hand dismissively as she crumples the bag up and shoves it in her pocket. “If you ever get pissed at me, feel free to go full parental and use my full name.”

“Okay? What is it?” PJ can barely keep a straight face.

“Pajamas.”

As Michael holds back a groan, PJ’s got a shit-eating grin that’s missing a gap in the teeth and a few more expletives coming out of it. Rich would totally get a kick out of this girl. Michael almost works himself up to testing her banter game, because this girl is definitely fucking with him at this point, but the opportunity quickly passes and he clams right back up.

“Oh!” PJ gasps, perking up. She leans in super close. “I like your patches.” She starts to trace the careful stitching around each one. First the flag of the Philippines, then all the way down his shoulder to the trans pride flag. “Did you sew them on yourself?” After no response, she looks up and frowns.

Green eyes study his face for a moment, analyzing. Michael’s warm under the collar and he can feel himself freezing up, but he remembers to think. He’s seen the same colors in Chloe’s eyes a hundred times, watching him amongst the chatter before sending a quick ‘You okay?’ text from under the lunch table. This girl must make the same sort of conclusion, because she silently scoots herself out of Michael’s personal bubble and God he can breathe again.

“Yeah, yeah, um.” Words, Michael. “I learned when I was a kid. Mom.” Michael points to the heart on his chest. “This is the first one I did. The stitching’s a little wonky so you can probably tell.” He points to the one near his right pocket. “This was a gift from a teacher in middle school. Got Philippines and Ecuador a little bit after.” Michael finally points to the last two. “Got these back when I, uh, came out.”

PJ lights up.

“Holy fuck, you should totally join Trans Alliance with me.” Michael almost laughs. He doesn’t do clubs. He would say that he only really does Jeremy nowadays, but fuck if that isn’t true either. Oh, God, did he really just think that? He did, he really did.

“Clubs aren’t… really my thing.”

“Oh, c’mon,” she whines. “I don’t want to go by myself and you seem like a pretty chill dude.”

“Being chill isn’t really my thing either,” Michael mumbles, all cryptic and shit. PJ raises one eyebrow and Michael prays to every deity under the sun that he doesn’t have to explain that today. PJ opens her mouth, presumably to push him further, but Michael beats her to the chase.

“Did you know that baby koalas can’t eat eucalyptus leaves yet?” he blurts out. “So, um,” because the stupid words have already come out of your mouth, great job Mell, “they eat a special kind of their mother’s poop called ‘pap’ so they can learn to digest them.”

Jesus fuck, out of all the useless junk in his head he went with that?

“Shit, dude, really?” PJ asks, unfazed. She then laughs to herself. “Heh. Shit.”

“Uh, yeah, I, uh, watch a lot of documentaries in my free time. I like learning weird shit like that,

,” Michael offers weakly, scratching the back of his neck. A terrible segue, but a successful one. He’s a little afraid to look up, because he’s seen enough faces turn sour when he reveals just how completely uncool he is (and it’s fine, because Michael likes himself enough to make up for it but boy does it still sting a little every time,) but when he finally meets PJ’s eyes they’re burning bright like a wildfire.

“That’s so cool. What else are you into?”

“Oh, y’know… stuff.”

“Liiike?” She gently punches his arm. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t wanna know.”

“Well, I’m kinda into music, I guess.” He glances down at the papers in his lap. “I was thinking of Theory and Comp as my major, but I dunno. It might be dumb.”

“Oh shit, Liberal arts re-pruh-seeent,” PJ grins, pointing two thumbs to her chest. “Gotchu a Fine Arts girl right here.” She wiggles her eyebrows. “A pretty Fine Girl too, if I do say so myself.” Michael can’t help but chuckle. He feels the tension in his shoulders start to melt away as he pushes up his sleeves. An unsteady hand works its way through his hair.

“I’ve read about the program here, God, probably a dozen times now online and it sounds rad as hell. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble declaring, but I’m trying not to worry about it. It’d be nice to finally get some formal guidance. I’ve been coasting on YouTube videos and underfunded music classes for years.” PJ nods along, encouraging him to continue, but her eyes flick down to the inside of his left arm and she freezes in place. A finger jabs Michael’s tattoo. PJ looks at him.

“Video games.”

“Video games,” Michael repeats. “...Do you play?” PJ stares at him a moment before slowly pulling away. Her fingers curl into her sweater sleeves. Michael feels a familiar twinge in his chest as he sees PJ almost shrink into herself, looking anywhere but at him.

“I guess you could call me a fake gamer girl.”

“Fake?” There’s a bad taste in Michael’s mouth as he says it.

“I, uh, own the viddy games. I love the viddy games. I am… not good at the viddy games.” PJ laughs nervously. Jake’s always been great at laughing at himself too, but anyone who listens closely can tell that he’s had more practice learning to laugh at things that have hurt him. Michael hears that same pain in PJ’s voice. “Plus I’ve only really played, like, Minecraft and Mario Party, so… I wouldn’t call myself a real fan or anything.”

“Are you kidding? Mario Party’s the shit. And I spent most of sixth grade locked in my basement trying to recreate Middle Earth in Minecraft. Only a damn fool and a liar would shake their head at anyone who digs that game.”

“Really?”

“Fuck yeah. I consider myself an expert at most things. You name it, I’ve played it. Atari 2600, N64, Dreamcast, the busted claw machine in the arcade back home,” Michael says, counting on his fingers. “So if I say that you’re a certified fan of video games, you gotta take my word for it.”

“Wow, ya nerd,” PJ mumbles, but her smile is back. “You better go easy on me.”

Michael laughs. “Not a chance.”

“So that means you’ll play with me sometime?” PJ suddenly asks. Her tone is innocent, but it reminds Michael of Brooke’s sugar sweet smiles and clever words that always rope you in.

“Uh--” Michael is interrupted by a few notes of Space Invaders playing from his pocket. He gestures apologetically as he fishes his phone out and checks his notifications.

From that gross heere kid 💕: Hey, I just wanted to check that you got to campus alright. It blows that we didn’t get to go together.

Michael quickly turns his phone on silent as another message pops up. From that gross heere kid 💕: We’re still hanging tonight, though, right? There’s gonna be Doritos galore and a packed bowl for ya when you finally get your ass back in town. From that gross heere kid 💕: When exactly is that going to be again? From that gross heere kid 💕: Anyway! Have fun, talk to strangers, make me proud. See you soon, buddy. “Who’s that?” Michael nearly jumps out of his skin. PJ’s leaning over in her chair, trying to take a peek at the screen again. “I saw heart emojis.” “It’s my friend. Uh, Jeremy.” Michael holds the phone to his chest, much to her dismay. “Jeremy,” PJ repeats, trying the name out on her tongue. There’s something about the way she says it that makes Michael wonder if he’s that obvious. “Yeah. He’s asking me how things are going.”

“And how are they going?”

“Good. I think.”

“You gonna tell him that?”

“Maybe. Once I know for sure. I usually put things off when it comes to him.” “Oo, there’s a story there. I’m intrigued.” “Easy there, Jen,” Michael quickly says, gently pushing her back. PJ falls back into her chair, squinting as he shoves his phone back into his pocket.

“Wha? Who’s Jen?”

“Huh? Oh, fuck, I mea--” Michael’s cut off by the orientation coordinator at the front of the room. Clipboard in hand, she calls for everyone to group into pairs for the campus tour. Michael blinks. How long had they been talking? When he had arrived, he had definitely been the only one in the room. Now, at least a few dozen other freshmen are pushing past each other, loud and way too excited for a Monday morning. One by one, potential partners are picked off.

Understanding the urgency of the situation, Michael then turns to PJ, because this is the longest conversation he’s had with someone outside of the squad that wasn’t the 7/11 attendant back home. And him and Darlene are acquaintances at best.

“Uh, duh.” PJ rolls her eyes. She hops out of her seat, scooping up her knapsack by the Beanie Baby keychain and flinging it over her back. “So, who’s Jen? Is she pretty, too?”

“Just one of my other friends.” Michael stands up, carefully sliding his papers into his own backpack before slinging it over one shoulder. “You kinda remind me of all of them. My friends, I mean.”

“Oh. Well you can tell me all about ‘em at Trans Alliance, right?” She looks over her shoulder to make sure Michael is still following her. He is. “Maybe I can give you the scoop on some original Peej content too.”

Michael bites his bottom lip, thinks about it, then decides that maybe he should just roll with things every once in a while. See what happens. “Yeah, uh, yeah. I can. That’d be cool.”

“Great.” PJ grins. She falls a step behind. “Now, let’s go check out the cafeteria food. You think anything’s growing in there?”

“Oh, definitely. I’ve seen enough D-List movies in my time to know there’s a horror movie in there just waiting for us to star in.”

PJ suddenly pushes Michael forward. Such strength for a tiny girl. “Well, c’mon, then! It’s your time to shine!”

Michael laughs, digging his heels into the floor. PJ huffs behind him.

Okay, maybe life’s got his back after all.

#be more chill #michael mell #pajamas #hahaha guess thats gunna be the pj tag #hey i fucking love sunny #ive been sitting on this for a while BUT I CANNOT WAIT ANYMORE i must post it #askguestslikeus

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socialistsephardi · 6 years

Text

Regarding cops and soldiers.

ACAB/ASAB.

It's not a comment on them as individuals, its a comment on the role they play in society and the wider world and the inherent corruption and power abuse present in both the policing system and the military industrial complex. Both are not much more them money making tools for the wealthy, either by locking up and looting minorities and provide literal slave labor in the form of prison work, or by pillaging, uprooting, and obliterating foreign governments, markets, and populace in order to ransack their material wealth, strategic resources, and further develop a stranglehold over global hegemony.

We don't give a fuck about your nice aunt who's a cop, and you know, yeah, maybe she is a good person, maybe shes a great person! It's not a judgement on her. But the role of the cop is an abusive one, cops and soldiers are respectively the domestic and foreign sides of the coin of populace subjugation.

