#the doctor literally called in other specialists in her field
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Not with You pt.1
Pairing: Michael Morbius x Reader
Summary: Something about being near Michael just makes you feel different, makes you feel... renewed? Working at Horizon Labs can be difficult, but it gets easier when certain coworkers help you feel more yourself.
Wordcount: hovering around 3.6k
a/n: I have literally never written anything in my life, but I was suffering from the severe lack of Morbius x reader content, so I busted out this entirely self-serving ficlet in about three hours. Shoutout to my beta reader/English teacher: @cynicalsquib , who really doesn't get the obsession but continues to enable me.
“Well, Anna, I don’t know what you want me to tell you; it looks like a penguin to me,” you sighed, gently placing the origami… thing back into the girl’s delicately cupped hands.
Anna had been demanding your attention for the past hour as she did her best to replicate the crisply-folded paper zoo that she had been collecting. And she was getting frustrated. She loved showing the stationary menagerie off to anyone who was around, which, unfortunately, didn’t include many people, given the environment…
The famous Horizon Labs, home to some of the world’s most brilliant scientists from all fields of study (you had heard that, somewhere in the tower, there was a man with eight robotic arms). Horizon was the best place for someone like little Anna, the best place for someone with debilitating diseases or physical disorders, to be. Here, she received round-the-clock care from overqualified, highly trained experts in bio-medical treatments. Which she needed, desperately. Anna was only seven years old when the illness had first manifested itself. It had started with lethargy and an unwillingness to play outside with her brother, which no one spared a second thought to. Until the fevers came. Sometimes reaching 105°F, her family knew that something was very wrong. After a long bout of specialists poking and prodding Anna, there finally came a diagnosis: Hepatitis C. Not a death sentence, but not the makings of an easy life. Because of her age, no physician wanted to put her through the toil of dozens of pills per day, but there was truly no other way to manage her disorder. Until Max Modell caught wind of her case. CEO of Horizon Labs, and an honest-to-God hero of the scientific community. Modell brought Anna to the central Horizon location, deep in the heart of Manhattan, and made sure to outfit Lab Floor Six with the best equipment his money could buy, funding the research of many an experimental doctor. Which is where you came in. Kinda.
You were a zoographist and botanical researcher, meaning you really knew your fauna and flora, which was incredibly useful to more than a few scientists in the building. Tiberius Stone, the electro-magnetic tinkerer from Lab Floor Seven, had asked for your help in orchestrating an experiment called “Alpha” (what a vague and not-at-all helpful name, you had thought). Doctor Aribella Fishbach, Nobel Peace prize winning ecologist, damn near talked your ear off about helping her create a biodegradable, near-zero waste tire prototype until you gave in. You had even lended a hand to Peter Parker with his unstable “Cryo Cube 900”, adding a naturally occurring antithermalite to the casing of the creation, though you’re pretty sure he’s still tinkering with that one. Needless to say, you were useful on almost every floor of Horizon, which suited you nicely, as it gave you a lot of options for what you wanted to do on any given day, as long as your own deadlines were met.
What were you working on? That was hard to answer. You were convinced that certain species in the arctic circle had… odd… evolutionary nuances from their counterparts in other climates. There was evidence of a polar bear with wings. It was- it was unheard of and, as far as you had found, unimagined by the likes of most civilizations, ancient or otherwise. Regardless, you had been pulled from your own endeavors by every other goddamn researcher in the building for so long that you had mostly abandoned your own office, choosing instead to work with others, milling about their desks and workstations to assist with whatever they needed, picking up some skills and interests along the way- it could get lonely- working hunched over a pile of zoological diagrams that didn’t add up. Knowing that your work wasn’t saving any lives. Unlike the work of a certain hematologist that made your heart leap into your throat. Your friend, the doctor that actually made you want to quit your job so that you could just follow him around all day every day, hanging on to every word he uttered.
Doctor Michael Morbius, the self-proclaimed “Doctor Death” (a joking title that may or may not have caused Max Modell to double over laughing during a press conference preceding Michael’s Nobel nomination). He was…how to put this gently? The most enthralling person you knew? Forgetting the fact that he was painfully beautiful, as you often had to force yourself to ignore, he was just charming. His alarmingly quick wit that always caught you off guard and caused involuntary blabbering from you, his devastatingly unmatchable intelligence, and- you know what? No, you can’t ignore how pretty he is, because that’s a huge thing too- His eyes are just fucking piercing, like he could stare through your very soul with ice-cold intensity, daring your resistance to slip for even a fraction of a second so that he could analyze whatever unhinged thought leaked from your mind. The pale pallor of his skin, while clearly not healthy, created an almost marble-like, statuesque appearance, as though his jarringly high cheekbones and annoyingly smooth, clear skin were carved from stone. And his hair! Why did he have to take care of it so well? The first time you saw him take his hair down from its usual low bun, you quite literally stumbled over your own feet, earning you the title “Bambi” from his friend and colleague Doctor Martine Bancroft, who told you after the fact that you had looked like a baby deer caught in headlights. Speaking of which…
“Well, well, well, who do we have here?” Stealing you from your reverie, Martine looked exceptionally smug as she leaned against the doorframe to Anna’s room, taking in the sight of Anna ferociously folding a piece of paper that you may or may not have nabbed from nurse Sutton’s desk, and you, frozen in place, eyes wide and a poorly-shaped paper pyramid in your hands. She smirked at the terrible attempt to replicate Michael’s delicate craftsmanship in your cupped palms, then slid her eyes over to Anna. Beginning to read vital monitors and charts that you really didn’t understand, Martine plucked the sad excuse for a project out of your hands and absentmindedly fiddled with it.
“She’s helping me make more of my army,” Anna replied with zero sarcasm in her voice, not taking her eyes off of her current task of fixing the “penguin” she deemed not perfect enough.
Such a strong girl, you thought with a little smile.
“Is she now? Bambi, why are you helping my patient conquer Dr. Morbius’ paper squad? Well- helping in the loosest sense, because what even is this?” She held up the lump. You took a second to stare sheepishly at the little creation she clutched before clearing your throat to answer.
“See, Anna beat me at chess-”
“Again?”
“Shut up and let me finish.” Both Anna and Martine laughed at that one. “As I was saying, Anna beat me, and I told her that she could have whatever she wanted as a prize for her victory-”
Anna finally looked up from her work to stare straight into Martine’s eyes; “I asked for a motorcycle.”
“-Which I obviously can’t give her, she’s not old enough for her license, so she settled on enlisting my… help,” you looked at your pitiful attempt, “in trying to take down Dr. Morbius and his animals.” You’d think that working in the field of animal anatomy that you could make some stupid animals a little better, but, sadly, that was not the case.
“Okay, then, Anna, answer me this: why do you want to take on Dr. Morbius’ paper crew?” Martine raised an eyebrow, along with a very good point. You actually didn’t know the answer to this.
Anna shrugged as much as she could, eyes returning to her project and grimacing when her IV held her back a little. “Dunno. Just want to show him that I can do cool stuff, too. Surprise him like he always surprises me with them?”
You did your damnedest not to well up at that. Being reminded of how sweet this girl could be is hard.
Letting out a little “Ha!” of delight, she held up what was definitively an emperor penguin. You and Martine shared a smile and looked on in pride. Until you heard the distinctive noise of incoming crutches. Expression blanking momentarily, Anna hurriedly rounded up her small collection of origami animals and tried to shove them under her pillow. When that didn’t work, Martine scooped a couple up into her lab coat, including your pyramid creature, and you snatched a few to hide in Anna’s bedside table, the three of you frantically hiding the evidence of Anna’s new hobby from the approaching doctor.
You were just shutting the drawer of the little stand when Michael rounded the corner to look into the room. He clearly wasn’t expecting anyone but Anna to be in the small space, but he really wasn’t expecting the three of you to be staring straight at him with noticeably forced smiles on your faces in not-at-all fake and totally-natural positions. He looked taken aback for a second before a truly heart-stopping smile curled his lips. He took the little trio in with a look of pure familiarity and humor, nodding to himself.
“So… seems like the doctors are already in, apparently,” he breathed out with a small chuckle. Soft spoken, as always. He moved into the room with little difficulty, looking no worse for wear than he normally did. Easing himself onto the foot of Anna’s bed on the same side you were sat in the adjacent chair, he began scanning the same charts Martine had a few moments before. Seeming satisfied with what he saw there, he wheeled his head around to look at each Martine, Anna, and then you, curiosity and suspicion growing with each successive face. The three of you did your best to maintain expressions void of anything he could use against you, which of course ended up with you and Anna emphatically and pointedly ignoring Dr. Morbius’ eyes in the most obvious manner possible. Catching each others’ eyes, you had to press your lips together in a poor attempt to suppress a laugh. Anna did no such thing.
Anna’s sudden screams of laughter had the three adults in the room falling apart in a nanosecond, each of you trying desperately to stifle some of the very loud gasps for air your laughing fits were leaving you with. It was good to get Anna to laugh- she needed it. As for you, you were also exceedingly glad for the excuse to watch pure delight erupt onto Michael’s face, laughs coming from deep inside his narrow chest and bringing an extraordinary light to his whole body. You leaned onto Anna’s bed for support as you came down from the sudden high, and buried your face into her sheets in order to take a second to catch your breath. Martine had somehow ended up on the floor next to the bed on the opposite side, hand to her mouth to try and cover the smile. The four of you took the silent minute to just breathe and relax. It was nice.
Until a small beeping sound broke the fond quiet in the little room, causing you to lift your head. Martine’s pager, you guessed. A guess that was immediately gratified when she sighed and hauled herself to her feet, turning to Anna with a light frown.
“I’ve got to go. Lily needs something, and you know her- she’ll start throwing things at anyone who passes her room until she gets what she wants,” she said with fake disdain in her voice, a real smile reaching her eyes. “You let me know if you need anything, too, okay?” She put a hand on Anna’s shoulder and gave a gentle grin before shooting you and Michael a look of ‘get out of here and let her rest’. Anna nodded in agreement and waved Martine goodbye, looking to the two remaining doctors in the room. You dropped your head forward and let it hang there, knowing what was waiting for you once you took one step out that door: the commute home through New York on a Friday night. In other words? Hell. Luckily, someone caught your look before Anna could. He nudged you with his right foot, eliciting a small jump from you, which he noted and swallowed a smirk at.
“Okay, Anna. It is officially bedtime for the both of us, meaning it is absolutely bedtime for you,” he said, pitching himself forward onto his crutches to stand and look at Anna with all the fondness in the world.
“Why should I be forced to have a curfew when I’m dying here?” Anna protested, throwing her free hand up into the air.
“I’m sorry, but if all of these guys,” Michael motions a hand towards you and towards the door, following Martine’s departure, “force me, another rapidly dying person, to go to bed at a reasonable hour, I feel zero shame making you do it, too.”
You roll your eyes at Doctor Death’s comment and chose to ignore it as you addressed Anna, too.
“Listen, if you want to ride that motorcycle I owe you, you’ve got to rest and heal,” you soothed, swiftly standing and raising her covers up a little higher than where they had fallen.
Anna’s eyes lit up at the mention of her waiting prize, and her grumbling subsided as Michael turned down the lights in her room. The two of you left, him first and you following. You slid the door to Anna’s room closed about halfway, leaving it open for the night watch nurses to get in. Turning to the good doctor behind you, you found him smiling at the floor. No, not at the floor, at something on the floor. A closer look granted you the image of… a… lopsided… pyramid. Embarrassment seized you as you hurled yourself down on one knee to snatch the little failure away from his knowing eyes, but you knew he had already seen it.
“Damn you and your lab coat pocket holes, Martine,” you groaned, not meeting Michael’s eyes as you stood from your position on the floor. You heard him reveling in polite hilarity and couldn’t even look in his direction, feeling your cheeks burn red-hot at the thought of him knowing you had tried and failed to emulate one of his little hobbies. Moving your arm with the intent to stuff the piece of rubbish into your jacket pocket, you felt a hand seize your forearm and had to adamantly suppress a shiver. You turned your head to watch as you felt the same hand move down to your own, where the paper was clutched in your iron grip. Except, as it turns out, no part of your body could deny Michael what he wants, and your once-stiff fingers betrayed you by uncurling and allowing his own slender fingers access to the little note. The exchange took maybe less than five seconds, but his hand dragging against your arm seemed to slow time to a standstill for you. The sounds of the busy hospital floor around you both hushed, allowing you two a miniscule bubble of Eden amidst the chaos of your fast-paced lives. Before he actually took the damned paper from your hand and held it up to inspect it closer. The sounds of Lab Floor Six resumed, and your bubble burst.
“Contrary to the popular notion, you don’t seem happy that we get to go home now,” Michael mused, still studying your creation held between his middle finger and his thumb. You hesitated a moment, deciding which answer seemed the least pathetic between well if it was actually WE it would be fine and actually, I just hate going through the city alone. You permitted yourself a brief second to imagine what it would be like to actually go home with him, to catch a cab together, make your way to a shared apartment and argue about who would make what for dinner, call it even and just order in so that you could settle on the couch together and just bask in each other. You shook your head to clear the pitiful thoughts of longing from the forefront of your mind (because those images never truly left you), and finally glanced at his light but pensive expression.
“Contrary to the popular notion, I actually happen to like my job and the people I work with,” you replied, as casually as you could manage. Which ended up decidedly not casual as his focus shifted from your pyramid to directly into your eyes, catching you staring at him. You quickly cleared your throat and spoke again, “plus, you know, this city is rough and I kind of hate going home the way I have to.”
“What’s the way that you ‘have to’ go home?” Every question he asks is so hushed, you felt compelled to lean in to be able to fully hear him.
Blinking away what you could only guess to be literal hearts coming out of your eyes, you told him of the complicated series of subways you had to take to go home in order to avoid the street, which made you nervous to travel on alone, despite the years you’ve lived in the city.
He seemed to digest your answer, turned his head away, and smiled to himself, satisfied with the response, and, much to your dismay, pocketed your origami attempt. He hummed as he thought to himself, expression dropping to one of contemplation as he focused himself inwards. It’s not rare to see Michael in this state, but it is unique for you to see it up close, with the excuse to stare at him like this and not feel like you’re gawking. You stayed like that another minute, standing together outside Anna’s room, him pondering hard on something and you just blatantly admiring him for it. He pulled himself out of whatever reverie he had himself in and refocused his gaze on you, having made up his mind. Sharp eyes bored into your curious ones, shattering whatever thought process you had going on.
“I’ll take you home,” he stated simply.
If you could find the correct way to explain how much you inwardly reeled at that, you would. As it is, all you know is that it took everything in you to be able to maintain your composure, breath catching in your lungs and your pulse skyrocketing at the thought of being driven home…by… him…? Wait, how did he even get home? Could he drive? How did you not know this?
He laughed.
“Jurgen helped me create a system to allow me to drive with some assistance. I’d wager you didn’t know that because I don’t like having others in the car with me, in case the mechanism faults,” he murmurs.
“Shit, did I actually say that out loud?” you blurted, eyes going wide. “Because the other explanation is that you can read minds which would make sense sometimes.”
He shook his head, letting a small sound of amusement out at your question.
Of course you had said it aloud, dumbass.
You coughed in an attempt to transition the conversation to something else, anything else.
“So if you don’t like having people along with you then why are you inviting me? Clearly you don’t care for your safety but I’d have never guessed you don’t care for mine,” you teased.
That got his head to snap towards you, expression stricter than has ever been directed at you.
“Of course I care about your safety, but I know you won’t distract me too much, or hover over me and backseat drive. Others would take my focus away from what is actually a rather simple task, but you’re much easier to exist with.”
That knocked the air right out of you, though for better or worse you can’t tell. Should you be upset that you don’t even offer the devastating doctor a modicum of temptation for distraction, or overjoyed that he is willing to break a personal rule of his for you? While you filed away the former in your mind to deal with at a later date, the latter fully possessed your body.
Tipping your head to the side, allowing a small victory smile to grace your face, you asked, “So that's why you prefer a smaller team, to limit distractions? I didn’t know people had that effect on you, made you feel like that.”
He cocked his head to the side, mirroring your own as he gazed out of a nearby window to consider his answer.
“I feel suffocated with large groups of people, like they’re expecting one of two things from me: to keel over right then and there, or to spout some genius idea that’ll save more lives. I don’t like all of that pressure. So, I limit myself to a few relationships in order to not feel the compounding effect of all of their expectations.”
“All of… ‘their’ expectations? So you don’t feel that pressure with some of us?” You were basically holding your breath at this point to hear every second of his response.
He turned his head back to you with a trusting smirk.
“Not with you.”
#michael morbius x reader#michael morbius#morbius 2022#fuck_jared_leto#michael morbius the living vampire#morbius
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we could be Dreamers - Prologue
Pairing: Marcus Moreno x GN!Reader
Rating: T
Summary: How this world came to be
Word count: 1,671
A/N: Hiii friends 🤗 soo there’s not really a lot of plot or Marcus Moreno :( here, but consider this a prologue/worldbuilding for a Marcus Moreno x reader fic I may eventually write lol. I’m really interested in how this universe got from The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl to We Can Be Heroes, because like. Sharkboy and Lavagirl were literally just some kid’s imaginary friends that somehow magically became real, so what does that mean for the other Heroics? Where did they come from?? So I kinda wanted to write something that would make you Think :) and explore the ramifications of such a transformed universe.
