#it trumps computer written any day!

[blubberquark]

Share Your Anecdotes: Multicore Pessimisation

I took a look at the specs of new 7000 series Threadripper CPUs, and I really don't have any excuse to buy one, even if I had the money to spare. I thought long and hard about different workloads, but nothing came to mind.

Back in university, we had courses about map/reduce clusters, and I experimented with parallel interpreters for Prolog, and distributed computing systems. What I learned is that the potential performance gains from better data structures and algorithms trump the performance gains from fancy hardware, and that there is more to be gained from using the GPU or from re-writing the performance-critical sections in C and making sure your data structures take up less memory than from multi-threaded code. Of course, all this is especially important when you are working in pure Python, because of the GIL.

The performance penalty of parallelisation hits even harder when you try to distribute your computation between different computers over the network, and the overhead of serialisation, communication, and scheduling work can easily exceed the gains of parallel computation, especially for small to medium workloads. If you benchmark your Hadoop cluster on a toy problem, you may well find that it's faster to solve your toy problem on one desktop PC than a whole cluster, because it's a toy problem, and the gains only kick in when your data set is too big to fit on a single computer.

The new Threadripper got me thinking: Has this happened to somebody with just a multicore CPU? Is there software that performs better with 2 cores than with just one, and better with 4 cores than with 2, but substantially worse with 64? It could happen! Deadlocks, livelocks, weird inter-process communication issues where you have one process per core and every one of the 64 processes communicates with the other 63 via pipes? There could be software that has a badly optimised main thread, or a badly optimised work unit scheduler, and the limiting factor is single-thread performance of that scheduler that needs to distribute and integrate work units for 64 threads, to the point where the worker threads are mostly idling and only one core is at 100%.

I am not trying to blame any programmer if this happens. Most likely such software was developed back when quad-core CPUs were a new thing, or even back when there were multi-CPU-socket mainboards, and the developer never imagined that one day there would be Threadrippers on the consumer market. Programs from back then, built for Windows XP, could still run on Windows 10 or 11.

In spite of all this, I suspect that this kind of problem is quite rare in practice. It requires software that spawns one thread or one process per core, but which is deoptimised for more cores, maybe written under the assumption that users have for two to six CPU cores, a user who can afford a Threadripper, and needs a Threadripper, and a workload where the problem is noticeable. You wouldn't get a Threadripper in the first place if it made your workflows slower, so that hypothetical user probably has one main workload that really benefits from the many cores, and another that doesn't.

So, has this happened to you? Dou you have a Threadripper at work? Do you work in bioinformatics or visual effects? Do you encode a lot of video? Do you know a guy who does? Do you own a Threadripper or an Ampere just for the hell of it? Or have you tried to build a Hadoop/Beowulf/OpenMP cluster, only to have your code run slower?

I would love to hear from you.

#programming #algorithms #distributed computing #threadripper #software development

[hangingslothcentral]

happy trans day of visibility! I know it's rough out there right now, especially for those of us who have other marginalised identities as well as trans and/or nonbinary-ness, because so often it seems like the news is either full of vitriol against us or going out of its way to frame our pain, discomfort, suffering and death as the only things that matter, leaving next to no room for the real joy which can be a part of the trans experience. so I want to tell you this:

in January someone important to me started using the right pronouns for me for the first time after years of really struggling to get my pronouns right. we've spoken about it before and whilst he understood what I was telling him in principle, he couldn't really follow through on it because it just didn't compute in his head. it was not an act of malice but a failure to conceptualise, and i didn't force the issue as much as i could have because i didn't want to (which is a totally valid choice).

i have, however, written several long coming out letters which this person has read, had many long, difficult conversations with them, tried my best to provide educational resources, and generally pointed out when their language or choices further marginalised people like me. none of this had a measurable impact on the way they talked about me.

last year, in April, I started taking testosterone and it's had this massively positive impact on my life. I'm happier, less anxious, and more comfortable in my skin. the change is really, really dramatic, though it's come on slowly. it's hard to fully articulate the difference this has made because it's so big but also so subtle. it's like existing just became incrementally easier and easier.

I'm happier and it bleeds into every facet of my life. I'm making healthier choices, I'm easier to talk to, and it's a far cry from the absolute rock bottom I hit several years back which this person bore witness to and which coincided with when i first came out. and it was just me being happier which made him understand what my identity meant, and which ultimately got him to the place where he uses the right name and pronouns for me.

i'm incredibly lucky to have had the access to medical transition that I have had. what should be the bare minimum of care is extremely hard for so many people to access, and it's so often down to the luck of where you're born, your ethnicity and your level of general health, and none of that is fair or right.

access to medical transition hasn't just changed my own life for the better, it's helped the people around me see me more clearly, and the joy I so obviously experience as a result has helped them completely reframe their views not just of me, but of the entire trans community.

(i do also wanna say that I know it's not going to be the case for everyone that they'll be able access medical transition at all and that even if they do it's not a magical trump card which will suddenly make everyone who's not accepting of your identity come around to seeing you as you really are.)

absolutely it's important that we hold people to account for the harm they do to trans people. it's important to remember the names of the people we lose every year to systemic failures preventing access to trans health care and as a direct result of a failure to empathetically educate the public about what trans and nonbinary identities are. there is a need to outline in detail all the ways we're being let down and how this harms not just us but everyone around us, and to outline how these problems are only more difficult for trans and nonbinary folks who also have any skin colour besides white, or who are disabled, or mentally ill, or in poverty, or any number of other factors which make it harder for them to move through the world.

but! trans and nonbinary joy is also desperately, desperately important. it can be a beacon of light to those of us in dark places who have forgotten that joy is even a possibility. it can give hope to children whose families turn against them and let them down. and it can also change the world. i know this because i've seen it happen in this very small way, where one person's views were reshaped by nothing more than me living my life and being happy in my own skin.

last of all, know that you are loved, whether you're out or not, whether you're happy or not, whether people see you for who you are or not. you are loved.

#trans day of visibility #tdov 2023 #tdov

[bambamramfan]

Lacan and GPT

This feels so obvious I haven’t written it down for months, but maybe this will be a new insight to someone. It’s just been my immediate reaction to GPT discussions of the form “oh this AI actually seems pretty bad.”

Lacan talked about the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic (I prefer to say the Social/Symbolic) is the abstract ways we talk and think about anything. Any phenomenon reduced to a word or a group or a stereotype or a graspable concept is removed from the actual thing itself. You call her “wife” but you don’t know her inner mind or her DNA or a thousand things about her, and wife means different things to different people when you use the word with them.

The Real is the nigh incomprehensible reality that is the world itself. The gross flesh of a human and the inevitability of their death, the exact number of people who like Trump at any given time, the fractal patterns of weather, etc. It’s impossible to truly reach, but at least some things get closer than others: ie making your predictions about next year’s sales based on declining current sales (the Real) versus what you say to get your boss not to fire you (the Social/Symbolic) or why editorial columnists never seem to get fired for being wrong.

Computers, while far from perfect, have always been a useful tool for getting closer to the Real. They store exact numbers about things we could not otherwise remember, they store databases too larger to comprehend, and they can fetch data from technical instruments far from us. These machines are one way we intermediate with the Real.

