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wileys-russo · 3 months

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can we pls get ready x leah and/or lessi on the beach in portugal?? maybe sneaking off to have alone time while the teams all there etc. etc.

portugal sunsets II l.williamson

you watched with a shake of your head at the sight of kyra grappling around on the ground with katie, the irishwoman threatening to make your national teammate eat sand as kyra desperately struggled to get away and make a run for it.

"help me!" kyra reached out for your hand as you kicked it away making her gasp and katie grin wolfishly, shoving kyras head into the sand.

"no loyalty!" the midfielder yelled at you with a grunt, elbowing katie and trying to break away as the girl grabbed her ankle and sent her flying back down into the sand.

"do we step in and stop them?" steph appeared beside you with an amused smile as you firmly shook your head. "no way. i hope ky eats sand she tied all my shoes together last night and she's been trying to cheat this entire game." you shrugged as steph hummed in agreement.

"she's really taking this annoying little sister title in her stride isn't she?" you sighed as kyra broke free, sprinting away to tackle an unsuspecting caitlin to the floor as katie dove to dog pile on top of the both of them, kyra tossing handfuls of sand at both girls as if it was snow.

"well she's only taken the title from you hasn't she?" steph cooed pinching at your cheeks condescendingly making you roll your eyes. "i am twenty four year olds steffy i am not the baby anymore!" you huffed wrenching her hands off and shoving her playfully.

"you'll always be a tillies baby. because never will we forget the nervous little kid in a training shirt two sizes too big and her socks on inside out showing up for her first senior call up!" steph teased as you groaned at the memory, the two of you walking down the beach and away from the game which had now resumed.

"i was really nervous okay!" you defended with a pout, body slumping into stephs making her stumble a little as you hugged yourself into her side. the brunette called away by jen you waved off their invitations to join in and wandered back toward your girlfriend.

you chuckled and shook your head at the sight of her laid down on a towel in the sun, bundled up in a ridiculous amount of layers for the only slightly cool air with a pair of sunglasses covering her eyes, hands tucked behind her head.

"you know babe the whole paint of tanning is to actually expose your skin to the sun so it tans." you teased, leahs head turning as your body flopped down beside her, nudging her to move over a little.

"get your own towel." leah mumbled, finger tips pressing to your forehead and pushing you away as you tried to tuck into her. "leah!" you huffed in offence, sitting up and glaring down at her as her lips curled into a smug smile and she opened her arms.

"only jokin gorgeous." she patted your cheek a few times as your head rested on her chest. "why are you wearing so many layers? its a lovely sunny day." you laughed as your girlfriend shrugged.

"dunno i'm comfy." she murmured and you rolled your eyes at the use of her favorite word. "my love you're the first one to complain about english weather and here we are abroad in the sunshine and you're dressed for a rainy day at colney!" you laughed at her thick puffer which was shrugged on over a hoodie and track pants, all the arsenal training gear of course.

"then the loafer slides...didn't realise i was dating a dirty old man." you teased earning yourself a sharp pinch to your exposed thigh. unlike your english girlfriend you were embracing the weather in shorts and a training top, your hoodie loaned to laura who forgot hers back at the hotel.

"you're so mean to me." your girlfriend sighed, eyes still closed and covered by her sunglasses. "maybe, you kinda like it though." you pushed yourself up onto your elbows and hovered over her, the corner of the blondes mouth curling into a smile confirming your words.

"and you give as good as you get, don't pretend like you're nice and sweet and chivalrous all the time williamson." you clicked your tongue at her as her smile grew.

"stop!" leah whined as you continued to poke at her, smacking your hands away. "oo jackpot! thank you." you found and fished a chocolate bar out of the pocket of her pants, laying back down on the towel. "oi you little thief thats mine!" the blonde protested as you sat peeled it open, taking a bite with a grin and sitting up trying to wriggle away from her grabby hands.

"well darling whats yours is mine and whats mine is ours." you explained moving it out of reach as she tried to reach for it. "you better at least share!" leah grunted, grabbing at you and dragging you back to the ground.

"you're gonna get it all sandy you idiot!" leah groaned, eventually plucking it from your fingers. "such a pest." leah pinched your cheek as your head settled in her lap and she finished off the last couple bites, tucking the rubbish into her pocket and resting back on her arms.

"oh go ahead, didn't want those anyway." leah scoffed as your own arm reached up to snatch her sunglasses, placing them down over your own eyes as you blew her a kiss.

"think i deserve a proper one for all this sharing and caring." leah tutted, dipping her head so her lips just ghosted over yours.

"mm i guess you've been pretty well behaved today." you teased with a hum, stroking your chin thoughtfully. "yeah thats cause i'm a good girl." leah smirked with her infuriatingly attractive accent though right before she could close the minuscule gap which was left between the two of you there was a shout.

"leah heads!" your girlfriend looked up right at the wrong time as the aussie rules ball kyra had insisted on bringing everywhere with her this trip sailed through the air, smacking her right in the side of the head.

"leah i am so so sorry!" steph apologized profusely with wide eyes, hurrying over with beth in tow who was too busy laughing at your girlfriends misfortune as she grabbed the ball back off the sand.

"just a little tip when someone says heads leah it doesnt mean to look up it means to duck!" beth patted the girls shoulder sarcastically as the defender glared at her and you squeezed her leg sympathetically.

"yeah cheers mate!" leah grumbled with a frown, steph apologizing again as leah mumbled it was fine and you sent the brunette a smile and mouthed it was okay as she left the two of you be.

"come on then cranky lets go for a walk." you patted her thigh and hauled yourself up to your feet, holding out your hand for her. "up you get!" you wiggled your fingers impatiently as leah groaned.

"i'm concussed i can't go for a walk." her arms fell to cover her face as she lay back down. "you are not concussed! honestly you're the most dramatic woman i've ever met you could get a papercut and tell the doctor your finger needs amputating." you smiled as she moved her arms slightly and shot you a glare.

"come onnn, up you get! go leah! go leah!" you clapped and cooed at her, encouraging as if you might a toddler or a puppy as her look of distaste continued to grow. "im so tired." leah sighed, arms flopping to her sides.

"leah you are not being very romantic, acting like asking you to spend time with me is apparently a grave inconvenience." you frowned, folding your arms across your chest.

"baby no thats not-" "well hello lovebirds, not quarreling are we?" lia arrived with an amused look as you smiled knowing this would work to your advantage.

"wally she's being a bad girlfriend." you accused with a point as leah sat up and scoffed. "i am not! she's just being annoying." leah retaliated as you gasped sarcastically and clutched at your chest.

"you see the way she speaks about me? all i wanted to do was go for a lovely little sunset stroll together hand in hand down the beach and she won't get up!" you pushed your foot into leahs side making her whine.

"well then i will go for a lovely sunset walk with you instead. come on schönes mädchen!" lia offered you her hand as you interlocked your fingers and started to walk away with her. "i give it thirty seconds." the swiss mumbled to you knowingly with your backs turned to your girlfriend.

"i give it ten." you shot her a grin as sure enough within seconds leah was scrambling to her feet and sprinting after the two of you. you squealed as her arms wrapped around your waist, her hand smacking lia's away from yours as she lifted you into the air and carried you away.

"you are welcome, enjoy your romantic sunset walk my lovers!" lia called after the two of you with a grin as you waved to her over leahs shoulder before she placed you back down on your feet, her fingers interlocking with yours tightly.

"you're so easy to get to bite." you teased, the girl bringing your interlocked fingers up to her mouth and placing a few soft kisses to the back of your hand. "and you're a wind up." leah rebutted before the two of you fell into a comfortable silence and you swung your hands back and forth.

the chatter, laughs and yelling of your teammates and friends faded into the background the further the two of you walked, eventually reaching the end of the beach and the rocky cliff face loomed in front.

"view would be better from the top!" you grinned suggestively, leah sighing dramatically before agreeing, but not before of course her competitive nature kicked in and she deemed it a race.

"oi! cheat." leah laughed as you took off running, shoving her aside and racing up the small hill that lead to the top, grateful you'd chosen to wear trainers today and not slides.

"loser, loser, loser!" you chanted as you reached the top first, watching as leah struggled up after you. "oh yeah sorry dunno if you realised i done my acl!" leah huffed, eyebrows furrowed in annoyance at the loss as she finally reached the top.

"that excuse has an expiry date you know baby and its coming up fast." you teased as leah grabbed your hand again, the sun had already started to set, bathing you both in the warm burnt orange of the golden hour glow.

you dropped the blondes hand and wandered closer toward the edge, leah warning you to be careful as you snapped a few photos. you missed the way your girlfriend watched like a lovesick puppy at the soft smile which graced your face, forever in love with sunrises and sunsets.

whenever you and leah were apart that was always something you knew drew you together, the two of you sending photos of the sunset to one another for every day you were apart, which was more often than either of you liked given you were born and raised on opposite sides of the world.

"c'mere and give us a cuddle sweets." leah was quick to pull your body into hers once you were within reach again, your back tucking into her front as her arms hugged you tightly and your hands rested on top of hers.

a few beats of silence passed as the two of you just watched the dying sun and the way the sky changed colour, wrapped up tightly in a shared embrace, leahs chin coming to rest on your shoulder.

"don't think i'll ever get over how pretty the sky can be." you sighed happily. "don't think i'll ever get over how pretty you can be." leah sang out with a smile, nose tucking into your neck as her lips peppered warm kisses along the skin of your shoulder.

