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theproverbialpen · 1 month

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Musings from a Hazbin Fan and Hotel Employee

Yeah, that's right—I'm posting to this blog for the first time in years because I got into Hazbin Hotel of all things. Not only did I get into this cursed fandom, I'm writing fan fiction for it. Fan fiction. I think the last time I wrote fanfiction was...2012? 2013? And I only ever told 3 people about that one. Now here I am posting on main. The brainrot truly is unquantifiable.

If you're one of the few people that survived the purge of those I know IRL, congratulations. Please don't judge me lol. Anyways, actual musings are below the cut!

So I’m writing a fun little fanfic on AO3 and after someone left a comment (if you’re reading this, still genuinely one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me about my craft), it occured to me—as a Hazbin Hotel enjoyer, I have a pretty unique perspective on the series as an IRL hospitality professional. So! Thought it would be some cute bonus content to talk a little bit more about my life at an actual hotel and how it’s impacted my experience with Vivziepop’s hit series.

Please note: this is written purely for shits and giggles. I don’t actually have any issues with the setting of Vivzie’s narrative or how it plays into the stories she and her team want to tell. I fucking love this show, to a potentially unhealthy degree, and I haven’t had this much fun with a series since like…okay well my hyperfixations change like every few months, but still. Point is, this isn’t actually critique, or satire, or anything with negative or critical intentions. TLDR; this post is for funsies, get off my dick.

So Who TF Am I, Anyways?

A little background on myself, for context. I’ve been employed at my hotel for almost a year now, and it’s my first hospitality job. I work in the Sales and Events department and I’ve come to learn that Group Business is actually integral for keeping a hotel up and running. When your average person (read: me before this job) thinks about hotels and traveling, you’d think it’s all about the families, bloggers, and individual travelers when it comes to guests and revenue. But in actuality, most of a hotel’s revenue—at least in the market I work in—will come from contracted room blocks and events.

That’s where folks in my department come in. We work with clients to negotiate contracts and secure occupants for our hotel year round. Simply put, if we don’t do our jobs well, then no one else gets hours. So as much as the anti-capitalist in me will sometimes hate being a cog in the machine, it is really fulfilling to be able to help clients meet their needs while also making sure my coworkers are able to put food on the table.

Speaking of being a cog in the machine, because of my role in Sales, this means that whenever I travel or think about hotels, I’m always thinking about the revenue side of things. I also work more with the Events team, so operations are also on the forefront of my mind. Which leads me to my principal quandary for this little blog post:

How in the Hell does the Hazbin Operate?

I have a laundry list of questions. A laundry list that’s almost as big as the actual pile of dirty laundry that is currently plaguing my bedroom floor. I will summarize (which is a generous word given how fucking verbose I can be) below:

Issue #1: Revenue Generation

Okay listen, I know Charlie is the Princess of Hell. I know she probably has unlimited capital, whatever that looks like in the HelluVerse. And I know the Hazbin is literally there to help rehabilitate people so charging them to stay would be counterproductive.

But my dude…do you understand how much money would be needed to run an operation of this scale?

At the end of Season 1, the new Hazbin is huge. Like it easily looks as big, if not bigger, than the hotel I work at which has nearly 500 rooms. Do you know how much revenue our team has to generate to keep this place running? Do you know how many millions our target goal is set at for each quarter? How many hundreds of thousands my coworkers’ individual quotas are set to? And sunshine in a bottle over here doesn’t charge her residents anything?????

How does she get all those decorations? How does she order food or inventory? We know Hell has an economy, like Angel literally says he needs to save money for drugs in his first appearance. Is she…does she even pay her staff???

It is utterly appalling that Charlie is able to operate a hotel of this scale, both because of how it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective and because there are IRL billionaires that could probably do the same thing and solve homelessness overnight.

Speaking of scale:

Issue #2: The Hazbin’s Systems, Or Lack Thereof

Okay so, yes, there’s only like…one official resident of the hotel, maybe two if Cherri moves in and doesn’t become a staff member (RIP Pentious, you would have loved living with Cherri Bomb). With the staff the way it is, that’s a solid 5:1 ratio, which is beyond ideal. But—and I touch on this in the fic—I feel I must reiterate: the new Hazbin is fucking massive. And you know what that means? It’s going to be able to hold a lot of guests. Guests that will need staff to take care of them. Let’s review:

Charlie is the owner and mostly teaches classes. Vaggie is the co-owner and kind of acts as the Executive Assistant to Charlie’s General Manager. I guess Alastor is the Hotel Manager? I’m gonna be honest, I have no idea what he does, but generally speaking he’s supposed to be the jack of all trades and manage the rest of the staff. Niffty handles Housekeeping and I guess would be the director of that. Husk is the bartender but like canonically only really eats pub food so he definitely can’t be the Food & Beverage head.

Let’s say we scrap the Sales and Revenue Departments because clearly they don’t need income, but we keep a Marketing position so that Charlie can get the word out about the hotel. That leaves us with the need for Engineering, Front Desk, Rooms, and F&B staff. And like, not just one person—that would fucking suck—but proper staff. And given their track record of organization and managing the hotel…let’s just say, I would not be applying to the Hazbin Hotel anytime soon. Honestly, it sounds like that job would qualify to be the new tenth circle of Hell.

What Does the Hazbin Get Right About IRL Hospitality?

So yes, clearly the world of the Hazbin Hotel leans towards the more fanciful—it is a story about Hell after all. However, there have been some moments that have made me chuckle as a hotel employee, things that are relatable for us in the hospitality world. Allow me to highlight them for you below:

Everyone is Bat Shit Crazy

Hospitality professionals are weird. So weird. Before I started my job, I was terrified of the level of professionality I would need to have. When I first got hired, I was given a whole packet on dress code and appropriate conduct. As you can probably tell from my writing style, this was concerning: I can be professional when I need to be, but I cannot maintain that guise for extended periods of time. Call it my toxic trait.

I also already had this impression of poised and put-together hotel staff from my previous experiences with travel. All the Front Desk agents would be in these clean and wrinkle-free clothes with kind yet business-forward attitudes, office workers would be walking around in full suits, and occasionally you’d see the hotel management on the floor if you were looking. Let me tell you now—it is a facade. An act. An incredible stage production unfolding in real time where all the staff do their absolute damndest to make you feel like you are in an organized and professional institution. Not unlike a certain hit animated musical.

My direct supervisor, the literal Director of Catering and Events, once told me that being a liiiiiittle crazy was a prerequisite for working in our department during the hiring process for a new Sales Manager. She was wrong—the prerequisite is not “a little” crazy. The prerequisite is being bat shit insane. And it’s not just our department, oh noooOoooOo, it is every department. Downstairs in our little basement dungeon, we make out of pocket comments, scream at random intervals, and swear way more than we should (that one might be my fault…according to my partner I swear more at work than at home and apparently it’s rubbing off on my colleagues), but that behavior is in no way restricted to just the Sales Team.