Except talking to them is very annoying and requires a special skill. You can’t just say “computer do what I mean”, you have to check your logic and write formal statements (or get someone else to write them for you and make a cute UI, but then that isn’t very flexible going forward.)

The magic of GPT is that it doesn’t operate at the level of the Real at all. It operates in the Social/Symbolic. It’s very good with words-as-symbols and how others play with them, and not so good with words-mean-something-Real. Which is why we get the complaint that GPT just tells us what other people would say, and not giving us new or correct information (even if the tools exist to give a right answer that it could connect to.) It’s excellent at coming up with memes. It’s terrible at predicting the future, or tricking anyone knowledgeable in a subject space.

Obviously the goal is to one day merge the machines-as-Real and AI-as-Symbolic capacities of computers now, so we’ll have something that operates more like us. I have no idea how feasible this is, and do not have any new insights to bring to the discourse.

[papirouge]

I sent you message a few days ago about traditional women and dating and I think it didn't send because of my shitty computer u.u I guess I'll write something similar.

Anyways, if I was a grifter or e-beggar I'd also cater to right wingers because they tend to have more money than leftists. I remember this black woman who posted on twitter about how she got kicked out of her house for supporting Trump, alongside a photo of herself wearing a MAGA hat partially obscuring her face. She asked for donations to help her desperate situation, and right wingers literally gave her thousands of dollars thinking she was one of them. Later, it was revealed she was lying and wasn't a trumper or kicked out of her house, and she simply dissapeared with all of their money. Don't know what happened after, if she ever got caught or what, she might still be enjoying all that conservative money for all I know.

Cant say I understand this mentality; I could never betray my own race or sex or culture just for some conservative money, I just have too much dignity and respect for that

I actually have a friend that hangs with conservatives and right wingers, and she has told me that trad men and the like tell her that they tend to find the women in their circles boring. Which makes sense if you think about it, as these women usually limit themselves to "femenine" hobbies and skills, thus meaning that these "masculine" trad men end up finding little in common with them that they can bond over and have fun with. There's also the fact that some of these tradwomen convince themselves they have to dumb themselves down to attract any of these "manly" men, so these men end up dealing with women that can't keep up with them intellectually and dont offer them a mental challenge, thus boring them to death.

Another point is that many of these tradfems are too "man pleasing", and while these ladies brag about hating hookup culture and having standards and hating sex positivity, they end up coming as too "easy" to many of these men. Because while this woman respects and strokes your ego as a man, she might as well be doing it to any other man that gives her a crumb of attention, meaning that there's no respect or admiration to be won from her, you're not special to her and there's no "chase" or "challenge". It has been pointed out before that many of these men don't date any of these tradwomen, usually prefering other type of ladies.

The fact that some of these women can't find a man in these traditional spaces is weird as hell considering there's more redpilled or tradmen than women. There's something sketchy going on, like you'd have to be completely repulsive in basically every way to not be able to find someone, even if its bottom of the barrel tradmen. It's just suspicious.

And lately, it makes sense that some white tradmen end up dating asian and black women even if they're white supremacists or whatever. They might talk about how superior the white race is, but ultimately they're straight men so obviously they're going to be attracted to women of other races too. And many of these women, while raised in traditional societies, still have standards for their men and expect them to fullful the male role and be providers and protectors aka they're not impressed by any man.

My original message was better written and mcuh more coherent, but im ok as long as this one sends....

SORRY ANON FOR BEING SO LATE REPLYING THAT YOU ASK LOST 😭😭

It's here

I think shoe0nhead is a good cautionary tale of how far being a pickme will lead you to. Homegirl has been wasting years of her "young & breedable" years with a master scrote who never married her, left her for another (ironically older) woman, and now is being clowned by rightoid scrotes (who are a good chunk of her audience) for being old and degrading herself for the man who didn't marry her 🥴

She didn't even celebrate her turning 30 💀 I guess she's getting highly defensive of not being able to milk her youthfulness for her pandering grift anymore 👀

She just got financé by her new boyfriend who's a Christian so I hope he'll eventually marry her but it's interesting how despite doing the most for all those years she never managed to tie the knot earlier..

#answered

[chubbycaucasianchristiancloseted]

Did the author ever correct or admit to “misinformation”?

Did the author ever correct or admit to “misinformation”? The laptop has been 100% confirmed by the FBI and written about by the Washington Post. Every implication within this article that the laptop might be fake is incorrect. That would lead one to believe that this author is either incompetent or lied. This article was allowed to be posted prior to the election in 2020 but the New York Post article was removed.

This article appears to be waiting on the FBI to confirm a lot of information. It’s a shame they slow walked the investigation.

Direct Quotes:

President Trump’s allies have long promoted claims of corruption about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter in a bid to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign. The accusations intensified in recent days when some of Mr. Trump’s associates, including his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, provided material for a New York Post article detailing some of the allegations. The Post reported that the F.B.I. had seized a computer that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden.

The Post article relied on documents purportedly taken from the computer to try to buttress an unsubstantiated argument

that as vice president, Mr. Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.

Mr. Isaac said in an interview with The New York Times last week outside the shop that he is legally blind and could not be sure whether the man was Hunter Biden but asked his name to fill out a work order, and the man identified himself as Hunter Biden. Mr. Isaac said the man came to his shop twice but never returned to retrieve the computer or an external hard drive on which its contents had been stored.

At some point, he decided to examine the material, calling it “alarming” and “embarrassing” but declining to discuss specifics. Mr. Isaac also said he made a copy of the computer’s contents.

The agents also gave him a receipt for what they took, according to a photograph of it published by Fox News. The receipt included an F.B.I. code, 272D, the bureau’s internal classification for money laundering investigations, and “BA” for its Baltimore field office. Officials separately confirmed that the F.B.I. seized the laptop and an external hard drive as part of an investigation, though they did not detail the inquiry or whether it involved money laundering or Hunter Biden. They also confirmed that the agent who signed the receipt works in Wilmington and is overseen by the Baltimore office.

Mr. Isaac said he did not hear back from investigators. He said that he wondered why the laptop’s existence had not been disclosed during the impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump, and that he began to fear that agents might be trying to bury the information he found on the laptop.

Mr. Trump’s impeachment focused on his dealings with Ukraine, and in particular his attempts to press the president of Ukraine to announce investigations that could benefit Mr. Trump politically, including one into Burisma and the Bidens.

No concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.

But Mr. Ratcliffe, who has been criticized for embracing the president’s political agenda in a traditionally apolitical job, did not make clear whether the intelligence agencies or the F.B.I. authenticated the laptop’s contents or whether he was simply saying that they had not gathered evidence that Russia altered any of the material.

Mr. Isaac, who said he voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, declined to answer many questions about the laptop and his contacts with the F.B.I. He also would not talk about his communications with the Trump loyalists who orchestrated the plan to make the computer’s contents public just before the election.

It is also not clear what the F.B.I. did with the laptop or what Justice Department officials knew about the sensitive F.B.I. investigation at the time. F.B.I. officials have declined to discuss the inquiry.

