Comic book writers who still make Bruce hit his kids even after years of mass criticism from fans who TELL you it's a bad creative choice that pushes them away from the fan base and comics in general,,, you did this for what?

Thoughts While Watching Gilmore Girls, Season 2, Episode 13 ("A Tisket A Tasket") Part 5, I Give Up

Just for funsies here's Jess calling Dean an idiot and Idiot admitting it.

Before I continued to slog through this absolutely mind numbing DALA (Dean and Lorelai Affair) episode, I uttered 6 words that I hope won't come back to bite me in the ass: "This can't possibly get any worse." Ahahahahahaha. There are 14 minutes left in the episode. I'm fucked. I've been on this one way too long and I'm determined to finish this. I'm just going to enjoy this Literati on a Bridge break. I'm going to my happy place where Dean doesn't exist and Rory is an orphan because Lorelai (and Chrisopher) don't exist and every episode is just 45 minutes of this.

"I'm so much happier here." R: "Why were you screwing with Dean an hour ago but you're suddenly being nice to me?" J: "Well it's the screwing with Dean that's an important step to getting here so I could be nice to you."

Ugh he took the fucking Quarter On A String so now I have to suffer through that fucking Lost and Found episode. God damn it Mariano! Why are the pretty ones always so dumb?

Did I mention that he is so pretty. I'm legally obligated to say that at least twice per Jess Episode. After Rory and Jess part ways, we cut to Rory returning home with a bag from the bookstore and Lorelai immediately shifts full gear into Weirdly Suspicious & Passive Aggressive Mode. When Rory admits she visited a bookstore and had a slice of pizza with Jess (oh the horror!) then goes to her room, Lorelai immediately shuffles her passive aggressive, suspicious little feet right in after her. 90% of the time that Lorelai and Rory meet to talk on their couch after Rory has just departed from the company of Dean or Jess, especially at night or at the end of the episode, it means Lorelai is about to dish out some horrible, horrible wisdom/life coaching. The Couch is where we have witnessed many classic mother-daughter bonding moments, such as the time Lorelai asked Rory to make sure Jess got his rabies shots before she slept with him. Ah, the couch.

Mmmm yep. *collects money*

SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH. Here we go. I think it was the great Michael Scott who once said, Why are you the way you are? Honestly, every time I try to enjoy something fun or exciting, you make it...not that. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.

Ya know, I stan Rory more and more lately with how she stands up for Jess. Sorry your mom's a bitch. How many more tmes I can rant into The Void about Lorelai's unhealthy grudge with Jess? How many more times can I point out that Lorelai has only had one prolonged interaction with Jess, while she's known Dean twice as long and he's been rude and used a condescending tone of voice with her many times, including the first time they met (on Willy Wonka night) and it literally just happened again moments ago. It's just mindblowing to me how she will not let this FUCKING GO and SIXTEEN years later in AYITL when she is married to his uncle she is STILL making digs at him over him being rude to her when he was 17, joking about how he should have a baseball thrown at his head.

I honestly don't think I could love Rory Gilmore more at this point. Bless her rationality and sweet heart and cute rose sweater that looks like a swirl of that strawberry icing you squeeze over instant oatmeal. Are you witnessing a historical moment right now? The birth of a Rory Stan? Sort of. It won't last forever, but since I won't go past season 4 anymore, then yes.

The "things she's seen and heard" are just her regurgitating what Dean told her 5 minutes ago. LOL. She just took this kid's word as gospel, without even questioning it. The DALA is so fucked up, man! Lorelai is way too concerned with the lives of teenage boys! If Dean told Lorelai to jump off a bridge would she do it?

I really wish this were my gritty unrated Gilmore Girls spinoff titled The Hollow because I would have someone on this show actually acknowledge that Jess is honestly something of a miracle. His father abandoned him as a newborn, he had a tumultuous, negligent, inconsistent, possibly even abusive upbringing. His mother drank while she was pregnant with him. He grew up watching unsavory men in his mother's life circle in and out like a revolving door (according to Liz The Worst, one of them even died). Yet he doesn't turn to any real crime, drugs, alcohol, or even sex (okay, well bless his heart he tries there but people seem to cockblock him at every turn). HE SKIPS SCHOOL TO WORK AT WALMART. In real life kids like that are really lucky if the worst path they go down after that kind of chilhood merely involves them stealing loose change from an old fucknugget like Taylor Doose who deserves to be stolen from anyway. That bridge should have been fixed 10 years ago. Here's some of the train wreck. There were no survivors.

If Dean needs someone to talk to that badly he can get a diary or a dog or a sock puppet or like, one fucking friend his own age. I think half of the issues of this show could be solved if these people had more friends. Can't Taylor Doose swing some kind of town wide Bid-A-Friend Auction? Or emotional support animals?

Sure but like, did you ever stop to think that you and Dean are actually his only "enemies" and it's completely one sided because he couldn't care less about you, and also, your enemy is a 17 year old boy and you're a full grown adult lmao. Crazy lady. I wonder how Jess feels knowing he's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to a town full of boring nobodies who will go nowhere and do nothing while he will eventually makes millions of dollars from his best selling novels that get turned into blockbuster movies. Maybe someone will even make a movie about his life. I'm going to think about who could play Milo/Jess in a movie about himself while Lorelai yammers on and remains in denial about how insane she is. What do you think? Lorelai says Rory is "So young and naive, so nice and gives everyone a chance"; what she's really saying is "Jess doesn't deserve a chance, not even from you." I stoppped watching at this point and only skimmed a few more seconds. I saw that Rory stormed off, Lorelai and Rory fight over it at FND, Emily is confused, Lorelai says "I didn't like Dean at first because I didn't know him, I don't like Jess because I know him." You know what, there are times when this show starts to get my under my skin so much that I’m just not enjoying it and there’s no point in finishing the episode. In conclusion, Lorelai sucks and ruins everything and my number one Hill To Die On will continue being that Dean and Lorelai are sleeping together because there is no other logical explanation possible for why she talks about him like this. Goodnight!

Edit: guys, sorry that I was so enraged with Lorelai The Worst that I managed to gloss over the fact that Rory and Jess went on a Book Shopping and Pizza PRE-DATE 😍😍😍😍 THEIR FIRST ONE!

In my Gilmore Girls spinoff The Hollow we would see every minute of every Pizza and Book date and pre-date I promise you this 🥰 No skimping!

I'm sorry but I always did think Emrata was BORING! Like people see a skinny white woman with defined cheekbones, a small nose and a pout and go nuts. But I said that once in a room and everyone told me I had internalized misogyny? Reminds me of this post that was swirling around earlier this year about Bella Hadid giving us nothing compared to actual supermodels who came before her and the notes were filled to the BRIM with people saying it wasn't a nice thing to say because she supports Palestine and hated her nose job, two things which had fuck all to do with her lack of modeling talent.

I just get tired of us uplifting every single woman who finally understands basic feminist theory as the second coming. Am I happy she has come to understand how terrible that music video she was in was? Yes. And I glad she’s discussing the power dynamics and imbalances inherent in the systems she worked in? Yes. Do I think she needed to write an entire essay book about a subject she just became truly enlightened to? Absolutely not.

Mind you, it was still full of whorephobia and casual slut shaming, so what exactly has she learned? Hmm.

She regurgitated the same points we’ve been hearing since 2014. It’s boring. It’s the Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer-esque feminism we’ve all outgrown. One dimensional.

Now Bella… is she in the upper tier of the models we have now? Yes. Does that mean she has anything on the greats of the 80s and 90s? Absolutely not. Personally, I like her. But I’ve said it before. She’s got a very heavy spirit, and I think that does manifest into her being a very withdrawn and rather “boring” person. But I also know her memoirs in twenty years are going to be much darker than we all think.

20 Questions

Tagged by @marezelle!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

31!

2. What’s your total AO3 words count?

1,723,715

3. What fandoms do you write for?

On AO3 it's The Legend of Korra and RWBY. I had some old X-Files fic but it got lost in the shuffle (and yes, I am sad about it) and as a kid and teenager I wrote a whole lot of fic for various fandoms.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Please Excuse My Penmanship

Dear Diary or: How I Had a Second Coronation and a Dalliance with a Detective

Five Times Mako Didn't Say I Love You

The Prince and the Bodyguard

Honeymoon

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I do make an effort, although I'm not 100% compliant. I think it's a nice exchange, and a good way to interact with readers. I very much enjoy comment exchange chains, where I can chat with the readers, in fact.

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Uh. None of them? I mean, I guess maybe A Fervent Conflagration; Or A Dispatch Regarding The Investiture Of The Crown Princess, since it ended with Qi crying about letting Naoki down.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Hmmm. Maybe Bouncing off Clouds? I wanted Lin Beifong to have some fucking satisfaction so I had her meet her father, finally. And specifically be happy meeting her father.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Yes. Enough so that my TLOK fics have had comments toggled so that I have to review and approve them before they get posted.

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Some. It's not my main focus. My smut tends to be pretty character-driven. I'm not a fan of reading the same old regurgitated smut that I read in 90% of smut fics (I find it boring and painfully obvious that most of it is being written by people who have never actually experienced said sexual acts they are writing about - thus the regurgitation), so I tend to avoid writing that.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written?

No. Although I have promised to complete a Love Between Fairy and Devil and Till the End of the Moon crossover super AU crack fic that I've been amusing a friend with in bits and pieces. It's ridiculous. And funny. It involves a teenage band that only does covers of Evanescence. I don't know what to tell you.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes, into Polish and into Spanish.

13. Have you ever cowritten a fic before?

I haven't! I am not sure how well I would do that. Generally speaking I don't play well with others. You never know, though. I wouldn't count it out in the future.

14. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

Of ever? Mulder and Scully.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

I don't think I am ever going to get to that Royalist story, unfortunately. I have written stuff on it, but it's not happening. Never say never, but. Yeah. No.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Characters! I am very good at finding individual voices for characters, and there seem to be an endless amount of them. I make an effort to keep canon characters canon even years and years into the future. I am also good at keeping details in my stories straight. Continuity is a strength, for sure.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I cannot write to a deadline to save my fucking life. Also, I am 100% a pantser and sometimes sustained plots can elude me. (See all of my thousands of ficlets.) I have a very difficult time finishing any and all of my longer, chaptered fics and that's no good.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Eh. I guess it depends, for me. Why are you doing it? If it's for worldbuilding flavor then I guess it comes down to whether or not it's important to you that readers understand what they are reading. If so, then you need to clarify what's been said by either some sort of direct translation or by what other characters are saying/doing in response. If you don't want readers to understand what's being written - trying to reflect the confusion a character has when hearing dialogue in a foreign country, for example - then sure, that works too.