I process the checks that are sent to our property and our Director of Rooms makes me say “can I get a WITNESSSS” before she signs off on the drop log (Charlie-core). If I don’t say it high pitched enough or with enough vigor, she makes me do it again. I once watched a guy in Engineering climb a tall step ladder balanced with two legs on a platform and a third leg balanced on a wooden plank his coworker was holding steady. The fourth leg was over the open air. Let me reiterate: the open. Fucking. Air. Tell me you can’t see Angel Dust and Cherri doing that shit.

Speaking of Engineering, you wanna know what dumbass thing happened just this morning? The Regional Director of the department—regional meaning he manages teams all across our area, like top level type shit—told us about this cursed ass Instagram trend he found where allegedly, putting ketchup on a Kit Kat tasted like fudge. So right there and then, him, myself, and two other coworkers decided ‘why the fuck not?’:

I would never seek it out willingly again, but I honestly didn’t hate it.

The point of all of this is to say—the antics the Hazbin crew get up to? Totally realistic. I could see my coworker Robert throwing me into an active battlefield against my will. We have deadass done the role playing thing Angel and Pentious did during our trainings, and it was just as unhinged. Every day some shit happens at this hotel and I’m just like, “Yup. That could happen in Hazbin.”

“Call Now! Or Don’t! I Don’t Care! We Still Don’t Have a Working Phone!”

I would like to preface this section by saying: if you happen to be a Front Desk associate, I’m sorry. This is not directed at you, this is directed at your managers and their communication skills that may or may not exist. If you are somehow a manager reading this, uh—first of all, cringe. Second of all, I hope these next few paragraphs don’t apply to you. If they do and you’re offended: that’s a certified you-problem, babes.

There are three certainties in this life: death, taxes, and miscommunication from your fucking managers. Tell me why in this past week alone I have been in 5 different email threads regarding fuck-ups and complaints from guests about things that we had clearly communicated. Tell me why in these email threads, people were attempting to throw me under the bus or shift the blame to my team. Tell me why I have gone to every single individual office in my department complaining about this. Tell me why this isn’t the first time this has happened.

Another hotel tidbit: across the board, Q1 (Jan-Mar) is supposed to be slow, for all of hospitality. It’s the time to get the metaphorical phone lines working, ya know? Our Q1 was stupidly busy, so I get it, people were slammed and short staffed. But like… we had time. Time to iron out our communication, time to create systems and processes that would ensure we’d be all set when things got busier. Yet here I am at the start of Q2 with an entire fist shoved up my ass being puppeted around to fix other people’s mistakes.

It’s times like these when I go back to rewatch Hazbin for the like 26th time and I watch Charlie and Alastor run the hotel and I’m just like “whyyYyYyYyYyYy”. Like I KNOW Vaggie has had days where she’s like, “what…what am I supposed to be doing right now? Like what is my job, what… What?”

It’s not just Front Desk either. It’s every department, even my own bosses. Like the call is coming from inside the house, sweetie, why did you tell this Sales Manager that I was taking care of all her commissions but you didn’t tell me this. Why am I blocking a room for an Orientation the following Monday at fucking 5:45 PM on a Friday. Why am I JUST finding out about a VIP guest when I have been asking you if you had any notes for me for the whole week.

I touch on it in my fic as well but like…pretty sure Charlie just, decides to host her classes day of. And that drives me insane. Like I…there are processes. Things that need to be done so that everyone is on the same page. You don’t just wing this shit, that’s how you end up with Susan calling your Director to tell her that you’re a useless waste of space not even deserving of the air in your lungs because you didn’t give her her fucking breakfast voucher.

As a character, I love Alastor. If I were ever in the same room as him, I’d probably hate him. But if there’s anything relatable about that Geneva Convention Violation on Legs it’s his absolutely done attitude in Episode 1’s opening commercial.

Charlie Loves Helping People, and So Do We!

Alright, I’ve complained for enough paragraphs, let’s be positive for a second. The thing that is by far the most true to life in Hazbin Hotel is how much joy Charlie gets from taking care of her guests. Like…that’s our bread and butter in the hospitality world. Well, maybe just the butter; we need that bread in the form of cold hard cash (or direct deposits, whatever works best). But as much as I will bitch and moan about the difficulties of working in a hotel, there’s nothing quite as fulfilling as a guest telling you that you made their entire trip better. The butterflies I get reading reviews where my coworkers are mentioned by name and a guest writes about how we completely turned around their bad day are an absolute delight. It just means the world knowing that you can have that kind of impact on someone, even if it’s just in the little things.

In Episode 2, when Charlie and the crew are welcoming Sir Pentious and she just starts vibrating with excitement is exactly how I feel when I get to meet a client that we’ve been working with for months and finally welcome them to our property. When they sing “It Starts With Sorry” and just get to have a moment of empathy and compassion together, it reminds me of the clients and the phone calls I take where I get to ask them about their goals and help them feel like they’re supported and heard. In the grand scheme of things, is a nice phone call or interaction with some hotel employee going to change your life? Probably not. But for those few moments when their burdens seem lighter is why I love my job.

This goes for guests, and for my fellow coworkers. I’ve been very blessed to start my hospitality career in an unusually supportive work culture. Yeah, we can be some right petty bitches sometimes, but overall everyone is so encouraging and so quick to help lighten each other’s loads. Like in Episode 5 (best episode btw, for obvious reasons) when all the Hazbin Crew are working together to prepare the hotel for Lucifer’s arrival, that shit made me so giddy cause like- that’s us! Look at us go! We workin together so hard, we’re so cute! Like when Niffty and Pentious are baking and she looks up at him all excited n’ shit—that’s literally been me working with our Director of Restaurants on new food menus or promotional material.

There’s something about being in an occupation where your whole purpose is to take care of people that really brings out the selflessness in you, and I think that’s what makes the hotel such a great setting for Charlie’s mission of redemption. I didn’t realize that until writing this paragraph tbh, but yeah, it just kinda…works. When your job is to make sure other people have a good time and feel supported and you’re surrounded by people that make you feel the same way, it’s a lot easier to want to choose to do good, to do right by the people around you. So as much as I have some silly little nitpicks…yeah, I can admit—I love that this show is about the Hazbin Hotel specifically.

Anyways, if you made it this far, thanks for reading! Next update for Life is In Redemption will be out in the days to come, just thought this would be a fun addition while I work on some of the content with my friends. This upcoming chapter is going to have a co-author, so get hyyyyyped :)

#hazbin hotel #blog post #text #charlie morningstar #alastor #vaggie #angel dust #cherri bomb #sir pentious #hazbin hotel husk #lucifer morningstar #hazbin lucifer #personal post #life is in redemption #bonus content

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 3 years

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HASO, “Ash.”

A couple people were showing some interest in other Alien characters aboard the ship, and I thought I would give you all some insight into that. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you all have a great day.

“You have ruined this family.”

“What have you done!”

“The war is the only thing left for you now, so make yourself useful and die.”

