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mariacallous · 2 years

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Ever since Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he’s remained the center of America’s political universe. But at least one former congressman believes the continued fixation on the 45th president is now a distraction. He’s only part of the story, especially now that Trumpism has grown larger than Trump himself.

On Friday, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol formally subpoenaed Trump, which seems to be the minimum amount of red meat the Democratic base demanded from the panel. While the big reveal of the subpoena—which was leaked to NBC News during the panel’s final hearing earlier this month—garnered headlines and TV hits, it overshadows the misunderstood and still-unfolding story of the digital machinations that fueled the attack and are poised to remake America for years to come, if not forever.

The US has entered an era of algorithmic political warfare, according to former Republican congressman Denver Riggleman. Until this spring, he served as a senior advisor to the January 6 committee, which he recounts in his new book, The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th. A former Air Force intelligence officer, Riggleman cofounded a successful data mining and analysis military contracting firm before his election to the House in 2018. While the special panel conducted hundreds of interviews, Riggleman says, they’ve been lapped.

“The information war moves at the speed of electrons, not at the speed of interviews. That’s it. We’re in a new world,” Riggleman says. “The committee did a great job, but we have to move faster. We have to be more aware of how data can help any investigation into these types of activities when it comes to domestic terrorism or the radicalization pipeline.”

Riggleman says it’s unfortunate that the select committee devoted the bulk of its time and resources looking backward. He fears they missed what’s afoot—and still to come. “We’re trying to solve today’s problems tomorrow with yesterday’s technology. We’re in an information warfare battlespace,” Riggleman contends. “They’ve already changed their tactics. Deplatforming didn’t work. They just go to other platforms.”

Riggleman, a conservative who left the Republican Party after he was primaried out of office in 2020 for officiating a same-sex wedding, had asked the committee for a budget of $3.2 million for his digital sleuthing, but he says he was allocated just a fraction of that.

Still, he was granted a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into not just the January 6 attack. He also believes he identified the insurrection’s central player: Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Riggleman handed the special committee 2,319 text messages Meadows sent or received from the election through Biden’s inauguration, which he says reveals how deeply conspiracies have now “metastasized” in today’s Republican Party.

“What it shows is that QAnon conspiracy theories have saturated every level of the GOP,” Riggleman says.

The coordination included members of Congress, the wife of a Supreme Court justice, myriad lawyers, little-known aides, and, of course, Trump’s most ardent supporters. Riggleman also revealed a mysterious nine-second phone call placed from the White House switchboard at 4:34 pm on January 6 to 26-year-old Anton Lunyk, who has since pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol. Despite these findings, the former intel officer bemoans not being able to go all the way down the meme- and hashtag-laden rabbit hole.

“Thousands of documents are great, but millions of lines of data are better. And so when you look at call detail records or open source intelligence research or you look at social media, those types of things can tell you a lot,” Riggleman says. “And I think it can actually direct the way that you investigate more than bringing people in who lie, plead the Fifth, or sometimes conveniently forget things.”

The real story, Riggleman contends, isn’t Trump. (“If you indict Trump, his polling numbers are going to go up,” he says. “So good luck.”) Trumpism is now gospel to an online army of devotees, hundreds of whom are now running for state and local offices. No matter which party comes out in control of Congress once the dust settles on Election Night, the next Congress is guaranteed to have Donald Trump’s stamp on it. The GOP candidates on the ballot next month include 291 who say they wouldn’t have certified Biden’s 2020 victory, according to the Washington Post. Of those, 171 are running in safely Republican districts.

As a former member of the House Freedom Caucus who has deep libertarian leanings (he farms his own hemp), Riggleman is worried about the digital takeover of a party he used to love, respect, and doggedly fight for. “You also have to figure out who the hell is pushing these radicalizing ideas over digital channels because that’s where it’s happening too,” Riggleman says.

Thousands of Trump supporters took his post-January 6 deplatforming as their cue to follow their leader off Twitter and Facebook and into a new world of almost-anything-goes social media apps, like Trump’s own struggling Truth Social, or Parler, which Kanye “Ye” West plans to buy. Those apps suck up the most recent coverage, but other apps continue to attract new and frustrated users.

There’s Gab (where QAnon devotees feel safe discussing ever-evolving conspiracy theories), GETTR (a “free speech”-focused app founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller), Rumble (think YouTube for the far right), MeWe (think Facebook for Trump Republicans), and CloutHub (if Twitter and Facebook had a baby). Even Reddit is helping Trump successfully spread ungrounded conspiracies about ballot-stuffing in Arizona.

Many on the right are also increasingly employing popular messaging apps like Telegram, which allows private groups to include as many as 200,000 members, and Signal, popular for its promised end-to-end encryption. That includes many of Trump’s most motivated followers, which we know from the dramatic spike in users they both attracted after Silicon Valley firms started their post-insurrection purges.

Then there are forums like 4chan, 8kun, and Endchan. Movement-inspiring memes, dangerous conspiracy theories, celebrations of violence and violent rhetoric all abound on these hubs connecting kindreds who proudly consider themselves social outcasts set on upending the “normie” society most of us inhabit.

As the select committee now prepares its final report on the preparation and planning leading up to the savage assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the right has moved on. And in laying the groundwork to leave a Trump-sized imprint on this year’s midterms—including upending voting laws in countless battleground states and recruiting thousands of new pro-Trump poll workers to “police” local polling locations—the former president’s acolytes are also proving to be a few steps ahead of their opponents in their plan to capture the White House in 2024.

Just as an escalator helped Trump glide into the center of US politics, Riggleman says, the real story is the online gears, lubricants, chains, and steps lurking just under our feet. Likewise, unless more attention is paid to these means of political production, this new political order is something we all should get used to.

“We’re in a post-truth era, but we’re also in a post-Trump world—where those belief systems are baked in, and we’re going to have to deal with this for decades,” Riggleman says. “We need to look at going faster, harder, and better with more technology and more resources in that arena.”

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freedfromthegalactichivemind · 1 year

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Of Echoes

She-Ra fanfiction Rating: Teen and up Main characters: Catra, Hordak (sort of). Tragedy, Comedy, Science Fiction. (Mostly comedy, despite the subject-matter).

Summary: In the years after Etheria's last war, Catra and Hordak had learned to accept each other - kind of of - in an uneasy alliance for the sake of their wives. They also had an ongoing prank-war with each other. It is now Hordak's funeral and Catra is uneasy. She attempts to step out for a breath of fresh air. There is something that doesn't feel right - and not just the awkwardness one would expect at a memorial service for a long-repentant ex-warlord. Strange things are afoot at the Crypto Castle. A loose sequel to Project H.O.R.D.A.K. Also found here if you prefer Ao3: Of Echoes

Of Echoes She needed to get away. It was amazing how stuffy such a cavernous room could feel. The high, vaulted ceilings and long dark walls seemed only to catch the echoes of the multitude of murmuring people. Bits of conversation pinged off them like ball bearings in a washing machine. Her ears were sensitive and could catch far too much of low-speech and whispers uttered by people with far less acute senses. She really did not need that one guy’s sexual fantasy; that was for sure. That was from some Maker’s Guild inventor she did not know – someone who had a taste for Horde-clones, apparently, as well as scars and deformities. Catra cringed and flattened her ears. She wasn’t about to kinkshame monsterfuckery (she was of a rare species, herself, and, despite appearances, her wife was the member of an even rarer one), but this wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted to hear conspiratorially whispered within her earshot first thing in the morning. Well, okay, it was more mid-afternoon, but the sentiment still applied. It absolutely wasn’t anything she’d wanted to hear about a…friend? Enemy? Enemy turned friend? Frienemy? Lover of a friend who was kind of an enemy and then a friend again? What had Hordak been to her, anyway? Difficult to figure out, yes. Most of the conversation going on in the room concerned philosophy (particularly as it related to the concept of “redemption,”) invention and technology, politics, personal interactions both positive and negative, the old long-disbanded Etherian Horde and the half-forgotten Fright Zone (now New Scorpionia), history, health matters specific to space-born clones of a long-dead galactic emperor and a few snippets here and there of small talk about snacks, pets and the weather. Adora and Bow were talking with Entrapta on the other side of the room. Catra had greeted her earlier, but was avoiding her now. She did not like the sleet that she saw in her hair. Most of it was as purple as ever and seemed to have grown longer since the last time she was up in Dryl. Entrapta was among the oldest of them and of course would probably start graying early with all of the stress everyone had gone through, not that she’d ever seemed stressed at all. In fact, in situations that would have the average person a puddle of misery in a corner, Entrapta would just build robots, usually ones designed to explode. Fireworks during holidays at Dryl were legendary. Catra ducked and weaved between bodies, careful to avoid Entrapta catching a glimpse of her. It was not hard. The woman had a welding mask down over her face and had been wearing it that way for most of the day. Catra did not know what she could say that had not already been said. The altar at one end of the room burned with many candles – red ones, black ones and a few small ones that were dark blue. Pictures in frames were laid out upon it including one large painting in the center. Of course, the table also held a six-sided hex-driver. Most of the little photographs had a shock of purple hair in them, as aside from the Royal Portrait, there were very few pictures of Hordak where he was alone. He and his mad scientist were practically joined at the hip… …until now. The formal part of the memorial service had gone smoothly. The Horde Clone Reaper’s Guild of Etheria had done a respectful job – to the point that one could be forgiven for forgetting that Hordak had once been a vicious warlord. It wasn’t like Catra, herself, was innocent. Adora assured her constantly that she had more years of making the right decisions than of making the wrong ones. Hordak had done his part, too. He and Entrapta had developed many useful technologies together, things that had saved and improved many lives. Catra, for her part, didn’t like to think about abstract philosophical questions regarding the number of lives positively impacted versus the number of lives negatively impacted or lost due to any given person’s actions or existence. Lives didn’t really work that way – individuals were not a numbers-game. Maybe that was one of the core-reasons why she found the clones so unnerving. Catra didn’t bear any particular prejudice against them, not in their post-Prime lives, in any case. She could never bear any gathering of them singing in unison (and had avoided part of the funeral-proceedings for this very reason) due to some of her long ago and far away initial experiences with them, but she had long accepted their victimhood under Prime.