The one thing I wouldn't do as a writer is add dialogue in another language with the expectation that readers will go to google translate on their own to figure out what it means. That's going to take them right out of the story and the world you've created (literally and figuratively) and as a writer, that would be the last thing I would want to do, break that fourth wall. But that's just me.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

If we're talking about actually writing it down then it's a toss up between my self-insert Duran Duran epic masterpiece (which I still have) and a Pern fic that I wrote when I was 10 and which my mother threw out. The Pern one was technically earlier than the Duran Duran one but it wasn't as much a story as it was disjointed scenes and such.

20. Favourite fic you’ve ever written?

I Do Not Ask the Night for Explanations. It pulled my fucking heart out and trampled it into the ground and brought me back to life after my wife died. I don't know if it is the best fic I've ever written - it's certainly not the most popular, that's for sure - but it saved me, in more ways than one. Especially for a fic that took me over 5 years to write.

I am not a fan of tagging, but if you write fic and you'd like to answer, please do and let me know, because I genuinely enjoy reading people's answers to these.

tagged by @cosmicrhetoric to share my top ten films... i am possibly the worst person to share my taste in cinema. but you asked for it babe i’m sorry i warned you. in no meaningful order, here we go:

1. WEIRD: the al yankovic story (2022): saw this movie the night it came out (11/4) and am STILL thinking about it. it’s (guess what) a really uh, strange film and not at all what i expected--or actually kind of wanted??? bc i do really like Actual “Boring” Al--but i thought it was a lot of fun!! and the re-records are fantastic. the entire rocky road scene makes me so happy.

2. baby driver (2017): hey look i know i know half this cast is absolutely terrible and they should’ve gotten run over with a car in real life but the first time i saw this movie i was in kansas visiting my freshman college roommate for her wedding and it was only like. the third time i’d ever been stoned and it was incredible. literally was the most incredible and life changing experience. made me want to become a stunt driver. i cannot legally operate a motor vehicle at 24 so that isn’t happening but it was a nice feeling while it lasted.

3. dead poets society (1989): i rented this movie the first weekend at college--literally got a library card just to check out the physical DVD copy of this movie because i did not have netflix yet. i was so dramatic and 18 about majoring in something i didn’t want to do, at a college i didn’t want to be at in the first place, that watching dps immediately made me cry. also mr. keating’s little speech of “Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing” haunts me every day.

4. how to survive a plague (2012): idk if this counts but this is my favorite documentary. it always makes me cry but i think it is such an important and informative documentary. but also it tells the whole story of all the people involved so well. like the way people’s voices stop appearing as voiceovers as the years go on. like you MISS THEM you FEEL the loss of all those people from the queer community in the 80s and 90s. it’s just so fantastic.

5. rocketman (2019): i don’t think i can accurately describe how much i love this movie. elton john is such a cornerstone of my childhood and feeling at home. and the performances in it are so incredible. i watch the crocodile rock scene whenever i’m close to losing my mind. it contains curing and healing properties.

6. glass onion (2022): not to be like i finally watched a modern, relevant movie and fuck people were right it IS GOOD but. guess what i watched a modern, relevant movie and fuck people were right it was very good and i had a lot of fun watching it. also blanc’s outfits made me feel so goddamn envious. the linen pants COME ON!!!

7. ghostbusters II (1989): not to say i don’t also love gb1 but the the “higher and higher” sequence, baby oscar, sigourney weaver being a cellist, “boys, you’re scaring the straights.”, “no, i believe it's one of the fettucinis...”, like c’mon. this movie is amazing. okay i’m realizing that i really need to make you watch ghostbusters II with me. even if you haven’t seen the first one i don’t care we’re watching the guys imply that egon has fucked the goo.

8. groundhog day (1993): okay so maybe i’m just a guy that really likes a certain era of bill murray movies??? ironically this is a movie that, i’ve found, i can really watch again and again and again. like: credits roll, start it again. andie macdowell’s blue coat has been on my mind since i was eleven and saw this movie for the first time. i love the town it looks so delightful--and actually was reminded a lot of it when i was in vermont recently--but it has destroyed me to know that the set was not in punxsutawney but actually somewhere in illinois... boo.

9. beetlejuice (1988): i’m saying beetlejuice as a stand in for like all tim burton movies from 1982-1993 (& like, two in 2005). but i remember watching this movie as a kid and literally not being able to regurgitate the plot at all. like, jump in the line is playing and i’m like “i have no idea what anyone’s name is and don’t know what’s going on. but that lady’s dress [barbara] was nice!!” haven’t changed much but now i at least know what’s happening. also: know that me listing this movie is also me saying that anything danny elfman touches is amazing and i love the soundtrack to this movie so much i wrote a paper on it in undergrad [music in film class] and made my professor read ten pages about the genius of danny elfman making the film’s main melody motif be three. notes.

10. barbie as rapunzel (2002): best for last. i don’t need to explain myself here. the movie is like: 20 minutes of experiencing the horrors of both servitude and otto, 5 minutes of the best dress montage of your life, 10 minutes of being like “oh my god is the prince really that stupid?”, 10 minutes of “yes, he is...”, 15 minutes being confused by the romantic pasts of the kings and gothel, 15 minutes of family therapy between two talking dragons, and 3 minutes of crying over “I know Rapunzel's secret. She painted what she dreamed.” “When you do that you’ll never be wrong.” and it deserved an oscar.

Yeah, those people who always brings up Manga sales are annoying. I mean of course some manga has been outselling some comics everyone knows that. We've known that since like the late 90s as I'm sure Dragon Ball and Naruto outsold comics I've seen kids in school consistently read those compared to comics since like early 2000s. Pointing this out at this point in time is like pointing out the color of an orange. Most money is made in merchandise anyways

Its annoying like I don't give a fuck who's outselling who. My original point is that Marvel and DC have great books every year that people ignore because of the regurgitated and false myth that both companies releases nothing but trash.

Long Way Home | Bucky Barnes x Reader (Part 1)

MY MASTERLIST

Series Masterlist

Summary: As Dr. Barnes is about to begin his new job at Massachusetts General Hospital, he gets to work on a patient who was once involved in making medical history. 

Word Count: 1870

Pairing: Doctor!Bucky Barnes x Doctor!Reader, Doctor!Steve Rogers x Platonic!Reader

Warnings: Heart Disease, Hospital, Surgery.

A/N: Give it up for another clusterfuck from yours truly. Thanks to my dearest @dramadreamer14​ for the beta, as always. I DON’T DO TAGLISTS! Divider by @firefly-graphics​ <3

September 29, 2020 - Boston, Massachusetts 

For as long as she could remember, Dr. Y/N Y/L/N had followed a strict morning routine. She began her day with a 5 am wake up call and a cold shower to get rid of the remaining slumber, followed by her usual forty minute drive to Massachusetts General Hospital while sipping on a freshly prepared green juice. She parked at the same corner spot in the employee parking lot, and entered through the sliding double doors that led her inside of the emergency room. She always made a beeline for the cafeteria to pick up two cups of decaf, and then headed over to greet the Chief of Surgery. 

The moment she entered the Chief’s office, she was quick to realize that things had changed. What was once the office of Dr. Anthony Edward Stark now belonged to a Dr. Steven Grant Rogers. “Oh- shit. I totally forgot.” How could she forget that Tony was gone? 

Change was the only thing in life that never changed. But Tony had been the one constant in her life. A part of her refused to accept that he was gone, even though she knew that it was his time to go. It’s what he had claimed, and that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was having to see Steve replace him. Not that he did not deserve the position or anything, but in her mind, no one could ever replace Tony Stark. 

“Good morning to you too, Dr. Y/L/N.” Steve greeted the woman as he looked up from his emails, a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he saw her enter his office with a sunken look on her face. “I’ve been expecting you.” 

“I was only gone for two days, Steve.” She let out a sigh as she walked up to his desk. “I didn’t think you would already manage to redecorate.” Not that it mattered, as it was Steve’s office now. But it was safe to say that a part of Y/N refused to accept that Tony had retired, and that Steve was the new Chief of Surgery. She had to keep repeating it in her head, hoping that her fucked up heart could eventually come to accept it. 

Steve was one of the few people at Massachusetts General Hospital who knew of Y/N’s relationship with Tony. She had been his patient long before she began working for him. Even after all those years, the two of them had shared a close bond. He knew that she might have a hard time adjusting to the fact that her beloved boss had left his post, only to be replaced so quickly. 

“I’m sorry, Y/N.” Steve frowned as he closed his laptop, eyeing the extra cup of what he assumed what decaf that she had set on his desk. “I’m sure Tony misses you as much as you miss him.” 

“No, he doesn’t.” She shook her head, laughing softly. “He’s probably glad that he’s finally gotten rid of me, if I’m being honest. He’s had to deal with me for thirty years.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Isn’t it?” 

“Is that decaf for me?” Steve asked as he motioned towards the cup she was still holding. 

With a pout on her lips, she gave him a nod. “If you don’t mind me bringing you one every morning. Tony and I always spend our mornings having decaf and bitching about you.” 

“You and Tony bitch about me every morning?” He asked her, though he was not all that surprised by that revelation. “Did he really hate me that much?” 

“If he hated you, he wouldn’t have asked you to be Chief when he was gone. He knows you’re a good surgeon, but he’s someone who doesn’t like to be challenged unless he’s going to win.” Y/N slid the cup of decaf towards him. “You were always giving him a run for his money, bud. He preferred to get it out of his chest before he starts his day.” She shrugged. 

“Well, I’ll take the morning coffee. But as for the bitching, I’m sure our newest Chief of Cardio would be more than happy to join you in on that.” Steve remarked, cheekily. 

Oh right, how could she forget about Tony’s other replacement? Steve was running the hospital, while some other doctor was coming in to run Tony’s department. Tony had even suggested that he would also be her doctor, but Y/N was going to be the judge of that. She may not have control over who would be her boss, but at least, she could have control over who got to be her doctor. 