Etium slowly lifted his head from the computer where he sat staring blankly at the accounting spreadsheet on the screen. Beside him, the other two Tesraki’s chairs were empty. He sighed, and slowly turned back to the accounting. They had likely finished their half of the books hours ago, leaving him to sit in the darkness alone with his own strange thoughts. His four fingered hands clicked at the keys of the human made keyboard,

He was good at typing, pretty fast for someone who was missing two requisite fingers, but he was nothing in comparison to the others.

He was nothing in comparison to most Tesraki.

Etium was slow when it came to doing the books, repeatedly checking every line and ever string of numbers for any possible mistake that could have been made. The process took him hours longer than it should have, but finally he stood, pushing back his chair and hopping down to the floor. The human ship whirred softly in the distance. It was a comforting sound, but he had always found some measure of comfort in humanity.

Etium had been hit the hardest by the huminization phenomenon. It didn’t surprise him all that much. He had fought side by side with humans since the Drev war, and the changes in him had taken a long time to develop. They ran deep now through his body as sure as his blood. WIth skills honed in human war, and being one of few survivors, he was quick to react to sounds, followed movement more easily, and could read body language better than almost any other alien he knew.

Dr Krill wasn’t even as good as he considered himself.

That’s what war did to a person.

He reached up to his torn ear and shivered at the smell of smoke that seemed to waft up from his fur. He could never get the smell of ash out of his head no matter how hard he tried.

Etium knew there was something wrong with him, but he kept that to himself. The others tended to avoid him, and that was alright. He was friends with the Finnari, and while they were a bit sensitive, he supposed that was ok. He didn’t need anyone asking questions about what he was doing and why he was there.

He ducked through one of the maintenance corridors, and into the hallway behind the rec room.

He could hear humans and Drev talking and laughing on the other side, but when he passed through the next door, he found the hall opened into a large-ish storage room that was lined in boxes and crates. Inside was what remained of the Omen crew. Tesraki, Finnari, Celzex and Yeb. They had a little place here for those aliens who found it difficult to constantly interact with humans.

Yeb was a bit of a special case as she seemed to hop between both without much trouble. She lounged on one of the crates, her tail swishing back and forth against the box below her, bright green fur along her back, waving slightly in the air currents.

Etium leaned against the wall making no noise, and interacting with no one.

He wouldn’t have minded hanging out with humans, and drev, but….. Every time he did he just couldn’t shake the smell of smoke.

Why was he here?

Because he had seen a human boldly risk his life for two wounded alien soldiers.

Etium remembered the red sky above and the ash covered ground beneath. He remembered the wounded Rundi soldier at his side as the creature stalked towards them from the darkness. He remembered the flash of blue, and then an animal howl as the human came charging from nowhere.

When he closed his eyes, he could still hear the blood curdling scream of pain the human had given off as his limbs were ripped from his body.

He shook himself trying to shake the smoke away.

“Clan is more important than anything else.”

Etium lifted his head, arms still crossed over his chest.

“Then mean nothing.” Yeb was saying, “My parents abandoned me in an ice cave when I was just a cub.”

“Not our fault your species is defective.” Lord Avex was saying.

The burg lifted his hands in an attempt to keep the piece, technicolor wings flickering behind him, “Not now, all of you we must remember that as different species we all have different beliefs and needs. He pressed his hands together. The Burg do find clan very important, but it was for our survival for the longest time. There are plenty of other species that don’t need such things, like the Vrul or the Gibb for example, who are solitary creatures.”

The group of three finnari huddled close together and nodded.

They wouldn’t be likely to argue, they hated conflict and tried to keep the peace as much as it was possible.

He glanced over to the side surprised to find Waffles, the dog, lying with her head on her paws, around her neck, the snake creature Jeffery hung like a boa scarf.

He supposed she had any right to be here like the rest of them, she wasn’t human and neither was the snake. Though neither of them were classified as sentient and didn’t have the intelligence to speak. Waffles licked at her paws and Jeffery lifted his head turning to look at the speakers as if he was listening intently.

“This is not about biology, this is about the facts. There is strength in numbers, and numbers can win out over force anyday. Humans are the best example of this and you all know it. They managed to survive on a death world by making packs.”

Lord Avex did have a point, but lord Avex was also known for being an egotistical asshole.

That was sort of the defining feature of Celzex.

The furry little creatures were very proud, and very loyal, so they were both a blessing and an absolute pain to have on your side.

Most of the time they just liked causing problems for the sake of causing problems.

“There is nothing wrong with a solitary existence. My species has been living as single occupants inside a distanced society for a very long time.”

Lord Avex snorted, “Might I also point out that you society is a fascist Authoritarian dictatorship recovering from a pandemic crisis and refuses to join the GA to control their own citizens?”

The hair on the back of her body stood up, “Oh like your planet is any better. Roving warring clans who eat their own children.”

“Please, Peace.” THe burg was saying.

“You have no place in this. The burg have lived under a corrupted monarchy for ages.”

Etium sighed and closed his eyes.

Apparently, he had sighed much louder than he intended, and when he opened his eyes the entire room was looking at him,

“You got something to say.” Avex growled, “Anything to offer from a corporate capitalist hellscape.”

Etium pushed himself off from the wall, “No, I have nothing to say.”

Avex bristled, and when he did he got even fluffier, “I don’t think we are done here. I want to hear what you have to say.”

Etium sighed, knowing that he wasn’t going to get out of this one, “I think that all of our societies suck, they just all do it equally.”

The room bristled, but he kept going. He had stuck his foot in it and now he was going to have to deal. He looked at yeb and Avex, “Both of you are true about the other, same with the burg sorry to say.” He nodded over at the winged creature, “But think about it, all of us suck in some way or another,. My species destroyed our own natural habitats in the name of progress, He looked at the Finnari, No cohesive leadership, and a societal wide inability to make decisions. The Vrul live under a corrupted communist system and the Rundi are all politicians, so guess where that leads us. The Drev are a fractured group of clans bent on killing each other for no other reason than the fact that it is honorable. And don’t even get me started on humans, they are the worst of us all, since they can do everything we can and more.”

He sort of expected the uproar that followed, but kept his head low to avoid having to deal with it. He brushed a hand through his fur, attempting, mostly to brush the ash from it, and despite being able to feel it with his fingertips, he saw none break loose.

The room grew louder and louder until a sharp bark broke the silence.

The room went very quiet very suddenly.

He turned to see waffles had risen up into a sitting position, her hackles raised.

She growled low in her throat , and the entire room calmed down very quickly after that, Jeffery opened his mouth and turned his head like a periscope around the room.

Waffles slid back onto the floor and rested her chin on her paws ears sticking straight up as she sighed.

The room was only slowly able to return to its former discussion, though everyone remained mostly quiet.

Etium slumped back against the wall. He could see the other Tesraki across the room staring at him. He tried to ignore them for the most part, he didn’t really fit in with them to any sort of degree. He didn’t blame them.

He wasn’t particularly good with finances.

He didn’t have to be though, most humans were pretty poort at it too, so any ability whatsoever was considered good. That was another reason why he was here. If he was slow and ok at handling money, then he was going to be fine. If he tried to work anywhere else as a Tesraki….