She’d even accepted Hordak’s, not that he was ever someone to be coddled. He’d done many crimes against her that could not be erased, but they had come to an understanding over the years.

The closeness of their wives had pretty much forced it.

Bonding between them was what most outside observers would have called awkward, if not a bit toxic. Conversations were often peppered with physical threats and descriptions of various tortures they might put each other through should a mission fail or one of their significant others be made to cry. They’d had martial-contests, testing out the latest model of Entrapta’s body-armor against a new training-regimen. Sometimes, bonding meant joining forces to evacuate their lovers and friends when a negotiation between them and one council of one nation on one planet or another had gone south or narrowly avoiding a full intergalactic incident. There was, of course, the barbeque they’d hosted together in which one quarter of the Whispering Woods had burnt down before being healed by the touch of She-Ra.

Good times.

It was some good barbequed sand-drake, too. Who knew that both the ex-warlord and his ex-second-in-command would take so well to culinary delights and the making of them after they’d gotten out of a military-mindset? Catra was feeling trapped. Entrapta had assured her that she had disabled all of the traps in the Crypto Castle – not just for her guests – but most of them had been disabled years ago for the sake of the number of Hordak’s brothers that lived there. There were so many of them here... not all of them that were on the planet by any means, but a great number. They all had differing eye-colors, hair colors and clothing now, whatever suited them. Still, each and every one of them carried a certain melancholy that went beyond mere grief. It was something unique to them, even in joyful times – something that Etherians, or, indeed, any member of a people born free – could not touch. They outnumbered Etherians here. After all, Hordak had helped many of them in regards to accepting their independence in a post-Prime universe. Most of the Etherians here were ex-Horde, but Hordak had never had many friends. The friends he did have… well, that had started with Entrapta – his first and for the longest time only true friend. Catra shivered as she caught a glimpse of her again. She ducked behind a doorway. She had to get out of here. She couldn’t face Entrapta again right now. Just let Adora talk to her…that’s right. When she’d spoken to her earlier today, she had said the strangest thing. “Oh, don’t worry!” she’d said with a smile. “Hordak’s all around us!” Catra shook her head thinking about that, trying to dislodge the notion. Such a saying was so…unlike Entrapta! That was the kind of fluffy, quasi-spiritual annoying thing that Perfuma would say, nothing at all suitable to the mad scientist that she knew. Hordak had died two weeks ago, so the report went. It shouldn’t surprise her that Entrapta was taking it in a weird way. In fact, Catra was surprised that they weren’t seeing some kind of hastily-built Hordak-bot walking around. The pictures of Entrapta’s Parental Units she’d seen told Catra that Entrapta did that very thing when she was missing someone – their image in mechanism, attempts at replacement. However, Entrapta had grown in the years that they’d known each other – not just in a few more wrinkles about the eyes and the few long strands of gray in her hair (as motile as the rest), but she seemed to understand friendship with organic beings more. Well, as much understanding as could be had. Catra wouldn’t say she understood people much, either. Whatever. She knew that she couldn’t go through the main room with the milling people and way too many somber clones to go outside to get some fresh air, but maybe one of the corridors lead that way, or, at least, she could find a set of stairs to one of the balconies. Melog, for their part, had gone to one of the gardens. They had wanted some space away from everyone’s strong and varied emotions and Catra had told them to go ahead and go and that she’d meet up with them when she could, and not to worry. It was much easier for someone in four-footed animal-form to get out of these things. Swift Wind had the excuse that he couldn’t fit through the front door! (It wasn’t true, Entrapta’s main room was huge, but he pretended that he couldn’t get his horn under the doorframe). Lucky horse… In any case, a balcony sounded like just the thing for a breather. Her ears pinned back when she remembered that time that Entrapta had threatened to tape a slice of buttered toast to the top of her head and push her off the edge of the topmost balcony – For Science! It had come from some conversation between her and Hordak after his motor-skills had become iffy and he was dropping some items at breakfast – an observation of the rate at which toast landed on the floor butter and jelly side-down versus the old legend of how cats, when falling, “always land on their feet.” Entrapta had wanted to see if “a feline, properly affixed to a prepared slice of toast might suspend itself in midair and form a perpetual-motion kinetic spinning machine.” It was a joke, of course, but something in the gleam of Entrapta’s eyes told Catra that she’d wanted to test the hypothesis in earnest. Of course, Entrapta had not wanted to hurt her, but it had taken Adora to intervene to keep curiosity from killing the cat. She walked down a dimly-lit hallway, listening to the soft clack of her toe-claws echoing on the stone. For all of the technological advancements that Entrapta had made to the place, the Crypto Castle had been built in an old style – solid construction in stone, punctuated by added metal elements. Force of habit had Catra’s ears turned to the absurdly spacious ventilation-shafts above. She didn’t want Entrapta to come popping out of a vent to scare the willies out of her and, as usual, she had no idea where Imp was. Hordak’s old experiment had grown up and had a life of his own now, but he was short and of a small-build. Much like Entrapta, he could fit into small spaces. Catra was pretty sure she’d last seen him out in the main hall, but she was cautious over being tailed. The lack of beeps and boops in her proximity told her that Emily hadn’t followed her, at least. “Forgot how confusing this place was,” she muttered to herself. As she stepped through a doorway, she heard a low groan and then a quick sliding sound. In an instant, a door came sliding down right on top of her! She leapt ahead and came just seconds from it slamming down on her tail! She panted on the floor and caught her breath. She stared wide-eyed at the closed-off path behind her. The tip of her tail had lost a few hairs. “What was THAT?” she yelped. Light streamed in from a window. As she picked herself up, she looked around for any kind of control-panel. There wasn’t one visible – it would seem that this was a door that could only be accessed from the other side.

“HEY! What is this?” she yelled at the door. She gave the door a swift kick with the flat of her foot. “Dumb malfunctioning piece of junk! What I get in Entrapta’s castle, I guess.”

The door began sliding open. It hitched up and down, up and down, making a sound akin to… laughter? It slid back into place. “Weird,” Catra concluded as she shrugged and continued on her way. She ascended the spiral stair. If this was where a window was, this stairway led to one of the balconies – probably. It had been a while since she’d been here. It was this moment that her brain decided to remind her that she had no navigation-pad and that even Entrapta couldn’t get around the place without a map. Catra grit her teeth.

Just as she ascended the spiral stair, up around a central pillar, the stairs collapsed. Each stair shunted into itself, interlocking with the other stairs, forming a rather slick slide. “Aaaaaaaiiierrrgh!” Catra screamed as she slammed her claws into the former staircase. She scrambled with her back legs, her tail puffing out, as she held on desperately with her hands. She felt a couple of her claws chipping as she slid right down, leaving pale streaks in the stone. She was left at the foot of the staircase and the door that had almost pinched her tail was mocking her. It slid up and down, up and down – a gaping mouth laughing at her. “I disabled the traps!’ Entrapta’s such a liar!” she grumbled. “She probably forgot all about this wing. No wonder Sparkles still has nightmares about this place.” She stormed down another path. If she couldn’t go up the stairs from this wing, perhaps she’d try another. That’s when she ran into the trap door that plunged her into a dank pool of water. “Hiiissssss!” Alright, something strange was going on here! And not the usual Entrapta-strange, but strange-strange! Catra climbed out of the hole – it was quite shallow and she was subject to a tidbit of memory: Way back when he was first being domesticated, not all of the government officials in Dryl had welcomed Hordak as Entrapta’s “boy-toy” – er, “Prince Consort.” Not all of them had welcomed the idea of Dryl becoming a clone-haven, either, or of any of the other ways Entrapta had wanted to do things upon re-taking her birthright-queendom. In a bit of playful sadism, she’d installed a trap-door in the Royal Reception Room. A button was placed on Hordak’s throne to control the door and whenever they had to deal with a particularly bothersome bureaucrat, Hordak had the freedom to send them into a rather cold pool located in the basement. Pretty soon after that, people had stopped complaining about Entrapta’s methods of rule.

Hordak had tried to pull that trick on members of the Princess Alliance and visiting ex-members of his Horde many times; as he had found the trap door way too amusing (only Kyle consistently fell for it – quite literally). The trick to it was that the trap door was made moveable and they’d never put it in the same part of the floor twice, so it was difficult to dodge. (And if they had, there was another door that would open up right under them!) – The entire Reception Room floor was probably made of false tiles! Glimmer had, of course, been able to teleport whenever she’d felt a hint of gravity. Bow had rope-arrows. Adora and Catra had acute reflexes and could dodge whenever they heard the tell-tale click of it opening, but even Adora had taken the plunge a few times. Hordak was lucky he hadn’t been arrested for it, but Entrapta INSITED that he was just being playful. After all, no one had died. This one had apparently been installed with a silencer. Catra tried to shake herself to dislodge the uncomfortable wet.

Catra had heard a rumor that Entrapta had started building robots for Hordak to send through the doors to keep him entertained… The Reception Room trap-door had been a Decant Day present, after all. Entrapta was eventually commissioned by Queen Glimmer to install one in Bright Moon as well. Prince Consort Bow successfully kept the queen from using it (most of the time). It did not surprise Catra that there would be a few more of the things around this place.

“Alright, don’t trust the floor,” she said to herself as she tiptoed down her new chosen path, hoping to find some stairs that did not become a Super Happy Fun-Slide. Before committing to step anywhere, she cautiously tapped each tile ahead of her with her toe-claws. There would be a tell-tale sound if the floor was hollow. She hopped and skipped and figured out a solid path. She found another path and turned right. Ah, yes! She actually remembered this part of the castle and that it led outside! Catra was feeling better already. She almost stepped on the vacuum-cleaner. A disk-shaped robot beeped and whistled indignantly at her and raised its circular scrubbing brushes in an argumentative gesture. It then spoke to her with a synthesized voice. Green letters appeared on a screen on the top of its chassis, reading out the same words:

“You have made it this far, Force-Captain. Congratulations. Greetings, Force Captain.”