“Tony did say that he’s a friend of yours.” Y/N sipped her drink before looking up at Steve. “Do you think I should trust him with my life? You know, given that Tony’s the reason why I’m still alive.” 

Steve knew why Y/N was apprehensive about having someone else take over as her doctor. If she was having a hard time accepting him as her boss, he could imagine how hard it would be to replace Tony as her doctor. While cardiothoracic surgery was not his specialty, he was well aware of Y/N’s condition, and the clinical trial that had saved her life. As a doctor, he could understand the patient’s concerns about transferring to another doctor, especially after thirty years of being treated by someone like Tony. But he had to reassure her, he would trust Bucky Barnes with his life. 

“I would trust him with mine.” Steve admitted with a shrug. “You can call me biased, but Dr. Barnes is one of the most reputable heart surgeons in the country.” 

“He’s not better than Tony.” 

“No one can be better than Tony. But since he’s decided to put his scalpel down and focus on running his foundation from New York, you’re going to have to accept that I wouldn’t hire someone who did not live up to that standard.” He assured her. 

“You hired him because he’s your best friend from college.” Y/N pointed out. 

He knew that it was a call out, but he was simply going to ignore it. “I know you don’t like change, Y/N. But we want what’s best for you.”

“Well, I promised Tony that I would meet with him before I decided if I want him to be my doctor. Hopefully, he lives up to everything you’ve been saying about him.” 

“Trust me… he’s the best there is, for the hospital and for you.” 

If she only knew… 

Bucky Barnes stared out of his window as his flight was taking off, the view of New York City slowly fading away as he was leaving behind his home of almost twenty-five years. He never would have thought that he would be leaving New York like this, but he knew that he needed the change. New York had been where he had met Steve, where he had gone to college and medical school, where he had established himself a career as one of the finest heart surgeons in the country. 

As happy as he had been in New York, there was always something that seemed missing in the life that he’d had there. No matter how hard he worked or how much he had accomplished, none of those accomplishments seemed to live up to the expectation that he had for his career. It felt as though he hadn’t done the one thing that he was always meant to do, although he was unsure if he would ever be able to do just that. 

The hour ticked by as he caught up on some emails, one of them from a certain Dr. Y/N Y/L/N from Mass Gen with the subject line as ‘Patient Consult Request’. 

Dear Dr. Barnes, 

I’m aware that you will be taking over the care of a number of Dr. Stark’s patients, and that you have already received their files to begin reviewing. Due to your expertise in the matter, I have an urgent request for an in-person consult with you for one of my own patients. I have attached the relevant medical information. 

Please let me know when you would be free to meet after your arrival in Boston. 

Sincerely, 

Dr. Y/N Y/L/N

Bucky pulled up the attachment to see that this patient had been born with transposition of the great arteries, and had been operated on by Tony Stark at the age of five. He had performed an arterial switch using what would eventually become the world renown Stark procedure, which involved the switching of the pulmonary artery and the aorta to their normal positions and connecting them to the right ventricle and the left ventricle respectively. 

For a moment, he wondered if this patient was indeed the one who Stark had written about in his 1993 article about the Stark procedure. Needless to say, Bucky had been fascinated by the accounts of Stark’s clinical trial during the 90s that paved the way for many cardiothoracic surgeons like him. 

If this was the same patient, it meant that he would be working with a patient who was involved in making medical history. But as excited as he was about that, he began to worry once he read further into the file. He came across a series of test results that concluded that this patient was currently experiencing aortic valve regurgitation, followed by a note from Dr. Stark that said: 

Patient refuses aortic valve replacement. 

It was a simple aortic valve replacement, but the thought that the patient was refusing the surgery made Bucky wonder why that might be. Perhaps being operated on at the age of five and having to follow up for almost three decades now would do that to a person. He wouldn’t know, but he wasn’t going to judge the patient for refusing surgery. Needless to say, it was now his job to convince the patient to have surgery, as it was best to repair the aortic valve. Hopefully, he can do it without geeking out about Tony's article. 

And so, he wrote up a quick email to schedule the consult for this patient. 

Dear Dr. Y/L/N, 

I’ve reviewed the case, and I agree that it is urgent. I will be arriving at the hospital within the next two hours, and would be happy to meet with you as soon as I get in. Please let me know if this works for you. If so, I will come to meet you. 

James B. Barnes

It must have been a few seconds before he received a reply. 

Dear James, 

Thank you so much for getting back to me so quickly. I have no surgeries scheduled for this afternoon, so you can find me in my office. I look forward to meeting you. 

Y/N

With that, he closed his laptop and looked down at his watch rather eagerly. Only a half hour left until he would touch down in Boston, and he could not wait to get to meet Y/N. 

Overall, I just think we should stop with the biopics. They're tired anyway and all of them are biased in one way or another. As for Pam - who remains pretty private and has done a lot of good with her charitable foundation and various causes for decades yet that's rarely ever mentioned - you point out her "problematic" faults but do you do the same for Sebastian or your other faves? A genuine question, not a criticism. Hasn't everyone done or said something "problematic" at this point? I mean, when does this "cancel culture" stop? Who's it actually for, you know? I dunno, all of this is incredibly frustrating on all sides.

I mean, firstly lol... Sebastian isn't a fave of mine. I like him as an actor and I think he can be good-looking (he also.... can't), but I don't hold him (or any other celebrity) on a pedestal. I actually don't know much about him at all on a personal level, aside from the fact that his taste in women could be better. To me, you can enjoy the fuck out of someone's work without saying that they've done nothing wrong ever in their lives. My *impression* of someone may be that they're a nice person, but I never delude myself into thinking that I actually know them. Everything about celebrity is crafted. They either let you in as little as possible (an Adam Driver approach) or they APPEAR to let you in, while actually carefully editing basically everything that you see to fit a narrative (a Kardashian approach). None of what we see about these people is who they actually are, unfiltered. I would actually prefer to know as little about the personal lives and opinions of actors as possible. But when I do know about them, I think it's like... kind of impossible to not take that into account when discussing them.

I don't think Pam should be cancelled for saying shitty things; but I do think that she has said very harmful things, and people need to be aware of that before she's painted as this flawless being. My comments about what she has said were no a condemnation of her, but a comment on how people uphold these celebrities as perfect until they find out that they actually aren't. She's a complicated person, as most people are. And a lot of what she has said, imo, should be grappled with when you're discussing the way that she has been treated by men. Because what Pam has said is that women should expect to be treated badly by powerful men, and that women are responsible for their own destinies. She said that you should know what you're getting yourself into when you go into a hotel room with Harvey Weinstein. It's actually really interesting to dissect the image and public persona of Pam against this new attempt to grapple with the way she was treated. Where do Pam's beliefs align with all of that? We just shouldn't try to paint any celebrities as flat villains or heroes, or symbols. They're just people. Pam's primary income has been as a tabloid fixture, a precursor to Kim K--and therefore, her persona has been commodified and is part of how she's been processed by the public.

It's pointless to say stop with the biopics because they bring in cash, and they bring in awards. Since the moving picture was invented, biopics have been made. So instead of fretting over whether or not they should be made, perhaps we should watch them, process them, and discuss them. And I've gotta tell you--just as with any work of art, biopics can also say insightful things about the world we live in. I, Tonya did a great job with processing 90s media; it made people look at someone who they'd dismissed as a joke or a monster with a new, human lens. Biopics can be bad and pointless; but they can also be a way of regurgitating our culture and history and processing the way that people are depicted and turned into icons.

Silky, I forget to add that one of my biggest peeves with that writer is overuse of the following narrative device, which I call the “Oh. OH.” device. It goes like this:

Some character says or does something super OBVIOUS and the main character, who is chronically clueless, begins to have a MOMENT OF ENLIGHTENMENT, wherein the narration then goes:

“Oh.

OH.

OOOOOH.”

This writer does this over and over, throughout all of her fics and multiple times within a single fic. Is this supposed to be an attempt at like, “showing not telling”? Bc it’s fucking annoying.

She also loves to trail off her sentences when describing inner thought processes of her characters, in this manner, which I call the “…yeah” device. It goes like this:

Character is in middle of his or her thoughts. They think about something, but instead of trying to “show” us, we get:

“She couldn’t possibly be interested, right? She’s too beautiful, she’s what everyone would want, and he was…yeah.”

Silky, am I supposed to be impressed by this, like ohhhh let the reader infer (his OBVIOUS FEELINGS) but the author won’t sketch it out? Is this supposed to be elegant? Listen, I get when someone writes this once or twice. But this author, it’s like every single fic. In fact, one time I read a fic where she collaborated with another author and I can literally tell which part she wrote because it was filled with “…yeah.” And “oh. OH.” I find this type of narrative device very tiresome and again, very cloying. I can’t really explain why. Have you ever encountered this type of writing? Am I alone in feeling this? Maybe I’m nonsensical. - 📖

Oh, wow.

I'm sure, like any device, it would grow pretty ineffective and irksome if overused.

They both sound like what romcoms do, or that record scratch - I bet you're wondering how I got into this situation, huh? South Park has a great episode making fun of cheesy 90s movies that did that.

I don't want to sound like I'm dragging the author, since I don't know them and people hold my views on subpar writing against me, but I was laughing out loud at the examples you gave 😄

It's a rather inelegant device, something that might be used by a very young author (my best friend has some of her fanfics that she wrote when she was about 11 that sound very similar to Oh. OH. OOOH! and the ... yeah. We have a good laugh about those over a glass of wine at least once a year) or by someone who hasn't encountered more sophisticated writing and devices. Either way, the effect is repetitiveness and an amateurish air.

But as you pointed out earlier - it's very popular, so what do I know at the end of the day? I just write my silly little stories and share them with the two people who care to read them 🤷‍♀️😄

I don't think you're alone or nonsensical in feeling this way at all. What I've been struck by back when I was trying to power through some fics was how they all blended together - using the same tropes, same verbiage, same style, devices, images, metaphors, and in the end I concluded it was simply fanfic speak. My hypothesis, if you will, was that people only read other fanfiction, adopted that flawed style and regurgitated it in their work, and the process was just repeated over and over, so now we have this paint-by-numbers style that those who read it find predictable and comforting, and those who don't find cringey and easy to make fun of.