"charmer." you smiled, more sweet words mumbled into your ear as she continued to trail kisses across every inch of your skin her lips could find.

"see baby girl? i can be very romantic." leah murmured, one hand coming to grab your chin and gently tilt your head back, rewarding you with a soft and tender kiss.

"it was my idea to come up here! all you did was walk with me and even that wasn't without complaint, few cute words doesn't change your moaning about it." you teased, pecking her lips a few times.

"yeah but here we are havin a cuddle, havin a kiss, watchin the sunset, thinking of everything i want to do with my pretty girl once we get back to the hotel." leah smirked, kissing you again though this time a little less sweet as she slipped her tongue in, licking the roof of your mouth as your breath hitched.

"laura do not leave me behind! you are being a bad friend!" you recognised the dutch accent as you broke apart at that, leah sighing as vic, laura, teyah and kyra appeared a few metres away.

"aw sorry did we interrupt your smooch sesh?" kyra cooed making kissy faces as teyah joined in and both you and leah rolled your eyes. "well romance is dead now." the blonde mumbled with a huff as you kissed away the fast forming pout.

"maybe, but whatever you were thinking about doing in that hotel room is still very on the table when we get back baby."

#leah williamson #leah williamson x reader #woso x reader #woso blurbs #woso imagine #woso fanfics #woso #woso community #engwnt

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najia-cooks · 5 months

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[ID: A bowl of avocado spread sculpted into a pattern, topped with olive oil and garnished with symmetrical lines of nigella seeds and piles of pomegranate seeds; a pile of pita bread is in the background. End ID]

متبل الأفوكادو / Mutabbal al-'afukadu (Palestinian avocado dip)

Avocados are not native to Palestine. Israeli settlers planted them in Gaza in the 1980s, before being evicted when Israel evacuated all its settlements in Gaza in 2005. The avocados, however, remained, and Gazans continued to cultivate them for their fall and winter harvest. Avocados have been folded into the repertoire of a "new" Palestinian cuisine, as Gazans and other Palestinians have found ways to interpret them.

Palestinians may add local ingredients to dishes traditionally featuring avocado (such as Palestinian guacamole, "جواكامولي فلسطيني" or "غواكامولي فلسطيني"), or use avocado in Palestinian dishes that typically use other vegetables (pickling them, for example, or adding them to salads alongside tomato and cucumber).

Another dish in this latter category is حمص الافوكادو (hummus al-'afukadu)—avocado hummus—in which avocado is smoothly blended with lemon juice, white tahina (طحينة البيضاء, tahina al-bayda'), salt, and olive oil. Yet another is متبّل الأفوكادو (mutabbal al-'afukadu). Mutabbal is a spiced version of بابا غنوج (baba ghannouj)‎: "مُتَبَّل" means "spiced" or "seasoned," from "مُ" "mu-," a participlizing prefix, + "تَبَّلَ" "tabbala‎," "to have spices added to." Here, fresh avocado replaces the roasted eggplant usually used to make this smooth dip; it is mixed with green chili pepper, lemon juice, garlic, white tahina, sumac, and labna (لبنة) or yoghurt. Either of these dishes may be topped with sesame or nigella seeds, pomegranate seeds, fresh dill, or chopped nuts, and eaten with sliced and toasted flatbread.

Avocados' history in Palestine precedes their introduction to Gaza. They were originally planted in 1908 by a French order of monks, but these trees have not survived. It was after the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (in which Britain, having been promised colonial control of Palestine with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, pledged to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine) that avocado agriculture began to take root.

In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, encouraged by Britain, Jewish Europeans began to immigrate to Palestine in greater numbers and establish agricultural settlements (leaving an estimated 29.4% of peasant farming families without land by 1929). Seeds and seedlings from several varieties of avocado were introduced from California by private companies, research stations, and governmental bodies (including Mikveh Israel, a school which provided settlers with agricultural training). In these years, prices were too high for Palestinian buyers, and quantities were too low for export.

It wasn't until after the beginning of the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from "Jewish" areas following the UN partition of Palestine in 1947) that avocado plantings became significant. With Palestinians having been violently expelled from most of the area's arable land, settlers were free to plant avocados en masse for export, aided (until 1960) by long-term, low-interest loans from the Israeli government. The 400 acres planted within Israel's claimed borders in 1955 ballooned to 2,000 acres in 1965, then 9,000 by 1975, and over 17,000 by 1997. By 1986, Israel was producing enough avocados to want to renegotiate trade agreements with Europe in light of the increase.

Israeli companies also attained commercial success selling avocados planted on settlements within the West Bank. As of 2014, an estimated 4.5% of Israeli avocado exports were grown in the occupied Jordan Valley alone (though data about crops grown in illegal settlements is of course difficult to obtain). These crops were often tended by Palestinian workers, including children, in inhumane conditions and at starvation wages. Despite a European Union order to specify the origin of such produce as "territories occupied by Israel since 1967," it is often simply marked "Israel." Several grocery stores across Europe, including Carrefour, Lidl, Dunnes Stores, and Aldi, even falsified provenance information on avocados and other fruits in order to circumvent consumer boycotts of goods produced in Israel altogether—claiming, for example, that they were from Morocco or Cyprus.

Meanwhile, while expanding its own production of avocados, Israel was directing, limiting, and destabilizing Palestinian agriculture in an attempt to eliminate competition. In 1982, Israel prohibited the planting of fruit trees without first obtaining permission from military authorities; in practice, this resulted in Palestinians (in Gaza and the West Bank) being entirely barred from planting new mango and avocado trees, even to replace old, unproductive ones.

Conditions worsened in the years following the second intifada. Between September of 2000 and September of 2003, Israeli military forces destroyed wells, pumps, and an estimated 85% of the agricultural land in al-Sayafa, northern Gaza, where farmers had been using irrigation systems and greenhouses to grow fruits including citrus, apricots, and avocados. They barred almost all travel into and out of al-Sayafa: blocking off all roads that lead to the area, building barricades topped with barbed wire, preventing entry within 150 meters of the barricade under threat of gunfire, and opening crossings only at limited times of day and only for specific people, if at all.

A July 2001 prohibition on Palestinian vehicles within al-Sayafa further slashed agricultural production, forcing farmers to rely on donkeys and hand carts to tend their fields and to transport produce across the crossing. If the crossing happened to be closed, or the carts could not transport all the produce in time, fruits and vegetables would sit waiting in the sun until they rotted and could not be sold. The 2007 blockade worsened Gaza's economy still further, strictly limiting imports and prohibiting exports entirely (though later on, there would be exceptions made for small quantities of specific crops).

In the following years, Israel allowed imports of food items into Gaza not exceeding the bare minimum for basic sustenance, based on an estimation of the caloric needs of its inhabitants. Permitted (apples, bananas, persimmons, flour) and banned items for import (avocados, dates, grapes) were ostensibly based on "necessary" versus "luxury" foods, but were in fact directed according to where Israeli farmers could expect the most profit.

Though most of the imports admitted into Gaza continued to come from Israel, Gazan farmers kept pursuing self-sufficiency. In 2011, farmers working on a Hamas-government-led project in the former settlements produced avocados, mangoes, and most of the grapes, onions, and melons that Gazans ate; by 2015, though still forbidden from exporting excess, they were self-sufficient in the production of crops including onions, watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, almonds, olives, and apples.

Support Palestinian resistance by calling Elbit System’s (Israel’s primary weapons manufacturer) landlord, donating to Palestine Action’s bail fund, and donating to the Bay Area Anti-Repression Committee bail fund.

Ingredients:

2 medium avocados (300g total)

1/4 cup white tahina

2 Tbsp labna (لبنة), or yoghurt (laban, لبن رايب)

1 green chili pepper

2 cloves garlic

2 Tbsp good olive oil

Juice of 1/2 lemon (1 1/2 Tbsp)

1 tsp table salt, or to taste

Pomegranate seeds, slivered almonds, pine nuts, chopped dill, nigella seeds, sesame seeds, sumac, and/or olive oil, to serve

Khubiz al-kmaj (pita bread), to serve

Instructions:

1. In a mortar and pestle, crush garlic, pepper, and a bit of salt into a fine paste.

2. Add avocados and mash to desired texture. Stir in tahina, labna, olive oil, lemon juice, and additional salt.

You can also combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor.

3. Top with a generous drizzle of olive oil. Add toppings, as desired.

4. Cut pita into small rectangles or triangles and separate one half from the other (along where the pocket is). Toast in the oven, or in a large, dry skillet, stirring occasionally, until golden brown. Serve dip alongside toasted pita chips.

#Palestinian #avocados #tahina #lemons #long post /#gluten free

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

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/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."

Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.

That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.

These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."

Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."

(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.

Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.

In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.

The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.

A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.

This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.

If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.

What's not to like?

Here's what.

The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.

That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.

These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.

For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.

But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.

Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.

Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.

The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.

This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.

This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.

For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.

Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.

But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.

That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.

Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.

For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.

These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.

It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.

For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.

Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.

This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#

Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.

The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.

Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.

Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.

Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.

The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?

2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.

That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.

The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.

Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.

The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.

The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.

Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").

All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.

Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.

Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #chips act #ip #monopolies #antitrust #national security #industrial policy #american economic liberties project #tmsc #leading-edge #intel #mature node #lagging edge #foundries #fabless

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afeelgoodblog · 1 year

Text

The Best News of Last Year

1. Belgium approves four-day week and gives employees the right to ignore their bosses after work

Workers in Belgium will soon be able to choose a four-day week under a series of labour market reforms announced on Tuesday.

The reform package agreed by the country's multi-party coalition government will also give workers the right to turn off work devices and ignore work-related messages after hours without fear of reprisal.

"We have experienced two difficult years. With this agreement, we set a beacon for an economy that is more innovative, sustainable and digital. The aim is to be able to make people and businesses stronger," Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo told a press conference announcing the reform package.

2. Spain makes it a crime for pro-lifers to harass people outside abortion clinics

Spain has criminalized the harassment or intimidation of women going for an abortion under new legislation approved on Wednesday by the Senate. The move, which involved changes to the penal code, means anti-abortion activists who try to convince women not to terminate their pregnancies could face up to a year behind bars.

3. House passes bill to federally decriminalize marijuana

The House has voted with a slim bipartisan majority to federally decriminalize marijuana. The vote was 220 to 204.

The bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, will prevent federal agencies from denying federal workers security clearances for cannabis use, and will allow the Veterans’ Administration to recommend medical marijuana to veterans living with posttraumatic stress disorder.

The bill also expunges the record of people convicted of non-violent cannabis offenses, which House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, “can haunt people of color and impact the trajectory of their lives and career indefinitely.”

4. France makes birth control free for all women under 25

The scheme, which could benefit three million women, covers the pill, IUDs, contraceptive patches and other methods composed of steroid hormones.

Contraception for minors was already free in France. Several European countries, including Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, make contraception free for teens.

5. The 1st fully hydrogen-powered passenger train service is now running in Germany. The only emissions are steam & condensed water.

Five of the trains started running in August. Another nine will be added in the coming months to replace 15 diesel trains on the regional route. Alstom says the Coradia iLint has a range of 1,000 kilometers, meaning that it can run all day on the line using a single tank of hydrogen. A hydrogen filling station has been set up on the route between Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, Bremervörde and Buxtehude.

6. Princeton will cover all tuition costs for most families making under $100,000 a year, after getting rid of student loans

In September, the New Jersey Ivy League school announced it would be expanding its financial aid program to offer free tuition, including room and board, for most families whose annual income is under $100,000 a year. Previously, the same benefit was offered to families making under $65,000 a year. This new income limit will take effect for all undergraduates starting in the fall of 2023.

Princeton was also the first school in the US to eliminate student loans from its financial aid packages.

7. Humpback whales no longer listed as endangered after major recovery

Humpback whales will be removed from Australia's threatened-species list, after the government's independent scientific panel on threatened species deemed the mammals had made a major recovery. Humpback whales will no longer be considered an endangered or vulnerable species.

Climate change and fishing still pose threats to their long-term health.

Some other uplifting news from last year:

A Cancer Trial’s Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient

California 100 percent powered by renewables for first time

Israel formally bans LGBTQ conversion therapy

Tokyo Passes Law to Recognize Same-Sex Partnerships

First 100,000 KG Removed From the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

As we ring in the New Year let’s remember to focus on the good news. May this be a year of even more kindness and generosity. Wishing everyone a happy and healthy 2023!

Thank you for following and supporting this g this newsletter

Buy me a coffee ❤️

#best news of last week

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octuscle · 1 month

Note

So I just got my Chronivac and noticed that it's saying that I used to be a country boy stud with a redneck boyfriend and don't remember any of this, did someone else use one on me without my knowledge

Phew! As far as I can tell, you have purchased a special edition of the Chronivac with a preset already activated. And you started the activation by contacting support. I'm afraid there's not much I can do… At least not until the transformation is complete.

You're sitting in a sports bar with one of your frat brothers. You've just come from rowing training. You're both stars of the university team. Still! Because while you're waiting for your non-alcoholic beer, something starts to change… You were just talking about the upcoming exams. And suddenly you're talking about football. Somehow out of the blue. Fuck university. University pisses you off.

You may not notice it, but the smell in the bar starts to change. Sweat. Beer. Sawdust. Frying fat… Your eyes fall on the man next to you at the bar. Stephen, the captain of the lacrosse team, was just standing there. Now there's someone who looks a lot like Stephen. But he's wearing a sweaty undershirt, has one thumb tucked under his massive belt buckle and has a bottle of beer in the other. His jeans are dirty and he's wearing dusty biker boots. And they are no longer standing on a stylish concrete floor but on an old floorboard covered with sawdust. Stephen turns up his nose. And spits on the floor. What the hell?!?!?! Your bro asks you if you have snuff. You're too confused to be surprised that you pull a can of Copenhagen out of your back pocket. And before you put the tin away again, you take a big pinch yourself.

Something is different. But you don't know what… Caren comes over and asks if you'd like another round of beer. And if you want something to eat. Damn, a big portion of chicken wings and a pitcher of beer would be just the thing right now. But before the food arrives, you have to take a piss. And actually get rid of any other pressure. You glance in the direction of the toilets. The stall has just become free. You signal to your bro that he should follow you straight away. As an appetizer, he gets a load of what's currently building up in your balls.

It was a damn great evening in the bar. The food was good, there was plenty of beer and you were able to cum twice. But you and your buddy had to go to bed early. You had to be at work at 07:00. At the latest. There's a lot to do at the moment. Due to the economic crisis, your fellow citizens have to drive their cars longer than usual. And that means more work for you and your buddy in the workshop. But you love your job!

But you love the end of the day even more. Tonight is burger night at the sports bar. Eileen makes the best and biggest burgers in the county. And every second pitcher of beer is free. And today you have something to celebrate. A city slicker broke down with his show-off car. You don't have that much experience with German tin. But the car eventually purred like a Bavarian cat again. And the snob had to bleed for it. And you finally have the last installment for your garage together. Tomorrow you'll go to Pete at the bank and then tear up the loan agreement. And you'll spend today a local round on that fact. It's only half the price today. Hehehe.

You're the hottest studs in town. Rumor has it that you've bedded every woman under 40. Many women brag that you got them pregnant. You like to jerk off to these stories. Preferably as a couple. You keep your trucker hats on. The one or other dried cum stain can tell stories.

A few weeks ago there was some chick who took pictures of you and shared them on one of those shitty social networks or whatever. She got in touch a few days later and said that the response had been amazing or something. She could turn you into stars. You don't want to be stars. You're already studs. That's quite enough for you. But the good thing is that a whole lot of guys are now coming to your place who want to be fucked by you. And you don't need to be told twice. Your food is on Hank. Because of you, his motel is almost always fully booked since the chick's visit.

The sports bar is still called "Eileen's". Just like it's still called "Hank's Motel". They haven't owned it all for a long time. It's all yours. It may not be obvious to your bro and you, but you're by far the richest people in town. It all started when some rich guy you two were shagging in Hank's presidential suite had a heart attack shortly afterwards. And left you both a million dollars each. There were several cases like that. Inheritances, gifts. One guy even wanted to adopt you both. Shit, you had a stressful time. The workshop during the day, you had to look after your fans in the evening. That damn chick. Until her visit, you had a really relaxed life.

Hell, your life is as relaxed as it can be. There are so many people in this village who owe you a hell of a lot. Literally. And figuratively. You might not have as much energy as you used to. But you still have a hell of a lot of sex!

Caren comes over and asks if you'd like another round of beer. And if you want something to eat. Damn, a big portion of chicken wings and a pitcher of beer would be just the thing right now. But before the food arrives, you have to take a piss. And actually get rid of any other pressure. You glance in the direction of the toilets. The stall has just become free. You signal to your bro that he should follow you straight away. As an appetizer, he gets a load of what's currently building up in your balls. Good things never change!

#male tf #muscle tf #reality change #chronivac #inked man #age progression #age reduction #ai image

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pannaginip · 28 days

Text

Located 62km north-east of the capital Manila, Daraitan village in Rizal province is home to about 5,700 residents, a majority of whom are members of the Dumagat-Remontado indigenous people who consider vast hectares of the mountain range as part of their ancestral domain.

But the village may soon disappear under the same waters that give it life, once the Philippine government finishes building the Kaliwa Dam – one of 16 flagship infrastructure projects of former president Rodrigo Duterte that is being funded by China.

The new dam is expected to provide Metro Manila with an additional 600 million litres of water daily once it is finished by end-2026. Officials said building the 60m-high reservoir is even more necessary now that the country is starting to feel the impact of the El Nino weather phenomenon.

But it was only in 2021 under Mr Duterte that construction finally broke ground, three years after Manila and Beijing signed the 12 billion peso (S$288 million) loan agreement.

Of the 119 on the list [of flagship projects of the "Build, Build, Build” infrastructure programme], Mr Duterte turned to China to finance 16 big-ticket projects in a bid to cement his legacy by the time his presidency ended in 2022. He embraced Beijing during his term and even downplayed Manila’s claims in the disputed South China Sea in favour of securing loans and grants from China.

Analysts have criticised Mr Duterte’s infrastructure programme as ambitious. Perennial domestic issues like local politics, right-of-way acquisition problems, lack of technology and red tape in bureaucracy led to severe delays in the projects.