Catra suddenly felt heat by her ear and heard a “SHOOM!” There was a tiny, smoking hole in the wall in front of her in an instant. She felt the ions in the air as she jumped and rolled, dodging a barrage of lasers fired from rotating turrets in the ceiling! She found a moment, caught her breath, jumped, dodged and clawed out a turret. She jumped between the walls, doing the same for as many as she could find. She grabbed a debris-fragment and flung it straight into the last one at the end of the hall. She found herself at the end of it all panting heavily, her hands on her knees.

She wasn’t a spring chicken anymore. She was still young, but this was like the obstacle courses in the Horde!

The robot came scuttling by her feet again. She was about to kick it until it spoke to her again. “Are you feeling too old for this shit?” its tinny voice asked. She thought she’d heard the same question echoed from somewhere up above her, but in a voice that was deeper, somewhat more familiar… Her eyes widened. “Hordak?!” she asked her surroundings.

Okay, that was IT!

“WHERE ARE YOU?” she demanded. “I swear, I will find whatever control room you’re running this shitshow from, I’m gonna break your kneecaps and I will drag you out for all to see!” She shivered in fury. “It is just LIKE you to fake your own death! What did it for you? Tensions with Sparkles? That negotiations-breakdown with Aarboria? The bounty you’ve got on five planets because you and Entrapta blew up that moon?” She sighed and laughed bitterly, “Oh, don’t tell me it’s some kind of ‘ultimate penance’ of yours! Some kind of plan to free Etheria from your shadow! I thought you’d gotten over that! Pathetic!”

Catra stormed through the hall, every hair on her body bristling, wary for any new tricks. “Oh, and it’s just like you to mess with me! I’ll find out where you’re watching from! I’ll get past all of your little traps…and lasers…” She looked around, checking for any cameras or screens. She found a vent-grate and hauled herself up halfway into it. She wasn’t a nice fit for scuttling around in the thing like Entrapta was, but she could get a decent look around with her gifted feline eyes. A few robotic cockroaches skittered about and there was nothing to be seen. She hauled herself down.

She walked down the hall, ears swiveling, senses alight. Catra remembered the prank-war that they’d had going on before Hordak had gotten very sick. It was all delightfully stupid. Sure, there were the threats they’d made to each other and the many insults of endearment. Glimmer had taught Catra many an interesting swear-word to tag onto Hordak. Hordak, in turn, had taught her many Hordish-language insults by using them on her. He’d also managed to convince her that the sentence “I want to lick Horde Prime’s lubricated asshole” was “Hey, can I borrow your screwdriver?” This led to many puzzled and offended looks among clones when she had been trying to borrow tools that Bow had requested of her. It took her a week to figure it out and when he’d shared what the words really meant, he’d laughed and laughed. For her part, she liked knocking things off his lab-tables when he was working (a “typical cat”) and of course, there was the time when she’d replaced his hair dye with razzleberry syrup, leading to much unwanted attention from the Freedom Forest bees. She’d also one time (after she’d learned a little baking) crafted him a pie with fruit that was found to have a certain laxative property in spacebats… And, of course, there were the fisticuffs. They always knew how much of a beating they could take. (And Entrapta had redesigned all of Hordak’s armors with Catra’s claws in mind: Try as she might, she couldn’t ‘equal the playing field’ by taking out any of his power-drive crystals).

Until now, Catra had always been able to dodge Hordak’s trap-doors. “I just know you’re running things from somewhere, Hordak! How about you stop being a coward and show yourself? You’ve had your fun faking your own death, but it’s over now!”

She rested her hand against a wall and suddenly found the wall flipped. She was suddenly in another room. It was dark. “Okay, you can come out now. I won’t tell your bounty hunters or Sparkles, I promise, but Adora ought to know that you’re okay. She was beside herself when she couldn’t give you a healing the last time… when it was….too much. She was broken, you know? She’ll be so happy when she finds out that it actually wor-” Catra paused mid-sentence and went stark-still. In the gloom she could make out the shine of long glass-pods. A chill ran through her bones. No…not here, anywhere but here! Her gaze caught a sign along the top of one wall, a screen with lighted green and red letters. “Techno-Organics Laboratory 5: Morgue.” Now, one strange thing that Catra had learned from working with Bow was that there were different definitions to the term “morgue.” It could, indeed, refer to a paper-filing system in which old designs – both graphic design and technical, as well as old publications were kept. Entrapta probably did keep one or more of these kinds of morgues around but Catra knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was where Entrapta and the medical-clones that lived in Dryl kept the bodies of clones that had been donated to science.

In the years post-Prime, the sacred mission of finding clones that had fallen in the war was complete, but the Horde Reapers’ Guild of Etheria had turned to normal undertaking services for clone-kind. Very few had died post-Prime, as they had been designed to be healthy and apparently long-lived (although their true lifespan was unknown, due to them being slated as cannon-fodder). Until the post-Prime era, no clone had known a “natural death.” To be killed as part of violent conquest for the Glory of Prime (or to otherwise be decommissioned for imperfection) had been their fate. After the Last War and the initial rocky adjustment-period, some did die via accidents or the occasional manifest genetic-illness such as the one that Hordak had, although it was few and far-between enough for the Reapers to almost not be needed at all and they all, indeed, did other kinds of jobs independently. Part of the time, fallen clones were buried or set upon a pyre as per the custom of whatever Etherian family or community they had been adopted into, but donation to science in Dryl for the furtherance of understanding of clone-bodies among Etherian healers, particularly of pathologic specimens, was common.

How Entrapta could keep enough of a detachment to do these kinds of studies on people she’d considered valued friends (she’d practically adopted every clone that came her way) was something that Catra would never understand.

She remembered when she was with Adora, Glimmer and Bow when they’d entered one of the old offices in Bright Moon shortly after the end of the war… They’d found a few sparkling feathers, shed at some point by Queen Angella on the floor and Glimmer freaked out. She’d had a full-on panic attack at being confronted with the remains – and they had not even been the full-remains. It was just a reminder that her mother was gone and it had hit her in full-force after the immediacy of surviving Prime had been taken care of. King Micah wasn’t in great shape that day, either.

Eventually, the “late” Queen had been recovered. Entrapta and Hordak had worked to create another portal, one that could reach into that “in-between” place that had been created by the prior existence of Despondos. Catra had been a part of the retrieval, wearing an Entrapta-created personalized exploration-suit. She wasn’t about to let Adora risk her life again – not for something that had been her fault to begin with. Getting Angella back was on her, Entrapta and the old bat – it was their thing to make right. Angella had thankfully survived her ordeal and the fact that the place she’d been to wasn’t as empty as everyone had assumed it to be had helped her keep her sanity intact.

Funny how they’d all gone from being enemies to how, for several years after that, Angella and Hordak would meet to play Chess on Tuesday afternoons…

Angella’s recovery was long ago, a story that Catra could recount at another time when it was more relevant.

What was relevant to her in the moment was the memory of the panic-attack over a few feathery remains and how… well, Hordak and Entrapta had been so…different. Some… did not like the idea of keeping any remnant of a body in a place of the living. Them? Well… Catra blamed the way that clones were built and raised in the Hell that was the Galactic Horde, a system where death was a way of life, for the way that Hordak could have a certain detachment from his brothers at the right times, such as with aspects of medicine. She blamed Entrapta’s views toward greater goods, such as the pursuit of knowledge. She’d always had a bit of morbidity to her – what with her fascination with explosions, apocalyptic potentials and how, on every space-journey in which she was a part, she’d rattle on about the many different ways that one could die in space with an…admiration for natural powers greater than themselves.

Catra’s heart-rate increased and her palms sweat. In time with a “Rrrzzt!” sound, several pods lit up. She bit off a scream. They were empty – just pods from Horde Prime’s ship, empty of all but green fluid, lined up in a row. One of them was covered in a black sheet, held by robotic clips. With a “Click! Clack!” they un-snapped systematically, dropping the sheet to the floor just as the pod lit up…

All of the hair on Catra’s head, tail and body bristled. He had an undergarment on, at least, a set of black shorts, close to the skin. Everything else was in full-display – every scar, every bit of discoloration… the grotesque holes in his arms… His hair – dark blue, that had not changed, flowed with the subtle motions of the fluid in the tank, as if in a gentle breeze. He had no black liner over his eyes, which were thankfully closed. This looked unnatural for him.

It was definitely him. He wasn’t hooked into anything, no tubes or wires. He looked very much like the specimens of creatures that Catra had seen in Shadow Weaver’s old alchemy room back in the Fright Zone when she’d wandered there as a kid. The stillborn Whispering Woods four-eyed piglet had stood out the most in her memory, although she also remembered the shed-tail of one of the Horde’s lizard-troops being there.

In any case, Catra stared up in shock at a pickled Hordak.

She stroked the glass and whispered to him, noting his concave stomach and how thinned out even his once rather muscular thighs were. “You look… so much sicker since the last time we saw each other.”

After she paused, just looking at this very-much-a-corpse, she set her gaze to the floor and her ears down. “So what is going on here?”

Words came in machine-echoes throughout the room, screens lighting up with corresponding text. “SHIT!” she shouted as she clutched her chest and frantically looked around.

“As you can see, I am very much deceased,” the voice intoned. It WAS made up of a recordings of Hordak, although the words were stilted (much like Imp’s were when he spoke via playback of various recorded voices).

Catra grit her teeth and held her claws out. She looked around the room. Her eyes kept darting back to Pickled Hordak.

“My original body is very, very dead,” the voice said, “Yet, thanks to Entrapta’s brilliance, I remain.”

“This has got to be some kind of stupid joke! Where are you? Did you two set this up just to mess with me?”

The lights shut off on all of the empty pods, leaving only Hordak’s illuminated. Catra remained bristling.

