#Google My Business New Features

[familyabolisher]

I've walked past the Barbie branded selfie booth, sat through the reel of old commercials that precede the previews, and watched Margot Robbie learn to cry, and I’m still not sure what “doing the thing and subverting the thing,” which Greta Gerwig claimed as the achievement of Barbie in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, could possibly mean. This was the second Gerwig profile the magazine has run. I wrote the first one, in 2017, which in hindsight appears like a warning shot in a publicity campaign that has cemented Gerwig’s reputation as so charming and pure of heart that any choice (we used to call them compromises) she makes is justified, a priori, by her innocence. This is a strange position for an adult to occupy, especially when the two-hour piece of branded content she is currently promoting hinges on a character who discovers that her own innocence is the false product of a fallen world. But—spoiler alert!—the point of Barbie’s “hero’s journey” is less to reconcile Barbie to death than to reconcile the viewer to culture in the age of IP.

“Doing the thing and subverting the thing”: I haven’t finished working out the details, but I think the rough translation would be Getting rich and not feeling feel bad about it. (Or, for the viewer: Having a good time and not feeling bad about it.) One must labor under a rather reduced sense of the word “subvert” to be impressed with poking loving fun at product misfires such as Midge (the pregnant Barbie), Tanner (the dog who poops), and the Ken with the earring, especially given that the value of all these collectors’ items has, presumably, not decreased since the film opened. Barbie may feature a sassy tween sternly informing Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie that the tiny-waisted top-heavy billion-dollar business she represents has made girls “feel bad” about themselves, but if anyone uttered the word “anorexia,” I missed it. (There was a reason Todd Haynes told the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death with Barbies, and it wasn’t because an uncanny piece of molded plastic has the magical power to resolve the contradictions of girlhood and global capitalism.) There’s a bit about Robbie going back into a box in the Mattel boardroom, but Barbies aren’t made in an executive suite; they come from factories in China. On the one hand, it’s weird for a film about a real-world commodity to unfold wholly in the realm of ideas and feelings, but then again, that’s pretty much the definition of branding. Mattel doesn’t care if we buy Barbie dolls—they’re happy to put the word “Barbie” on sunglasses and T-shirts, or license clips from the movie for an ad for Google. OK, here’s my review: When Gerwig first visited Mattel HQ in October 2019, the company’s stock was trading at less than twelve dollars a share. Today the price is $21.40. 

Christine Smallwood, Who Was Barbie?

#currently reading #sorry for not being The Ignorer re: bad IP film but this is good

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

#pluralistic #john stewart #the daily show #apple #monopoly #lina khan #ftc #too big to fail #too big to jail #monopolism #trustbusting #antitrust #search #enshittification #kagi #google

[millenialfanfictionaddiction]

Expecting: Life with their Pregnant Partner

Featuring Aizawa, Fatgum and Hawks

Aizawa x pregnant GN! Reader; Fatgum x pregnant GN! Reader; Hawks x Pregnant GN! Reader

Warnings: fluff, reader being a little reckless

AN: I was reading through my google docs and found these 😄 absolutely zero clue when I wrote these. Honestly love that for me.

Aizawa

"YN what the hell are you doing?" Shota shouts as he walks in, seeing his heavily pregnant partner perched along the baseboards of class 1-A's dorm floors.

"Shota! Just in time, I need you to change my water bucket. Look how dirty these baseboards are! Can you believe that?" you say, smiling at your husband as you go back to dipping the cloth in the bucket and wiping the soaking cloth along the now sparking boards.

"YN, seriously? I can't leave you alone can I?” He says going to help you up from the ground, fussing over you as you stand.

"You know the doctor said to rest right? I mean you and I were both at the last appointment. I'm pretty sure I heard him say that about 15 times,” he says, looking at you with a scowl as you roll your eyes in response.

"I'll have you know I did rest sweetheart. But then Miydoria came in and asked if I wanted a snack. So I said 'yes let me help you' so then I got up. I walked to the kitchen and noticed some dirt on the floor. So I got the broom out. Then I swept the dirt and noticed a scuff on the baseboards and well we can't have a scuff so I went and got a bucket. Then one scuff turned into two and then three and then five,” you say gesturing to the floor boards.

“YN seriously,” your husband said, crossing his arms over his large chest.

"You really want our baby to be born with filthy floor boards Shota?" You say, crossing your arms and waiting for your husband's reply.

"YN the baby isn't going to be studying the floor boards when they arrive. Plus I think you should be worried about more important things like, and maybe I'm just being dramatic here, but oh I don't know labor perhaps?" Shota says escorting you to the nearest coach the rest. You scoff at your husband once more as Midoriya, Bakugo, Kirishima and Todoroki walk in.

"I'm going to need you all to watch YN for me,” Shota says standing up and walking towards his students

"Excuse me? I'm very capable!” you shout, shocked at your husband's words to his students.

"YN I have a patrol tonight. There is no way I'm leaving you to your own devices. You'll probably end up repainting the whole common area,”he says looking at you.

"Didn't you already by paint YN?” Todoroki says before you quickly interject

"Well would you look at the time! Come on boys, let's go start dinner,” you say waddling towards the teens

"YN you have got to be kidding me right now?!?” Shota says rubbing his temples

"Have a great night love!” you say pushing the boys towards the doors.

Fatgum

"YN I'm home my love",” Taishiro shouts. The apartment smells amazing and he is starving. After a long night fighting crimes and arresting villains, Taishiro only wants two things.

To have a good meal and to see his beautiful partner.

"In here my love! I'm just finishing supper,” you shout as you wipe your hands on your apron.

Taishiro stoped and looked at you. His beautiful partner, pregnant with his baby and making him his favorite meal.

"Honestly I could get use to seeing you pregnant for the rest of my life YN,” Taishiro says pulling you into a hug and kissing your forehead lightly.

You giggle and pat his stomach as you head back towards the stove to stir your vegetables.

"Lets get this one out first and then we will talk,” you say rubbing your belly as your stir the food and grab plates.

"Busy day my love?" He asks, washing his hands and sitting at the table.

"I went by the new fish market today and grabbed a huge variety! Then I went to the farmers market and got these and some fresh produce,” you say pointing to the freshly cut bouquet of sunflowers sitting on the table.

"YN I thought the doctor told you to stay away from fish,” he says worryingly.

"Love I can eat some cooked fish but I mostly got it for you! I've been watching this cooking show I wrote down some awesome recipes to try!” you say plating Taishiro's food and setting it in front of him

"Baby you should be resting during the day,” Taishiro says scolding you

You look at him, deadpan. "Babe I literally sit on the coach and write down recipes. I'm not running a marathon," you say rolling your eyes.

"I just worry about you YN. You do so much for me and I want you and the baby to be healthy,” Taishiro says, grabbing your hands and pulling you close.

You smile at your husband and give him a soft kiss. "Taishiro, you have Kirishima and Tamaki check on me at least twice a day when you are at work. Plus you text me every hour. Aizawa even came by last week to make sure I didn't need a snack. I'm well taken care of love!” you say smiling at your husband as he smiles back.

"Ok YN,” Taishiro says smiling as he grabs his fork and begins to eat.

"I did lug the groceries up the 5 flights of stairs today tho,” you say resting your hips against the back of the counter and smiling at your husband as he chokes on his food, quickly reaching for his water.

"YN seriously?!" Taishiro says clearing his throat as his eyes widen on you

"I'm joking babe," you say smiling. Taishiro breathes out a sigh of relief as he goes to take another bite.

"It was only four flights," you say laughing as you walk out of the room, leaving your husband hanging, fork halfway to his mouth.

Hawks

Hawks walks into his apartment to hear music coming from down the hallway. He smiles as he sets his keys down, removing his goggles, headset, boots and coat before heading to see you.

He knows you’re in the baby's room. That's where you've been for the past few days. Your nesting has kicked into full gear as you prepare for the arrival of your baby any day now.

What Hawks doesn't expect is to see you singing 5 feet above the ground, as you balance atop a ladder pounding a nail into the wall.

"Holy crap YN!" He yells as he goes to steady you and you smile down at him.

"Hey baby! So glad your home safe! How was your night?" You say smiling down at your husband

"YN what in the hell are you doing? Get down from there!" Hawks growls as your roll your eyes, setting the hammer on top of the ladder and climbing down.

"Ok I'm down here now what?" you say looking percuriously at your husband.

"Well for one, no more ladder,” Hawks says grabbing the ladder and folding it up, hauling it out of the babies room.

You sigh and follow your husband as he puts the ladder away.

"Keigo I have things to do!” you say your hands now on your hips as your husband glares at you.

"Do I need to put a lock on this door YN? Because I absolutely will!” he says narrowing his eyes at you.

"Keigo the baby is coming and their room isn't finished!" You say pouting and stomping your feet.

You husband sighs and rolls his eyes, walking up to you and pulling you into a hug. He knows how stressed you've been about your babies arrival.

"YN the baby isn't even going to be sleeping in their room remember? You have time love," Hawks says nuzzling your nose.

"Keigo first impressions are everything! And I want to give the baby a tour when we bring them home. And that includes their FINISHED room!" you say with emphasis, throwing your hands in the air.

Keigo looks at your, trying not to laugh at your pure ridiculousness.

"I'll tell you what YN. How about this weekend we do the finishing touches together?" He says as he notices your mood perk up at the suggestion.

"Babe that would be so awesome!" You answer gleefully.

"I mean I have to put the crib, swing and rocker together anyways. Might as well do it all,” he says as he notices your eyes widen and you look away from him.

"YN-"

“Ok so I may have accidently out the swing together,” you say, grinning at your husband.

Hawks sighs, his hand doing to his head, "what in the world am I going to do with you?"

#aizawa shouta #takami keigo #taishiro toyomitsu #eraserhead #hawks #fatgum #aizawa x pregnant reader #hawks x pregnant reader #fatgum x pregnant reader #gender neutral reader #aizawa x reader #aizawa x you #hawks x reader #hawks x you #fatgum x reader #fatgum x you #pregnant reader #tw: pregnancy #my hero academia fanfiction #my hero fluff #aizawa fluff #hawks fluff #fatgum fluff #my hero academia #my hero fanfic #my hero academia fluff #boku no hero academia #boku no hero fanfic #bnha aizawa #bnha hawks

[kirby-manga-translated]

It’s Kirby Time - Book 9 English Translation + An Update on Blog Happenings

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! IT'S HEEEEERE!! A truly adorable story about Kirby and Meta Knight deciding to spend some alone time and the activities they like to do during that time. Featuring beautiful illustrations painstakingly cleaned up by myself, this one is a must-read for fans of the relationship between Kirby and Meta Knight. Read the full thing at the links below:

Imgur

MangaDex

Google Drive

...But wait, there's more! Because the illustrations are so pretty, here's a link to a folder containing just those illustrations with no text at all! https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19z8WLah-ZGES2jnyZOILJKc9kE75Wvs9?usp=drive_link (I'm probably also gonna make a post featuring all these images on their own soon.)

Finally, I have an update regarding the blog. tl;dr, I'm definitely gonna keep doing translations, but the rate at which they are completed and uploaded is most likely going to change soon. I don't know by how much or even if it will be positive or negative. For a more detailed explanation, click the Keep Reading.

So, I got a job! *audience cheers* But the job does not involve translating Kirby manga. *audience "aww"s* Ordinarily I wouldn't get more specific than that since I try to avoid revealing too much about my personal life, but in this case the explanation won't make much sense unless I do, so: The job entails working on fishing boats. This means that there isn't really a set daily schedule or even a weekly schedule. When the boats are fishing, I'm working, and when they're not, I have next to nothing to do.

I've been told by many people that I should expect a lot of down time for that reason, so I'll definitely have time to work on translations. However, I can't predict exactly how much I get and I also most likely won't have an internet connection on the boat. All this is to say that I literally do not know how this is going to affect the rate of translations on this blog beyond just, "It's going to change." I could find that I have so much down time on the boat that translating is the only thing that keeps me sane and I actually get more done. I could find that the boat I'm on is a super-busy one and I get barely any time at all. And regardless of which one of those happens, I won't be able to actually upload anything until the boat gets back into port, which is entirely dependent on how long it takes for the boat to catch all the fish it needs.

The job doesn't start for a couple weeks yet, so I'm gonna try to fulfill a few more requested chapters before then. Once again: I'm definitely going to keep translating, I just don't know how often I'll actually be able to do it. So enjoy this translation, look forward to more coming in the future, and please wish me luck both in my work and in getting time to translate!

#kirby #kirby manga #it's kirby time #meta knight #nintendo #blog update #still not over how pretty this one is... #honestly its kinda cool this wound up being the “new year” post? #wasnt my plan but it worked out that way

[kakiastro]

Who’s your Future Spouse ? Detailed 18+ reading

Hey y’all! It’s been so long since I made a intuitive post but I’m back! This reading is all about who you are going to marry or just be in a committed relationship with.

Disclaimer: please know that this is just a general reading and for entertainment purposes only. We all have free will so take what resonates and leave the rest.

Now take 3 deep breaths. Pick which animal you feel called too. If it’s more than one then that’s okay.

🦌🐅🐘

🦌

Physically: deep round light brown or hazel eyes(prominent feature) have a youthful face. Small build, lightweight muscular, light brown shaggy hair and beard. Big smile, there’s something noticeable about their hands so it can be a tattoo, a scar or birth mark. Wears casual clothes especially sweaters

Personality: chilled laid back person. They’re more on the introvert side but loves to talk once they’re comfortable with you. I feel like their low key nerdy, like for example,you wouldn’t expect them to be huge Star Wars nerds first talking them until they reveal they own collectibles😅. I wouldn’t call this person a stoner per say but they don’t mind hitting a blunt every once in a blue moon😅they also love nature and I’m seeing a hiking bag so they could have an adventure side to them as well. I feel like some of you all are interested in astrology and they’re going to love hearing you teach them about it. Im hearing they love Greek mythology. This person loves learning things as well. They’re readers. This person gives me Taurus and Gemini vibes. They love food especially street food. They’re not confrontational but they will step up if need be “I’m not with the drama but don’t get it twisted, I got these hands.” Is what I heard. If you ever seen the tv show euphoria, your person reminds me of Fez a little bit lol.

Career hobbies: im hearing they love jogging or running. They love to paint as well. Im hearing they don’t have career per say but they do have ambitions. Im hearing freelance or one day owning some type of business (im seeing a gym) I do want to point out that this is the current energy they are in so when you 2 actually meet, they may be established in their chosen field

Sexually: very sensual in bed, they love the late night cuddles and conversations after y’all have sex. They don’t mind doing it whenever but at the same time they’re not in a rush either. Very chilled person like I said. they have a nice butt. If you’re interested in men then their 🍆 is long and slightly curved. If your interested in woman, they may have some hair down there

Astrological: Mercury, Taurus, Gemini, some Sagittarius as well

Letters: D, M, L, Y (First, Middle, Last name) or nick name

Overall your person sounds dope too me deer pile, I hope you enjoyed your reading

🐅

Physically: fine as hell! intimidating look at first. May have resting bitch face😅 I’m hearing covered in tattoos, they love tribal and quote type of tattoos. They have an intense stare, they can see your soul type of stare. They’re tall and muscular, they take care of their body. They have deep dimples that you can see when they’re talking. They’re very confident but not arrogant with it. Here’s the the thing, they’re attractive and they know it😅 they dress nice and love to wear suites or athletic wear. Classy gentleman vibes. They have dark brown panther type eyes, google panther eyes and that’s how your Fs stares at you🔥clean cut hair but when it grows out, it’s really curly. They’re not really a smiley type person but when they do, their smile lights up a room.

Personality: “all my life I’ve had to fight” is what I heard. I’m going to be honest here and say that y’all Fs has been through some traumatic things in their life!! This is why they carry this tough, intimidating persona, it’s a defense mechanism. The have a hard time opening up to people due to past betrayals especially with lovers. The good news is that they’ve been working on some healing. I do feel like when they meet you, they’re going to really start taking their healing seriously because they want to be the best person they can be for you🥹they’re very protective of loved ones as well not just physically but emotionally as well. “If someone hurts you, then I’m hurting them real talk” is what I heard. Your person sort of reminds me of Jax Teller from sons of anarchy. The bad boy /bad girl with heart of gold type of vibe. They’re big romantics as well, loves date nights and very funny. Sort of a jokester (especially dirty jokes)

Career/hobbies: they love working out, playing cards, camping, traveling is a big one Im seeing. They’re very proud of their family roots; I’m hearing Italian descent. So they may love traveling their family ancestral place. For career, they work in some corporate type of work. Hence why their wearing suits a lot lol. I’m hearing entrepreneurs so they may own a business. They love this type of work because it’s competitive and they’re competitive lol

Sexually: Whew Chile!! I hope you guys have lots of stamina because this person is very sexual omg! Your Fs works a lot so when they do have time for you they want to do everything with and too you. Now I’m blushing🫣 they’re open to do all positions. They’re favorite is missionary, not because they’re boring but because they want to look you deep in your eyes while they’re in you👀, they trying to snatch your soul and you’re going to let them. I heard “Make you lose your breath with each stroke” There’s a deep spiritual connection between you 2 so the sex is fire and otherworldly. They love to go down on you as well. If you’re interested in men/masc then they have a big 🍆, if you’re interested in women (fem) then they have nice breast.

Astrological: Mars, Aries, Capricorn with some Libra energy

Letters; T, V, D, B (first, middle, last name) or nickname

Well that was hot pile 2, I need a drink of water after that😂 I hope you enjoyed it tigers

🐘

Physically: I’m hearing this person has a very gentle aura about them. They feel like a warm fireplace with hot cocoa during a winter storm. I feel so relaxed. They’re medium height. Pillsbury doughboy just came to my head so they might be on fluffy side which is good for cuddling. Round face and brown curly hair and beard. Watery blue eyes, they may wear glasses(im not sure if it’s for reading or everyday use) big hands and feet😜, they love to wear sports jerseys. They have dimples and you can really see them when they laugh. They also have rosey cheeks and they blush a lot

Personality: this person is very shy, I’m having a hard time picking things up about them because they’re so hesitant. They may have been bullied growing up so it’s hard to open for them.🥹 They’re very much homebodies but don’t mind going out every now and then. They’re very much in a bubble and only those that’s in this bubble with them can see their true personality. I am hearing that they love watching and discussing movies. They’re great listeners. They’re more of a listener than a talker but they will carry a convo with you. They love their family, especially their mom. Very protective over them. Their a very family oriented person. Im sorry y’all, I’m not getting much here, their very private person.

Career/hobbies:watching and discussing movies, loves to cook (that was a big thing I received from y’all Fs) , watching sports. For career Im hardly getting jack squat😅Im only picking up on writer so they could be that

Sexually; very emotional connection when having sex. They’re pleasures rather than receivers. Your Fs sees sex as a bonding experience more than just a “hey let’s have sex” type of way if that makes sense. I’m not going to go furthur because they’re so private and shy compared to the other piles. I want to respect that. I’m hearing “I promise I’ll do my best to make sure they’re pleased.”

Astrological : Moon and Venus. Cancer, Pisces Aquarius and some taurus energy

Letters: B,R,A, D, H (first, middle, last name) or nickname

Hey I hope you all enjoyed my post ! Make sure to follow and share my content if you want to see more. Thank you!