The same issues hound the China-funded projects – which come under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to build infrastructure in developing nations – with the problems made more severe by Beijing’s high interest rates in its loan agreements and local backlash due to displacement of residents or potential environmental damage.

Critics say the BRI has been detrimental in the long run to some recipient countries, especially those that have been unable to repay their loans, like Sri Lanka and Zambia.

The Duterte government’s failure to take advantage of its BRI loans was a “missed opportunity” for the Philippines, said infrastructure governance specialist Jerik Cruz, a graduate research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The four completed China-funded projects under Mr Duterte were controversial too. But they came to fruition because they had the support of local politicians allied with Mr Duterte and therefore increased his political capital, said Dr Camba.

Tribal leaders said they were not properly consulted regarding the project that threatens their traditional way of life. Environmentalists from the Stop Kaliwa Dam Network also say the project would destroy 126 species of flora and fauna in the Sierra Madre.

The Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act states that the government must first secure a tribe’s free, prior and informed consent before building on its ancestral lands.

But Ms Clara Dullas, one of the leaders of the Dumagat-Remontado in Rizal, alleged that the Duterte government had either misinformed or pressured other tribe members into giving their consent.

She could not bear to hold grudges, though, noting that the Dumagat-Remontado organisations that eventually agreed to the Kaliwa Dam were each given 80 million pesos, or $1.9 million, in “disturbance” fees.

“The Kaliwa Dam is the reason why our tribe is divided now. There is a crack in our relationships even if we all come from the same family,” said Ms Dullas. “I can’t blame the others because we lack money. I believe there was bribery involved.”

The government requires them to present identification documents, and only those given passes may enter. Mr Dizon said this is to ensure that no unidentified personnel enter the area [close to the construction zone].

“We feel like we are foreigners in our own home because the Chinese and the people in our own government are now preventing us from entering the lands where we grew up,” said tribe leader Renato Ibanez, 48.

Mr Ibanez also accuses the Philippine authorities of harassing tribe members who are vocal against Kaliwa Dam. Some of them have been accused of working with communist rebels, a charge the tribe vehemently denies.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr Marcos is more aggressive in defending Manila’s overlapping claims with Beijing in the South China Sea, but still fosters economic ties with it.

Geopolitical tensions between the two nations and Mr Marcos’ stance towards Beijing are going to dictate the fate of the pending China-funded projects the President inherited from Mr Duterte, said Mr Cruz.

Tribe members said they would be more amenable if Mr Marcos would revisit Japan’s proposed Kaliwa Intake Weir project that Mr Duterte had set aside.

“We like Japan’s proposal. It would not destroy our forests. It would not affect residents here. The Philippines would not be buried in debt,” said Ms Dullas.

This was among the alternatives the Dumagat-Remontados offered during their nine-day march in February 2023, when some 300 members walked 150km from Quezon and Rizal all the way to Manila to protest against the Kaliwa Dam.

But they failed to secure an audience with Mr Marcos. They remain wary of the President’s position on the Kaliwa Dam and other controversial China-funded deals.

“As much as we want to fully pin our hopes on him, we don’t. We’ve learnt from past efforts to trick us, make us believe a project is about to end, only for it to be resurrected again years later,” said Ms Dullas.

2024 Mar. 3

#philippines #indigenous rights #dumagat-remontado #state violence #red tagging #infrastructure #environmental issues #afp-pnp

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jksprincess10 · 1 year

Text

A small loan || Pedro Pascal x reader

Summary: Your boyfriend Pedro found your secret kink.

TW: Age gap, unprotected sex, mask kink, dom!pedro

I feel like this isn’t as good as I imagined but I needed to get this out of my brain

You two had an agreement. He would leave for months for filming and came back eventually to his New York apartment, where you stayed for free. He gave you everything, in return, you were discreet and you took care of his home. You liked this freedom, liked being alone. As an introvert, you could stay in your-his office all day and write your silly little romance novels and give some writing lessons on the side to have some pocket money. You would spend nights exploring his bookshelves and imagine his voice reading aloud.

You liked this independence, yes, but a part of you always waited for him to come back. Of course, you would facetime at least once a week. More if you could. But you were young and he didn’t want the media on his ass for dating a younger woman, although he wasn’t as creepy as Leonardo Dicaprio. No, you were far into your twenties. Still, he didn’t want anyone to know, except close friends, and you were his little secret.

Your best friend knew, of course, she was the reason you two met.

It was Jessie’s book launching party. You two went to university together and you followed your dreams, always supporting each other and being honest with each other.

You hated those stupid parties and meeting new people, having to make small talk, but you went to encourage her. Jessie was showing you around to everyone like a cute puppy and eventually, you two stopped in front of Pedro. His face was familiar, but you didn’t know from where.

“Pedro, this is my best friend.”

He leaned in to leave polite kisses on your cheeks and you felt his beard scratching your cheeks.

“Nice to meet you.” His voice was soft, inviting.

“L-Likewise.” You responded, destabilized by his beauty.

“Y/N, you probably know him from The Mandalorian…”

“Oh.” That’s all you could say. This stupid show that inspired some smutty stories you wrote about mask kinks. You didn’t know it was him – hell, they never showed his face and you weren’t a big enough fan to dig deeper. But he was handsome. “Didn’t recognize you without the mask.”, you justified awkwardly.

And Jessie left you there to see other friends. You looked probably dumbfounded, but he laughed and it made your shoulders relax, leaving the tension and the awkwardness behind.

“You’re right, I look so much better with the mask on.” He sipped on his wine and you did the same. You felt his soft brown eyes analyzing your body in that light purple dress. You liked the attention he gave you.

“That’s not what I meant at all, you’re very handsome… I just didn’t expect to see you at a romance novel launch party.”

“I have my secrets. So, are you also a writer?”

You engaged in small talk that was, for once, comfortable.

Eventually, that night, you don’t know how, but you ended up in his hotel room, moaning his name as he was exploring your body.

You hung out more and more when he was in town, not only for sex, but for dates, until you came to this little agreement between you two. It was simple and complicated at the same time. You two had a life on the side, but you knew you loved each other, but-but-but no one could know. So many buts. So, you would watch him from afar, on various screens, until he came back to you in this cocoon you two created.

“Almost home. Got a surprise for you, sweetheart.”

You smiled at your phone and saved one last time your draft, before texting back:

“Excited to see what kind of surprise you got for me.”

Since he was – well, older, you had to teach him the rules of texting. Some days, he would just forget that texts existed and would call instead.

Soon enough, you heard the lock of the door turning. You moved from the couch and jumped in his arms. He groaned slightly, surprised, wrapping his arms tightly around you. Then, he pressed a soft kiss on the top of your head.

“Missed you.”

You got up on your toes to leave a kiss on his lips. “Missed you two, sweet girl.”, he whispered against your plush mouth.

You gave him some time to breathe and take care of his luggage, until you saw a bag that looked heavy. You tried lifting it up, it felt like… metal?

“Pedro, what’s that?” You were always to say his name the right way, the “r” rolling on your tongue.

He took the bag from you before you could see what was inside.

“Your surprise. And it’s not ready yet.”

Your mouth formed an adorable pout, but he didn’t flinch.

“Promise, you’ll get it soon. I just need take a shower first, I smell like… airplanes.”

“That makes no fucking sense.” You laughed.

“I know. But shush.”

“Can’t I come in the shower with you?”

He seemed tempted, you hadn’t touched in months and his body ached for you. But he said no, before disappearing in the bathroom and taking the mysterious bag with him. You waited on the couch, scrolling mindlessly on your phone. It was taking a long time, longer than usual, you thought. But you were patient because he asked. You were his good girl waiting to get praised by him for waiting.

After thirty minutes, the bathroom door opened, and you heard his steps – heavier than usual – coming to you. You lifted your chin to see him in full Mandalorian armor, helmet masking his curls and all.

“Oh.” Your chin dropped to your neck, and you tightened your thighs together.

“They let me… keep it since I asked. A small loan, since they’re making a new armor for season 3.”

His voice sounded deeper as it resonated against the metal.

“Pedro, don’t tell me you found my silly and dirty story-” You panicked.

He approached slowly. He looked taller, scarier. And the naughtiest part of you loved it. His gloved hand lifted your chin, fabric soft against your skin. You were faced with a visor, and you couldn’t see his soft, warm eyes. You were already breathless, and he was barely touching you.

“I did. It gave me a few ideas. So, the helmet stays on, unless you close your eyes. For now, I don’t trust you to keep them closed. Understood?” His voice was deep, dark. The same stupid voice he used in the show. Asshole.

“Yes, sir.”

You swore you could see him grinning behind the glass.

“Come with me.”

You nodded and did as he said, following him to the bedroom, although your legs felt weak. He sat on the side of the bed, still looking tall and menacing in this stupid stupid suit. His hands pressed your shoulders, and you went down on your knees in front of him.

“You will let me fuck your mouth.”

You nodded and you watched him as he undid the bottom of this stupid costume. A gloved hand grabbed the back of your head and pushed you towards his already half-hard member. You opened your mouth as he guided himself past the barrier of your soft lips. You swallowed against his length, sucking in your cheeks. His hips moved, slowly at first, but softness didn’t last too long.

“Good girl.” He praised in a low voice.

You felt yourself getting ridiculously wet as he hips thrusted into your mouth, fucking it harshly, using you as a vessel for his pleasure. You moaned against his skin and concentrated so you wouldn’t choke as the corner of your eyes filled with tears.