#USA #TheChubbyCaucasianChristianClosetedConservative #Biden #Trump #FBI

[the-firebird69]

You're you're a stupid f****** a****** threatening my life and I was like thinking you're my butt or a friend or some dumb s*** I'm sitting here getting rid of your army because you won't get off me and I'm taking your computers and trashing them and ruining your program you're going to be a f****** nothing cuz you won't stop doing it why is that so hard to understand John remillard you went to prison cuz I came here and back skin up I'm going to put you in prison again everyday you've been in prison about 10 times because of me you been shot in the head probably 50 times because of me cuz you won't get the f*** off me f****** lame piece of s*** every f****** day now you get shot or beat up very badly and killed and you won't f****** leave you're so God damn stupid you come back like I'm your mommy after I had you pulverized now you're not a rebel you're not with them and you're not with Tommy and you're not a Mac and you're not American you're a criminal you don't belong in this country you have a record you should be in prison now you're an escapee from prison and you live next door to me any police ever read this s*** you say that I'm doing something illegal this guy is escaped from your prison he's a Starfall he's telling people to do terrorist attacks upon you he's miring everything you try. I don't know what the deal is you went after all his bases and you treat him like he's not there and then nobody and you don't listen he starts bothering me it's like who the f*** are you you're so dumb John Lord you ain't no friend of mine Norris Dave AKA Dan you people are so stupid and f****** hurts there's no scam here you're a little peons and your imps what you do is just repeat stuff to make people mad at you I can't believe how stupid you are and I know Billy z he's going to f*** you up again and f*** you up again and f*** you up again this guy next door Dan your son he's going to get his head written over by an SUV after you get shot and it's going to crack it open most of his brains going to get squished cuz he can't stand hearing him or see him I can't stand here again a****** outback digging a trench man what a f****** useless s*** you're trash man you're garbage people going to hit you for what you just did and I'll tell you you got to drive around and stuff to go places you got to go to your fly car and all that stuff they're going to break your fly car I mean really people do that and there's a seal team looking for you you even know where they are maybe they're in that house that you came from so smart such a clever bunch of s***. You being here is illegal even the morlock don't want you here what are you staying here for there's nothing here for you I'm not your friend I'm definitely never I've never been related to you you just sit here and bother me and you are in reverse like the whole time that you're doing it you are in reverse your whole life you didn't get anything from it stupid it's not even motivational you people are wondering what kind of crack you're on you're sitting here abusing me you're subject of abuse I did the program to f*** you up and it worked

Zues Hera

I haven't heard this before no I have I swear to go back and forth people don't care for that either but this is who I am and you don't care for it I'm not your friend and never was but I'm stuck on you so what what are you going to do about it oh I see I saw it I guess I'm getting killed every day cuz I'm here and just keep doing it I guess that's my problem

Trump

Both of you get killed everyday and I'm hardly here or I'm hardly ever seen and you know why cuz I don't want to be associated with you two dead f**** you won't shut your f****** mouth you're constantly going by him people see you in the store going by him bothering him and bothering him and bothering him now you've got people attached to you and they're killing people who are near you and they're killing relatives I got to tell you you went over the top with the seal team these people are professional killers and they're taking out tons of us dumb f****** assholes that's what you are you stupid assholes get the f*** away from him we're going to be gone

Sarah

Don't ask me who they are stupid you know who they are you're the one who tried screwing them stupid you keep telling you who they are too you stupid a******

[happyheidi]

Time to bring back handwritten letters. x

#oh yeah! #it trumps computer written any day! #cottagecore #writing #letters #handwriting #handwritten letters #light academia aesthetic #light academia #dead poets society #brown aesthetic #light brown aesthetic #caligraphy

[teachingtales]

I’ve had to answer this a couple times already so I want to share it with you to help make some sense of the Capitol Hill Attack. In bold are the questions/comments from someone else and then my response follows. 

I don't know what these people expected by doing this. We must first remember that these are not the "average person". These are people who firmly believe in an underlying persecution. I grew up in such a cult, where we were taught that everyone is persecuting us, secretly or overtly. To account for the fact that we were part of a religious majority in the US, we were taught that the "other Christians" were not "true" Christians. They were liars who pretended to believe in God hoping for eternal life, but would vote for "worldly and Satanic" ideas like gay marriage or abortion.

These people genuinely believe that the entire political system of the United States is a Satanic cult that sacrifices children. They are told not to donate blood because the Satanic Leaders (politicians and celebrities) steal this blood in order to use it for youth (by putting it on their skin or ingesting it or both). In some cases, young Christian children are stolen and drained of blood for this purpose. They believe that Trump, and only Trump, was fighting a secret battle against the Powers That Be. They believed that Trump's lack of presidential activity/effects was due to him being far too busy fighting the secret Satanists. In other words, the fact he was ineffective (in public) meant he was effective (in private).

So, to your question: what did they expect by doing this? Any or all of the following:

die a glorious death for the man hand-selected by Jesus, thus gaining access to Heaven

they believed they would find the "hidden votes", exposing the Satanic Politicians and showing the world they were really right this whole time

force another recount, which would finally prove that Trump actually won

The election was fair, there's no damning evidence of election fraud and Trump's legal bullshit is baseless and a desperate attempt to cheat the system.

True. But these are not reasonable people we are dealing with. In their minds, the lack of evidence is the evidence, that cheating the system was done so well that they made sure to really cover their tracks. Oddly, they also believe that it was done so sloppily that they do have evidence in the form of a video that Trump referenced multiple times in his Georgia Phone Call. It doesn't matter that the actual, unedited footage wholly disagrees with Trump's accusations; remember, he was hand-selected by Jesus, and the people in possession of the unedited footage are hand-selected by Satan. This, then, means Trump's video and Trump's claims are automatically correct, while anyone else is a liar and holds forgeries. After all, Lucifer is "the Father of Lies", so his agents (politicians) surely can lie effectively.

Again, we are left with this problem: the lack of evidence is the evidence.

Storming the Capitol was a shitty idea, what was going to change? People are dead because of this "overthrow". The government wasn't going to be affected by this.

In addition to what I mentioned earlier, they have a very small view of the world. These are people who typically believe the Earth is only 6000 years old and evolution cannot happen because they cannot fathom the long periods of time it takes. These are people who believe that those of us outside of the US are all collectively lying about the SARS-CoV-2 virus so we can hurt President Trump's reputation. They cannot understand scale. They are the people who watch movies like “Independence Day”, where a single person who has no knowledge of alien computers can take down the entire fleet. They don't understand how complex things really are. Thus, they genuinely think a "last stand" type of attack on a building will bring on the glorious end to this troubled tale.

Trump repeatedly bashed people who protested for BLM and said it was violent, unnecessary, etc. But when people riot and kill in his name he's just like "well they didn't do anything wrong".

This is unfortunately an easy one to answer: if they're against me, they are wrong...but if they are for me, they are right.