#intuitive readings #intuitive #pick a pile #future spouse

[beegalactica]

How I journaled every day in 2023, and you can too in 2024

I heard someone wants to become "that girl" in 2024...

Well, let me tell you, "that girl" is the type of babe who embodies consistency; consistency in her thoughts, feelings, words and actions. Now one of the ways I have personified this aura of consistency is through frequent inward reflection through journaling.

I know, we've heard it a million times now. And with the new year approaching, it's so easy to set the intention to journal every day and do it well. News flash, my love, you must do much more than just set the intention. Let me tell you how I did it so you can do the same ~

Equipment

Believe me, I've tried it all: countless notebooks, diaries, bullet journals, apps, all of it, but this past year, only one app *stuck* for me, and that is Notion. Whether you prefer to journal with a good old pen and paper, or even if you prefer to make a big Google document, go for it!

The reason I settled on Notion was its table view/ calendar view database features. I liked being able to add properties like what rating out of 5 I would give my day or being able to label whether I was on my period, or any major milestones. I found that these labels made it really fun to look back and laugh at all the crazy things that I came up with, and reminisce over those 5/5 star days when I really felt like that girl. (see example below)

What the hell do you write about?

"You can write about whatever you feel like!" is the usual response, and while that's great if you're anything like me, you'll need more detail than that. I opted for some classic prompts that I would simply respond to at the end of every day, but if you want to freestyle it, try some shadow work prompts, or even just sum up your day in one sentence, you are more than welcome to.

My prompts were:

1. Three wins of the day: 2. One thing I learned today: 3. One thing I will do tomorrow: 4. Am I worried about anything? 5. Favourite thing of my day: 6. Song of the day: 7. A story from today: 8. An affirmation for my mind to sleep on:

You don't have to write paragraphs upon paragraphs if you don't want to, and some days, it might be hard to even think of three wins, but an it girl can be present and celebrate the endless blessings in life, even when it seems like there are none.

How to be consistent?

Going back to the central theme of this post, consistency, it is important to acknowledge that no matter how pretty you make your journal, or how thought-provoking your prompts are, the most important thing is to actually do it.

Life is fluid, it's never going to be linear. Some days you'll feel amazing, gorgeous and ready to take on anything, but other days you'll just wish you were a flower instead that doesn't have to deal with anything. That's just life. Some days, the last thing on my mind was my silly little journal, but I knew it was something I needed to do for myself, so I took 2 minutes to write a few sentences down, even when I'd rather be doing other things.

How to maintain your consistency:

Set reminders - at the start of the year, I had 2 reminders every day to journal; after the first few months, I cut it down to just one at 9pm, and by the end of the year, I was just doing it because it had become a routine for me.

Reward yourself - at first, you'll just be able to say you journaled for 1 day, then it will be 2 days, then slowly up to 1 week, 1 month, and soon you'll be like me, bragging about how you did it for a whole year! It's an accomplishment! Never lose sight of that.

Be kind to yourself - ultimately, this should be something you do for you and you only, so if you miss a day, it's not the end of the world. Every now and then, I didn't journal for a day - maybe I was too busy, or just exhausted by the time my day was over - so I accepted it and caught up first thing the next day. You make your own rules.

JUST START!!!!!!! - do it! Even if you mess up, start again and again and again! Nothing changes if nothing changes.

What's the point?

You've read this far, and you may be wondering, what's the point of journaling?

Well, I can confidently say that journaling changed my outlook on life immensely. 2023 was the best year I've had so far. Yes, there were setbacks: I lost friends that I thought would have forever, I struggled with my mental and physical health, and I reached points where I thought I was too low to get back up. But recording little bits about my day every day showed me, with actual tangible proof, that I will always get back up. I also had some amazing moments this year: I started a whole new school and era of my life, I made amazing friends, I fell in love with myself again and I found my voice.

Journaling has helped me to see the little positives in everyday life. Even when a situation seemed absolutely awful and I thought that I could never recover from it, I developed the mindset that not only could I recover, but I would absolutely recover. This new mindset helped me to laugh at myself in moments when a previous version of me would've shrivelled up into a ball and disappeared from the outside world.

Looking back over my life these past 365 days has helped me cultivate a new outlook on life, where I don't see setbacks as obstacles or barriers to my success, but as little stories to journal and laugh about when I inevitably overcome them. If that isn't the most it girl attitude to have, then I don't know what else is!

Journaling changed my life, and I hope that it can change yours too! Happy 2024! 🎀

#lifeblr #girlblogging #journal #journalling #girlblogger #becoming that girl #that girl #it girl #self improvement #new year new me #new year new you #goal setting

[faeriekit]

Health and Hybrids (XX)👽👻💚

[I can't remember the original prompt posters  for the life of me but here's a mashup between a cryptid!Danny, presumed-alien!Danny, dp x dc, and the prompt made the one body horror meat grinder fic.]

🖤Chapter navigation can be found here🖤 Click to browse previous updates.

💚 Ao3 Is here for all parts (now featuring mediocre mouseover translations, only available on a computer)

Where we last left off... A LOT of readers google what an "ostomy bag" is! Danny reestablishes his comfort with the Arabic numeral system!

Trigger warnings for this story:  body horror | gore | post-dissection fic | dehumanization (probably) |  my nonexistent attempts at following DC canon. On with the show.

💚👻👽👻💚

The next time Diana comes to visit her charge, her gloves are blue. Her scrubs are a pale pink. She is given a new face mask, and a new hair net, and walks through the double doors without needing to be buzzed in.

Alright. Perhaps the boy is not genuinely “her charge”. Still, he is hers to protect and to keep; although her position is, officially, as security to the medical team working with their young patient, the medical team knows as well as she does that the boy does not genuinely intend harm.

Is he prone to outbursts? Perhaps, but very few of them are powered. It is entirely understandable too, according to the mental health professionals on board the Watchtower: trauma affects how well one comports oneself and how one interprets their environment. They may see things, hear things, or misunderstand things, and believe they are under threat. The circumstance makes for a great deal of residual fear and mistrust.

Diana was once raised amongst communities of women with few untouched by battle fatigue. She recognizes the signs of lost time and of reawoken fear. She understands what battle-weary warriors are truly fighting against.

A doctor and a nurse mumble a greeting as Diana passes by them. “Morning, Wonder Woman.”

“Good evening,” Diana returns, eyes crinkling. One nurse visibly glances out the window—and then smiles, sheepishly, having forgotten their location in space. Time zones on the Watchtower are often…flexible; Diana, however, has only just returned from her day job. “How is the patient?”

A doctor jerks their head towards the monitor. It is only ever left on if no one else is in the room; privacy is key to recovery. The active monitor means that the medical team has left him alone for now. “Take a look. You might have to go kid wrangling again, Ma’am.”

Alright. Diana obliges them.

On the monitor, in little stick-figure form, are three figures, all sitting or crowded around the room’s singular bed. Her patient sits in his little white gown, legs still as ever, as Impulse drapes himself across the bedspread, and Robin (ex-Robin? Third Robin? Doesn’t he have a new name now?) stands at the bedside.

The Speedster wiggles, mouthing out words she can’t hear without a microphone. Robin is focused on something in his hand—a tablet, perhaps? If Impulse is chattering into the air, then Robin is short on answers; her charge, in comparison, looks back and forth between them, likely unable to understand what the two are up to.

Diana’s mask catches her sigh. “Busy, are they?”

“Do you think you can hold the red one down long enough for a refresher on proper PPE usage?” the doctor begs. The question appears to be genuine. “They just zoomed in a little bit ago. We’ve been trying not to disturb them, but without masks and gloves…”

…Her charge was still at risk for possible contamination or infection, as they couldn’t get consistently accurate test results on his immune system. Diana hummed. She could see the problem.

“I shall. Buzz me in, if you will.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

The door clicks open. Diana strides through, unafraid of teenagers or similar ilk, and content with her position as designated scolder.

And, to his credit, the Robin at her charge’s bedside recognizes Diana’s lack of enthusiasm with the situation, and winces with artful precision. Silly boy— as if Diana would believe that any Bat would be ashamed of breaking a rule if they had already chosen to break it. She cannot help but be fond of each Bird’s eccentricities in their own ways. Robin hides the contraband food in his hand behind his back.

Impulse, however, hardly notices her approach, draped over her charge’s casts as he is—a whiteboard in his hand, furiously scribbling away at whatever attempt at communication he has decided to test today. Having met several male teenagers in her recent years, there is a decent chance he has been drawing genitalia as well.

Diana politely coughs into her mask. The gesture is entirely performative. Robin responds by hiding a separate can of energy drink—opened—on the side table behind him, in the hopes of hiding it from view.

Impulse, who failed to notice her arrival, continues to scribble. Occasionally there will be a burst of superspeed, but it will be in contained little bursts. He likely either wants to preserve the marker, or he is taking more care with his attempted art than usual.

Her charge looks up.

His eyes are still a concern—glazed with a green film, they jitter back and forth ever so slightly when he tries to focus on any one object in particular. He hasn’t indicated any discomfort with his eyesight, however, so it hasn’t been addressed beyond documentation.

The crack in his face—from two inches above his white, nebulous hairline and trailing down to his chin—is visible evidence of an injury or gouge of some sort, with new pink skin all around the edges as the only visible sign of inhuman levels of healing. Diana has seen a number of scars, and a number of healed, gaping wounds, but it is occasionally unsettling to set eyes on her charge and see the still-healing brain matter, skull, and inner sinus cavity through a viscous, green, not-quite-organic wound filling material.

There seems to be a consistent rate of healing, though. Diana can only hope that recovery is possible.

“Good afternoon,” Diana greets softly. Her charge’s discolored fingers flex as his face turns to look at her. “Are you well?”

His green-tinged lips part and then come together again. He’s not not paying attention—he listens very well, and has begun to use certain words in English to compensate for his need for communication. That being said, Diana has little idea what he is and is not capable of understanding.

Impulse, however, finally recognizes the newest occupant in the room. “Wonder Woman! Uh—we totally had permission to be here this time! Promise!!” he offers, immediately switching from someone gleeful to see her from someone remembering their misdeeds.

Diana is very lucky that her mask covers her fond smile. If it is her job to be stern today, she ought to live up to the task. “Did you, now?”

Impulse beams sheepishly, and rolls off of the casts of a bemused half-alien boy. “Yes! Remember last time when the nurses all said I could ‘come whenever’ and ‘bring a friend’ and—“

“You were asked to buzz in ahead of time and put on your protective gear?” Diana finishes, wry. Before she is able to scruff him appropriately, however, the superpowered boy is already gone and back—now with an askew hairnet, an upside-down surgical mask, and gloves a size too large for his hands.

“So I did that!” Impulse protests, the mask moving unnaturally over his face. “Look! All dressed up!”

It is a well-intended last minute effort. Alas, it would all be for naught. Diana scoops up a squawking speedster by the nape, and a now-blinded-by-a-misplaced-surgical-mask Robin, and trots them both back to larger medical.

“One moment!” Diana tosses back to her charge, who is, understandably, concerned.

Still. It takes Wonder Woman, two nurses, and a paraprofessional to successfully sanitize and gear up an uncooperative speedster. Robin sulks through the entire process, but capitulates to it with more grace.

Her charge’s green eyes shine and his fingers curl around his few personal possessions as Diana returns to him his companions; she wishes, so dearly, that she could ruffle his pale hair. “All done!”

The teenaged heroes sprawl across his bed just as casually as they had before—if better prepared for their environment. Robin largely gives her charge his space, careful not to impede where he isn’t wanted, but Impulse freely shares affection that her charge, at least, does not visibly deny.

Diana has her own routine to complete. She heads for the intravenous injection bags, pulls out a fresh one, and cracks the seal. After that, it’s shaking to mix the concoction and a fresh replacement.

Impulse grabs one of the toys off of her charge’s side table and brings it into his lap. The board is tilted, and all the slotted-in pieces fall out. He spends some time sorting them by shape, and then by color, until her charge lifts trembling fingers to pick them up, very carefully, one by one.

She’s impressed. His pincer grasp recovery has not been consistently smooth sailing. “Excellent work,” she praises.

Robin looks up from his tablet. Impulse looks back at her and beams. Her charge gives her a brief look, observes that she doesn’t need anything from him at the moment, and gets back to sorting the little pieces back into their allotted slot.

Impulse rests his chin on the steel arm bar of her charge’s cot. The pose seems…uncomfortable. “Hey, Tim. He got them all right.”

Timothy Robin taps away at his tablet—no doubt taking down documentation of his own. Diana can’t help but feel affection; every Bat and every Bird is so nosy, but if she wants to actually see those notes on her charge, she will have to press Batman for them with a reasonably-sized threat.

“Really?” Robin asks, eyes on the screen. “Do you think the pieces were matched based on color, or actual understanding of the numerical system?”

Diana looks down, line in her hand as she reconnects the intravenous bag. The toy in her charge’s lap is a mock clock face. Each of the numbers is printed onto the removable piece, in different cut-out shapes, and painted different colors.

The atmosphere changes. The air itself tastes different—something like electricity sparks on her tongue. And then it’s gone.

“No, he’s looking to put the clock face back in order, specifically,” Impulse confirms. Ah. Speedforce. Diana should have been able to recognize the feeling by now. “He’s kind of annoyed, actually. It’s like a baby toy.”

“Well, it is a baby toy.” Robin taps away.

“Yeah, that’s why it’s annoying. He knows he should be able to do it.”

Impulse buzzes again, and her charge hums, stuffing his flat hand between the board and the sheet until he can tip it over without grabbing at it. He repeats the same process, the only difficulty stemming from his shaking grip and his shaking eyes.

The urge to pull him close and pet his hair is understandable, Diana reminds herself, but not conducive to his long-term comfort. She smiles at him, as best as she can behind a surgical mask, and discreetly checks his drainage bags to see if they need replacing while she’s already close.

“All’s well,” she declares at last, finished with anything that isn’t social. Thankfully, having two teenagers in the room takes care of her charge’s most frequent issue—boredom. She claps her hands together, and her charge looks up at her, eyes vibrating. “Do you require anything?”

Her charge looks at her. Her charge looks at his friend. “Ouatair?” he tries to enunciate, tongue thick against the green-filled split in his hard palate. “Pleese?”

“Ithinkhewantssomewater,” Impulse rushes to translate, but Diana already knows this request. The water provided is chilled in a refrigerator, and it takes no time for her to find sanitized cup and straw—steel, so as to be safe when dropped, and relatively uncrushable, with a handle for simple gripping.

She presents it to him grip-first. His expression is grateful, and frustrated. No warrior wishes to be in the position of needing constant. Diana can understand the wish to do things on his own.

“Soon,” Diana offers, voice a whisper. “You’re already better off than before.”

Her charge grumbles into his cup. His tongue, half-green, finds the straw for him; he chomps down on the straw, slurps as loudly as he can, and sulks.

Teenagers. Diana finds herself unable to understand how Bruce has so many of them, and understands perfectly well how easy it is to take on a child in need and make them your own.

The cup goes back onto the side-table, half-empty.

“Hey,” Robin starts again. He puts his tablet to the side. The white board is pulled out of Impulse's hands and goes onto her charge's lap, and with only a little whining. “How’s this?”

Her charge mumbles something neutral. His eyebrows scrunch together, but he takes the offered blue marker from Impulse and lets the boy uncap it for him.

“Yeah, it’s more adult or whatever,” Impulse encourages. Her charge sticks out a green-mottled tongue, but takes the marker to the white board and writes. Robin peers over his shoulder to watch. “It’s just the alphabet. A, B, C, D~!”

Her charge hums the tune back to him, continuing seamlessly where Impulse left off. The teen hero beams.

Diana stills.

“Yeah, you got it!” Impulse encourages, and peeks over the edge of the board to see her charge hard at work. His letters are wobbly, certainly, and there are some that he misses, but the alphabet song is a longstanding English-language tradition. He know it. He knows it by rote.

“You missed the ampersand,” Impulse points out. Her charge scowls through the fissure in his face.

…There is no reason for Diana to get excited. Yet. Robin-the-former is already jotting down his own notes, pleased with his observations. There are many reasons and many ways this teenager might have picked up the song. J’onn famously picked up on Earth’s radiowaves before being transported to Earth; this could be further evidence that her charge has some connection to Earth, or it could be a connection to something more bizarre and unusual.

There is no shortage of unusual events these days.

And, of course, Diana runs out of things to do. She smooths down her charge’s blanket, which he hardly notices in his frustration. She refills his water. She is tempted to go grab her copy of The Art of War from her bag in the other room, which she has read before, but which she is rereading at behest of Bruce’s newest initiative: Tactical Book Club. She is optimistic about the opportunities for further education this will provide her comrades-in-arms, if not underwhelmed by the reading material. As long as the teenage heroes are in the room, Diana is obligated to remain with them, in the event that the danger level might…fluctuate. A book would give at least the semblance of privacy to the three.

Her charge makes a noise. “Hay!”

Diana looks up. In shaky hands, resting on his lap, he holds up a largely complete alphabet. There are one or two shaky letters—thorn, which is fairly common, and eth, perhaps less so—but otherwise carefully drawn, very neatly done.

“Excellently done,” Diana praises. The alphabet is a triumph of the physical work it takes to heal.

Her charge beams through his craggy face, buzzing with delight.

"I dunno," Impulse teases, upside down on her charge's legs. "They're kinda wonky."

The boy's face scrunches, smears the color away with a swipe of his arm, and draws something else.

The board shakes with his exertion as he lifts it back into place on his lap, and Diana allows herself to sigh, audibly; sure enough, as she had expected, there is a misshapen, blue, cartoon representation of a penis.

Robin full-on cackles with surprise, but Impulse falls of the bed with laughter.

Unfortunately, it is now Diana's job to figure out how to scold a teenager, and one who speaks no known language besides. Based on the resulting expressions she earns, Diana is unsure if the scolding works, but. Well.

...She tried.

#teenage shenanigans triumph over adversity #even trauma. Even pain. Even horror. #ALSO we finally get an outside POV on his FACE #Danny's body is perhaps a little more fucked up than he knows #health and hybrids #danny phantom #dp x dc #dpxdc #dcxdp #tw gore #tw medical #tw body horror #dcu crossover

[thefallennightmare]

Moment of Weakness-one

*credit to whoever created the gif. found on google/Pinterest *

Pairings: Mob!Bucky Barnes x reader

Warnings: language, smut, angst, fluff, affair, cheating, violence.

Summary: Reader is the assistant to New York's most feared mob boss, James Buchanan Barnes. He had the picture-perfect life: status in the mob, friends, and beautiful wife. So why can't he keep his mind and eyes off of reader?

Authors Notes: I'm not too sure how long this series will be so let's just enjoy it!

Tags(open): @splendidreads @sebsgirl71479 @mdpplgtz03 @pattiemac1 @elizacusi-blog

The heels of my boots smacked against the hardwood floor as I hurried around the room, trying to finish my work. The setting sun had blasted its rays through the window, an indication that I had about a half hour left before the work day had ended and I was able to go home. 

Even though I would have rather stayed longer, with him. 

Part of me thought of going to ask him if he needed me to stay later tonight but that would require me going into his office and talking to him; something I had only done one or twice in the few months of me working here. 