“Aw, I thought you could take more than that.” He cooed.

His cock slipped from your mouth, leaving you empty, his hand held you by the throat so you would get up. You knew, even though Pedro was “gone” for the sake of this little play session, he still cared about you and knew your limits.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Take a break. We have plenty of time to play.” He said as he trapped your hips between his strong thighs.

His fingers hooked the elastic of your shorts, before pulling them down. You felt already exposed under the dark gaze you imagined he had. You liked not knowing, not being able to read his face. Fingers covered in leather teased the hidden parts of you through the thin fabric, already soaking wet. You sucked in a breath.

“You’re such a pervert, aren’t you? You’re getting off on the kinkiest stuff.”

“I am, sir. B-But please…”

You grinded against his hand, wanting your lover to commit fully. A sound came out of his mouth that sounded like a low laugh, that didn’t sound like him.

“You’re pathetic.”

Slowly, his fingers came up to your mouth. You bit through the fabric to take the gloves off, freeing strong, manly hands. Once free, his fingers found their way back to your panties, he pulled them to the side, before slipping two fingers against your swollen and wet lips. You let out a pathetic moan as he worked his fingers slowly through your folds. Your legs were already shaking, and if he wasn’t holding the small of your back with his palm, you would be falling. His thumb found your clit and teased it, circling around it, as he inserted a finger in you.

“F-Fuck… C-Can I…”

He let out a small “shush” as he kept working on teasing you, inserting another finger. He fucked you with two fingers, curling them, as his thumb kept caressing that sweet spot on your anatomy. That’s all it took to send you over the edge, and you tried to stay up as he guided you through your orgasm. It pitiful how fast you came, but you were so hungry for him.

“Good girl.” He praised. “Now, you want to try again?”

You nodded before dropping to your knees and you took all of him in. This time, he didn’t thrust in your mouth, and he let you go at your own rhythm, even though he seemed impatient. He occasionally let out slow groans as you bobbed your head up and down, coating his member with your sweet saliva. You went faster as you heard his pleased sounds and when he was done playing, he stopped you, pulling your hair.

“Better.”

You looked so good on his knees for him, makeup already fucked. He could’ve cum already, but he wanted to last longer for you.

“Aren’t you hot in all of this?” You asked, fingers caressing the armor on his chest.

The helmet nodded.

“You can take it off, y’know?”

Slowly, you helped him getting him out of the costume, revealing tan, golden skin and patches of curly hair here and there. Your fingers hooked the bottom of the helmet, but he shook his head.

“Not yet.”

You pouted, even though you were the one who fantasized about this in the first place. You just… really missed his face, that you hadn’t seen in person for months. His strong hands pulled you on top of him as his back touched the mattress. You leaned in, kissing the defined line of his neck and sucking on the skin. You wanted him to know he was yours. You wanted everyone else to know so bad. Suddenly, his hand smacked your ass cheek. You let out a little cry of surprise.

“Bad girl. No hickeys.”

So, you found something else to negotiate about.

“I’ll keep my eyes closed and you can fuck me from behind.”

He groaned, letting out a swear word. The simple thought was so hot to him.

“Fine.” He sighed.

You sat beside him on the bed and put your hands over your eyes as he took off the helmet and carefully put it aside. He was so sweaty under it, dark curls wet with sweat and his forehead glistening. He manoeuvred your small body so you would lay on your belly, face burrowed in the soft pillows.

His hands positioned on your ass, he entered your walls, already strong and rough. You bit into the pillow as he thrusted in and out of you, fast and hard. You tried to be silent, but soon enough, you were screaming as he hit that spot inside of you. Your walls tightened around him and without a warning, you felt warm liquid shooting in you.

He turned you around to face him as you kept your eyes closed. You felt him gently cleaning you up.

“You can look, sweet girl.”

You opened your eyes and smiled as you saw his face. His curls were going in every direction possible; his face was shiny with sweat and god this stupid smile was placed on his lips. You pulled him closer to give him a long kiss, delicate fingers grabbing the back of his neck.

“Was it better than your story?” He asked teasingly.

“Frankly, yes. And I’ll write more of it.”

His laugh filled the room.

“Can’t wait to read it, love.”

#pedro pascal x reader #the mandaloria/reader #pedro pascal

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stereax · 21 days

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Wait, can fedetov play for the flyers for the remainder of the season and in playoffs?

Yep, he can! He was signed to an NHL ELC a few years back (summer 2022) with the intention of going to the NHL after his KHL season ended. The Russian government, however, arrested him on charges of "evading the draft" and sent him on a wonderful one-year "vacation" to an Arctic Circle Russian Navy post. When he returned from his vacation, he re-signed with his KHL club, CSKA Moscow. The IIHF said that, because Fedotov had an NHL ELC, the KHL contract was illegal. The KHL basically flipped the IIHF off and played Fedotov anyway despite being fined for it.

At this point, it seemed that Fedotov would be stuck in Russia forever. Thus, the NHL, from what I understand, quietly suspended Fedotov's contract, as Fedotov was categorically unable to play for the Flyers. What this essentially did was create a sort of "ELC slide" proxy - if Fedotov were to ever come to play in the NHL, the contract would be unsuspended then and he could play. This also allowed the Flyers to retain his rights. Clubs who draft Russian players technically have unexpiring rights to sign them to their ELC, a by-rule in place because the NHL and KHL do not have an official transfer agreement. Clearly, the Flyers should not be penalized (by losing Fedotov's rights) for signing a player who was trapped in Russia. Plus, as the contract was suspended, the Flyers would not have to pay it. Allowing them not to pay makes sense, given they do not control the player at any level (NHL, AHL, ECHL) and did not loan him themselves.

So now that Fedotov was basically hostage-released to Philly (CSKA "abruptly terminated" his contract and Fedotov hauled ass to Pennsylvania), the NHL has quietly lifted their quiet suspension of his contract. As he was a contracted player to the Flyers at the time of the trade deadline, albeit suspended, he is eligible to play in the playoffs. By virtue of having an NHL contract with the Flyers, he can also play out the rest of the season with them.

Note - there are cases, like Ottawa with Scott Gomez, where a free agent is signed after the trade deadline and is thus ineligible for the playoffs but can still play in the regular season. This does not apply to Fedotov, as he was signed far before the trade deadline. It's only that his contract came into effect afterwards because he was able to come to the United States.

#stereanswers #stereanalysis #ivan fedorov #philadelphia flyers

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necroromantics · 7 months

Text

🌾 — Battle Fields

ticciwork short story

- a boy lay silent atop the bright autumn meadow of the countryside. farmstead and forest still waiting, but the woods of the darkened world no longer lure him in, and horrify him with its dreadful kingdom.

- silently, he wishes to a god who is not listening to remain lying under the warm sunlight, breathing along to the birds song and humming symphony of crickets.

- here in the endless wilderness, he was removed from the world of man, and creature. he never saw so clearly the wide blue spread of heaven coated by soft white cloud.

- his back met the grassland that cradled him as dandelion weeds sat messily in his brunette hair. tired, ladened eyes found a semblance of strength in the sky as he stared up. strange country surrounded him, nevertheless the forest brook spoke to the young man.

- a deep inhale of the reek of the wartorn fields caused the boy to tremble with the wounds of a hundred dying and sick. time has long slipped past him, and he knows only that somewhere in the distance, a battle is being fought.

- brown, earthly eyes grow heavy and darken the world around him for a moment. slowly, he begins to slip away. he, too, will return to what he was. he will once again become a soldier. and he will once again know, that the sweet breath of peace, the precious possession of heartbeat, is only a loan.

- a soft kick to his side fluttered him awake, the small boyish frame hurriedly taking a seated position and faced the leg which had touched him. he looked up, and his gaze met with a familiar, tall and brunette girl.

- “what’re you doing out here?” she spoke.

- “what do you care?” he replied.

- the rolling chirp of a northern cardinal was heard in the distance, singing from the tall trees of orange and yellow. in this torturous year, autumn had come early.

- without another word, the girl had taken a seat beside the boy whose thick brow was now furrowed in disregard. with his eyes, he promised friendship, and they were so young. the winds come and go, the clock that sat itself inside her left eye ticked on, and yet she stayed. sat for a time by his side. she stayed in silence.

- the last warmth of the fall catered itself onto their skin, and the wide meadow enveloped the pair. the mighty sun falls kindly onto their foreheads, and jackets. breathing in, they shared a sense of an upcoming winter.

- “maybe some day you will come back from the war, and take a walk with me one evening.” the clock-eyed girl spoke, her slender arms draped casually around her long legs as to hug them. the boy only stared at her in reply. he had forgotten for a moment what he was, and where he was supposed to be.

- “give me your hand then, i still have a long way to go.” a reply was spoken in a low mutter, a boyhood fear of making the companion beside him run off as one frightened deer might. he was a soldier running away from the battlefield, and she was beautiful.

- “you know nothing of time. you will remain in those woods until it kills you,” her eyes gazed forward into the edge of the dark, tall forest that beckoned, “you will never free yourself wholly like this. the puppet strings remain attached.”

- the girls long thin fingers calloused with years of creation, and destruction, wrapped neatly around the boys blood-stained hand. they interlocked as though they were never meant to be apart in the first place, as if a puzzle piece was being put into its proper place.