This is a classic "in-group/out-group" type of thinking. In-Group: the group you belong to Out-Group: the group you do not belong to (often with directly opposing views) In this type of thinking, you stereotype the Out-Group by their worst actors but your worst actors in your In-Group are different. We can see this in the media in the form of the following examples:

Example A: foreigners who attack something on national soil are "terrorists", but domestic attackers are "troubled individuals"

Example B: if the majority is white, a 17 year-old black male who shoots some people is written about in the news as a "violent man" or "man opened fire on innocent victims". If the shooter is a 17 year-old white male, the news is characterizes him as a "troubled teen" or "boy open fires at school, family wonders where they went wrong"

Example C: if the minority religion has a passage in their holy book that says "Women are less than men", it's because that religion is clearly false and laughably erroneous; if the majority religion has a passage in their holy book that says "Women are less than men", it's not sexist and just needs to be understood in cultural context

The subconscious reasoning for this type of thinking is very tribal but also ego-preserving...that we each believe we are always making the most correct and most reasonable/logical choices, so if someone makes a different choice, that person and choice are unreasonable and illogical.

None of this excuses the behavior, but I hope it helps shed some light on this type of extreme thought process. 

#capitol hill #teacher #teaching #student #students #history #capitol hill attack #trump #insurrection #terrorism #terrorist #impeachtheloser #impeach the president #impeach45 #government

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I’m nearly done re-watching Succession season 1, and I have to admit it’s better than I’d remembered. I’d remembered enjoying it in a way that people enjoy soap operas, as indulging in a lot of drama when I feel like doing that. Re-watching is making me realize I should give it more credit. It is, you know, well written. Well acted. Well filmed.

There’s this one specific thing they keep doing with the cameras in which they’ll suddenly zoom in on a character, with no warning, that does annoy me. I see what they’re trying to do. To point out that that character is the focus of the current drama. It just feels like overkill not befitting of a show that was made by a guy who wrote for The Thick of It. I know there is absolutely nothing subtle about Succession, but sometimes it's smart to let the events on screen speak for themselves.

But other than that, it is a genuinely good show. Like… a properly good show, not just a show that’s fun to watch the way messes of drama are sometimes fun to watch. It has a ring of truth that I recognize from The Thick of It; the way Westminster insiders have said The Thick of It accurately portrays that culture, I know some ludicrously rich people have said Succession accurately portrays their life. I have no idea whether there’s any truth to that whatsoever, of course. But it feels true, and that does count for something. I watch most things that claim to mirror real life and roll my eyes (as do most people – gone are the days when television and movie viewers would see a character bang on some computer keys before declaring, “I’m in,” and say, “Oh yes, that must be what hackers do”), but I watch Succession and think yeah, that is basically what I’ve assumed all the super-rich people are doing anyway. It feels real, in a way that most dramatic shows on TV don’t.

I know it’s based on the Murdocks, and I’m sure that’s an accurate comparison, but I can’t help thinking of the Trumps when I watch it. Older son who’s supposed to follow in his father’s footsteps (Kendall/Don Jr.), younger son who’s also in his father’s general area of business but is generally weird and less cool than his brother (Roman/Eric), daughter who’s the only remotely competent one among them but being more competent than her peers does not make her a remotely better person than they are (Siobhan/Ivanka), daughter’s husband who was not born into this incredible amount of privilege but has found a way to claw his way into it and is holding on for dear life (Tom/Jared). Then there’s the patriarch who owns a corporate empire and aims for world domination but is really getting too old to keep doing this shit (Logan/Donald Jonald Trump), and the patriarch’s younger wife who is not the mother of any of the above childdren and comes from a foreign land and probably has her own agenda but no one’s quite sure what it is (Marcia/Melania).

I do not presently know of any Connor or Cousin Greg in the Trump family, but I assume most people would agree with me when I say it would be fucking hilarious if someone filling those roles showed up in the news.

[the-lincyclopedia]

Fic writer questions I never get asked

Thanks for the tag, @khashanakalashtar! This is an interesting list! 

What date did you make your AO3 profile? What date did you post your first fic?

I joined AO3 on February 5, 2018. Seriously. I was FFN-only for so long. I posted my first fics on AO3 the day I joined. My first fics ever to hit the internet, however, were published on July 13, 2011, which is when I got my FFN account.

Do you cross-post your work?

Yeah, still. When I first got my AO3 account, I posted a bunch of things that were already on my FFN account, and these days I put basically everything on both. I like that FFN gives a pretty accurate and nearly complete timeline of my fanworks, which is the main reason I’m still posting there. Nothing I’ve posted there in the past three years has gotten much engagement, and I know the site is dying. 

What’s your fic with the most comment threads? The most bookmarks? Are the top 5 of those categories basically the same, and basically the same as the top 5 kudos?

Top 5 by comment threads: 

Face the Future with You (Check Please)

Man Oh Man, You’re My Best Friend (Check Please)

It’s Always You (Check Please)

Love in the Time of Influenza (Carry On)

I Love You, All Right? (Check Please)

Top 5 by bookmarks: 

Love in the Time of Influenza (Carry On)

The Aftermath of Angelic Assumptions (Good Omens)

Man Oh Man, You’re My Best Friend (Check Please)

Nightmares (Carry On)

Christmas Planning (Carry On)

Top 5 by kudos: 

Love in the Time of Influenza (Carry On)

Face the Future with You (Check Please)

Nightmares (Carry On)

The Aftermath of Angelic Assumptions (Good Omens)

Christmas Planning (Carry On)

So basically the Check Please fandom comments more and the Carry On fandom is more into bookmarks and kudos, and there’s more of a correlation between kudos and bookmarks than between either of those and comments. 

What’s the word count of your longest fic or series?

“The Jumper Chronicles,” my longest fic on FFN, is 111,223 words. I abandoned it in 2015 and I really would not recommend it. On AO3, my longest fic is “who could ask to be unbroken (or be brave again)” at 14,772 words. It’s part of my longest series on AO3: “Samwell Men’s Harmonies” at 29,921 words. 

What’s your most underrated fic?

MOST underrated? I have 132 fics on AO3, so there are a lot of potential answers. I guess I’ll pick my work with literally the fewest kudos: it’s a charming little rhyming poem about Harry Potter called “The Willow May Whomp You.” It has two kudos, fewer than 70 hits, no bookmarks, and no comments. I was so proud of it when I finished it, and AO3 really did not care. 

Does your early work contain any writing sins?

I had heard that not breaking up your dialogue was bad (which it’s not? Who told me this? Why did I believe them? Ugh), and I thought that adding adverbs to dialogue tags constituted breaking up your dialogue. So I had lots of unnecessary beats and adverbs and internal monologue mixed up in what otherwise might have been passable dialogue scenes. (I don’t remember whether this came up a ton in my fics and I don’t feel like looking, but I remember it pretty clearly in the original stuff I was working on back then.)

Have you ever had a work podficced?

Yes! I requested it for Fandom Trumps Hate, though, so I don’t know if it counts, exactly. It’s not like someone read my work and approached me about podding it. Anyway, my Yuri on Ice fic “When and If” has a podfic version. 

Have you posted any podfics? Fanvids? Fanart?

I was going to say no, and then I remembered that back in, like, 2009, I tried to make a couple Romione fanvids, one to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” and one to “I’m Not That Girl” from Wicked. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I didn’t have a clue how to pull bits of video from a movie (still don’t, actually), so they were basically slideshows. I’ve long since taken them down from YouTube and the computer I made them on has long since died, so I can’t prove any of this to you, but . . . uh, yeah. That happened. 

Are there any trends in your favorite ships?