I have friends who are aspiring cops and who are soldiers, actively on duty. I love them very much, I hate the role they play and though I know there is many different reasons why they've gotten to where they are, I sincerely do hope they see the institutional issues. I feel a lot of fellow Leftists forget exactly how many prominent leftists are former cops/soldiers. The easiest way to radicalize someone isn't to convince them of us, it's to show them why the other groups are wrong and the damage it does. You don't jump directly from 1 to 4. For many people that go through those systems, they see firsthand the horrors committed in the name of capitalism and the state. They see it and they hate it and by that point there's nothing they can really do and they're trapped, but you fucking bet they'll come out of that disillusioned. ESP the military. So many kids, especially minority kids, are specifically targeted by drafters and fed propaganda from a vulnerable age where they're trying to figure out how the fuck they're gonna afford to eat or get an education in the future, and I don't think its fair to write off a potential ally, someone who could come around, because when they were 16 they made a deal with literally one of the most powerful and corrupt forces of all time without realizing what they were getting into.

Seriously I know so many people who's entire stance is just "fuck 'em" and they think that's revolutionary, radical praxis that'll change people minds and spread the cause and get people to wake up. No!!! You're cutting them off from leftist resources, from exploring and asking those questions and finding those answers, and just confining them to that same fucking system we're all claiming to be against. Well, if you pushing people away and back into the system, you're not fighting it, you're helping it. A lot of the way online radical pages are structures, the norms within those forums and feeds and magazines etc, are so self-toxic and detrimental to the overall resistance and revolution like... you can't cut everyone off until it your small fanclub in a wooden house and expect a world-changing revolution to occur. You can't.

So yes, all cops are bastards, all soldiers are bastards, but it doesn't mean you don''t stick around and try to change their minds later on, it doesn't mean you just tear up all connections with them. And ofc no one has to stick with someone if they're scared of them, I'm not saying that. Trust me, I hate the police, I hate soliders and the army and everything to do with it, but I will be damned before I seal off my buds and remove what might be the only radical voice they know from their lives, which only further embeds them as a cog in the machine.

like ffs there are 15000 trans people in active service RIGHT NOW, and that's only estimated. There are 130,000 ESTIMATED trans reservists and veterans. More than a fifth of all trans people in the US are military affiliated. I for one am not comfortable condemning a fifth of the trans population from ever radicalizing because they signed a piece of paper as a scared, desperate, hungry teenager. There has to be room to allow people to improve. You have to let people improve. You can;t build a revolution out only people who've held entirely pure lives and never made mistakes, and a lot of online leftists like to act as if that's the way it is, which I find to be absurdly liberal thinking that everyone must adhere to a life-long ideological litmus test spanning birth to death. Let people have a journey of radicalization ffs.

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myavhishek · 4 years

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i-read-good-books · 7 years

Text

fic for victuuri week day 6!

I’m late! So sorry but i am a busy bean. The rest will be coming soon. This is based off @tanaw (who is awesome) ‘s reincarnation au art (so go check that out!)

Title: in another life

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: about 5.7k

Summary:

Yuuri doesn’t know how long they stay there, frozen in that moment, how long he thinks about the things he wants to say to Victor, the things he wants to say - not now, but in time, as he grows to know him better. How long he thinks about the fact that he truly wants to know him better, that he’s letting his soul be touched by someone for the first time in years.

He doesn’t know how long they stay there, a knight and a mage - the unlikeliest of companions - but he does know he never looks away.

Link on ao3: here

Full fic under the cut

They meet in the heat of battle.

The mage comes to his aide when he’s surrounded by fire and deafened by the screeching of evil spirits near the eastern waterfalls. There’s a whirl of blue ice suddenly, stepping between him and his enemy and just a flash of teeth in a quick smile. Their movements match the other’s effortlessly, a predetermined partnership weaving itself as they dodge attacks and try their best offensive, sweat dripping from both their brows.

It’s been twelve years since the fight against the nymphs began; three since it became serious enough that the roads aren’t safe. People say it takes a dozen men to take down one of their basic spirits.

They do it between the two of them in under ten minutes.

“What’s your name?” the mage asks, lips curling into a smirk. There’s no trace of the spirit left, just the residual faint smell of rotting apples in the air, the most surefire way to know if nymph magic is involved.

He looks up from where he’s leaning against one of the rocks that make up the waterfalls. It’s almost impossible to hear him over the wind and the rushing water, but somehow the mage’s voice reaches him without trouble, clear and strong. He has an accent. The knight wipes his sword against the rock on instinct, sliding it smoothly; it doesn’t have any blood - spirits don’t bleed -, but old habits die hard.

He meets the mage’s eyes, and smiles, slightly shy. He hasn’t seen a mage that powerful in the last decade, and certainly not one that beautiful and kind enough to help him when he was in need. “I’m Yuuri.”

“Yuuri,” the mage repeats, his voice curling over the syllables like he’s licking honey, savouring every drop. He has an accent, his consonants resonate in a way he’s never heard before. The mage smiles back at him, relaxing his smirk, and holds out his gloved hand, “Hey, Yuuri, I like you. I’m Victor.”

…

“Oh my god,” Yuri groans, burying his face in his hands and pretending to barf. “What the hell is that bastard doing?”

“Who are you talking about?” Victor smiles, moving to ruffle his hair and pouting when the teenager hisses at him, recoiling and raising his arms to protect himself. He’s in that age. “Did you make a skater cry again?”

“Stop bringing that up, I was twelve the last time it happened,” Yuri groans, as if it wasn’t simply three years ago, but a distant era in the past. Victor will never get over how teenagers measure time. “And I’m talking about Yuuri Katsuki, otherwise known as a walking fucking disaster.” He grabs Victor’s shoulder, shaking him a little, and points him in the direction of the ballroom, where people are gathering to chat, forming small groups that are divided into which complexity of English one can speak, and if they’ve known the other skaters for some time. Following Yuri’s finger, he looks in its direction.

Victor’s eyes go wide, jaw dropping open. His breath hitches.

Yuuri Katsuki (he’s heard of the name before, a champion in Japan - great step sequences, last place this final) is dancing.

He’s dancing, completely free, in front of all the exhausted athletes and expensive patrons. His hair is messier than it was during his programs, a bit longer now, which Victor thinks is a great improvement, and it’s far easier to notice that his trousers fit him almost ridiculously well when he’s moving around without the edge of nervousness competition brings. Every aspect of him seems liberating; his shirt buttons are undone, his eyes shut, and his hands are clapping to the music, following the rhythm perfectly.

Honestly, Victor thinks, he looks like he’s having the time of his life.

Before his eyes, Yuuri lets out a short, delighted laugh as the music picks up, sinking to his knees and jumping back up in a sudden movement, receiving a loud whoop from where Mila is talking to her friend. Yuuri notices and waves at her, winking and falling to the floor again with expert control.

Victor can’t help but think, He’s beautiful.

On cue, he takes his phone out, giggling like a schoolboy, “I’m taking a video of this.”

“To share online?” Yuri raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t think you were that cold, Nikiforov. The guy’s drunk off his ass.”

“Um,” Victor doesn’t say, No, I wanted to take a video so I can watch it during my lonely, lonely nights and cry about how pretty this man is. “Yeah, I won’t share it. Just - for other stuff.”

Like crying. And debating whether or not to send him a Facebook friend request at 2 am.

The young skater huffs, crossing his arms over his chest, “And anyway, it’s pretty fucking sad.” He turns his nose up, “That dancing’s terrible.”

Victor smirks, “It is?” Frankly, he thinks it’s absolutely mesmerizing and yes, zoom in, Victor, good man. He yelps, excited, when Yuuri starts jumping around, humming and smiling. “So you think you could do better?”

Yuri frowns at him, scoffing, offended, “I know I could do better.”

“Hm,” Victor flutters his eyelashes. “Can you prove it?”

The skater’s eyes narrow.

It takes him ten more seconds of innocently sipping his glass while struggling not to drop his phone (that’s still recording), and then Yuri is marching up to Yuuri Katsuki and break dancing it out.

Victor’s laughing like he hasn’t in months; snapping pictures, clapping along when either of them manages a pretty risky move, and politely awwwing for Yuri when he loses, rubbing his shoulders in reassurance. Well, what did he expect, going up against such an obvious master of the craft? God, Victor needs to fan himself after watching Yuuri Katsuki slide on the floor without a care in the world. The only thing missing is a stripper pole.

It’s maybe because he’s thinking about Yuri, wondering if he’ll develop an eternal grudge against Katsuki, or because he looks away from the man for a few seconds to steady himself (don’t embarrass yourself against a king, Victor, this is your only chance to look good!), that he doesn’t notice Yuuri standing in front of him until he turns around to find him waiting there.

Their noses are almost touching.

Yuuri smells like champagne, and sweat, and he’s panting, blinking rapidly. He has the hugest smile on his face Victor’s ever seen, something so purely joyful that it tugs at his heartstrings. Clumsily but firmly, he bows a little, wobbling as he goes down, and holds out his hand, beaming, “Dance with me, Victor?”

He’s got a slight accent, and his speech is slurred from being drunk as fuck, obviously. This is silly, and there’s people here who pay for Victor’s livelihood who probably don’t want to see him dance it out with the person who got last place, no matter how much Victor doesn’t care about that. Plus, he doesn’t know the guy at all, really, he could be a jerk who just dances really nicely.

And yet, Victor, feeling like his heart might burst from his chest, doesn’t hesitate before taking his hand, breathing out, “I’d love to.”, and letting himself be led.

…

Victor and Yuuri get to know each other slowly.

It’s not easy to travel, even if it’s in a small group and the both can pretty confidently take on several enemies at once. The roads are solitary, slivers of grass growing between the stones in the path, marking the fact that they haven’t been stepped on for months. Weak nymphs and their basic spirits are everywhere, showing up at the most inconvenient of times; transforming the mere act of bathing in the river or managing to stop and eat a chore that makes Yuuri’s skin prickle with alarm, his heartbeat quickening. It’s quite understandable that he doesn’t chit chat much.