- “i need to make my way back now. the sun is beginning to set,” he spoke softly, there was a hint of melancholy that hitched his speech. only in reply did the girl stare out to the orange and red rusted skies as the two watched the sun lay to rest.

- “its going to kill you some day, toby.”

- “that is knowledge i can live with.”

- “take me with you to your grave, then, stubborn boy.”

- a low chuckle escaped his mouth at the oh too familiar scold of his closest friend. he nodded in agreement, joining her in a peaceful gaze at the beautiful view ahead of them. when he made a glance over to her, he saw a hint of deep sorrow make its way into the cracks of her time-ridden face as her brow creased and her lips folded into a frown.

- it seemed that no matter the exchange of words, the boy had an unfortunate habit of upsetting his intimate other. shaking his hand from her comfortable grasp, he stood up from his bedding within the vast golden green fields and stretched his tired body. the sweet breath of life shook sorrowfully from his overworked limbs and a quick goodbye was exchanged before he made his way back into the distant woods.

- for the boy, always a dim picture of a legend. war will remain, and heavy are the recent days. he has no place in the peaceful meadows outside the bounds of the battlefield.

#tombwrites #creepypasta #ticciwork #ticci toby #creepypasta fandom #creepypasta ticci toby #toby rogers #clockwork #clockwork creepypasta #creepypasta ticciwork #ticci toby x clockwork

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sincerelyy-youres · 10 months

Text

Trade Secrets (Yandere Sampo x Reader)

TW: Obssesive Behaviour, Manipulation. Read at your own risk.

You can't really tell if Sampo Koski is a good person.

Or a bad person, because you could never really say if his actions are for his clients or for himself, but realistically speaking, all businesses are like that. All deals, all transactions and for whatever purpose, the merchant and the employer must reap the benefit of their agreements. On the merchant's part, the benefit is the pay; the money or whatever possesion their employer had that they can have once they finish the job, and on the client's part, the benefit is the job that is done by the person they hired. Business are for yourself, and for your clients.

This is what you believed Sampo always had kept in mind. At the end of the day, all of us just wanted to have a good pay and treat for ourselves, and of course, a job well done! It doesn't really matter If theres a few loose ends on the way-- these things are part of the job. If you have to use other people to your advantage to get the job done easier for yourself, or even if you have to manipulate, or in a simple much more convincing word-- to persuade other people into giving in and to avail your offered good services and commodities, all of this are the basic, fundamental meaning of business. Without manipula--err, persuasion, there's no business to be made!

That is what Sampo's mentality is. He is not a bad person, because he's only doing what's expected to him as a businessman. But he's not a good person either, because he's willing to do everything to make his life easier and for a good extra tip-- even if that means persuading other people. And since he neither had the basic quality of a human being in this standard of society, he had one quality that you can call him. Again, he's not good, but he's not bad, either.

He's manipulative.

And which is why you avoid making transactions with him as best as you can. You know there's something wrong with his discounts, there's ulterior motives behind his free commissions and his 'deal all you can' and 'loan with zero interest' offers is as suspicous as him. You'd seen him make deals with other people in the underworld but he's never as desperate as when he tries to persuade you into his doubtful offers. He's always there, waiting, staring, following, just for you to give in. You knew better, anyway, than to fall for his trap, even if his offers hits too tempting to let go because its involved with any recent problem you have, and its just a coincidence that he knows whatever is bothering you at recent anyway.

Until, well, you got yourself into a big, mess of a business transaction.

Its something that no matter how hard you try to get yourself out to, you can't. It felt like you threw yourself at a rabbit hole, and you desperately are in need of a helping hand. It felt like you are thrown in a maze, trapped, helpless, scared. Every day you feel like you were being watched, and at night the doorknob to your room rattles and rotates likes someone is trying to get in. Walking in the streets of the underworld became a horror to you as you feel like you are being followed, but there also, Sampo appeared.

Out of nowhere, with a smile that is not his usual convincing, persuasive and businessman smile, but the kind of smile that felt like he knows what he's doing will benefit him in the long run. He held your right cheek, and leaned into your left ear, and there he spoke of the various solutions that he offers to solve your problem. A quick fix, a solution and he doesn't even require you to pay. All you have to do is say yes. All you have to do is nod your little head and everything will be okay.

Sampo... is a manipulative businessman. He had all the tricks up in his sleeve, all that means to get an extra to every deal. When things doesn't go his way, he makes way for it with a smile on his face, and a radiating positivity, all his actions justified, because there's no way that nothing goes according to his plans. If there is actually something that doesn't go according to what he planned, for example, you, he adds a little pressure on your side. It is not equal if the pressure is always on him, after all! Business are always equal to both parties, is it not? It only takes a little cracking on the wall you had created between the two of you, one that if he destroyed, youre surely falling right into his arms, just as he first planned when he approached you.

Now that you witnessed first-hand how he works, don't go telling it to others now! Not that you can talk to others now anyway. But just in case!

Its a trade secret, after all~

#yandere #yancore #yandere x reader #honkai star rail #yanderecore #sampo x you #sampo koski #sincerelyy youres #sampo honkai #wrote this on a whim #HES SO INSANE FOR THIS

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wileys-russo · 7 months

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I was wondering if you could write something with alessia x reader where r plays for an opponent team and they sorta get into it on the pitch because they’re so passionate playing

enemiesII a.russo

the london derby day was always an interesting one, for both fans and players alike. but it was even more challenging for you and your girlfriend, who played for rival teams, destined for that entire day to go from lovers to fierce rivals.

both you and alessia's passion was football, you'd met in the early youth camps for the lionesses and started off as best friends, though as time passed and the two of you grew up, your feelings for one another became a little less friendly.

it took a couple of years of dancing cautiously around these feelings before either one of you made a move, you'd played a singular season with man united on loan from chelsea and with so much time spent together it pushed the two of you to finally confess, laid down together listening to music in the back of your car one night when you were both too nervous to sleep.

since then, your season with manchester united had come and gone and your contract with chelsea was renewed. the season on loan taught you a lot about adapting to a different style of play and pushed you to challenge yourself, especially when playing against your friends and old team mates, making sure you played your very best despite that.

and it paid off. alessia was sad to see you go but understood that ultimately it was the best move for your career to return to your beloved blues, and so you did distance for awhile, spending weekends and free days and the off seasons flickering between london and manchester, alterntating who would do the travel each time.

but now with alessia having transferred to arsenal, you'd both made a decision to move in together, you'd been seeing one another a little over two years and felt it only right that this was the next step.

wanting a fresh start and not for alessia to feel like she was moving in with you rather than the two of you moving out together, you spent weeks prior to the announcement searching for the perfect place to call home.

fast forward and here you both were, wrapped up together in one another's embrace, both purposefully procrastinating needing to get up and start your day, fully knowing the moment your feet hit the carpet your bubble of love would be burst.

"we really need to get up soon love." you mumbled into alessia's shoulder, body vibrating with silent laughter at the audibly annoyed groan which left the blonde beneath you. "if i get up, will you let me score today?" your girlfriend cracked one baby blue eye open with a smirk.

"not a chance baby." you smiled at her attempt, peppering her lips with soft kisses as she pouted up at you in response. "okay. up we get!" you sighed, forcing yourself out of her strong hold and sitting up, rubbing your eyes tiredly.

"come on, if you're quick we can save water." you suggested, standing to your feet and extending a hand, squealing as alessia practically jumped out of bed, grabbing your hand and dragging you to the bathroom.

"from this moment forward my love, sworn enemies." you held out your hand as both you and alessia stood at your cars, dressed in your respective clubs colors, kit bags hanging off your shoulders and keys in hand.

"like i never knew you babe." alessia nodded in agreement, shaking your hand, pausing for a moment before yanking your body into hers, turning around and pressing you against her mercedes with a grin.

"buuut, one more for the road?" the taller girl tapped her lips expectantly as you shook your head. "sorry, don't kiss strangers." you shrugged, hint of a smile tugging at your lips.

"and i don't fraternize with the enemy, but i'm willing to make an exception if you are." the striker smiled charmingly as you paused, tapping your chin to think it over.

you sighed as if her request was an effort, leaning up and connecting your lips for a moment, your hands on her shoulders gently pushing her away as her tongue started to explore your mouth.

"french kissing a woman you don't even know, shame on you russo." you tutted, the blonde smacking your bum as you turned around, flashing you a cheeky grin and slipping into her car.

you flipped her off and blew her a kiss as you sat down in your own, both of you revving your engines before peeling out of the driveway, headed in opposite directions.

"they're pressing in hard, they're gonna be desperate to at least equalise!" you struggled to catch your breath as you were all paused, guro off to the side being assessed for a concussion as she'd taken a nasty headbutt a few moments ago when going up for a header.

"it's gonna get messy girls, watch out for one another and don't let communication die off!" millie warned you, jess and niamh who all nodded, taking a long drink and tossing your bottles back as guro was cleared and the ref blew the whistle for play to resume.

arsenal were down 2-1 and they needed to at least draw this game to keep in the running for top of the table, this match the very last of the weekends WSL fixtures.

and you hadn't been wrong, they were desperate, and tackles became more and more messy as the time wound down, 9 minutes of stoppage time all that remained for them to score.