Any time he needed something, he would either write a note and leave it on my desk or send me an email. We barely spoke to each other and if we did it was a quick good morning as he was walking in and a goodnight as I was walking out. 

He was always right behind me in the morning, both of us usually arriving at the same time but he would always stay much later in the evenings, long after I had gone home. 

Being New York’s top mob boss was a full time gig and it kept him busy. Which is why he hired me. When I first applied for the job, I thought I would be the assistant to a C.E.O or something. Needless to say, I had been shocked on my first day when I walked in and noticed who I was actually working for. 

His name was the hush gossip around town, his mob gang running the neighborhood I had lived in my whole life. It has been passed down from generation to generation. When he found out that I had lived here and remembered his grandpa running the gang before his father did, I had been hired on the spot. 

When I told the people in my life of my new job, they were worried for my safety. They reminded me that I could have gotten a job anywhere in New York, why did I agree to this one?

The pay was perfect, exactly what I needed to get by and then some, but the main reason why I accepted this job was because of him. It would have been a lie if I said I didn’t find him attractive. I had to keep reminding myself, though, that it was just a crush. Nothing more. 

Of course, I couldn’t help but worry on how I would be assisting him. But it ended up being the typical mundane tasks any assistant would have. Running errands for him, helping sort his meetings, taking some calls, deterring anyone he didn’t want to see or didn’t have a meeting away. There was only one person who was allowed to walk into his office freely. 

Her.

With a soft sigh, I packed up all of my belongings, the clock on the wall striking six in the evening, and the thought of sitting on my couch in my lazy clothes watching trashy television brought a smile to my face. 

The door behind my desk clicked open and I felt the warmth radiate from him as he walked out, a charming smile across his soft features. 

“Leaving for the night?” 

My eyes glanced at him and felt my heart begin to pound in my chest, the vibrations echoing up to my throat. 

I nodded. “Unless you need something else from me?” 

He shook his head, a smile still plastered over his face. It was almost as if he knew how much his smile made me weak in the knees. The hairs that had been slicked back when he arrived this morning were now a mess on top of his head, no doubt from him running his hand through it. With the light from the lamp on my desk, I could see the few gray hairs that peaked underneath the browns of his beard. 

He looked breathtaking. 

My eyes darted to his left arm, the black and gold vibranium catching the said before light and I had to force myself to look away, so I didn’t get caught staring. 

Except I knew I had because he hid his hand into his jacket pocket.

“No, you go home. Enjoy the rest of the night. I’ll see you in the morning.” 

“Have a good night Mr. Barnes,” I smiled with a red face at being caught. 

“I already told you, Y/N. You can call me Bucky,” he insisted. 

I smiled at my boss, James Buchanan Barnes, and while tossing my bag over my shoulder bid him a goodnight with a nod. I could feel his burning gaze on my backside as I walked away. 

I hummed a low tune while I typed away at the computer in front of me, the list of emails waiting to be sent. Bucky had made sure that this task was my number one priority today because the monthly meeting with the other two mob gangs that ran the other neighborhood around us was coming up. He wanted to make sure that those leaders knew what was going to be discussed before they would arrive that day. 

It had been held here at Bucky’s office for the last handful of years because of his reputation and position in the mob. He was well respected among the other gangs, their own leaders looking up to him. The reason for these meetings were to discuss business, of course, but also to make sure that everyone remembered who was in charge. 

A large presence was felt behind me but I didn’t have to look to see who it was. A smile pulled at the corner of my lips but kept my attention on the email I had been typing. 

“Need something?” I asked over my shoulder. 

The blonde smirked. “I’m just wondering when you’re doing the next coffee run.” 

I spun around in my chair, eyes glancing up towards the man. His beard had been a bit fuller since I saw him last week and his long hair was slicked back, his blue eyes shining bright. 

“Last time I checked Rogers. I’m not your coffee runner,” I joked while standing to my feet and gave his chest a pat. 

The firmness of it did not go unnoticed by me. 

Steve chuckled. “It’s Buck. He’s ready for his afternoon coffee with lunch.” 

I nodded. “Is he busy or can I pop in to get his order?” 

He held up a piece of paper in his hand. “I already got it. Bucky wants me to go with you.”

“Sam usually comes with me,” I raised a brow. “

Steve shrugged with his hands in his pockets. “Figured you could use a change of company.” 

I nodded, eagerly to spend some time with him. Steve was not only one of Bucky’s bodyguards but was also his childhood best friend. The two of them grew up together and while I didn’t speak much to Bucky, Steve and I found ourselves talking almost every free chance we could. There had been a few times our conversations had taken a flirtatious route, neither of us correcting it or changing it. What started off as fun was slowly becoming serious which confused the hell out of me.

Admittedly, he was very attractive as well but there was only one man that currently kept my wandering eyes, even if that’s all that it would come too. I wouldn’t allow it to become anything else because of her. 

“Bucky does know that I don’t need someone to come with me almost every time I run errands for him, right?” I spoke. 

Steve nodded. “He does but it’s company policy.” 

I playfully scoffed. “Is that what you think of me, Steve? Company policy?” 

There was a flash of something in his eyes and his tongue quickly darted over his lips. 

“You really want to know what I think?” Steve’s voice became heavy as he took a step closer. 

I met him halfway, chin raised up to him. “Yeah, I really do.” 

We stared at each other, gazes burning, and I couldn’t ignore the way my stomach flipped when Steve’s bottom lip got stuck between his teeth and I knew he heard me suck in a breath when he began leaning closer. 

Someone clearing their throat caused me to move away from Steve and when I saw who had caught us, my heart sunk. 

Bucky stared at the two of us, lips parted in confusion. “Am I interrupting something?” 

Steve sighed while shaking his head. “Always had perfect timing, Buck.” 

A red blush of embarrassment covered my body and I kept my gaze at my feet while the two friends bickered back and forth. I waited for them to finish so I could make the afternoon coffee run, hoping that the rest of the day went by fast. 

“James, you’re not going to believe who I ran into at the shops this morning.”

My head snapped up at the petite voice, eyes watching with jealousy as the woman placed a quick kiss on Bucky’s cheek. 

“Hi, sweetheart.” Bucky mused. 

Steve nodded with a smile. “Hey Natasha.” 

The red head smiled back at Steve. “James keeping you busy?” 

“He’s actually letting me leave with Y/N to grab the lunch order,” Steve joked while looking at me. 

Natasha's gaze followed and even if her smile said one thing, the look in her eyes said something completely different: annoyance. 

“How are you, Y/N?,” she asked. 

I gave her my own fake smile. “Good.” 

It wasn’t news to anyone that Natasha wasn’t happy about Bucky hiring me, she wanting to be the only girl in the office but as Bucky told her many times, it was his choice and his alone. 

“Well, I have to fill you in on my morning,” Natasha returned her attention back to Bucky. 

My broken gaze watched as she cupped his cheek to lay a kiss upon his lips, the diamond on her left-hand glimmering in the sunlight. 

Steve noticed the way I longed to be in her position, so he gently nudged me. “Ready to go?” 

My eyes locked with Bucky’s for a second, a small glimmer mixed with the blue pool of his iris', before I had to force myself to look away once again, now staring at Steve. 

“Yep.” 

Steve wrapped an arm around my shoulder and nodded a fast goodbye to Natasha and Bucky before leading me away from them. 

With our backs to them, I hadn’t seen the look Bucky burned into Steve, who still had his arm nestled on top of my shoulder. 

#mob!bucky barnes #mob!bucky barnes x reader #mob!bucky barnes and reader #mob!bucky barnes x yn #mob!bucky barnes and yn #mob!bucky barnes reader insert #bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes and reader #sebastian stan #moment of weakness-mob!bucky barnes

[colsonlin]

“Cape Cod”: a good old-fashioned short story (a 45-minute read)

“Cape Cod” is an analysis of our society’s tendency to produce narcissism, sociopathy, and casual dehumanization. It felt so good to get all of this off my chest! —Nina

A lot of how we talk about middle school in America is something I take issue with—like, for instance, that it’s somehow not the most formative experience of our lives. (It is.) A lot of people say “college,” but I had already cycled into an idea of who I was going to be as an adult by then—an A student, a talker, a birdwatcher, a take-no-prisoners observer of human social life. I studied sociology at the University of Maryland. At my retail job now—I work at a Nordstrom in Connecticut—I interact with a dying breed: old rich white women who still buy their cashmeres at the mall. At my old retail job in Farmington I was a cashier. At Nordstrom I’m more of a saleswoman—I don’t hand my customers their purchases after I’m done folding their clothes into the bag, I walk around the counter to deliver their parcels to them personally. I work six nights a week until the mall closes at 11 and on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays I drive to my second job at a call center in Southington. I earn enough money to pay for my Hyundai and an apartment above the laundromat, have coffee on the weekends, keep up with my student loans, and map out what the next step will be.

College feels like a million years ago.

Middle school still feels like yesterday.

“Brenda” (not her real name), my supervisor at my old department store in Farmington, was the portrait of managerial incompetence. She was fat and unmarried and all of the associates who weren’t actively helping a customer used to crowd into the stock room whenever she came out of her office, usually to berate one of us for misplacing a store key. We all know a Brenda from middle school. Everything you say is wrong, and everything she says can’t be improved upon. Three of us quit within the first ten months of Brenda’s arrival, and at least one of us later wrote an anonymous email to the district manager about her obvious drinking problem.

My old department store—I don’t want to get into any trouble here so let’s just call them “Not-Quite Sephora”—was in a strip mall. I never knew who to feel more sorry for during the day, myself or the customers who came in. I once explained to my boyfriend that we were kind of like Wal-Mart’s “more youthful older sister”—a high school varsity cheerleader perhaps, but still stuck in the past all the same.

There were ten of us on the first floor—the second floor, “Men’s,” might as well have been a different planet entirely. Brenda acted like she was better than all of us, because she has a master’s degree in “Global Business Administration,” whatever the fuck that was. Brenda didn’t seem to understand that all her master’s degree did was make her look both underqualified and overqualified for her job at the same time. (Her main role, from what I could tell, was assigning holiday bonuses and amplifying customer complaints.)

Not-Quite Sephora has a dying business model, but we were kept artificially alive by a steady stream of suburban glum as the principal anchor of a once-iconic strip mall. The first floor was perpetually understaffed—our Google reviews under Brenda’s mismanagement decayed from 4.2 to 2.8 stars (and this coming from a woman who tends to take “American public opinion” with a grain of salt). The turnover rate among everyone except me, Ashley, and Gabby seemed to be such that a new Chris, Brian, or Andy was being fired every three months. Good riddance, I always thought.

Men don’t understand how to take orders from a woman, and the ones who say they do are liars from the black lagoon.

I understand Brenda.

I really do.

Brenda’s most direct feature was that you couldn’t get a direct answer out of her, ever—it was either caustic sarcasm or happy-peppy self-deprecation. Everything she said was either designed to suppress or to charm. She was intelligent, which was the problem—quick-witted even—she prized competence, prided herself on being everything everywhere all at once (with self-pity), once complained to me in the break room that she was an ex-spelling-bee champion. Appearance-wise, what once made me jolt awake at night was that she tries, she actually tries. Not doing anything to set Brenda off had become something of an obsession of mine by her third month there. I applied to other jobs, but only in non-retail.

Trying to go non-retail—my life in a nutshell.

Brenda took over at a precarious time. Inflation was rising. Covid was either over or about to be over, but either way, brick-and-mortar seemed to be one of its death tolls. Brenda had mousy blond hair, wore black trousers to work, and used to tramp around the store carrying an inventory clipboard whenever she was upset about something. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to take fashion-merchandising so seriously. Her first day at Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda compared our fitting rooms favorably to the fitting rooms at her old Kohl’s in Florida, now shuttered (“So coming back up here was kind of like coming home for me, y’know?”). Brenda grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey and you can tell.

You can guess what her politics are.

I think what appealed to me most about the Cape Cod trip, if I were to be honest, was the right to tell Brenda that I’d have to take a few days off in mid-September because my boyfriend had invited me on a trip to “the Cape.”

Here was a woman in her late forties or early fifties who had located the profundity of her self-esteem in “competence”—and yet it never finally occurred to her that the only way to be “competent” in your everyday life is to command the trust of those around you. Trust is earned, Brenda, and it’s lost with unreliability. I could never really trust that woman not to not trap me inside a rule without being able to explain to me the reasons—not to not be imperious and self-certain and in self-protection mode at all times—and not to not explode all of her emotional wreckage on me, drenching me in the black mist of her self-absorption. Brenda was always right. Brenda is never to be questioned. (Brenda’s real name is “Karen,” which is why I didn’t want to say it at the time.)

It felt so good to able to tell Brenda that—all of her anxieties about the back-to-school rush aside—I’m going to have to take three days off in mid-September because my boyfriend has invited me on a trip with his three friends to the Cape. (I met my boyfriend a year ago on Opal.) It pained me to be so petty—no, not the reference to Cape Cod, which was just a kiss on the lips, but the reference to having a boyfriend, which was my primary poison. I wore more eyeliner to work, not less, the longer the weeks went by trying to circumnavigate Brenda’s imperialism. I enjoyed looking like a magazine cover while supplicating to her at the makeup counter.

We worked at a department store.

(“—so that’s my life, okay?”)

I could see it already. I love how Brenda, with her master’s degree in Global Business Studies or whatever the fuck she majored in, has to flinch every time who I really was blinked in front of her. I bet you flinched every time you saw me shrug into your office, Brenda, no matter what you called me into your office for, because I know about the Us Weeklies you stole from the front stands—I told Accounting about them!—I know how responsive you are to young women with movie-star looks who had won the genetic lottery. I smile at you, Brenda, precisely because I know how my angelic dimples make you feel. It makes you feel like you want to protect me.

It makes you feel you need to defend your true queen.

Beauty was my one and only power over Brenda, but I can assure you I only used it sparingly (all it took was sparingly with a woman so obsessed with appearances). We don’t talk about being pretty enough, which is another way of saying we don’t talk about seeing only the appearances enough. Seeing only the appearances was how I, prior to this weekend, once saw Cape Cod. What do you know about Cape Cod anyway? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you mentally google it? I want to leave you now with an image of seagulls.

I matched with my boyfriend last September on Opal.

Now I know what you might be thinking—this whole story basically amounts to one long humblebrag about how I have an account on Opal, lol. No. First of all, I deleted that account six months ago. My boyfriend and I both did, on the same day—that was how we agreed to be serious.

Opal’s cornered the market on young attractive people who like to paraglide to remote destinations—the one and only trick it has up its sleeves is “exclusivity,” which in America is a royal flush. I’ll tell you real quick how I landed an account on Opal. A hedge-fund apparatchik I had gone on two dates with wrote me a recommendation letter after I told him I didn’t think it was going to work out between us, but did he still want to be friends? (And what do friends do?) It was his fault. He was the one who’d bragged to me about having an account on Opal in the first place. He even helped me pick out my profile pictures.

I left the Alma Mater field blank.

Opal’s about what you’d expect—videos of narcissist after narcissist who summer in Thailand. I swiped past all of the alpha males, which took days. Men who were earnest or men who were silly were the only men I could take seriously.

My boyfriend’s in that five percent of men just below the top ten percent that most women don’t know to circle the ocean for. You know the type. He’d be unstoppable if just one or two more things had gone right for him, but as it were, the wrong job, the wrong company, the wrong alma mater, had kept a handsome face trapped beneath a monthly gym membership. You’ll recognize these five-percenters from their personality—pure souls who’d lucked out facially, two sevens on the slot machine, but whose unambiguous victory had been stunted by some existential lemon. Some of them have eating disorders. Some google “male plastic surgery” in the dead of night. In my boyfriend’s case, he’s pansexual. Open-minded women have rejected him, which gives him a chip on his shoulder, and now he thinks he understands what it’s like being a minority. My boyfriend’s the type to care a lot about social issues. I’m not sure he even knows we’re interracial.

His parents have a house in Cape Cod.

His dad’s a federal judge and his mom’s an immigration attorney. Until we met and he started showing me pictures on his phone of his childhood vacation home, I had never really thought a lot about Cape Cod. I only knew it as the brand of a potato chip one step up the class ladder from Lay’s, and as a cultural metonym for white-sand beaches, old stone lighthouses, and the Kennedys. Brenda grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey, but I’m sure she must have learned at her master’s program what Cape Cod was.

Cape Cod was where she wanted to be.

And as it so happens, Brenda?

Cape Cod is me.

I wanted so desperately to tell her but I couldn’t.

I wanted so badly to inform Brenda that I had more important things to worry about than making sure the lipsticks were alphabetized, or that the powders were arranged in alternating shades of rouge and beige: namely, that a splitting image of one of the stars you read about in Us Weekly had a life to live, and she was going to enjoy the fruits of her beauty—fruits that Brenda could only live vicariously through (I tallied six missing issues of Us Weekly over the course of a year; no other magazine had gone unaccounted for during the same period except for a single issue of Better Homes & Gardens, which I found one night crumpled on top of Brenda’s desk).

The way Brenda’s eyes lit up whenever she talked about Mackenzie Davis—I just needed Brenda to recognize my own beauty in the same way! It flipped around, you see, like a head trip—sometimes Brenda bowed to her true queen, and sometimes she said mean things to me. I wasn’t thought of as “intelligent” by Brenda, and I could never tell if it was because of my race or my beauty—the two possibilities flickered around in my head like a dueling candlelight until one night I decided, “It’s both,” and just let it die.

Resentment was brewing between me and Brenda.

Ever since I realized I would have to lie to her about my Cape Cod trip, because September would be the back-to-school rush, and there was no way Brenda was okaying me those vacation days. At Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda’s first rule was: “Just be honest. I want to know everything.”

But do you, Brenda?

Do you want to know how I plan to get out of work during the back-to-school rush, because I’ll be with my boyfriend and his three Yale Law classmates traipsing across Cape Cod? Do you really want to read about a beautiful woman’s life in Us Weekly? (Just steal my diary.) I’ll call in sick. I’ll lie and cough right to your face over the phone, Brenda, and I’m telling you it’s corona. I don’t have to be honest with you about anything because you rule by fear, not trust, and in a world of fear without trust anything goes.

Fear without trust is the animal kingdom.

And Not-Quite Sephora is the animal world.

The night before my last day at Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda humiliated Ashley in the stock room. (Ashley had made the mistake of asking her for paid time off for a wedding in December.) I didn’t overhear it, but I heard about it, which was enough. I have always had a way with words, and I gave Brenda some direct evidence of it by way of a resignation letter I wrote to the district manager—only it wasn’t really a resignation letter, it was more like a record of how Karen McHiggins was a terrible supervisor, sent to Corporate and cc-ed to the entire floor. (What mattered wasn’t that I had cc-ed the entire floor, but that the next morning, every single person on the floor congratulated me.) The group chat I’m in with Ashley and Gabby pops off more than ever now ever since I quit, only I didn’t mean to quit.

I only wanted to take a truthful temperature.

Brenda showed all of her cards when I showed up to my shift the next day. “Nina? My office. Now.”

I made eye contact with Ashley, who was already in her uniform, and we both smiled.

She kind of gave me an eye hug.

I wore nude lipstick that day.