He'd be fired

Or disowned…

Etium quietly slipped from the room, out and down the hallway. He knew where he was going, and followed his own memory down through the hallways until he came to a door. He knocked once.

“Come in.”

The door slid open and he stepped into a room lit by soft yellow light. Dr Adric was sitting at his desk, skin glowing a pale yellow in the dim lighting. He looked up, and when he smiled his teeth flashed white.

“Etium, it is good to see you. I didn’t expect you till our session tomorrow.”

Etium wandered into the room glancing down at the diagrams on the wall, and the large books on the shelves beside the desk. “Do you want me to leave.”

“No, of course not, take a seat.”

He did and stared up at the ceiling with a sigh.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Etium was quiet for a while, but finally opened his mouth to speak, “I can still smell the ash sometimes, Feel it in my fur when I go to bed. It…. doesn't really bother me most of the time, and I know it’s not real, but it certainly feels that way.”

Dr Adtric leaned on his desk and nodded, “Did you know somatic hallucinations are extremely common In Tesraki.”

He rubbed his fur, “Really?”

“Yes, at least one in twenty report small things. Feelings of items brushing over their fur even when nothing is there. If it starts to bother you, come to me and we will look into helping it. Otherwise just remember the exercises I taught you.”

He shifted in his seat and absently looked at the wall, “So if Somatic hallucinations are common in Tesraki….. Than what about everyone else?”

Dr Adric smiled at him. His expression, both charming and calming at the same time. He had an eir about him that just seemed to make things slow down and relax. It was a nice feeling to have.

“Well both Vrul and Gibb are prone to psychosis with obsessive and grandiosity characteristics. Most Vrul I know could be classified as having some sort of anxiety. Rundi are commonly seen with OCD. Celzex presents with characteristics of Antisocial personality disorder. Finnari can commonly be seen with dependent personality disorders. Both the Drevb and the Starborn, have a high rate of narcissism. In the case of the starborn, they have a 100% rate at this time…. Though to be fair we only have one starborn”

Etium couldn’t help but smile just a little. “Humans have all of those things I guess, since you have a name for all of them.”

“Yes. Though, I would say that I work most closely with Post Traumatic Stress.”

“Like what I have?”

“Similarly yes, though yours presents differently.”

“That’s what the Admiral’s dog is for? He said she was a PTSD dog.”

“That would be correct.”

Etium leaned back in his seat and stared out the window behind Adric. The man said he presented with listlessness, difficulty concentrating, and emotional detachment. He didn’t have flashbacks or stress associated, which is why he couldn't be entirely diagnosed, bu7t the two of them were pretty sure whatever he had was similar. They had thought about depression on one or two occasions, but he didn’t have trouble getting out of bed, or doing things that he enjoyed. He just got listless and distracted a lot.

Adric thought it might be an entirely different issue from what humans could get, but as of yet, there wasn’t enough research to determine that. They were working on it in their own right now, and he had been feeling a little more present, but he still wasn’t really there yet.

He hoped that soon he would be out of the rut he was stuck in.,

“Have you managed to tell the Admiral, like we had been talking about.”

Etium picked at the fur on his arm, “He seems…. Too busy to talk to me and I…. well I don’t know what it would accomplish.”

“I think it would be good for you to talk to someone who experienced the war.”

Etium sighed, “I didn’t really do much in the war. I sat there and just… was scared. The humans did everything.”

“I think you might find there are humans that feel the same way you do. I encourage you to talk to him. Knowing the man myself, I have no doubt that he will be accepting of your story.” He held up his hands, “I don’t want to push you, but I do encourage you to let him know.”

I think it would be good for both of you

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bitchesgetriches · 4 years

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Noble citizens of the aspirationally decadent Conglomerated Nation of Bitches Get Riches: let’s have a lil’ chat, shall we? It’s been a while since we chatted about our favorite topic: ourselves!

We hope you’ve enjoyed season two of the Bitches Get Riches podcast. Recording it was a bright spot for us during this dumpster fire of a year, so thank you all for listening.

As we wrap up another season, we had a few notes to share with you. Including some more personal reflections about how we’re doing, where we’re at, and what the future holds.

Let’s get into it!

Merch is back online

If you visited our Etsy shop in the last few months, you might’ve noticed the physical merch—tee shirts and coffee mugs and tote bags and such—wasn’t listed anymore. Basically, when lockdowns started, it caused a lot of disruption and delays on orders. Not wanting people to be stuck waiting for stuff, we decided to take it all offline, and only offer digital merch.

As of today, we’ve reactivated everything! But please keep in mind that there may still be delays, depending on what’s happening in the world! We appreciate your patience, if patience is indeed called for.

Visit Our Etsy Shop

Season one transcripts

Next, we wanted to let you guys know that we now have transcripts available for season one of the Bitches Get Riches podcast!

We’re committed to making BGR as accessible as we possibly can. We know that some people can’t hear, or struggle to absorb information aurally, so transcripts were something we’ve always wanted to offer.

… But, you know, at the end of the day, we’re just two people! Transcribing and editing audio is time- and labor-intensive work, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day for us to do it along with the fifteen million other things we have to do.

We were able to offer season one transcripts thanks entirely to A Purple Life, a peerlessly talented and wonderful fellow blogger who selflessly made it happen. (If you don’t already read her stuff, you’ve already disobeyed us, as we commanded you to in 10 Rad Black Money Experts to Follow Right the Hell Now. And for that, we’re strongly considering smiting you.)

We’re incredibly thankful to Purple for her hard work on this. But we also feel strongly that this DESERVES to be paid work! So the release of season two transcripts is dependent on getting more Patreon donors to offset funding it.

Season 1, Episode 1: “Should I Tell My Boss I’m Looking for Another Job?”

Season 1, Episode 2: “How Should I Behave on My First Day at Work?”

Season 1, Episode 3: “My Parents Have Bad Credit. Should I Help by Co-signing Their Mortgage?”

Season 1, Episode 4: “Capitalism Is Working for Me. So How Could I Hate It?”

Season 1, Episode 5: “I Don’t Love My Job, but It Pays Well. Should I Quit—or Tough It Out?”

Season 1, Episode 6: “I Lent My Boyfriend Money. He Took It to a Casino.”

Season 1, Episode 7: “I’m Terrible at Budgeting. Do I Suck It Up��Or Is There Another Way?”

Season 1, Episode 8: “My Mother Demands Information About My One-Night Stands.”

Season 1, Episode 9: “I’ve Given up on My Dream Career. Where Do I Go From Here?”

Season 1, Episode 10: “I Want a Pedigreed Dog. She Wants a Rescue Mutt. It Turned into a Fight… and the Fight Got Ugly.”

Season 1, Episode 11: “I Feel Cornered by a Friend Who Keeps Asking to Borrow Money.”

Season 1, Episode 12: “Should I Believe the Fear-Mongering about Another Recession?”

Bonus Episode: Merry Bitchmas! The 2019 Star-Studded Holiday Spectacular

For transcripts, scroll to the bottom of each episode and click “episode transcript.” Or read them directly in the podcast player of your choice!