But being with Victor the mage and not speaking to him seems something akin to a crime, for him.

“You know,” the mage murmurs, hands curling around his hood. The inside of it is covered with pale furs, glowing next to his creamy skin. “You haven’t told me your story, you know?”

“You haven’t asked,” Yuuri mumbles, feeling his cheeks heat. He’s been hunting for nymphs for as long as he can remember, training until daybreak to strengthen his muscles, sharpening his reflexes without rest - and he gets tongue tied whenever Victor smiles at him. Sometimes he gets unbearably embarrassed about his crush. “It’s not that interesting, anyway.”

“Let me be the judge of that?” Victor asks, voice soft. Around him, small snow crystals glow into existence before melting and falling to the ground. It continues to amazing, this way in which Victor displays his magic openly and unashamedly, despite what some think about mages.

Trying to be courageous, Yuuri gives in, “I lived in Hasetsu all my life. I was there when the attack happened.”

The mage frowns, his blue eyes colouring with concern, “That’s not… Japan?” At his slight, sombre nod, his expression tightens, alarmed. “But it was destroyed by the nymphs.”

“Aye,” Yuuri sighs, fingers grasping his sword’s hilt. “I remember. Lost my horse, my money, and my home. Thankfully, my family survived.”

I considered Vicchan to be family, he doesn’t say, keeping his voice level. He’s learnt to be tough, after fighting with Mari to defend their home, temporal as every place they stayed in was. Now that they’re no longer together, now that Mari defends their parents with her archery and Yuuri has chosen to travel alone, he has to fend for himself. She can’t coddle him anymore.

“I’m glad,” Victor says firmly, taking him out of his thoughts. He moves until they’re almost beside one another, stopping and standing in front of him, mouth slightly parted.

Yuuri blinks; Victor doesn’t walk like normal people - that would defeat the purpose, what with him being a mage - he glides on the floor, making no sound, white light flickering around his feet. They’re closer than they’ve ever been right now, if he doesn’t count their battles, now that they’re motionless in the middle of the deserted road. Victor takes his hand - Victor’s powerful, delicate, warm hands take his, so incredibly gently, and he brings them upwards, brushing Yuuri’s skin with pale lips. “I’m glad that you didn’t lose them, Yuuri.”

He doesn’t know how long they stay there, a knight and a mage - the unlikeliest of companions - but he does know he never looks away.

…

“Oooh,” Victor crows, resting his arms on Yuuri’s shoulders from behind the living room couch at the onsen, smirking at him. “You ever have a lover, Yuuri?”

The man blushes bright red, turning his face away as if to hide his obvious embarrassment. He fidgets with his hands, nervous, and murmurs, “Um, not really.”

“Never?” Victor can’t really believe it. Does he expect him to believe that? The man who boldly asked for a dance at the banquet? The man who shines on the ice like an angel? The man who skated his program without faltering? “A man like you?”

That makes Yuuri snort, just a little, “Yeah, Victor, a man like me. I’m not that much of a catch, you know.”

“Nonsense,” Victor dismisses it immediately, patting his head in reassurance and beaming when he sees Yuuri smile at that, just slightly. “You’re a national figure skating champion! You’re young! You’ve got a university degree! You’re extremely nice! And well,” Victor coughs, swallowing.“You’re beautiful.”

“I’m not -” Yuuri chokes over his own words, flushing even more deeply and waving his arms in front of him. “I’m not beautiful.”

Victor narrows his eyes, poking at his side, “Modesty doesn’t suit you, Yuuri.”

It’s a lie. Everything suits Yuuri. He’s annoyingly wonderful like that.

“Well,” Victor jumps over the couch and sits beside him, fluttering his eyelashes seductively. “I think you’re gorgeous.”

“T-thanks,” Yuuri says, ears red. He runs his fingers through his hair, still flustered, before murmuring, in the softest, most tentative tone he’s ever heard him use, “I think you’re pretty, too.”

Victor’s dead. He’s deceased. Victor needs - he has to go, and bury his face in his pillow. Yuuri’s voice there? Fucking adorable. He can’t help but think, giddy, he called me pretty! Yuuri Katsuki thinks I’m pretty! Me! Yuuri!

Out of the corner of his eye, while he’s freaking out, he sees Yuuri relax slightly, and subtly nudge his thigh closer to Victor’s. It’s a bit unsure, a bit uncertain. So Victor nudges back.

…

“Let me handle this,” Victor tells him, smirking.

They need information from a nymph expert in the area who’s rumoured to frequent this tavern. Also a large fan of pretty boys and not a huge fan of people asking for information, according to their source (lovely village lad called Eimer). Apparently, he knows where this region’s main spirit, the Dragon, is located.

Yuuri’s grip on his sword tightens. If they can get rid of the spirit, the nymph will be weakened enough to be vulnerable to their attack. Nymphs have to distribute a large amount of their power to their main spirit so as to keep their basic spirits in line and control the region, which means it depletes their energy levels if they go down suddenly.

Victor requests surprises him, though. He blinks, “You want to get the information by yourself?”

“Oh, Yuuri,” Victor throws his long hair back, letting out a soft sigh and curling his fingers around the cords of his cape, teasing the motion of unlacing. “Trust me, I can make him talk.”

His eyebrows shoot upwards, a smile curving his lips, “Oh?”

The mage shoots him a dirty look, “I’m a very desirable man, Yuuri Katsuki.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he replies, holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t be suspicious for a mage to be sniffing around a nymph expert. You’re not exactly welcome around here.”

Victor sniffs, turning his nose up, “Stupid belief that nymphs are mages gone mad. As if that has any basis in reality.”

“I know,” Yuuri says, lightly touching his forearm in support. They’ve had a few close runs with angry people calling Victor a nymph and throwing stones at them. It’s almost impossible to hurt them, of course, not with Victor’s shields and Yuuri’s skills in play, but it must hurt to hear someone condemn him like that. Mages are raised in the academy, so they often don’t meet other people until adulthood. He saw Victor’s face, the first time a child insulted him. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to never see that again.

“I can do it, too, you know.”

Victor’s eyes soften, “You’re such a sweetheart.”

“Maybe I’m just possessive,” Yuuri suggests, feeling brave, and relishes the startled blush on the mage’s cheeks. He coughs lightly, pleased, “I’ll be out of there in ten minutes.”

“... Optimistic,” Victor chokes out, still rattled. It isn’t often that Yuuri initiates the flirting, he knows that. But well. It wouldn’t have been nice to watch Victor drape himself over a potentially dangerous informant. Sometimes he really is a bit possessive.

“Just watch,” Yuuri winks.

They both go in, although Victor puts his hood up. His features are too fine to be any common villager, telling the tale of a life spent at the academy instead of in the fields, his hands uncalloused, and his snow crystals are too noticeable. He can pass for some time, but Yuuri will have to be quick.

No worries. He’s been quick before.

He leaves his sword with Victor, warning him to be watchful, before he changes in a small closet space he finds empty, taking off unnecessary furs and struggling not to feel observed. There are eyes everywhere. Once he’s got his clothes on, he messes up his hair a bit, erases some of the bags under his eyes with powder Mari and him used to buy at the Hasetsu market, and nods, satisfied.

Yuuri walks out of the small closet swishing his hips and letting just enough of his chest show, and ten different men and women turn to stare at him. Victor, from where he’s skulking near a table in the back, drops his glass noisily on the floor, eyes wide.

Aren’t you supposed to be subtle? Yuuri muses, slightly excited. He doesn’t really unsettle Victor much, and it’s nice to see him lose his composure a little.

He seduces the guy into telling him all the possible info, dropping spare touches on his arm and fluttering his eyelashes. He makes sure to trail his fingers all over the man’s face, and leaves before the guy realizes he’s just spilled important data to a travelling man working at a nearby ‘entertainment venue’ (code for pleasure house).

“...I did not expect that,” Victor gulps when they’re out of the tavern, glancing back at him, already wearing his regular clothes, in amazement. “That was...extremely educational.”

“Oh, really?” Yuuri blinks innocently, very purposefully pulling on his sword’s hilt before letting it drop all the way into its sheathe, watching Victor’s eyes track the movement. “I think I held back too much.” His heart is beating its way out of his chest, but he powers through. “If you want to learn though,” he licks his lips unconsciously. “I could always teach you.”

Victor lets out the tiniest whimper he’s ever heard, chest quivering up and down, and quickly walks ahead.

…

“I know!” Yuuri shoots up from the dinner table, breathless, with his cheeks flushed red. “I finally know what my eros is!”

He turns to look at Victor triumphantly, curling his fingers into his fist, “Pork cutlet bowl!”

For a moment, Victor wants to tear his hair out, to shake him and tell him, “No.”, because he’s seen Yuuri’s eros, seen him seduce him more expertly than anyone he’s ever met in his life, reeling him in and digging his hook all the way in. He wants to kiss him until he can’t think, his head is dizzy, and he finally lets go.

But Yuuri isn’t ready, that’s plain to see. Yuuri shuts the door at night, and hesitates when Victor is close, blushes at proximity incredibly easily. Yuuri is still figuring out what he wants, apparently, and the fact that he might have made the first move while drunk can’t change that. He’s going to have to be patient; it’s worth it, for a guy like Yuuri.

So Victor beams at him, grabs his arm, and declares, “Then you will be the pork cutlet bowl that enthralls men!”

The way Yuuri smiles at him, relieved and reassured in his choice, lets him know he did the right thing.

…

The Dragon spirit is at the top of the mountain - at least, that was what Yuuri’s informant claimed - in an area without many trees but near a stream, so the nymph can feed off its energy. There’s a minimum of two days travelling uphill in desolate terrain until they reach its hideout, and it’ll be tough, with no moment to rest. It’s extremely dangerous to fall asleep while so close to a main spirit; anything can attack, masking themselves with the spirit wards; basic spirits sneak into dreams if they’re strengthened by the main spirit’s power, and the mind must be alert at all times to stop nymph possession.