“Alright, you’ve had your revenge for that time I benched you over that table… and for that time I gave you that pie that made you fart for three days…”

“Heh, heh, heh…”

Screens along the walls pulsed with green light, shutting off into dark in fluttering sequences. Catra pawed along the walls, looking for some source of a pre-recording.

“Take a run, little cat.”

A section of wall flipped suddenly back around as she was inspecting it, putting her back out into a hallway. Several humanoid robots with dubious levels of functionality and red eyes were there to greet her.

Catra breathed heavy. She took off in a dead heat, followed by murder-bots, laughter and lasers.

Every single laser missed hitting her, but came close to singing hairs. In the insanity, Catra started to notice that it seemed deliberate that they were missing her. The robots, too, seemed to know just where to not swing their crowbars and chainsaws.

Metallic laughter echoed through speakers set into the wall. A large screen craned down from the ceiling and she almost ran into it. It bore a cartoon-style image of the face of a Horde-clone, winking and making a two-fingered “peace” sign in mockery. The icon’s one open eye, in contrast to its white-green lines, glowed red.

A trap door dropped out from beneath Catra’s feet. She screamed as she fell an entire floor down…

… right onto the plush purple couch of one of Entrapta’s tea-rooms.

People screamed.

Mourners were gathered into the room – Hordak’s first liberated brother, Kadroh, wearing a black dress with a veiled little black hat (which looked quite odd against his pink-dyed hair), Adora, Perfuma, and Scorpia who was having quite a difficult time trying to hold a tiny teacup in one of her enormous claws, Emily, settled beside Imp and, of course, Entrapta.

“Are you alright?” Scorpia asked, dropping her cup, which Entrapta grabbed in a tail of hair before it hit the floor.

“What happened to you?” Adora asked, “You just disappeared… I thought you were just getting some air, but you obviously got lost…and you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Catra gripped the couch cushions. “You… you won’t believe this, but…”

“Chamomile tea?” Perfuma offered.

Catra caught her breath. “Hordak’s still alive!” she huffed.

“What?!” Scorpia yelped, dropping yet another teacup she’d picked up to enjoy some chamomile tea with. Once again, Entrapta caught it with her hair.

Adora looked down. “I couldn’t heal him, remember?”

“No! He’s messing with me! He’s in the castle! Like, wired in somehow! Some kind of Horde non-local consciousness tech bullshit! I don’t know how, but…”

“I told you - Hordak is all around us,” Entrapta said, lifting up her mask and coyly smiling.

#spop #she-ra fanfiction #catra #hordak #catra and hordak #disaster duo

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golden--flowers · 1 year

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I know a part of me doesn't like gundam and witch from mercury and would like to just stop being interested in it altogether, but I also really like witch from mercury and find it comforting to watch. I've been rewatching from the start yesterday and am halfway through now (lots more you can understand in the first bits after seeing the whole thing and thinking about it a lot) and it's been helping me be less stressed, briefly at least. It's really exciting and the music and animation and everything are so good. I know the next season is going to get a lot more serious than it already has been, which I'm interested in too, but I really liked this first season of it being a weird sports anime of sorts with political machinations and mysteries afoot as well.

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theliterateape · 1 year

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When You Can't Tell the Difference Between Snake Oil and Hair Tonic

by Don Hall

We are now in the Golden Age of the Grift.

There's always been grift. Lies told in order to separate cash from the unsuspecting or willfully ignorant have been told since before there was the written word. We're all just suckers waiting to be taken in, the promise of easy solutions to our health problems, money problems, moral problems and the hope of solving them with nothing more than a few bucks skinned across a few palms is just too juicy, too delicious to pass up.

From the religious man promising sins will be forgiven for a small fee to the traveling salesman promising his unique tonic will increase your vitality and inspire hair growth, the grift is simply a part of life. There are the obvious swindles that include a fake IRS audit and fine and you can pay the fine today with seven Visa gift cards and the GoFundMe for unproven hardship and less so that allow you to donate to a cause that makes you feel righteous until you find out the recipients bought party houses and cars with your intended largesse.

Today, however, is the Golden Age. With the internet providing such incredible reach and the rapidly aging Boomers dominating the How does this app work on my cell phone? market, grifters, liars, and snake oil salesmen are now embracing the cheat as a legit side hustle. Even more pervasive is the obvious trade-off between easy and potential horrors like convincing a man that standing on a ledge 1,000 feet above the street will vastly improve his view but the fine print quickly explains that if the wind blows him off the ledge, his view will be obscured by asphalt smashing his gourde into pulp.

Over in Puck magazine, Theodore Schleifer asked Sam Bankman-Fried a pretty simple question:

Schleifer: I have always wanted to understand how you had so much personal liquidity to take a $650 million stake in Robinhood, to invest hundreds of millions in Anthropic, and spend tens of millions on politics and philanthropy. Where did that money come from?

It's money. People gave it to you. Where did it go? What happened to it?

SBF: At the end of the day, dollars are fungible, which means that it's not trivial to answer the question of where $1 in particular came from. But my basic sense is that the bulk of it just came from trading profits from Alameda. Between 2019 and just reaching 2021 or so, all told, Alameda had, I think, a couple billion dollars of trading profits, and then had obviously a whole lot more in market profits, although that all crashed, I think, this year.

WHAT? FTX was a Ponzi scheme. All cryptocurrency is really just gambling with chips (tokens) you buy from the dealer and hope your luck profits you even though you know the House always wins. Those unlucky idiots who bought into SBF's Ponzi scheme are now outraged that they were taken. They want their money back.

✶

“There’s something wrong!”

She had just lost her money at a Timber Wolf slot machine. She couldn’t understand how she lost her $10 despite the fact that she came into a casino, plopped her ample ass into a chair, slid the bill in the validator, and pressed the buttons. The money was gone and, in her perspective, there was something terribly unfair afoot.

“What can I do to help?”

“I want my money back!”

“Did the machine not credit you with the money?”

“What? What does that mean?”

“When you put your ten dollars in, did it show up on the screen so you could gamble?”

“Yes! And then I spun the thing and it took my money!”

“So...you gambled and lost?”

“Yes. I want my money back. This thing stole my money!”

I explained to her patiently that that is exactly what the machine is designed to do: take your money and let you gamble. If you gamble and lose, it isn’t stealing, it’s gambling and losing. She couldn’t get her mind around it. For fifteen minutes I demonstrated how she could win—the scores of micro-rules, the requirements in the fine print for larger payouts, the reels that would get her bonus games. She listened but still wanted her $10 because, in her mind, she was supposed to win. The concept of losing her money was like hearing someone speak in gibberish to her.

“I’m sorry, darlin’. I wish I could help you understand. You gambled and lost. You don’t get your money back. Now, this is a casino and every dollar you put in is a risk that you might lose it. If you can’t handle losing it, you probably shouldn’t play.”

“That’s not fair,” she responded, her mouth turned into a sneer.

“Welcome to Vegas.”

✶

Modern pharmaceuticals are a grift like no other in just the size and scope of it. I've been living with my parents for the past four months and they watch television. Sitting down and catching the evening news invites a parade of bizarrely named medications available to them that, if seen in the light of reason, offer a devil's bargain that millions accept.

According to TV, shingles is a real problem. Shingles is a viral infection that causes a painful rash. Shingles can occur anywhere on your body. It typically looks like a single stripe of blisters that wraps around the left side or the right side of your torso. It sucks but isn't life threatening. One of those oddly named cures is Acyclovir.

A miracle cure! No more painful rash. Images of people playing in parks and enjoying meals with their happy multi-ethnic families. Flying kites and playing catch with children. As if a single dose of this magic will entice you to go out and do things you wouldn't think of doing prior to your rash. I mean, you don't even have kids and you haven't gone out for a walk outside in decades. Sign me up!

Except for the side effects that you trade for eliminating your itchy rash. No more rash but you might have to endure:

Diarrhea Difficulty sleeping Dizziness Fatigue (lacking in energy) or feeling tired Fever Flushing or skin redness or unusually warm skin Headache Itching Loss of appetite Menstrual abnormalities Mild skin pain Mouth or gum pain (if using an acyclovir buccal tablet) Mouth ulcers (Canker sores) or other sores in the mouth Muscle or leg pain Nausea Rash Sleepiness Sore throat Stomach pain Sweating Taste disturbances Thirst Urticaria (hives) Vomiting

Hmmm. I could get rid of this rash but I risk getting a rash and taste disturbances? Sure. Why not roll those dice. I'll pay for the ridiculously expensive buccal tablets with my cryptocurrency winnings!

✶

“I have an issue. I trust Jason. He’s the best. But I put $100 on the Raiders and he fucked it up. I should’ve won but he didn’t take the right bet.”

“I’m sorry. Once you walk away with the ticket, that’s your bet. We can’t void it now and allow you to change it after the game.”

“That’s bullshit, man. I need that money. Shouldn’t have bet it because it was for my cable bill but it was a sure bet and Jason didn’t write it down right. It’s his fault, not mine.”

“You ever go to a drive thru at McDonald’s?”

“What? Yeah.”

“They give you your order, you drive home, get inside, and discover that instead of the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese they gave you a Filet-o-Fish?”

“I don’t get this...”

“If you drive back and ask for your actual order, they’re not going to refund your money or give you a different order because you went home and didn’t check it in the drive through. Right? The receipt they gave you was for a fish sandwich, you have a fish sandwich, and it doesn’t matter that practically no one likes those fish sandwiches. It’s yours now.”

“Oh. I get it.”

“That ticket is your fish sandwich.”

✶

Brian Johnson—the self proclaimed "Liver King"—has made $100 million selling online supplements based on his preaching the virtues of eating raw cow liver and testicles. He has denied for years that his cartoon physique and rutabaga skin color has anything to do with steroids and, despite what is blatantly obvious to anyone with two brain cells firing, millions bought that lie. They also bought supplements instead of cow livers and balls. Why? Because eating gonads is gross but taking a prepackaged supplement is easy.

You wanna know what's easier? Spending $11,000 a month on steroids and lying to everyone that it was the digested genitals that bulked him up.