I feel like there have been, like, eras of my shipping. When I first started shipping (i.e. before I realized I’m queer), it was basically “girl I can project on” shipped with “literally whoever her canon love interest is, regardless of anything about him” (Romione, Percabeth). Then it was “asshole guy” shipped with “other guy who interfaces between the asshole guy and the rest of the world” (Johnlock, Otayuri to a lesser extent). I feel like it’s becoming “broken person whose coping mechanism is meanness” shipped with “broken person whose coping mechanism is sunshine” (Zimbits, maybe Snowbaz). This is pretty similar to the asshole x interface-with-world, but the relationship is a little more mutual and balanced, and the mean one has a better excuse for being mean. 

Do you have fandoms you’ve written a lot for? Fandoms you’ve only written a one-off for?

Fandoms I’ve written a lot for: Check Please, Carry On, Harry Potter, Sherlock, Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and Yuri on Ice. (I’m defining “a lot” as at least five fics, and please note that I’ve got a 30k Lizzie Bennet Diaries fic that’s only on FFN because I really don’t like the ending.)

Fandoms I’ve only written one-offs for: Discworld, Turtles All the Way Down, Maleficent, the Chronicles of Narnia, Paper Towns, Six of Crows, Hoot, the Odyssey, Song of the Lioness, and Downton Abbey. (There are multiple other fandoms with two fics each.)

What fandom got you into fandom?

Harry Potter. I’d been writing next gen fics for like two years when a school acquaintance shared an FFN link to a Marauders fic on Google Buzz and I was hooked. 

Do you have a strategy for summaries?

I try to describe the premise/first part of the plot, and I add notes that might be relevant (i.e., major trigger warnings or other things that might put people off). I don’t use quotes, either from the story or from anywhere else. 

Do you use beta readers? For what? Do you have a go-to beta?

Occasionally for plot/general “is this good?” type feedback, or if they’re mandatory for an event, I guess. (I’m doing my first bang, so that’s a new thing for me.) I don’t feel the need to use a beta for spelling, grammar, or punctuation since I’m a semi-professional copyeditor. These days I do read most things to my QPP over the phone before publishing them. That’s usually more of a cheer-reading situation than a beta situation, though. 

I tag @doggernaut @carryonsimoncarryonbaz @birlcholtz @cricketnationrise and anyone else who wants to play! 

#mine #tag game #fanfiction #about me

[breezeinmonochromenight]

I heard they're making ff7r part 2 ps5 exclusive. Have you heard the same? I'm going to be a bit upset if it's true, considering new gen consoles are currently unavailable and likely won't be for a long while. Square Enix has to realize that'll hurt them, right?

Anyways, thanks for any information you might have! And I hope you're having a great day!

Hope you are too! (:

And I’ve heard that but I’m not sure — I haven’t seen actual evidence, nor could I find any. It just seems to be people theorizing that it’ll be PS5 only since that yuffie dlc PS5 only. I wouldn’t be surprised, though. Even if Remake Part 2 comes out this time next year or later, the PS5 will have been out for well over a year (pushing on 2), and that’s typically about when devs start focusing entirely on the newer system.

Don’t get be wrong tho! The PS5 thing is just seemingly all speculation rn. I’m not ruling out it being on PS4&5, personally — I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised, solely depending on when it’s released (we haven’t even seen a teaser yet, and I’m sure you and I both know how slow Squeenix can be lol). I also think it would be completely insane not to consider system shortages that may or may not still be going on whenever the game does come out, because this isn’t like the whole Nintendo Switch ‘we wildly underestimated demand’ type situation.

That being said, I also figure ps5’s and whatever the new Xbox is will be back in full swing production (or at least close to it) by then — COVID caused an electronics purchasing boom, which in turn (partially) caused a semiconductor shortage when coupled with Trump’s dumbass trade war bullshit. It’s not just game consoles — everything from computers to cars have slowed production. That linked article was written in February, I figure it’ll take at least to the end of this year to get close to normal again.

(Intergrade also was mildly annoying but not very hard to upgrade to, and I don’t see why they couldn’t just do that again — it’s not that huge of a graphical difference. The biggest things I’ve noticed are that some backgrounds have more depth, and it seems to have fixed that issue where certain textures take a second to load and pop in. That’s literally it. So Yeah. Don’t see why that’d be so hard.)

#sorry this is so long #anonymous #if that even is your real name #misc. ff7 #ff7r part 2

[feminist-space]

"You may not have heard of Arise, but chances are, you’ve talked to an Arise agent — perhaps when you thought you were talking to a Comcast employee about a bill or a Disney employee about a reservation. Arise lines up customer service agents who work from home. It then sells this network of agents to blue-chip corporations.

Arise and most of its corporate clients consider preserving the secrecy of this arrangement to be vital. An Arise company manual says, “The confidentiality of information related to Arise and its clients must be maintained forever.” Arise’s agents are forbidden from publicly identifying the brand-name companies whose customers’ calls they answer. Even commiserating in a private Facebook group, they avoid typing out Airbnb, opting instead for rather flimsy code. The “bed and breakfast client,” some write. One used “sky bnb.”

Arise’s workers not only don’t work for its clients, they also don’t officially work for Arise. Like Uber drivers or TaskRabbit gofers, they are independent contractors. To get gigs, they first absorb substantial expense, paying for their own equipment and training, and then have fees deducted from every paycheck for the “use” of Arise’s “platform.”

Arise has faced, and lost, legal challenges alleging that its arrangements with agents violate federal labor law and cheat workers of what they are rightfully owed. One judge called the arrangement an “elaborate construct” created by Arise to get around labor law. Nevertheless Arise has been able to avoid altering its model in any significant way, aided in part by a 5-4 ruling from the Supreme Court, written by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch.

Arise not only creates separation between its corporate clients and individual agents, it also allows those companies to quickly add or subtract workers. In March, Instacart needed all kinds of agents. By May, those jobs had largely disappeared. “I was there for a week. We’re disposable,” one Florida agent dropped from Instacart assignments told ProPublica.

...

After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Arise; after paying Arise to run a check on her background; after passing Arise’s voice-assessment test and signing Arise’s nondisclosure form; after paying for and passing Arise’s introductory training, to which she devoted three days, unpaid; after paying for and passing a certification course to provide customer service for Arise client AT&T, to which she devoted 44 unpaid days; after then being informed she had to get more training yet — an additional 10 days, for which she was told she would be paid, but wasn’t; and then, after finally getting a chance to sign up for hours and do work for which she would be paid (except for her time spent waiting for technical support, or researching customer issues, or huddling with supervisors), Tami Pendergraft spent three weeks fielding telephone calls from AT&T customers, after which she received a single paycheck.

For $96.12.

To understand what happened to Pendergraft, picture a hanging chain. The first link, at the top, is a big company with many customers who have questions about their bill or some product or service. This big company contracts with Arise, the second link. Arise contracts with smaller businesses, the third link. These small businesses are often a lone person who incorporated because Arise’s business model demanded yet another corporate layer. They contract with an agent — such as Pendergraft — who is the fourth and bottom link. So the agent assisting the big company’s customers doesn’t work for the big company: she is three links removed.

...

When Tami Pendergraft first heard of Arise, it was 2012. She was in her 40s and unemployed. She had attended college in Missouri and gone on to live in Houston. For 20-plus years, she had worked in information technology sales. Then she hurt her back and sought work from home. Arise offered her that chance. It was her first job in customer service.