Yuuri knows this. He’s lived amongst nymphs for the better part of his childhood; Japan was a disaster that fell quickly enough, but nymphs followed their journey all the way out of the island, attaching their main spirits to vessels and landing in fertile grounds.

Nymphs are terrible, parasitic creatures who barely have any distinguishable emotions and lack an organized society. Contrary to what the stories said about them before they took over, nymphs aren’t beautiful maidens with kind words, but shorter, sickly-looking tiny women with sunken cheeks and bottomless black eyes. Yuuri won’t ever get the image of a nymph spreading her wings as she flew away with a child out of his mind, not for as long as he lives - her yellowed teeth shining, her claws wrapping around the baby, the way she glowed as her feet touched the earth.

They are distinctively non-human, and they aren’t mages, either. No one could mistake a nymph for them. They don’t have feelings, they don’t lure unsuspecting travellers to their doom. It’s almost ridiculous, how easy it is to hate them for sucking the life out of their home, out of their people, out of their hope.

But their blood is just as red as Yuuri’s is. And the screams of terrified agony - high-pitched, desperate, pleading - as he drives his sword through them while not allowing himself to falter, sound just like people’s.

“Do you want to do this?” Yuuri asks, swallowing hard. He’s been through too much to give up now; he’s already killed nymphs before. But Victor… Victor fights because he wants to practice his magic in peace, because he smiles at his ice crystals and draws snow mustaches on Yuuri’s face while he’s sleeping. Victor fights for the Academy, for his apprentice, a boy named Yuri, too.

Victor deserves better than risking his life alongside a mediocre knight; he deserves battalions, legions, armies.

Victor’s standing in the middle of the path, his bag with their provisions lying at his feet. His hair falls loosely all over his shoulders, covering up his hood. He looks at Yuuri, and says, very quietly, “I want to fight with you.”

“Are you certain?” Yuuri needs to know. He takes a step forward, biting his lower lip. “Victor, are you sure -?”

“I want to court you properly, you know,” Victor cuts him off, eyes fixed on the outline of the mountain in front of them. “I want you to get to know my apprentice. I want…” His hand curls into a fist, cold wind whipping his hair back. “I want to fall asleep next to you on the road without fear, Yuuri.” He finally looks up, determined. “I can’t be with you until I die if there’s creatures trying to kill us every second now, can I?” He smiles, amused. “And I still haven’t introduced you to the mage academy scholars, Yakov would never forgive me for marrying without his approval, anyway -”

Victor doesn’t continue then, but that’s because it’d be a little complicated, what with Yuuri’s lips monopolizing his mouth for the moment.

…

It’s cold, Barcelona.

Not as cold as St. Petersburg, of course; Spain’s got nothing on that. But cold enough that Victor sees Yuuri - sniffing every couple of minutes and sneezing - and frets, wrapping scarf after scarf around his neck, taking out gloves from every pocket he has, not even hesitating to warm up his face with breathless kisses.

“Victor,” Yuuri whines, pushing him away slightly. “We’re in the middle of the street!”

“But you’re freezing,” Victor pouts, wrapping his arms around Yuuri stubbornly. It’s almost his birthday, goddamnit, isn’t he allowed to hold his lover close, at least? “You’re not used to these cold winters.”

Yuuri raises an eyebrow at him, a small, amused smile on his lips, “I’m from Japan, not Brazil, Victor. I’ve seen snow before.”

“Was it frightening?” Victor teases.

“You’re sleeping on the couch tonight, I hope you know that.”

“So cruel,” Victor clutches at his chest desperately, biting his lip to keep himself from smiling. He knows Yuuri enjoys thinking his threats come off as serious most of the time, when really anyone can see from a mile away that he crumbles in the face of puppy dog eyes. Yuri has so far gotten soda six out of the six times Yuuri swore not to let him have some. His Grandpa hates them and won’t allow the kid to stay at their place.

“Hmph,” Yuuri rolls his eyes. “I can see when you’re being patronizing, Victor!”

“Right,” Victor replies cheerfully, dropping another kiss on his cheek.

“I-I’m telling you,” Yuuri chokes out between giggles. Ooh, ticklish. “This is so embarrassing…”

“No one knows you,” Victor whispers, his lips brushing Yuuri’s cheekbone as he moves to speak into his ear. “We can just have fun here.”

“Yeah,” Yuuri whispers back, and then says. “Except for the fact that there’s two teenagers taking pictures of you.”

Victor turns automatically. It’s true; two teens wearing ‘I HEART NIKIFOROV’ t-shirts with his face plastered on the front. The minute they notice him being aware of their presence, the short one screams and grabs the other one’s forearm in what seems like a death grip, before yelling, “¡No me lo puedo ni creer, tía! Aaaaaah, nos está mirando.”

Victor doesn’t know much Spanish, but he’s willing to bet there’s something about how cool he is, right there.

“They’re saying you’ve gotten old,” Yuuri tells him, as if the git knew Spanish.

“That is a lie,” Victor gasps, quickly switching his attention to glare at Yuuri. “I am not old. And even if I were,” Victor flicks his hair, “I would still look amazing.”

“You’ve spent the last few months drinking and binge-eating pork cutlet bowl while you had me on the steamed vegetable and pure protein diet,” Yuuri reminds him. That comes up a lot, in their arguments. Yuuri’s not the diet kind of guy, regardless of how loyal to his career he is. Victor currently has three chocolate boxes hidden in his part of the closet. “You deserve to be called all the insults in the world.”

“You still love me, though,” Victor says, his voice soft. He reaches out for Yuuri’s hand, and he immediately takes it, entwining their fingers without thinking. It’s become almost second nature these days, to reach out and find Yuuri waiting, to wait until Yuuri reaches out to him.

“Yeah, Vitya,” Yuuri goes on his tiptoes, gracing him with a single kiss on the tip of his nose and chuckling when he blushes bright red. “I still love you.”

…

Yuuri has never doubted the fact that Victor is strong. He’s always known that, and has worked tirelessly to match his level and grant him a chance against their enemies, to cover for him and compliment his style.

They’re strong, together.

The Dragon is stronger.

…

“Victor,” Yuuri starts. He looks troubled, his fingers curling into a fist on top of his thighs.

“Yes?” Victor smiles, trying to be reassuring. Tomorrow’s the final, and they’re engaged. It’s only natural that he gets nervous, especially if it’s Yuuri. He just hopes his anxiety isn’t too bad.

“Victor,” Yuuri begins once more, voice firm. “After the Grand Prix Final, let’s end this.”

…

It all starts to go wrong once Yuuri lets himself think they can actually do this.

They caught the Dragon while it was resting, thanks to Victor’s stealth, and managed to attack it in quick, efficient hits, staying light on their feet and saving energy for the entire battle. Even when the situation worsens, when the Dragon rises up to its full height, glorious and lethal, they maintain their composure, making sure that everything goes according to the plan.

The spirit feeds on the nymph to gain its power and although she’ll likely be aware that losing the guardian to her region is not a viable option, she’ll still take time to redirect her powers to one particular entity. Besides, she won’t be able to keep it up for long if someone else chooses to fight her. They must wear the Dragon out then, must outlast it. This nymph isn’t like the half-dead ones Yuuri’s seen in the wastelands or on the paths, the ones who can barely muster up three basic defense spirits. It’ll be dangerous.

They’re doing well, and then Yuuri gets hit by the spirit’s blast of pure white fire.

It’s unlike anything he’s ever experienced before. Yuuri has been stabbed, has been stepped on, thrown against walls, hit, slapped, has survived attempted drownings… he’s known violence all his life, has grown to expect it rather than recoil at the first sign of it, to accept it as part of his life.

But then the flames lick his skin, teasing and biting, and he starts screaming.

It bites at him, gnaws on his body, ripping apart the folds that keep him together. There’s nothing to run away from, nothing to shake off, no wound to put pressure on, no possible remedy - there’s just heat, unbearable, eating away without mercy, burning through cloth to sink its claws into him and make him choke.

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe he can’t breathe.

- cold.

Yuuri’s body cools down immediately, a change in temperature so brusque he feels dizzy with it, panting and clawing at his throat. He’s shivering while his blood pulses from the fire, while red rivers leak out of his red-hot wounds. There’s snow on the ground where he’s lying, he can feel it cushioning his body, recognizes its texture from being around it so much because of -

“... -uuri, Yuuri, oh for the Mage’s soul, Yuuri, pl- please.”

“V-Victor,” he rasps out. “Victor,” he repeats.

“I’m here,” Victor chokes out. Yuuri can’t open his eyes, but his heart constricts at the pure agony in Victor’s voice, gut-wrenching. “Yuuri, come on, I have to get you something -”

Neither of them are healers. The most Yuuri can do is tie a tourniquet, from days at the camps he and his family stayed at, but his knowledge of medicine doesn’t extend to burns like this. He can’t - he’s not sure he’ll survive this.

“Dragon,” he whispers, coughing. He manages to see a little, from between his eyelashes. Victor still looks gorgeous, even when his vision is blurry. It makes him want to smile, a little, and touch his cheek. He looks really worried. Victor shouldn’t be that worried about him.“Dragon.” he insists.

“I don’t care about the stupid Dragon,” Victor bites out, as if they haven’t spent the last few days chasing after it, sacrificing hours and hours of sleep and time because of it. He’s crouching protectively on top of him, “Yuuri, stay with me, I’m begging you.”

“You’re pretty,” Yuuri blurts out, woozy. It all hurts so much. The words seem to come from far away. “Want to dance?”

“What -? Nevermind,” Victor dismisses it, fussing over him. His hands are shaking. Why are they shaking? It’s still cold, but Victor’s immune to that. And anyway, the place is heating up. Yuuri’s hot. Should he be hot? That doesn’t sound right. “My wards won’t hold for much longer, we need to get you somewhere safe, I’m going to call Otabek, he can help you -”

“Be my coach, Victor,” Yuuri slurs, barely conscious.