"y/l/n, get her on the wing!" millie yelled as caitlin crossed it over to lia who tapped it in for alessia, who'd come hurtling down the left side as you sprinted over to intercept her before she reached goal.

you slid in for the tackle right as alessia sent it through for caitlin again, collecting her ankles and entirely taking out her legs, the blondes body thumping to the ground, forehead bouncing off the pitch.

you heard the away section start to scream for a penalty as you tried to get to your feet, but a hand tugging on the back of your jersey sent you flying back to the ground. "are you serious? get off!" you grunted, wrenching away your girlfriends hand as the two of you stood.

"am i serious? you just took out my legs studs up for no reason, are you trying to break my fucking ankle?" alessia shoved you harshly in the chest, face bright red as you heard the ref blow the whistle in warning.

"oh grow up! that was completely legal, you had the ball when i slid in." you shoved her back, not backing down as she glared down at you half a foot taller, the two of you standing chest to chest. "she went in studs up, that should be a card!" alessia yelled at the ref who joined you both and warned you each to calm down.

"are you joking me? that was soft!" you scoffed, shoving her away from you as she tried to stare down intimidatingly, feeling millies hands come to rest on your shoulders.

"oi back up away from her! that should a fucking red." katie appeared beside your girlfriend, pushing you harshly as millie held you back from retaliating.

"are you fucking serious? it was completely legal!" you threw your hands up as you watched the ref reach into her pocket, pulling out a red for the booking.

"hey we'll contest it. just walk away babe, don't make this any worse." millie murmured, moving an arm around your shoulder and starting to walk you away as your team stepped in to argue for you, several of the arsenal girls starting to contest the yellow card given to alessia for the shoving around.

"this is bullshit." you spat as you shrugged off millies arm, head hung low as you stormed off the pitch and into the tunnel, the sound of the chelsea fans booing the refs call following after you as you headed for the change rooms.

you kicked off your boots, throwing them around the room allowing yourself a tantrum before you thought better of it, hurrying to collect your things and shoving them back into your cubby, ducking off for a shower.

you were sat by your locker, showered and dressed in your tracksuit, knees tucked up to your chest as the rest of the team filed in. you'd checked the score on your phone, showing the girls manage to hold down your lead, narrowly scraping by and getting the crucial three points.

niamh and erin took their seats at their own lockers either side of you, niamh patting your back sympathetically and kissing your cheek as you sent her a small smile, a congratulations for their efforts slipping past your lips as emma joined you all.

you tuned out most of her speech, giving a weak nod as she confirmed millies words that the red would be attested in hopes you'd be able to play next week, before the older woman took you aside one on one for a gentle but firm reminder about keeping cool.

"come on stroppy, off we go." millies arm fell over your shoulders once you'd grabbed your things, though she guided you in the wrong direction as you frowned. "mills my cars that way, where are we-" your words stopped as you noticed them.

"are you joking? no way." you huffed, trying to turn around as millies grip on you tightened, as did leahs on alessia as she pushed the younger girl down the hallway.

"now girls, obviously tensions arose and some not so nice words were exchanged. but thats football, and we leave it out on the pitch." leah started, your national captain giving you both a stern look as millie hummed in agreement.

"she got me a red for nothing!" you protested, looking to millie for some sort of support as alessia scoffed. "she studded me!" alessia retaliated, crossing her arms firmly over your chest. "no no no! we leave it, on the pitch." millie warned, grabbing your arms as leah grabbed alessias.

"what are you-" "oh this is just-"

both girls forced your arms to wrap around one another, both you and your girlfriend going limp as they fell back off. "no! hug it out and say you love each other." millie ordered sternly, leah draping alessias arms over your shoulders as yours were forcibly wrapped around her torso by millie.

"im getting annoyed here!" leah warned, tapping her foot impatiently, you and alessias eyes rolling in sync as you hugged one another. "now say you love each other." millie waved and you withheld the urge to lash out at her.

"i hate you." you mumbled into the blondes shoulder, feeling her sharply pinch you for the comment as millie stepped in to hold your arms against one another, still forcing you into the hug.

"say it! or the next national camp i swear to god i will ruin the both of you. im talking hill sprints, push ups, burpees, i'll even make you do a private little beep test." leah warned seriously, pulling her captain rank as you sighed.

"love you, even if you tried to break my fucking ankle." "love you, even if you played it up to the ref."

"no! with sincerity, and a little smooch." millie ordered, leaning against the wall beside leah as you both groaned, though admittedly most of your anger had melted away the tighter your girlfriend clung onto you.

"i love you." alessia unwrapped one of her arms to grab your chin, turning your head and pecking your lips with a roll of her eyes. "i love you too." you leant up to quickly brush your lips with hers in return, both of you looking to your co-captains with raised eyebrows as they waved for you to separate.

"i'll see you at home?" alessia questioned, adjusting her bag on her shoulder, all traces of anger gone from her features. "i'll see you at home." you sighed, leaning in and properly kissing her, ignoring the immature squeals from the two older blondes to your side.

after all the moment you crossed the threshold of your shared home, you were enemies no more.

#alessia russo #alessia russo x reader #woso x reader #woso #woso fanfics #woso imagine #woso blurbs #engwnt

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agentrouka-blog · 3 months

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I've seen a handful of people speculate that if Jon is truly alive (assuming that the wounds he received at the end of his chapter in ADWD were fatal to begin with), he could maybe inform the Vale of the ongoing food problem at the Wall and therefore, Sansa (or rather "Alayne" in this case) would receive that message and maybe try to reunite with Jon in some way. It sounds a bit wishy washy to me... Do you think that theory holds any merit?

Hi there!

Well, GRRM made very sure to explicitly state that the Vale is sitting on a big food surplus in his TWOW Alayne sample chapter, and that Littlefinger is pressing certain lords to hoard it in order to drive up potential profits in the future and weaken his political opponents.

And while GRRM also made sure in ADWD to emphasize the dire food situation in both the Riverlands and at the Wall, it is only Jon who actually connects this to the Vale in his thoughts:

Our best hope may be the Eyrie. The Vale of Arryn was famously fertile and had gone untouched during the fighting. (ADWD, Jon IV)

He then proceeds to show us Jon negotiating for a loan with the Iron Bank and collecting (meagre) funds from the wildlings as part of the agreement to let them pass the Wall.

Bowen Marsh sighed. "If they do not slay us with their swords, they will do so with their mouths. Pray, how does the lord commander propose to feed Tormund and his thousands?" Jon had anticipated that question. "Through Eastwatch. We will bring in food by ship, as much as might be required. From the riverlands and the stormlands and the Vale of Arryn, from Dorne and the Reach, across the narrow sea from the Free Cities." "And this food will be paid for … how, if I may ask?" With gold, from the Iron Bank of Braavos, Jon might have replied. Instead he said, "I have agreed that the free folk may keep their furs and pelts. They will need those for warmth when winter comes. All other wealth they must surrender. Gold and silver, amber, gemstones, carvings, anything of value. We will ship it all across the narrow sea to be sold in the Free Cities." (ADWD, Jon XI)

(Jon. Why. Not. Tell. Him.???)

So GRRM obviously sets up the idea of money procured for the Watch in order to buy food, and food sitting by waiting to be bought in the Vale.

There are complications, of course: Jon's stabbing and potential loss of direct political influence in the North (at least for a while), the uncertainty of the loan going through given Tycho is still roaming around the North, Littlefinger's desire for maximum profit, alternative needs for the food such as the Vale's own starving wildlings which are the mountain clans....

But the connection is obviously there.

I doubt it will be handled as neatly as (recovered) Jon asking and them selling. Much more likely, it is Sansa herself who will try and forge a connection between the North and these food stores GRRM took so much care to inform us of through her POV. The bread riots in KL would have left a lasting impression, and there is the imagery of food used both to tempt her (wine, lemon cakes, pomegranates) and to depict her rejection of Tyrion:

He wanted something from her, but Sansa did not know what it was. He looks like a starving child, but I have no food to give him. Why won't he leave me be? (ASOS, Sansa IV)

(She ends up serving him overcooked peas during tense and unpleasant dinners.)

What happens when there is food and there are recipients she very much wants to feed, after reuniting with Jon and learning the true extent of the plight of her people?

It may be that Sansa herself will be pressured to pay a high price for that Vale food if she wants it to go North. Whether she ends up having to pay it, is a different matter, but it would absolutely set up a nice mirror between Jon and Sansa in the North toward Joffrey and Margaery in King's Landing, when she arrived with the bounty of the Reach to feed the cheering people - who had been starving due to her own family's blockade of the food supply in the first place. The dark irony of that might be turned on its head. A starving North, a princess with the key to their survival, hard choices, high drama.

#asoiaf speculation #vale arc #food supply #sansa stark #jon snow

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amanitaphalloides · 2 months

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Please give me all your unemployment, job hunting, interviewing, etc tips!

hi unemployed community member <3

I am so sorry in advance for the length of this. I’m coming at this as someone who got laid off from a corporate job and is basically looking for the same job again, so ymmv with how relevant this is, but here’s a random array of tips I have found helpful.

MY GUIDE TO BEING UNEMPLOYED!