I'm pretty fascinated by it myself and I love discussing it, but it's so rare to get that chance.

Thank you for your thoughts, I always find what you have to say illuminating 💕💕

The more I see from Mark Fisher the more fruitless his writing seems in terms of actual implications for theoretical/practical future movement of any anti-capitalist politics...like for all his talk of the impotent paralyzed state of a left unable to escape or meaningfully able to learn from its past, beset by circular patterns of discourse and movement it's tied itself up in as a result of cultural fixations/conflicts and stifling insular academic and/or online intellectual developments that are often completely detached from the actual political sphere, unable to formulate an actionable political programme that can genuinely confront power, have no relevance to the social base of a potential anti-capitalist movement, etc, like for all the talk of that shit his own critiques of those things tend to essentialize them as inextricable, even inevitable features of capitalism itself and as a result cultural or intellectual trends that are not intrinsic to but symptomatic of a system based on this particular mode of production, and that develop as a result of the interplay between societal elements existing within and formed by that system in a given time and place, are posited instead as defining features of that system (for example the insistence that regurgitation of past cultural forms must be seen as inevitable features or tendencies of capitalism - and that that alleged fact has some fundamental explanatory power - rather than being seen as trends that have come to prominence, and cyclically have become prominent before as well, due to the ebbs and flows of accumulation of intellectual property & consolidation of productive/investment capital etc and that at times have given way to or existed alongside dominant cultural/artistic movements outside of that retrofetishistic lane. Which like even when that was the case capitalism was still bad...like the problem is not encapsulated by the culture's perceived failure to find the next jungle music, nor would it be solved or meaningfully altered were the next jungle music to be found). And in that process you're bestowing an undue sense of significance upon and giving a completely misplaced centrality to things that you're purporting to be criticizing on the grounds that they distract from and are unproductive when it comes to dealing with the pressing core issues by which we're actually faced, while completely failing to incorporate the breadth of actual political & economic shifts, movements, conflicts, etc both against and in favor of the expansion of capital within your analysis in the same way that the individuals/organizations/institutions that you started out critiquing are guilty of. And that related failure to genuinely consider political reality as it exists outside of certain insular left spaces & discourses as well as the left spaces & discourses being used as the basis for the critique being advanced largely neglects anything that might be going on outside of metropolitan centers within advanced western states (and even then it seems mostly confined to the anglosphere) that might complicate or even outright contradict the narratives being advanced, which idk may also contribute to the tendency to grossly generalize and even essentialize specific aspects of society or culture that have taken shape in the first-world as being endemic to capitalism itself as it exists and must exist everywhere at all times...and even if that's being done based on the view one sometimes sees that as capitalism advances then the societal condition of the global south will come to resemble that of the current north then it's still bullshit because while of course that does and will still continue to happen in some respects, there's no broad convergence of that sort in sight at all and given increased pauperization already in motion as a result of ongoing economic trends and mass migrations as a result of accelerating climate change the future of LA or Berlin might look more like the present in Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai than vice versa...idk like there are genuinely interesting discussions of music and evocative (though by no means novel on the level or either tone or content) descriptions of a certain kind of prevalent malaise and ennui peppered throughout Fisher's work but his analyses of the way those things reflect and/or are produced by capitalism itself either fall off the mark or, again, aren't advancing any ideas that haven't long been circulating either in the marxist critical tradition or in any others that have in differing ways been in some form of dialogue with or have to some degree been influenced by it (even those that either explicitly/self-consciously or not find themselves in opposition to marxism, poststructuralism being probably the most obvious/notorious example) right down to the concept of capitalist realism itself, which as elaborated by Fisher offers nothing that isn't present in the diverse and even divergent analyses & conceptual frameworks surrounding ideology, consciousness, hegemony, the ~real~, etc that were already there in the work of everyone from Marx himself to Lukacs to Gramsci to Althusser, Baudrillard, Jameson, Eagleton or numerous other notable figures even just within the western intellectual realm. Like the only distinguishing feature of Fisher's capitalist realism is his contention that in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, not only has the social reality generated by capital successfully naturalized itself in various pervasive ways as it has been doing for the past five hundred years, but now there's been a crucial turn in that since 1991 there's been an additionally ingrained negation of our ability to conceive of or pursue alternatives to neoliberal capitalism on a collective level, which allegedly wasn't there before...which like I'm sorry but that's a ridiculous fucking claim to make especially in light of the fact that shortly before his death Fisher said that the movements behind/supporting the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to labour party leadership & the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign represented breaks in and the beginning of the end of the era of capitalist realism, which like. If that's the standard then how does the latin american pink tide of the late 90s-late 00s, which involved much larger popular movements that were much more firmly rooted in and directed by the working classes and peasantry and that pursued much more radical goals and even in the face of counter-revolutionary forces that have been ascendant in recent years still succeeded in attaining significant tangible gains for themselves, especially when compared to the negligible results that revived new deal democratic or midcentury labour agendas have had so far in the US & UK, like how did that shit not contradict capitalist realism well beforehand...or the fact that in Cuba the first post-Soviet decade entailed a renewal of genuine socialist energy & societal transformation of a kind not seen since the first 10-15 years immediately following the revolution, or on the other end of things, the clerical authoritarianism that existed in iran already at the time, or the terrifying rate at which the genuinely fascist RSS consolidated popular support and came to have an increasing hold over the various institutions governing Indian society, especially since the early 90s, until at this point there's no significant challenge to their power within the second most populous country in the world...like all those things seem to be much greater refutations from so-called capitalist realism to the point that the concept seems to have no meaning or utility at all...like whether intentionally or not,  Fisher's ~acid communism~ basically leads to the same endpoint, perhaps with different aesthetic trappings, as FALC bullshit, where residents of the first world are freed of the labor and alienation of the past by a super expanded version of the welfare states created by postwar european social democracies and can both go to raves and consume as often as we want. The problem wasn't the violent abstraction of commodified life, the value form, whatever it was that we couldn't pursue and indulge in the thrills and pleasures that per my mans Lyotard & Nick Land are undeniably present in capitalist consumer society except now we can, thanks to those beefed up fully automated welfare states, those indulgences are no longer simultaneously a source of malaise and depression as they previously were when the free market barred the masses from partaking of them with the freedom and reckless abandon that are necessary in order to give us that truly liberated libidinal fulfillment. What the effects of the magically automated extraction of the natural resources necessary to maintain that steady flow of goods and resources to the fully automated luxury acid communists might be on the environment, how that might impact the people that live in the places where extractive industries tend to be based, how they might fit into this acid FALC utopia, whether they'd be forced into ever more menial forms or labor building or providing upkeep for the robots that replaced their former fellow proletarians in the first world, whether their labor might itself be the supposedly 'automated' part of fully automated luxury communism, whether they might legally be recategorized as robots so as to prevent that seeming contradiction from shaking things up, no need to trouble ourselves with that

hey!! we haven't really interacted much, but I was hoping to get to know you more!! what kpop groups are you interested in? I'm not familiar with many of them and I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about them? (no pressure, you don't have to if you don't want to!!

yeah of course I can tell you some!! my top three groups are nct, seventeen and stray kids, but i stan a handful more than those (I can talk about the other ones more if you want, I just dont wanna overwhelm u with information lol)

stray kids - my ult, currently has 8 members but started with 9 (we dont really talk about the ex member bc he turned out to be a really shitty dude), debuted in 2018 but had a predebut survival show in 2017 that determined the members of the group. even though the survival show isnt necessary viewing to stan them, I still recommend it bc it's a big part of their history (although it's kinda hard to find now with eng subs, unfortunately :/)

stray kids were monster rookies when they debuted, and (in my opinion) consistently self produce bangers. I'd recommend songs like gods menu, question, awkward silence and heros soup to get an idea of what kind of music they put out (they do a lot of different genres so I just picked a few of my favorites that arent too similar in sound). if you wanna get to know personalities more, you should probably check out some of their variety show episodes (weekly idol and whatnot, I'd recommend watching vlives but ever since they updated the website idk how to work it lol)

nct - has an infinite concept meaning the group can basically have new members whenever the company decides they want to add more. the group has subunits: nct u (interchangeable members, basically anyone can be in it depending on the song), nct dream (was supposed to be just for minors, but after fans complained a bunch about mark lee leaving the group since he was 20 years old, they made it so that there wasnt a graduating system anymore. not really sure what the concept for the group is now lol), nct 127 (none of the members leave the group but members can be added whenever) and technically wayv is apart of nct but sm (their company) half the time acts like they arent (wayv is a chinese subunit). uhhh this group is really hard to explain considering it has like 23 members now? I believe? does lots of different genres, each subunit has different dynamics, but overall they're all very talented and charming! I can't spit out facts about nct like I do skz bc I've been stanning skz since predebut but I only started stanning nct in 2018 and it's hard for me to keep up with them bc of all the different units 😭 but ik they debuted in 2016 and each subunit has put out a lot of bangers. I'll suggest a few songs from each unit tho :> (and if u wanna get to know their personalities, I'd recommend you watch variety shows for each unit like I said with skz. it's the easiest way to get to know a group, in my opinion)

wayv: moonwalk, take off, dream launch

nct u: 90s love, yestoday, the 7th sense

nct dream: my first and last, love again, 119

nct 127: cherry bomb, simon says, 0 mile

seventeen - even tho they arent my ult, this group has talent that wows me more than any other group ever. literally not a single bad song, deadass the kings of choreography AND they're funnier than any other group I've ever stanned. would highly recommend seventeen as a group to start off with because even though they have a lot of members (13), theyre very memorable and they never fail to impress.

they debuted in 2015 ? I believe ? with, as I said, 13 members. each member falls into a subunit of either dance, vocal or hip hop, but these units dont serve a huge purpose as they make most of their music as a group and then each unit will usually have a song on the album. this group produces all of their music and has a huge part in basically everything they put out, making them a self produced idol group, which I think is poggers. i also just think this group is poggers bc they've made me enjoy ballads even tho i usually find them boring as fuck. if u wanna get to know them, try watching their episode on men on a mission (it is on netflix) I genuinely think it's like the funniest variety show episode I've ever seen a group do.

some song suggestions: very nice, fear, clap, still lonely, fast pace

sorry if this is a lot, I didn't mean to just word vomit in response to this ask but kpop hyperfixation went brr and I just regurgitated everything I could think of lol

Covid 19 and the New Era

Initially published on the OA blog here.