Consider my previous Marcus Moreno fic a prelude to this prologue 💗
--
It was a little unnerving sometimes, being in a room with so much power. No matter that this particular training arena at Heroics Headquarters was at least the size of an American football field- when all of the Heroics are gathered in the same confined space, focused on a single purpose, you can feel it. Like their power prances tauntingly in the corner of your eye, slipping away when you try to look directly at it. Like it winds through the air, worming its way into your veins, so your very blood breathes at you to run, run, run.
Not all of the individual Heroics gave off such uncanny vibes; some were simply ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. Techo-No, for instance, and his gift for creating fantastical gadgets. The implications of his works relevant to the world at large could be worrying, but he had limits. He was just a man. Determined, and creative (even more so with his son throwing ideas at him), but ultimately human.
Not like those with powers who’d been Dreamed.
Take Sharkboy. The temper for which he’d been infamous in his youth had cooled, but when he snapped, he did so literally- blade-sharp teeth an audible clash when he bared them in a ringing snarl. Any water in the room would roil and froth- but the most hair-raising sight was his eyes, tinged with the unreadable, abyssal blackness of his namesake. Focused with a predator’s calculation on the object of his fury. (It made you think that, ironically, his temper had cooled too much- concentrated into something as icy and merciless as the depths of the sea. Just as well his wife was a lava goddess).
It was well-documented that Sharkboy could influence his oceanic kin, seeing as he was half-shark himself. Some marine biologists postulated- in low voices- that fluctuation in his emotions could unknowingly influence shark activity no matter how far from the sea he was. But nobody at Heroics Headquarters had ever dared suggest attempting a study.
That you knew of, anyway. You wouldn’t be surprised if there was a classified government branch somewhere which dealt solely with more insidious studies of the Heroics. Their weaknesses. Ways to defeat them.
Just in case.
Sharkboy and his emotions had stabilized as his Dreamer matured, but not all Dreamers were so invested in the well-being of their creations, or of the world they inhabited and could inadvertently affect. It was suspected that not all Dreamers knew that they had Dreamed at all, that they unintentionally brought Dreams into being far from where they were located and simply never became aware. This resulted in some Dreamed individuals being...unstable. Incomplete, really. Brought forth from a child’s mind, a young person who didn’t yet fully grasp the complexities of existing in this world, or indeed, the intricacies of what made one human at all.
Dreamers were children, more often than not. Their imaginative abilities generally far outstripped those of adults, worn down as they were with the grind of building a real life. The younger the person, the more time and creativity they maintained. The fewer methods they possessed to process their struggles which were grounded in reality, and not their imaginations.
--
Despite the years that have passed, nobody quite knows what happened to lead up to the Incident. How a single young boy had imagined so powerfully that it had warped reality; how his imaginings had given him the ability to design the universe at will.
The Daydreamer.
Max, as he later insisted on being called. An almost disturbingly innocuous name for a boy who had changed the world. Who had all but envisioned himself into having terrific powers- and enabled others to do the same.
In the years following the Incident, Sharkboy and Lavagirl continued to visit him in secret (Later, scientists realized that this why they recorded occasional, inexplicable disturbances in seismic and marine activity). But it wasn’t long before a larger threat to the entire Earth appeared- and so did they. To defend the place which they declared to be their new home. Though they had been willed into existence to protect Planet Drool, as Max determined to relinquish his daydreaming abilities and by extension, his dreamworld, so did the planet and its life diminish. Their presence there was no longer required, they’d explained. But earth could still benefit from their protection- especially after the reality of the threat came to light.
Someone else had Dreamed.
It wasn’t clear who, or how, or what their intentions had been. But once it had been said, everyone was forced to acknowledge the truth of it- or at least, admit that there was no other explanation. The villain’s origins were not terrestrial in any previously established sense.
Anyone who had ever met a child could have a predicted it. Too many young people ended up feeling outcast, overlooked, by both their peers and adults in their lives. It should have been obvious from the way they whispered his name. Not Max- a moniker far too average and relatable- but what they reverently regarded as his true title. The Daydreamer. A near-holy figure who had changed the game for youths everywhere. Now they had a way to combat those who plagued them. A way to create or become the superheroes who previously only existed in comic books and TV shows.
Or some did, anyway. Individuals with the strength of will and heart to Dream weren’t rare, but they weren’t quite common, either.
The only truly neutral positive of the Dreamer evolution was that governments everywhere suddenly accepted the need for increased mental health resources. Designed to increase healthy socialization for all ages and give young people ways to process and communicate their emotional needs, such programs were approved seemingly overnight in schools from elementary to university aged. “Small town life” flourished, and many city quarters and apartment buildings took to implementing “community builders” or, less charmingly, “social facilitators”- positions designed to create cohesive areas of living and minimize the kind of isolation and negative feelings that could leave someone to Dream of improving their life.
--
Nowadays, not all super-powered individuals were Dreamed. The second generation of Heroics was a testament to that. As if the universe itself had reckoned with the self-inception of the Dreamers, and seen fit to provide reality-warping countermeasures of its own.
Less than a year after the Incident, babies with...unique qualities began to be born. Few and far between, it seemed at first. Whispered reports swept from far corners of the globe, a phone tree branching from frantic parents to anyone who could provide even the slightest bit of reassurance. It seemed like doctors everywhere were swapping glances, no one willing to admit what was happening- until a second Villain appeared.
Every incident report said the same thing: a baby started crying, and then the hostages were saved by a power outage. A wash of sparks that darkened half the city.
Webbed with red lightning.
You sneak a look at the fully grown Heroic now, the long braids of her ponytail slipping over the shoulder of her characteristic red training outfit. Red Lightning Fury flexes her fingers as she listens to the head trainer explain today’s exercise- the usual sort of ‘heroes versus villains’ battles, with you and your fellow specialists assisting as villains- but judging by the lack of the smell of ozone, she isn’t yet using her powers. Blinding Fast, on the other hand, appears to fritz in place every few seconds, and you guess he’s running invisible laps to pass the time. It’s hard to tell if that’s what’s causing Lavagirl’s hair to tendril like neon pink smoke even though she’s standing still; usually the hypnotic heat shimmer of her lava flow causes the effect naturally.
You stretch in place while team arrangements are announced. As the majority of the Heroics filter into the stands to wait for their match, the buzzing, writhing presence of their power fades, and you can breathe more easily.
A figure flickers into being beside you, and you jump. “Jeez, Visi! How many times have I told you not to do that?”
Having anticipated your reaction from the countless previous times she’s snuck up on you anyway, Invisigirl laughs. “You think you’d be used to it by now.” Your closest Heroic friend grins at you, all pearly teeth against smooth brown skin.
And she’s right, which is why you were so disgruntled. Having been caught unawares too many times by the invisible hero’s silent movements, you had once asked her to give you lessons. Her instruction had improved your own stealth immensely, and now that you knew what kind of signs to listen for, her attempts at startling you didn’t work nearly as often as they had. But- “It’s hard to focus on anything with all of your powers clogging up the air,” you grumble. The birthed heroes understood what you meant- they felt it too, the nagging hiss of something other in the Dreamed heroes’ energy.
Across the arena, it looks like Miracle Guy and Marcus Moreno are waiting to be your opponents. Interesting. Miracle Guy, with his Dreamed up Superman-like abilities, was the only one who had a way of seeing Invisigirl. What it was precisely, you couldn’t recall. You make a mental note to ask Visi later.
Marcus, however, telekinesis aside, is clearly meant to be the counter to your strengths. The two men are discussing intently, but as if feeling your assessing stare, Marcus glances over. He lifts his eyebrows at you in playful challenge, a hint of a smile quirking his shapely lips before he’s pursing them at his duel-mate again.
Suppressing the pleased flutter down your spine, you turn your attention to the task ahead as Invisigirl dips her head toward you. Planning something clever, you realize, intrigued by the glint in her eye. “Let’s talk strategy.”
When the starting bell rings, your partner vanishes, and your smile curves as sharp and gleaming as the blade in your hand.
#marcus moreno#marcus moreno fic#wcbh fic#wcbh#we can be heroes fic#we can be heroes#pedro pascal characters#marcus moreno x reader#marcus moreno x you#let me know what you think!!!#🙈🙈🙈#and if anyone wants to help me dream up a plot for this...i have Some Thoughts
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POST PLEASANT HILL.
We thank you for your patience and understanding during the last month. We highly emphasize ‘understanding’ as it is likely that forgiveness will not be found for a long while. Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you choose to ask for a retrospective forgiveness instead of permission. The fallout from Pleasant Hill has been expansive, which should not come as a surprise to anyone. In the last two week reports have been published by both S.H.I.E.L.D. and the United States Government regarding Pleasant Hill. Due to varying access levels we are unable to release them all to the public, but can present a synthesized version. Please see below.
001. PERSONNEL.
Director Maria Hill has been under investigation for negligence, abuse of power and failure to comply with government regulations and orders. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Board of Oversight Affairs, S.W.O.R.D.’s Committee of Internal Review and the U.S. National Security Counsel have all been conferring as the Trustee Alliance and came to the consensus that Director Hill will not lose her title but all administrative decisions will have to be approved by the three councils. Hill contested the ruling, but it is to remain in effect for the next twelve months before being reevaluated.
Other personnel associated with Pleasant Hill have also been subject to investigation and trial. Head scientist Dr. Erik Selvig has been cleared of criminal charges along with Dr. Kavita Rao and Dr. Randall Jessup. All research conducted for Project KOBIK has been confiscated and will be reviewed and distributed. Dr’s Rao and Jessup will continue to contract with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Dr. Selvig is expected to resume independent study.
Pleasant Hill Administrators Sharon Hill (Agent 13) and Barbara Morse (Agent 19/Mockingbird) were placed on leave while their cases were reviewed. Due to her primary affiliation being the C.I.A., Agent Carter was pardoned by the government but they maintain that they had no involvement with the situation. She is expected to continue her actions as the liaison between S.H.I.E.L.D. and the C.I.A. Dr. Morse, primarily a Mighty Avenger now, was pardoned on the grounds that her actions as a whistleblower for the Avengers acted as a turning point that led to the dissolution of Pleasant Hills. Morse has gone under oath that she will continue as an Avenger but report to S.H.I.E.L.D. when called for assignment. There will be no infractions to her record or change in rank.
On-Site Specialists and embedded agents have been vetted and cleared by the Committees. Agents Avril Kincaid and Daisy Johnson (Quake) were both called in to testify along with five others. Although culpable in participation, actions within the town during the day the border fell have been regarded as exemplary in preventing additional deaths. Agent Kincaid will continue to contract with S.H.I.E.L.D. while Johnson will be declared inactive and return to duty with the Ultimates.
The Wyngarde Sisters (Martinique & Regan) were both apprehended and returned to Krakoa. Because the mutant nation is a sovereign one, the Trustees had no say in their trial or assessment. S.H.I.E.L.D., however, sent a lawyer on their behalf that explained that their actions were sanctioned by the government. Krakoa has confirmed that Mastermind and Lady Mastermind will be subjected to disciplinary actions.
OO2. INMATES.
As it stands, 90% of the inmates have once again been apprehended and distributed between the Raft and Ravencroft Institute of the Criminally Insane. Some have been placed on wanted lists, some have returned to monitored areas and some are acting independently. Statuses are as follows:
Agatha Harkness, Karla Sofen (Moonstone) and Norman Osborn (Green Goblin) all escaped the town and have not been seen since. They are currently on S.H.I.E.L.D., S.W.O.R.D. and the U.S. Government’s wanted list. Please call in any sightings of them.
Cain Marko (Juggernaut), Elektra Natchios, Felicia Hardy (Black Cat) and Wilson Fisk (King Pin) all left Westview independently and the government is not currently seeking to arrest them once more. Their actions prior to Pleasant Hill were not severe enough to warrant internment, and while we will occasionally observe their behavior we apologize for their arrests.
We also would be remiss if we did not extend a sincere apology to Roger Gocking (Porcupine), While investigating Pleasant Hill, Roger’s history as a former felon was flagged and he was mistakenly placed into Pleasant Hill. Claims have been made that he was turned into a literal porcupine to stop him from exposing the operation, but S.H.I.E.L.D. denies the accusations. They will privately be settling the matter with Jessica Drew (Spider Woman) and the Avengers.
Following Ripley Ryan (Star)’s departure of Pleasant Hill, the Council has been unable to reach a unanimous decision on how to proceed. Ryan is still listed as a high level threat and a rostered member of the Thunderbolts but it has not been determined if restorations need to be made or if time needs to be removed from her probation. For more on the Thunderbolts under Section 003.
003. THUNDERBOLTS.
AIM’s taskforce the Thunderbolts were some of the earliest inmates inserted into the town. The six members -- Anthony Masters (Taskmaster), Georges Batroc (the Leaper), Helmut Zemo (Baron Zemo), John Walker (U.S. Agent), Melissa Gold (Songbird), Ripley Ryan (Star) and Yelena Belova (White Widow) -- have all been approached separately about how to move forward. In exchange for lighter sentences, Masters, Batroc and Walker have agreed to work with the Thunderbolts again on a probationary level. As mentioned above, Ryan is still a rostered member of the team but has refused to sign any paperwork thus far. Belova, meanwhile, has had her record expunged in a deal with the C.I.A., similar to the one made with the Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff. Despite this, she has elected to work with the Thunderbolts under the agreement that she is able to break contract and leave at her own discretion.
After the staged rebellion in Pleasant Hill, the Trustees were divided in how to move forward with Zemo. While Wakanda still wishes for him to be in their prison for the murder of King T’Chaka during the U.N. Bombing, it was narrowly agreed upon that Zemo will either have to work with the Thunderbolts under a handler or be sent to the Raft. The selected handler for the team is Melissa Gold, who contracts directly with S.H.I.E.L.D. Pre Pleasant Hill, Gold was offered a lighter sentence pending her ability to go undercover and resume her former relationship with Zemo. As an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Gold was instructed to pretend as if her personality had been rewritten so that she could monitor the inmates on a closer level. Her ability to do so, along with her help in removing a fragment of the Mind Stone from Zemo’s possession has increased her rank and qualified her for a handler position.
We have high hopes for what the Thunderbolts can do as a rehabilitated unit working in tandem with A.I.M. on a probationary basis. Any member who fails to uphold their contract will be interred in the Raft for a time and a half of their original sentence.
004. AIM.
The agency has passed under various leadership over the years, but is currently being run by Scientist Supreme Monica Rappaccini. As it stands, the Alliance is unsure about how to interact with them in the long run. It would be beneficial to make peace, but we are hesitant that all motives may not be properly expressed. Allowing them to handle the Thunderbolts team with S.H.I.E.L.D. / C.I.A. liaison Sharon Carter overseeing it is a hopeful step in the right direction. Classified documents will not be shared between the agencies, and S.W.O.R.D. / S.H.I.E.L.D. will continue to work on a more intimate basis while allowing agents at A.I.M. outposts. The situation will be reassessed at the quarterly debriefing.
Personal apologies have also been made to Dr. Rappaccini for the arrest and imprisonment of A.I.M. members such as Carmilla Black and Jeanne Foucault without advising the agency.
005. IMPORTANT -- POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS.
It has come to our attention that there may be some changes post Pleasant Hill that had not been originally accounted for. Although the transition from inmate to resident was precise, the return to true form was not. Following the splintering of the Reality Stone, one fragment went to Baron Zemo and was used to create a device that was passed around to various inmates, effectively ‘waking them up’ from their Pleasant Hill personas. The changes later made by Star when she reclaimed the Stone counteracted -- in some instances -- what had been done.
Please be alert to any sort of physical or personality changes in inmates or absorbed Avengers. All inmates who are in custody are being subjected to biweekly sessions with our specialists and weekly doctors check-ups. The same applies for the Thunderbolts, who are on-field and under more scrutiny. So far, increased or reduced aggression has been noted in some inmates. Physical changes have been minor, but not all effected have yet to go through testing. Because Ryan’s Stone is based in Earth-616, we believe it may be a multiversal glitch that has caused these changes. At the moment we do not believe the changes to be life threatening or dangerous but should be monitored nonetheless.
006. IN CONCLUSION.
What happened in Pleasant Hill was a colossal mistake that should never have been allowed to progress for as long as it did. S.H.I.E.L.D. apologizes to all who were negatively impacted but stands by the decision to look into more creative ways to inter inmates in the long run. The inaugural group of Pleasant Hill residents consisted of thirty inmates, and 90 were ultimately removed from the town by the time everything was said and done. It is with heavy hearts that we announce that we lost the lives of ten S.H.I.E.L.D. ground agents, but are also grateful that the count stayed low considering the 184 agents assigned to the town.
Some have asked what the criteria was to be selected for Pleasant Hill and how it began. After reading S.W.O.R.D.’s research report on Westview and seeing Wanda Maximoff’s decision to leave Agatha Harkness in a friendlier ‘role’ of sorts, it was decided that the Pleasant Hill experiment would be elaborated upon. In order to minimize the risk of injury, Ryan was drugged and intubated in the town before any residents were brought on. The Database had already been established and was waiting for use, and one of its commands were to keep her comatose. The Thunderbolt’s Belova, Walker, Masters and Batroc were then sent on a rigged mission into the town, where they were apprehended and transformed into their resident roles. That took place in the beginning of May, with the following residents being Natchios, Zemo and Gold. After that, the Database proved to be functioning efficiently and more inmates were transitioned consecutively, instead of one a day during the initial experiment. Criteria was criminals who were in custody, those with active warrants or those who posed ‘potential threats to a devastating degree’. All inmates have been redistributed between Ravencroft’s Institute for the Criminally Insane, Ryker’s Island and the Raft.