…

Victor doesn’t notice he’s started to cry until his tears are pooling together on his lap.

…

Yuuri comes to with the worst headache he’s had in his life, spitting out blood as he writhes on the floor.

The cold - the sweet, blessed cold - is gone, and now there’s fire again, except his skin isn’t the one suffering under it this time. It’s everywhere, poisoning the air, making him cough black smoke and struggle to breathe. The only thought on his mind is - where is Victor?

…

“I’m retiring, after this,” Yuuri says, with that half-smile of his Victor knows better than he knows his own hand, the half-smile that fights to show how completely happy he is with what he’s saying, while burying the regret underneath.

Victor imagines a world in which he skates and Yuuri doesn’t - a world in which Yuuri doesn’t spend his morning hours lazing in the rink, in which he doesn’t stay up until 3 am because that’s when the best offers for skating equipment come in, in which he doesn’t rehearse jumps in Victor’s living room, accidentally breaking his lamp for the fourth time. Figure skating has become so deeply integrated into what he associates as Yuuri in the time they’ve known each other that, although he can say without a doubt that he’d stay with Yuuri regardless of whatever he did with his career, he doesn’t know if Yuuri would be happy with that.

If Yuuri would want that.

“Your career isn’t dead, Yuuri,” he whispers, trying not to plead and yet desperately wishing to.

“It’s dying,” his fiancé murmurs, shrugging.

…

Victor’s losing.

Victor’s fighting on his own at the top of the mountain, defending himself and Yuuri as best as he can. He’s on his last resources of power; Yuuri can tell by the way there’s no snow around him like there always is, just faint droplets of water hanging in the air.

“Victor!” Yuuri yells, wincing at the sound of his voice. His lungs are filled with smoke. “Victor, I’m coming!”

For a moment, Victor turns, his blue eyes widening, his lips quivering with relief before they decide on an exhausted smile. His shoulders go down, losing some of their tension. He says, “Yuuri -”

That’s the precise second when the Dragon’s claw comes down, almost as if in slow motion, and tears through his neck like it’s sandpaper.

…

“Oh my god,” Yuuri breathes, eyes following the shape moving on the TV screen. “Who is that?”

“That’s Victor Nikiforov,” Yuuko answers, not missing a beat. She sounds giddy, grabbing his hands to get his attention. Her ponytail swings from side to side as she gushes. “He’s like, the best skater in the world. Can you believe he’s only 14?”

“...Yeah, I can believe it.”

There’s something familiar about Victor Nikiforov, something that calls out to Yuuri immediately. He moves swiftly and surely, like the ice is his element, like his jumps are supported by rising and falling tides.

He’s watching him, curious and interested, when Victor Nikiforov gives a look at the camera after his spread eagle - an intimate, heated glance accompanied by a perfectly delivered wink, and Yuuri’s heart skips a beat.

He bites his lower lip, “Hey, Yuuko, can we learn that program?”

Maybe he could meet him at a competition one day.

Yeah, right, Yuuri sighs much later as they’re actually practicing the program, which is absurdly complicated. He purses his lips. As if he’d meet the best skater in the world. In another life.

fin

#victuuriweek #day 6 #au prompt #victuuri #yoi #yuri on ice #fic #fanfiction

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sneakersonlinesale-blog · 5 years

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demitgibbs · 6 years

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Troye Sivan Talks Finding Power in Femininity, Unhibited Second Album

Nobody is stopping Troye Sivan except for maybe Troye Sivan. No queer-averse label bosses, no identity-stifling pressure to be anything but who he is: the LGBTQ community’s precious paradigm of unapologetic, unicornian queerness.

But even with the YouTube-launched pop fixture’s steady mainstream rise, with assists from Ariana Grande on a single featured on his sophomore album, Bloom, and a live duet at a recent Taylor Swift concert, the 23-year-old’s follow-up to 2015’s Blue Neighborhood refuses to sacrifice self for commercialism.

And he won’t stop there this time, not during this album cycle (or ever): In the seductive video for the album’s first single, “My My My!,” Sivan works a room doused in the carnal grit and flashing lights of a gay bar’s seedy backroom – and also an entire street – in a blistering heat as hot as the shirtless guys feeding his desire.

He’s coy about its subject matter, but Sivan wrote an entire song about bottoming too.

I tell the South African-born, Australian-reared Sivan that “Bloom,” notably an official single, is the perfect Monday song to crank on your way to work, or at a family gathering. Its gay-sex specificity perhaps lost on heterosexuals, the anthemic send-up is concurrently a love song and the most liberating of queer secrets. Giggling, he tells me, “That was the goal.”

Elsewhere, the celebratory, spirited and brazenly gay Bloom turns the page on Sivan’s youth, which was cast with wistfulness and, admittedly, tentativeness on Blue Neighborhood, his first Capitol Records album. That same sentimental lilt – but now, with winks – also marks his burgeoning adult years captured on Bloom: losing his virginity to an older man during a Grindr hookup (the dreamlike, fraught-with-realness “Seventeen”); recognizing he’s failed his better half (the tender and winsome “The Good Side”); and a strutting, newfound sexual liberation, with “Bloom” and “My My My!”

Sivan’s transparency is hardwired: He truly can’t be anything but himself. This is clear on Bloom, but holds true during conversation, as Sivan talks about deriving power from femininity, working through residual queer issues, and dealing with the fear of shooting “My My My!” with a crew of dudes bigger than him.

WATCH:

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Did you imagine you’d be answering all these questions about sex after “Bloom” was unleashed into the world?

No way. Honestly, I never would’ve thought I would have written that song. That song came out of a session that I felt wasn’t going too well. It was me and my best friend (and producer) Leland, us being like, “OK, well how do we make the most of this day? Let’s just start messing around and having fun.” And we wrote it that night – never, ever thought that it would see the light of day. We ended up with something that I thought was really, really cool and interesting and real.

Mainstream culture has come around to same-sex love, but gay sex is still taboo. Does your frankness about gay sex on this album feel radical or political?

Not really. I wanted to make music for people like me. The first album I was conscious of trying to keep things really digestible for as many people as possible. This time around I had a different set of goals, which were to really, actually, accurately represent where I feel like I am in my life. And if it’s talking about going out and partying, or if it’s talking about staying at home and cooking in the kitchen – or if it’s talking about sex – whatever it is, I wanted a 20-year-old queer person to hear this and be like, “Oh yeah, this is, like, legit.”

What influenced you to deliver something more queer-specific?

It was having all of these really inspiring experiences and meeting all of these really inspiring people. You know, whenever I start writing music, my number one goal, always, is to keep things honest and real, because I think it’s the only way to stay relevant and stay true over a long career. I wanna be doing this for the rest of my life, and I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to be thinking about cool concepts and things like that for the rest of my life. But I’ll always be able to speak about where I am in my life, that’s always gonna be there. So I fall back on that, and I wanted to not hold anything back. It’s so cool to me to be able to celebrate all of those things I was celebrating in my real life. So, why not go for it and talk about that on the album?

When did the album’s more defiantly queer narrative begin to take shape artistically?

It was probably just the moment where I had immersed myself in the LGBTQ community. When I think about my real life, I have almost exclusively queer people around me in L.A. I’m living in this little bubble right now where I forget sometimes that it’s a thing and that there are, like, straight people in the world (laughs).

I’m sure that you’re reminded when you perform in small towns that aren’t like West Hollywood.

Right, exactly. And then I travel to somewhere like that or I’ll go home to Australia – or I’ll just read the news – and very quickly get reminded just how lucky I am and how specific my experience is. But my hope is that it’s an experience of hope for people, that they hear this and feel like, “Oh, that’s possible and I can go and live this happy and healthy and fulfilled, fun life.” And see that there is, 100 percent, another side to the world.

For some gay people, coming out doesn’t mean the personal battle has been won – there’s still overcoming sexual repression. I feel like you work through some of that on this album.

Probably, yeah. Totally. And I think just in general a lot of the residual issues that queer people deal with have also completely followed me into my older life, just internalized homophobia that I’ve held onto without meaning to from when I was, like, 13 or whatever. It’s like, “Oh no, you can’t talk about that or you can’t sing about that.” I’m doing my very, very best to actively throw all that away. It’s been really empowering.

What has been the most challenging part of navigating the music industry as an unapologetically out gay man?

Normal music industry stuff. I came into the industry at the perfect time for me, a time where people were willing to let me be who I am and say what I want and do what I want, so that’s been the biggest blessing. All that really leaves is just personal challenges of like, what do I want from my career? Am I making sure that I’m releasing the very best thing that I possibly can? And what’s inspiring to me? And do I want this to be a radio smash, and if I do, how am I gonna get there? Or do I just want this to be something that means something to people, and how am I gonna get there? It’s been fairly typical music industry stuff, which I feel really thankful for, because I think 10 years ago, it would’ve been a whole separate set of worries and issues that now feel much more intense than dire.

Is your goal to make gay radio smashes?

I actually don’t know. For me, I’ve walked this line between having a really young, active online audience – a similar audience that you would see at an Ariana Grande or Justin Bieber show – and then also wanting to do these really subversive queer pop songs. I think my approach to it is not thinking too much about what I want commercially, just letting things happen, making stuff that I like. Hopefully if I like it, somebody else is gonna like it.

When you performed “The Good Side” on SNL in January, I got lost in you getting lost in the song. For a performance like that, are you in the moment? Or does your mind tend to wander beyond the performance?

I’m mostly just in the moment. Sometimes I think about the lyrics. I try not to think about them too much because, like “Good Side,” it’s one of the most personal songs on the album and that can get kind of weird, being that vulnerable, so I try not to let myself go too deep into the hole. But in general, I’m just thinking about doing the song justice.

WATCH:

youtube

You have a role in the forthcoming film Boy Erased, starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe as parents who send their child to a conversion-therapy camp. What about the film resonated with you?