Part 1: Goodbye to the end of History

31 years ago, US political writer Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled The end of history. In it, he summed up what many were feeling at the conclusion of the Cold War: without a grand historical conflict between world superpowers, what further challenges could there be to the system we live under today: capitalist liberal-democracy? In this essay, and his later books, he wrote that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, most world governments would shift towards a liberal democracy, with an emphasis on transnational government much like the European Union, and with this new epoch would come a period of unparalleled peace. Events might still occur, he said, but the overall trend of civilisation would be towards endless peace, endless profit, and endless technological advancement that would eventually lead to humans having control over their own evolution.

What Fukuyama might not have predicted is that his simple thesis would become one of the most criticised essays of all time. Barely had the ink dried on his paper when scores of writers poked holes in his analysis – something very easy to do, for Fukuyama wasn’t much of a philosopher, but rather a political hack who summed up the dominant view among liberal thinkers at the time. In this, he was wholly successful, but he also ended up being correct in ways his critics couldn’t have predicted.

The next 31 years of history were some of the most uneventful, in terms of real movement, of any decades that had passed before – sure, not all countries became liberal democracies, and sure, history continued to chew up innocent lives and spit them back out, and sure, a few terrorists showed up here and there – but it seemed that no single event could ever truly change things beyond occupying the evening news for a few weeks. We have just emerged from the one of the most viscerally boring periods in human history, at least for the more sheltered populations in the west, and it’s important to recognise this.

Fukuyama’s end of history was not a new thesis: as the postmodernist Jaques Derrida, was quick to point out, Fukuyama had simply regurgitated some of the most turgid liberal philosophies of the early Cold-War era; the idea that liberal-democracy had emerged victorious, and that socialism had been proved wrong once and for all through the many perceived failures of Soviet societies. All that had changed was that Fukuyama said it at the right time: it truly was the end, capitalism had found its perfect justification in neoliberalism, a set of ideologies based in the idea that capitalism was a perfect, trans-historical goal of humanity, that only needed to be sufficiently untethered from regulation and sufficiently protected by a growing military and police forces in order to function properly. In this proper version of capitalism, untethered from the need to legitimise itself in the face of opposing ideologies, there was no need for capitalist societies to change to face new threats, for what can challenge an ideology that is so totalising it can convince people that it’s the only thing that exists? The only thing that has ever existed. A universal default.

In that sense, Fukuyama was perfectly right. History did grind to a halt for three decades. Not just the history of those decades, but all history, for every society throughout history could be painted as nothing but a stepping stone to this universal conclusion. There was no challenge to neoliberalism in that time, no great ideological foe to defeat, no workers’ movement to crush, and the best that the neoliberal states could offer up as some immense civilisational enemy was a pitiful force of Wahhabi terrorists – a by-product of the previous era, and therefore hardly a new historical agent. All that was left for the world to do was to reckon with the leftovers of the Cold-War period (the Wahhabis, remnant socialist societies, and shrinking unions), products of the last true period of historical movement, and wait for whatever technological innovation that would come next and inject some feeling of forward momentum into an otherwise stagnant society.

In time, even technology failed to deliver a feeling of progress. Each new technology of the period wasn’t truly new: all that capitalism could deliver was slightly faster and more powerful versions of technologies based in the previous era of major public scientific investments. Internet, wi-fi, cell phones, miniaturised processors, satellite communications – every single one of these technologies was a product of Cold-War era military or public scientific investment, albeit with a better marketing team. It is almost as if capitalists could produce no new innovation whatsoever, other than a faster, slimmer version of existing tech, that broke more often.

In this sense, one of the two defining features of the past 30 years that gave life a sense of movement and progress, communications technology, proved to be nothing but a latent product of the previous era, that came up against a wall as soon as the legacy technologies it relied upon reached the limits of exploitability. The same would soon be proven true of the other great symbol of neoliberal progress: economic growth.

Since the beginning of the end of history, economic growth has skyrocketed. Only part of this was due to imperialism – the ability for strong states with financial capital to spare to offload their surpluses onto the global south. That would have been a source of actual value were it the primary cause of this continuous economic boom, since it would have meant greater exploitation of labour. Instead capitalism developed along the much easier route – pure speculation in financial markets and tech companies, both of which are largely phantasmal.

Capital was creating a bubble – not of any one market, such as the late 90s tech bubble or the late 2000s housing bubble, but rather it was making a bubble out of capitalism as a whole. Who could have guessed what would pop it?

Part 2: What the fuck is going on?

Sometime around December 1, 2019, a few people got sick in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Many writers have spent thousands of hours speculating about the potential causes of transmission. Was it from a shopper at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? Did the disease come from the actual produce at this market? Was it a bioweapon? Was it a bat? A Pangolin? Was everyone at the market just too weird and Chinese to not get the disease? What comparatively few news sites have focused on was how on earth a virus could cause an economic crisis so great that we have nothing to truly compare it to.

This is because it could have been anything. It could have been a completely different virus in a completely different country, it could have been a sudden war erupting, it could have been a plane crash, it could have been a Wall Street Executive slipping on a banana peel. The system of global financial markets had been systematically hollowed out and prepared in every possible way to collapse at the drop of a hat sooner or later. To understand how, we need to understand three things: the underlying philosophy of neoliberalism, the way a modern financial market operates, and the general theory of economic crisis put forward by Karl Marx in his unfinished third volume of Capital.

Under neoliberalism, austerity is everything. The existence of everything, often including human life, has to be justified in terms of cost-effectiveness, self-reliance, and interoperability with the rest of the system. This is why social welfare, such as Work & Income New Zealand, operates by giving the absolute bare minimum to beneficiaries, and why all government departments, with the exclusion of Defence, Police, and Corrections, have to operate on paper-thin budgets, constantly needing to justify any expenditure whatsoever in terms of net-benefits to the economy. It is also not a rational ideology, in that in pursuing its goals of profitability and lean government, the means are much more important than the ends. A health system stretched thin (the “ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff model”) might actually be more costly to society than a health system which is budgeted to act preventatively and deal with unexpected crises, but this doesn’t really matter. Likewise, stockpiling, preemptively initiating spending, or even paying for proper maintenance can come to be seen as unnecessary luxuries in a system in which everything must be justified in terms of short-term profitability.

This is why the richest country in the world ended up with a shortage of basic medical supplies. Under ideal circumstances, each hospital should have had just enough masks, gloves and smocks to last a normal week, just in time for a new shipment. The same is true of most systems of logistics and supply under neoliberalism – things enter the warehouse, the shipping container, or the truck, just in time for them to leave. If anything stays in the warehouse, or is stockpiled, then that is an inefficiency in the system. Every minute those hospital gowns spend in the warehouse means a surplus is developing, which means profits lost for the manufacturer and shipping company.

The same logic rings true for financial markets. Each sector of the economy deals in just enough liquid assets (money) to operate under normal circumstances. If too much money circulates in the economy at any one time, then we get inflation – the decline in the value of currency. In a crisis, excess liquidity can be a good thing, which is why the US markets are being flooded with trillions of dollars, but under normal circumstances, these simple laws of financial supply and demand create an incentive for capitalists to invest their cash assets as soon as possible, never leaving anything in reserve in the event of a crisis.

But all of this, supply and demand, surplus and shortage, is somewhat obsolete under late capitalism. Contrary to popular belief, most microeconomic problems are pretty easy to solve using the microeconomic levers most accessible to capitalists such as changing prices, production or wages. Capitalists make them out to be huge, complex issues so that price regulation can be painted as naive meddling in the arcane market, but really, these simple problems like overproduction, underproduction, low demand, and the like, can all be fixed using the tools of the private sector. Larger systemic problems (macroeconomic issues), such as sovereign debt, low competitiveness, trade deficits, and poor consumer buying power, can also be fixed, but through the financial levers available to the state, such as bailouts, stimulus packages, elimination of reserve requirements, and massive liquidity injections. What can’t be fixed, at least not permanently, is the general downward trend in profits relative to investment.

The more serious problems of late capitalist economics – wafer-thin profit margins, constantly slowing rates of growth, and constant fears that consumers are “killing” various industries – are all products of one phenomenon that Karl Marx identified as far back as 1857, the discovery of which he called his “greatest triumph” but which remains a lesser known Marxian theory. This is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a hypothesis which explains why capitalism is doomed to perpetually swing between boom and bust, until it reaches a crisis from which it can’t recover.

Central to Marx’s theory of crisis is a much more famous theory – the labour theory of value. Put simply this is the idea that all the value that capitalist society places on a commodity comes from the workers who harvested the raw materials, worked in the factory that made it, and built the machines that filled the factory. The work being done by living workers is supplemented by the machines that other workers have made to assist them in their work.

The living people involved in this system are the organic component, while the machines, products, and other lifeless objects are the inorganic component. Taken together, the ratio between these components is the organic composition of capital (OOC). When there are few workers but many machines in a factory, the OOC is lower, and so the productivity of these workers is very high because the machines allow them to multiply their efforts. But high productivity creates a problem – if all of this work can be done by fewer workers, then unemployment will surely rise, wages will go down, and fewer people will be able to pay for the products from the factories. Eventually this leads to a crisis of consumption, which is what we are currently experiencing, and unless you’re over 50 or so, you’ve probably been experiencing one your entire life.

In a consumption crisis, wages are far too low for people to buy commodities or easily reproduce their capacity to work. Since the 1970s, wages have stagnated in most Western countries, but until now capitalists had many ways they could “kick the can down the road,” delaying the crisis for another few years and making higher and higher profits in the meantime. For example, to absorb the huge surpluses generated by an economy undergoing a consumption crisis, Capitalist states could offload their surplus values onto colonies and nations in the global south by creating new markets, or waging wars and thereby investing in weapons and reconstruction. A good example of this was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, which ended up costing trillions of dollars, allowed for billions to be invested in weapons manufacturers, and opened up a handful of new markets in the bombed out ruins of Baghdad or Fallujah.