Moving forward, we hope to put Pleasant Hill behind us to focus on future conflicts that may arise. The Trustee will continue to meet when need be, and classified Pleasant Hill documents will officially be sealed. Pleasant Hill, CT will be rezoned and no longer used by S.H.I.E.L.D. Please directly reach out to the Trustees for any further information or unanswered questions.
SIGNED,
A.BRAND (S.W.O.R.D. DIRECTOR), A. MACKENZIE (S.H.I.E.L.D. ASSISTANT DIRECTOR) & H. GYRICH (NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL).
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This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.
For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.
My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.
All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.
Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Burns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.
I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.
What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.
I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.
If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.
But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).
So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?
Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.
Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.
The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’
Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.
The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.
We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.
I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.
Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.
I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.
I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.
If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.
I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.
Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.
It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”
Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.
But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.
The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.
The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.
All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.
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College-Aged Asura
Trying to figure out the ages of Blish and Gorrik is a CHORE.
In Season 1, Taimi was out and about doing things (albeit without permission) and identified herself as a member of the College of Synergetics. She was the personal ward of Zojja, which, if asuran colleges work anything like real-life human colleges, probably means she'd completed the core curriculum and was doing further, more advanced research. (Or maybe she was going to write her thesis on Scarlet?)
Anyway - this implies that she's been through college and is either done or almost done. But she was thirteen. Either she was an exceptional prodigy (which fits; even Phlunt calls her that a few times and takes more of an interest in her than a government official normall would, I think, even for an orphan in the care of the Progeny Protective Services) and went to college years early, OR it was normal.
I think we've all been assuming it was normal, since we have very little other evidence to go off of.
There was Zojja; she is said to be younger than Caithe, who, at the time of Edge of Destiny, was twenty years old. This would make Zojja a definite teenager, yet she was working with Snaff full-time as his assistant (post-college apprenticeship? possibly without monetary incentive?). If you believe the timeline in the back of the book (the one that says the Firstborn awakened in 1302 instead of 1300), then Caithe was eighteen at the time of EoD, and Zojja would be even younger. But again, Zojja may have been exceptional, and that's why Snaff chose her, and Zojja chose Taimi because Taimi was similarly exceptional.
Anyway. It might be normal, and the asuran college system is very near to the real-life human college system, in which case, guesstimates that Blish is, at the time we meet him, twenty or twenty one years old, and Gorrik is maybe eighteen or nineteen, are fairly correct, since Taimi was about nineteen to twenty at that time herself (we knew her birthday is 1313).
BUT - there are two variables. One is, what if being thirteen and (presumably) being out of college is not normal. The other one is, what if asuran colleges don't work similarly to ours? People do stay at college for years and years, doing research, getting funding for said research, eventually becoming professors or doctors or whatever else and teaching. That's human colleges. Asura probably have a similar system - except that even asura who aren't specifically working with the college still identify with their college (likely because there's only three colleges that each pursue a different type of study). But in any case, the number of asura that stay working with the college is likely a lot higher than the human numbers. Therefore, saying 'I knew them in college' is less likely to mean 'we went to school together/are the same age' and more likely to mean 'we were working on a similar project/on the same krewe/shared research' which would undoubtedly include many researchers of different ages and specialties and experience levels.
We have no idea - we are never told - in what capacity Taimi knew Blish, except 'from college.' We only know they were both Synergetics (probably; he's a portal specialist, which sounds more like asura gates and waypoints, which is a field of the College of Dynamics).
These variables heavily imply that Blish and Gorrik could easily be many years older than Taimi.
In short, we have no idea whatsoever. Now, the both of them being close in age to Taimi is a good guess; Blish maybe is a few years older than Taimi (Taimi, being nineteen/twenty, maybe we'd put Blish as being more like twenty-two/twenty-three) instead of just one or two years older. But this casts more doubt on Gorrik's relative age; we've been assuming three or four years' difference, but if the above statements are true, then Gorrik would be Taimi's age, and it seemed to me that Taimi only knew Gorrik as 'Blish's brother' and a few extra details about him. She was confused and kinda skeptical when she heard that Gorrik had joined the Inquest; she was more I'm going to be literally depressed over here and sadly tinker with my things for nearly twenty-four hours straight when she heard about Blish, because she knew him better.
Now maybe asura don't do anything based on age, and she didn't know Gorrik as well just because he was an entomologist, not a portal specialist, and she was doing something involving Blish's research at the time, not Gorrik's.
But again: we simply don't know. Feel absolutely free to use any of this information to cobble together a headcanon supporting the way you perceive their ages. This is just a bunch of here are all the variables on how we don't know anybody's ages unless we are explicitly told from asuran society.
Be warned I have absolutely not played more than one asura character, so if I've missed something important about asuran society, feel free to correct me!
#asura#blish#gorrik#taimi#zojja#snaff#this is just#me absolutely thinking out loud#ideas and concepts and maybes#nothing concrete here XD#gw2#college of synergetics#college of dynamics#ls1#ls4#asuran colleges
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Why Vox by Christina Dalcher is not a good novel: Review & Analysis
The premise of this novel is incredibly interesting, don’t get me wrong: Vox (2018) is about a dystopian future, in which US American women are only allowed to speak 100 words per day and must wear a bracelet that shocks them if they go over that limit. Women also aren’t allowed to write, read or use sign language. The main character is a genius linguist called Jean who hates every man in her life, including her husband Patrick and her own sons.
The first sentence already tells us three things about this novel: (1) it’s told from a first-person perspective, which means the reader will be aware of the protagonist’s every thought, (2) the oppressive regime in the novel goes by the name of Pure Movement, so it’s probably going to have something to do with religion, and (3) the action takes place in the span of a week, which I feel like it’s a huge spoiler for the fact that I won’t care for any of the characters at the end of the book, since there’s only so much character development that can happen in that time.
If anyone told me I could bring down the President, and the Pure Movement, and that incompetent little shit Morgan LeBron in a week’s time, I wouldn’t believe them.
There will be spoilers from this point on.
The Setting and the Protagonist
The main character in Vox, Dr. Jean McClellan, is a specialist researcher in the field of aphasia, that is, according to Wikipedia, “an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions”. At some point in the novel we are made aware that a colleague of Jean’s, with her help, has discovered a cure for aphasia, even though they are both linguists and neither a chemist nor a medical researcher. However, she was unable to publish this discovery, due to the conveniently timed sexist apocalypse that stripped her of all her academic titles, as the reader is often reminded.
Jean is married to her husband Patrick and has four children with him: three boys and a girl. Jean evidently resents every man in her family, especially Patrick and their 17-year-old son, Steven. Apparently they’ve all been very quickly indoctrinated to believe women shouldn’t be allowed to speak, so they treat Jean and Sonia, the daughter, accordingly.
There is a whole subplot about Steven, but it’s so plain and uninteresting that there isn’t much to say about it. Basically, he is all for the Pure Movement and their ideals of purity for women, but then still sleeps with his high school girlfriend and proceeds to tattle on her. When she is taken away to a camp, he realizes his mistake a leaves to save her. At some point he is captured by the Movement and ridiculed on TV. Jean doesn’t really care that he’s gone, but is pleasantly surprised when he reappears at the end safe and sound.
At this point, the Pure Movement has only been in power for less than a year and a half. This movement is very overtly described as a Christian uprising that originated within the bible belt and had spread to the entirety of the USA. The followers of the Movement also adopt overly conservative views on gender roles, marriage and sex, leaving very little doubt about the roots of the oppressive regime in Vox.
The Plot
The main intrigue in Vox begins when the brother of the US president starts suffering from aphasia after a “skiing accident” and the government comes to Jean for help, despite her being a woman in a society that literally won’t let women speak. Why do they come to her instead of going to any other male scientist? Because apparently Jean is the best linguist in the whole country... even though, as far as the government (and the reader) knows, she’s only been researching aphasia for a couple of years and hasn’t found a cure yet. Well, the author herself has a doctorate in linguistics (not in the field of aphasia), which brings me to my first problem with this novel: the blatant and, quite frankly conceited, self-insert.
You may have noticed that I wrote “skiing accident” in quotation marks on the last paragraph. That’s because it’s hinted a couple of times throughout the novel that the president’s brother was actually injured on purpose by the government, but this turns out to be false. Later it seems like he was never even injured in the first place, but this is never clearly resolved, as the character himself never appears “onscreen”; however, it’s not a cliffhanger that perpetually haunts the reader.
Back to the story: Jean agrees to help because, by taking the job, she and her daughter get to remove the shock bracelets for the duration of the research. The government then proceeds to give Jean one week (remember the novel’s first sentence) to produce a cure that, to the best of their knowledge, hasn’t even been found yet. If that sounds like a stretch, they even let her work with her old research team of three people, which is supposed to fully convince the reader that a week is a completely plausible time frame to discover, produce, test and approve a cure for an illness.
The Side Characters
This team is composed of Jean, her former colleagues Lin and Lorenzo, and their supervisor Morgan, who you might remember from the novel’s opening sentence. Morgan is apparently an idiot linguist who is very unfit for his position, which is supposed to show how twisted the society in Vox is, as they put the dumb people in charge just because they’re men, and silence the smart women. What it actually does is show that this version of the USA apparently only has a handful of linguists and no other skilled scientists.
This is the novel’s description of Lin:
Lin Kwan is a small woman. I often told Patrick she could fit in one of my pant legs – and I’m only five and a half feet and 120 soaking wet, thanks to the stress diet I’ve been on for the past several months. Everything about her is small: her voice, her almond eyes, the sleek bob that barely reaches below her ears. Lin’s breasts and ass make me look like a Peter Paul Rubens model. But her brain – her brain is a leviathan of gray matter. It would have to be; MIT doesn’t hand out dual PhDs for nothing.
Here we learn that Lin is small, not conventionally attractive (read: small boobs and ass), and finally that she is incredibly intelligent. For some reason, Jean finds it important to describe Lin’s curves, as well as her own, before mentioning Lin’s intelligence. No, this novel was not written by Michael Bay. Also, for representation’s sake, Lin is Asian and a lesbian, yet every other major character in this novel is a white straight person.
Well, there is another lesbian in this story, actually. Jean’s old college roommate, Jackie Juarez, who Jean hasn’t seen since before the machocalypse. We get to know Jackie through flashbacks: the novel tries to portray her as this loud, over-the-top feminist who often tries to make Jean join the rallies and protests against the growing Pure Movement. Alas, Jean chooses to focus on school instead of going to protests and forever regrets this, thinking that if only she had fought, she might have changed history.
I don’t know how to feel about this novel’s depiction of Jackie. She is made out to be a stereotypical feminist lesbian, who actively protests against the uprising of the Pure Movement, and yet whose efforts are in vain. Here is an excerpt that characterizes how Jean sees Jackie, and therefore how the reader is supposed to see her:
“You have to vote, Jean,” [Jackie] said, throwing down the stack of campaign leaflets she’d been running around campus with while I was prepping for what I knew would be a monster of an oral exam. “You have to.”
“The only things I have to do are pay taxes and die,” I said, not holding back the sneer in my voice. That semester was the beginning of the end for Jackie an me. I’d started dating Patrick and preferred our nightly discussions about cognitive processes to Jackie’s rants about whatever new thing she had found to protest.
Here you can see that Jean clearly dismisses Jackie and “whatever new thing she had found to protest”, and instead muses about what an intellectual she is. I understand that this is a flashback, and it’s supposed to show that Jean was wrong not to care about protesting the Pure Movement, but this is told from present Jean’s perspective, so it’s clear she still rolls her eyes at Jackie’s activism in general. It feels like Vox is trying to say that actively expressing your ideas and concerns is useless, since Jean eventually overthrows the government with science and not through activism – and it even takes her no longer than a week to do it, as we learn at the beginning of this novel. There is a lot to unpack here, but I still wouldn’t recommend thinking too hard about the ideas in this book.
Jackie only becomes relevant to the plot towards the end. At some point she is held hostage by the government, so that Jean is forced to finish her work. Why the government chose to kidnap Jean’s old college roommate who she hasn’t seen or spoken about in years instead of, say, her daughter, we will never know. In the end, Jackie is only there so that Jean can save her and “redeem” herself for not having been there for Jackie in the past.
Lorenzo, the last member of the team, is Jean’s love affair since way before the Pure Movement effectively took over. The novel likes to remind the reader that Jean is with the Italian hunk Lorenzo because she despises her husband Patrick, so that makes cheating okay. Eventually we learn that Jean is pregnant with Lorenzo’s child, so he offers to let her escape with him to Italy as his wife. Yet Jean can’t allow herself to leave without her daughter Sonia – she’s fine with never seeing any of her sons again, though. She considers this for a while as she works on the cure for aphasia.
The Ending
At some point during the week, Lin disappears (we later learn she was imprisoned due to big gay activity). Jean and Lorenzo announce that they’ve discovered the cure and even test the serum on a random neighbour of Jean’s who happens to have aphasia as well. Also, Jean’s mother had an aneurysm earlier that week and also started suffering from aphasia. The government is pleased with the results and take the serum away.
Later, Morgan, the supervisor, takes Jean and Lorenzo to a strange lab underground to have them further develop the cure. There they walk through a hallway full of chimpanzees in cages, and there is a bizarre scene in which Jean gets too close to a cage and is attacked by a chimpanzee. There is no purpose to this scene other than to shock the reader, honestly. Here, the novel briefly, yet disrespectfully brings up a very real woman who was mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009 and managed to survive (Wikipedia link, no pictures), by having Jean think something along the lines of “oh no, I don’t want to end up like her!” during the attack.
Jean is fine, obviously. We’re over 200 pages in and nearing the end of the novel when the first interesting development happens in the form of a plot twist: the government has been using their cure in order to create an anti-serum that gives people aphasia. Their plan is to create a more effective means to silence women, of course, since they wouldn’t be able to comprehend or formulate language any more. When Jean discovers this, she wants to quit, but is forced to stay when they reveal they’ve been keeping Jackie, Lin and Lin’s girlfriend hostage in the same building for this very occasion. And maybe also Steven back at that camp, but we don’t even care about him at this point.
The climax of the story arrives, and everything happens so quickly the reader doesn’t have time to digest it. I had to reread what actually happened at the end, because I couldn’t remeber it anymore. I’ll try to recreate the pacing of the ending in the following paragraph, so you can understand what I mean:
Jean and Lorenzo save the lesbians (who are the only likeable characters, so that made me happy), Morgan dies, I think, and they escape with the anti-serum. Patrick appears and decides to help, so they send him to the White House with an anti-serum bomb that suceeds, giving the president and all evil politicians aphasia. Patrick is killed during this, freeing Jean from their marriage and allowing her to escape with Lorenzo and all of her children, whom she suddenly stopped resenting. The Pure Movement collapses and all is well, thanks to... well, thanks to Patrick and Lorenzo.
Conclusion
Vox is a mess of a novel. The characters are unlikeable, the plot is badly paced and the ending is too sudden. I really didn’t care about what happened to any character at any point, which is incredibly disappointing. Additionally, there are many things wrong with the political message in Vox, namely the idea that all religious people are inherently evil and that men generally wish to control and silence women. The premise was good, the writing was fine, but the performance was terrible, unfortunately. Vox feels like it was rushed to come out in time for the dystopian fiction craze of 2017-18 caused by the release of The Handmaid’s Tale TV series. Hopefully we’ll see better work from the author in the future.
Blog | Goodreads
#book review#booklr#bookblr#bookish#reading#bibliophile#booklover#litblr#reader#book#books#review#library#feminism#anti feminism#radfem#sexism#vox#dystopian#dystopia#christina dalcher#vox spoilers#tw: death#tw: animal attack
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Hopeless Heroes AU
Support Hero Pack
Law/Surgeon of Death
Law, most commonly known as Surgeon of Death, is a special type of support hero, who is capable of using his ability both defensively and offensively during missions.
He prefers to work on the background, finding his calling to be in healing rather than in fighting.
He was the one who completed the suppressants, which he refers to as devilfruits. These pills are used to suppress abilities that are hard to control to give the heroes the ability to blend into the society smoothly, add control over them and to switch them if the powers prove to be damaging the body of the holder.
He is one of the closest friends of Stealth Black, being one of the few who knows his real identity due to the fact that Law has been the one to patch him up often.
He's a graduating student at the university, while his power does give him a leverage on the field of medicine, he decided to go over the formal training to become an eligible doctor.
His favourite past time is relaxing in a pile which consists of polar bear like creature known as Bepo and his two assistants called Penguin and Shachi. Sometimes they're joined by Usopp, a tech specialist.
Law is also one of the smartest people in the HQ, who has been able to figure out the secret identities of most heroes including Hunter.
Zoro and Law share the same passion for things like ninja, samurai, superhero movies and robots.
Bartolomeo/Barrier
Became a hero upon witnessing the temporary team which consisted of Stealth Black, Hunter and Rubber Man.
He holds great admiration towards the trio and has even studied their fighting methods in order to become a better hero himself.
His main ability is to create barriers, which makes him ideal for damage control and saving missions.
Rumour has it that he has cannibalistic desires, but they were quickly debunked by Barto himself stating that Man Eater and Cannibal are very different terms. He just likes to go out on dates a lot.