The script. I just couldn’t put the script down. It really tore at me. Then I read the book and started immersing myself as much as I possibly could in that world. My coming out experience – and the moment where I accepted my sexuality as something that I couldn’t change – was a weight off of my chest. This wasn’t for me to deal with; it was more for everyone else. I had come to the point where I had accepted it within myself, and then it was about navigating through the rest of the world: my family, my friends.

So, the thought of going to a program like the one in the film at that crucial, vulnerable moment and being told, “No, this is 100 percent back on you, and you’re filling a God-shaped hole in your life with these tendencies” was one of the most harmful and hurtful things that I can imagine. It’s been proven to be ineffective and extremely dangerous, and you’re signing these kids up for an impossible task. It really hit home and struck a chord with me, and I haven’t wanted anything as bad as I wanted this role in this movie, so I just auditioned and thankfully got the part.

Your sister once caught you in a vulnerable state, dancing to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” When did you become comfortable with that kind of vulnerability on stage?

It’s still really new to me. I think the “My My My!” video was a huge step for me personally; that was a moment where I really had to actively pep talk myself into it. I knew that was the way I naturally wanted to move to the song, and that was the way the song made me feel, but that didn’t make it any easier to do in a big group of people – especially with burly cameramen! (Laughs) It was scary! But when I pushed through, I felt how amazing it felt. It felt so right, and now I have to retrain my brain a little bit to be able to do that on stage and to be able to do that in front of other people.

How do you get into that mental space?

It’s a really active decision that I have to make. I have to actually think about it and push through a lot of nerves and vulnerability. And, again, the only reason I do it is because it’s what feels right to me. That’s what I would do in private. So, why the hell not do it publicly, and celebrate that?

You were scared of your feminine attributes as a child. Can you tell me about your journey to embracing femininity? And when you do embrace it now, how it makes you feel?

I was really scared of it in my childhood, and it was something that I definitely tried to shy away from. Now, I celebrate it as such a source of power for myself. I feel so liberated and free, and I’m having fun. And femininity is magical. Who wouldn’t want to be feminine?

It took me a second to get to that point, but now that I’m here it’s so fun to be able to push through all of those worries. On the other side of that is such a liberated existence where you can just do whatever you want, and it’s just been a pleasure.

How would you compare where you were to where you are now?

It’s like night and day. It feels really artistically inspiring to me, really personally inspiring. And I’m just much happier.

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/08/30/troye-sivan-talks-finding-power-in-femininity-unhibited-second-album/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/177553844055

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years

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Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It?

Google spent nearly $5.4 million on lobbying in the second quarter of 2017. (Photo: Vladislav Reshetnyak/Pexels)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Corporations and rich people donate billions to their favorite think tanks and foundations. Should we be grateful for their generosity — or suspicious of their motives?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

I’m sure you’ve been hearing the ever-more-anguished calls to regulate the huge tech firms collectively known as GAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

Barry LYNN: These companies, these super-large platform monopolists, they have developed the capacity to manipulate us, to control us, to control the information that is delivered to us, to control the pricing at which products are delivered to us, to control us as producers.

The GAFA companies are far bigger, richer, and arguably more dominant than tech companies in the past. Google, for instance, has more than 80 percent of global search-engine market share. Facebook has nearly 2 billion monthly active users. Amazon has an estimated 90 million prime members in the U.S. — that’s something like 70 percent of all American households! It’s estimated that 40 percent of all online spending goes to Amazon. This kind of scale creates a lot of concern. We’ve examined this concern in previous episodes, like “Who Runs the Internet?” and “Is the Internet Being Ruined?”

Zeynep TUFEKCI from a previous Freakonomics Radio episode: We’re seeing the birth of a new center of real power. We depend on these technologies that have been, in many ways, wonderful and fascinating. But they’re making significant decisions unilaterally.

There’s also the question of whether the mission of these firms is as socially beneficial as many people believed they were in the early days of the internet:

TUFEKCI: There’s all these really smart engineers. They’re the brightest computer scientists, and all they’re thinking about is, “How do I keep someone on Facebook for 10 more minutes? What’s the exact combination of things that will keep them staying on the site as long as possible so that we can show them as much advertisement as possible?”

So here’s a question: if you were one of those huge, dominant, super-wealthy firms, what would you do to ensure that the good times stay good? You’d probably spend a lot of money lobbying politicians — which, yes, they do. There’s been a huge ramping-up lately in lobbying by tech firms. But you might also do something a bit subtler than that.

Robert REICH: Yeah. There’s been a parallel ramping-up of the philanthropy that’s associated with the tech firms. That philanthropy comes in a variety of different forms.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: corporations using philanthropy to shape the public debate — and how that can go terribly wrong:

Barry LYNN: That was on June 27th. And on June 29th, I was told that my entire team had to leave.

* * *

Our story today begins with a journalist …

Franklin FOER: I’m Franklin Foer, a writer with The Atlantic.

Stephen J. DUBNER: You are one of three brothers who write books. Talk about that for just a minute, and the family that produced all of you.

FOER: Right. So I have two brothers: Jonathan, who’s written a good number of novels, including Everything is Illuminated. I got a younger brother named Josh, who is a science writer [and] wrote a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. It’s actually incredibly uncomfortable for us to talk about growing up in a family of other writers just because— I’m sure in some ways, we benefit from the novelty act of being three brotherly writers. But then we all, of course, want to be known for our own accomplishments.

DUBNER: Right.

FOER: But our parents didn’t do anything— They didn’t force us to play violin four hours a day or sit down and study the great chess masters. We watched a lot of He-Man and Addams Family reruns on television when we were growing up. But one of the things that they did was they gave us a credit card, which they said we weren’t allowed to spend essentially on anything except in the event of an incredible emergency. There was one exception to this: they said that we could basically spend the credit card at will at the bookshop. They basically guided us to one thing.

DUBNER: Your first job in journalism was at Slate, one of the very first mainstream online publications, which was started by Microsoft. There was this huge enthusiasm, certainly among the chattering classes.

FOER: There was a certain amount of utopianism that was associated with the emergence of the internet, this idea that we were going to tie the world together. I love search engines. I love the fact that I can access every book in human history in a nanosecond. I love that I can get things delivered to my door incredibly quickly. These things, arguably, make life much better; maybe inarguably make life much better. These technologies were incredible! Amazon is an incredible company. The Kindle was an incredible invention. The iPad and the iPhone were incredible innovations. We were right to marvel at them.

DUBNER: After writing for Slate for a while, you moved on to the New Republic — as you call it, the “intellectual organ for hard-nosed liberalism.” You ultimately became editor there not once, but twice.

FOER: The New Republic was this little magazine that always had outsized influence in politics and culture. It was an incredibly elitist organ and it managed to persist over a hundred years while never really turning a profit. As we entered the Internet Age, that became a more and more difficult thing to continue to do. We ended up shifting from one ownership group to the next. I got so exhausted trying to find an owner and sick of that, I ended up resigning as editor. But then a couple of years after I resigned, the magazine got bought by a guy called Chris Hughes who had been Mark Zuckerberg‘s roommate at Harvard, and co-founder of Facebook. He bought the magazine and, to me, this seemed almost too good to be true. You had this guy who understood social media, who had incredible number of resources, and seemed devoted to this little magazine that I was also devoted to. So I came back, I edited the magazine, and Chris and I tried to re-make it.

DUBNER: The relationship in the beginning seemed like it was unbelievably good.

FOER: We became really good friends and it was exhilarating. We felt like we were trying to save something that was imperiled in the world and that maybe we could help provide some dignified solution to the rest of journalism, which was grappling with a lot of the same issues that we were grappling with. But there was a moment when things just took this turn. Chris had always talked about wanting to make a profit with the New Republic, and he suddenly decided that he didn’t want to lose, at least not a whole lot of money with it. So we had to turn around our financial position incredibly quickly. He insisted that we start chasing clicks. In 2013, the surest way to get clicks was to post a clip from last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart. You slap a headline on it and maybe write a couple sentences about it and everybody would click on it.

DUBNER: You got caught up in, at least, monitoring the numbers, right?

FOER: Yes, I did. Look, data is crack cocaine. If you’re the guy who had a hard time getting a date in high school, to suddenly find yourself producing things that are extremely popular — you become obsessed with replicating that popularity. In some ways, everybody in the magazine wanted to be successful on Facebook. We wanted to master social media and this new environment. But we didn’t want that new environment to dictate how we did our jobs.

DUBNER: All right, so we should say that [you were] quitting as you were about to be fired from the New Republic.

FOER: Yeah. I took the brave decision to resign when I learned that there was some guy who already had my job and was offering other people jobs at the New Republic.

DUBNER: It’s funny. You’re describing what was happening to you at the New Republic. But it sounds as though you’re also perhaps describing your view of what happened at places like Google and Facebook over time, where you may begin with a certain set of motivations, but as those motivations lead you to this overwhelming commercial success, you’re so seduced by the magnitude of that success that you can’t help but want to replicate it over and over again.

FOER: Yeah, that’s completely right. In retrospect, I realized that I was living this compressed version of recent history.

The recent history of the internet at least. Over the years, Franklin Foer’s views of the internet had shifted. The same guy who used to think this …

FOER: There was a certain amount of utopianism associated with the emergence of the internet.

And this:

FOER: I love search engines!

And this:

FOER: These technologies were incredible! Amazon is an incredible company.

Has now come to think this:

FOER: Amazon thinks of itself as “the everything store.” It’s gotten itself in pretty much every conceivable business. It owns Whole Foods, it powers the cloud, it houses data for the C.I.A., and so on. There’s really nothing that it doesn’t try to squeeze into its empire.

He also thinks this:

FOER: As Facebook shapes the way that we consume news, as Google shapes the way that we interact with information, and as Amazon has shaped the way that we interact with books, the dominance that these companies exert ends up trickling through the cultural intellectual ecosystem. With Amazon, my concern is that the book business has become utterly dependent on them, that they hold one of the few true monopolies in the world.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

Swati BHATT: My name is Swati Bhatt. I teach at Princeton.