✶

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), people lost $547 million to romance scams in 2021, up 80% compared to 2020 and six times higher than in 2017.

Grifters are turning to peer-to-peer payment apps as a means to steal. The con will email, text or call you pretending to work for your bank or credit union's fraud department. They'll claim that a thief was trying to steal your money and that they have to walk you through "fixing" the issue.

When student loan forgiveness applications opened in 2022, the FBI warned borrowers to watch out for scams targeting applicants. Student loan forgiveness scammers may contact you via phone or create phony application sites aimed at stealing your Social Security number or your bank account information. They may put pressure on their victims with fake urgent messages that encourage you to apply for debt relief before it's too late. Then they'll charge you a hefty application fee.

There are also now countless websites enticing those who have been scammed to sign up for Fraud Prevention. You know, for an annually reoccurring fee. Grift, gang.

My advice for avoiding these opportunists looking to grab your cash is not more law enforcement or being more cautious with your money. No recommendations to research offers better or look for suspicious email tags.

If it's an easier way to solve a problem that would ordinarily require a bit of effort, it's a grift. If you want to support a cause, go out and stand with the protest because sending money is easy and is easily used for personal expenses. That weight loss pill to help you avoid walking and eating a fucking salad? Buyer beware. That amazing love interest who lives in another country and only needs $3,000 to join you in eternal matrimony and unending love? He's making bank luring fifty other lonely hearts from a cubicle farm in India.

If you assume all of capitalism is just like a Las Vegas casino, that you're gambling and all gamblers eventually lose, that the results of your labor have more concrete value than the craps game potential, you'll avoid being sold snake oil. You won't. Easy and convenient is just too enticing. You'll take the bait and looked shocked and outraged when the obvious lie is exposed and you're left holding an empty wallet and suffering from menstrual abnormalities.

It's the American way.

#bitcoin #FTX #Liver King #gambling #grift

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infinitemonkeytheory · 2 years

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The Quiet Insurrection the January 6 Committee Missed

A former congressman who helped the House select committee investigate the Capitol attack says the US is losing sight of the big picture.

Matt Laslo

Oct 23, 2022 7:00 AM

“What it shows is that QAnon conspiracy theories have saturated every level of the GOP,” Riggleman says.

#jan 6 insurrection #treason #fascism is a threat to democracy #qanon #qanon conspiracy #wired

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smylealong · 3 years

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I want to talk about the general look of Joy of Life. Let’s start with some posters.

I’m not an artist, but even I can tell that this is a genius poster. (I haven’t finished the first season yet. Only on episode 14, so this is a mostly uniformed opinion). The placement of the hand instantly tells me that political machinations are afoot. And the way the hand mimics the writing is just a master stroke. The color of the sleeve and the hand itself beautifully compliments the general color scheme of the poster, and the show in general. The entire show is awash with tinges of yellow, and that makes for a beautiful cinematic experience. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Look at the set design. It is well lit, despite the absence of (visible) modern lighting, yet, adequately dark for us to believe that it is entirely lit by the candles. The ever present yellow tinge is still visible, yet the characters don’t look jaundiced. The dark alley backdrop provides for a beautiful contrast, ensuring focus on the two people in the foreground. Their white clothes only add to the splash of colors, without making it jarring.

More on the gorgeous set design. The level of detail that has gone into this one shot. The camera is low enough to show the intricate design on the floor. Yet high enough to give it a wide angle perspective. The camera is at an angle where the Jade lamp/chandelier thing becomes the center point, yet, never once taking the focus away from the character that we are supposed to focus here.

Now for a look at the gorgeous costumes

Look at that! Just look at that! The details, the colors, the hair pieces. Simply gorgeous. More? See here.

(Is it fair to include Xiao Zhan here? He looks good in the most absurd stuff.)

(How can I not have Li Chengze? How can I not? These are my heart eyes <3)

But look at the details and the colors of the costumes. The hair pieces. I am simply in awe of the visual experience that is this drama. I cannot take my eyes away from the sheer magnificence.

#joy of life #the look #set design #camera work #costumes

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ao3feed-janeausten · 3 years

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Incomparable

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/37zkJEj

by Raven_Blanchard

/ˌinˈkämp(ə)rəb(ə)l/ adjective Definition: without an equal in quality or extent; unable to be compared; totally different in nature. Daphne Bridgerton is perfect; she is beautiful, graceful, kind and talented in the arts that matter. She is also a woman of sharp wit and keen intellect, not that any of the peerage cares at all about women having more brains than that of a particularly accomplished broodmare. She misses 2021, truly, COVID and all.

Words: 1919, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice & Related Fandoms, Bridgerton (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M

Characters: Daphne Bridgerton, Anthony Bridgerton, Eloise Bridgerton, Violet Bridgerton, Benedict Bridgerton, Francesca Bridgerton, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Charles Bingley, Caroline Bingley

Relationships: Daphne Bridgerton/Fitzwilliam Darcy

Additional Tags: Crossover, Self-Insert, Isekai, Reincarnation, Rebirth, Modern Girl in the Regency Era, Plagiarism, OC basically takes great works and writes them as her own, She Has Good Intentions Though, green tea protagonist, OC is a classy bitch, OC is a fujoshi, Anthony Bridgerton is so done with Daphne's shenanigans, Class Differences, Daphne is richer than Mr. Darcy, Mr. Darcy is a fanboy, Charles Bingley is a fanboy too, Caroline is confused by this creature, Political machinations afoot, Historical Accuracy, or at least what counts for it, for a fictional world, Historical Figures, Regency Romance, manners, long circumlocutory speech, Daphne has seen this Jane Austen book before

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/37zkJEj

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #Jane Austen

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Anime For Beginners: Best Genres and Series to Watch

https://ift.tt/2N0s0pf

The past decade has seen anime’s popularity increase in dramatic ways, whether through a much broader spectrum of series receiving dubs, the growing success of anime feature films in theaters, or the sudden prominence of streaming services. There’s never been a better time to be an anime fan and the medium has become more accessible than ever. There’s a lot of anime out there, but the wealth of new series can often blend together or not be given a fair chance. Additionally, there are definitely certain types of anime that are more prominently showcased outside of Japan.

How to Watch Anime Online: The Best Legal Anime Streaming Options

By Daniel Kurland

Upcoming Anime 2021: New and Returning Series to Watch

By Daniel Kurland

For the uninitiated it’s easy to assume that anime consists of giant robots, monsters that battle, and strong fighters and magical girls that transform, but that’s really just a fraction of what the medium has to offer. Words like shonen, shojo, isekai, and even reverse harem are used in reference to anime, which can sometimes feel overwhelming when someone just wants to watch a silly romantic comedy or superhero clone. Here’s a helpful breakdown of all of the major anime genres and where to get started with them all.

Shonen

The shonen genre is by far the most popular brand of anime and the majority of breakout hits and major successes like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and One Piece all fit into the shonen brand. What’s interesting about anime genres is that they’re treated more like demographics and shonen is content that caters to boys with a young male protagonist. Shonen is so accessible because beyond this basic disclaimer, it’s able to cover a wide berth of content and a show like My Hero Academia can be completely different from Yu Yu Hakusho, yet they can still fall back on the same values.

Shonen anime has largely been generalized to be series that feature lots of fighting and battles, which isn’t always the case, but has become quite representative of the genre. Shonen series are ideal for people that want lots of action and are hungry for a show that has hundreds of episodes to consume.

Notable Series To Watch: Yu Yu Hakusho, Hunter x Hunter, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Attack On Titan

Shojo

Shojo is the female counterpart to the shonen genre that caters towards an audience of girls rather than boys. The shojo genre isn’t entirely bereft of battles, but it’s a style of anime where relationships and emotional drama is the priority or the source of power. There are many eclectic kinds of shojo series that are content to explore awkward relationship drama where there’s typically some kind of atypical supernatural element afoot.

The Resplendent Queerness of Sailor Moon

By Michael Mammano

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The Sailor Moon / Buffy the Vampire Slayer Connection

By Michael Mammano

However, the most popular style of shojo that’s largely become emblematic of the genre are “magical girl” series where regular girls transform into powerful warriors. There’s also typically a bright and pastoral aesthetic to shojo series and characters, both female and male, are beautified. Shojo anime is absolutely the place where the power of love will triumph over evil.

Notable Series To Watch: Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Fruits Basket, Vampire Knight, My Love Story!!

Seinen

Seinen is the R-rated evolution of the shonen genre that’s geared towards a more adult male audience that can handle mature storytelling. That’s not to say that shonen series can’t be violent or deal with adult situations, but seinen series often center around antiheroes and adult characters who are disenfranchised as opposed to optimistic youth that want to save the future.

Some of the most sophisticated and challenging anime series come out of the seinen genre and it’s a great place for people to jump in that are looking for a story that’s not overly drawn out and achieves the same dramatic peaks as prestige television. Seinen once more comes down to the viewers’ preferences and there are science fiction, horror, and fantasy seinen shows that all deconstruct their material in different ways. As a point of comparison, major anime movies like Akira or Ghost in the Shell both fit into the seinen genre.

Notable Series To Watch: Kill La Kill, Berserk, Ping Pong The Animation, Vinland Saga, Dorohedoro

Josei

Josei is the more mature version of shojo content and it’s full of series that are designed for women as opposed to girls. Romance is a big component of josei series, but it’s more concerned about the harsh realities behind relationships than the flirtatious courtship that kicks things off. Josei love stories are messy and full of heartbreak and they’re less romanticized than shojo’s interpretation of love.

A trashy way of putting it would be to say that Twilight is shojo, but Fifty Shades of Grey is seinen. Matters of the heart don’t always have to fuel josei series and there are also plenty of shows that center around adult women as they negotiate through professional and creative endeavors. It’s a place to find less flowery female-driven stories.