He's one of the few heroes who are willing to be interviewed, he provides good distraction and his comments have put a lot of civilians at ease over the wellbeing of the heroes while also explaining why they can't take part in interviews.
Nami relies on him for some juicy hero rumours.
His greatest dream is to be paired with ASL, Stealth Black and Hunter.
He immediately drew parallels between Stealth Black and "Prince".
Like many in the support team, Barto doesn't really like Germa 66 as they tend to leave a lot of citizens in danger along with a lot of destruction. He was glad to learn that 03 left the group and wished him good luck.
He was the one who suggested the colour scheme and the crown to Usopp upon learning that he was working on a suit for Prince/King.
Bartolomeo has a civilian boyfriend whom he affectionately refers to as Prince Charming.
Dr Kureha
Healing specialist.
Currently training the next generation healers, Law, Marco, Caesar and Chopper.
She's also the wife of Dr Hiriluk and the adoptive mother of Chopper (he hasn't been officially adopted yet though).
She's also the supervisor of medical team.
Kureha was notably incharge of project Devil's Fruit, which was left unattended upon the deaths of Hiriluk and his two assistants, who just so happened to be Law's parents.
She sees great potential in her apprentices, which is why she's extra hard on them as her way of attempting to keep them on the right path.
Can and will paralyse you until your body has been completely healed. Pressure points are a bitch.
Was present during the deaths of Roger and Rogue, still blaming herself over them as she wasn't "fast enough" in a situation where nothing could be done.
Rushed to save Ace and Sabo with Garp upon learning what the science ward was doing to them during project REVIVE. She also alerted Dragon about her bad feeling regarding Sabo's family, leading to his eventual saving.
Fully accepted Dragon's resolution to form his own team of heroes, even giving him her at the time top assistants and students.
Keeps in touch with Dragon to tell him how his son is doing.
Affectionately calls Ace "Spitfire".
Marco/Phoenix
Hero who revolutionised what it means to be a support hero with his ability to both fight and heal.
He classifies as support hero, but more than often he goes where he feels like he's needed the most, which just so happens to be in middle of action.
His mother was a healing type while his father was a mix of fire and a bird, hence his ability to turn into an actual phoenix.
If he knew how, his singing would have the same effect of bringing hope and courage to those who hear him just like the mythological beast itself.
He studies traditional medicine directly under Dr Kureha while having formal training from his own university years.
He's a friend and a role model to Ace, often hanging around with ASL even outside their missions.
He is incapable of getting drunk, which is the reason why he often sasses the heroes who tend to party hard as a revenge due to the fact that he's also the one to look after them.
He's pretty much sassy gremlin uncle and most people adore his sarcastic nature.
Bonnie Clay
Part of the diversion team, which was created with the intention of helping to maintain the double lives of the heroes without them being caught.
Usually Bon is paired with Bartolomeo and the duo get along quite nicely.
His special ability is Mimicry, which is perfect for him to pose as his coworkers. Usually he does that to also cheer others up.
Thanks to his special placing in the HQ, he is aware of the most heroes' identities.
He looks up to a vigilante known as Queen, who works with Dragon and is even rumoured to be his lover.
Bon is a fashionista of his own right, his expertise lying in visual kei and kawaii fashion.
Bon's closest friend in the HQ is Luffy, to whom he is very dedicated to as he helped him break out of his former life.
He used to be part of Crocodile's criminal organisation, being lured there as a child from an abusive home life. But unlike Miss Sunday, Bonnie Clay chose to become a hero upon being given the opportunity to by Shanks.
Caesar Clown
No, he and Buggy aren't actually related.
He was formerly contained to a government facility due to his questionable fascination to poisons and gas.
The United Nations chose to hand him over to the United Heroes to ensure that if his intelligence was going to be used, it'd be for something good.
Doctor Kureha has been extra hard on him, constantly steering him away from the more destructive path.
He honestly doesn't really realise that what he does is bad, he was literally raised to be a living weapon and as such emotions and compassion aren't his strongest points.
Caesar is always paired with Law, who appears to be the only one capable of keeping him in line. Nobody knows how he does this and at this point they're too scared to ask.
There was a time when Doflamingo tried to get him to join the Donquixote Family, but Law's stories about what kind of person he was made it so that Caesar was too afraid of the mad man to actually go with it.
Even if he's technically a captive, Caesar feels like he's being treated like a human in the HQ, which is what he had been wishing for most of his life, wondering what it was like to have a normal relationship with other people.
Chopper
Currently, he's the youngest person in the HQ (15), thus he isn't allowed to go on the field.
He was abandoned by his birth parents to the test facility where project REVIVE took place, ultimately becoming one of the test subjects.
He was rescued and illegally adopted by doctor Kureha and doctor Hiriluk, who have been his mentors up until the latter's death.
Kureha is planning on having him take over as the leader of the medical team once the time comes for her to retire.
Chopper prefers the humanoid reindeer look over his actual human one, it makes him feel more confident and in control. It also seems to make others smile.
When someone is stressed, Chopper tends to climb onto their laps, refusing to move until they've relaxed. His soft toy like appearance has helped a lot of workers.
#Hopeless Heroes AU#Support Hero Pack#support hero#support#one piece#onepiece#one piece au#one piece headcanons#one piece hcs#one piece chopper#chopper#kureha#dr kureha#trafalgar d. water law#trafalgar law#one piece trafalgar law#marco one piece#marco the phoenix#caesar clown#bartolomeo#bon clay#Bonnie Clay
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Jar of Rebuke Episode 7 Unofficial Transcript
Season 1 Episode 7: Shifts
INTRO
The following audio recording is classified documentation for Case [audio distortion] with the Enclosure. Unauthorized access to this information will lead to immediate intervention. Progress further if proper clearance has been given.
JARED
So today I'm actually recording this from the lab I've had the room to myself for hours, just as it's been for a while now. Ever since my little vacation I've had more and more lab time to myself. It's nice? But also I just feel more lonely. I can play my music or whatever, but I do almost miss Dr. Castillo's presence. I guess I'd just gotten used to it no matter how weird it is at times. But having Grove around has helped immensely with the loneliness at home, at least. He's super cuddly, which I never expected from a literal hellhound. But Milo did mention the possibility of me being... touch starved? Which might also explain why the attention just feels so weird. I had never even heard of that before. I mean Dr. Daman has never brought it up. But again knowing that most hellhounds are not at all the cuddly sort... oh well, I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. [door creaks open] Oh, uh, hey Jamie!
JAMIE
(to herself) Alright, oh shit! (to Jared) Um, hey! Sorry, I thought this lab would be empty.
JARED
I mean I normally would be out on the field at this time, but it's a bit too cold today. Can I help you with something?
JAMIE
Nah, nah. To be honest, I kind of steal your office to nap during my break. This weather is killer on my body and I'm just, well, I'm tired.
JARED
Well if you need a nap, I can keep quiet? Or I mean, I can even duck out if you'd prefer, I don't want to stop you from getting any rest if you need it.
JAMIE
(small laugh) No no no no no, that's, that's fine. I'm... I'll just go grab a cup of coffee. You want a cup? I can grab one for ya, no problem.
JARED
Uh yeah, yeah, that'd be nice actually!
JAMIE
How do you take it?
JARED
Just grab a handful of sugar and some things of creamer. I like it pretty sweet.
JAMIE
You got it. We get crap coffee anyways. I'll be back.
JARED
[door closes] Thanks! That's Dr. Everett, though she never really lets me call her that. She's great. We've talked a few times in the hall mostly. Sometimes we catch each other in the elevator or end up chatting at the coffee machine. We've never hung out outside of work, though. I mean, hell, the only co-worker I've ever hung out with is Milo. We, we didn't hang out much when we were lab partners, but we started hanging out more recently. I don't know if I'd prefer to have them as a lab partner again or what we have now. It's nice to have, I don't know, friends? Anyways, the weather's getting colder so we've been working inside more. Yeah we bundle up and go out sometimes, but not as much as we were a month or so ago. I've mostly been working with Dr. Castillo to go over old recordings that we gathered. With us being lab partners we typically are also project partners, though not exclusively. It seems like recently she's been assigned to a project that's more in line with what she used to be doing. Something far less dangerous, which she seems to be very happy about. Whatever it is, it's keeping her out of the lab a good amount. So here I am, alone, as usual.
After I got back from my little vacation I went to see Dr. Daman for another appointment. She asked what I got up to so I told her about taking in a dog. I didn't tell her about how Grove isn't, you know, like most dogs, but I told her how nice it is to have Grove around. I mean, heck, that dog knows when I'm waking up from a nightmare and is always by my side! I thought that she'd be happy about it! But she seemed, I don't know, disappointed? She asked if I thought that I really needed to keep a dog around just to manage. Her tone was concerned, but her words? I don't know, it just… it made me feel bad about having Grove around. Made me feel bad for finding him so comforting. I told her I guess not, but it does really help. I've also gotten pretty attached to Grove. It's just nice to have him around even when I'm not in a panic or whatever. She gave a soft sigh and then just moved on, as if she wasn't happy about my answer. Even though she's always taking so many notes I don't know how much of me she really remembers. Like she doesn't really mention my friends by name, ever. I say names like Holly or Darius, or I mention Laura and Ester, and I always have to re-explain who they are. Holly, you know, the person from the snipe hunt? Or Darius, you know, the guy that I hung out with on his birthday? And she just takes more notes. I hardly feel like I'm getting much from her anymore. She asked me about the audio journal again and actually seemed pretty happy that I'm still taking her advice. And listen, I get it, I get it, it feels really good to know that someone is taking your professional advice, and doing this really does help. But I don't like how she presses on it. I mean, I almost want to stop doing this out of sheer spite sometimes.
After a bit of talking Dr. Daman mentioned that there's going to be a change in our sessions. My stomach sank. She said that I need to come in more frequently which was weird considering the fact that I feel like I'm doing fine! In fact, I feel like I'm doing better! But she's insisted that I need more help in this whole remembering thing. Help that she alone can't provide, apparently. I don't know, maybe she could have provided the help if she tried to actively help me remember, instead of just leaving me to remember naturally. So now there's going to be another person getting involved. I haven't met him yet, I meet him my next session. Apparently he's helped patients who have received injuries that have caused memory issues in the past. I wanted to ask why I didn't just see him from the get-go, but whatever. Next session, I am meeting a Mr. Liam Zimmer. Not a doctor, like most of the people around here end up being. He's a psychologist though, and according to Daman, he's a damn good one. Though those weren't her exact words, of course. She spoke highly of his abilities, though by her tone I can't tell how she personally feels about Mr. Zimmer. She's not as blatant in her cheerful disliking of things as Dr. Castillo is. Mr. Zimmer will focus on my amnesia, Dr. Daman will work on my other day-to-day evaluations, and Dr. Rahal is still my general physician for these headaches and whatever else happens.
Speaking of headaches, they've kinda come back again. Not as fiercely as before, more annoying than anything else really. Not debilitating by any means, but my gods! Are they a nuisance. Amir is trying to help me find other methods of dealing with them since medicine doesn't really work. Started drinking more water, which I'm objectively just bad at drinking enough water in general. I also have started some light workouts like twice a week, nothing too strenuous, just enough to get the blood pumping. It kind of sucks but I know it'll get easier over time. Amir said that all of my vitals are normal which is definitely good, but like, I don't know. Still a bit annoying sometimes that I can't look over my own records. I think next time I get a scan done, I'm going to ask to see it. I don't think that he's the kind of person to keep things from his own patients, so I'm sure he'll show me if I just ask.
Not gonna lie I looked up Mr. Zimmer in the work database. After trying to look into Dr. Kelder, I've gotten a bit curious to look and see what I can find about others. And if this guy is going to be helping me do a deep dive into my own brain, yeah I want to know about him. It says he's been with the Enclosure for a few years, mostly working in rehabilitation. But that doesn't explain why they didn't have me see him sooner. Like if he's literally in the rehabilitation program. What the hell have they been considering my case, huh? According to his records there was a period of time a couple of years ago that he was involved in some highly guarded cases. Not the general, you know, “can't discuss my patient’s work file” thing, but I mean high level clearance, password guarded. The Enclosure seems to really shuffle people around a lot. A lot of his methods, by what I could find, seemed to be experimental.
So when I say how unsure I am about all this I cannot emphasize how much I'm not exactly feeling this one. I hate sudden change, and this is kind of a big deal! They didn't even ask if I wanted this, they just told me that this is how it was going to be. Not even Dr. Daman seems too thrilled but considering how often she seems huffy with me that might just be her usual state. She's rarely pleased with any progress I make. She used to at least seem curious but nowadays she's more and more sensitive to me developing my own coping mechanisms outside of what she suggests. And I don't know, it just doesn't feel very good. And it's not like that I can find another therapist anyways. I mean Wichton has a fairly small but a very good network of counselors and social workers, but not any that I could see about my specific needs. To say I need specialists is putting it lightly. I feel like anyone outside of the Enclosure just wouldn't be able to help. I mean, if they are from outside of the Enclosure I can't tell them anything. I wouldn't be able to explain what I do at work. I can't go into my personal relationships are being affected by these things, the headaches, the bad dreams, the not remembering anything! So Dr. Daman and Mr. Zimmer it is.
But I'm also doing more at home to try and work on that stress which is actually really helping. Again Grove has been a huge help, he always seems to know when I need him the most and he'll pull me back into the moment. It's nice! And I've been spending some time with Holly, Darius, and some other folks in town. I've gotten this weekly routine of stopping by Mrs. Weddington's bakery to pick up some sweets and also at least once a week stopping by the Chronicle Inn for a meal to see Laura and Ester. I'm starting with the people and places that I'm most comfortable before I start branching out. Though I'll admit, whenever I go to the Chronicle Inn I can't help but consider booking myself a room again and seeing if I could speak with the Blue Lady. I mean, at least to get her name, at least to ask more questions. Should I get on that? I mean, no time like the present.
I'm also working to not lose myself to fixations, uh, trying to balance work-related studies and well, I guess studies of myself. Balancing all that out with relaxing things. I got another crossword book from Christine. I have no idea where she keeps getting them but they're great, honestly. It's been a bit harder to focus on them recently but I am going to try. I've tried cooking more, but I'm not really good at it. As Holly would say, I somehow burn water. But Darius has offered to come by and teach me some recipes so we're gonna hang out here soon so that he can help me learn some basic dishes. And considering that Holly wasn't too phased by the children knocking at the door, in fact they said it was cool, it makes me feel a little better at the idea of Darius actually spending some time over at my place. Grove is very protective of me, but he got along very well with Holly and doesn't seem to have much issue with people when I'm walking him. I'm pretty sure that it won't be an issue when Darius comes by. I warned him, but he seems excited to meet Grove, so we'll see how that goes. I feel like it'll go well.
[papers rustling] I think here soon, I have to go back out onto the field though. Not today, but I'm expecting within the next few weeks. A file that I have here is something about some kids wandering the woods not too terribly far away from here so I think I'll be going out to investigate that soon. The file says something here about them being the ghosts of victims of some unethical doctor that tested on children suffering from a hydrocephalus or water in the brain. An old haunted mansion with a wide range of things, but the most notable are the lingering spirits of those kids. Or it may actually be the kids themselves? Immortal or transformed into whatever it may be. So I'm probably gonna be going out and taking a look at that here soon. But I'm not gonna worry about it until I get that official email telling me to head out.
Well, uh, a new therapist, potential lead… uh, well my week other than that was great. I didn't really record much after I took Grove in. I hung out with Holly. We watched a few weird movies, played some video games together. They brought over their own gaming system and we just hooked it up to my TV. It was a lot of fun, and they got along very well with Grove. We did talk a bit about the whole gendered language issue. I started it by telling them about my whole situation with naming Grove, and it kind of just naturally led to the broader discussion of it. I also brought it up with Milo a little while later and both Holly and Milo asked if I'm non-binary. I wasn't expecting that question. I also wasn't expecting how right it would feel when I looked into it. Like, I don't mind people calling me sir or he all that much, but I just don't feel like the man that they see me as. Holly asked if I wanted to try they/them pronouns instead. But the pronouns aren't really what matters that much. I mean, as long as the person is addressing me in a way that I find respectful I don't really care much about pronouns. Milo made a similar offer, saying that if I ever wanted to try a new name or different pronouns to just let them know. I like my name, it's something that I have that's me, the only real tie that I have to my past, you know? And the pronouns thing? We'll see. Haven't talked to Dr. Daman about it yet. I really don't know if she'll care either way, in the dismissive way, not the accepting way. I have a feeling that Dr. Rahal would be accepting, he seems like the sort of type, the sort of person that would be accepting on this sort of thing. I might talk to Darius about it too. I don't know, I just have a feeling that he'd understand. Or at least be willing to listen. We've been starting to really open up to each other more about stuff, getting more personal. With that said I really don't know how much longer I can keep him entirely in the dark about my whole amnesia thing. He's smart, he's definitely gotta notice that I don't talk about my past. I'm surprised that he doesn't find me boring as hell to be completely honest. I mean, I'm glad he doesn't, I'm glad he likes to hang out.