One course she teaches: The Economics of the Internet.

BHATT: The existence of a monopoly — of a single firm in any product space, unless it’s a government-granted monopoly — is rare in the digital economy.

So even though Amazon has, for instance, at least 70 percent of e-book sales, that doesn’t make it a monopoly.

BHATT: Technically, no. Because that leaves 30 percent for some other set of firms.

When describing firms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, Bhatt prefers the term “behemoth.”

BHATT: Yes, there is a difference. “Behemoth” suggests that it’s simply a large firm, whereas a “monopoly” suggests that it’s the only firm.

Okay, economic semantics aside: Bhatt does see strong parallels between these modern behemoths and what we traditionally think of as monopolies. But a modern tech behemoth has a particularly modern advantage:

BHATT: Ownership of a scarce resource is the definition of a natural monopoly. What we’re seeing with the behemoths today is an ownership of a scarce resource called “personal data” or “data” in general. There’s an interesting self-reinforcing dynamic here. Whereas a firm transacts, buys and sells, [a behemoth] acquires data about its consumers. That enables it to grow by producing more personalized products by advertising more effectively. That brings in more customers, which brings in more data, which then enables the firm to grow even further and that leads to the behemoth status.

And that is what Franklin Foer, and a growing chorus of other critics, are so concerned about. Foer recently published a book called World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. It’s part-memoir, part-screed against the dominance of the big tech firms. It’s not a particularly empirical book; and it’s hard to say how much of Foer’s argument was informed by personal experiences, like the New Republic disaster. It also turns out that Foer’s family, in addition to encouraging his love of books, encouraged his distrust of monopolies.

FOER: My dad was a University of Chicago-trained lawyer who’d worked in the antitrust division of the Carter administration. I grew up in this household where antitrust was part of the family religion. My dad would drive around in a car that had a bumper sticker that said “bust the trust” on it. It was a real obsession and passion of his. For a long time he was this lonely activist who was railing for greater, more aggressive enforcement of these laws prohibiting monopolistic behavior. I always admired him for this quixotic stand that he took, but I never really fully bought into his arguments until Amazon got in this fight with the book publishers, when it started to hit close to home.

DUBNER: This was the Hachette deal, yes?

FOER: Exactly. Let’s just say something about book publishing, which is that book publishing is an incredibly oligopolistic industry. There are four or five big companies that dominate book publishing. They’re oftentimes jerks. It’s hard to have a whole lot of sympathy for the book publishers. But suddenly you have these five big companies that were up against one big company, which was Amazon. Amazon basically controlled their access to the marketplace. Amazon was renegotiating their ebook contract with the publishers one by one, trying to strong-arm them with their market power into pricing their books lower and lower. To me, it was grotesque and ominous that Amazon was able to use its market power to try to dictate to the publishers in this incredibly aggressive way.

DUBNER: Where do you draw the line between winning — or competing — and being evil?

FOER: Right.

DUBNER: Persuade me that it’s not just a case of big companies being really good at what they do and winning and you having sympathies with the people who are not winning.

FOER: My book, in some ways, is a valentine to competition. I believe that a marketplace is most healthy when you have a number of market players. I might not love book publishing. It might be too concentrated in some ways for my taste. But at least there are five companies competing against one another for the marketplace. If I don’t like the way that one company is treating me, I can always go to another company. Or if I don’t like the goods that one company is selling, I can go to another company. The problem with Amazon, and the problem with Google, and, to an extent, with Facebook, is that they become the only market player. The choice that we have as consumers is limited and competition is limited. My argument is against the big technology companies, which are racing to expand into every nook and cranny of our lives.

As it happens, this expansion had just raced into Franklin Foer’s own life. We spoke to him in early September, just before his book was to be published. And there had been a plot twist.

FOER: The New America Foundation supported my book.

The New America Foundation is a center-left think tank devoted to “renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age.” It’s run by the political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter, who’s a former top official in the Obama State Department.

FOER: One of the cool things that New America does is that they give money to journalists who are writing book projects. I didn’t get a lot of money from them, but I got a small sum. They were especially generous to me because I’d just been fired from a job at the New Republic.

And the partial funding of Foer’s book about the dominance of firms like Google suddenly became relevant because—

FOER: That’s since become relevant just because they fired a vociferous critic of Google from the foundation. Which is noteworthy because the foundation has received a fair amount of money from Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

DUBNER: Right. How much fun is it for you to be publishing a new book and already distancing yourself from the foundation that funded the writing of it?

FOER: It actually doesn’t feel good because New America has been supportive of me over time. I’d rather not seem like a jerk and disavow them when they’ve been so nice to me. But this does feel sadly reflective of a much bigger issue.

DUBNER: Who was the critic who was fired?

FOER: His name is Barry Lynn and he ran something called the Open Markets program there. Very active opponent of monopoly and a very vociferous critic of Google.

LYNN: We used to have an affiliation with the New America Foundation, but that ended on August 31st. We were kicked out of New America.

And that is Barry Lynn.

LYNN: And I direct the Open Markets Institute.

So the name of his project has not been taken away; but his affiliation with the New America Foundation has.

LYNN: We’re working out of a WeWork on the 1400 block of G Street in Washington.

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: the story is not as neat as the headlines would have it:

Anne-Marie SLAUGHTER: At no point did Google or any funder tell me to fire Barry Lynn.

Also: funding controversies can reach across many decades. Like all the way back to the founding of Stanford University.

REICH: There is an effort to unearth the sordid history of the university’s initial benefactor.

* * *

Barry Lynn started out as a journalist …

LYNN: I worked in Venezuela and in Peru as a foreign correspondent. Then, I ran a magazine called Global Business Magazine.

We should say it was a pro-business magazine.

LYNN: We were a magazine that aimed at the people who ran businesses. We had a[n] inside look at how globalization actually works at the institutional level.

That inside look led to Lynn crossing over to the other side. He came to believe that corporations are too powerful, and that their power is too concentrated. This was a theme he pursued in a couple of books and, since 2002, with the New America Foundation. His project came to be known as Open Markets.

LYNN: We got the work going. We did it with increasing effect over the last seven years, to the point where in 2016, we had a number of folks on the Hill starting to understand that, indeed, America has a monopoly problem. The first person who really reached out and said, “I want to actually help shine a light on this problem,” was Senator Warren. The result was a speech that she gave on Capitol Hill.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech was part of a conference, organized by Open Markets, called “America’s Monopoly Problem.”

Elizabeth WARREN: Today in America, competition is dying.

LYNN: This was probably the most important speech about concentration in the United States, about the monopoly problem, since a series of speeches that F.D.R. gave in the 1930s.

WARREN: Google, Apple, and Amazon provide platforms that lots of companies depend on for survival. But Google, Apple, and Amazon also, in many cases, compete with those small companies. That platform can become a tool to snuff out competition.

LYNN: She said, “It’s not just an issue that affects us as consumers. It also affects our democracy, because it’s this concentration of power that leads to concentrations of wealth. Concentrations of wealth lead to concentrations of control over government, and other institutions of authority.”

This line of criticism would seem to be very much in sync with the mission of not only Open Markets, but also its parent organization, the New America Foundation.

SLAUGHTER: In my own scholarship, I’ve written about monopolies and risks of consolidation and data ownership.

That’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department official and Princeton professor, who’s now president and C.E.O. of New America.

SLAUGHTER: What convinced me to leave Princeton and become head of New America — which was a big move, because I had a wonderful position at Princeton — was this idea that we really could be a place that hosted fundamental debates about our future in the digital age.

But as Barry Lynn tells the story, New America didn’t share his enthusiasm for the conference he put together where Senator Warren spoke.

LYNN: Well, a few people in my organization at New America were not happy with the way we were framing the conference, and the fact that we were focusing some of our attention on the platform monopolies and especially on Google.

What was wrong with focusing on Google in a conference about monopoly? Remember, they do own some 80 percent of the global search market.

LYNN: Or I guess the question is, “Why was our work at New America problematic for Google?” Eric Schmidt, who is now the chair of the board at Google, was also, for a long time, on the New America board and then for a period of time served as the chair of our board.

Eric Schmidt, who was C.E.O. of Google for 10 years, has also given New America a lot of money, both personally and through his family foundation. So did Google itself. Between Schmidt and Google, New America had received roughly $20 million since its founding in 1999.

LYNN: There was a relationship between our two organizations. This is a relationship goes back to the very early days at New America and actually had never seemed to result in any problems at New America up to this point.

But now, it seemed, there was a problem. Were Schmidt and/or Google leaning on New America as Lynn’s critique of the company grew more intense? A year after the New America conference where Senator Warren spoke against Google’s domination, European antitrust regulators hit Google with a huge fine, $2.7 billion, for allegedly tilting search results in its own favor. Barry Lynn posted a statement on the New America website. It congratulated European regulators for giving Google such a good spanking, and it urged American regulators to do the same.

LYNN: We released this statement in support of the decision in Europe. That was on June 27th. And on June 29th, I was told that my entire team had to leave. We had two months to leave.

One natural conclusion to draw was that Google had stepped in and asked New America to do something about Barry Lynn. Indeed, that’s how it was portrayed in The New York Times. Their headline read: “Google Critic Ousted from Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant.”

LYNN: At that point I asked for this decision to be reconsidered, and if it could not be reconsidered, I asked for more time. I was told that neither of those was possible.

The writer Franklin Foer, who happens to sit on the board of Barry Lynn’s Open Markets Institute, told us a similar version of events. He made it clear that Lynn’s statement about the European regulators’ decision—

FOER: This was something that was a bit too far for Google. New America was very generous in supporting me, and they never did anything to interfere with my own work. But I was fairly outraged by their treatment of Barry. I can’t resign from New America because I’m not affiliated with them. I’m not taking any money from them now, but I’m extremely disappointed.