Pendergraft, citing her nondisclosure form with Arise, declined to be interviewed for this story. But her account can be found in arbitration hearing transcripts.

Pendergraft testified that she put in “50, 55” unpaid hours a week during the AT&T training, which cost her $199. “Practice, practice, practice, practice,” instructors told trainees, who had to pass a succession of tests to keep moving on. Her class — or “wave,” as each was called — had about 60 people at the start. All paid to take the course. Only half finished. They did not get their money back.

Once Pendergraft was certified, she was obligated to work at least 20 hours a week. But come her turn to sign up for shifts, “there would be nothing left,” she said. Any slots available to her were chopped up, “30 minutes here, 30 minutes there. It was all broken up.” She realized she couldn’t have a life and meet her contractual requirements. When she did get hours, she was paid for time talking, not waiting, even though she was tethered to her computer and headset: “Sometimes I wouldn’t get a call for 30, 40 minutes, sometimes an hour, and I’d just have to sit there.”

Disgusted, Pendergraft quit.

“I felt like I did my part in good faith,” she testified, but “nobody really cared.”

Then she sued.

Around the country, other agents did, too, joining federal class-action lawsuits filed against Arise in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2016.

A woman from Douglasville, Georgia, filed a declaration saying her initial Arise training had cost her approximately one week and $99. She then worked with six companies that contracted with Arise. To be eligible for each gig, she paid an upfront training fee, and for each, her training time was unpaid. She approximated the training commitments and fees:

Jewelry TV: one week; $50

Sears: 30 days; $200

Walgreens: 30 days; $159

TurboTax: 30 days; $59

Rogers (a Canadian telecom): six weeks; $279

AT&T: 90 days; $179

Added up, she had spent about $1,000 for about eight months of training, unpaid.

A woman in Orange County, Florida, reported working 117.5 hours in one two-week period. That would have entitled her to 37.5 hours of time-and-a-half overtime — if she were an employee. But since she was labeled an independent contractor, there was no OT.

This same agent had signed with Arise in 2015 to help AT&T customers with questions about bills, rate plans and other matters. Her contract listed 25 performance measures that she had to meet.

Her Average Handle Time, the industry term for average length of call, had to fall between 6 minutes, 40 seconds and 12 minutes, 20 seconds. Commitments to get back to a customer to resolve a particularly complicated issue had to be kept at or below 0.5% of the calls. If she put a customer on hold, the average hold time had to remain below 30 seconds. She could offer a credit on a customer’s bill no more than once per 15 calls, and if she determined a customer was indeed owed money, any refunds or deductions had to average less than $2.50 per call.

Failure to meet any one of these 25 requirements “shall be deemed a breach,” the contract said, allowing Arise to terminate her job.

An agent who worked in Florida testified that he answered calls from customers for Barnes & Noble. Someone hired by Arise would listen to some of the agent’s calls and then send him a scorecard — with 40 items.

...

Arise is privately held, so its finances are not public. But a 2017 confidential slide deck obtained by ProPublica shows quarterly revenue of $40 million and a gross profit margin of nearly 30%. Intuit, Carnival, Disney and Comcast were among the largest revenue generators."

https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service-reps-for-disney-and-airbnb-who-have-to-pay-to-talk-to-you?

[narrowtriangle33-blog]

"You just said the incarceration rate among black men and that you do SEE that. But what you’re being dismissive about is THAT VERY SYSTEM! The things you’re blinded to here are right in front of you. You, yourself, just mentioned systemic discrimination and racism and you dismissed it. That’s what I mean about “normalizing” discrimination so much that what you see is “inevitability”, we see as a systemic injustice.

You see, the laws are now written to take out the racist language BUT now, because RACIST PEOPLE are put in these positions of power, they now take the laws and apply it in racist ways.

That way, you can’t NOT dismiss individual racism away from systemic racism because they literally go hand in hand. In order for a system to be racist, there has to be individual racism to go along with that. You can’t dismiss individual racism and say, “Well we know that exists” and then say “But where is the systemic racism?”

Its all around you.

Let’s take a quick look at black farmers and the SYSTEMIC racism they face, but it starts with INDIVIDUALS running RACIST SYSTEMS.

in 1910, 15% of farmland in America was owned by BLACK FARMERS. A MILLION of them farmed land. Today, that number is 50K. Is it because we lost interest? No.

Because their land was systematically stolen from them by the racist USDA….

Black farmers in particular lacked a safety net. According to a report from the Counter, white business owners received 99.5 percent of the subsidies designed to help farmers survive the trade war. And although Trump handed out record subsidies to help farmers rebound from COVID-19, African Americans in agriculture largely didn’t receive these monies. For the most part, Black farmers did not obtain federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP) aid designed to help businesses weather the pandemic.

These systems exist today, denying these funds to black farmers ensuring that white farmers get nearly all the assistance.

How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against black farmers | New Food Economy

It’s everywhere you look. Or want to look.

The Great Land Robbery

The Federal government knew that the money given to farmers would never reach black hands, as they were given to all white councils, who would then dole out the money to other whites, leaving black people out cold. Taking up federal resources for themselves. This also happened in education funds too, but lets stick to one thing at a time.

A computer isn’t racist. Neither is a building or a piece of paper. But people are. And people who perpetuate systems to advantage one group over another exist to this day.

Here is another example of systemic racism still at work today. Let’s go to Georgia, with its strange runoff system, which was created to stop black voters from having any say about their own state.

The report reads, "support for the majority-vote plan reinforced the moderate segregationist position. It did not remove anyone's right to cast a ballot, but it was commonly regarded as hampering African Americans—the stigmatized bloc voters."

While still allowing Black voters to cast a ballot, runoffs at the time, attempted to make sure candidates representing the white majority, not the interests of Black citizens, would be elected.

You mentioned redlining. These things are still going on. Right around you.

A comment on Bank of America/Countrywide’s discriminatory mortgage lending and its implications for racial segregation

These things are not the past, but still ongoing, therefore systemic discrimination and racism have never been in the past. Black homes are undervalued constantly, which hurts Black residents trying to materialize on the merits of homeownership. They simply can’t do that when discrimination is rampant and active.

I have included many things to look at and many links to read. So, I honestly don’t know where the disconnect here is but there is a glaring one. If you simply can’t see these things, then I feel that one has to actively see it and ignore it.

You’re asking a lot of big questions to be fair, but my answers will not make sense to you, as you’re still stuck on “where is the systemic racism?” My answers won’t make sense to younand you’re putting the cart before the horse. In order to understand how to stop it, you must first agree that it’s happening, and I don’t think you’re there yet. I hope some of this helps."

https://qr.ae/pGJDUm

[lov3nerdstuff]

Ik it's obviously not you in the little Tumblr icon thingy but every time it pops up, I now assume you have black hair. You are probably studying something fancy and complicated in college maybe ( I think you are around like 22??? Another assumption lmao) like phycology or something. I just get that idea bc you seem reliable and give good advice. I think you are European? Not American anyways. I feel like you would be very anti trump if you were American. But ugh, random brain mush for you, enjoy pancake Day!