Speaking of ties to the past last time that I was at the Chronicle Inn to pick up more dog treats for Grove, because I may or may not give him more treats than would be healthy for a normal dog. Spoiled rotten. I caught a glimpse of the inn's guest book, names dated back many years, and it was also strange to look over my own entry. I almost hadn't written in it but Ester reminded me on my way out a while ago to fill it out. And how could I say no? It got me thinking, like, should I go back? The Blue Lady insisted that she knew me and that must mean that she knows more about this whole situation. Since my headaches have been a lot better it might be a good time to go check in again and see what I can, you know, figure out from her. Figure out what she knows in a way that wouldn't leave me just with more questions like last time. Hell, maybe I could call work and see if they want to come fix some of my housing again. I'm sure Ester and Laura wouldn't mind if I brought Grove. I mean he may be huge but he's a really well-behaved softy most of the time. He does wander off at night, likely to do general hellhound things, but he hasn't caused much trouble. At least that's nothing that's gotten back to me. Well, I'll look into that.
I'm also pretty excited for time with Darius, I don't know if he'll stay the night like Holly did. My couch is pretty cozy, I mean I doze off on it all the time. But with the knocking at night and everything else, I don't... I'm worried I'd scare him off. I wasn't too worried about scaring Holly off with just, um, how they generally are. But I don't know how Darius would be about it. Guess all that I can do is just give him an heads up and let him decide if he wants to chance it. I mean, Holly's been trying to get Darius and I'd hang out more for whatever reason. [phone buzzes] Oh, alright, time to start getting ready for lunch. Um, I guess I might as well wrap up. This is Dr.- oh uh…
JAMIE
You won't believe the gossip I've got! I had a run-in with Todd in the elevator.
JARED
Wow, quickest way to have your day ruined! What did he say?
JAMIE
(small laugh) Well, he saw I wasn't using the wheelchair today, right? So I got all cocky and asked if my legs were finally working today. Even if I wasn't in so much pain, I wouldn't want to deal with that shit. So I asked him when his brain would finally start working. He looked like he was gonna have a conniption. But what's he gonna do, fire one of his most experienced people? Okay!
JARED
I would give my whole paycheck to be there next time you pull that. I would, god, I wish that I could say stuff like that to him.
JAMIE
Anyway, I was thinking of taking my lunch soon. You wanna pick up something in town? I could use the company.
JARED
Oh that that sounds great, yeah! You've been to the Royal Cow? They've got some pretty good food but their desserts are the best. Here, let me just wrap up here and um, this is Dr. Jared Hel signing off.
OUTRO
Jar of Rebuke is written and produced by Casper Oliver, who is also the voice of Dr. Jared Hel. Voice of Jamie Everett is Jenny O’Sullivan. The intro is read by Vanessa Rosengrant, and credits are read by Ashley Craft, who has created the podcast official graphics. Music was created by Luke Menniss, spelled m-e-n-n-i-s-s, who you can find and support on Bandcamp, Spotify and Twitch. Find us on social media for updates. You can support us on Patreon or Podhero by following the links in our episode description. And special thanks to our patreon supporters, Tristan, Perry, Devin, Becky, Nico, and Joyce.
#jar of rebuke#jar of rebuke podcast#jor podcast#jar of rebuke transcripts#i will get 8 and 9 done sometime this week!
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12 Shocking Things I Learned by Working as a Butler at the Plaza Hotel
You’ll never look at hotel staff the same way again.
Bloomberg Brandon Presser
Old-school service is alive and well at the Plaza: High tea treats are served in brass birdcages, tuxedo-clad bellman whisk away luggage to gilded suites, and chefs bear toques that tower above their heads. But in the age of Amazon Prime—when we all want everything now—what is it really like blending vestigial aristocratic assistance with light-speed wish fulfillment?
In order to properly find out, I accepted an offer from New York’s iconic Plaza Hotel to join its team of butlers, a coterie of 10 servicemen (and one woman!) who trot around the property’s 20 floors day and night, making sure 282 rooms’ worth of guests feel like royalty. For two hot days in July 2017, I raced around with a team that, like the city itself, seemingly never sleeps—hearing tales of the trade from the department’s director, Emma, and serving guests alongside some of her most experienced staffers.
This is an elite crew: It bears a combined 147 years of experience, and many have served as house managers for affluent families all over the world. Me? I got express credentials for my two-day residency—unprecedented for the Plaza. They included a detailed orientation of the property and a uniform fitting for my hotel-issued attire (gold-plated name tag and all).
Over my short tenure, I delivered laundry to Middle Eastern princesses and fetched lobsters out of wishing wells—and listened to colleagues delight in the oddities of their jobs, from fielding requests for Viagra or comforting a weeping woman over spilled blueberries. Serving the world’s rich and famous, it turns out, plumbs the depths of an alternative universe that readily embraces the absurd without even batting an eye. And that was only the beginning of what I learned.
Here, 12 secrets to keep in mind the next time you check into a five-star hotel.
One VIP List You Don’t Want to Be On
Hundreds of butler requests roll in each shift—mostly to fill ice buckets, handle laundry, and shine shoes. Complimentary packing and unpacking requests are also common, though they can turn into day-long affairs. A surprising number of international guests will purchase adjoining suites: one to sleep in and one for their luggage.
By matter of corporate philosophy, every guest should feel like a VIP at the Plaza. But a hierarchy still exists among those who check-in at reception. At the top of the pyramid are kings, queens, and heads of state—or as butlers call them: V1s, and they are ever-present on the property. Then come high-payers, long-stayers, guests booking a large block of rooms, and recognizable celebs. They’re called DVs, or distinguished visitors. On the bottom of the VIP totem pole is the SA group, known complainers or otherwise difficult and demanding guests who require “special assistance.”
Bath Time Can Be Awkward
Another common request for the butler team is to draw baths with a signature blend of salt, oil, and roses—especially during the colder months of the year. But the butler’s duties aren’t necessarily complete once the tub is full. Bal, the Plaza’s resident bath-time specialist, said that 95 percent of the time, he’s asked to remain within arm’s reach as bathers suds-up. Most of them, he said, want more hot water or scented oil, and are happy to keep him on hand while they relax in the nude. He is often left to pull the plug from the drain, elbow-deep in leftover water.
It gets weirder. One of my butler colleagues at a previous job in London was asked to ship in and set up a guest’s order of fresh oysters in the bathtub. He diligently filled the tub with ice and laid the oysters out, only to discover that the guest wanted the oysters placed in the tub around his soaking body. Eventually, the client seemed satisfied: He purchased the room next door for his butler so he’d always be near.
Hotel Guests Are Pretty Predictable …
The Plaza’s guest relations team researches everyone staying at the hotel on an individual basis, using a variety of social media tools. (The favorite is LinkedIn.com.) Butlers, on the other hand, often use past trends to size people up on the spot. They send electric kettles to the rooms of arriving Asian guests, who often bring noodles from home to cook in their suite. They keep an eye on the minibar when tending to Americans in their thirties and forties—they’re considered the partiers of the hotel, likeliest to plow through the booze. Middle Eastern VIPs get what is called an “Arabic Amenity”—a tray of dates, dried fruit, and nuts; they tend to prefer these to chocolates, cakes, or other sweet desserts. And the butler staff knows to immediately ask Western businessmen if they have shirts or suits that needs servicing upon checking in; they’re always the ones who treble the quantity of laundry in the basement.
… Except When They’re Totally Unpredictable
Despite the overwhelming regularity of guest behaviors, travelers can mystify even the most experienced of butlers. During my shifts, lobster shells kept appearing in the fountains of the hotel’s interior courtyard. Every day, the staff would fish them out, only to find a new one a few hours later. It turned out that a Middle Eastern prince was ordering cooked lobster from room service for every meal and then throwing the empty shells out the window to land in a fountain below. (Emma asked him to stop—nicely—but pieced together the mystery only on the day of his departure.)
Another time, a woman called Emma hysterically crying “as though her husband died and she just discovered the body.” When Emma finally calmed her down, she comprehended the real reason for the guest’s tears: There was no more Kleenex in her suite, and her young daughter had been forced to blow her nose on toilet paper.
Sex, Drugs and … Come Again?
As at any hotel, requests for drugs and prostitutes do happen—but not frequently. Bal has been asked for drugs only two or three times in his 10 years at the Plaza, and he is careful to stick within the boundaries of the law. Condom needs are another story: Mouhsine, one of the other butlers, always carries a pack with him, especially in the evenings. On being called to fulfill one such late-night request, no one answered the door after several knocks; he gently entered the room to find the two guests in the “go” position, waiting to be walked-in on.
Far more interesting than sex and drugs are the more outlandish client requests. Recently, Emma fielded a service call from a woman searching for some missing chocolate-covered blueberries, which had fallen off a window ledge. Emma offered to obtain replacements from the same brand and store, but the guest was adamant about retrieving her exact snack. Emma and the security team trawled the hotel’s interior courtyard for hours, blueberry-hunting, to no avail. During my brief tenure, the weirdest request was for two liters of intravenous saline solution—meant for a doctor’s ailing wife, who was presumably on the wrong side of a stunning hangover.
Some requests are even more bizarre. One butler told the story of how he was asked to replace all the furniture in a suite because the guest didn’t like the color blue. Another was sent off to scout the city’s reliquaries for a justice of the peace trophy—a prize for a newly minted lawyer. Another arranged for a live tarantula flown in from Africa to be served as a meal. Of course, butlers always deliver with a straight face.
Mind the Pillowcases
Missing pillowcases can be a real issue at the Plaza. But it’s not the tourists that have sticky fingers. And it’s not hotel pillowcases that are getting stolen. At least once a week, a white pillowcase that was brought from a guest’s home gets mistaken for a hotel-issued version and is sent out for cleaning. Sometimes they’re never seen again, in which case Emma dispatches a bellman to purchase new coverings, drawing on the hotel’s coffers, no matter the price.
Christmastime: Not so Merry
“Party season,” which spans October to December, feels like a constant carousel of functions, banquets, and events at the Plaza. Every evening, there are four or five requests for assistance at looping bow ties and zipping up cocktail dresses. And in the last few years, requests for holiday-themed decorations in the rooms have become so commonplace that the hotel now offers a standard Christmas package that includes a fresh, fully decorated tree, assembled by the butlers pre-check-in for $500.
The Customer Is Not Always Right
Complaints follow regular patterns. Every day, a guest will complain about too-slow laundry service. Though forms clearly offer standard and expedited return times, they’re not fast enough for some.
Minibar charges also lead to regular disputes. A full raid of your room’s bar runs $600 at the Plaza—something that happens at least once a week. The likelihood that guests will not want to pay is almost guaranteed.
This requires butlers to document everything with pocket cameras, whether it’s open booze bottles spread across the room, stains on laundry that existed before washing, or evidence of damaged furniture. Every ticket is verified on a computer and photos are attached, so when TripAdvisor.com lights up with a fiery review, the butlers are able to provide evidence to dispel any falsehoods.
The Easiest Way to Get Banned
It’s a lot easier than you might think. The hotel has a strict anti-discrimination policy, and zero tolerance is given to guests who mistreat the staff because of race, gender, age, or creed. Even now, guests sometimes request that staff of a certain ethnic extraction not be allowed to service their rooms; others will ask service members if they are legal in America. Emma, the director of the butler team, cited several incidents of sexism, too, such as the time guests asked to speak with a manager but grew angrier when she showed up instead of a man.
The refusal of services goes all the way up the ladder to DVs. At least two specific celebrities are permanently banned from the Plaza—one, a pop diva expelled for excessive drug and alcohol use and a belligerent attitude towards the staff, the other a sitcom star who took his anger issues out on a suite’s worth of furnishings.
Afternoon Tea Leftovers Don’t Go to Waste
Hidden within the Plaza’s secret back-of-house corridors and tunnels is a cafeteria reserved for the staff. Open during lunch, dinner, and late-night hours for (surprisingly good!) hot meal service, the canteen offers bagels and drinks for the peckish throughout the entirety of the day. But the savviest snackers know to visit the cafeteria at exactly 5:30 p.m., because that’s when the leftovers from high tea at the Palm Court upstairs are put out for the staff. (They serve only the food that was prepped but not plated.) Emma said she practically lives off mini cucumber sandwiches. I liked the tiny blueberry cheesecakes.
A Good Tip Can Make It Worthwhile
New York City’s hospitality workers are protected under a spectrum of different unions. While bellmen and room service are considered “tipping staff,” the butlers do not expect fiscal rewards for their work, beyond the Plaza’s paycheck. But Bal and his colleagues still see a few ex-presidents from time to time.
His biggest tip during the last 10 years? It came from a French model-actress keen on setting up a romantic weekend for her boyfriend, a well-known fashion magnate. Bal placed flowers on every flat surface throughout their suite, organized lunch in a helicopter over Central Park, and tracked down a very specific, very expensive bottle from a specialist store off-site. By the end of the weekend, she handed him $8,000 in cash.
Seven months later, the founder of the fashion label was back at the hotel with a different girlfriend.
When to Call It a Night
The Plaza maintains a Betsey Johnson-designed suite in honor of Eloise, the capricious six-year-old that fictionally lived on the property. It was here that Nimer, another member of the butler team, had his most bizarre service experience to date. A request was put in for someone to come up and read the beloved children’s book as a bedtime story, but when Nimer arrived there were no children to be found. Four thirtysomethings were neatly tucked into one, large bed. Concealing his shock, Nimer read to them for 90 minutes—then tracked down Eloise on video, in case they hadn’t had enough.
This post originally appeared on Bloomberg and was published August 8, 2017.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/12-shocking-things-i-learned-by-working-as-a-butler-at-the-plaza-hotel?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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Okay so last week was a shitkicker and was literally so bad I spent the better part of the week trying to delude myself into thinking it was a good day. Like, we're talking, "the sun is shining and I'm here to see it so today is a good day" and "I'm having a bad day- fuck me I am not haveing a bad day- I'm having a good day- I'm not having a bad day". Denial is a powerful tool for mental health, apply judiciously. I get that everyone on earth is kinda having a shitty year but it feels like things just kinda escalated in my little corner
The 7th had a huge snow storm that brought traffic to a stand still. No one could leave the house and university class was online anyway. Batshit customer demanded to pick up her gear anyway. I drove in because I was the only person with keys to the shop that could get to the building. It took me a solid 2 hours going 15mph on the highway. The snow in the parking lot was up past the fenders of my truck. Crazy lady gets 10 out of 18 of her survival suits back but the other 8 still have holes in them because our only repair tech is also the only one who answers the phone or runs the computer or handles customers or cleans or disinfects anything or stores gear. I'll give you one guess who that person is.
Did you guess me? Good for you. Fun fact this was not the case in October.
Crazy lady swans off through the snowed in parking lot and because she cant find the exit, blasts straight through the ditch and onto the road.
I say fuck it and leave. I've been at work for 2 hours. I have made 24 dollars for my trouble. It takes me another hour to get home.
The 8th is Saturday and I'm supposed to be at work. No one can drive. There was another 10 8nches of snow last night. I say fuck work and go to dig out the plow truck. The canopy over the plow truck collapses as I walk out to clear the snow of it.
I do not scream.
My partner and I get the truck running and go plow people out of their driveways and then go do the shop.
We come back home and the heater doesn't work. We just spent most of last week frantically trying to limp the thing along because no heat at -20°F is in a word fucking unpleasant. At least now its 40 degrees warmer because if the snowstorm. We take it apart again. The house smells like diesel. The house smells like exhaust. The house is not cold because the wood stove can keep up at 20 above zero but it won't keep us through the winter.
There is no saving the oil heater. We need a new one.
Its 730 and neither of us have eaten. I start rice in the pressure cooker so I can throw a tasty bite on top and call it dinner and that dies too. Explosively.
Dinner is half cooked rice and microwaved curry.
Sunday is spent finding a way to stretch our increasingly thin budget to buy a new heater. Between us we actually have 2275$ and we will still cover the mortgage. Somehow. All our Christmas gifts will be hand made this year. The next thing that breaks will stay broken.
Monday, power outages due to snow storm. No wifi, no zoom meetings. Another 8 inches of snow. This is now more snow than my city gets for the full year.
My boss calls sobbing. The dog died. Joey, an 11 year old, 130lb mastiff with a tumor the size of a football on his liver has been her constant companion for at least 8 years. The pandemic has confused the bejesus out of him because while he loves the lock down and going out to play every hour or so he doesnt really like the concept of strangers in masks. Hes a guard dog and doesnt understand that men in masks coming into the shop are not here to kill mom they're wearing masks so they don't kill mom.
Mondays the shop is closed anyway and I spend it installing the new heater. It doesn't quite fit in the space the old heater came out of but its warm.
Tuesday, I go to work, everyone cancels class, I once again gently explain to a regular that eugenics is bad. I would like to curse him out. I cant. He drops a grand on scuba gear and leaves, talking about how great his trip to Mexico will be.
I do not scream.
A friend calls to ask how I'm doing. Not great. Yea, her niether. She asks if I want to go out to the backcountry with her over the weekend. I explain that my leg physically does not move and I'm downing copious amounts of advil to remain upright. The doctor sent me in for an MRI but has not yet called back. Plus I'm supposed to go to Valdez for the weekend and actually go diving. That I can do with limited use of my leg.
She says yikes, take it easy, take care of yourself, I love you.
I say, yikes, I'm tired of taking it easy, I wanna play, I love you too.
Hit me up if your plans open up and we can do something gentle on your leg. She says.
God yes. The cold woods away from people sounds like paradise. I dont even care that it will cause me rending physical pain to get there. I need a break.
Its Wednesday. I go to school. I get pulled over. Miraculously I dont get a ticket. I'm white female and conventionaly attractive, maybe not so miraculous. I rolled through a stop sign but I'm pretty sure I couldn't afford a ticket.