But Anne-Marie Slaughter offered a substantially different portrayal. First of all, she says—

SLAUGHTER: No funder at New America has ever influenced New America content in any way.

And, this:

SLAUGHTER: New America has a set of principles on our website that makes very clear that no funding can affect the integrity of our research and/or shape the research in any way. We do not pay to play. We take funding and we do our work. Those two things are separate.

But the timing of Lynn’s firing certainly gave the appearance that Google and/or Eric Schmidt had asked Slaughter and/or the New America Foundation to get rid of Barry Lynn and Open Markets. And Slaughter found herself on the defensive.

SLAUGHTER: At no point did Google or any funder tell me to fire Barry Lynn, and at no point did Google or any funder try to influence the work of anybody here. If any funder ever did tell me that, I’d tell them to take a hike!

That’s Slaughter at a New America event a few weeks ago called “Is Big Tech an Existential Threat?” The event was actually in support of Franklin Foer’s book.

SLAUGHTER: I did not part ways with Barry Lynn for anything to do with Google. I decided that Barry Lynn and I had to part ways because he could not work respectfully, honestly, and cooperatively with his colleagues.

So Slaughter says she got rid of Lynn, not because of a funding conflict of interest, but because he was a difficult employee. That said, she acknowledges a real and long-standing tension between the people who fund research and the people who do research.

SLAUGHTER: I don’t actually think this is just a think-tank issue. I worked at three universities, and universities have private funders for centers and for different bodies of research. Even newspapers have constant tensions between advertisers and reporters that reporters don’t have to navigate, but the management does. There is a general tension wherever you need to protect the integrity of research and you also need to fund that research.

New America says all its major funders are listed on its website. We asked Slaughter for a breakdown:

SLAUGHTER: Only 12 percent comes from corporations. By far, the largest amount comes from foundations and then from private individuals.

LYNN: Taking corporate money does not mean necessarily that the work of the entire institution is suspect—

Barry Lynn again.

LYNN: —but it definitely can create a slippery slope that will lead to pressures being brought to bear on those people who are questioning concentrations of power or the use of corporate power in other ways.

REICH: People are right to have a skeptical, maybe cynical, orientation to corporate lobbying or corporate philanthropy.

And that’s Robert Reich, a political scientist at Stanford.

REICH: My research interests these days focus a great deal on philanthropy and the role philanthropy plays in democratic societies.

And that philanthropy increasingly comes in the form of foundations.

REICH: There are lots of foundations.

DUBNER: What is the median size of assets? It’s really small, right? A million or so dollars—

REICH: Oh yeah, it’s not much. It may be a couple of million dollars. But there’s an enormous growth in the number of foundations, and that’s just a logical consequence of the growing inequality in the United States.

DUBNER: Just talk about your thesis essentially — the role, the influence, and the complications around modern philanthropies.

REICH: I’d start by saying most people’s attitude about philanthropists and about foundations is that we should be grateful that people are trying to do good with their own money. That’s the attitude I want to try to sweep away. I don’t think philanthropists deserve that amount of charity, if you will. Why is that? Because philanthropy, especially large philanthropy, in the form of a foundation or especially wealthy person represents the exercise of power in which they attempt to use their own private wealth to affect public outcomes or to produce public benefits or make social change. Power deserves scrutiny in a democratic society, not gratitude. I’d add on top of that that a foundation, in particular — which is a legal form that allows a wealthy person to create a donor-directed, unaccountable, barely transparent, perpetual, and tax-subsidized corporate form in order to use their private assets to affect the public — is an especially interesting and potentially worrisome form of power.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about think tanks, per se. Is there such a thing as a truly nonpartisan think tank, or is it just too hard because of where the money is coming from?

REICH: Well, I’d say that you’re more likely to make the case that there are nonpartisan universities, universities which are funded in not entirely dissimilar ways from think tanks. Officially, they have to be nonpartisan, so do think tanks. In other words they can’t declare themselves in favor of particular political candidates. But think tanks have become far more popular in the United States as a result of the polarization and inequality in the United States. Idea generation that happens in think tanks — the policy frameworks and proposals that get disseminated from think tanks — flow from philanthropic interests with particular policy positions in mind.

DUBNER: Tell me what you know about Google’s history of philanthropic, foundation, or think-tank giving and especially the timeline because I understand it’s accelerated quite a bit recently.

REICH: Google, like lots of other tech firms, has gotten much more aggressive in its formal lobbying efforts. I think it’s now the case that the top five Silicon Valley companies are amongst the largest sources of lobbying, greater even than the five top Wall Street firms in New York. There’s been a parallel ramping up of the philanthropy that’s associated with the tech firms. That philanthropy comes in a variety of different forms.

DUBNER: Rob, knowing what you know about the situation with the New America Foundation and the Google money and the controversy, what would your advice be for them, for the New America Foundation?

REICH: The New America Foundation needs to be aware of the soft power, the agenda-setting influence that donors can have to the think tank even in the absence of calling someone up and saying “we disagree” or “we object to the work that someone does.” When Anne-Marie Slaughter — whose job is chiefly to ensure the existence of the New America Foundation into the future, which involves fund-raising — does her work, she needs to be cautious that she hasn’t internalized the policy preferences of the donors such that she shapes the work of the foundation around the donor interests. The idea is you’re worried about the conversation you’ll have with your donor in the future. You orient the work that you do to please the donor, rather than to displease the donor. That has, functionally, the same outcome from the donor’s perspective, without even having to say anything.

DUBNER: Now, your own fine university, Stanford, benefited, was founded from the private largesse of a man, Leland Stanford. Most of history paints him as a classic robber baron — a railroad man who did all kinds of stuff that we would frown upon today. Talk to me about that and whether that’s a conversation that takes place regularly at Stanford. Or is it avoided?

REICH: I’d say people here are aware of the history of the university and the deep connection between philanthropy and the well-being of especially wealthy universities. People here, I think, know something about the history of Leland Stanford. There is an effort on campus to unearth the sordid history of the university’s initial benefactor.

DUBNER: Has there been any movement of any magnitude to rename the university?

REICH: Not that I know of. They’re starting with lower-hanging fruit — monuments and places on campus named for people with no obvious connection to the university and whose historical records are not so appealing.

DUBNER: Let’s say I have some money, Rob. I want to set up a foundation. I come to you and I say, “I’m a big believer in bringing critics into the inner circle. I know that you’ve been critical of how foundations behave, and that it’s undemocratic, and so on. But Rob, I’d like to make you the executive of my foundation.” Let’s say I made my money in ammonia fertilizer. How would you go about setting it up in a way that takes advantage of my largesse to try to accomplish something that we could all agree is some public good without falling into all the traps that you’ve been describing to us?

REICH: First, I’d say, despite the fact that laws don’t require me to be especially transparent about what the foundation is doing, I pledge to make completely available to the public all of the grant-making we do, the evaluations of the grants that we make. I’d want to invite in outside experts as well. I would want to find ways in which to organize the foundation’s efforts to seek out the most severe critics of what we were doing in order to try to learn the most in order to give grants away to greater effect.

DUBNER: Let’s say I also make you chairman of the board. Tell me about that board, how you’d set it up. What would the elections look like? What would the terms be like? Who’s on it?

REICH: Well, “elections” already reveal that you don’t know much about how foundations are operating. There are no elections on the boards of foundations. The boards are hand-picked by the initial donor. You can create the governing board of a foundation in such a way as you guarantee that only family members and heirs ever serve on the board. There’s no public representation necessary. The Gates Foundation, with something in the neighborhood of $40 to $80 billion devoted to philanthropy, has as its governing trustees Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, and, I believe, Bill Gates Sr. I’d like to see possibly experimentation with a form of foundation peer review in which an effort analogous to what happens in academia happens within the foundation world. It would be surprising if the philanthropic efforts of corporations were purely altruistic. Corporations seek to advance their own interest especially in their lobbying — quite possibly often in their philanthropy. I’m trying to stimulate people to be morally awake and in the same moment, to get people to consider what types of public policies or frameworks ought to govern and structure our collective lives, which is a moral and philosophical question.

That was the Stanford political scientist Robert Reich. We also heard today from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Barry Lynn, Swati Bhatt, and Franklin Foer. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio: my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt drops by to answer your FREAK-quently Asked Questions:

Steven LEVITT: That is one of the weirdest definitions of social good I’ve ever heard in my entire life—

LEVITT: The thing you want to do, from a public policy perspective, is not put people’s identity and their morality in conflict with efficiency—

LEVITT: As you take the knife and think about whether you’re going to stab the person with it, you’re not thinking about what’s going to happen 15 years later when I apply for a job and I have to check the box—

That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Brian Gutierrez. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern and Harry Huggins; the music throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Swati Bhatt, professor of economics at Princeton University.

Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute.

Robert Reich, professor of political science at the Stanford University.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and C.E.O. of New America.

RESOURCES

“America’s Monopoly Problem: What Should the Next President Do?” Elizabeth Warren, New America (June 29, 2016).

“Antitrust: Commission Fines Google €2.42 Billion for Abusing Dominance as Search Engine by Giving Illegal Advantage to own Comparison Shopping Service,” European Commission (June 27, 2017).

How Digital Communication Technology Shapes Markets: Redefining Competition, Building Cooperation by Swati Bhatt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

“Is Big Tech an Existential Threat?” Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America (October 5, 2017).

“Repugnant to the Whole Idea of Democracy? On the Role of Foundations in Democratic Societies,” Rob Reich (July, 2016).

“What Are Foundations For?” Rob Reich, Boston Review (March 1, 2013).

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (Penguin Press, 2017).

EXTRA

“Is the Internet Being Ruined?” Freakonomics Radio (July 14, 2016).

“Who Runs the Internet?” Freakonomics Radio (November 14, 2013).

The post Thinking Is Expensive. Who’s Supposed to Pay for It? appeared first on Freakonomics.

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