Podcast reviews

We also super wanted to thank all the people who’ve etched their names in blood upon the dusty pages of our dark grimoire written reviews for the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and other places!

We are beyond flattered by the kind things you guys have said about us. Like MoonPetalLily, who described us as “the snarky older sisters [they] wish [they] had.”

FunshineKelly said our “advice helped [them] land a $20k raise and a signing bonus without crying even a little bit.” GOOD! We don’t support tears in the workplace! Not even in the sanctity of your car parked way in the corner of the parking lot. Keep it together!

And God bless MelHubbs, who said, and I quote:

They’re prepared, and still relaxed; informative, and still light-hearted; comforting, and still sexual. It’s everything you could ever want in a podcast, in an internet personality, in your sisters-in-arms against the terrible war between capitalism and what humans actually need to survive & thrive. One of my favorite things about them is that they don’t have any corporate sponsors or ads, so you know what they’re saying is what they mean, not what their advertisers want them to say. If you’re able, support them on Patreon! If you’re not, listen to their podcast, take their advice to heart, reflect on your options, make your moves, then, with your newfound financial independence, become a patreon!

MelHubbs, you joyful sonnet!

Your review is so good that it reads suspiciously like something we paid you to write! But we’re too cheap for that—IT REAL!

Bitches Get Riches at the crossroads

All right. Time to level with you guys.

In keeping with 2020’s overarching theme (“everything is pure shit”), this year has become a real “shit or get off the pot” moment for the two of us.

Although I’m comfortable and doing fine, Piggy is still unemployed. And last week she received the last unemployment check she’s entitled to. It sucks. And it’s scary.

Being a partnership is awesome in almost every way. But one way that it sucks is that we have to earn double the amount of money to be truly profitable! (And no, before you ask, it’s not possible for us to only pay Piggy. Believe me, that was our original plan—but it turns out that’s not allowed in a 50/50 legal partnership. We must pay ourselves equally, or Uncle Sam will spank us. And he doesn’t do it in the sexy way—only the traumatic way!)

Piggy is doing okay for now. She has freelancing work, and an intact emergency fund. But understandably, anxiety and worry take their toll. She’s pushing through it, but it’s hard. Creativity and passion can’t thrive for long without some measure of safety and stability.

During these scary times, our Patreon community has been a lifeline. As more and more of you have joined us, it’s slowly crept up from grocery money to grocery and utility bill money! So thank you, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts thank you to those who’ve stepped up and joined.

But we’re kind of at a crossroads. Because of Piggy’s situation, we really need it to become “paying the mortgage” money. And it’s gotta get there pretty fast. Otherwise, it’s just not fair to ask Piggy to invest so much of her time in Bitches Get Riches, when she could be taking on higher paying freelancing work to keep herself afloat.

And trust me, you do not want a BGR that’s too Kitty-heavy. I am longwinded af, slowly losing my abilities to think and spell, and take every possible detour to inject disgusting sexual comments wherever they are least germane (although idk maybe you’re here for that).

Our new goal for ourselves, and you

With all of that in mind, we have a new goal: to produce season three of our podcast, we need 500 total Patreon donors.

Today we have… 294. So that’s, uhhhhh… a really ambitious goal!

It’s probably too ambitious. We’re probably gonna fail. Who cares, it’s 2020! The planet is on fire and god is already dead, so we have no reason not to give it our all!

We are leaving this in your hands. We—Piggy and I—believe that the world would be a better place if people could hear reliable, relatable financial wisdom funded by regular people, untainted by corporate sponsors with deep pockets who want us to push their capitalist crap upon you. And 294 of you have already demonstrated that you believe that too. Thank you, thank you, infinity thank yous to all of you who are already a part of our Patreon community. You are shining stars that smell faintly of vanilla.

For the rest of you: if you like what we do and you want us to keep doing it, please show us that you believe in it too. You can do that by joining us at the Bitches Get Riches Patreon.

We hope to be back soon for a third season. Until then, stay safe, stay sane, wear your masks, triple-check that you’re registered to vote, and save room for dessert. (What’s for dessert? So glad you asked—it’s the rich!)

For now, Bitches OUUUTTTTT!

Join the Bitches on Patreon

#etsy #merch #bitches get riches #patreon #donations #personal finance #financial advice #money #adulting #money advice #advice #adulting advice

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the-autisticats · 4 years

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How capitalism harms disabled & autistic people.

This topic is a long-awaited one, and something that not everyone will understand immediately. That’s okay. This post is here for you to learn from, even if you have to return to it more than once and do your own independent research in the meantime.

Before you read this, it’s probably relevant for you to know that I was raised in an anti-capitalist household. My mom has a PhD in Sociology, and her dissertation focuses heavily on the way that female re/productive labor is exploited under capitalism. She has been heavily influenced by the academic work of Silvia Federici, and Chris Knight (an anthropologist).

For over a decade, I’ve been in constant conversation with her on these issues. It has taken me an incredibly long time to fully understand everything, but now I have an understanding deep enough to debate her, educate her, and sharpen both of our knowledge. One of the key things I’ve educated her about is the way that disabled and autistic people fit into the big picture of capitalist exploitation. Now, I will do the same for you.

I think the best thing to do is to give you the general framework for understanding, and then provide you with specific examples that fit into the big picture. That way, you’ll know what you’re looking at when I give you the examples.

First, you need to know what capitalism is, and how it relates to every other system of oppression. Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian, patriarchal economic system, characterized by private ownership of the means of re/production, and the exploitation of re/productive labor to create surplus product/profit for the owners of an enterprise. Under capitalism, everyone is expected to reproduce, to create new workers. Additionally, economic growth (the creation of surplus/profit) has to be exponential, constantly increasing, in order for the system to survive. This means that the ecological boundaries of the planet are exceeded, because the Earth (coded female, of course) is assumed to have an infinite amount of resources to extract and create profit from.

This economic structure necessitates a binary reproductive class system, with reproductive females as the “working class,” and pregnancy as the labor required to produce the end product, new workers. This is why abortion is often heavily criminalized in patriarchal/capitalist societies. It is also why same-sex attracted and gender nonconforming or trans people are criminalized and stigmatized: we don’t conform to the re/productive expectations associated with our sex at birth.

Ethnicity has also been weaponized as a tool to create class categories that we now refer to as “race.” People racialized as white are afforded economic benefits. People racialized as Black are severely economically exploited. In order to fully understand the way that American capitalism developed, you have to understand slavery as the origin point. You must also understand that “race” is a tool that the ruling class employs to keep the working class divided. Because they know that if working-class white people joined forces with Black people and other POC, it would be over for them. MLK understood that, and was assasinated right after the Memphis Sanitation Strike, which was a major part of the the multiracial Poor People’s Campaign (which still exists today, btw!).