I get a text in class. One of the instructors who works with the dive shop has tested positive for covid. I haven't seen the man in 2 months. I needed a spare instructor but he was nowhere to be found. But hey, evidently that's a good thing.
I go to work. I vacillate between doing the job a 4 people and having nothing to do.
I go to the grocery store because I misjudged my last monthly grocery run and even though I'm increasing my exposure I'm out of cheese and tea damnit.
The store is packed. Pandemic who?
My partner and I haven't had a date nite in a while and this week has been shitty. I want a nice dinner. I pick up a couple boxes of the carton sushi which isnt terrible and is about as nice as I can justify on the new budget. I grab a gallon of milk and a few other things. I forgot my wallet in the truck and the cashier is chill and sets my stuff aside while I grab it.
I pay and take my stuff home and realize I left one of my bags at the store. No cheese or tea for me.
Thursday. 10am my phone goes off with an emergency alert. The govoner has grown a spine in light of recent elections and is instituting a voluntary lock down. My state has 500 new cases a day. That might not sound like a lot but theres only 300,000 people in Alaska and we've got poor medical infrastructure.
Unfortunately Alaska is full of Alaskans and nobody can tell us what to do. Nothing changes. 7pm rolls around and I'm teaching scuba classes in the pool.
I load a few hundred pounds of scuba gear into the back of my truck. In a wet wetsuit. In the snow. In a fabric facemask. 6 feet apart. In the pool.
I dont get paid for pool time.
Over the summer we had 6 dive masters including me, all big burly dudes, much better suited to picking things up. Its November and I'm the only one.
The kids I'm teaching are going to Hawaii. They're 10 and 13 and so wildly excited about breathing underwater its beautiful to watch. And they're traveling to an island. In a pandemic.
Friday.
Unload scuba gear so it doesnt get stolen out of the back of my truck while I'm at class. Were doing a make up lab today. Hey of the five student in my class only one of us has covid so theres that.
My boss calls an let's me know that shes left for Valdez without me. If I'd like to make an 8 hour drive by myself in a snowstorm I'm welcome to follow.
I'm in class till an hour before shop closing. I'm not driving across town so I can run on the open sign for half an hour.
The shop stays closed on Friday.
Saturday.
I explained to everyone we had business with that the shop would be closed over the weekend and Friday. I planned on being in Valdez. Hell I canceled plans to be in Valdez.
I open the shop and immediately field calls about why we werent open. I start to explain about the Valdez trip and logistical difficulties and then I realize that shes not mad about that. The woman was here before I opened early this morning. We have never been open that early. The hours are on the door.
A regular comes in. Hes also confused as to why I'm here.
Sunday finds me curled up in bed, reluctant to leave. Getting out of bed has not played out well for me recently.
A friend comes over to chat with my partner about specialist rifle parts. This isnt that wierd, he works at a gun shop and they've been discussing upgrading my partners current rifle set up.
He is wearing a full Scottish kilt. Red tartan. Looks very lovely.
I make zucchini bread and my proportions are a little off because I have too much zucchini so it's a little over moist but it's good. I'm recovering from an asskicker of a week and next week will be better.
Monday morning:
Baby brother has covid
Dads getting the results of his rapid test tonight.
Mom isnt getting tested because she says she doesnt have symptoms but that's not the fucking point mom.
So, I'm not going home for thanksgiving. I'm not diving in Valdez. I'm not skiing backcountry.
I'm not sick. I'm not flat broke yet. I dont have a ticket. I have a job. I have people who care about me. Im managing my physical and mental health as best I can. Im just fucking exhausted.
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Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 26 Feb 2020
Today’s links
Brave autolinks 404s to the Wayback Machine: The internet’s time-traveling, privacy respecting, ad-busting browser.
Clarence Thomas admits he blew it on Brand X: A very safe mea culpa from the man who helped kill Net Neutrality.
Medicare for All would be the biggest take-home pay increase in a generation: Even if my taxes went up by six figures (!), I’d still save money.
The Smithsonian publishes 2.8m hi-rez images into the public domain: Tired: “It belongs in a museum!” Wired: “It belongs to the world!”
McMansion Hell visits 1971: Before “lawyer foyers” there were “paralegal foyers.”
This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019
Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading
Brave autolinks 404s to the Wayback Machine (permalink)
A new feature in Brave’s excellent, privacy-centric browser: when you visit a dead page, it automagically checks to see if there’s a cached copy in the Internet Archive and directs you to that instead.
The Archive is crushing it. Working with Wikimedia, they’ve linked every book citation in Wikipedia to the relevant passage in a scanned book in their library section.
Brave’s plugin works on 404 (page not found) errors, and also for 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, and 526 errors (451 is “page censored!”).
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21154096/brave-browser-wayback-machine-404-internet-archive-lost-pages
Clarence Thomas admits he blew it on Brand X (permalink)
In 2005, Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in Brand X, a case that ratified GW Bush’s FCC’s power to interpret both the statutes and jurisprudence of telcoms law however it wants, overriding judges.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-277.ZS.html
That decision meant that GWB’s FCC could arrange telcoms rules to suit the Big Cable donors GWB relied on. It meant that Obama’s FCC could reverse those rules and impose net neutrality. It meant Trump’s FCC could reverse Obama’s FCC and kill net neutrality.
Now, Thomas has written a dissent in Baldwin, a new case published Monday, in which he admits that he blew it in Brand X, by giving political appointees from the administrative branch the power to overrule both Congress and the courts.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-402_o75p.pdf
When the Ajit Pai decision to kill net neutrality was brought before a circuit judge, she called it “unhinged.” Then she upheld it, because Brand X tied her hands.
Unfortunately, Thomas is the sole dissent in Baldwin, whose appeal SCOTUS will not to hear, leaving Brand X unchallenged. Given Thomas’s historic cowardice when it comes to challenging the establishment, this is a nice safe way to mea culpa without risking wrath of plutes.
“Although I authored Brand X, it is never too late to ‘surrende[r] former views to a better considered position.’ Brand X appears to be inconsistent with the Constitution, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and traditional tools of statutory interpretation. Because I would revisit Brand X, I respectfully dissent from the denial of certiorari.” -C. Thomas.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/clarence-thomas-regrets-ruling-that-ajit-pai-used-to-kill-net-neutrality/
Medicare for All would be the biggest take-home pay increase in a generation (permalink)
UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman: “Because this is my lot in life, I will note again that Medicare for All would lead to the biggest take-home pay increase in a generation for working families, because it would replace private health insurance premiums (a huge privatized head tax) by taxes based on ability to pay.”
https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/1232295342185558018
We pay more than $2000/mo for gold-plated healthcare from Cigna through my wife’s blue-chip employer, where she is an exec. When my daughter broke a bone, our ER visit to the preferred hospital (across the street from corporate HQ) cost $2700 in excesses.
The kid didn’t even see a doc. $2700 in out-of-pockets was for a Tylenol, an X-ray, and a one-minute consult with a physician’s assistant, who referred us to an orthopedist. The ortho and ER initially refused to treat my daughter unless I signed a binding arbitration waiver.
Cigna also just declined a pain therapy course recommended by my specialist, head of a prominent university’s pain clinic whose papers on the therapy are the most-cited in the field: “It’s experimental.” It will cost me $52,000 in out of pockets if I want to proceed.
So, keeping track: we’re currently spending $24k/yr on health care, and about the same in out-of-pockets, and our care is being rationed. If I want the care the top specialist in the region recommends, that’s another $52k.
Our inadequate private care, literally the best we can buy, would cost us $100k this year if we got the care our doctors recommended; $50k if we decided to ignore their advice and not get that care.
That is to say: if Medicare For All raised our taxes by ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS, we’d be breaking even. And getting better care. I grew up with Canadian healthcare, then 13 years of NHS UK care. The US system, at the very highest tier, is so much worse than either.
The Smithsonian publishes 2.8m hi-rez images into the public domain (permalink)
The Smithsonian has released 2.8 million hi-rez images into the public domain!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-releases-28-million-images-public-domain-180974263/
The images include reproductions of both 2D and 3D artifacts in the Smithsonian’s collection, from all 19 Smithsonian museums, hosted on an open access platform:
https://www.si.edu/openaccess
200,000 more images are slated for inclusion in 2020, and the scope of the whole project is to digitize all 155,000,000 images in the Smithsonian’s collections and dedicate them to the public domain for any use, including commercial use. It’s part of a “digital first” strategy that eschews hypothetical licensing revenue from art books and penny-postcards in favor of serving the public mission of a museum.
Here’s a crib from a keynote I gave about this to the first Museums and the Web Europe conference in Florence — museums have both an ethical and practical duty to serve the public rather than relying on plutes and licensing.
https://mwf2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/glam-and-the-free-world/
Tldr: the public will support you and demand your preservation when austerity-crazed governments want to de-fund you. Plutes won’t — they’ll just offer to buy your collection for their mansions.
Anyway, this is amazeballs. The possibilities for remix, fine art, new work, and computational historical research are endless. This is the Smithsonian we pay our taxes for. It’s a brave, principled move. Go, Smithsonian go!
McMansion Hell visits 1971 (permalink)
The luckiest people in the world have never heard of McMansion Hell because they get to discover Kate Wagner’s superb dunks on architectural excess, cynicism and ill-founded optimism for the very first time!
Lately, Wagner’s been doing a “Yearbook,” revisiting proto-McMansions from 1971 to trace the primitive ancestors of today’s hulking atrocities. The latest installment is a $1.2m, 5000sqft titan in Morris County, New Jersey.
https://mcmansionhell.com/post/610960530721636352/the-mcmansion-hell-yearbook-1971
This beast predates the modern “lawyer foyer” and instead sports a “paralegal foyer,” which ” lacks the transom window above the door that enables the entryway to be seen from the street.”
I could listen to Wagner riff on bad kitchen design ALL DAY.
The realtor’s just rendered a bunch of virtual furnishings into this empty room! Wagner: “Personally I’d love to have a copy of the software that lets you 3D decorate random real estate listings – it’s like the Sims but for realtors.”
Wagner signs off with a promise of a “Brutalism Post.” Swoon!
This day in history (permalink)
#15yrsago: Dismantling fear, uncertainty, and doubt, aimed at Wikipedia and other free knowledge resources https://web.archive.org/web/20050301003539/http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_02/fud_based_encyclopedia/
#15yrsago: HOWTO break HP printer cartridge DRM https://constitutionalcode.blogspot.com/2005/02/cartridge-expiration-date-workarounds.html
#15yrsago: @Aaronsw asks why Stanford professors include so few astrologers http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001588
#15yrsago: Why John Gilmore won’t show his ID at airports http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/05058/462446.stm
#5yrsago: World War 3 Illustrated: prescient outrage from the dawn of the Piketty apocalypse https://boingboing.net/2015/02/26/world-war-3-illustrated-presc.html
#1yrago: Youtube ignored repeated reports about explicit suicide instructions spliced into cartoons on Youtube Kids https://pedimom.com/youtube-kids-scare/
#1yrago: New Orleans reduced homelessness by 90% (and saved a fortune) by giving homeless people homes https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/02/19/new-orleans-reducing-homeless-hurricane-katrina
#1yrago: Trump made history: introducing tax cuts made him LESS popular https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/02/trump-choose-unpopular-president.html
#1yrago: How the payday loan industry laundered policy by paying academics to write papers that supported its positions https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/?utm_term=.92930478ab59
Colophon (permalink)
Today’s top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/”), Glenn Fleishman (https://twitter.com/glennf).
Hugo nominators! My story “Unauthorized Bread” is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/
Upcoming appearances:
Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC’s Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445
Currently writing: I just finished a short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” for MIT Tech Review. It’s a story set in the world of my next novel, “The Lost Cause,” a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I’m getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I’ve been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world’s prehistory.
Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes’s forthcoming Afterland: it’s Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it’s amazeballs. Last week, I finished Andrea Bernstein’s “American Oligarchs” this week; it’s a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I’m getting really into Anna Weiner’s memoir about tech, “Uncanny Valley.” I just loaded Matt Stoller’s “Goliath” onto my underwater MP3 player and I’m listening to it as I swim laps.
Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers’ Fortresses: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/
Upcoming books: “Poesy the Monster Slayer” (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627
(we’re having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).
“Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
“Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.
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It’s time we stopped saying people take “the easy way out” in medicine
I’d really like to stop hearing people say “people don’t want to make diet and other lifestyle changes, they just want pills” as if people wanting (or not wanting) things occurs in a vaccuum.
There seems to be an understanding that capitalism has made life exceptionally difficult, even for people and families in the so-called middle class. In the USA, even someone who is financial secure -- has savings, a retirement fund, “good” health insurance -- can be set back financially for years for injuries sustained in a car accident.
It seems to me that most people in the USA know that they’re not that far off from financial ruin. All it would take is a serious enough injury - or, worse, a fight to surive something like cancer. Suddenly, you go from being financially secure to screwed, and the system is set up so that you receive no aid until after you’ve depleted your carefully saved funds (and, in some cases, anything considered an “asset”, too).
All that hard work to do “the responsible thing” suddenly means nothing.
So when I hear someone say that “people don’t want to make life style changes -- they just want to pop a pill and fix it,” I have to wonder if this person is just generally unaware of the lurking financial crisis hanging over all our heads, or has -- for reasons unknown -- decided to persist in this ridiculous assumption that other human beings aren’t actually invested in the health of their own bodies.
After a patient hears that they are either fully prediabetic or are close to developing Type 2 Diabetes, do people really think that they don’t care that they’re about to develop a serious illness that will put them at risk for countless other maladies -- including a shortened lifespan?
Do people honestly believe that these individuals persist in their old eating habbits because they can’t be bothered by eating healthier? Isn’t it entirely possible that they have made “poor choices in diet” to due circumstances beyond their control? More specifically, isn’t it possible that those same circumstances are still beyond their control, even after they find out they need to “make a change”?
Isn’t it possible that these individuals “have a lunch break” that rare actually happens because of the “lean and mean” scheduling tactic their employer uses to save money? (Which results in them “grazing” rather than eating a single meal - a notoriously bad thing to do if you’re at risk for Type 2 Diabetes.)
Or maybe that’s not it. Maybe the issue is that when they go to the grocery store, their weekly grocery budget isn’t enough to cover purchasing “healthy” options -- not if they want to eat for the entire week, anyway.
Or maybe it’s not even that. Maybe they have enough money to buy “healthy” foods, but by the time they get home, they’re exhausted and hungry, and don’t have energy to cook -- or simply don’t want to spend over an hour preparing the “healthy” meal they’re supposed to eat that night when they’re hungry right now. (Or, worse, maybe they’re responsible for feeding other family members who are also hungry right now.)
The same goes for exercise. Do people honestly thing that other people don’t exercise because they’re lazy? Because “all people want to do is watch TV”? Really? Surely everyone must know that the vast majority of people like at least one activity that qualifies as exercise. (And if you disagree, think about it for a moment. Is there anyone you know who doesn’t like a single activity where they are moving? Anything. Anything where you are moving is excercise.)
But -- if that’s the case -- why don’t people in the USA exercise enough? If we have the desire, why aren’t we doing it?
It’s the same issue as eating “healthy” -- you need to have the time/money/opportunity to do the actiivty you like that counts as exercise. If you like gardening, you need to own (or have access to) a garden to do it. If you like running, you either need access to indoor equipment or an area where it’s safe to run outside. If you like exercises classes - like spin class or other workouts - you need the money to pay for those classes.
Yes, you can cheaply purchase some lifting weights to “exercise” at home. Hell, you might even be able to come up with an exercise routine that costs you no money at all -- but, there’s no such thing as an exercise routine that doesn’t cost you time -- which is often something people just don’t have, especially if they have to work more than one job, or if they have children/family members they’re responsible for taking care of. Surely, people must know that some people honestly don’t have an “extra” hour - or even an “extra” thirty minutes - for anything.
I’m also sick and tired of hearing stuff like, “Well, their priorities are wrong. They need to put their health first.”
What?
Tell me, isn’t it “healthy” to have adequate shelter and clothing, so as to avoid sunstroke, hypothermia, and other forms of illness and death by exposure? Oh, it is? Then I guess paying rent (and paying for clothing and clothing management) is part of “putting health first.”
Tell me, isn’t it “healthy” to have adequate calorie intake - even if it isn’t rich in nutrients - so that you don’t starve to death and lose your teeth? Oh, it is? Then I guess paying for groceries - even if they’re not all “healthy” foods - is part of “putting health first.”
This idea that people “aren’t putting their health first” because they stick with a crappy job to afford housing and other basic needs -- despite the negative impact on their health -- is ridiculous because leaving a crappy job (without haivng another one lined up) puts their health at even more risk then it is now.
It’s not that people don’t want lifestyle changes -- they don’t “want” a pill to make it better. The ugly truth is, the way things are now, they need a pill to make it better -- they need the fix to be something that won’t risk their livelihood because if they lose their job, they’re at risk for losing everything.
I have a disorder that’s technically systemic (meaning, it affects all systems in the body), though it’s classified as a neurological or a neuroendocrine disorder, since effects the neurological systems and the endocrine/hormone systems of the body directly.
When I first sought treatment, I was given medicine and some basic guidance on things to avoid whenever possible. Doctors explained to me that I needed to make behavioral (aka “lifestyle”) changes, too, but seemed resigned to the idea that I wouldn’t really bother doing more than the bare minimum (that way, I can say I’m following my doctor’s advice, but still be “lazy” or whatever).