This is one way to offset a major crisis, which we might call the “fuck the rest of the world” method. The other method is a bit harder for the capitalists, which is to massively increase consumer buying power through various measures. The most straightforward of these is the one capitalists are most loath to do, since it undermines neoliberal ideology, which is to simply give people money. This was done in Australia in 2008, when each Australian was given $300 and ordered to spend it immediately. Many other countries, even the US, are now rushing to copy this method of stimulus. Another method, which has been growing since mid last century, is by artificially raising a stratum of consumers through employing people in “bullshit jobs,” a term used by economist David Graeber to refer to people engaged in work that doesn’t seem to do anything. This includes a lot of professionals: secretaries of secretaries, managers of managers, supervisors of supervisors and the like. Finally there is another method which is gaining traction among some of the more far-sighted capitalist technocrats, the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would give people a flat rate of just enough money to fulfil their duty to the economy as consumers. Such a move would represent a last-ditch effort by capital to avoid the looming consumer crisis, which at time of writing appears to be a tsunami whose waters have only reached chest-height.

However, all of these means can only delay the inevitable. A capitalist system undergoing crisis can only offset the real crunch for so long. In 2008, the global capitalist system experienced a major shock when a speculative housing bubble popped in US financial markets. If the crisis continued, the capitalist class would have had to sell off huge amounts of assets, including industrial machinery. This would have solved the underlying productivity crisis for a time by restoring the huge imbalance between the organic and inorganic composition of capital. But this imbalance had been building for decades. Could the capitalist system survive the shock? Mass sell-offs are nothing new – the first response of the US government to the 1929 Wall Street Crash was to encourage these sell-offs, only to find out that doing so would massively increase public unrest from both capital and workers.

In the end, the crisis was instead offset through fiscal policy, as the US federal reserve removed barriers to debt and artificially preserved the value of assets by paying off capitalists with sums that often exceeded the value of their entire business. For this reason, the recovery from the 2008 crisis was slow, but the crisis itself was short-lived. The speculative bubbles weren’t quite popped, but enough air was let out to delay the inevitable, for about 12 years, as it turned out.

Part 3: Infinite new era

It is still entirely possible that the capitalists will be able to kick the can further down the road, and avert the current crisis through arcane fiscal finagling or through truly barbaric methods like forcing US and UK workers back into the workplace well before it is safe to do so.

But it seems equally possible that the world as we know it is over. By this I don’t mean that we’ll soon be living in a Mad Max-style apocalypse, but rather that period of “the end of history” is finally over. Capitalism will probably recover, either through solving the crisis through the above means before it gets worse, or it will allow the crisis to reach its conclusion and engage in massive selloffs of fixed capital, which might extend its rule by several decades by restoring some degree of profitability relative to investments. What that could mean for our people and ecology is anyone’s guess.

But whatever the results of this crisis are, one thing seems very clear. For the first time in our lives, workers have been forced to sit at home and think – not between shifts, or under the endless stress of being a beneficiary expected to look for work that often doesn’t exist, but just thinking, and getting bored. I don’t remember a time when capitalism gave an entire class of people the opportunity to get truly bored, apart from the upper classes, who get to call it ennui.

The politics of idleness are interesting. A few thousand years ago, the backbreaking labour of slaves, poor citizens, and women created the opportunity for the first truly idle class – the Ancient Greek philosophers who are credited with the entire foundation of our moral and political systems. For the next few thousand years, the only people who were allowed to be idle were the sons of rich nobles and merchants, and only with the birth of capitalism did common people find themselves idle – the unemployed newly-displaced rural folk who waited outside the great cities of Europe, waiting for jobs at the new textile factories to open up. Many of these people became the backbone of the first workers’ parties, often millenarian Christian-socialists and underground brotherhoods like the Chartists, Luddites, or League of the Just, which Marx and Engels would later co-opt and rename The Communist League.

Idleness in these times was feared greatly by those in power, and rightly so. Nothing worried them more than huge surplus populations growing restless, organising in their idle time, and realising their position somewhere near the bottom of a great social pyramid. From time to time these surplus populations grew so great that entire nations had to be set up just to get rid of them: the unemployed and wretched masses of the British Isles found themselves criminalised and subject to transportation to the penal colonies of the Caribbean, the Americas, and later New South Wales. Luckier surplus citizens found themselves in the free colonies, such as Perth, or New Zealand.

But are we truly surplus to requirements? Surely after the crash we’ll get our jobs back?

Many economists aren’t so sure. Unemployment modelling already shows rates are going to grow higher than during the great depression, and that’s without a much more pessimistic Marxian analysis of the crisis. To be surplus is a new experience to many of us. Idleness will force us to reckon with our position in the pyramid of society, just as those 19th century oligarchs were afraid of all those years ago.

The ideological backbone of capitalism as it currently exists has been broken. Neoliberalism has shown itself incapable of dealing with Covid-19. But what we make of this realisation is up to us. The ideological backbone might be broken, but the real nuts and bolts of the system: the police and politicians, bosses and workplaces, will still remain. Given enough time, they will use this crisis of legitimacy to forge a new kind of capitalism: maybe a society with a UBI? Or a form of eco-capitalism? Or maybe they’ll go the other direction, and lead us down a road to fascism, or Trumpian nationalistic fervor? If I had to place bets, I’d put it on a mix of all of the above, as usually seems to happen in a crisis of legitimacy. After all, the last great crisis of legitimacy happened during the Great Depression, leading to both the social-democratic compromise of the New Deal and Michael Joseph Savage’s welfare state, as well as the horrors of Nazism.

In truth I don’t think it matters so much what path capitalism chooses to take in order to legitimise itself in this new era, because unless the agency of that choice lies with working people – with beneficiaries, Māori, migrants, the multitude, the proletariat – it will leave us worse off. It might end the crisis, but we’ll live with the knowledge that the next one will be worse, and once again our lives will be utterly beyond our control.

So agency should be our watchword in this new era. So long as we lack agency, we are only a few years from collapse. So long as we lack agency, the response to crises will be arbitrary. New Zealanders got lucky in getting a rational response to the crisis, but next time we might be more like the US or UK – sending thousands more people to die in the name of profits. Taking power, then, is the only way to ensure that this total lack of agency never happens again.

So far in the things I’ve written for this blog, I’ve not actually included a call to join Organise Aotearoa. In a system built on broken promises, who am I to make a promise to readers that things will get better if only we fight for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses, police and markets that put us in crisis again and again? As an organisation, we are young, and we are emerging from a very beaten-down, hollowed-out, and disparate left-wing movement. Revolution doesn’t seem realistic to many people, but then, neither did capitalism being crushed by a virus a few weeks ago. Socialism will never just happen – it takes work, and a sense of realism. We have a lot of work to do, but only in this period of transition can we see the possible futures laid out before us – apocalyptic misery, or social and economic justice. To fight for this is always worth the effort.

The best summary of the times we’re living in come from this quote I’m quite fond of:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”

Goddess ramble

I did a tarot reading some time ago to commune with my Goddess.

When i do readings such as this im usually tied up shuffling and spreading for several hours interpreting associations, numerical sequences, and arcana major/minor. So I Am given a good deal of information and not all of it makes sense at the time of the reading.

I write down these readings for future reference.

However, the one reading i have been mulling over for the last couple of weeks was an intense one discussing possibilities and covenants with my patron deity. She may be a insatiable and fluxing Goddess but has always been responsive and forthright.

The message she spoke clearly to me was this: "I cant help you attain what you desire if you do not know what you wish to have. Concentrate on some delightful, think about what makes you happy. Remember the things you have enjoyed in the past and things you wish to try in the future. Not only does it set a goal for yourself but it also gives me a frame work to fill."

I know many of these witchblr blogs go on and on and on about manifestation and transmutation without actually providing substance to resource. Spiritual Journey and all that fun jazz.

In the past, since I was like 9 yrs old, i have been pestered by those around me pushing for me to tell them what i like. However, a scene from the sixth sense resonated with me. When the kid is showing bruce willis pictures he drew and (loosely) says "you dont get sent to the office for drawing rainbows and unicorns" (bear with me, the movie came out in the 90s before the connotations changed.) I knew the feeling. I have spent much time in the office having my parents called because i drew something from the history channel.

Similarly, i figured out if i spoke in pastels and flowers i would not be castigated for my somber preferences. "This is why youre depressed. Surrounding yourself in dark colors and filling your head with garbage." Spoken in angry white lady voice.

Im a spooky bitch.

Bones and charcoal make me happy.

Cheer stresses me out. Happy funtime chimes make me nervous. Light is blinding. Bright colors are uncomfortable. Shopping traumatizing. So on...

I have struggled with this for over a decade and a half. Whenever I was asked (or my tastes blatantly ignored), "What do you like?" I would draw a blank as if nothing has ever made me happy because telling them the truth would result in scorn or criticism.

As i thought it over, after speaking through my cards to my goddess, i have been slowly reclaiming my list of joy. Things that i had found pleasurable over the last two decades forcing me to face the truth why i dropped them from my active pursuit in the first place.

Then, understanding when i gave up these things i thoroughly enjoyed i had clipped defining aspects of my motivations for the future and was left with the begging demand: "Why am I miserable? Tell me what to enjoy." Which set pace for years of being directed by others and authority to participate in 'normal' things.

Worse, most of what i had found pleasurable was benign. They were just unseemly.

Being absent of this knowledge about myself had sat me down and nullified my internal desire. I felt numb. Things that were 'supposed' to give me pleasure did not. I was broken. Why couldnt i connect to these things? I am told these 'should' make me happy. Why am i disconnected? I cant bring myself to do any of that. Its remedial and meaningless. It should be joyful but i struggle. I struggle with this. : (

My Goddess patted my head and said, "Speak the truth, what makes you happy?"

And i responded monotonously, "You do."

To which she in turn clicked her tongue and with a shake of her head she spoke; "No i dont, you liar. But i can make you happy. What is the first thing that comes to mind when i asked you? Dont give me some ego stroking bullshit. Im a fucking goddess. I can provide more than my mere presence."

So, i have been trying to give Her what she demands. She demands the things that make me happy but not as a penance. She is not going to punish me for my joy or pleasure. *relieving sigh*

I find it extremely difficult to communicate my emotions and express my joy to anyone. (mostly because i hate the turning I get in my stomach when fear flickers past their eyes like a shadow...) Speaking truthfully and unabashedly to a deity allows me to recover that which i had programmed myself to deny internally.