Haha my icon here actually is a picture I drew of Loki! Two years ago or so... But I've never bothered to change it since 😉 I don't really have black hair, but very very very dark brown, which tends to look black in lower light and reddish brown in the sun 🤷🏻‍♀️ so you're not too far off 😄 (I also just realized that Tumblr has absolutely no idea what I look like... Wow, I never realized that before 😅)

Now, oh boy... My academic history is quite complex indeed, but I doubt that it's all too fancy 😂 I'll give you a short summary: I started attending uni when I was 14, studying psychology and English (but not finishing any degree); when I was 16 I studied in the US for a while, mostly psychology, sociology, literature, art and theater/stage production/acting (I honestly don't remember what the course title was haha); with 18 I studied medial computer science for a while, but that wasn't my thing (I'm still very much familiar with formal logic and basics of programming though...); With 19 I started studying art history, musical sciences and media sciences and literature at a graduate school (all four of which I will graduate in once I've actually sat down and written my thesis... 🤦🏻‍♀️ This is what's been holding me up since Christmas, as in, it has kept me from writing VNA). So yes, I'm actually getting a degree in 3 (or 4, if one's not looking too closely) different subjects. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I also work for the university though, so uh... I'm both student and staff 😂

I am indeed 22 currently! (I think so, at least... I keep forgetting how old I am because I literally don't give a damn). I honestly take it as a big compliment that you deem me reliable and as someone who gives good advice 😊💕 I just happen to have a lot of unusual life experience 😅 never have been clubbing (if you don't count the one time I was forced to go into one – in jeans and sweater, mind you – only to sit around at a table and watch over everyone's stuff), but I have been paid to climb around dangerous industrial construction sites to rescue animals 😂 that kind of unusual thing happens in my life quite regularly

And yes, I am indeed European through and through! I've lived in the US for a while, as I said, but that was back in the Obama days 🤷🏻‍♀️ I am indeed anti Trump, very much so, but I also dislike the biased and unreflected medial landscape in Europe. In general though, not just in this matter, so oh well 😅

Thank you so so so much for your assumptions about me!!! You were super close to the truth, which is amazing! 😁🥰💚 Hugs and more hugs and more hugs 💗

[arbitrarygreay]

PoI S5 rewatch: disc 2

A More Perfect Union: Once again, the parts are greater than the whole, plus the season arc parts being inferior to the numbers plot, plus the results of the season arc being a stain on the episode. The Samaritan/Fusco parts are STUPID. Thankfully, the A-plot is delightful Leverage-style crack. QSO: I somehow wiped this episode from my memory. Which is weird, because everything about this episode's content should be good shit. It speaks to just how much the baggage of S4 of S5 has tainted things. My main touchstone for this feeling is SPOP, wherein the protagonist faction was so infuriatingly incompetent that I could not give a shit about things anymore. A whole lotta "stuff" happened in this episode, and none of it mattered. Nothing was learned, nothing was gained. And at that point, no amount of pretending that there are character themes gestured at will stop the plotting from tainting the characters. This is why I maintain my opinion that strong world-building will trump character-first storytelling most of the time. The world-building in this episode is shit. Reassortment: One of the things I was most looking forward to on this rewatch was Pandemic of Interest, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, it was a big fat let-down. The only "prescient" part of that plot were some throwaway lines by the the perpetrator about how computer diagnosis is more accurate than doctors. Everything to do with flu and its fallout aged very, very badly, particularly the ending, which has way more belief in institutions and the population's rationality than has borne out in real life. In addition, few of the characters come off well. No one amongst the hospital one-offs get any nuance, for one, which is a contrast to how Reese would consistently find moments in earlier seasons to be gentle and empathetic with his charges. The Fusco and Shaw storylines do work in isolation, but are far too-little-too-late. They would have been good developments 2 or more episodes ago. Instead, all they do is reiterate how poorly Samaritan is written as an opponent, and how this season has surgically implanted the Idiot Ball into Harold. Finally, we have the Blackwell storyline, which is fine within the episode (besides yet another failure of the show to explain The Great Filter properly), but will fail to receive proper follow-up. What jumped out to me with this episode was that no one on Team Samaritan is allowed to receive the forgiveness and redemption that our own team of ex-spies gets, which inadvertently proves Samaritan's point that the team is not the good guys. Sotto Voce: I liked this episode! That's because the show has finally stopped dragging its feet, so things actually moved forward and paid off. Reese and Fusco reconciled, Elias had a romp with Harold, Harold was a wet blanket only a minimal number of times (because Samaritan wasn't a major factor this ep), and of course Root is winner and still champion of International Chicken, even against Shaw, who won International Chicken against Samaritan over 7000 times. At this point, only Nikaido Saki could beat Root. The only complaint is that The Voice has no motivation, only a mystery box catchphrase. That's why he pales in comparison to the other time the show has done the victim-perpetrator twist to great success, two of which are team members in this episode. Amir was the more interesting personality. Ideally, I would have also had Harold and Elias overtly argue more. The lack of meaningful discussion with any character shows that Harold's wet blanket idiot balling isn't a stance that the writers could defend, but was just a means to stall for time and force certain inferior plotting that they were hung up on to happen. I'm going to group Day The World Went Away with disc 3.

#person of interest #poi s5 #category: tv

[innytoes]

Self-Insert January: Let’s Go Steal A Protégé

Yes I did write a self-insert fanfic of my own fanfic. Most of this was written in December and then um, January happened. This takes place December, probably before Christmas (and is obviously not canon).

Happy Self Insert month!

Being with Leverage, Jamie had seen a lot of weird stuff. Done a lot of weird stuff, too. But all the breaking into highly classified places and museums and pretending to be a circus performer and jumping off the Eiffel Tower did not prepare them for the magic portal that opened up in the ceiling of the Leverage Offices, or the lady that fell through it.

Luckily, their startled yell had summoned an Eliot, which meant that if this was the beginning of an intergalactic space war or some kind of mutant criminal rival of Parker’s, Team Leverage was going to come out on top.

Except Eliot actually put away his knife and greeted the lady, who struggled out of the squashy purple beanbag chair she landed on. “Hardison, Parker, Inny’s here!” he called.

“What the hell is an Inny?” Jamie asked. Was it a species of alien? Was Hardison’s Doctor Who obsession because they literally knew The Doctor? Honestly, it wouldn’t really surprise Jamie.

“I the hell am an Inny,” Ceiling-Lady said, before gasping and pointing at them. Which was concerning, to say the least.

“That’s Inny,” Hardison said, coming into the office and handing the lady one of Jamie’s Mountain Dews. Rude.  “She’s from a darker timeline and drops out of the ceiling once or twice a year to catch up. And get inspiration for her fanfiction. Apparently we’re like, a TV show over there. What’s up, girl?”

“Is that why nobody is allowed to move the beanbag chair?” Jamie asked. They had thought it was some weird Parker thing. Or perhaps that it was on top of some kind of secret trap door to Hardison’s BatCave or something. They ignored the part about the fanfiction and the TV show. That was too Truman Show to think about. Though their brain was already going over actors they’d cast as the team. Eliot would totally be played by Chris Evans, right?

Inny stopped chugging the Mountain Dew long enough to shrug. “They used to live somewhere with way lower ceilings. Nearly broke something falling from this one.”