For some reason, a lot of medical professionals seem invested in the idea that patient’s don’t make “good lifestyle choices” because we’re lazy - despite the fact that this makes no sense. There’s no logical basis for this assumption. Yet I see this idea everywhere. As if someone was really, really trying to convince us that other people have poor health because of “poor lifestyle choices” that they could change but simply choose not to. They have to work really hard at it, though, because most of us are making “poor lifestyle choices” not because we’re lazy idiots, but because capitalism has created a system where we’re forced to make “poor lifestyle choices” in order to meet our basic needs.
I was able to switch careers so I could have better pay and better health insurance. And once I had enough income, I was also able to make lifestyle changes. I was able to afford membership in a dojo so I could do martial arts training (which has been the most effective treament for my symptoms, most of which didn’t respond to any medications). I was also able to afford ridiculously high copays for trying so-called “orphan” drugs that had no generic version available yet. I was also able to afford dozens of specialists appointmnets each year to manage my disorder.
As a person who mananges most of her disorder’s worst symptoms by so-called “lifestyle changes,” I’m constantly told how impressed people are with “my approach” to handling my situation. Yes, people have told me they’re impressed with the fact that I am so willing to make lifestyle choices to benenfit my health. It’s very clear to me that these people don’t understand that most people in the USA aren’t being held back by will at all. They’re willing to make lifestyle changes, but they’re not able to implement them.
As someone who has done “lifestyle choices” -- as someone whose life was literally transformed by “lifestyle choices” -- I know how incredibly difficult it was to do. And you know what? I don’t know a single person in my life who wouldn’t do the same thing.
Notice in my story that I mentioned switching careers. I was able to do that because I graduated with a dual degree. I had the opportunity to change not just jobs, but my entire career path, in order to enter a field that has decent pay and health insurance. I only was able to make “better lifestyle choices” to treat my disorder because I made enough money - and had good enough benefits - to make those changes to begin with.
No matter how difficult it was to implement these changes in my life, I assure you, choosing to do it was easy as soon as I had the opportunity to actually choose to begin with. My life is definitely better because of it. But that being said, I am also keanly aware that money was a prerequisite to these changes. Like I said, I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t make the same choices I did, but I know plenty of people who don’t have those choices at all.
It’s shocking to me how people act as if “good lifestyle choices” are made free of charge. Nobody wants “the easy way out” when it comes to medicine. Nobody wants to put the one body that’s their own at risk just because they’re “too lazy” to do anything else. That’s 100% capitalist propaganda.
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Offside Pt2
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Series Masterlist!
Genre: Smut, Soccer AU, College AU
Pairings: Soccer Player! Jungkook X Sports Trainer! Reader
Word Count: 2k
Other BTS members all make a cameo as well because I’m an OT7 Trash!
You work as a sports trainer, providing basic first aid and injury management for the Hanguk University’s soccer team. Going with your mundane life of caring for the dozen of guys hurting themselves in the soccer game takes a turn when one of the guys catches your eyes. It’s not his breathtakingly good looks or his muscular athletic body usually seducing girls at the campus that catches your eyes. But the action plan in your kit, indicating he is diagnosed with Asthma is what draws your eyes time and time again to the Golden Boy of Hanguk University.
Warning:
Slow burn, eventual smut, Taehyung being a freaking tease the whole time, Fuckboy!Jungkook, Asthmatic! Jungkook , mentions of episodes of Asthma, Take your Ventolin kids, Take your medications kids!
A.N. This is unedited so bear with me for now, I’ll probably edit it tomorrow!
“How’s everything going?”
You look up to the source of the voice, a faint smile dancing on your lips as the sight of the young doctor greets your eyes. The doctor’s beauty never fails to brighten up your shifts and tonight is no exception. Kim Seokjin, the sports medicine specialist taking care of Hanguk University’s sports clinic who also happens to be your boss.
“Not too bad!” You reply back in a jolly tone as you quickly jam pack the strips of tape in the bag carefully, hiding your blushing cheeks from the guy.
“Were the guys behaving while I was away?” The young doctor asks in his soft, polite voice as he helps you pack your tools
“Yeah, they’re alright,” you nod reassuringly, “We just had an ankle sprain over the weekend, that’s the most exciting it got.”
“Jung Hoseok?” He asks and you chuckle in response
“The captain is always a bit too passionate,” You elaborate with a smile “I just taped his ankle off and sat him down on the bench for the weekend. He was doing fine tonight so we compromised under one condition. And that is he will take it easy for a while.”
“I think its time for me to retire then,” he laughs as he pushes the last piece of tape in your bag “you’re ready to take over huh?”
“Of course not Dr Kim,” you shake your head with a frown “I won't last a day out here on my own, its the finals in a bit and we’ll see how they all start to fall apart.”
He helps you place the bag full of tapes and gels on the side of the room, before looking around and reaching for the plastic bag containing the Inhaler.
"Not that," you quickly call catching his attention "I have to put that away, It's expiring in a week."
"Oh right," He nods as he quickly looks over at the side of the puffer and checks the date "Are we getting one anytime soon?"
"I placed the order through the office, Mrs Han said it'll be here sometime next week." You explain as you organize the grab a paper towel to clean the table
"How's Jeon doing?" Dr Kim's voice echoes in the room and you pause while doing your cleaning duty, briefly thinking over your earlier observation
"He's alright!" You reply after a moment of hesitation against your real intentions
"That's good, I was wondering if I need to take him in for a review."
Your ears perk at the statement and you quickly stop, glancing up at the young doctor.
"Why?" you asked with a keen tone
"Why what?" Seokjin replies with a dumbfounded expression
"N-Nothing..." you quickly shrug it off, proceeding to dry off the traces of wet water off the chair before pausing again and looking up at the confused doctor "Actually, I dont know!"
"You dont know?" he repeats, his face showing more confusion
"About Jeon, I dont know if he's fine," you state nervously watching Seokjin's questioning eyes for the cue to continue talking "I mean I'm only in my third year and we barely learnt anything about Asthma but-" you quickly shrug off with a chuckle "Its probably foolish assumption of me anyways!"
"No go on," he says furrowing his eyebrows "I'm sure it's worth discussing at least!"
"Well, he was coughing quite roughly in the middle of the game tonight," you explain and Seokjin nods in response
"Was that all you observed?" he asks, his voice suddenly resembling some of your tutors in the classes you attend every day
"He seemed a bit short of breath, I mean he was in the middle of the game so It might be normal but he was hunching over and gasping during his cough," you elaborate your earlier memory of the guy "Which means he was usually extra help from his accessory muscles."
"What's your hypothesis?" He asks softly as he takes the information in
"I'm not sure, I mean I dont know much about his Asthma but I know he shouldn't be feeling so breathless if he's taking his meds." you reply honestly and the doctor nods with a smile
"Well I think someone has been listening to her lectures pretty well," he chuckles placing the plastic bag on the table, " I agree with you. I should probably review his medications. Good call."
"Oh," you respond quite surprised at his reaction "Thanks." you flash a smile before walking across the room to get your bag and leave
"Y/N..." you turn around upon hearing your voice "If you observe anything next time, dont hesitate to tell me," he instructs giving you a reassuring nod "Considering you see those guys more often than me on the field, It doesn't hurt to call things out."
"Sure Dr Kim!" you bow quickly before shifting your bag on your should and leaving the clinic
-
"These pain science lectures will be the death of me. they are so freaking boring.”
Your friend sighs dropping his forehead on the table, pressing it firmly against the book.
"Calm down Joon, we're in the library, not your living room," you hiss under your breath, grabbing the corner of his MacBook and having a quick look at his screen "hey you're almost done with it."
"Yeah after literally 5 hours," he rolls his eyes at you as he brings his head up "Are you done?"
"Yeah, I was having a look at the Asthma topic-"
"Asthma?" he interrupts, quickly leaning to have a look at your screen “Dont you guys learn that in the second year!?”
"Yeah," you shrug nodding your head "Doesn't hurt to revise you know!"
"Ugh you're so freaking annoying," he whines pursing his lips forward, "I barely get to catch up and you're already revising!"
"The finals are near, you should start too-" you start your mini-lecture for your friend when he quickly stands up
"I think we've done enough," he quickly jams his notebook, pens and papers in the bag "Pack up, we're partying tonight!"
"I can't," you sigh, pressing your bottom to the chair as you rest your back on the backrest "With the final games coming up I'll have to work double shifts soon, It's not time to party!"
"I came all the way from SNU to study in Hanguk’s library with you,” he raises an eyebrow unimpressed “Now you’re sending me off to the party on my own?”
“Well thank you but no one asked you to come here!” you shrug in response
”Woah,” he scoffs in disbelief leaning closer over the table “I get called a traitor by my team for coming here and hang out with you just to be disrespected like this!?”
“Seriously, you and your team are SO overdramatic!” You sigh
“Well, with the final games coming we have to keep our guard up,” he replies determinedly “Which is why we decided to go to Jeon’s party this week!”
”What!?” You shriek with wide eyes, receiving a few hushes and glares from those in the library “You’re attending your opponent’s party to hold your guard up!? Are you guys dumb!?”
“Hey hey,” he hisses furrowing his eyebrows “This is highly professional leadership, I figured it’ll be a good idea for the boys to get to know their opponent. As they say, keep your friends close and your enemy closer.”
”Christ, That sounds even more ridiculous when you put it that way.” You chuckle mocking his way of describing things
“Anyways, I’m going to Jeon’s party and you’re coming with me,” He says as he snaps the top of your laptop to close it down and grabs your bag “And you’re gonna be my wingwoman and introduce me to Jiwoo.”
You start laughing right away, covering your mouth so the sound of your hysterical laugh doesn’t receive any more harsh glares from the library attendants.
”Highly planned leadership my ass,” You mock looking at your friend with an amused look “You wanna get in your opponent’s pants huh!?”
“Well, technically it’d be my opponent’s sister’s pants so ..." he explains defensively
“Hoseok will kill you if he knows!” You warn, tone slightly threatening
”I know,” he rolls his eyes as he unzips your backpack and pushes your books in, “I can handle him on the field, how bad can he be!"
”Pretty bad!" you nod sternly "I’m just saying Jiwoo is my friend and I know how protective Hoseok can get,” you throw your shoulder up defensively "Dont tell me I didn't warn ya!"
-
You quickly type a text informing Jiwoo that you're in the place. The house is packed with Hanguk University's party animals, youth in their 20s dancing and getting smashed on the hard liquor.
You're not quite used to these places, considering yourself more of a nerd as your friend Namjoon would love to call you. You hate crowded places like this and prefer enjoying your weekend drinks at a more classy bar rather than a house party like this.
But you can't object your friend's request considering how far he's been travelling from his own campus to yours every single week to give you a hand in your studies.
Namjoon is in his final year, studying the same major as you. But instead, he's pursuing it at the Seoul's National University. You still remember how jealous you were when you studied your ass off and still got rejected by SNU while he managed to get in with full scholarship via what you'd consider as "minimum effort".
His high IQ, however, is not the only matter of envy in everyone's eyes. But the fact that he manages to be the captain of the SNU's soccer team labels him as the official cream of the crop.
But nevertheless, he's still you dumbass Joonie who used to play with you in the backyard of your house, putting rocks in the middle of your bicycle path so he can laugh at you stumbling and hurt your butt.
So you have no other choice but to put yourself in a place you'd never voluntarily be just so you can help him out with his love life.
"Jiwoo!" You call getting a sight of your friend who's swaying to the beat with a red cup of booze in his hand.
She turns around and smiles waving at you with her signature bright smile and you walk through the crowd to get to her.
"Look Who's here," she declares with an amused grin on her lips "Did the sun rise from the west today?!" he chuckles teasingly
"I figured I'd be able to finally get a sight of my old friend here!" you hiss looking for a plastic red cup to get some booze yourself
"Hey hey," she crosses her arms across her chest "You're not blaming it on me, I told you I can always be found here."
"Yeah sure," you roll your eyes at her statement "I'll keep in mind your primary method of the meetup is House parties."
"It's fun." she pouts, hooking her hand around yours and placing her chin on your shoulder "Did you hear the SNU boys are coming tonight?" she hesitates before muttering "I wonder how that'll go!"
"I was with Namjoon earlier, he told me he's coming over with the boys," you nod and glance back at her worried expression "why?"
"This a secret, dont tell anyone," she warns as she leans closer to your ear "Jungkook has some kind of history with one of them. He didn't really want them here."
"Jeon?" you repeat and your friend nods to confirm "How come?"
"Not sure!" she purses her lips in uncertainty "I overheard Hoseok talking to him earlier, he didn't look too pleased and kept talking about this guy called Jimin. but Hoseok convinced him its good for the upcoming friendly game they have next week."
"Friendly game?" You ask with furrowed eyebrows, "How come I never heard of that? They should have added it to my schedule!"
"They still haven't confirmed it, they're planning to discuss it tonight."
You nod digesting the new information your friend just gave you. You recent memories with Jungkook flashes through your mind and considering he's such as jerk all the time it's not so unexpected for him to have beef with other people in your mind.
"I'm going to the bathroom." you make an excuse, drifting away from the girl in an attempt to find Namjoon and hopefully do your mission of the night.
Walking through the crowded hallway you find your way to the bathroom with the help of Jiwoo's rough guide. You stop by a wooden door that appears to be very similar to Jiwoo's description of the bathroom when you hear an unusual sound of breathing. It sounds like rough gasps for breath along with occasional coughs in between which all sound to familiar to your ear.
You furrow your eyebrows slowly walking towards the open door at the end of the hallway, peeking through the crack of the half open door. You watch the hunched view of the guy who has his head between his hands, gasping for air while sitting on the edge of his king sized bed.
"Jeon, You alright?" Before you even realize your instincts push you inside his room, ignoring other things such as personal space and privacy that might have been a good idea for you to consider before heading inside the guy's room.
His doe eyes travels up to you, pupils slightly dilated which in your mind reminds you of every lecture you sat through about Fight or Flight response kicking in.
"Hey you alright?" you quickly step closer to him and he winces, body retracting
"G-Get out!" he yells through his gasps, stumbling on his breath to make it to the end of his short words
"Are you sure you're fine?" you ask squinting your eyes at him as you take another step closer
"I said get the fuck out! NOW!" he shouts back in response, firmer this time and thats enough for you to turn around and run.
Before you know, you're running down the hallway in rushed footsteps. You dont even know why you're running away but before you even try and rationalise you're actions, you bump to someone who's walking in the opposite direction towards you and you both stumble on the floor.
"I'm so sorry!" you quickly mutter against the guy's chest who you basically used as a shield against the floor you just fell on
"No, you're alright," he mutters in his quite high pitched sound
You raise your head up to get the sight of your savior just before you attempt to roll off his body. He has a faint smile on his plump lips and his eyes almost disappear as his grins widens upon seeing your face.
"Hey," he greets raising up on his elbows, while still having your body draped over his comfortably. You shiver as he leans closer and his warm, alcohol scented breath hits the side of you neck "You dont look as heavy as you feel," he whispers and your whole body heats up in embarrassment "But you know I always had a thing for girls who have a bit of meat on them."
A.N. Please reblog, comment or send in anons and let me know what you think! Love ya’ll!
#jeon jungkook x you#Jungkook x reader#Jungkook x female reader#Jeon Jungkook x reader#Jungkook x you#Jungkook smut#Jeon Jungkook#Soccer AU!#Jungkook as soccer player#bts jungkook x reader#Soccer au#college au#Kim namjoon#Kim seokjin#Min yoongi#Jung hoseok#park jihoon#Kim taehyung#bts#Daddychims#offside
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What is a Medical Intuitive?
What is a Medical Intuitive? A medical intuitive is a person who has the insight and ability to see into most medical issues that many medical doctors seem puzzled or baffled about. The way Joan Marie works is to get to the root of your medical situation by diving into the emotions and the past pain that is still lingering in your body and create havoc and crisis in your life. A medical problem is a wake-up call to deal with deep - rooted emotions that are ready to be addressed.
Joan Marie Whelan is a well-known intuitive who has utilized her gifts of awakened intuition to help others find answers to various situations that have affected their lives. Whether you want a simple reading that will allow you to speak to your loved ones who have pasted to the other side, or you need guidance, support or insight into your health issues, business, career or relationships, Joan Marie is able to share with you information that can help you reach a better perspective on how to move forward or handle the situation.
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The majority of Joan Marie’s clients all over the world simply call her on the phone to get answers. Joan Marie is not a medical doctor, nor does she claim to prescribe medical advice. Her gifts and talents are enhanced by her connection with the Divine. Through her many years of preparation and dedication to her field of endeavor, Joan Marie has fine-tuned her skills to become sharp. Joan Marie literally has X-RAY Vision and is able to look into your body, do a scan and let you know what is going on. Joan Marie scans the body to see if there is disease forming in the body and if there are any emotions stuck in your body. Stuck emotions most definitely hinder the body, not to mention the mind and spirit and very often are the core root of the disease. Disease is formed first in the emotions.
There is never a guarantee that everyone will live through their sickness or disease, however, healing your root issues will help you heal your Soul and that is valuable. As an intuitive specialist, Joan Marie’s expertise will also help you understand why you have this disease and what patterns and experiences happened in your life to aid in bringing this disease into your body. The key to true healing begins with healing your emotions – from there anything is possible! As a Medical Intuitive there are times when Joan Marie can predict before a doctor is visited, what is wrong with you and what is going on in your body.