It is also important to realize that capitalism, characterized by private ownership, is not the only predatory/authoritarian/patriarchal economic system out there. There were older forms, like feudalism. And the USSR, China, and North Korea are good examples of the way that States can co-opt the role of private ownership and turn an entire country into one large corporation. It is therefore much more accurate to describe those countries as demonstrating a system called “state capitalism” rather than “communism.”

So what does all of this have to do with disabled people? And what does it have to do with autistic people specifically?

Well, under capitalism and other predatory economic systems, everyone is expected to be able to work in a manner that serves the ruling class by producing surplus/profit. If someone is not able to work at the same pace as everyone else, or perform the work required of them, they are no longer of value to the system. In an economy like this, people’s productivity is the only measure of their worth in society.

This has obvious and far-reaching implications for disabled people. So now, let’s get into the specifics that I told you I’d talk about earlier. I can’t think of a way to do this chronologically, and I don’t know how to organize everything I’m about to tell you. But hopefully you’ll be able to pick these pieces up and put them into the framework I’ve provided.

Disabled people are often killed, discarded, and left to die. This is a problem that exists worldwide, because patriarchy/capitalism are systems that exist worldwide. One notable example is the Aktion T4 program in Nazi Germany, which ended up being the precursor to the Holocaust. In this “euthanasia” program, which started in 1939 and continued until around 1945 (even though it technically ended in 1941), around 300,000 disabled people were killed across Germany, Austria, and Poland.

During this program, Hans Asperger (the man who gave Asperger Syndrome its name), saved autistic people he deemed “valuable” to society (for their ability to work under capitalist expectations), and sent other autistic people (who he saw as “unworthy of life” bc of their inability to work in the ways desired by the Third Reich) to die in gas chambers and death camps. This dark history is why the vast majority of autistic people despise the term “Asperger Syndrome,” as it promotes the idea that autistic people who conform to capitalist notions of productivity and intelligence are inherently superior to (and more worthy of life than) autistic people who can’t or don’t conform to those standards.

And you know how I talked earlier about how patriarchy/capitalism want everyone to reproduce? Well, the main exception to that rule is disabled people, because disability is often genetic and inheritable. The system hates it when more “defective” workers are produced. So, beginning in the United States around the 1910s and continuing into the present day, forced sterilization of disabled people became commonplace. Between 1909 and 1963, there were around 20,000 forced sterilizations in California alone.

The main reason given for these eugenics practices was to save money and limit the amount of resources spent on caring for “undesirable” people. Because after all, caring for people who won’t in turn produce surplus for you is just an impractical drain on resources /s. Now, I want you to turn this critical lens to these modern issues:

It is still legal in the United States to pay disabled workers below minimum wage. For example, Goodwill pays its disabled workers as little as 22 cents an hour. (Because even when we do work, our work is not seen as valuable)

Disabled people often lose all of our disability benefits if we get married, even if our spouse doesn’t have the financial means to support us. This means that many disabled people who rely on social security are completely unable to get married. (Because someone else should be taking care of us, we shouldn’t be wasting the government’s money with our existence /s)

The main focus of ABA therapy is on molding autistic children into employable adults. This means making them perform as many neurotypical “skills” as possible, in the hopes that they will be hired to work as “productive members of society.” Regardless of the methods used to try and achieve this goal, it is misguided to try and force autistic people to conform to the expectations of an exploitative system that was not built for us.

There’s so much more that I can and should talk about, but for now I’ll leave you with some things to Google and research:

Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan, Rojava / The Federation of Northern Syria, Democratic Confederalism / Liberterian Municipalism

Cooperation Jackson

The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico

Crip Camp / the American Disability Rights movement

Extinction Rebellion

The Poor People’s Campaign

10 Principles of Disability Justice by Sins Invalid

“Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion,” from the New York Times

Mutual Aid as a political and economic theory & strategy

Matrilineal societies and the “gift economy”

Thank you for listening and learning with me. In love and solidarity,

Eden 🐢

#actually autistic #autism #autistic #ableism #autismacceptance #anthropology #history #sociology #capitalism #patriarchy #disability #disability rights #disability justice

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livingdeadinsideyourhead · 3 years

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Free Music in a Capitalist Society - Iggy Pop's Keynote Speech Transcript

Hi, I'm Iggy Pop. I've held a steady job at BBC 6 Music now for almost a year, which is a long time in my game. I always hated radio and the jerks who pushed that shit music into my tender mind, with rare exceptions. When I was a boy, I used to sit for hours suffering through the entire US radio top 40 waiting for that one song by The Beatles and the other one by The Kinks. Had there been anything like John Peel available in my Midwestern town I would have been thrilled. So it's an honor to be here. I understand that. I appreciate it.

Some months ago when the idea of this talk came up I thought it might be okay to talk about free music in a Capitalist society. So that's what I'm gonna try to talk about. A society in which the Capitalist system dominates all the others, and seeks their destruction when they get in its way. Since then, the shit has really hit the fan on the subject, thanks to U2 and Apple. I worked half of my life for free. I didn't really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn't making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it's not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.

As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there's gonna be a correction.

When I started The Stooges we were organized as a group of Utopian communists. All the money was held communally and we lived together while we shared the pursuit of a radical ideal. We shared all song writing, publishing and royalty credits equally – didn’t matter who wrote it - because we'd seen it on the back of a Doors album and thought it was cool, at least I did. Yeah. I thought songwriting was about the glory, I didn't know you'd get paid for it. We practiced a total immersion to try to forge a new approach which would be something of our own. Something of lasting value. Something that was going to be revealed and created and was not yet known.

We are now in the age of the schemer and the plan is always big, big, big, but it's the nature of the technology created in the service of the various schemes that the pond, while wide, is very shallow. Nobody cares about anything too deeply expect money. Running out of it, getting it. I never sincerely wanted to be rich. There is a, in the US, we have this guy “Do you sincerely wanna be rich? You can do it!” I didn’t sincerely want to be rich. I never sincerely felt like making anyone else that way. That made me a kind of a wild card in the 60's and 70's. I got into the game because it felt good to play and it felt like being free. I'm still hearing today about how my early works with The Stooges were flops. But they're still in print and they sell 45 years later, they sell. Okay, it took 20 or 25 years for the first royalties to roll in. So sue me.

Some of us who couldn't get anywhere for years kept beating our heads against the same wall to no avail. No one did that better than my friends The Ramones. They kept putting out album after album, frustrated that they weren't getting the hit. They even tried Phil Spector and his handgun. After the first couple of records, which made a big impact, they couldn't sustain the quality, but I noticed that every album had at least one great song and I thought, wow if these guys would just stop and give it a rest, society would for sure catch up to them. And that's what's happening now, but they're not around to enjoy it. I used to run into Johnny at a little rehearsal joint in New York and he'd be in a big room all alone with a Marshall stack just going "dum, dum, dum, dum, dum" all my himself. I asked him why and he said if he didn't practice doing that exactly the way he did it live he'd lose it. He was devoted and obsessive, so were Joey and Deedee. I like that. Johnny asked me one day - Iggy don't you hate Offspring and the way they're so popular with that crap they play. That should be us, they stole it from us. I told him look, some guys are born and raised to be the captain of the football team and some guys are just gonna be James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and that's the way it is. Not everybody is meant to be big. Not everybody big is any good.