The email I had sent Corporate was subject-lined “Management’s Mismanagement,” and it listed six bullet points about Brenda’s bad behavior (one involved throwing a purse at a mannequin; the last five were instances of emotional abuse). It ended with a paragraph about Brenda’s encounter with Ashley in the stock room (Brenda had called Ashley “unlikable,” “self-absorbed,” “a fucking dipshit”).

I laid out the case like the lawyer I couldn’t afford to be (I had other interests, hobbies, and pursuits in middle school, like not killing myself). Brenda was probably shocked I could write. She was probably shocked I could read, but I wield words as weapons—that’s the only thing you ever have to know about me. (In third grade, I won the spelling bee too.)

How did I dress for work the day after I wrote “Management’s Mismanagement” (and really I should say the morning after, because I sent the email at 4 a.m. and had to wake up three hours to let an exterminator in)?

I looked like a star.

I had even spent the last six months of my life casually coaxing Brenda toward the mixed-race celebrities I wanted her to subliminally see me as. Cape Cod would smile. I’d fit in well there, because in my late forties or early fifties I’d have the sort of personality that everybody at Beach Road would know to be impressed by—I could lift my life up to heights that the bourgeois rabble couldn’t even see. Not a single one of my applications to a white-collar job had ended in a palatable offer. Not-Quite Sephora, founded in Vermont, has a labor-friendly CEO. My benefits were good—I even had vision and dental. “One way or another, I’m bringing up my Cape Cod trip,” was the last clear thought I had before knocking on Brenda’s door.

“Come in,” a harsh voice gruffed.

I opened the door.

“Close that please,” was the first thing I heard Brenda say before she and I even made eye contact.

I closed the door dutifully.

Karen McHiggins was standing next to her desk in red pants and a black blazer. She had tied her hair into pigtails that day for some reason, although her hair was so short that they ended up looking more like ringlets, and her eyes behind her glasses were blue and pixel-like. Brenda made a quick gesture at the floor with her hands, almost like she was trying to say “Enough!”, and then said: “What is going on, Nina—what is going on, because I do not understand you.”

Her voice was hoarse.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her red pants—but your blazer is black?—so I just said, “I—” while panning my gaze to her desk, waiting for her to continue.

Brenda’s desk was a mess.

Just like her thought processes.

“If you have ever had a problem with me, you could have come to me directly. What have I always told you, Nina—” Brenda was now screaming.

Brenda thinks screaming has an effect on me.

She’s right—loud noises do have an effect on me. Elevated decibels have an effect on every animal that evolves through nature. How much do I hate Brenda right now? My eyes are staring into hers—but I don’t see a human.

I see an animal.

The power of volume is that it throbs the ear—and ears desire music. Ears desire harmony. Wild animals make me forget poetry as I bolt into the jungle—how much do I hate the woman screaming into my ears right now? Well, there’s a simple formula for that, and all of us are making it, even if we don’t know that we’re making it. We take how much anxiety we experience from being around a person, and then we multiply it by a factor.

My factor is 1 when that person is equal to me.

My factor is a fraction of 1 when that person is homeless.

My factor is greater than 1 when that person is greater than me.

And for Brenda my factor was 42,137—that’s 1 for every dollar that the winds of Brenda’s turbulence lorded over me, granting me vision and dental.

The ensuing number is a hatred.

How much anxiety was Brenda creating in me? Well, for starters—how much did I distrust Brenda? (And how much did I secretly want Brenda to like me?) All the eyeliner I wore to work every day—it wasn’t for mall patrol, it wasn’t for Ashley, and Lord knows it wasn’t for Gabby.

It was for me.

But maybe a little bit of it was for Brenda.

And how much taller does Brenda tower over me right now?

And how much taller does Brenda tower over me right now? Well, let’s see—I submitted 42 job applications, all non-retail. Interviewed at 11. Final-rounded at 7. Received an offer at two—both in New York, which I couldn’t afford. A young white boy at a social media marketing firm told me during the interview that I was “obviously brilliant” before offering me an internship. By July, Brenda towered over me like a god. I fell asleep at night fantasizing about her supervillain origin story. Brenda complained so much about Americans who weren’t vaccinated that I once asked her if she was a childhood polio survivor. “Where in the world did you get that idea?” Brenda laughed, and I laughed too. “Oh, I was just curious.”“How many times have I told you, Nina…”

My expenses have been going up, thanks to my new boyfriend. (As a matter of fact, I am the type of girl to go Dutch!) Taking over Brenda’s position would mean a four-percent raise. To my surprise, Brenda took off her glasses, put them on top of a crinkled magazine on her desk, and started crying. Like, actually crying.

Two actual teardrops leaked out of her eyes.

Self-pity makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when the powerless do it, because now I have to do something, and it makes me uncomfortable when the powerful do it, because now I have to eat them. When somebody more powerful than me expresses self-pity, I can’t help it: I want to guillotine them. I want to take away their right to exist, but I want to watch them suffer first. If I were God, I’d invent Hell just for Brenda. It satisfied me that Brenda would most likely die without children or a partner. I want all capitalists in the First World to die without children or a partner, but to have afterlives that go on forever.

It still doesn’t seem enough though.

Brenda’s office has a desk, no windows, and a door that leads to the loading dock. A poster on the wall behind her desk, and I was just noticing this about her office now for the first time, was of a lighthouse in Cape Cod. “—the back-to-school rush—” Brenda was saying, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

The ceiling light was fluorescent, and the walls were built of the same beige bricks that made up my elementary school. I once applied to a master’s program in sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

I got in, too.

I hate it here in America—doesn’t anybody else? Is this really that much better than the Soviet Union?

Sympathy for Brenda?

Brenda who lorded over my vision and dental like a bureaucratic algorithm—my boss Brenda?

I did good work.

I was Brenda’s star employee! (I left that part out because I’m not the bragging type.) The only work I couldn’t charge for was the work I didn’t want to do—navigating around the runes and mysteries of Brenda’s uncharted sensitivities like Leif Erikson. The truth was, I hated Brenda for not being able to see me as a beautiful woman just because I wasn’t a beautiful white woman like the pin-up girls she’d gone to school with in New Jersey. Brenda bleeds white guilt, but she rarely ever let me massage any of it toward my favor, except superficially (and you can guess by now how I feel about superficiality). Brenda’s insincerity dehumanized her to me. We humanize each other first as leaps of faith, and then through trust—and nothing about Brenda’s way of existing suggested she could be trusted by me. Not her white guilt. Not her New Jersey liberalism.

Not even her tears.

In fact the longer Brenda cried, the more intensely I wanted to punish her—the phrase “white bitch tears” comes to mind. I wondered if Brenda sincerely didn’t understand that if I could push a button to keep her trapped inside a hole for the rest of her life, I would, and her tears only made me want to push harder. Still, it gave me a start to see—this woman who could take away my ability to not go into debt like checking “Buy Now” on Amazon—reduced before me into a person now trying to trick me into believing she has a soul.

Don’t the workers of the world understand?

Powerful people don’t have souls.

Brenda having a soul would have meant taking my ideas about the BOPUS orders seriously, and not dismissing them out of hand because how could any good ideas come from Nina, the pretty one, if Brenda’s even not-racist enough to see me as pretty (BOPUS is industry slang for “buy online, pick up in store,” and it’s basically brought Not-Quite Sephora to its knees—that and Brenda’s mismanagement). I could divide my hatred of Brenda by a factor to account for the fact that she was fat and unmarried—but whose fault was that, Krispy Kreme? Do you think I actually like exercising?

Are you ready for some real talk now?

I can tell you about the runner’s high until I’m blue in the face, but I’m not built inside like a runner—I’m built inside like a girl who understands that nothing tastes as good as being pretty feels. I don’t know how American society decayed to this point—my Ph.D. dissertation in sociology at Johns Hopkins would have been about the link between an artificial society and the importance placed on appearances, but I couldn’t afford to go, I had actual work to do in middle school (like not killing myself) so I never bothered thinking very long and hard about anything. “Quitting would mean losing my gym membership,” I suddenly remembered.

A new recognition suddenly dawned over me—no gym membership would mean no Cape Cod. It takes a couple hundred months and a couple thousands steps to get there, but trust me, I’ve worked out the odds.

(I make my brain work for me.)

I looked at the lighthouse poster behind Brenda’s desk and said: “Brenda, it’s just—how you treated Ashley last night in the stock room…”

“You weren’t even there!” was what a clear-headed Brenda would’ve said, but Brenda the Tender said nothing.

“I heard about it from Gabby,” I continued. “You know, we’ve talked about this so many times.”

“I know, I know,” Brenda whispered.

“You don’t know how to create a functional work environment sometimes. Groups are held together by trust, not fear.”

I wasn’t quitting.

I was saving everyone at Not-Quite Sephora from Brenda’s bad temper. Brenda’s boss Charles would understand—he’d say, Nina made some good points in this email, but it sounds like you guys have everything worked out, so get back to work—and everyone would move on.

Only Brenda would now be moving into the light.

She would see how her anxieties about Not-Quite Sephora’s declining sales figures were spilling into her paranoias about job security (“And what will I do with all of my competence now that I can’t find a job because I’m old, fat, and ugly?”) and have been spilling into us as sarcasm and curt dismissals ever since her second day on the job. (Her first day was lovely—I was obsessed with Brenda! I even nicknamed her “cool Mom” to Gabby and Ashley.)

How Brenda appeared to me that first day was how Cape Cod once appeared to me too, before this weekend—white-sand beaches, old stone lighthouses, the Kennedys.

Cape Cod had told me a story—and so had Brenda when she first took over Kristi’s post at Not-Quite Sephora (Kristi got pregnant and never came back). Cape Cod’s story was Yale Law, benevolence, intellectualism. Brenda’s story was that she was loud and earthy and understood how to make an entrance—if she’d been honest, she would’ve just said: “I can use my power to make you feel however I want you to feel about yourself. I’m an emotional abuser.”

But the story I heard, because I’m a gullible sweetheart, was “Fun Mom.”

I laughed along amiably to “stressed-out Mom,” bopped along bewilderedly to “not everything is functional upstairs Mom,” and—how do I put this?

I didn’t like the mother who had a master’s degree.

Self-protection was Brenda’s middle name, and nothing I said using the tools of reason or logic could penetrate the fortress of Brenda’s first impressions—that’s the definition of “closed-minded,” by the way (Brenda has a lot to say about closed-minded people—that’s the crazy part).

How we look is the first story we tell each other about who we are. It’s our audiovisual accompaniment to the words that make up the second half of our story—the “spoken half”—and everyone understands that this isn’t fair, everyone understands and then does nothing. Brenda isn’t the only person who learned how to survive in America by going to an American middle school. She’s only lost her temper at me a couple of times, but I’ve been tracking all of them.

I’ve been watching you like a falcon, Brenda.

I’ve been watching you like a true A student.

True A students are out of favor in America for a reason. We’re only mortal, but we’re a little bit supermortal too. Because what I really didn’t like about Brenda was her insincerity—“When have I ever said no to you, Nina?” Brenda was now drying her eyes with a tissue and screaming.

It was a change in the air—a subtle bit of misdirection that she probably thought I was too stupid to catch (I’m not).

I was the powerful one now.

And Brenda McHiggins was now “the victim.”

“You threatened to fire me right after Easter for being late on a BOPUS order,” I treaded carefully.

“Nina, ninety-nine percent of our Google ratings come down to the BOPUS orders—”

“Which is why I said you needed a better system for assigning roles for when people aren’t .”

“Which is why I said you needed a better system for assigning roles for when people aren’t here.”

“But I never threatened to fire you.”

“You told me you’d have my name forwarded to Charles!"

“Exactly!”

“Which is the same as getting fired!”

“That isn’t true, Nina—I would have protected you.”

This statement was so stupid that it almost broke my brain. “Wha—protected me: do you not understand how Charles operates?” Brenda turned her back to me, waved her hand in the air, and said: “I’m not going to go into this with you again” as she looked for her glasses.

“It’s right there,” I said. “On top of Better Homes & Gardens.”

“Oh,” Brenda said without acknowledging me.

Brenda put on her glasses and then sat down into the chair, which made a sound like it was about to snap in half.

This was how she always liked to berate us—from her chair. I had seen that painting of the lighthouse behind Brenda’s desk so many times—it just never occurred to me that it was Cape Cod. Sometimes, I’d overhear Brenda berating Gabby on my way to the restroom and I’d think, “Well, she isn’t wrong—Gabby is kind of stupid—but that’s still not the way you talk to her. You have to incentivize her to trust you first.” (Gabby was the one who first changed Brenda’s nickname from “Fun Mom” to that cunt with a stick up her ass.) Ashley and I burst out laughing. (What else is there to do inside a dying country?)

“Everyone here is so short-tempered with each other because you set the tone. I’ve been too afraid to ask you for three days off in September to go on a trip with my boyfriend for our one-year anniversary because I knew you weren’t going to say yes, so I was just going to take them off as sick days—and that’s not a functional work environment if people are constantly doing things like that all the time, because what you really need to do is go to Charles and ask for more staff.”

“This September—oh, Nina, you got to be kidding me!”

It was the first honest thing I ever heard Brenda say.

I thought about my naïve dream from earlier—how I thought I was going to turn Brenda around.

How I thought I was going to save the store. “The problem is we’re under_staffed_” was what I should’ve said—I get that now, I do, and I don’t know why I couldn’t wear it in my mouth even as it was trying to form in my subconscious. Because other forms were rising in me now too, forms like: “Brenda is a world-class manipulator. She butters you up just to brine you.” (I couldn’t even trust her tears, and if you can’t trust someone’s tears, you can’t trust them to ever find help.) I don’t know how I’d fare if it were just me and Brenda on a deserted island—I could see her killing a cougar for us with her own bare hands, but I could also see her killing me. “I never said that, I just told you I’d have to forward your name to Charles”—Brenda the liar. Brenda who could probably play dead about as well as she could play stupid—any falcon worth its weight in bird could see through it.

“I’ve been having issues with my boyfriend,” I suddenly blurted out.

Where had I learned this from?

Middle school.

“The anniversary trip means a lot to him, and I can’t even say yes or say no—it just hangs there over us, because he knows about the back-to-school rush. And he’s not even someone I—even feel fully comfortable with in some ways. But I’m also scared to lose him, I’m scared every time I come into work on Tuesday because I don’t know how you’re going to change my hours. Everything we do revolves around my not having enough time—I’d have issues building a perfect relationship with him if we had the rest of our lives to ourselves on a deserted island, but every weekend until closing? He works a normal job! He’s tired all the time too, but he makes time to see me and I can’t—I can’t come to you about anything.”

I didn’t cry.

But I did smile in my head:

“Wanna play victim, bitch?”

I could see Cape Cod now—I could see its lighthouse drawing my boyfriend and I closer and closer, I could see us dancing now to The Strokes at midnight like we were back in middle school because I didn’t want this to be the rest of my life, I don’t want retail, I don’t want resumes and cover letters and I don’t want to meet any more Brendas—what I want is for the Brendas of the world to collapse at my feet, but all I can see are the Brendas of the world closing in on me until death and so I need a release, I need to go back to middle school (I was popular in middle school, I can admit that now, I had bee-stung lips, and a bee-stinger too)—I need The Strokes (haven’t you ever made out with a boy in a hot tub while stroking your nails across his abs, parting the hair where his lower back begins?)—“Is this it? … Is this it?”—(my boyfriend and I swimming in the stars of our liberation, and I’ll give him all the vision and dental that he likes)—prey: always just a one-click order away (and we’ll eat lobster, because lobsters hold harms forever)—I the warm body and he the warm arms, holding me in his lanky-panky forever (and if Connor ever got a gym membership I would die—I don’t need a perfect 10, I can settle for an 8.9)—my captors: do they know? Do they understanding I’m not living my one true life? Wearing Ray-Bans while gazing out at the Atlantic from a yacht, because Comfort is my one true God—I’m ready, Mr. DeMille, for my one true closeup to begin. How am I still in Brenda’s office? I’m twenty-seven years old—how am I twenty-seven years old and still smoldering in Brenda’s office? In middle school I listened to The Strokes while everyone else listened to pop hip-hop—another Universe has been calling to me all my life. And all it would take was just a few more thousand steps to get there.

I’ve been running every day since I was thirteen. I don’t even eat my desserts correctly—I just spit and chew.

Ashley and Gabby remind me of who I was back in middle school. I had power over everyone back then except Abercrombie Couture (not her real name). Abercrombie was the class favorite—it’s hard to explain, but among the very-outgoing girls, Abercrombie was Frivolity Personified. And when only the people who needed to see it could see it, Abercrombie was the cruelest human you’ve ever met—she’d ignore you so subtly you’d drive yourself crazy for days asking the other girls if she was mad at you. Back then I had already begun telling myself I was too cool to care—but I still have nightmares about Abercrombie sometimes, about the way she’d say hi to everybody else at the party except me. “I just can’t deal with your emotional up and downs anymore, Brenda! Like I’m sorry—I’ve defended you to Ashley and Gabby so many times! I’m sick of having these conversations with them.”

Abercrombie, I later realized during college, must have been unsettled by how candidly I could talk about her behind her back. That was my little power over her, and I’d like to think I wielded it gracefully. (Abercrombie was dethroned by a lurid sex scandal involving a used condom in eighth grade, and I’d like to believe I led our class to a more open and inclusive place after her dismissal.)

“Three days—where you trying to go, Wuhan?”

“No. The Cod.”

“The what?”

“The Cod.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Massachusetts.”

“You mean Cape Cod?”

That was how quickly I realized I had fumbled the ball—that was the speed at which I realized I had fumbled the fuck-you—the one thing I needed to do correctly and I had fumbled the ball trying to cross the finish line. “It’s the Cape, not the Cod sweetie,” Brenda was already huffing to me by the time I realized my mistake, with a smile on her face. She’ll deny it to this day, and in absolute candor I can’t really say it was a “physical” smile—I don’t remember what it looked like, I don’t remember if Brenda actually huffed or if she even moved her mouth all that much at all, it was more in the eyes, but that bitch smiled.

I grew up in Nevada.

My boyfriend graduated from Yale Law and with him I can see a way out of my life—and I really don’t understand why that’s such a terrible thing to say. And I’m about to lose him—it’s in between the lines, but I can just feel it, I have him wrapped around my little finger because that’s the only way I’d ever have any man who loomed so tall over me, with him it’d be Cape Cod until the end of my days and nobody would ever laugh at me for calling it the Cod again—I’ll just rename it.

My hatred of Brenda in that moment was rivaled only by my childhood hatred of Abercrombie Couture.

But I knew I had to proceed gingerly.

I began to feel like Leif Erikson again—what other uncharted sensitivities do you have, Brenda?

Do white people really have white guilt?

Verbalizing the subconscious is like navigating by stars—Pequod knows where it’s trying to go, it just needs the conscious mind to plot out the steps to get there first—only I couldn’t verbalize any of this, all I could do was feel the mind for throbs like the twitches of a rat’s tail inside the forest below—and I was throbbing for a release, I was throbbing all my middle-school embarrassments, I was throbbing Cape Cod. A woman who understood nothing but appearances stood in front of me, utterly preoccupied with her own self-preservation—neither wise, open-minded, nor beautiful—but who could mean the difference between me and my income, between me and my livelihood, between me and my boyfriend breaking up (which would mean the difference between me and Cape Cod)—and I couldn’t even get anyone on the second floor to take her magazine theft seriously. How do I even begin to tabulate all her subtle knife-wounds to the psyche?