I know the lies i have told myself so i can regurgitate a palpable half truth. I threw up these lies to satiate and appeal to other people just so i dont get locked away for my blatant 'malformities'.

The delusion i had is the construct i made to hide my joy but like a clam to its pearl, my goddess adorns these secrets as brilliant crafts.

I hope you all understand that deities dont wish to be spoonfed lies to appease them. They wish to revel in your truth and wear your secrets as crowns.

Michael After Midnight: Jupiter Ascending

Over the past decade, there have been so many movies that garner fanbases that I feel are wholly undeserved. I think the biggest offender in this category is Sucker Punch, which is an utterly worthless piece of shit with next to no redeemable qualities unless you’re stoned out of your mind, and yet it has so many fans and defenders, particularly those who think Zack Snyder can do no wrong. Is it really so hard to have standards in the trash you watch? If you’re going to die on the hill of a trashy movie, at least make it something respectable, like Maleficent, or Venom, or, uh… Jupiter Ascending?

Jupiter Ascending is perhaps one of the most batshit insane movies ever made. It feels less like a movie trying to exist on its own merits and more like a badly condensed comic book adaptation that crams all of the worldbuilding into absolutely ludicrous infodumps that take up way too much screentime, and at one point it has this ridiculously long chase scene where aliens chase our two leads across Chicago, causing carnage and mayhem as they go along and basically wrecking the city more than Superman ever did in Man of Steel. As if that wasn’t enough, the story is so absurd and convoluted, it can be really hard to follow. There’s more bureaucracy in this than all three of the Star Wars prequels combined and almost every major bit of storytelling is just regurgitated onto Mila Kunis by other characters.

And speaking of characters, the movie has two types aside from the leads. The first is the horribly underutilized and under-explained sort, such as the fairly intriguing bounty hunters and the numerous alien races that are not really explored or fleshed out in any meaningful way. The biggest case of this, though, is Bob, the bafflingly-named android lawyer who helps out Mila Kunis for precisely one scene before fucking off and never appearing again, despite being absolutely hilarious and delightful. And then there’s the numerous absolutely absurd characters, which is mainly the three Abrasax siblings; one of them is perfectly happy to strip naked and bathe in front of the reincarnation of her mother, one of them wants to marry the reincarnation of his mother, and one of them is Eddie Redmayne giving the most incomprehensible performance you will ever see. His character, Balem, spends most of his screentime whispering his lines in a barely audible mumble, UNTIL HE RANDOMLY DECIDES TO START SCREAMING!!!!!! It’s so absolutely laughable and ridiculous.

But see, that right there, that is what takes this from being an absolute trainwreck to a hilariously laughable trainwreck. It’s hard not to get a giggle or two out of Redmayne’s performance here and there, it’s hard not to chuckle at absurd twists like the bees of Earth somehow recognizing Mila Kunis as space royalty, and dear fucking god there is absolutely no way in hell you can look at Channing Tatum’s character and not get a big goofy grin. His role as the leading man can be described thusly: Shirtless, rocket rollerskating genetically engineered former space marine fallen angel werewolf bounty hunter desperate for coochie love interest anti-hero who breathes in space Channing Tatum. This is literally the greatest character descriptor in all of cinema, and I will give the film this, Tatum lives up to and deserves such a ludicrous title. I honestly wished the movie was more about him than anyone else, especially since Tatum is clearly taking his role seriously and trying to inject some actual emotion into his silly character – and it actually works.

What also helps the film is Mila Kunis giving a more grounded, straight man performance to all of the insanity around her. This is despite the fact her character is the reincarnation of an alien who had inheritance rights to Earth, making her the queen of the planet (and again, somehow recognizable as royalty to bees). There are even points where I daresay she delivers far above what a movie of this caliber calls for, with a lot of heart and emotion put into her performance. I certainly don’t find her character as strong or as engaging as Tatum, but she’s at least decent, and I can’t say she annoyed me in any meaningful way. I honestly found myself relating a lot to her bewildered reactions to the insane events and infodumps that kept getting piled up on her.

While whether our two leads are good or not is up for debate, what isn’t is the visual effects – the movie looks absolutely gorgeous. That pointlessly long chase scene I mentioned? It may be a waste of time, but good lord is it a treat for the eyes. The costumes and CGI and everything else in this movie range from enjoyably cheesy to amazing, so if nothing else this movie is at least enjoyable to look at, which is definitely more than I can say for the grimy, miserable CGI spectacles of Sucker Punch.

I honestly feel like this should not have been a movie, and instead have been a TV series or comic book or even a video game, just some sort of medium that could flesh out and expand this world it created. I can’t deny that this is a very ambitious film with a lot of interesting ideas, but it just never really felt like it truly reached the heights it was aiming for. The Wachowski Sisters really wanted to make a Star Wars-style space opera, and boy did they ever fail at that… but you know, I think they did achieve the next best thing: a trashy, hilarious cult space opera a la Flash Gordon.

I think every decade deserves its own Flash Gordon-esque trashy space opera. The 80s had, well, Flash Gordon, the 90s had Mom and Dad Save the World, the 2000s had Revenge of the Sith, and the 2010s had this movie. I will say this: it certainly is not one of my personal favorite cheesy movies, but that being said, I get it, I get why this has become a cult favorite and I have a lot of respect for it to a degree. There are elements of it I like, and I definitely love Shirtless, rocket rollerskating genetically engineered former space marine fallen angel werewolf bounty hunter desperate for coochie love interest anti-hero who breathes in space Channing Tatum because really, who couldn’t? I guess if you’re into trashy sci-fi and appreciate visual spectacle enough that it can cover glaring flaws in storytelling, well, maybe this film will work better for you. This is definitely not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, that’s for sure, but it’s pretty easy to see where it does get its fans from.

Way easier to see than Sucker Punch, at any rate.

Saccharine - LA Sunbathing -Monty Pithon’s Harsh Whisper - LD For the thing. Hope this is what you wanted. :P

[AN: One universe at a time, pls. The combo thing means - combos of words. My bad for not saying that. Three stories for the price of one!

1. Saccharine - LA

[AN: LA stands for Little Accidents. A universe in which a WAY younger La’ming and a WAY nastier Sazed manage to create half-Elf Angus. La’ming and Taako raise him and Nono in a loving -if mobile- home with La’ming pretending to be older and Taako pretending to be hetero and married to La’ming. 90% angst]

The fair was under full enough swing that Taako couldn’t give food away. Which meant that Sizzle it Up! was not doing any shows until after a majority of the other food carts had closed for the evening. On the plus side, plenty of time to spend looking around for ideas. On the minus side, he had to keep the kids entertained as well as himself.

In a fairground, that meant the potential for encountering processed sugar and, in the case of tiny little Angus, someone using cow milk instead of any of the perfectly reasonable alternatives. Taako knew he couldn’t go anywhere near a peanut, and as for the rest of their little family of four... staying away from processed sugar was just smart.

“Oh look. Miller Labs. They’re always good for a giggle. They’re doing a food science show.”

Minmin, pretending to be an adult, also pretended cheer for her babies, Nono and Ango. “Yay,” she said. “Food science.”

The kids were less than enthused. However, the bribe of some spun maple candy and a hot dog in combination with a place to sit seemed to keep them appeased. They would be appeased and sticky in less than ten minutes, Taako guessed. He kept an eye on the kids -all three of them- and watched the show.

This one was a new alchemical wonder. Sugarless sugar, called saccharine, and Miller Labs was so sure of its safety that they were allowing volunteers to come up and taste their saccharine-laced fare.

“I wanna,” piped tiny little Angus.

Taako took the baby boy into his lap. “No you don’t, son-of-mine. You’re a little young to turn into a guinea pig.”

Since he had his hands full with Angus, and Minmin was busy trying to take him back, Nono leaped up, waving a hand in the air and bouncing out of parental reach. “I want to try!”

“...gods damn it...” muttered Taako. Too late, he handed Ango back to his mother and stood, ready to field an errant Elven teen...

...who already had a cake in her mouth.

“Damnit, Nono...” he sighed. “This is not the time or place to be rebellious streaking. Fuck.”

Nono was wincing. “Too sweet,” she complained. “It’s like way, way too sweet... it’s--” no further words came out of her, but there was a torrent of regurgitated cake, dissolved maple sugar, and hotdog.

Taako wasn’t about to sabotage a fellow food show. “Aw, honey,” he said, pitching his voice to carry. “I told you three goes on the Chunderwonder was two too many.” He sampled a cupcake for himself. Eugh. WAY too sweet. “Needs more lemon curd,” he said, and then quickly got outta dodge because -damn- that stuff made him want to hurl, and he’d survived the slop they served at Saint Vingo’s.

He didn’t get as far as that, though, but did find cool relief in a green patch far away from the smells of the fair. Nono fanned him with his wizarding hat and Minmin provided the damn cloth for his brow.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” said tiny little Ango.

“I will be. Eventually,” Taako panted. “Moral of this story, try new foodstuffs with caution. They always test on Humanmen... ooogh...”

The things he did for love.

2. Sunbathing - Monty Pithon

It had been a rougher winter than Varmvale, and therefore the circus that stayed there, was used to. The spring had been weak, for the first month, but now the sun was out with a vengeance and all the cold-blooded species were out, too.

Lulu and Koko, also thawing in the sunshine, found Monty, Mrs Monty, and all the Montlings spread out on a stretch of dark stone and sighing in the sunlight.

“Say, chief, aren’t we late to get on the road?” said Koko with fake enthusiasm.

“Yeah,” said Lulu, who knew that a cold-fogged Monty was a gullible Monty. “We got a circus to put on. Acts to plan. Rubes to bilk...”

“Time to quit sunbathing and start moneymaking,” said Koko, hoping that Monty hadn’t heard that last bit.

Montgomery Pithon was neither impressed nor swayed. “The roads will still be mud, the people know to expect us closer to summer, and I’m not falling for that horseshit again.”

Drat. Koko sighed and settled down on the rock. “Mind if we thaw with you?”

3. Harsh Whisper - Little Domestic

There is but one truth of life on the streets - cold kills. Pass out or try to sleep away from the warmth - any kind of warmth - and you could die. Even in summer’s last hurrah before winter moved in, you could die from the cold.