I only ever wanted the money because it was symbolic of love and the best thing I ever did was to make a lifetime commitment to continue playing music no matter what, which is what I resolved to do at the age of 18. If who you are is who you are that is really hard to steal, and it can lead you in all sorts of useful directions when the road ahead of you is blocked and it will get blocked. Now I'm older and I need all the dough I can get. So I too am concerned about losing those lovely royalties, now that they've finally arrived, in the maze of the Internet. But I'm also diversifying my income, because a stream will dry up. I'm not here to complain about that, I'm here to survive it.

When I was starting out as a full time musician I was walking down the street one bright afternoon in the seedier part of my Midwestern college town. I passed a dive bar and from it emerged a portly balding pallid middle aged musician in a white tux with a drink in one hand and a guitar in the other. He was blinking in the daylight. I had a strong intuition that this was a fate to be avoided. He seemed cut off from society and resigned to an oblivious obscurity. A bar fly. An accessory to booze. So how do you engage society as an artist and get them to pay you? Well, that's a matter of art. And endurance.

To start with, I cannot stress enough the importance of study. I was lucky to work in a discount record store in Ann Arbor Michigan as a stock boy where I was exposed to a little bit of every form of music imaginable on record at the time. I listened to it all whether I liked it or not. Be curious. And I played in my high school orchestra and I learned the joy of the warm organic instruments working together in the service of a classical piece. That sticks with you forever. If anyone out there can get a chance to put an instrument and some knowledge in some kids hand, you've done a great, great thing.

Comparative information is a key to freedom. I found other people who were smarter than me. To teach me. My first pro band was a blues band called The Prime Movers and the leader Michael Erlewine was a very bright hippy beatnik with a beautifully organized record collection in library form of The Blues. I'd never really heard the Blues. That part of our American heritage was kept off the major media. It was system up, people down. No Big Bill Broonzy on BBC for us. Boy I wish! No money in it. But everything I learned from Michael's beautiful library became the building blocks for anything good I've done since. Guys like this are priceless. If you find one, follow him, or her. Get the knowledge.

Once in secondary school in the 60's some class clowns dressed up the tallest guy in school in a trench coat, shades and a fedora and rushed him in to a school dance with great hubbub proclaiming "Del Shannon is here, Del Shannon is here." And until they got to the stage we all believed them, because nobody knew what Del Shannon looked like. He was just a voice on some great records. He had no social ID. By the early 60's that had really changed with the invasion of The Beatles and The Stones. This time TV was added to the mix and print media too. So you knew who they were, or so you thought anyway. I'm mentioning this because the best way to survive the death or change of an industry is to transcend its form. You're better off with an identity of your own or maybe a few of them. Something special.

It is my own personal view having lived through it that in America The Beatles replaced our assassinated president Kennedy, who represented our hopes for a certain kind of society. Didn’t get there. And The Stones replaced our assassinated folk music which our own leaders suppressed for cultural, racial, and financial reasons. It wasn't okay with everybody to be Kennedy or Muddy Waters, but those messages could be accepted if they came through white entertainers from the parent culture. That's why they’re still around.

Years later I had the impression that Apple, the corporation, had successfully co-opted the good feelings that the average American felt about the culture of the Beatles, by kind of stealing the name of their company so I bought a little stock. Good move. 1992. Woo! But look, everybody is subject to the rip off and has to change affiliations from time to time. Even Superman and Barbie were German before America tempted them to come over. Tough luck, Nietzche.

So who owns what anyway. Or as Bob Dylan said "The relationships of ownership." That’s gates of Eden. Nobody knows for long, especially these days. Apparently when BBC radio was founded, the record companies in England wouldn't allow the BBC to play their master recordings because they thought no one would buy them for their personal use if they could hear them free on the radio. So they were really confused about what they had. They didn’t get it. And how people feel about music. ‘Cause it’s a feel thing, and it resists logic. It’s not binary code. Later when CD's came in, the retail merchants in American all panicked because they were just too damn tiny and they thought that Americans want something that looks big, like a vinyl record. Well they had a point but their solution was a kind of Frankenstein called "The Long Box." It didn't fool anybody because half of it was empty. It had a little CD in the bottom. You’d open it up and it was empty. Now we have people in the Sahara using GPS to bury huge wads of Euros under sand dunes for safe keeping. But GPS was created for military spying from the high ground, not radical banking so any sophisticated system, along with the bounty it brings, is subject to primitive hijacking.

I wanna talk about a type of entrepreneur who functions as a kind of popular music patron of the arts. It’s good to know a patron. I call him El Padron because his relationship to the artist is essentially feudal, though benign. He or she (La Padrona) if you will, is someone, usually the product of successful, enlightened parents, who owns a record company, but has had benefit of a very good education, and can see a bigger picture than a petty business person. If they like an artists’ style and it suits them, they'll support you even if you’re not a big money spinner. I can tell you, some of these powerful guys get so bored that if you are fun in the office, you’ll go places. Their ancestors, the old time record crooks just made it their business to make great, great records, but also to rip off the artist 100%, copyright, publishing, royalty splits, agency fees, you name it. If anyone complained the line was "Pay you? We worship you!" God bless Bo Diddley.

By the time I came along, there was a new brand of Padron. People like this are still around and some can help you. One was named Jack Holzman. Jack had a beautiful label called Elektra Records, they put out Judy Collins, Tim Buckley, the Doors and Love. He'd started working in his family record store, like Brian Epstein. He dressed mod and he treated us very gently. He was a civilized man. He obviously loved the arts, but what he really wanted to do was build his business - and he did. He had his own concerns, and style, and you had to serve them, and of course when he sold out, as all indies do, you were stranded culturally in the hands of a cold clumsy conglomerate. But he put us in the right studios with the right producers and he tried to get us seen in the right venues and it really helped. This is a good example of the industry.

Another good guy I met is Sir Richard Branson. I ended up serving my full term at Virgin Records having been removed from every other label. And he created a superior culture there. People were happier and nicer than the weasels at some other places. The first time he tried to sign me it didn't work out, because I had my sights set on A&M, a company I thought would help make me respectable. After all they had Sting! Richard was secretly starting his own company at the time in the US and he phoned me in my tiny flat with no furniture. He said he'd give me a longer term deal with more dough than the other guys and he was very, very polite and soft spoken. But I had just smoked a joint that day and I couldn't make a decision. So I went with the other guys who soon got sick of me. Virgin picked me up again later on the rebound. And on the cheap. Damn. My own fault.

Another kind of indie legend who is slightly more contemporary is Long Gone John of the label Sympathy for the Record Industry. Good name. John is famous with some artists for his disinterest in paying royalties. He has a very interesting music themed folk art collection – its visible online - which includes my leather jacket. I wish he'd give it back. There are lots of indie people with a gift for organization who just kind of collect freaks and throw them up at the wall to see who sticks. You gotta watch 'em.