My favorite song by The Strokes?

“Hard to Explain.”

“You can correct the way I say things all you’d like, but it doesn’t change the fact that I live in fear of you—okay? I go home every night and cry. You bully Ashley and Gabby every day but I’m not Ashley or Gabby—okay? You have not created an emotionally safe environment in the workplace and it’s affecting my life—okay? I’m sorry you take yourself so seriously, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with your fear that all the girls who thought you’d never amount to anything in middle school might be right, but if you have to terrorize other people just to feel better about yourself, that’s not how I roll—okay? That’s not me. The way you talk to Ashley, Gabby, Mike, Chris—it’s un-ac-cep-ta-ble, Brenda.”

And this is where my ship was trying to go:

“I don’t think you belong in your position. So that’s what I told Charles.”

I’d set fire to Cape Cod if I could.

I’d set fire to my boyfriend’s lake house, I’d set fire to Brenda’s Us Weeklies, and I’d certainly set fire to the poster of the lighthouse with seagulls behind Brenda’s desk.

“I don’t work here anymore. Not until you apologize to Ashley,” I added quickly.

My speech was now outpacing my life decisions.

“And I’m not going to be manipulated by you anymore, okay? Because you know how hard I work, you know how much I give to this store every day but Wannabe-Nordstrom isn’t my life, okay? I am not living the life I want to live every single day—so that’s my life, okay?”

Were ordinary people in the Soviet Union this unhappy? Has anyone ever bothered to ask them?

The only thing I ever knew how to do around Brenda was say whatever I needed to say to make her feel comfortable.

Like seagulls exploding out of a cove, that was the only thing Brenda ever seemed to value: her personal comfort. I don’t remember how Brenda looked in that moment. She kept darting her eyes between Better Homes & Gardens and the floor, and her glasses were foggy. I gazed at Brenda with a falcon’s stare and said:

“Think of last night as my last straw.”

It’d be worth it, you know.

It’d be worth it to suspend my gym membership for a few months to see Brenda have to swallow the fruits of her own disorder. I hadn’t coaxed Brenda into reacting the way she did to Ashley’s request—I had only coaxed Ashley into talking to her, and that was a sincere act of friendship: “You have to stand up for yourself with people like that, Ashley.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Brenda and you are like best friends.”

“We are not.”

“You have her wrapped around your little finger, Nina.”

“No I don’t,” I said, and then I hit Ashley’s face with a big fat pillow until feathers fell out, which of course never happened because Ashley and I don’t have open and honest conversations about anything. All Ashley said was “You’re probably right,” and I could sense in Ashley’s eyes that she was perceptive enough to understand I was probably wrong—but even I couldn’t pick that up, at least not consciously, so in a way, Ashley doomed herself by failing to correct me.

I was Brenda’s star employee and everybody knew it.

I’ve been an A student all my life.

I’m the picture of good anger management.

Management hates it when you quit. That’s the one thing you can still lord over them, even during a recession (and July 2022 in America was anything but)—replacing an employee costs time, and time is money. Every store manager knows that—even Brenda (her management woes don’t source back to her inability to optimize).

And then Brenda said something so stupid that for a second I almost thought she was parodying Gabby.

“I thought you and I could speak openly to each other.”

Brenda.

Girl.

Just because you tell me about the medications you take for your back problems doesn’t mean we’re friends.

Was this really happening right now?

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I told Brenda. “I did speak openly in the email.”

Was Brenda really buying into Ashley’s delusion that management and workers can be just friends?

Or was she just calculating that I—because I’m pretty—was stupid enough to buy into it too?

“Actually, no—the way you engage with others doesn’t seem intended to provide a pathway for sincere and open conversations. You have a ‘No Assholes’ policy that seems intended to make other people suppress their true feelings around you at all times, because anybody who contradicts you is automatically an asshole.”

I didn’t say that.

I just said: “It can be intimidating to speak to you sometimes.”

Even when you try to laugh with me about your muscle relaxants, I laugh back, but what I really want to say is “Brenda, a certain percentage of the population is going to have back problems, and you have given me no particular reason to care about yours.” I think again now about if Brenda and I were stuck on a deserted island. I’d probably have to save her life from the elements from time to time, and that’d build trust between us. “What we’d need to do is charter a plane somewhere, and have the plane crash. That’s the only way to resuscitate this relationship.”

“How many times have I told you, Nina, you can come to me about anything…” and before I could even respond, Brenda began comparing our dynamics to a mother-daughter relationship and I was one second away from saying, “Bitch, that’s your problem,” but I caught myself and said calmly:

“Brenda, that’s the problem.”

Brenda looked at me earnestly.

“Just, that right there—the word you used. I don’t think you really understand other people’s boundaries? I tell you obligatory anecdotes from my personal life because you specifically ask to hear them, not because I want to volunteer them—again, that’s how afraid I am of you, Brenda, because I don’t even feel like I have the right to tell you that my dating history is, actually, now that I think about it, none of your business. And then you lecture me about how I talk to my boyfriend? Again, because you asked to hear the details, and you actually make it so that now I’m thinking about my boyfriend at work instead of focusing on my job, which you then get mad at me for? I don’t think you really understand, Brenda, how your friendliness comes off when it’s mixed with so much—neediness, I don’t know, this need to control everything all the time—to make everything perfect.”

The first time I ever met Brenda, we got along so well that after our shift we went to a Red Lobster on the other side of the strip mall, where she bought me three milkshakes. I told her about growing up with my mom in a trailer park in Nevada and she told me about growing up with her mom in a trailer park in New Jersey—we laughed a lot that night. I don’t even remember what we laughed about, but we were both talkers, Brenda and I, we were both tellers, and we were both showers. I could tell after my first milkshake that Brenda must have floated in the margins of the sub-popular crowd in middle school, and she all but confirmed it on the second (she just had one of those I’ve seen it all energies).

“So how does it feel being back in the Northeast?”

“Honestly?” Brenda said, grabbing a French fry. “I’m ready.”

You couldn’t hear the ocean from where we were sitting, but you could hear a highway.

I understand Brenda.

I really do.

Sometimes at night, while I fantasized about quitting a company whose Corporate was famous for giving their employees vision and dental (and anyway, what else would I do besides marketing or retail? In what other way might I be called upon to serve the good people of America?), I’d climax with an image of Brenda sitting alone at home on a Thursday night (that was Brenda’s day off), crocheting to Fleetwood Mac, with a cat rubbing up against her ankle. The only mystery was how many paintings of beaches dotted her apartment.

I know Brenda doesn’t talk to her mother anymore (“Neither do I!” was probably one of our first laughs), and I’d fantasize about how much she probably secretly admired me—because I was pretty—because I could always talk my way into classes and parties she could only stare through the curtains of (I once helped Brenda create an account on Plenty of Fish), and now it was too late for her because she was already in her late forties or early fifties—and I?

I was bound for Cape Cod.

“What are the locals there like,” all summer long I used to wonder. I work at a Nordstrom now.

And I no longer wonder.

“Oh, sweetie—it’s called the Cape, not the Cod.”

Wasn’t that how she had said it?

Even in her most helpless moment, she was still so condescending—she was still just so frivolously condescending—I mean think about the stakes here, girl, you’re about to lose your star employee right before the back-to-school rush—was the poison dart worth it?

Was the poison tip worth it, Brenda?

“I don’t think it’s healthy for me to work here anymore,” I suddenly blurted out. “You’re not a good influence on me.”

“What can I say to make you stay just through September?”

It was so quick and direct that it snapped me instantly out of my sympathy spell.

Brenda.

There’s the Brenda I knew—Brenda, you’re back!

And you’re still holding onto threads in the air.

This store will dissipate, Brenda. Your job will dissipate, and then you’ll have to go right back out there again and sell your competence at another round on the roulette wheel. (Just don’t end up at another store that sells beauty supplies, Brenda—I don’t think you quite understand what they’re really telling the world.) “I don’t think there’s anything you can say, Brenda. I know how hard the last few months have been for you, and I thought very long and hard about doing this to you. But I have to prioritize my own mental health.”

“You know Charles is only giving me a year.”

Brenda said this with a vulnerability I had never heard from her before.

Her voice was like a child’s.

Guilt—it’s impossible to summon it for a person you’ve already dehumanized. Cockroaches die every day.

My subconscious was churning again—I would have a child with my boyfriend someday, and I would protect her from people like you, Karen McHiggins. “Brenda, you have the mental age of a child,” was what I really wanted to say to her. “When I fuck up at work, who do you think I go to? Nobody—do you understand that, Brenda, because adults take responsibility for their shit.”

But I would have to sugarcoat it, because someone with the mental age of an Abercrombie would be unable to understand that the powerful can’t be friends with the powerless, no matter how hard they tried—and someone with the mental age of an Abercrombie would also need everything sugarcoated for them.

“Brenda, I don’t know how to break this to you but there isn’t going to be any back-to-school rush! It’s not 2019 anymore—Covid killed retail. We don’t know whether we want to be bargain basement or high-end and the middle class is dead, everyone wants either a bargain or an experience! What did they teach you in that master’s program?”

Only I couldn’t say that either, because Brenda would somehow spin it into me losing my cool, which is the one thing I never do—I’ve been one thing and one thing only all my life, and that’s an A student.

“You’ve given your life to a dinosaur, Brenda—move on. Department stores are dead—this isn’t the ’80s anymore. Your image of America—it’s a façade, and I can prove it. It’s that picture of the lighthouse you keep behind your desk that you pilfered from returned merchandise, and I can prove that too. We’re like explorers in an uncharted land. Things are going to fall apart for us in ways we have no templates for, just like they did for all of the generations before us—only they weren’t as trapped inside the façade of returned merchandise as we are! Settled mores are changing. This century could still look like anything—it’s all up for grabs, and more and more people are just beginning to wake up to this new dawn. Maybe what you really need to do is start a YouTube channel. You have the voice for it, you have the charisma, and you have the storytelling abilities—we could all profit from hearing from your perspective, only nobody will because you’re not young, thin, or beautiful, but hey—it’s worth a shot! You’ll have a better chance there at the lighthouse than you do in retail.”

Only I didn’t say any of this either, because I knew Brenda couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Brenda was dead between the eyes—her soul died in middle school, and she’s been dragging the corpses of would-be lives ever since.

“You’re not a particularly smart or competent person, Brenda, and what’s happening right now speaks for itself. You didn’t just get unlucky, Brenda.”

Brenda once whistled to me when she saw me change into a sundress as I was leaving my afternoon shift—“Whose heart are you breaking tonight, Nina?”

“None of your business!” was what I wanted to tell her, but I wanted to let Brenda live vicariously through me—it was the only gentleness I could ever offer her.

“You know Charles is only giving me the year,” Brenda had said, and she was staring into the void now. I could feel her back pain. She had given her whole entire life to Not-Quite-Sephora, six days a week, and on most nights on my way to the restroom I could hear “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac playing from a small Bluetooth speaker. I looked at Brenda and said: “I have no idea what you want from me. It’s not my job to make you look any better than you are at your job. And I don’t know what your agreement with Charlie has to do with anything—in fact, I had lunch with him the other day.”

Brenda lifted her eyes.

“What?” she said stupidly.

“Oh, I’m sorry—I was trying to get a vacation approved. No, Brenda. I needed to talk to him about a few things.”

“What things?”

And then, before I could offer an answer, “What are you trying to say, Nina? Just spit it out!”

“You have a problem, okay? I’ve seen the way you’ve unraveled in the last few months—Gabby and Ashley are afraid of you, Chris is about to quit, literally nobody can handle your emotional volatility anymore. Everybody’s so short-tempered with each other all the time and coming to me for help, and it’s not my job to help them—that’s your job! You’ve created a situation where nobody can even talk to you. We just smile at you out of fear. You don’t command anybody’s respect—you know that, right? So we basically have to operate without a supervisor—you understand that, don’t you?”

It feels good to eat.

I no longer have a gym membership anymore. Instead, I jog every Tuesday and Friday at the public park.

“So yeah—so I guess I just thought it was about time Charlie heard all of this. He’s actually very reasonable if you talk to him in a reasonable way. He said he’d look into opening one or two more positions for us to cover the weekends. But you probably won’t be there to oversee it.”

Not-Quite Sephora was founded as a regional competitor to J.C. Penney in 1991. It never expanded beyond the Northeast, Minnesota, and California, and it’s about to die—it’s only a matter of time. Unless if maybe Corporate in Burlington saw the light and hired someone like me and actually listened to her ideas for turning all of their stores into “experiences,” which is what I’ve been trying to tell Brenda every time she questioned one of my lipstick arrangements. A lot of what I miss about middle school is the taste-test of freedoms I enjoy every day now as an adult: you build a friendship with the highest person who’ll take you in.

That’s how you climb a hierarchy.

Brenda looked at me like a wounded animal.

There really isn’t ambiguity, is there, about which one of us would survive if it were just you and me on a deserted island. A new recognition was forming inside of Brenda, and I didn’t want to be there to watch it settle in—you can’t treat people like you treated Ashley the other night in the stock room, this isn’t the ’80s anymore. Of course, Brenda was too obtuse to work out that I was only bluffing. The truth was, I had talked to Charlie briefly on the second floor, but he just told me to “put it all in an email,” and I knew he was never going to speak to Brenda long enough to ever contradict anything I had just said—Charlie’s not exactly the open type. Besides, Charlie did agree to look into hiring more part-timers, the way Charlie ever agrees to anything—by pretending it was his idea all along. “It’s the unreliability of when customers come in, that’s the problem,” Charlie had explained to me. (“Yes, that’s true. Unreliability is always the problem,” I told Charlie.)

You can’t rely on other people’s testimony when you ask them about Abercrombie Couture.

You have to come to me.

I’ve seen sides of Abercrombie that nobody else has.

“So what’s the dating scene like out here?” Brenda had asked me that first night at Red Lobster, while popping a French fry. I remember trying not to look at Brenda like she was serious. “It’s just men!” I remember laughing to Brenda in front of two tall glasses of milkshake. “It’s just a bunch of men—that’s the only way I know how to put it!”

And then Brenda in her black blazer and black pants laughed too.

Like we were girlfriends.

“I would’ve given you those vacation days, Nina,” Brenda finally said in a whisper. “If I had just understood that you knew what you were doing when you took them—what you were doing to the store—I would’ve given them to you.”

A new sincerity is trying to grow in the air all around us—I can hear its infant-screams, can’t you? (Couldn’t Brenda?) “Oh my God, Brenda. This is about so much more than whether or not I can go on one trip to Cape Cod.”

“That is all this is about to you, Nina, and don’t you pretend otherwise—”

“No, it isn’t.”

“—because you have a fancy boyfriend now.”

“Leave Connor out of this.”

I don’t really know where my life’s going to go after Cape Cod. Colson’s mental health—it causes collateral damage to people (Colson was one of Connor’s three friends that had stayed with us at the lake house). I don’t really think he understands that his actions have consequences on other people. He thinks I’m one of the popular kids who terrorized him in middle school, but the truth is—I’m just a little bit higher or lower on the pecking order than he is. All of us are—all of us down here. I can’t really bring myself to fully hate him for what he did, but then I remember what his life is and I do—I hate him by several orders of magnitude more than I ever hated Brenda. And what Colson and Brenda both have in common, of course, is their dripping self-pity: they’re both absolutely lacquered in it (what is it about competitive social environments that produces so much self-pity anyway, dripping like honey?). I didn’t have too much compassion for Colson when he asked me to feed some of his honey back to him with my fingers. “Money,” I wanted to tell him.

“How much money you have is an easy way to tabulate what your self-pity is worth to me.”

But to be honest, I couldn’t even lift a finger to care.

Cape Cod was only four days ago, but it’s already just another memory now—that’s how all of our weekends are bound to end. Several hundred more of these and then it’s lights out. Connor and I listened to the first season of Serial on the way up, and as we walked through Martha’s Vineyard later that afternoon, we saw fifty migrants from South America file onto a bus bound for a military installation.

There were cameras and cake everywhere.

We’re all participants in this gladiatorial contest to see who ends up in Cape Cod as the sun sets over our lives.

Colson recently wrote a book called A Stick of Dynamite in the American Elite.

I wish him luck.

I have plans for him, you know.

No matter what his next chess move is—I have a plan to stop him. I left Brenda alone in her office that day. I never learned where she went after she was dismissed from Not-Quite Sephora, all I remember is Ashley and Gabby coming over to hug me as I grabbed my purse from the break room, and they both quit two days later. It was because there’s something in my soul that doesn’t like to see other people are in pain—even people without souls like Brenda (Colson doesn’t count because he’s not really a human in my eyes, he’s more like a bad anecdote you shake off)—that I found myself hugging Brenda right before I said goodbye, holding her as she kept saying to me that I’d been like a daughter to her: “Brenda—Brenda, listen to me. My boyfriend has an ex-boyfriend whose stepmom also has a drinking problem, okay? Brenda—are you listening to me? They live in Westport…”

Cape Cod will die.

It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. I sail America’s values like Leif Erikson now—other people have built their homes and comforts here, but I don’t mind. I wonder sometimes what Abercrombie Couture anesthetizes her listlessness to these days—HBO? Unsubtle affairs with younger men? “How long before mundane dehumanization bears fruit?” I smile to myself every day at Nordstrom, as I walk around the counter to deliver my customer’s parcels to them personally.

I see Abercrombie sometimes in the eyes of the women I help at Nordstrom. They’re all moms, and if that’s the final meaning of our lives—then yes, I agree.

Let’s all be moms.

You don’t know the Hell I’ll reign over America’s guilty class in the twenty-first century, but you will soon: I will mother the destruction of America’s guilded gilts into existence. I broke up with Connor this morning. Something about his reaction to Colson’s breakdown in Cape Cod just didn’t sit well with me—he couldn’t see through Colson’s insincerity, and that makes me think he might not have what it takes in this life to go where I’m trying to go. At my new job at the mall, I nibble on old memories like a woman who hasn’t eaten now in years. The last person I ate was my narcissistic mother in Nevada—she ruined my childhood—she was the Leif Erikson of my formative years—but then again?

So was my middle school.

College feels like a million years ago. My sorority sisters are all married with kids now. Mothers will do anything to protect their young.

#MeToo.

2022

[wonwoosthetic]

series masterlist

word count - 2.1k

pairing - minnie x mingyu (feat. wonwoo at the end)

summary - mingyu thought to have found the perfect chairs for their new apartment… much to minnie’s dismay

a/n - as I went through my mimiwon google poll, a lot of you guys asked for more domestic scenarios and since I also once asked if you'd be okay with short writings, I thought I could post this as well :) just a little something I came up with back when I saw one of their chairs in Mingyu's live haha, kinda random but I hope you like it! <3

Chairs 🌷 Minnie

"Nini!" The familiar loud voice bounced off the walls of their apartment. The female member was sunken into the couch, her laptop propped up on her lap. She had thrown on a slightly thicker sweatshirt due to the colder weather, with a short shirt underneath, knowing she'd probably take off the first layer later in the day.