Notable Series To Watch: Chihayafuru, The Gokusen, Honey And Clover, Nana, Princess Jellyfish

Isekai

The isekai genre is perfect for fans of fantasy and this style of anime has become wildly popular over the course of the past decade. Isekai anime is any show where a character gets transported away to a fantastical new world. It’s a classic storytelling idea, but anime has been able to run with it in some creative new ways. There’s an abundance of isekai series that incorporate video game aesthetics and there are now just as many series where characters are trapped in a video game world than some alternate fantasy dimension.

Isekai can focus on the protagonist’s mission to return home, act as a savior in their new world, or simply kill time and enjoy the vacation. There are even reverse isekai anime where a supernatural character gets stuck on Earth and must acclimate. Arguably the biggest most mainstream example of isekai content is Spirited Away, but even something as foundational as Alice in Wonderland would qualify.

Notable Series To Watch: Overlord, Re: Zero – Starting Life In Another World, That Time I Got Reincarnated Into A Slime, KonoSuba, No Game No Life

Ecchi

Ecchi is that brand of anime that’s generalized to be the oversexed content that’s likely to make someone blush if they were watching it in public. Ecchi is any sort of anime series that prioritizes a certain sexiness and isn’t afraid to showcase its assets and indulge in “fan service.” Ecchi anime usually has a lot of skin on display, but it’s far from empty content and there’s an important distinction between something like this and actual pornography.

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What Makes Eden Netflix’s First “Japanese Original Anime”?

By Kayti Burt

Ecchi series titillate, but they still are concerned about their story and characters. There’s inevitably going to be some overlap between ecchi and seinen content (Kill La Kill is a series that really tows the line between both), but there’s often more of a gratuitous playfulness that drives ecchi content. Sexualized characters may bring in the audience, but the series are still deep enough to maintain their interests.

Notable Series To Watch: High School DxD, High School Of The Dead, Rosario To Vampire, Strike The Blood, Prison School

Mecha

Mecha anime are widely prominent and the visual of gigantic robots locked in combat as they fly through outer space feels like a tentpole of the anime industry. There’s a large awareness towards mecha series and it’s even entered mainstream live-action content through works like Pacific Rim. However, this visibility also makes mecha content easy to generalize and some may write it off without understanding the versatility of the genre. Mecha anime can be broken down further into real robot and super robot series, each of which apply a different level of realism to these unrealistic creations.

Real robot series might focus more on the humans that pilot the machines and the politics that surround mecha, whereas super robot content can feature robots that destroy planets with giant lasers. There can be a lot of gratuitous action in mecha series, but the human element in shows like Appleseed and Neon Genesis Evangelion, or how various Mobile Suit Gundam properties are dedicated to the casualties of war, is proof that mecha anime can be a lot more than just giant robot battles.

Notable Series To Watch: Mobile Suit Gundam, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Appleseed, Mobile Police Patlabor, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Harem

Romance is popular in any medium and there’s often exceptional tension that’s created from out of a love triangle. One genre of anime takes that idea and seriously exaggerates it in a way that can sometimes be problematic, but has spawned a popular style of anime all the same. Harem series center around a hapless male protagonist who stumbles into some incredible situation where a large group of girls–all of contrasting personalities–fall head-over-heels in love with him.

Harem anime can come across as baseless wish fulfillment fantasy, but the broad structure allows many other genres to mix together with it in a productive way. A lot of the time these series will center on the actual characters and the complex relationship dynamics involved and try to say something that may not be explored in a josei or ecchi series. There are also reverse harem series, which take the same idea, but flip the genders where multiple men fawn over a woman.

Notable Series To Watch: Tenchi Muyo!, The World Only God Knows, Nisekoi, To LOVE-Ru, Ouran High School Host Club

Gag

Anime series are able to achieve a lot of things that just can’t be accomplished in other forms of animation or programming. Comedy is something that’s able to connect extremely hard in anime and operate at an absurdist level that uses visuals, timing, and premises that are rare to find elsewhere. Many anime series have a sense of humor or are even specifically designed as comedies, but gag anime are a different breed that operate at an overwhelmingly relentless pace.

Reality and the fourth wall are just things to break in gag series, which often engage in wild parodies and lampshade anime as a whole. Some gag anime have extended storylines, but they often operate in shorter vignette style sequences that allow the comedy to really pop. Gag anime thrive in pop culture references and some of the hardest times I’ve laughed in my entire life have been at gag series like Mr. Osomatsu and Gintama where comedy is king.

Notable Series To Watch: Gintama, The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K, Pop Team Epic!, Mr. Osomatsu, Excel Saga

Slice Of Life

Slice of life anime are those endlessly soothing series that don’t try to create major spectacles where the planet is at risk, but instead celebrate the mundanity of life. Slice of life series may center around the staff at a job, a group of friends in a high school club, or just a loner that’s moved to a new community. These are series that elegantly display the tiny moments that make life important and the bonds that create eternal friendships.

The stakes are often more muted in slice of life anime, but that doesn’t mean that they’re without tension or can’t dabble in fantastical material. There are still slice of life anime series that involve magical creatures or are set in unbelievable worlds. It’s sometimes even more humbling to learn that some planet in a far away solar system has a struggling chess club or that a dinosaur can be obsessed with different brands of candy.

Notable Series To Watch: The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, Toradora!, K-On!, Dagashi Kashi, Clannad

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crimeronan · 4 years

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no supernatural au concept i haven’t been able to stop thinking about since considering ronan and opal were once the same age

the lynch family has a reputation. partly it’s because they’re fucking weird, but let’s be real -- every rural town has its share of characters. weird farmers are par for the course. if the lynch family just kept to themselves at the barns, no one would know they existed. however niall lynch is a swaggering larger-than-life storybook hero who loves attention and scandal, so: the lynch family has a reputation

by and large, the household is made up of known entities. niall, the irishman who never shuts the fuck up. aurora, the quiet beautiful wife with the bizarrely gorgeous beadwork at craft fairs. declan, the eldest son who’s got one foot in DC and won’t ever look back when he gets there. matthew, the youngest boy with the enthusiasm and adoration and intellectual prowess of a golden retriever puppy

however. the lynch twins are largely folkloric

it’s not just that they never seem to appear in public. it’s that there are a dozen decade-old stories told by knitting folks on their porches that cannot POSSIBLY all be true, including:

the lynch twins set fire to the post office

the lynch twins stole four pallets of soda from the back of a truck unloading at the henrietta general store and drank all the evidence

the lynch twins lured a man into the woods and stabbed him in the leg

the lynch twins helped the local vet’s office coordinate 30 TNR procedures because they’ve befriended a colony of feral cats

the lynch twins trained a rotating cast of corvids to shit on the mayor when he leaves his office every evening

the lynch twins were banned from three local churches after incidents involving a statue of mary, stained glass worth several thousand dollars, and the preacher’s microphone respectively

adam doesn’t give much of a shit about local gossip but has gleaned quite a bit of it when being deferential and polite to middle-aged women at the dollar store. it takes him a month of attending aglionby to put together that ronan and declan are siblings (they look unbelievably alike, but their body language and speech are SO different) and another week after that to realize ronan’s one-half of the unidentified lynch family variables

“isn’t there another one of him?” adam blurts

declan looks up and blinks, nonplussed rather than smooth for once in his life. “excuse me?”

adam’s eating lunch and has ended up at a table with declan not because of friendliness, but because declan’s taking a break from his roving cast of intransient social interactions to work on college apps and adam’s getting a head start on homework. neither is here to make friends. adam nods across the room at ronan, who appears to be constructing a fully landscaped mountain sculpture out of french fries

declan says “god, i wish” as ronan upends a bottle of ketchup over the fries and causes a volcanic eruption that obliterates everything in the lunch table’s path

that tells adam absolutely nothing but also he doesn’t really care. later, when he and gansey are friends, and he’s no closer to understanding ronan but much more actively annoyed by him, he asks gansey the same thing

“oh, his sister!” gansey says, and beams. this at least explains why she doesn’t go to aglionby. “she’s great. she’s taught me a lot about what plants want to kill you”

adam can’t decide what to make of this. once upon a time he’d think that the affection of someone like gansey predisposed the mysterious lynch sister toward being like declan, but it turns out gansey reserves that ebullient expression for losers like him and ronan and noah alone, so. more data necessary

it’s important to note that this isn’t like, occupying a huge part of adam’s mind. it’s just idle querying because he likes knowing things. to that end, he asks ronan once if he’d ever met ronan’s sister when adam attended the public junior high. they’d be in the same grade, right??

ronan gets weird and evasive with some response about how she homeschools with his mom, and adam’s like okay, some religious cult thing with the women running the farm. whatever. not my issue

adam and ronan get slowly closer over time, etcetc, you know how it goes. eventually adam's invited to the barns. his first few visits are normal. suspiciously normal. aurora is loving and gentle in a way that makes adam skittish - probably more due to his own issues than any Actual malevolence, but who knows - and there is zero mention or sign of a girl living there

it doesn’t Really bother adam, but it kind of bothers him. less because he’s dying to meet her and more because equations that don’t add up make him nervous. his running list of theories include 1) she doesn’t exist 2) she’s dead 3) she’s at some elite boarding school for girls in connecticut 4) she’s an emancipated minor 5) she’s not an emancipated minor but has run away anyway 6) she’s a fugitive from justice 7) she’s in prison 8) she’s dead but, like, worse this time

adam carefully and subtly raises his concerns to ronan by asking, “so is your sister being tortured in your attic or what?”

ronan, reasonably, is like, “the fuck?”

adam’s like, “look, all i’m saying is that when a twin goes missing in a story and no one seems to care, something sinister’s afoot. that’s all i’m saying here.”

ronan’s like, “say the word ‘afoot’ again. you sound like gansey. come on”

he takes adam out for a walk in the woods, which seems like a pretty murdery way to respond. adam, uncomfortably aware of that rumor about luring people to the woods and stabbing them in the leg, is like okay i’m about to die here. i’ve uncovered a lifetime movie plot and now i’m gonna be buried in unmarked barrel #457. what a way to go

this is pretty much confirmed when he gets attacked

he hits the ground before he’s really registered anything beyond a surprise impact. it drives the breath out of his lungs. he flips onto his back right away. ronan’s got half a foot of height on him and stupidly long legs so a sprinting escape doesn’t seem viable. he’s gonna have to rely on the old-fashioned power of fingernails and kicking

he has time to see a pair of blown-pupil eyes WAY too close to his face before the weight disappears from him. the culprit is a girl, late teens, with hair that’s probably blonder when the matted dirt is washed out of it. “for fuck’s fucking sake,” ronan is saying, hauling her to her feet and blessedly away from adam’s vulnerable internal organs, “why. WHY.”