Lulu had been looking for more clothes to line their little nest-box with. Koko was prone to chills at the best of times, and this coming winter wasn’t looking to be the best. They were lucky they got through the last one with all their fingers and toes intact.

They were not lucky in the fact that the City Watch was clamping down on homeless people camping out in or near the old steam tunnels. The worse news was that more and more places that used to be safe were employing hostile architecture to try and get the homeless to move away - or at least die somewhere out of sight of all the nice, orderly rent-payers in the city.

At least here, they had a shelter from the wind and a steady supply of half-eaten food via the dumpster and the neighbouring blocks of flats. Lulu was moderately sure she could figure out how to pick the lock and get into the basement before the snows came. That way, she and Koko could huddle in a corner near the furnace and stay nice and toasty during the worst of the winter.

That had been the plan, anyway.

Right up until the instant a huge garbage bag fell on Koko from above with the sound of shattering glass and the sickening thud of one baby twin brother hitting the uncaring concrete of the alleyway floor.

Lulu dropped everything -literally- and ran to her brothers side. She could roll the garbage bag off her brother. He was beat up, cut a little, but still breathing. Okay. Okay. That was fine. That was okay.

“Koko?” she managed in a harsh whisper, lest any noise alert anyone prone to narc. She shook him a little. “Koko?”

His hair was straight. His hair was never perfectly straight. There was always a kink or a curl or straight-up frizz. Lulu couldn’t even remember the last time she’d seen her brother’s hair completely limp.

“Koko...” Lulu wrestled his head and half his body into her lap. “Koko.” Nothing. He was completely limp, just like his hair. And there was a wet patch of blood spreading out through those golden locks and -oh gods- “Koko, don’t die! Koko!”

Panic. Utter panic. Koko was going to die because some asshole dumped garbage on him and they were going to take them both away and she’d never know where he was buried if he even got a burial and they couldn’t take him away, they couldn’t! He was her heart! He was her whole heart and the only reason she even bothered waking up in the morning and Koko! Koko please! Wake up, Koko! KOKO!

There was an adult Elf leaning over them, and that was when Lulu went from ordinary hysterical to full-blown scream-crying and fuck whatever authorities wanted to take them away. She’d scream and scream and scream until the whole world vanished. She’d scream her heart and soul away if it got her Koko back.

The Sea Elf kept murmuring and cooing and gently touching them both in an I-won’t-hurt-you-ever way. She had half a bagel that she picked little mouthfuls off of to offer Lulu and things that stopped the blood and a way of showing Lulu that her dumb baby brother was still alive, just unconscious. She had a better, cleaner place where he could recover and they could both get clean and she could cook them a nice, hot meal and wouldn’t everything be better after a hot chocolate?

There came a point in a cascade of terrible events where just about anything was a step up. If it turned out that this Sea Elf was some kind of horrible, they could bail anyway and be no worse off. In the meantime, there would be a clean place and hot food and new clothes and, once Koko was back to wakefulness, a real bath with real soap and real hot water.

All the same, Lulu refused to let go of Koko and flat-out refused to let him out of her sight. All the way up to a tiny, one-bedroom flat where Koko looked even tinier inside a grownups’ bed. All the way through patching him up and getting him clean and making sure he wasn’t in real danger. All the way through a quick mercy run to the local Bodega -don’t go anywhere! Not that Lulu had any such plans.

All the way through dinosaur chicken nuggets and bubble-and-squeak patties all cooked in the microwave with ketchup on the side.

Koko was awake. Koko was okay. That was all that mattered. Koko passed the weird-ass concussion test, which was better. Koko was also amazingly cool about letting a stranger bathe them and clothe them in identical baggy I (heart) NW tee shirts and ludicrous, one-size-fits-nobody pull-cord pants.

“You sure you’re okay, Koko?” Lulu whispered after the stranger called La’ming tucked them in for the night. “You’re not complaining about anything.”

“Bad food is better than no food,” he whispered right back. “This place is okay. It’s out of the weather and she seems to care enough to want to look after us. Worst comes to the worst, we’re outta here when it gets warm.”

Lulu wrapped herself around her brother. “That’s the dumb baby brother I know,” she cooed. “Always planning for the worst.”

“Geez, make me puke,” Koko mockingly scolded. “Then she’ll call the Fantasy CDC on our asses.”

[TAZ Prompts remaining: 0]

[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for details on how to support this artist]

are you still gonna support them even if they never address anything/the accusations turn out to be true?

depends which accusations. a lot of them are misinterpretations or regurgitating what others have said as Truth (eg about the stage gay with ryan being “ryan being sexually assaulted by brendon every night,” “fetishizes lesbian/bi women” when he’s attracted to confident bi women who know what & who they like, jokes, using barsexual to describe some women when he’s used it to describe himself and guys he’s made out with too, saying him repeating the word tranny to explain what an asshole the guy who used it was him using it himself as a slur against someone). a couple accusations are mild, nonsexual, in a public context touches that people were ok with for years until this summer.

some of the accusations are by men saying they know women/girls who say they were assaulted by b. one of them is homophobic, misogynist, and racist himself, and the other is shane morris (more of the same, plus violent including rape fantasies that he’s spewed on fob and panic fandom, plus he’s been caught in serious lies before) so... i question their honesty. a lot. 

i used to be more angry at b not addressing the accusations, but it seems there’s a lot of them, and the accusations of in person inappropriateness and assault have all been anonymous and most have been drive-bys that the accuser no longer stands by, has deleted, etc. leah’s story honestly reads like fanfic and there are details that defy credulity eg that she was loitering inside after, that some guy came up to her and invited her back into a room with b. kam’s story was... that b, drunk and/or high, hit on him rather mildly for his drunken state eg *looked at him* in a sexual manner?, asked if he was into dudes. the reaction to it eg wanting to run off, feeling sick, running off, feeling disgusted with himself, seems over the top, unless he was previously sexually abused/traumatized by an older male and/or if he was under 16 (if so, it’s understandable and b shouldn’t have tried anything if he was under 16). it says he told him he was a minor, but how old? minor could even be under 21. even if 17, b just turned 22 the day before. he was able to easily get away. (i suspect unresolved trauma from someone else sexually abusing them is what’s really going on here and that this meeting either didn’t happen or happened very differently from how they claim. some have challenged the possibility of it happening at all given the where of a train station, the timing, etc..)

prettyoddfever, who has followed them since fever era, also explained in another post that these accusations have been cropping up from the get go, but would be usually quickly challenged by other fans there who saw eg girls saying they were touched inappropriately/sexually by a band member during a meet n greet, waiting outside the venue to see them, etc. 

the most solid ones they should address is breezy’s revelations about zack, because those are undoubtedly true eg sexually harrassing her, bullying dallon. the worst of his tweets should be addressed too as they are undoubtedly true too eg telling a pregnant woman’s friend he only helped her because he thinks “preggos” are hot, the nude wallpaper (even if he’s saying don’t send nudes, screen-shooting them before they disappear and posting them, blurred or not, is not ok), that very misogynist one saying that females control males with our vulvas/vaginas from young girlhood.

i actually think b’s friendship with zack is the strongest piece of evidence against b, so far anyway, because most of what zack’s accused of is verifiable (breezy’s screenshots, the tweets, him being a dick to dallon in a periscope, what breezy has said is also very very credible and in line with what we’ve seen). guilt by association isn’t always on, but in clear cases like this, of repeated “bad things” over a decade, yep, it is. the question is how much he knew. obviously he’s not stalking zack’s twitter or phone or breezy’s phone. but he’d know/hear/see some things. and i think zack probably gaslights and lies to and hides from him some too, although i don’t think it’s a pat “zack groomed and was abusing b since he was 16!!!!” like some claim (eg he didn’t meet him until he was 18 or 19).

lana was the closest for the b accusations, because she had a casual sexual relationship with him in 07, but she stepped back from things once she realized a catfisher, probably chelsey, was duping her and others online until 2016. if she decided to speak out now about what happened in 07, i’d absolutely believe her, but what actually happened there is up in the air eg she still stands by the open letter being mostly untrue, written by someone else, with inside jokes. 

if anyone else actually puts their identity out there in discussing this, i’ll default believe them too. ciara did, but current and former friends quickly challenged her as i explained in a couple other posts, and she herself backed out on accusing him of doing anything purposeful. i’d also probably believe someone who came forward by name as a witness. cash cooligan and alex from the cab have hinted at things, but nothing concrete has come of it aside from blaming b for capitalism and the music industry and fbr, maybe b did something to alex but who the fuck knows what, and alex’s declaration to do violence to b.

depending on what it was, and how far ago, i may or may not continue with this blog/writing smut about him. considering who i do listen too, i doubt i’d stop listening to his music. think of all the rapists, abusers, etc we listen to on the regular. if i didn’t, there’d be A LOT of men’s music i couldn’t listen to eg david bowie, led zeppelin (jimmy page what the fuck), michael jackson, iggy pop, red hot chili peppers, tupac, aerosmith, paul mccartney and john lennon (although lennon became pro-feminist and improved greatly throughout his relationship with yoko ono), alice cooper, james brown, elvis, sex pistols (sid vicious, the band also defended child pornographers), motley crue, and on and on and on... check out the dreamworlds documentary series (three of them, but the third would probably be easiest to find) for some eyeopeners on male musicians from the 90s and 00s abusing women eg snoop dogg (he was a pimp before he was famous and even when famous still pimped women in pornography), limp bizcuit (literally threw lunch meat at the groupies they demeaned). kid rock is another scumbag. of course: r kelly. kid rock is just bad music too, so no hardship not listening to him. r kelly is currently a sadist daddy dom who trafficks women, makes porn of them, literally pisses on them to degrade/humiliate them, makes them ask permission to go to the bathroom even, and controls them in a cult, and has managed to be charged for some of his abuse of underage teen girls a couple times, so i don’t support him in any way, listen to his music, etc. 

edit to add: found another https://twitter.com/Zapuda/status/1294069508282494980 this one says he was groping 14 year olds behind the bus on his first tour. b himself would’ve been 18 or 19 at the time depending on what he considers b’s first tour. how does this guy know this at all? how does he know that they were only 14 (and not 15 or 16)? who the hell is zapuda? why didn’t more people see if it was to the side of a tour bus and happened repeatedly?