Each one of the three had been busying themselves separately for the time until their manager would pick them up and bring them to the company's building for their scheduled practice.

"What?" She shouted back at her fellow '97 Liner, who had been in his room, but his quick footsteps suddenly echoed through the hall until they stopped in the living room, right by the couch. Dressed in simple grey sweats and a white shirt - almost a signature look of his.

Mingyu grinned at the girl. "Look at your phone." Said device was on the coffee table, face down to not distract her from the very serious shopping spree Minnie was currently indulging in.

Her eyebrows scrunched together in confusion as she glanced to the side, up at the taller member. "You're standing right next to. Show me."

"No," he shook his head, "look at your phone."

Not wanting to start a pointless argument in the middle of the day, she leaned forward with a slight sigh to snatch her phone off the surface. Turning it around, the notification she had heard only a few seconds ago was beaming right in her eyes. With one quick click and the face-id feature, the group chat the three dormmates had created after moving in together opened. Mingyu's message, a picture, was right at the bottom. "The chair?" She thought out loud. The rapper had sent a screenshot from a website, showing a white woven chair. As all three of them were getting ready to move into the new place they had chosen to rent, the hunt for new furniture had begun. Some of their old stuff, they'd of course bring along, but as their current apartment was slightly smaller, they'd have a lot more space to fill in the future. Some of that space would be filled with a new and bigger dining table, that would ideally have chairs as well.

Mingyu nodded excitedly. "I just ordered them."

The girl's head snapped towards him, her lips slightly parted. "Huh?"

"Four of them. But I think six might be smarter. For more people, right?"

"You didn't order them." Her statement was possibly supposed to come out as a question, but it surely didn't sound like one. As she took a quick peek back at the picture an almost chuckle fell from her lips.

"I did," he repeated, nodding once again. With a few steps forward, the '97 Liner sat down next to her, grunting as he let himself fall onto the sofa.

"No, you didn't," each time, Minnie tried to convince herself of the fact that this man just admitted to buying four, almost six, of those garden stools, only for them to be put into their new dining space.

"I really did," Mingyu chuckled, not catching up with her distressed reaction. "Look," he held up his phone screen, "We have a similar dining table and it looks good," showing her a picture on the original website.

"But..." The female member stopped herself, "Why did you order them?"

"We said we'd go for a European style, so... you don't like them?" Finally, he had caught onto it.

Minnie could only shake her head, her eyebrows scrunched up apologetically as she locked eyes with him.

"What? Why not?" The rapper gasped.

She shrugged, "They don't look good."

"Yes, they do," he glanced back down at the screen, "If you sit on them, you'll feel like you're in Greece."

"Why would I want to feel like I'm sitting in Greece when I'm in my dining room? Maybe for the terrace, but definitely not for inside!" The girl started arguing.

"You said you liked the European style," Mingyu commented back, his voice getting slightly louder in annoyance.

"Yeah, European as in like... Scandinavian. Not beach style. This isn't cute for a dining room."

He shook his head, pushing himself back to stand up. "Look at them once they're here, and then maybe you'll like them. How would you know that now?"

Minnie was quick to shake her head, her laptop already back on the coffee table. "No, because I don't like this style in general. And my mom's an interior designer, I think I have a pretty good eye then."

He shrugged, "Maybe you don't."

The female member scoffed, thinking for a second if she should continue that exact conversation, but decided against it. "Why would you even order them without asking us first? I ask you guys about everything too!"

"You didn't when you ordered that knife set," Mingyu pointed out, on his way to the kitchen, but turned around when he noticed the serious stance the girl had taken.

"Are you serious?!" She huffed out, "What's bigger? The only four chairs at the dining table or three knives out of many more that we'll have?"

"But I'm gonna use the knives the most probably," he argued. A good point, but Minnie wasn't going to admit that in the heat of the moment.

"I'm gonna use them too!"

"Yeah, but me too! And you didn't ask me about them," he stated, now walking back to open the fridge door, and getting the bottle of water he was looking for. 

"Okay!" The female member shot up from her place on the sofa, palms up. "Go and ask Wonwoo what he thinks of the chairs."

The oldest of the three was on the better end of the situation as he had been sitting at his gaming set-up for the past two hours. The noise-cancelling headphones being the biggest blessing as they kept him guarded off every single word that came from the '97 Liners.

"He said he doesn't care about the furniture. And," he added sheepishly, "he actually likes the European style."

"Mingyu! This isn't European!" Minnie whined out loud, holding her face in her hands. A frustrated sigh tumbled from her lips. She took a deep breath, trying to collect herself and not get too riled up over some chairs he had ordered, but he was really testing her. 

"You know what?" With her phone in her hands, she started to make her way away from the couch and over to the small hallway that would eventually lead to the gamer's room. "I'll go and ask him since you clearly don't understand why this is-" 

"Wait-"

The girl's rant was quickly interrupted when the taller member got a hold of her arm, pulling her in, making her back hit his chest and keep her from walking further.

"Let me go!" She fought against his tight embrace. But with no luck. "Mingyu, I swear to God-"

He tightened his arms around her, "Just listen to me-"

"Let me go and I'll listen," Minnie argued, stopping her frantic movements to try and shake him off.

"No, look-"

"I'm not listening."

The rapper sighed, "You'll go running as soon as I let go of you."

"No, I won't," she scoffed, turning her head to look up at Mingyu, only to find him with a smirk plastered on his face.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yes." She spoke quietly, closing her eyes and nodding her head in etiquette.

As genuine as she sounded, the '97 Liner had known her for long enough to know how good of a romancer she had become, knowing just how to use her words and facial expressions for her benefit. 

He grinned, "But listen to me first-"

"Mingyu! NO!" The girl started giggling in his arms, her hands coming up to wrap around his wrists, trying to push them off, which laughing only made it harder than it already was. "Leave me alone."

"Promise you won't go running off to Wonwoo-hyung," he tried to argue with her, a smile still evidently on her face, as well as on hers now.

Minnie rolled her eyes with a chuckle, "Sure, whatever, I promise. Just let me go," whining the last part out loud, trying to free herself with one last wiggle of her shoulders.

"That doesn't sound very convincing," Mingyu laughed at her attempt, only tightening his grip and pulling her deeper into him, getting a groan from the female member in return. 

Her head snapped back, her hair tickling his chin for a split second. 

"I'll scream." She suddenly threatened, getting a chuckle and 'tsk' in return. "You don't believe me?"

"Minnie-"

"OPPA-!" Her shrill voice echoed through the open room and hallway, only to be cut off within a second by Mingyu's big hand covering her mouth.

"Are you crazy?!" He glanced down at her with wide eyes, genuinely surprised by the sudden outburst. "What are the people underneath us gonna think?"

"I told you, I'd do it." He could feel her grinning underneath his palm, making him roll his eyes. His hand left her face before turning her body around in his embrace, now chest to chest with the smiling girl peeking up at him

"You're really annoying sometimes," he commented, not able to hold back copying her expression with the way she was looking at him.

With a finger to his chest, she blinked up, "But only sometimes," her lips curling into a sheepish smile.

Minnie patted the big muscle underneath his top, "Cancel the order," fluttering her eyelashes extra much, "Please."

"Maybe."

Her act immediately fell, her arms dropping down to her sides while his was still around her shoulder.

"But-" she was once again cut off, only this time by the messenger sounds from both of their phones. He reached into his back pocket, giving the girl the possibility to wiggle out of his embrace, now standing in front of him with her arms crossed.

After one quick look at the screen, he spoke up again. "We have to go." Informing her that the manager was probably already waiting for them downstairs.

"Cancel the order first," the female member didn't back down, continuing her argument.

Mingyu sighed, "Later." Before turning around to get to the front door to put on his shoes and jacket, "Get Wonwoo-hyung."

"Mingyu, cancel it, I'm serious. They're ugly," she continued, but he glanced passed her and raised his voice to call out for the older member, who was already coming out of the door to his gaming room, fixing the sweater he was wearing.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm here," he passed the girl, joining Mingyu in the hallway. Minnie looked at him almost offended. "You didn't hear me when I called out for you but when he does it you're up in a second?" Putting the fact that he was probably not wearing his headphones anymore these few seconds ago.

"When did you call for me?" Wonwoo wondered, crouching down to get his left foot into the sneaker.

The girl scoffed with a chuckle, walking up to him, "Wow... good to know you wouldn't hear if I was getting murdered."

Mingyu rolled his eyes with a sigh when the '96 Liner glanced at her in confusion and slight concern at the same time.

"Don't say stuff like that," reaching out to tap her chin. Minnie just shook her head and moved to her own pair of shoes in the corner.

The younger rapper was waiting for her, already in his outerwear, holding out his hand with her jacket in his grip. Without a word, she snatched it from him.

"You're being overdramatic," he commented, grazing a hand over her head of hair.

"Cancel the order, and I won't be," she shrugged off his statement, brushing past him to get to the door, but with his much longer legs, he had caught up with her, getting a hold of the handle first. He opened it and motioned for her to walk out first, chuckling even before his answer dropped from his tongue.

"Maybe later."

"Mingyu-" she turned back around, ready to smack him, only to be pushed further out the door by Wonwoo rolling his eyes in amusement behind her.

You better bet she was sulky about the situation during their practice session as well. And maybe the multiple times she then stepped on Mingyu's foot weren't all that accidental after all.

Taglist: @waosobii @chaebb @lunarxsun @hoe4wonwoo @kimhyejin3108 @soobzao @billboard-singer @cosmicwintr @zwiehe @alixnsuperstxr @angie-x3 @smooore @allthings-fandoms

#minnie 🌷 #seventeen #seventeen oc #seventeen 14th member #mimiwon #minmi #mingyu #wonwoo #fluff #kpop #Addition #kpop oc

[bitchinbarzal]

#46 with luke

“Stop being a fucking prick”

-

Milo’s birth had been the best kept secret of Michigan.

You honestly thought Mackie would’ve spilled the beans at one point.

You were cautious when Ethan left to play in Jersey. With Luke having left the year prior and Milo being a couple months old now, you waited for the

how come you had my baby and I didn’t know? text.

It never came.

So, you carried on with life. You were close to graduating and looking for a job. Not having a job after graduation wasn’t an option at this point, being a mom was expensive.

“Hey, you wanna go watch the Red Wings Devils game this Saturday? Eddy says that he can get us tickets” Mark asked, shouting through the house.

“I’m down but we’ll have to take Milo because his babysitter is out of town”

“Eddy also said ‘tell her she better bring Milo because I miss him’” you laughed, always one step ahead.

At almost a year old, the little boy was beginning to develop noticeable features from his parents. He had Luke’s hair and nose while he had your eyes. He hadn’t fully developed a smile yet but the way he gave his gummy half smiles with a certain slant you knew they’d be just like Luke’s.

Dressed up in his Devils jersey, a gift from Ethan when he left. Milo had been to so many hockey games in his short little life, being a common spectator at Yost.

While Luke wasn’t in the picture you still wanted to bring those certain aspects of him around Milo. You took him to hockey games, you celebrated certain Jewish holidays with him (after a lot of googling). People thought it strange, you hadn’t told Luke by choice but wanted to keep him around.

Your reasoning sounded stupid to some but others understood where you were coming from. Luke broke up with you after loosing out again at Frozen Four.

The devils organization were there in Tampa. Luke had signed before he even got out of his jersey.

He told you it wouldn’t work, how you were going to be too far apart and that he wanted to experience life as a rookie in New Jersey with a fresh start.

You planned to tell him that night, you were pregnant. You never got the chance. Instead, you nodded and wished him well in Jersey.

You then didn’t tell anyone for months until you were all leaving for the summer and you bid your goodbyes very tearfully. You weren’t sure what would happen next year, if you’d ever be back in Michigan with your friends.

You told them, they dragged it out of you and you made them promise to not tell Luke.

It was awfully quiet at the lake house that summer.

Everyone had brought their partners and Luke was alone for the first time in years, he felt lonely. He missed you. He screwed up.

“Have you got his bag? His ear defenders? Oh did I pack snacks? What about-“

“You gotta calm down, what’s up with you?” Mark stopped you, taking milo out of your arms and looking at you bordering on tears.

“This is the first time I’m gonna see him Mark, I thought I could do it-“

“You can! Luke knows nothing about Milo and I’m sure he won’t even notice us there. I’m right here with you”

His words of encouragement calmed you, nodding in agreement and making your way to the car.

It was a busy night and Milo was loving all of the attention he was getting from random people that passed, all waving and smiling at him.

“C’mon buddy let’s go find Ethan and get your first NHL puck” Mark announced, taking him from your arms and walking down the stairs to ice level.

You watched people skate by that you recognized; Jack and Dawson both from your visits to Jersey with Luke, a few Red wings players who had been in contact with Mark over the year with the team showing interest in signing him come graduation.

Eventually you found #73.

“Look Milo, who’s that?!” You pointed and his eyes followed to Eddy who had stopped right infront of you.

His eyes lit up, babbling and slapping the glass in front of him at his uncle.

“Hey buddy I missed you!” Ethan shouted, smiling down at him.

You were too consumed in the people around you, you hadn’t noticed a certain defenseman watching from the crease in utter disbelief.

Luke’s heart broke. You had moved on, with his old teammate and friend and now you even had a baby.

Jack skated into his little brother, almost knocking him over “Yo, what’s up with you? Move!”

Luke just pointed ahead of him and Jack’s mouth fell open when he saw it “Holy shit!”

Luke just pushed away from his brother, shaking his head and making his way back to the locker room.

When the game started Milo fell asleep leaving you and Mark to enjoy. Sometime after the second period started he began crying softly and you decided to take him on a walk around in an attempt to calm him again.

“I’ll be back” you whispered to mark.

“Sure you don’t want me to take him?”

“Nah I’ve got it, text me if anything exciting happens and if Eddy gets in a fight film it”

You were bouncing up the stairs, Milo starting to hush now smiling up at you “Hi cheeky boy, you’re just tired huh?”

Just before you could exit to the concourse you heard your name being called, turning to see The Hughes.

oh shit.

“Oh my goodness, I haven’t seen you in forever!” Madison, Jack’s girlfriend said while standing up from her seat to hug you “How have you been?! You have a baby now?”

You felt overwhelmed, a flush landing across your cheeks “Yeah, yeah I know it’s been a while!”

“He’s so cute! Hi little man” she cooed, her finger swiping across his cheek while he smiled a gummy smile.

You looked over at the rest of the family, they looked conflicted and your heart was racing.

“I should be going-“

“Luke’s hair was that light when he was that age, it’ll get darker” Ellen said, looking straight at you.

You’d been caught.

You bit your lip “I didn’t-“

“We’re here now, no point causing a scene for something we can’t change. You’ve got my number sweetheart call me when you get back to Ann Arbor and we’ll talk” she was always so good at getting her point across.

You nodded with a slight smile “Do you want to hold him?”

You could see their eyes light up “Please?” “Of course”

Milo groaned when he lost contact of you but soon situated nicely in his grandma’s arms while she doted over him.

Madison hugged you tightly now your arms were free and mumbled in your ear “You’re so strong for doing this alone”

Down in the locker room in the second break Luke was fuming. Since seeing you all he saw was red.

When everyone had filed out back onto the ice Ethan pulled Luke back “What’s wrong with you dude?”

“What’s wrong with me?! You knew Mark and Y/N had a baby and you never fucking told me!”

Ethan looked confused “Mark and Y/N? Milo isn’t Mark’s son you moron! Is that what you’re so upset about? You’ve been missing easy passes because of that?!”

“Because of that?!” Luke mocked him

“Yes it’s because of that! How would you feel?!”

Ethan chuckled humourlessly “You left her Hughesy don’t get it twisted”

“You don’t get it!”

“Oh I get it plenty, you’re jealous now you think she’s moved on with someone else! Milo isn’t Mark’s son you dipshit he’s yours! He’s almost one and he loves hockey, his mom is really fucking awesome and his dad? Well he’s a giant fucking loser”

Luke stuttered a response but came up empty.

“She’s out there, with your kid right now and you have every opportunity to make things right. Now stop being a fucking prick and sort it out but first we have a game to win”

Luke didn’t reply, just nodding and headed out the door to the bench.

Luke’s parents hadn’t wanted to let go of Milo, soaking up all of the time they had with him and you let them because who were you to stop it. After all, you’d deprived them of their grandson for months.

The game ended with a devils OT win, you were ecstatic for Ethan and nervous to see Luke. There was no hiding it anymore.

The hallway outside the locker room felt claustrophobic while you waited, staring down at your sleeping boy.

Ethan came out first, giving you a hug and mumbling “He knows, I told him and I’m sorry but he needed to know”

You nodded, a non verbal agreement that it was ok.

Luke was one of the last out, side by side with his brother.

He looked around for you almost instantly, shoulders physically relaxing when he saw you there. His eyes flickered between you and the baby.

“Go, go see her” Jack pushed him. The whole family watching him stumble over to you.

“Hi Lu”

“Hey”

You were both visibly nervous, taking it upon yourself to break the tension you asked “you want to hold him? Your mom said it’s the best cuddles she’s had”.

He chuckled, nodding and you handed the small body over. You watched him closely snuggle closer into Luke’s chest in his sleep.

Luke laughed softly and when you looked at him you saw the tears that lined his eyes and a watery smile to add “He’s so-“

“Perfect?” “Yeah”

The two of you had your moment, being mom and dad for a few seconds until the family interrupted. Uncle Jack claiming his stakes to meet the little one.

The two of you stepped back for a minute watching them all coo over him. Luke’s arm slinging over your shoulders to pull you in under his arm.

Your head dropped onto his shoulder “Lu I’m so sorry I kept him from you”

He shook his head lightly “It’s done now, let’s just go forward not back. Come back to the hotel with me, we’ll talk about everything”

“Everything?” “I want to fix it all, you and I too”

“I’d like that, I don’t think we’re getting him back anytime soon though” you joked.

“More time with you? I’m not complaining”

Later that night you were asleep in his arms on the hotel bed, Milo asleep in a travel cot next to you and Luke felt happy for the first time in a very long time.

Next morning the family had woken up to a text in the family group chat.

Quinn Hughes: what the fuck is this I’m hearing about having a nephew? Was someone gonna tell me? Jack who did you knock up?!

#lulu writes blurbs #lulu writes #milo’s world

[j4y-lvr]

day flower … park jongseong

SYNOPSIS. bent over the sink, coughing up petals and blood, you knew that your worst fears had come true.

PAIRING. jay x fem!reader

GENRE. fluff, angst, lovers2?, established!relationship (?), hanahaki au

WARNINGS. profanity, mentions of food, mentions of blood, quite a lot of kissing, possibly making out (?), one mention of loss of weight, graphic, mcd(?), death(?)

WORD COUNT. 5.3k

NOTE. i just wanted to write something sad and i came up with this,, idk why i chose jay to fit my mental image of this bc its so saddening to even imagine— EVEN THOUGH ITS SAD PLS DO READ😭‼ thoughts on an alternative ending? update:: I MADE ONE: !! ALTERNATE ENDING. !!