“holy shit.” adam sits up, clutching his chest. he can feel every bone in his body. “god. god. god”

the girl is almost as tall as ronan. she’s dressed in some kind of baggy coverall-ish getup that might once have been an army parachute. she is not wearing any shoes. there’s some blood on her face from a recently-opened scab, and also a black speck on one cheek that adam thinks is a smashed fly

“you didn’t jump gansey!” ronan is saying, extremely exasperated. “why!”

“i didn’t have my hammock yet when gansey first came,” she says. she does not sound remotely sorry

adam looks up and discovers that there is in fact a hammock stretched between the trees. it’s one of those heavy-duty camping numbers with thick canvas and a full insect net. it’s also thirty feet in the air. there are branches on the way down, but they are very precariously spaced. adam does not want to know how she parkoured to leap onto his shoulders

“when you snap someone’s neck,” ronan says, “i’m not helping you hide the body”

“who says i haven’t already?”

“the fuck? and you didn’t ask me to help hide the body?”

she darts a few feet away and pulls herself into a tree. adam watches with slight fascination as she shimmies out along a long branch until it dips under her weight. as he gets to his feet, trying to piece together his wilted dignity, she rides her makeshift nature elevator down until she’s staring into his eyes again. hugging the branch like a snake. absolutely no consideration for how normal human beings behave. it’s almost marvelous

“sufficiently free of my attic, parrish?” ronan asks

“uh, yeah. yep”

“so this is opal,” ronan says

opal flips over so she’s hanging from the branch like a sloth. then hooks her legs around it and reaches down until her palms are flat on the ground. cartwheels out of the tree like a particularly feral acrobat. adam jerks back to avoid being smacked by a faceful of twigs at the whipcrack slingshot of the branch bouncing back

opal pulls a pocketknife from one of the folds in the DIY parachute sewing machine tick protection onepiece from hell. adam eyes her warily

“opal, this is parrish. or adam. whichever. don’t stab him”

“god,” adam says again

opal beams. she opens the pocketknife, but all she does is start cleaning bits of plaque from between her teeth with the tip, which is somehow so much worse than stabbing. adam looks at ronan and finds him pinching the bridge of his nose. it occurs to adam that this is the only time he’s EVER seen ronan express any sense of embarrassment in any social situation. ronan has no sense of propriety. adam didn’t know he was capable of feeling embarrassed

he immediately likes opal just for that.

“yes,” opal says, unconcerned, answering a question no one’s actually asked. “ronan is the normal one”

#i spent nearly. 2 hours writing this stupid thing. this concept is so excellent #trc #pynch #opal lynch #my writing #this was SUPPOSED to be short enough i wouldn't have to readmore it but. shrug emoji #adam parrish #ronan lynch

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chandramurty · 3 years

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The Mysterious Affair at Antilia.

The curious case of Gelatine at Antilia has got curiouser.Like the tail,which sometimes wags the dog,an Assistant Inspector of Police has shook the very foundation of the Government.He apparently strode like a colossus on the political stage of the State. It is strange how a lowly ranked had the access to the highest and mightiest of the land. Lugging around a Note Counting Machine in a Mercedes, the Hafta Wasooli mechanism was afoot. Was the extortion from the Hooch trade,a la Mafia of yesteryears,just graduating to extortion from the mightiest business tycoon? In some Bollywood movies, the word Home Minister was made to sound a like a dirty word. Now the real life too has started imitating the reel life. The ‘Ardha Satya’has now become the ‘Param Satya’. Has the crime world now been taken over by the State Apparatus? Extortion and murder, till now the exclusive domain of the organised crime, has now undergone a role reversal? It is sickening to see the gall of the some of the top leaders,while defending their own,taking the public as fools. It would need a Herculean effort to clean the Augean stable of corruption. Let the dictum of ‘Na khaunga, na khane dunga’ spread to the highest and mightiest of the land . One case has come to light , but several more with the same modus operandi, are maybe just waiting to be discovered. Post hustings, Mota bhai would have his platter full to launch a ‘Clean India ‘ drive with a difference. If such drive be launched with all sincerity,it will be a watershed in the history of the country.

Whenever you hear the sum of 100 crore,the plight of migrants should come to your mind.Had just one month of this collection was put to their succour, the ‘Agadhi’would have had a solid vote bank on their ‘Pichhadi’.

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bakagamieru · 4 years

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Gami I have been MIA for literal YEARS. How are you?? Have there been any major developments in ot5 land?? Any reason to be optimistic for the boys?? Or is stuntmaggedon still in full effect? Basically google search indicates there is still f**kery afoot

I’m doing ok. I’m glad you’re checking in after so long XD

There hasn’t been anything major in OT5 land unfortunately. With the last round of promo, the talk about Zayn has gotten unnecessarily negative… again. It tends to happen with every round of promo, but it was even worse this time with Liam saying things like “I can tell you the truth now about what happened” (then going on to imply things were bad and that One Direction will never return as OT5) and Louis saying “Zayn and I are too immature to ever make up”.

These things, of course, make no sense since no matter what Liam is made to say, it will never match up to what we actually saw happening at the time:

Zayn was trying to get better at making speeches to the crowd during OTRA (with the other boys’ help)

Zayn was just as affectionate with the other boys as he’s ever been during OTRA and them with him

Zayn only said nice things about the boys and vice versa until the stupid obviously-staged promo-related Twitter fights

Zayn never said things that were more negative than neutral about the boys in his in-person interviews despite the discrepancy with his print interviews, etc.

Not to mention all the logical inconsistencies with Zayn leaving and all the shade the boys threw at the stunt of Zayn leaving and the hints at Zayn’s return.

It’s just frustrating for Liam to say what he did because it feeds directly into the mindset of the people who never questioned Zayn’s leaving - “clearly everyone was being polite in previous interviews, but now the juicy sordid truth is being revealed”. That sort of thing. I’m sure that was calculated because it’s a smart move for anyone trying to control the narrative. It plays to the possibility of Zayn actually being estranged from the other boys no matter how unlikely that actually is given the evidence. I don’t blame Liam, but it’s sure disheartening to hear it come from his mouth.

Then there’s Louis. What exactly does it mean that he and Zayn are “too immature” to make up? Zayn has always been relatively mature (see how respectful his diss songs about 1DHQ “Truth” and Perrie “Lucozade” are), Louis has had to grow up and be responsible an unfortunate amount since his mother died, and both Louis and Zayn always tried to look out for each other and the rest of the band in their self-proclaimed position as the “big brothers”. Also… see the fact that Louis and Zayn have made up publicly at least 3 times since 2015. This continuing “we’ve made up”, “no, we never made up” narrative is just plain idiotic.

Then there’s the happy stuff:

Louis included OT5 in his Walls music video. There’s a scene where 4 figures (plus Louis) are silhouetted on a stage and then Louis goes to fill the empty space left for him and there are 5. He didn’t have to do that and he in fact didn’t have to include One Direction in that song at all. The lyrics are pretty clearly about a single relationship and closeting and the rest of the images in the music video align with that. To me, the inclusion of One Direction is an outlier in the video and that means that he damn well just wanted to include OT5. Don’t believe some people if they try to tell you that “Zayn disappears in smoke” from the line-up. He doesn’t. The figure closest to the smoke machine gets engulfed by the smoke when it turns on, but that’s just because that’s how smoke machines work (Louis, too, would have soon been enveloped had the scene gone on for a few more seconds) and you can still see the outline of the person through the smoke anyway, so they definitely didn’t disappear. There’s no guarantee that particular figure was the Zayn look-alike anyway (although I do kind of think it was based on the front picture all the look-alikes posted together).

Oh yeah, and Louis said at his recent signing that Bus 1 is his favorite tattoo because it brings up memories from the tours. Bus 1 clearly being a Zouis tattoo referring to him and Zayn being the two who hung out on the same bus during that tour reinforces my belief that Louis was deliberately trying to be OT5-positive during his Walls video.

Ooh, I was looking through my “OT5-is-everything” tag and I forgot that Liam also included Zayn in his thank you note to the 1D boys on his first album LP1. If you want to look for other little things, that’s probably the best tag to search on my blog: bakagamieru.tumblr.com/tagged/ot5-is-everything

Anyway, there really hasn’t been much going on otherwise. Zayn barely exists as far as fans are concerned most of the time because he barely posts on social media and he just isn’t seen all that much. There was a period when he and Gigi were supposed to be done, but unfortunately she’s back again. But the upside to Zayn barely existing is that at least that means he barely has to be seen with Gigi.

Overall, I would say stuntmageddon is still very much in effect. It’s the same-old same-old as far as the narrative goes. The soonest I can see the band getting back together is 2021 at this point just because of all the scheduled tours, but maybe late 2020 would work too. That’s not to say that I expect it to happen that soon though. There haven’t been any particular hints that we’re headed that way yet.

#one direction #zayn leaving #speculation #ot5 is everything #Anonymous #bakagamieru

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project-rebirth · 3 years

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Prologue: Look What I Found Under This Big Rock – OP.“Apocrypha”

She was dead. It was 3PM on December 25 and Shirai Kuroko, a 1st year middle school girl with chestnut twintails and wearing nothing but a purple negligee, lay collapsed and unmoving on her bed in a Tokiwadai Middle School student dorm. She was completely dead.

As dead as a jellyfish rotting on the beach.

“Onwee-shama…still hasn’t come home…”

Yes.