Medical Intuitive Joan Marie, is dedicated to her work and she works closely with the Medical profession to help people heal. If you are experiencing physical or emotional illness, medical intuitive Joan Marie can shine a light onto the source. This process can make way for greater healing as well as, allowing you to Unlock your highest potential.
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JK Rowling’s essay about why she’s a TERF: Abbreviated
My last post was LONG, much longer than I’d intended, and difficult to read on tumblr I’m sure (if anybody would like it sent as a pdf please let me know). So I’m making a shorter post and only including the paragraphs that I responded to with links to a source, for people who are more interested in the places where JK Rowling provably lied in her essay.
“For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.”
First of all, Maya didn’t lose her job. Her contract was simply not renewed by her workplace, something that she was not entitled to under any law. JK Rowling also continues to falsely assert that Maya’s belief was that ‘sex is determined biology’, when she actually asserted that under no circumstances is a trans woman a woman nor a trans man a man, and the judge ruled that it did not fit all five necessary limbs to be a philosophical belief (it actually only failed the last one). The judge ruled that the ‘under no circumstances’ part of her assertion was absolutist, and that is what ultimately failed the fifth limb. [source]
“All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.”
First off, this goes against the statement a spokesperson made for her when this happened, stating that she had a ‘clumsy middle-aged moment’ and liked the tweet by ‘holding her phone incorrectly’. The tweet she liked also had no content that she could research, it was a baseless claim that men in dresses get more solidarity than cis women (which I won’t even dive into, we have so much more to cover). [source] I also won’t dive into the use of ‘wrongthink’ as if we are all characters in George Orwell’s 1984, simply because nobody is controlling her speech, she is simply facing consequences for the shit she chooses to fling at the wall.
“I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.”
Can we salute the man who decided to tell JK Rowling that he composted her books, because that’s absolutely hilarious. But really, I just want to point out that no matter how many threats of violence JK Rowling thinks she is getting, transgender people are subjected to much more abuse both online and in real life, and it affects their wellbeing much more directly than simply being called a cunt or a bitch on twitter. [source] While JK Rowling thankfully isn’t killing trans people, she’s disappointing so many of her LGBT+ fans who looked up to her and found comfort during their childhood in her books that encouraged people to be brave and be themselves.
“What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.”
I’ll tackle this paragraph from top to bottom. Firstly, the reason you believe the overwhemling majority of people supported you is because many of those who don’t (myself included, until now) simply rolled their eyes and ignored you, because you are not worth our time. We have lives to live that are unconcerned with your bigotry. Second, I hope those people who were working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people have since left their jobs, because they have no business serving a community who they secretly harbour unsupportive ideologies about. And finally, the idea of supporting and helping trans people (specifically trans youth) is DANGEROUS to young people, gay people, and women’s and girls’ rights is simply false. No women’s rights have been repealed in favour of trans people’s rights (mainly because trans women continue to shockingly be women). In fact, trans youth with parents who are very supportive and affirming show a statistically significantly lower rate of both depressive symptoms and suicide attempts. [source] [specific graph]
“If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.”
The first two sentences in this paragraph are true. Viv Smythe, a trans inclusive cis radfem, is credited with coining the term TERF to describe her fellow radical feminists who are ‘unwilling to recognize trans women as sisters’. It has also become widely used to describe feminists who exclude trans women from their feminism, even if they are not radfems. [source] I don’t care about who has been called a TERF, all I need to know is that they are transphobes, which they should feel equally disgusted at the fact their behaviour warrants the label. Trans men do not want to be included in radical feminism because we were ‘born women’, and JK Rowling including this as if it is an excuse is appalling. Trans men are not women, therefore we do not appreciate radfems claiming to support us based on their obsession with what genitals we were born with.
“The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”
There is a lot to unpack in this paragraph. And I don’t have the room in this already much too long post to dive into detransitioning, so I’ll say this: it sucks that some people transition only to realize they shouldn’t have. But these people are a staggering minority of people who do transition, and there is no external person they can blame for believing them when they relay their symptoms (as doctors are supposed to do) and acting accordingly, with the patient’s consent. The issues I have here are the language JK Rowling uses to say young women are transitioning, purposefully misgendering trans masculine people. And implying that people are transitioning because they are gay, because their families or society push them to not be gay and instead transition, is absolutely laughable. Studies have already shown that society as a whole is much less accepting of transgender people than they are of gay people and lesbians. [source]
“Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.”
There are a number of factors that could have led to such an increase in referrals, and no studies have a definitive answer, though most speculate that the increase in acceptance and visibility of trans people is likely a major contributor. [source] Additionally, I personally believe that more trans women seeked transition years ago because it was impossible to be accepted as a trans woman without fully medically transitioning, whereas trans men could get by without transitioning and simply presenting as their gender. Now that transition is more acceptable and available, trans men do not need to hold themselves back from transitioning, but unfortunately, with more visibility has come more vitriol that is specifically aimed at trans women, and this could discourage them from transitioning or coming out at all. I won’t dignify the statement about autism in afab trans people being prevalent other than saying that cis people can be autistic, trans people can be autistic, and implying that neuro-atypical people cannot make informed decisions about their bodies and healthcare is abhorrent.
“The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:
‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’
Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’”
Lisa Littman’s study can be read here. There are a multitude of issues with this study, and many big names in psychology and gender studies have spoken up about the issues in her conclusions and in the methods to begin with, which are unscientific and deeply flawed. [source] The biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that the study interviews parents of trans youth as opposed to the trans youth themselves, and takes the parents’ limited knowledge of their child’s inner thoughts and experience as fact without consulting the trans person at all. Additionally, recruitment for the study was mainly done through anti-trans organizations. All of this information is available in the original study and in the rebuttal. Because of this, I cannot take anybody who cites Lisa Littman or her study seriously, because it is not credible whatsoever.
“When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’”
More people than JK Rowling is probably aware of feel ‘mentally sexless’ in youth, because they have no crippling discomfort regarding their gender identity, and either do not feel pressure to prescribe to gender stereotypical behaviours or actively rebel against it. According to brain studies, everyone is technically a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ because there remains to be no such thing as a male brain or female brain. [source]
“I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.”
First of all, the number of kids who “desist” from their gender dysphoria are not reliable. Mainly because the methods in these studies are not robust (ie one study defined gender dysphoria as exhibiting any behaviour that was not typical of their gender, such as boys playing with barbies and girls playing with monster trucks; another study classified subjects that did not return to the clinic and did not follow up as desisters without confirming). [source] Additionally, studying children who do exhibit true gender dysphoria, the main factor determining whether it will persist or desist seems to be the intensity, and not at all related to peer relations. [source] Trans people wishing to transition medically may no longer need to subject themselves to extensive and unnecessary therapy to convince medical professionals that they are who they say they are, but they still need to wait on very long lists for our turn to access hormone replacement therapy and surgeries, and can spend all of that time being sure that we are indeed trans and want these medical treatments. JK Rowling is also purposefully misreporting facts in regard to Gender Recognition Certificates. In order to get one, one must be over 18, have lived as their true gender for at least 2 full years, and provide two medical reports (one from a gender specialist and another from a general practitioner) citing that they have gender dysphoria. If they have not had any medical transitional treatments, the medical reports must state whether they are waiting for them or why they are not pursuing any, in direct contradiction of JK Rowling’s assertion that any man can get this certificate. [source]
“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”
‘Natal girls and women’ is another transphobic dog whistle. There is a non-offensive way to say this, which I am sure if JK Rowling has done all the reading she has claimed to do, she must have stumbled upon the word ‘cisgender’ at some point. It effectively communicates the same information without alienating trans people and implying they are less than cis women. Trans women are not ‘men who believe or feel like women’, and this long standing myth that cis men will use the guise of being a trans woman to gain access to public bathrooms and changerooms has been thoroughly debunked, because trans women have been using women’s bathrooms and changerooms for years with no issues. [source] And scroll up for the claim that Gender Confirmation Certificates are given out to any man who decides to be a woman for a day above, this is just more misinformation, no ‘simple truth’.
“On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.”
First of all, JK Rowling is blatantly lying. The Gender Recognition Act Reform has been completely shelved by the Scottish government in light if the more pressing need to fight the coronavirus on April 1st, and I cannot find any updates on this being considered by the government. [source] The only trans related news out of Scotland I can find is that on June 5th, the Scottish government included trans women in the definition of women in guidance for school boards, which will have none of the effects that JK Rowling is fear mongering about. [source] Again, I am upset to know that JK Rowling is a survivor, but she is using this revelation as a weapon to make people fear that it will happen to others as a result of trans people gaining access to the same public spaces as their cis counterparts. Women’s and girls’ safety is NOT being put at risk by trans people using a bathroom or changeroom.
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Friendly Neighborhood Peter-Man (marvelbingo2019)
Prompt: Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
Summary: “Oh, do that one next,” Gamora said, pointing to the thumbnail of another generically named After Dentist Wisdom Teeth Removal - lolololol video that looked promising.
From what she understood, the human boy sitting beside her was extremely technologically adept by Terran standards, and the planet as a whole had made large technological advancements since the 1980s, including the touch pad screen that they were watching videos on now.
The Avenger’s Peter looked remarkably similar to her own Peter, and she half wondered if her Peter looked the same when he was 17. He was the youngest Avenger she had met, and by far the most enthusiastic about her and the other Guardians being aliens.
All of his teammates were released from the medical facility by now, but still he chose to just hang out with Gamora, asking her lots of questions between the funny videos.
(The story of how Peter Parker bonds with Gamora by showing her youtube videos of people high after dental operations, and their resulting friendship. Also, Peter Quill is accidentally exposed to what’s basically space catnip in the background, but that’s neither here nor there.)
AO3 Link
_________
Friendly Neighborhood Peter-Man
________
Gamora wasn’t sure how long it would take for the effects to wear off. It’s not like Quill ingested the alien fauna. He was just rolling around in it… for goodness knows how long. He seemed to be having a good time, though.
Just rolling around on the bed and swatting at the air, having the time of his life doing absolutely nothing- as far as accidental exposure to mind altering substances, this didn’t seem too bad.
After 30 minutes of watching him be an adorable dork and flipping out in a funny way, pretty much all her concern for him had worn off. He even sounded all loopy as he swatted at the air, giggling and telling Gamora to come over (which she had stopped doing after the second time, telling him she could see fine from where she was sitting, because Peter was high out of his mind so entertained by literally nothing). It was only a few more minutes before he forgot and tried to call her over again, holding in his snickers, she just shook her head and went back to reading her book in the chair. Just in case he needed adult supervision. He was pretty occupied for the time being, though. It was almost adorable, how good of a mood he was in- albeit a loopy, giggly mood.
It was like- what was that Terran substance? Laughing gas.
One of the Avengers health care facilities had treated the Guardians after the battle on earth- Gamora didn’t know why she kept chuckling from the sweet smelling air- like bubblegum, that Terran candy that tasted and smelled so good (that you apparently weren’t supposed to swallow, that Gamora kept swallowing anyway, no matter how many times Peter told her you were supposed to chew it and spit it out).
It affected Peter more heavily, the doctors saying it was the safest option for the procedures on their various injuries, since it was less potent than the normal human anesthetics. Just to be safe, for the biological difference.
Apparently, being an anesthesiologist was a profession on earth, and none of the specialists felt comfortable guessing how much of the heavy duty Terran drugs to give aliens to numb them or knock them out but not kill them.
Peter was happy and had a very good time on that laughing gas. It wore off on her first, but it was still funny watching him talk nonsense and laugh and just being all silly.
Plus the little Peter man, man spider showed her many funny videos of humans online after being put on such substances for tooth operations, and they were hilarious.
______
“Oh, do that one next,” Gamora said, pointing to the thumbnail of another generically named After Dentist Wisdom Teeth Removal - lolololol video that looked promising. Thanks to her mods and the human doctors treatments, she had recovered quite quickly, but of course the Guardian’s half human leader was taking much longer to heal.
From what she understood, the human boy sitting beside her was extremely technologically adept by Terran standards, and that the planet as a whole had made large technological advancements since the 1980s, including the touch pad screen that they were watching videos on now.
The Avenger’s Peter looked remarkably similar to her own Peter, and she half wondered if her Peter looked the same when he was 17. He was the youngest Avenger she had met, and by far the most enthusiastic about her and the other Guardians being aliens. All of his teammates were released from the medical facility by now, but still he chose to just hang out with Gamora, asking her lots of questions between the funny videos.
“Is it like- bad, if I ask you what species you are?” He even chattered like Quill too, rambling and adorably wide eyed, so excited by the prospect of getting to know an actual real life alien. “I don’t know if that’s like offensive or not- sorry if it is, I’m kinda new to stuff around here- like intergalactic visitors, so my bad if-”
“It is fine,” Gamora assured him, smiling at the sigh of relief he let out that he had not inadvertently offended her. “I am Zehoberei. Our species is similar, from what I understand. Need an oxygen rich atmosphere to breathe- though my home planet did have a higher oxygen content than earth seems to. The difference is negligible, but noticeable. I can survive much longer floating in dead space without a suit than any human would be able to. Some of that is biology, some of that is from my mods.” She paused, looking around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. Satisfied that they were reasonably alone, she whispered conspiratorially, “Is this Missouri?”
Peter’s eyes widened, and for a second Gamora was worried it really was a stupid question (why she hadn’t bothered to ask any of the other Terrans she had met so far).
“Oh! No, no, no, this is New York,” he explained quickly. “But we’re in the same country. New York and Missouri are both in the US- so like, we’re in the same territory? It would take hours to fly to Missouri from here though- on a normal, boring plane. A spaceship would probably get there faster. Is Missouri like famous in space?”
Gamora shook her head. “It is where our Peter is from. He was born here and lived in Missouri before he was abducted by Ravagers as a child. Er, space pirates.” She pointed to Peter’s medical room, right across from the comfy seats they had out here in the hall.
“Ohhh, Footloose guy,” Peter Parker nodded sagely. Then his head shot up, as if just processing something. “Wait, alien abductions are actually real?”
Gamora tilted her head, considering his question. She didn’t want to mislead the boy, but she was uncertain that her answer was to the question the boy was actually asking. She’s pretty sure she’s heard her Peter say the words ‘alien abduction’ as, like, a phrase. She thinks maybe it is a thing- on Terra, that it refers to a specific phenomenon or event that is some human zeitgeist, rather than what the two words literally mean.
“Not quite, I don’t think. Peter might be a special case. Terra is not something of interest to most of the galaxy, and interplanetary travel regulations keep your planet fairly isolated. But Peter is only half human- his mother is from earth, but his father was an alien. It is a long story, but his father hired the Rav- space pirates to come to earth and pick Peter up when he was a child. I can only speak to the veracity of half humans being abducted by aliens from Missouri on behalf of their alien father. That didn’t really go according to plan anyway.”
______
Gamora was surprised and pleased when the smaller Peter asked about her culture. She didn’t have much to tell him, little bits and pieces she remembered from her childhood, but it was nice to share them. She’s only shared stories about her people with the other Guardians before- no one else had ever asked. Not on Terra, Xandar, Vanaheim, Ria, or any other planet for that matter.
In the many weeks since she has been on earth, Peter Parker is the first human to ask her about Zen-Whoberi. Not just what species she is, or what planet she is from (she has fielded some of those questions from the Avengers), but asking her what it is like, what language she speaks, if Gamora is a common name (“Like Peter,” he jokes, nodding off to the half human who shared his name), what it was like growing up, if she had any brothers or sisters, what school was like-
She deflects some of his questions, asking him what his school is like, rather than admitting that Zen-Whoberi is destroyed, that she was too young to remember if they even had something like schools, much less what she would have learned in one.
He goes on to tell her about his physics class, someone named Ned (A best friend, not another superhero), a girl named Michelle (“who’s like, so totally cool” Peter explains), and she listens with interest about the life of a sometimes superhero sometimes highschool student who saves the world and sometimes just the neighborhood.
It is nice. He has so much energy when he talks, almost tripping over his own words sometimes, but he’s so bright eyed and overwhelmingly earnest, and that is a good thing, Gamora thinks.
______
It had been almost a year since the Guardians had last been to earth.
Peter was still in a similar mood to the happy laughing gas mood she remembered from that trip, though his chuckles seem to have died down. He seemed to be a bit more lucid now than he did on the gas too. So silly but lucid.
Maybe it had started to wear off- she still didn’t trust him to be alone right now, but she had her book, and he wasn’t causing any problems.
Gamora made a mental note to maybe pick something up from the next placed they stopped- something small and interesting that she could give to her little friend Peter man as a souvenir from an alien planet. A rock or stone, perhaps, with color shifting properties that didn’t exist on earth. Maybe the next time the Guardians made port for a supply run, she could find something at one of the intergalactic markets. Maybe a couple of things, something for his friend- Ned, too. And that girl Michelle he seemed to like. Gamora could get him a really cool knife to give to her as a gift- a cool knife from an alien planet.
Every girl deserved a cool knife.
Yup, Gamora was definitely making a pit stop and picking up some gifts for the little Peter man and all his spider friends.
#marvelbingo2019#gamora#peter parker#peter quill#spiderman#guardians of the galaxy#mcu fanfiction#starmora#gotg fic#marvel#some spideychelle#fanfic#my gotg fics#my fic
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