Reblogs and feedback are highly appreciated!

i. the bud blooms

At the ripe age of 12 you were sent away with your mother after a preceding divorce bought with complexities and the drop of niceties. This, however, was your chance  at a fresh start or whatever your mother bullshited about when you knew you'd nonetheless be a burden to her.

Maybe she was prepping you to put up with her never coming home nor checking up on you as time passed. With no real restrictions you spent your time outside after school and by the field of daffodils you found after a hike up the crest of a low hill.

A google search on the then simplistic site displayed that daffodils symbolise new beginnings, quite accurate given your situation. Much hadn't changed now as only the site was cleaned up to look mod and appealing but the information remained.

On the sole field you met a boy. Dark hair brooding his lowered eyes, and he wore nothing but a tiresome look on his face. He stepped forward and scrunched his nose in annoyance at the sight of  you, an intruder to his scarce peace. "ugh, whatever, just stay on that side of the field and don't disturb me,"  With no one to tell you when to not bother someone, you did exactly that, eventually getting him to gleam a boyish smile at you.

Just like the search engine viewing your answer, that boy, jay, seemed to have an answer for almost everything. Smart and logical, would always rationalise with himself and was punctual with his timings at the gripping age of 13. Not once had he been late when you’d inquire to meet him the very next day, finding him at his usual spot, grimacing at the withered flowers. His punctuality and love for flowers (?) scared you, either he was messed up in the head or he'd been expected to act like an adult for the majority of his life, to live up to his parents expectations.

He wandered to these fields for his lonesome mind to sing to some melody of a song you didn't know, caressing the petals of the varied and wilting flowers. You accompanied him with a sketchbook in hand, your hands at work, your ears to his humming and occasional tunes with no comments or interruptions. You had not a thread attached with his absolute, practical life, and that's what he grew to enjoy as he sang you sweet songs and admired the minimalist beauty of flowers for hours together before he vanished back the trail he hiked up.

A decade long later, he stood the same punctual, intellectual, stellar citizen as his facial features  matured and took a dark yet captivating bloom while he sobered from a teen to a young adult. Now the heir of his grandfather's company, he revelled in the success of his grandfather's business. To say he grew would be an understatement, rarely ever flashing you that lovable boyish grin, never to sing his silly little tunes in front of you again.

You weren't one to pry, years into your first ever relationship with your first love and beyond afraid to lose your loose yet stitched in place frail, threaded red heart the two of you share. The photobook stared upon you, urging you to reminisce about your uneventful past filled with mostly jay. The current times didn't get any exciting either, you painted and attended exhibitions, the usual smile carried on your peach tinted lips at the guests and those interested in buying your pieces.

Contrary to this, jay barely made it home, cooped up in his office all day everyday, allowing himself to come home merely upon completing his work. You didn't mind really, the two of you went out, spoke to each other often, and were happy. This while around, he had been distant for a week or two, his longest record of shutting you out till date. You figured he was exhausted mentally and gave him the space though you wished to circle in his arms and breath wistfully.

You veered your attention to the pages and stopped on one of jay, sat beneath the tree near your old, broken, rundown house, looking into the farther distance, admiring the view, and so were you at the time, etching each feature of his delicately put together face, ingraining it in your mind, taking out your then new but now ancient camera to capture the spectacle.

You grin at the photo stuck, your orbs drifting to the messy lyrics he'd written in english to match the mood of the moment, this particular one that of your favourite song till date, one that he used to sing you to sleep.

"what are you looking so fondly at," uttered jay whose presence you failed to recognise in the room, his exasperated expression making you almost coo at him. You patted on the bedding beside as he followed, crossing your painting that you'd left to dry for hours ere.

"our photo book," you replied gaily, surprised to see him speaking to you after weeks, instinctively reaching for his cheek and staring into his eyes to find the very night sky in them, to find them gleaming right at you, the type stars would beam before they went out. A mesmerising yet sad beauty.

His gaze flickered from your soulful eyes and he glued his sights to the photo and hummed in agreement, "i guess i've always looked this good," he finished the tire in his vocals evident with a slight snicker. You shifted closer to him on the bedding which you wrinkled in the process, "you always have," you completed, pulling him closer by the hand that cupped his cheek.

You drawled yourself up to his level, running your thumb back and forth on his soft skin while your other hand ran through his soft hair, watching as he watched you with this solemn look you couldn't put a finger on. You smiled wider and hovered your lips over his as you ultimately gave in to his alluring presence and pressed your soft lips to his in a desperate yet sweet manner.

He hummed from bewilderment and slinged an arm around your waist, inching the distance closer than possible, tilting his head further and into you as he danced with your lips. You pulled away and gasped, blinking as bliss hit you, wondering if it could get any better than this? You drew away and slotted your lips on his again, covering his frantic yet slow lips, kissing him passionately, emptying out your heartfelt sentiments in the shared motion. 

You climbed off and undid his tie and the first button of his dress shirt and told him to wash up, getting to your feet, fetching him comfortable clothes and a glass of water to drink. He changed into them after washing up and sat back down on the mattress, back pressed to the headboard, the glass coming in contact with his lips that stained yours not long ago.

He glugged the cool water down his throat and set the now empty glass on the bedside table, your hand ruffling his hair as he yearned for your lips to confirm his doubt, tugging down and setting his lips against yours to feel the emotion again as you relaxed into his warm touch after a long day. 

He separated the connection as a string of saliva drew apart and suspended, a sigh of what you thought was content from jay as he flopped to the soft matting underneath him. A pit settled in his stomach and he felt guilt. He chose to ignore the feeling and set his eyes to a close.

You joined him, clinging onto him, kicking on the blanket to yourself and snuggling into his shoulder with a grin. Jay forcefully shut his eyes with a wince he hoped you'd miss it and placed his hand on your waist. Jay pretended to sleep as you hiked up on your elbow, leaning to press a peck to his forehead and mutter, "i love you."

Truth be told, jay sighed out of worry than content.

ii. blossom

You gotten used to the sight of jays absence when you awoke from your prolonged slumber, even the days you rose as early as 8, he’d be out the door, bidding you goodbye as he tucked in the loop of tie and tighten it around the collar, patting you on the head before bolting out the door and zooming off in his vehicle.

He’s been distant but never avoiding, and that's what you felt like he was doing this time; avoiding. As painful as it was to accept the fact that he had been avoiding you for the past week was hurtful. Yes, he was out and at work, he hadn’t stepped foot in the house since a week, nor would he receive your calls, excusing himself through text messages shorter than 5 words.

Time you made him show up yourself. 

You spent almost the entire day prepping your setting, going as far as decorating and cooking something you saw online which ended up pretty decent. Now, all you needed was to lure jay like a wasp to light. You picked up your cell, dialling his number, your throat feeling rather scruffy as you coughed on the ringing line to soothe the uncomfortable sensation.

“did i work too hard for this, i feel my throat closing up,” you mumble, waiting for the line to connect, the mere automated voice blaring through your ear canal causing you to hang up and opt to text him. “come home, its an emergency,”

Not the best, but surely it’d do the trick, and in an hour's time, jay showed up, panting as he bolted the door open, “where's the fire!” he shouted, standing in the common room, across your resting figure on the couch. You yelped and got to your feet, rushing over and placing both hands over your heart, “here.”

His expression morphed from his initial shock to confusion and to anger. He should've seen it coming as it was February the 14th, Valentine's day. Discarding the tie to his fist, he stared you down with menacing eyes, making you gulp down the present discomfort in your throat, your fearful yet expectant orbs gazing into his raged one.

“i’m really trying to control myself,” “good, we haven’t even started,”

With his tongue poking the side of his cheek from annoyance, you led him to the backyard where a table was set from your preparation and he seemed surprised at the notion, and his mouth slitted open as you hauled the piping hot dish towards the meagre wobbling metal table that withheld the dishes well, allowing you to take a seat opposite of jay.

The look in his eyes was penetrating, feeling your throat close in more as you coughed uncontrollably prompting him to hand you a glass of water, glued to his seat as he observed you heave up and down before the hectic coughing subsided and you felt the air reach your nostril and travel without a hitch to your lungs.

“sorry, i, uh, made us dinner,” you conveyed, forcing a wide smile while overlooking your fit of spontaneous fits of coughing, “i can see that,” he responded sternly, beginning to serve the food onto both plates, his eyes not letting up the cold act for a millisecond, like he almost meant it.

You picked at your food, staring at him eat wordlessly, the irritation in your throat causing you to gag and wince every now and then before you mustered to pierce through the tension filled atmosphere, “did i do something wrong?” The resounding clang of the utensil to the plate made you straighten your back, “no, i’m just upset over the fact you had to lie to get me here,” he paused, drifting off into a daze, “i haven’t come home in a while, i know,”

He shifted away from your constraint, locking eyes with his meal and eating the plate clean, “you’ve gotten better at cooking,” he commented, shutting his eyelids and leaning back on the cold metal of the chair, waiting for you finish your respective meal, making you swallow down the larger chunks in haste. You stood to your feet, the ordeal leaving a metallic taste in your mouth. The chair scraped back, you collected the dishes and placed them in the sink, the unsettling pit in your stomach only digging deeper with the irking sensation in the back of your throat growing ratched.

You went to bed with a heavy heart, his back facing yours as he wordlessly drifted to slumber, leaving you to your consuming thoughts. Maybe, just maybe, he really was exhausted. You shouldn't have been so disapproving of him for his mental absence.

Either way, your plan was an absolute failure.

The sun rose inevitably and jay arose to his right, feet planted on the rugged flooring, remaining sat on the bedding, heaving a loud sigh. He peered over his back to sneak a peek at your asleep state. The way your eyes were clamped shut and your brows furrowed with a strong pout spoke enough of your nightmare and jay exhaled into his palms away from you.

He'd hate to break your heart but he'd hate to lead you on even more. He couldn't bring himself to feel the same anymore, his emotionality drained and his sentiments aside, he felt guilt to have wronged you. He felt like a shitty person every morning to face your innocent stature suffocating him in wallow. So, every morning, he left before you awoke to stop the aching in his wilting heart.

The dip in the mattress rises as he does, stepping disheartedly to the bathroom to start his mundane routine. The shower head shoots water as his hair dampens, his sole salty tears mixing with the overhead resource, tears drowning in silence. You stir awake with your throat suffocatingly sore to the point where swallowing water was excruciatingly painful.

The small clock on the bed side table ticked with faint clicks, the hour handle clocked at 7 with the longer needle on 40 as the splinter-like needle spun periodically. You coughed, finding it hard to breathe, the itching sensation increasing as you felt something will up your throat, your hand bracing your mouth in a clasp. 

Mustering out the strange discomfort inducing object, you coughed out a petite, white petal, accompanied with a sized spot of blood painting its own canvas— your palm, per se. Observing the viscous liquid the upside length of your hand, you begin to feel nauseous, ripping the blanket off you and grasping your neck from pain.

You separated the petal from the splash or crimson, clutching it in your free hand as jay made his way over to you, draped in a bathrobe, ushering your tained palm inspect. He grimaced at the sight of blood staining your palm, his thumb instinctively finding your cheek rubbing it of what he attempted to seem affectionate. 

Tears pricking your orbs, you urged forward and wrapped your arms around him merely to be held away from his hold with a jerk, making you gape clueless. "it'll stain," he reminded, though he'd pushed you for other reasons he couldn't have the guts to come clean too.

Wiping your eyes dry, you stepped away from him and washed away the substance while jay suited up for work. You left the premise and returned to where jay buttoned his shirt hastily. You strode up to him and finally found yourself in his hesitant hold, peering up to him with glossy eyes. 

He sighed into your face, his arms tightening around you as you hiked to his eye level in your tiptoes to press a peck to his lips. You approached forward and pecked his lips, to confirm your growing doubt. You readjusted to kiss him, parting your mouth only for him to pull you back once again with another excuse. 

"you haven't brushed your teeth yet," he delivered with a soft tone, running his hand down your bed hair. It stung. Not just your throat, your heart, years ago into your relationship you'd made out plenty of times with a nasty breath and none of you seemed to mind. He really was making… excuses. 

The flowers, the blood—him avoiding you, your fleeting touch— most importantly, he began to ignore your feelings for him. 

Jay was falling out of love with you.

iii. grow thorns

Desperate. That's what you felt coursing through your veins as you curled into a ball on the carpeted floor in the empty residence, jay long gone on a business trip to wherever. Upon your gruesome piecing together, you felt despair and spent most of your time wallowing in streams of tears.

It was March and you laid sick in bed, occasionally leaving to fulfil your regular duties as a human while completely neglecting physical activity and socialising, not like you were good at either but this case was extreme. The same boy you felt deeply connected to, the boy who made you understand what love felt like, the boy who showed you true love—which your parents always failed to accommodate— was also the boy who'd crumble your fragile beating soul to rubble.

Your first petals you coughed were once pea size petals that gradually turned into full fledged, grown petals, heaving up your trachea, branches growing in your lungs making it all the much harder for you to breathe. In arounv a week's time, was your anniversary with jay. It'd be foolish to think he'd just take you back like that after the answer of unrequited love stood from your lungs. 

Perhaps if he broke your heart a second time, you would be convinced and mercilessly succumb to the inevitable.

You kept the petals you threw to a side, setting up a fresh canvas and painting a blank later for white onto it. Unsure of what to paint, you stood contemplating what you were even doing in the first place but the thought of gifting it to him seemed motivating and so you began.

Strokes of wet paint slapped onto the once pearly white canvas, skilledly sketching with your brush the outline of your objects, filling in the remnants of white into the backdrop of the portrait. It wasn't over till it was, eventually over. The faint lines of your boyfriend became clear and so had your mind. You knew what your next change of plan would be.

Jay returned around two weeks later and by then your health had declined and the loneliness merely increased. Hesitant to speak to you, you took the hint and mainted your distance as well, only interacting when needed as he used the spare bedroom to rest. Indeed,.t hurt to think that he found it hard to even sleep next to you but you weren't going to take it till he uttered the words himself.

Then came your anniversary. The two of you had been great friends for four years and then dated for four and you'd like to say that you both were still going strong, though your current situation said all but that. You requested jay to help in making dinner for the while none of you spoke a word of the day's occasion.

You were at work chopping the vegetables as jay readied the base, sprinkling some spices and checking the flavouring every now and then all without saying a word to you. Your eyes travelled from the steaming stew to where he placed the spoon between his lips, a furrow creasing on his face, tongue clicking.

"salt," he mumbled, eyes drifting from around where he situated, then shifting to around you. The salt was placed beside the chopping board, and that meant it was across you, an arm's distance. Without much thought, he stepped closer to you and reached for the salt, his arm brushing past your waist, causing him to tense, his orbs darting to yours.

You solemnly watched his eyes grow from hesitate to panic to worry. Worry, however, caught you off guard? His hand remained on the salt bottle, arm still at your waist. "you've gotten thin," he mustered, peering down  at you. Your lips parted and cursed yourself for the water gathering in your tear glands.

You shifted to face him and your fists collided with the material of his shirt, clutching it in your grasp while you looked to your feet to collect your thoughts. Jay watched with no thoughts, bewildered at your shaken state. Just in time, your throat began to cave in.

You showed him your back, heaving up and down, the petals trailing up your throat and hitting your palm. You smacked your chest uncomfortably to stop the tractions to not let him suspect anything was out of order.

"you okay?" he queried, feeling the thumps of his feet getting closer to you, panicking as you collected blood and petals into your hand, the fear of him peeking it at your new high. He reached to your position and you scurried off in a haste towards the washroom. Passing by your jar of petals, you dropped them into the pot in a hurry as jay caught up to you.

Drowning the crimson in the sink you ran water on your hands, cutting the water supply and placing your wetted hands on the cold counter, panting. The heavy footsteps echoed and then soon were planted behind you. You gazed at his fallen front in the mirror. Why? Why did he look disheartened? Did he feel something for you after all?

He panned you around, caging you to the marbled counter, sealing in his arms with your chest by his, solely daring to search for any love in his eyes. Yanking the sleeve of your sweatshirt laid a spot of crimson from the viscous liquid. You mentally winced and set your sights away from him.

His finger glided to your chin and brought you towards his front, his palm resting on your cheek, "you're not okay, are you darling," he conveyed as your heart grumbled at the endeared name, a stray tear threatening to stain your cheek. "i've been unwell,"

The silence dawned on the two of you as he buried his hand in your hair, tugging down on it to tilt your head up, and his finger parting your nimble lips, the salty taste lingering in his mouth as he pressed down, and gave you a kiss. Under any circumstance than this, you'd relish the feeling but you felt sick with your throat itching.

Nonetheless, you played into his act of affection, gripping him further as his neck dipped to reach further in your cavern. Taking in what'd be the last time you'd ever meet his lips with such fever you attempted to feel the texture of his moist lips diving in and out. the pop sound loud and clear as you pulled him off of you. He settled his hand by your ear, his thumb giving you a false sense of security as he rested his forehead against yours.

"shall we get married?"

The falter in his facials was apparent and you felt your heart fall to your stomach. "marriage? what are you talking about, we're only 21," he missed, trying to play it cool.

"you know I love you right?" you did love him, you weren't lying but he didn't and you wouldn't let go of him till he said those harsh words himself.

His lack of reply set you off and you changed your blank face to that of despair, " you don't love me?" 

"i…"

You shoved him away, crinkling your eyes in downward crescents as tears peaked from your eyes, playing at his heart strings. You felt the similar aggression of anger pile in him as he rushed his breathing, brows furrowing deep and the same mouth you kissed parted to utter icy words..

"do you know how it feels to date the one you've known and cared for since you were child?! not once have I ever hurt you nor done anything to hurt and i never will but I can’t sleep at night looking at your unaware face that i settled to for work. It’d break my heart to break your’s but i can’t let up with this without feeling guilty for leading you on when i cannot bring myself to feel those sentiments of love— i just don’t love you like before! "

Though you knew it was coming, the actuality hurt so much more. The lines of him declining your love for him played repeatedly. Jay left the room and the house, slamming the front door to possibly never return again. You sobbed even harder than before, falling to the floor urging the feeling to succumb to die as you coughed up amounts of blood  and petals onto the floor in shambles.

iv. wither

April came as fast as March left with Jay slamming the door, never to return under any circumstance. You strongly believed he began living at his office unless one friend allowed him to stay over for an extended period of time. You, however, hadn't had any luck with getting better, accepting you would die soon.

Mustering any strength you conjured to get out of bed, meeting the carpeted floor where you'd spend hours staring at the ceiling with teary eyes. You were going to go down like this, despite your dreams and aspirations, this was how'd you succumb to death.

The sole motivation to sit by your canvas, that slowly came to picture, was the haunted expression in his front you could imagine ever so vividly. You meagre around the house to get your jar of thrown up petals, stained scarlet, quite a nice piece of decor to the vicinity though it'd be too bad that you'd be gone to not see it as one.

Frailly reaching for one petal, then another, you stuck them in carefully, the internal shaking refusing to seize as your breath turned shallow, leaving you gasping for air, overexerting yourself in finishing the piece. 

On the once pearly white canvas sat a portrait of jay through the lens of your antique camera where you stood a trail of your petals and blood mixed onto the canvas, increasing as they led to your situation behind the camera just like your dying self behind the canvas.