Her roommate Misaka Mikoto had yet to return after being sent to the hospital after the injuries she had received just a few days prior to the Violent Violet incident (Even though the injuries she sustained were relatively minor in comparison to some others who were caught up in it), but knowing her, the attractive Onee-sama was off enjoying herself elsewhere on Christmas and her cute underclassman had failed to board Noah’s Ark in time. She may have been sent to a deserted island all on her own. Shirai Kuroko had been tragically rejected. And it hurt all the more because she knew there was no ill will behind it.

She did not even have it in her to flail around in frustration. A monotone ringtone played from the phone she had left by her pillow, so she reached out with her face still down in the pillow and spoke in a deep, zombie-like voice.

“Uwehhhh? A joint manhunt with Anti-Skill?”

“They’re apparently planning a major arrest. And isn’t that kind of violence your favorite thing, Shirai-san? The adults are actually offering to let you run wild for once, so you should probably take them up on it.”

Judgment apparently had a lot of work piled up even on Christmas.

She briefly considered resorting to pretending she was in too much pain to get out of bed due to being on her purple period which would curse you unless you forgot it existed before you turned 20…but then she had a different idea.

Yes.

If there was going to be some major incident happening, wouldn’t Misaka Mikoto be more liable to show up?

She leaped out of bed, fixed her mussed-up hair, and hurriedly responded.

“Understood, Uiharu!! I will be there right away! Where is ‘there’, by the way!?”

Tokiwadai forced impeccable behavior on its students, so the dorms were strictly locked down around Christmas, but work for Judgment was an exception. This was Shirai Kuroko’s first Tokiwadai Christmas, but she managed to strut right past the dorm manager and out the supposedly impregnable front entrance in her winter uniform and a very long scarf.

“Now, then.”

She let out a breath and vanished into thin air.

She was a Level 4 Teleporter.

She could only teleport things a distance of 81.5m at once and she could only teleport a weight of 130.74kg at once, but by repeatedly teleporting herself, she could move at speeds greater than a racecar. All while circumventing the restrictions of the asphalt roads.

The safety of District 7 could vary a lot depending on the area, but she made her way to one of the less safe areas. There was decidedly unartistic graffiti spray painted on the walls and presumably stolen and abandoned bicycles were lying all around. There were no Christmas decorations in evidence.

A habit instilled in her by her job(?) took over and she photographed the registration sticker on the underside of the bike seats.

“Is this the place?” she asked over the phone.

“An Anti-Skill truck should be parked nearby, so go find them. I’m busy with my own work, so I unfortunately won’t be able to join you. …Eh? Oh, what is it? Ehhh!? You want me to turn all this into an automated processing flowchart today!?”

After some sounds of a struggle, the call ended.

(I guess I have to do this.)

Being out and about gave her more of a chance to run across her beloved Onee-sama, Misaka Mikoto, than lying dead on her dorm room bed. Especially when there was trouble afoot. Her motivation was impure as could be, but she hoped they would forgive her if she could restore order to the city while she was at it.

She knocked on the door of a large steel truck that looked like a windowless bus and the door opened from the inside.

It was larger than a van, but it actually felt cramped on the inside. Both walls were crammed full of industrial computers and the excess space was piled high with boxes of weapons and ammo. There were no ordinary lights, so the glow of monitors and heat of machines filled the limited space. This was apparently a logistics vehicle that handled data control and materiel provision more than transporting people.

(And this is only the backup. Does that mean they have more personnel deployed than would fit in one bus?)

She looked skeptical. Anti-Skill was the grownup organization that preserved order in Academy City. In terms of the world outside the city, they were similar to the police. She knew they were a highly organized group of volunteer teachers, but this appeared to be a largescale job even for them. Just think about it. How many police officers would be needed to chase down a single robber escaping through the streets? It would be unusual to find that not even 30 was enough.

“Excuse me, but you requested my presence here. I am Shirai Kuroko of Judgment. If this major arrest required calling me in, does it involve an esper?”

They were not as polite as a phone shop’s receptionist. First, her voice was absorbed by silence and a few sharp glances turned her way after a bit. “The customer is always right” did not apply with civil servants. Plus, Shirai was not actually a customer. Finally, a nearby woman, who appeared to be an operator, spoke up.

She curtly gestured further back in the truck with her chin.

“You’re working with her.”

That seemed awfully cold after Shirai had gone out of her way to name herself and express her enthusiasm for the job, but she accepted it since she had seen some girls in her class who tried and failed to play the tsundere like that. Then she looked over in the indicated direction.

Much to her surprise, the person that she was to work with did not look like your typical anti-skill officer based on the clothes they were wearing as well as the apparent age of the person.

She appeared to be a girl who looked around the age where she was in her last year of high school or starting her first year of university, though if she played her cards right, she looked like she could be any age. The girl had light purple hair, brown eyes and looked like she was wearing an old school uniform that surprisingly still fit her well. She was sitting at the table with a laptop, seemingly engrossed in whatever she was looking at.

“.....”

For some reason, Shirai was under the impression that she gave off the air of a NEET or some kind of shut in, And just when she had that though, the NEET girl turned her head towards Shirai.

“Hm? Oh, you’re that girl I’m working with.... Shiroko was it?”

“...Shirai Kuroko. I am from Judgement. You don’t look like you’re from Anti-Skill... who are you?”

“Ah, that’s right. I suppose I don’t seem like your common law enforcement officer do I? My name is Kihara Jikan. I’m a special researcher that’s been recruited by the Governing Board to help Anti-Skill with the large operation that’s taking place.”

Shirai raised an eyebrow. She was familiar with the name Kihara and how that family of scientists were responsible for all sorts of atrocities. The likes of Kihara Gensei and Therestina Kihara Lifeline comes to mind. But there was a chance that Jikan was not involved in anything like that,, so she had to refrain from judging her for now.

“So, what is this operation we are participating in? Are we finally arresting MINUS?”

“To be clear, you can’t let anyone know about this. Because we live in an age where people will do just about anything to get material for an online video or social media post. Unfortunately however, it’s not MINUS. You see, in recent times, dangerous individuals and organizations from the Outside have infiltrated Academy City. The governing board has finally had enough and decided to do something about it, hence why we’re both here. Welcome to Operation Apocrypha Shirai-san.”

Infiltrators from the outside? Shirai knew there were instances of people breaching Academy City’s security and entering, but she did not know it was on a scale like this, especially something that warranted the full resources of Anti-Skill and Judgement.

And based on Jikan’s tone, Shirai could tell that this was a situation that took precedence over MINUS, who had gone rather quiet after the District 19 incident.

“These invaders are not espers or anything we are used to dealing with. These people and organizations operate on laws and concepts that are completely out of our current understanding, but thanks to the OUTRANK list that we got from the anonymous source called The Guardian, we know who is in this city and what we can expect when we engage them.”

Jikan shifted her laptop so Shirai could see before moving from a tab that had some stuff regarding research into Multi-Universe Theory and Temporal Quantum Mechanics before moving to a tab that held a really long list of names of organizations and their members, as well as some other names who were not really affiliated with any particular organization.

Shirai looked at the names and gave it a read through. She had never heard of these people or groups before, however she was more astonished by the number of them listed. These people were really in Academy City?

“Hamanchi Eggoko, Lea Alecto, Rosimontis The Purger, The Wild Horse... are these people seriously in Academy City?”

“OUTRANK doesn’t lie I’m afraid. Those people are either already in Academy City, or is expected to come here. Lea Alecto and Rosimontis The Purger are big enough threats on their own, several members of an organization known as The X has been spotted in this city including the one named Shinpachi Oni, the Wild Horse. Oh, and the names you listed are all Harmfuls. They are the ones you should be careful of.”

“Harmfuls..?”

“Yes. You see, we have a category system that separates the very dangerous elements from the less dangerous elements. The names you went over are all in the Harmful category, while others have been placed into the Beneficial category. It’s to know who we need to use the proper amount of force against really.”

Academy City was under attack.

Many hostile individuals and organizations were in the city illegally and were most likely here for some nefarious purpose. Looking at the organization called The X, as well as some of the others, there was great concern to be had for the security and safety of the city and its residents,but there were a lot of it that seemed unbelievable, at least on paper.

But then there was a thought that came to Shirai, something that should be asked now.

“I do have a question. Why is it that these third parties are entering the city in the quantity that they have? Is this a coordinated effort between the groups, or is there something here that they are looking for?”

“It’s hard to say whether or not the groups are working together, but based on what we have gotten, they seem to be mostly operating on their own. As for the second point, we believe that they are after some kind of experimental device that I can’t get into, but it’s imperative that none of them get their hands on it. Academy City tech can’t fall into the hands of outsiders.”

“So, does that answer your questions for now? We are expected to apprehend Bazuko, one of the members of X soon so we can find out what the organization is really doing here as well as to give us the locations of the rest of their members, so I hope you are ready for some action, Shirai.”

This was a citywide sweep of forces from the Outside. Shirai had heard a few things about something called the Third Side or Cosmic Side being talked about on internet forums (the only reason she knows about it is because Saten Ruiko told her) but she could not give any clear definition of what the cosmic side was really supposed to be. It felt like a fictional thing spoken of only in rumors. Like a few separate incidents had appeared connected by coincidence, creating the illusion of something larger there. Yet it was all too ominous to just laugh it off in that way.

But this sounded exactly like something her Onee-sama would get involved in. If these Cosmic Siders or whatever was going to be causing problems on a scale like this, then it was only a matter of time before Mikoto threw herself into the fray. She was heavily involved in that last incident, so it was only natrual that she would appear somewhere down the line.

With that possibility filling her mind, Shirai Kuroko was ready to engage the enemy with more vigor than she normally would have.

“Then let’s do our best to stop the criminals that are infiltrating our city!”

Start: Operation_Apocrypha

@tetsuwan-atom @lawain-dimensional-heroes @xbloodsoakedx

#Toaru Majutsu no Index: Rebirth Testament (Main Verse)#Devoted Underclassman of Tokiwadai's Ace // Shirai Kuroko #Researcher of Temporal & Dimensional Mechanics // Kihara Jikan #Arc: Operation Apocrypha #Drabble

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