“Yeah, me,” Eliot grumbled. He nearly broke something again when Parker dropped down from the ceiling onto his back. “Dammit, Parker!”

“Inny!” Parker proclaimed. “How is Deeks?”

“Good!” the lady fished a beaten up phone out of her pocket. “He met some alpacas, wanna see?” Parker snatched up the phone and made delighted noises. Jamie peered over her shoulder. They had to admit the dog was pretty cute, and the alpacas looked very intrigued by their small, same-coloured, short-necked friend.

“How’s life in the darkest timeline?” Hardison asked.

“What date is it here?” the lady asked, looking around. “I mean, if you still know.”

“Why wouldn’t we know?” Parker asked, still swiping through dog pictures.

“Well, I mean, 2020, am I right?” Inny said, waiting for a reaction. She looked incredulous at their blank  faces. “It is 2020, here, right?”

“Um, yeah?” Hardison ventured carefully.

“How dark is this timeline of yours?” Jamie asked carefully. Sure, it was a tumblr joke, usually reserved for stuff like the however-many-renewed-season of Supernatural when great shows were cancelled or whatever creepy feature FriendCzar had tried to impose that month.

The woman paused, frowned, then took a deep breath. “In response to the global pandemic of a deadly respiratory virus, President Donald Trump suggested on television during a briefing that people should inject or ingest bleach to kill the virus.”  She took another big breath. “And that’s not mentioning the fact that he downplayed the seriousness of the virus while knowing how deadly and contagious it was, called it a hoax, made taking safety precautions a political thing instead of a public safety thing, and held massive super-spreader events.”

“Donald Trump?” Jamie asked. “The ‘you’re fired’ dude?”

“Oh my sweet summer child,” Inny responded, before taking another swig of her Mountain Dew. “Yeah, I mean, I thought the fact that Australia was on fire at the start of the year was going to be the only terrible thing I was going to tell you.” She laughed and shook her head ruefully, like that was some kind of funny joke.

“Australia was on fire?”

“Yeah. Parts of the US too, for a while. Orange skies. But since the country was basically on lockdown anyway, it wasn’t like it was very different to stay inside for that…” Jamie stared at the lady, then back at the adults. Parker didn’t look overly concerned, but then, she never really did. Eliot and Hardison were both frowning, though. There was no sign that this was some kind of elaborate prank Hardison was pulling on them with the help of one of Sophie’s acting friends. Besides, he was good, but not ‘fake opening a magic portal in the ceiling’ good. At least not within the five minutes Jamie had been in the other room.

After a litany of horrible things, which were apparently not even all of them, the woman stopped. “On the upside,” she said. “I perfected my banana bread recipe, Deeks met some alpacas, Leverage is getting a reboot, and I figured out why I probably keep dropping in here.”

“To remind us that things aren’t so bad like some messed up version of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’?” Hardison guessed.

“Because Jamie is my OC,” she said, dropping a fucking bombshell like she just dropped out of the fucking ceiling. Jamie felt their brain fill with static, because no, they were a real person, and that either meant that this lady was full of bullshit, or, well, basically god. The Truman Show feeling returned ten times over. “This is my fanfic.”

Hardison recoiled a little. “No,” he whispered, fully understanding the implications of that. Hell, it was probably even weirder for him. Sure, knowing they were a TV show was probably cool, even more so with the reboot. But Fanfic Land didn’t fade to black and Jamie was pretty damn sure some kinky shit went on behind the soundproofed doors of their bedroom.

“Now, there’s two prevailing theories about this, as far as my internet rabbithole searches can tell,” Basically God Maybe continued. “Either I wrote this world into existence, because the multiverse is ever expanding and that is one of the ways it expands, or I just got some vibes from whatever crack between worlds keeps bringing me here and wrote down your shenanigans.”

At Parker and Eliot’s blank looks, Jamie clarified: “Basically, she’s either God or…”

“Some kind of shitty false prophet,” the lady on the beanbag chair beamed. “Probably the second one, honestly. My subconscious turns everything into a zombie apocalypse sooner or later, and you guys seem to be fine.”

Jamie whipped around to look at Hardison and Eliot, hopeful. “We’re fine, right?” they asked quickly. If anyone knew about a starting zombie apocalypse, it would be those two. Between Hardison poking around in basically every intelligence agency’s server ever and Eliot’s contacts, they’d know. God, Jamie hoped not. They were so not ready for a zombie apocalypse. Eliot hadn’t even taught them how to murder someone with an axe yet.

“We are definitely fine,” Hardison assured them.

“Yeah, I figured,” Not-God agreed. “If I had my say, Eliot would have stopped pining long before he did and kissed you guys.” Eliot grumbled and glared, probably because she was right. Parker patted him condescendingly on the head, which wasn’t helping matters.

The ceiling started crackling and glowing ominously. The lady put her can down as she slowly drifted off the beanbag, alien-abduction style. “Well, it’s been real. Be good, guys. Have some fun adventures. Ruin some rich douchebag’s day for me.”

“Will do,” Parker promised. “Say hi to your dog for me.” She got a thumbs up.

“Let us know how the reboot turns out,” Hardison said. Jamie figured it would probably fuck with the space-time continuum if she downloaded the show and brought it to them, but who knew. Maybe there was some kind of loophole for that, too. They were kind of curious to see what a Leverage show would look like. It probably had kickass fight-scenes.

“Stay safe,” Eliot said seriously. He’d been the most concerned about the talk of the pandemic, probably because you couldn’t punch it.

“Will do,” Inny shrugged. “I mean, 2021 can’t possibly be any worse, right?”

The portal crackled louder, which Jamie hoped wasn’t a sign. The lady was almost at the ceiling. She looked concerned, like she realised she just totally jinxed herself and the new year.

“Hey, just in case you are god,” Jamie called up. “Can you give me superpowers?”

The portal closed to the sound of laughter, and then there was silence. All that remained was a dent in the beanbag and an empty can of Mountain Dew.

“What the fuck,” they told the room at large.

“Yeah, you get used to it,” Parker said, before wandering off back to the blueprints she had been studying.

“I’m just gonna… check some things,” Hardison muttered, making a detour to the kitchen to grab a ginormous bottle of orange soda before getting behind his computer. “And buy a bunch of disinfectant and toilet paper, just in case.”

Eliot rolled his eyes, before bumping his shoulder against Jamie’s. “Come on,” he said.

“Come on where?” Jamie asked. “I’m having a bit of an existential crisis here.” If they were someone’s OC, did that mean that they didn’t have free will? Did it mean that all the cool things they had done the past year had only been because of some weird lady that fell out of the ceiling? Or did it mean-

“I’m gonna teach you to throw a knife so you can take out a zombie,” Eliot said.

Fuck that, the existential crisis could wait until 2am. They had more important things to do. Knife throwing would be fun and useful no matter if there was a zombie apocalypse or a pandemic, or they got superpowers.

#fanfic #self insert month #I wrote a thing #leverage #lets go steal a protege #HardisonxParkerxEliot #I almost didn't post this because of you know the civil war thing in the US #but then I thought wouldn't it be funny if this was pre-january and self insert Inny was just like: well fuck #dear americans I'm sorry #yes Deeks did meet some alpacas it was adorable