Finishing the painting, you felt the hot breath hit your tired out hands and brittle paint dipped fingers— the same fingers Jay would kiss to you sleep, ticking you into bed if you ran a fever— were also the ones that gripped to the head rest, giving to the growing tiredness that overcame you, turning to lie flat on your back.

The keys jingled in the near distance, jay slipping in through the door, watching as nothing had really moved around in the house. He contemplated on notifying you of his abrupt appearance, opting to slowly creep up the stairs. Unknown to you, you had started coughing again, the strength in your arms to cover your mouth non-existent.

Resulting in the blood coating you and the mattress in a painful fit of red as you sobbed heartbroken to yourself wondering where it went wrong, did he require more space, had you been more mindful would he still be at your side.

Jay stilled on hearing your heart wrenching sobs, the previous hesitance gone as he ran up the stairs and to your situation on the bed stained bed. Having forgotten about your coughing fit of blood through the apparent stress from the separation. 

His sight fell to the canvas in front of him greeting as you cough seized, your eyelids lugging over your glassed over orbs, jay getting to knees as he saw you covered in blood, his hand finding your paint ridden hand. You gave a weak chuckle, "if we ever meet again, I hope it works out then," you say, the diamonds leaving the comfort of your eyes and onto your crimson imposed self. 

Jay heaved from panic, "why didn't you tell me?!" He hurried exclaimed, his hand running down your arm to keep your burning vessel even warmer. Unbeknownst to him he'd been crying and you watched with low eyes close to shutting, your palm lifting up to his tear stricken cheek, "just know," you paused, shutting your eyes completely feeling the life get sucked out of your body. 

"i loved you."

alternate ending. (1.6k)

#park jay #park jongseong #enhypen jay #enhypen #enhypen fluff #enhyped angst #jay angst #jay fluff #jay imagines #jay x reader #jay oneshots #jay fanfic #enhypen fanfiction #enhypen angst #enhypen x reader #enhypen imagines #enhypen drabbles #enhypen fic #enhypen scenarios #enhypen jay x reader #jay scenarios #jay fic #jongseong fluff #jongseong imagines #enhypen jongseong #park jongsung #enha #enha imagines #enha x reader #enha jay

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Tech disrupted disruption

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/#republicans-want-to-defund-the-police

Before "disruption" turned into a punchline, it was a genuinely exciting idea. Using technology, we could connect people to one another and allow them to collaborate, share, and cooperate to make great things happen.

It's easy (and valid) to dismiss the "disruption" of Uber, which "disrupted" taxis and transit by losing $31b worth of Saudi royal money in a bid to collapse the world's rival transportation system, while quietly promising its investors that it would someday have pricing power as a monopoly, and would attain profit through price-gouging and wage-theft.

Uber's disruption story was wreathed in bullshit: lies about the "independence" of its drivers, about the imminence of self-driving taxis, about the impact that replacing buses and subways with millions of circling, empty cars would have on traffic congestion. There were and are plenty of problems with traditional taxis and transit, but Uber magnified these problems, under cover of "disrupting" them away.

But there are other feats of high-tech disruption that were and are genuinely transformative – Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, RSS, and more. These disruptive technologies altered the balance of power between powerful institutions and the businesses, communities and individuals they dominated, in ways that have proven both beneficial and durable.

When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.

But the history of "disruption" features far more examples of tech companies disrupting other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft. Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts Nokia. It's only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital disruption are other digital businesses.

And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade. A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

The paper opens with a review of the literature on disruption. Big companies have some major advantages: they've got people and infrastructure they can leverage to bring new products to market more cheaply than startups. They've got existing relationships with suppliers, distributors and customers. People trust them.

Diversified, monopolistic companies are also able to capture "involuntary spillovers": when Google spends money on AI for image recognition, it can improve Google Photos, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps and many other products. A startup with just one product can't capitalize on these spillovers in the same way, so it doesn't have the same incentives to spend big on R&D.

Finally, big companies have access to cheap money. They get better credit terms from lenders, they can float bonds, they can tap the public markets, or just spend their own profits on R&D. They can also afford to take a long view, because they're not tied to VCs whose funds turn over every 5-10 years. Big companies get cheap money, play a long game, pay less to innovate and get more out of innovation.

But those advantages are swamped by the disadvantages of incumbency, all the various curses of bigness. Take Arrow's "replacement effect": new companies that compete with incumbents drive down the incumbents' prices and tempt their customers away. But an incumbent that buys a disruptive new company can just shut it down, and whittle down its ideas to "sustaining innovation" (small improvements to existing products), killing "disruptive innovation" (major changes that make the existing products obsolete).

Arrow's Replacement Effect also comes into play before a new product even exists. An incumbent that allows a rival to do R&D that would eventually disrupt its product is at risk; but if the incumbent buys this pre-product, R&D-heavy startup, it can turn the research to sustaining innovation and defund any disruptive innovation.

Arrow asks us to look at the innovation question from the point of view of the company as a whole. Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" looks at the motivations of individual decision-makers in large, successful companies. These individuals don't want to disrupt their own business, because that will render some part of their own company obsolete (perhaps their own division!). They also don't want to radically change their customers' businesses, because those customers would also face negative effects from disruption.

A startup, by contrast, has no existing successful divisions and no giant customers to safeguard. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from disruption. Where a large company has no way for individual employees to initiate major changes in corporate strategy, a startup has fewer hops between employees and management. What's more, a startup that rewards an employee's good idea with a stock-grant ties that employee's future finances to the outcome of that idea – while a giant corporation's stock bonuses are only incidentally tied to the ideas of any individual worker.

Big companies are where good ideas go to die. If a big company passes on its employees' cool, disruptive ideas, that's the end of the story for that idea. But even if 100 VCs pass on a startup's cool idea and only one VC funds it, the startup still gets to pursue that idea. In startup land, a good idea gets lots of chances – in a big company, it only gets one.

Given how innately disruptable tech companies are, given how hard it is for big companies to innovate, and given how little innovation we've gotten from Big Tech, how is it that the tech giants haven't been disrupted?

The authors propose a four-step program for the would-be Tech Baron hoping to defend their turf from disruption.

First, gather information about startups that might develop disruptive technologies and steer them away from competing with you, by investing in them or partnering with them.

Second, cut off any would-be competitor's supply of resources they need to develop a disruptive product that challenges your own.

Third, convince the government to pass regulations that big, established companies can comply with but that are business-killing challenges for small competitors.

Finally, buy up any company that resists your steering, succeeds despite your resource war, and escapes the compliance moats of regulation that favors incumbents.

Then: kill those companies.

The authors proceed to show that all four tactics are in play today. Big Tech companies operate their own VC funds, which means they get a look at every promising company in the field, even if they don't want to invest in them. Big Tech companies are also awash in money and their "rival" VCs know it, and so financial VCs and Big Tech collude to fund potential disruptors and then sell them to Big Tech companies as "aqui-hires" that see the disruption neutralized.

On resources, the authors focus on data, and how companies like Facebook have explicit policies of only permitting companies they don't see as potential disruptors to access Facebook data. They reproduce internal Facebook strategy memos that divide potential platform users into "existing competitors, possible future competitors, [or] developers that we have alignment with on business models." These categories allow Facebook to decide which companies are capable of developing disruptive products and which ones aren't. For example, Amazon – which doesn't compete with Facebook – is allowed to access FB data to target shoppers. But Messageme, a startup, was cut off from Facebook as soon as management perceived them as a future rival. Ironically – but unsurprisingly – Facebook spins these policies as pro-privacy, not anti-competitive.

These data policies cast a long shadow. They don't just block existing companies from accessing the data they need to pursue disruptive offerings – they also "send a message" to would-be founders and investors, letting them know that if they try to disrupt a tech giant, they will have their market oxygen cut off before they can draw breath. The only way to build a product that challenges Facebook is as Facebook's partner, under Facebook's direction, with Facebook's veto.

Next, regulation. Starting in 2019, Facebook started publishing full-page newspaper ads calling for regulation. Someone ghost-wrote a Washington Post op-ed under Zuckerberg's byline, arguing the case for more tech regulation. Google, Apple, OpenAI other tech giants have all (selectively) lobbied in favor of many regulations. These rules covered a lot of ground, but they all share a characteristic: complying with them requires huge amounts of money – money that giant tech companies can spare, but potential disruptors lack.

Finally, there's predatory acquisitions. Mark Zuckerberg, working without the benefit of a ghost writer (or in-house counsel to review his statements for actionable intent) has repeatedly confessed to buying companies like Instagram to ensure that they never grow to be competitors. As he told one colleague, "I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. The thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”

All the tech giants are acquisition factories. Every successful Google product, almost without exception, is a product they bought from someone else. By contrast, Google's own internal products typically crash and burn, from G+ to Reader to Google Videos. Apple, meanwhile, buys 90 companies per year – Tim Apple brings home a new company for his shareholders more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family. All the Big Tech companies' AI offerings are acquisitions, and Apple has bought more AI companies than any of them.

Big Tech claims to be innovating, but it's really just operationalizing. Any company that threatens to disrupt a tech giant is bought, its products stripped of any really innovative features, and the residue is added to existing products as a "sustaining innovation" – a dot-release feature that has all the innovative disruption of rounding the corners on a new mobile phone.

The authors present three case-studies of tech companies using this four-point strategy to forestall disruption in AI, VR and self-driving cars. I'm not excited about any of these three categories, but it's clear that the tech giants are worried about them, and the authors make a devastating case for these disruptions being disrupted by Big Tech.

What do to about it? If we like (some) disruption, and if Big Tech is enshittifying at speed without facing dethroning-by-disruption, how do we get the dynamism and innovation that gave us the best of tech?

The authors make four suggestions.

First, revive the authorities under existing antitrust law to ban executives from Big Tech companies from serving on the boards of startups. More broadly, kill interlocking boards altogether. Remember, these powers already exist in the lawbooks, so accomplishing this goal means a change in enforcement priorities, not a new act of Congress or rulemaking. What's more, interlocking boards between competing companies are illegal per se, meaning there's no expensive, difficult fact-finding needed to demonstrate that two companies are breaking the law by sharing directors.

Next: create a nondiscrimination policy that requires the largest tech companies that share data with some unaffiliated companies to offer data on the same terms to other companies, except when they are direct competitors. They argue that this rule will keep tech giants from choking off disruptive technologies that make them obsolete (rather than competing with them).

On the subject of regulation and compliance moats, they have less concrete advice. They counsel lawmakers to greet tech giants' demands to be regulated with suspicion, to proceed with caution when they do regulate, and to shape regulation so that it doesn't limit market entry, by keeping in mind the disproportionate burdens regulations put on established giants and small new companies. This is all good advice, but it's more a set of principles than any kind of specific practice, test or procedure.

Finally, they call for increased scrutiny of mergers, including mergers between very large companies and small startups. They argue that existing law (Sec 2 of the Sherman Act and Sec 7 of the Clayton Act) both empower enforcers to block these acquisitions. They admit that the case-law on this is poor, but that just means that enforcers need to start making new case-law.

I like all of these suggestions! We're certainly enjoying a more activist set of regulators, who are more interested in Big Tech, than we've seen in generations.

But they are grossly under-resourced even without giving them additional duties. As Matt Stoller points out, "the DOJ's Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

What's more, Republicans are trying to slash their budgets even further. The American conservative movement has finally located a police force they're eager to defund: the corporate police who defend us all from predatory monopolies.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #coopting disruption #law and political economy #law #economics #competition #big tech #tech #innovation #acquihires #predatory acquisitions #mergers and acquisitions #disruption #schumpeter #the curse of bigness #clay christensen #josef schumpeter #christensen #enshittiification #business #regulation #scholarship

[kygerbearr]

Can you educate me on license plates? Sexless style?

Sorry for putting this off for so long, I got reaaallly busy but I'll go ahead and break down most what I know about license plates.

First and foremost we need to establish a few types of license plates, that being US, European, and then pretty much everything else. I group US and Europe into their own groups because those two all follow the same format, albeit with some variations. In addition to this, some countries and US states have front plates in addition to back plates, which will be relevant in the future.

Since I have a lot of European followers I'm sure you guys already know that European license plate standards are white with a blue strip and then 2 initials to represent the country in question. There is some variance on this however.

Here is a Denmark license plate showing the format. (ignore the red border, thats part of the image, not the plate)

Great Britain is an exception to this, as it has a yellow backplate and white frontplate.

Similarly to this, Netherlands has a yellow backplate, but it also has a yellow front plate as well.

This is the only country to have yellow on both front and back plates to my knowledge, so it is a telltale sign that the car is from Netherlands or that you're currently there. I have seen yellow license plates in Belgium before but I don't know if that's the standard there.

On to the next thing, we have (old) portugal backplates that have a yellow strip in addition to their blue strip.

This is the old design but is still present on many vehicles in the country.

France has something similar, but it is two blue strips on them like so:

Italy also has this as well as on front plates

Mexico is most distinct for their shorter, stubbier front plates compared to most others. It might be hard to tell, but here's a comparison of Mexico license plates with United States license plates

Interestingly enough, there's a lot of similarities between three different South American license plates in that they all have the blue strip at the top. I don't know why this is the case because I'm not very learned on its history. It makes sense for EU license plates to be the same, but I'm not sure why these are the same or why Chile, Peru, Bolivia don't follow the same format.

In addition to this, it's worth noting that Colombia's license plates are yellow as well, and I believe the only country in South America to have yellow? but I could be entirely wrong, my knowledge is limited to whatever has google streetview coverage.

For a change of pace, in Bhutan they have very distinct red license plates like this one

Fun fact about bhutan: there is a lot of phallic imagery present on many houses

And as a side note, Israel has yellow plates as well

Laos has yellow plates too, not many countries in Southeast Asia have yellow license plates to my knowledge besides Japan (though only some of them are yellow)

I could go over areas like Russia and Ukraine but they are just white license plates and aren't that remarkable. Before I hit the image limit I want to cover US license plates as they're quite distinct, starting with the only yellow plates, Alaska and New Mexico.

Bear in mind that plate designs have changed countless times and I could have an entirely separate post showcasing some of the most striking changes I've seen. For comparison, here are more from New Mexico

Alaska has a variant with a kodiak bear on it

New York is more orangeish

This state loves to move in circles and features Arches National Park

Wyoming is the most stereotypical yeehaw cowboy plate

Kentucky has nothing.

Arizona features everything that made me fall in love with the state. The mountains, the desert, the cacti, the sunrise, it's perfect.

Bonus round: Canada. NT has a polar bear

Nunavut has a polar bear

I'm out of images but there's plenty of other variants you can see on Geohints, two separate sections for most of the world as well as a separate section for just US plates

I feel like there's more I could cover but with the image limit it's a little difficult, but some other details I can say is that Manitoba for some reason has Hebrew on their license plates, Czechia license plates' first 3 digits represent the region they were manufactured in, a lot of countries like Peru and Bolivia have their flag on the license plate as well.

I hope you learned something about license plates

[cfv-week]

Hello friends...

... we are not dead! Just rather busy, as life tends to keep us. But this blog is still alive! ;)

In case you haven't heard, tumblr is trying its hands at a new feature called "communities" (they got official info on that available, just google it, but it's kinda like a facebook group I guess?).

I have debated making a little Discord server for our corner of CFV fan tumblr here, but didn't know if there would be much interest. It's certainly easier to occasionally post a message on Discord than managing tumblr posts and tags (at least in my opinion). We'd love to involve you guys in the future of this blog as much as possible, but it's hard to communicate directly when it has to be done via comments on public posts or one-on-one in glitchy chats (or, Neon Messiah forbid, off-site surveys).

So this seems like the prime opportunity to ask:

Please reblog to spread the word (even if you don't have an opinion on this).

And as always, thank you guys so much for being so patient with us, and helping us keep this community and the love of Cardfight Vanguard alive!

- Mod Reo

#cardfight!! vanguard #cfv #aichi sendou #kai toshiki #I profoundly apologize for posting in the character tags but we need as much exposure as possible

[st-rarepair-roulette]

Stranger Things Rarepair Roulette

How to play?

This is an event for making new rarepair content, but with a twist. Challenge yourself to roll the dice and receive a pairing that you’ve never thought of before (or maybe you have, idk your business.)

Sign up begins September 26, and closes October 23. There will be a Google form posted to this account for you to sign up with.

From there each participant will receive a customized randomizer linked to their tailored list to randomize to their heart’s content!

Not sure what to do? Ask for a second die and we will roll you up a prompt to try and start you.

Participants will have to fill out a form with your likes and dislikes, and your rolls will be weighted for your parameters. Participants will also have a place to submit pairings.

How do I submit a pair?

Have a pair you’d love to see written? Maybe your beloved rarepair only has one or two fics and you’d love to see more. Maybe you have a crackship you just can’t get out of your head. Maybe you’re just throwing stuff in for fun.

This is not the rarepair event for big ships give us the weird stuff!

Submit pairings by a separate Google form beginning September 26. submissions will close October 23. Watch here for the submission form to go up. You can also submit a prompt for our writers and authors to choose from.

What are the dates?

Submission and sign up is from Sept 26 to October 23. On November 1, you’ll receive your randomized link and an invite to our discord server. There will be a check in around January 1 that you are still feeling good about the event. Final submissions will be due on or by April 1st. There will be a collection on AO3 open from April 1st to 7th, and you can post on tumblr or X (ugh) with the hashtags #ST Rarepair Roulette or #STRarepairRoulette.

Do you need help?

Yes please God, DM if you would be interested in helping give people pairs and answer questions!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the requirements?

Minimum of 500 words for a writer and at least a line work art piece.

Are there any other rules?

Only two: no ship or character bashing, this is an open event. And no Artificial intelligence, the goal is to make some more human art for a beloved rarepair.

I want to sign up but I’m nervous that I’ll have to write X or get character X, what are the parameters?

You’ll have to fill out a form with usernames and contact info, and additionally we’ll give you parameter options, like disallowing certain characters, or opting out of any dead dove ships. You may also select up to one favorite character, and your rolls will be weighted to favor ships featuring that character. If you have more questions feel free to shoot a DM.

You will not receive a randomizer that contains your disliked pairs unless the mod made an error but each pair list is tailored to you.

Will X character be included? What about dead dove pairings? Will any pairings be not allowed?

Yes, all characters and pairs are included but because it is random, and we want to be respectful of our author’s parameters, keep in mind that some submitted pairs may not be selected.

All pairs are allowed however the pairings will be weighted in favor of ships with less than 1,000 fics, in the spirit of being a rarepair event.

What if my pair was never selected?

You can hold on to it, who knows, i may do this again.

Who are the mods?

@shieldofiron @applewillowstone @jaylikesrainbowtigers and @intothedysphoria

I already messaged you a submission will it get counted?

Yes, anyone who dmed me or commented on the initial interest check will get counted. If you want to fill out the submission form with prompts or more pairs, feel free.

If I participate can I submit a pair?

Yes, and it will go into the regular drawing like all the others.

If two people submit the same pair does it get two entries?

No, the pair will be entered once, but as the pairing will be randomized there may be two participants who get the same pair.

How are you randomizing?

A randomizer from perchance.org.

Is the mod crazy?

Yes. Crazy for rarepairs.

#stranger things #rarepairs #stranger things rarepair #stranger things rare pairs #ST Rarepair Roulette #STRarepairRoulette #ST Rarepair