Getting your shit together after losing a job

Things you may need/want to do quickly if you have just lost a job (ie my week 1 unemployment to do list):

apply for unemployment benefits

review, negotiate, and sign your separation agreement

make an unemployment budget

take advantage of your final weeks of employer-sponsored insurance by having last-minute doctors appointments and getting your prescriptions refilled

look for new health insurance

contact student loan servicer to request a deferment/update your payment plan

More about this:

Unemployment benefits

If you’re eligible for unemployment benefits, apply to them right away. Different states are different, but you may need to have an in-person meeting at the unemployment office before you get any money. Scheduling this can take weeks. The world will look so much brighter if you have a little income. So if you qualify, do this first!

You will typically qualify for benefits if you got laid off or fired, but you also made qualify if your contract ended. Also you can usually freelance and still get benefits depending on how much you make.

Budgeting

Making a budget was really important to me so that I could concretely see whether I needed to panic about money and so I could give myself permission to relax. My goal was to stretch my severance and unemployment as far as possible while also doing stuff I enjoy.

Here's my budget template just in case our brains work the same way. This template is based on an old budget of mine - there are items on here that I set to $0 once I got laid off. I literally did budget in movie tickets because that has a massive impact on my joy in life.

Severance

If you are getting severance, it is possible to negotiate how much you get! I was able to get a few extra weeks basically by saying “this is bad timing and my income also supports my family."

Negotiating severance is like negotiating salary in that your former employer will probably give you less than you ask for. It's unlike negotiating salary in that you usually have zero leverage so honestly you might as well do an emotional appeal. IMO

Putting together an unemployed life

Stuff I consider absolutely non-negotiable aka things I MUST do not to spiral:

Make plans with friends. Write all your social plans down in your calendar and treat them as seriously as work.

Do something other than job hunting. Pick up a hobby. Give yourself a really specific reading or movie watching challenge. Volunteer. This will allow you to feel like you have a life which is absolutely critical to your self esteem, your ability to socialize, and your ability to function. You are going to have days when you NEED to feel cool. That will be way easier if you volunteered a few days ago than if you haven't done anything joyful for weeks.

Try to take care of your physical health. Move your body, eat full meals, go to bed at a regular time. I have really realized that sometimes the difference between me feeling good and despondent is truly just like, have I slept well and eaten and exercised recently.

Do things you like doing. I think it is very common to become unemployed and feel like you have to strip away everything in your life that's not focused on the job hunt. But you cannot stop doing everything that brings you happiness and expect to be okay. You will love your life if you fill it with things you love and you will hate it if you don't.

More tips....

Make a list of free or cheap things you can do for fun and then do them! Being unemployed is a great time to go to free days at museums if there’s anything like that near you. It’s also a good time to try a new recipe, check out a new walking path, FaceTime with a friend, write your grandma a letter, make diary comics, listen to new albums, watch movies you always meant to watch... for me though getting out of the house is especially important. I am constantly googling "free things to do in chicago this weekend" lol it pays off especially in a city!

I literally make Google calendar events for myself that are like "free museum day." I need to protect that time and treat it like an appointment to make myself actually do things.

If you have friends who wfh, go hang out with them and job hunt while they're working!

Applying for jobs

Tell everyone that you are job hunting. Post it far and wide. A lot of people get referral bonuses so they'll be trying to help you!

Job boards I use most heavily: Idealist, Otta, Built In, LinkedIn

This is so obvious but a lesson I really learned recently: only apply to places if you would take the job. If you're like "realistically I would not do that for that salary range" do not apply. you are gonna get yourself in Situations @ me two months ago

If you have a 1st or 2nd LinkedIn connection at a job you’re looking at dm them and say you'd love to hear what they think of the company!

I have also had success messaging random people on LinkedIn. Basically following this format: "Hi [name]! I came across this job at your company - I'm really interested and I'd love to hear more about what it's like working with the team. I'm sure you're busy, but is there any chance you have 15 minute this week or next to chat with me about the company before I apply? Thanks either way!"

Not everyone will want to talk but sometimes people still give you good insight into the hiring process.

It is really important to me to have boundaries around my job search. This has varied a bit depending on my schedule but the best thing I've found is telling myself I apply to jobs 9am-12pm. At noon I am DONE.

Interviewing

My interview prep: practice my elevator pitch with a focus on why it lead me to this company, pick out a few anecdotes from my past jobs I can share (a time I messed up, something I worked on that had a good result, something that didn’t go as expected, a time I had to deal with conflict), read the job's website and any news items I can find about them, and do a little quick review of the industry.

Most commonly repeated questions I've encountered recently: what's a time you made a mistake, what kind of management style do you like, why should we hire you.

This is the first time in my life I've ever genuinely practiced an elevator pitch and I hate to say it but it's really helped

After an interview (especially a panel interview) immediately take a few notes on what people said so you can write personalized thank yous.

I hope something in that was helpful and if not I'm sorry for the wall of text LOL but hugs and kisses it is all gonna be ok!!!

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jortschronicles · 4 months

Text

Coronet V: Sheep and Bears

Armiger Runa Bjarki fought for me at Vindheim's fifth coronet tournament, after fighting for me for the first time at Vindheim's fourth coronet tournament.

This will be a bit more of a costuming diary than anything, detailing my process from design, to drafting, to learning new arts, to the finished project, and what I learned along the way.

Our arrangement began prior to Vindheim's 4th coronet tournament, arranged by my wife and Runa's teacher much in the style of an arranged marriage. Runa would fight for me in exchange for me making our coronet garb, giving me an excuse to step up my garb game and enjoy some pomp and circumstance and giving Runa a growing closet of fancier garb. Our arrangement stipulated that I get to make Runa wear Pink, sometimes at least.

Our first outfits were pink and orange with black accents, which is TECHNICALLY Vindheim colors (dark Or, light gules, and sable :P) and includes the pink and orange which I have become associated with in the kingdom. These outfits would not have been possible without Dvorianka Anastasiia and Boiarynia Koia, who loaned me veils and undergowns, gave me instructions on drafting and assembly, and zhuzhed me incessantly day of to make sure the Rus impression was both up to their standards of accuracy and made me feel pretty.

A fun fact about this procession, we were the first ostensibly f/f entrant couple in a Vindheim coronet tournament, we were dressed as lesbian flags, and our procession was riddled with pride flags. Overall, a good day.

I created the following patterns for Runa's and my outfits, respectively:

Our arms:

Time passed, the second coronet tournament was fast approaching, and per our agreement, the next set of outfits would be Vindheim/ Free Company / Runa's own colors. Rather than struggling with pens and sketching over and over and over, this time I simply made "dress up dolls" in GIMP to present design ideas to my fighter, which included the following:

I cannot recommend this process enough. I just sketch outlines of my design on paper, upload into GIMP, adjust levels and brightness, then set the alpha channel to white. Under the lines layer, I make a series of layers in neon colors of each of the "sections" of color I might want to adjust, which allows me to bucket fill to make different designs.

After selecting a design, I obtained stamp carving supplies and sent them to Runa for her to carve my fleece and her bear, the animate charges in our arms, to be applied to the final product.

I commissioned trim by trade from a local to me, Lady Kenda, to accent the borders of the red facings. I only asked for 6 yards. This would prove to be a mistake, although the trim itself was LOVELY

My first attempts to use the stamps were...fraught. Many inappropriate jokes were made about the sheep, in particular. Koia and Anastasiia troubleshooted the problem remotely and provided better paint, respectively, resulting in the superior stamping on the right.

Not a single picture I've taken captures the depth and warmth of the brown in the bears, unfortunately. In natural light, they're clear, vibrant, and a warm coffee brown. In every photo i've taken, they're barely there. With stamping conquered, so began the cutting, serging, and assembly.

I used the crimson and the black linen from OKC fabric market, which are both soft, mid-weight linens with an apparently short staple, but are plenty affordable for my needs. After cutting and labeling all t he pieces with chalk, I ran them through the serger to keep the pieces from fraying while I work. This also let's me be lazy and not do any seam finishing at the end of the proecess, when I may be very pressed for time.

I prefer to attach the two body pieces at the shoulders and apply the neck facing ASAP, as it's easier to cut and turn before the entire tunic is assembled. I also attached the facing to the cuffs before attaching the cuffs. I lay everything flat, attaching gores to the sides of the gown and tunic, then I run one seam each up from the hem to the cuff. The exception to this is the side on which I include my pocket, since I like to have my phone, emergency meds, eye drops, and lip balm on me at events. Runa's tunic does not have this pocket, but her pants have both the cell phone pocket and the Jameson pocket. I should make a post about these pants at some point ;)

I didn't bother turning in the edges on much of the facings of my gown, anticipating applying trim over the top. Then I looked at how much trim I had left, and quickly decided to trim both of our sleeves, the bottom of my skirt, and the neck facing on Runa's tunic.

To the places I did not actually add trim, I embroidered the edge with a tacked herringbone stitch to add visual interest. Luckily, it turns out this particular design delights my fighter, is fairly strong, and has a very pleasant texture to the little hamsters in the brain.

Overall, I'm incredibly satisfied with this result and look forward to wearing so much Rus in the future. I finally feel comfortable enough with the construction of both of these tunics to offer them on commission locally.

Some more glamor shots:

Endless thanks to Dvorianka Anastasiia Dmitrieva Sokolova and Boiarynia Koia Karasova, my Rus Mamas and tolerators of many midnight questions about stamping and styling.

So what am I on to next? Med Fair cotehardies. I'm currently handsewing the supportive underdress for my own impression. Fingers crossed I maintain my sanity!!

#sca #society for creative anachronism #a&s #arts & sciences #historical costuming

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