When you go a step down creatively from the Padrons who are actually entrepreneurs you get to the executives. You don't wanna know these guys. They usually came over from legal or accounting. They have protégés usually called A&R men to do their dirty work. You can become a favorite with them if your fame or image might reflect limelight on their career. They tend to have no personalities to speak of, which is their strength. Strangely they're never really thinking about the good of their parent company as much as old number one. Avoid them. If you’re an artist, they’ll make you sick or suicidal. The only good thing the conglomerate can do for you – and they’ve done it recently for me - is make you really, really ubiquitous. They do that well. But, when the company is your banker, then you are basically gonna be the Beverly Hill Billies. So it's best not to take their money. Especially when you’re young. These are very tough people, and they can hurt you.

So who are the good guys?! They asked me when they read this thing at BBC 6 Music. Well there are lots of them. If fact, today there are more than ever and they are just about all indies, but first I want to mention Peter Gabriel and WOMAD for everything they've done for what seems like forever to help the greatest musicians in the world, the so called world musicians to gain a foothold and make a living in the modern screwed up cash and carry world. Traditional music was never a for profit enterprise, all the best forms were developed as a kind of you’re job in the community. It was pretty good, it was “Yeah, I’m a musician, I’m gonna skip like doing the dishes or taking the trash out.” It's not surprising that all the greatest singers and players come from parts of the world where everybody is broke and the old ways are getting paved over. So it's crucial for everyone that these treasures not be lost. There are other people of means and intelligence who help others in this way like Philip Glass through Tibet House, David Burn with Luaka Bop, Damon Albarn through Honest John Records. Shout out to Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Almost all the best music is coming out on indies today like XL Matador, Burger, Anti, Epitaph, Mute, Rough Trade, 4 A D, Sub Pop, etc. etc.

But now YouTube is trying to put the squeeze on these people because it's just easier for a power nerd to negotiate with a couple big labels who own the kind of music that people listen to when they're really not that into music, which of course is most people. So they've got the numbers. But the indies kind of have the guns. I've noticed that indies are showing strength at some of the established streaming services like Spotify and Rhapsody – people are choosing that music. And it's also great that some people are starting their own outlets, like Pledge Music, Band Camp or Drip. As the commercial trade swings more into general show biz the indies will be the only place to go for new talent, outside the Mickey Mouse Club, so I think they were right to band together and sign the Fair Digital Deals Declaration.

There are just so many ways to screw an artist that it's unbelievable. In the old vinyl days they would deduct 10% "breakage fees" for records supposedly broken in shipping, whether that happened or not, and now they have unattributed digital revenue, whatever the **** that means. It means money for some guy’s triple bypass. I actually think that what Thom Yorke has done with Bit Torrent is very good. I was gonna say here: “Sure the guy is a pirate at Bit Torrent” but I was warned legally, so I’ll say: “Sure the guy a Bit Torrent is a pirate’s friend” But all pirates want to go legit, just like I wanted to be respectable. It’s normal. After a while people feel like you’re a crook, it’s too hard to do business. So it’s good in this case that Thom Yorke is encouraging a positive change. The music is good. It’s being offered at a low price direct to people who care.

I want to try to define what I am talking about when I say free. For me in the arts or in the media, there are two kinds of free. One kind of free is when the process is something that people just feel for you. You feel a sense of possibility. You feel a lack of constraint. This leads to powerful, energetic, sometimes kind of loony situations.

Vice Media is an interesting case of this because they started as a free handout, using public funds, and they had open, free-wheeling minds. Originally a free handout was called Voice and these kids were like “Just get rid of the old! I don’t wanna be Vice, yeah!” Okay. By taking an immersive approach with no particular preconceptions to their reporting, they've become a huge success, also through corporate advertising, at attracting big, big money investment hundreds of millions of dollars now pumped into Fox Media and a couple of others bigger than that in the US. And they get it because they attract lots of little boy eyeballs. So they brought us Dennis Rodman in North Korea. And it’s kind of a travesty, but it’s kind of spunky. It's interesting that capital investment, for all its posturing, never really leads, it always follows. They follow the action. So if it's money you're after, be the yourself in a consistent way and you might get it. You’ll at least end up getting what you are worth and feel better. Just follow your nose.

The second kind of freedom to me that is important in the media is the idea of giving freely. When you feel or sense that someone that someone is giving you something not out of profit, but out of self-respect, Christian charity, whatever it is. That has a very powerful energy. The Guardian, in my understanding, was founded by an endowment by a successful man with a social conscience who wanted to help create a voice for what I would call the little guy. So they have a kind of moral mission or imperative. This has given them the latitude to try to be interesting, thoughtful, helpful. And they bring Edward Snowden to the world stage. Something that is not pleasant for a lot of people to hear about, but we need to know.

These two approaches couldn't be more different. To justify their new mega bucks Vice will have to expand and expand in capital terms. Presumably they'll have to titillate a dumb, but energetic audience. Of course all capitalist expansions are subject to the big bang – balloon, bust, poof, and you’re gone. As for the Guardian I would imagine that the task involves gaining the trust and support of a more discerning, less definable reader, without spending the principal. There is usually an antipathy between cultural poles, but these two actually have a lot in common in terms of the energy and nuisance to power that they are willing to generate. I wish red and blue could come together somehow.

Sometimes I'd rather read than listen to music. One of my favourite odd books is Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry by Clinton Heylin. I bought the book in the 90's because a couple of my bootlegs were mentioned. I loved my bootlegs. They did a lot for me. I never really thought about the dough much. I liked the titles, like Suck on This, Stow Away DOA or Metalic KO. The packaging was always way more creative and edgy than most of my official stuff. So I just liked being seen and heard, like anybody else. These bootleggers were creative. Here are two quotes from the dust jacket by veteran industry stalwarts on the subject of bootlegs in 1994.

"Bootleg is the thoroughly researched and highly entertaining tale of those colorful brigands, hapless amateurs, and true believers who have done wonders for my record collection. Rock and roll doesn't get more underground than this." – that was David Fricke, the music editor of Rolling Stone "I think that bootlegs keep the flame of the music alive by keeping it out of not only the industry's conception of the artist, but also the artist's conception of the artist." – that was Lenny Kaye from the Patti Smith group, musician, critic and my friend.

Wow!! Sounds heroic and vital!

I wonder what these guys feel about all of this now, because things have changed, haven't they? We are now talking about Megaupload, Kim Dot Com, big money, political power, and varying definitions of theft that are legally way over my head. But I know a con man when I see one. I want to include a rant from an early bootlegger in this discussion because it's so passionate and I just think it's funny.

This is Lou Cohan "If anybody thinks that if I have purchased every single Rolling Stones album in existence, and I have bought all the Rolling Stones albums that have been released in England, France, Japan, Italy, and Brazil that if I have an extra $100 in my pocket instead of buying a Rolling Stones bootleg I am going to buy a John Denver album or a Sinead O'Conner album, they are retarded."

So the guy is trying to say don't try to force me. And don't steal my choice. And the people who don't want the free U2 download are trying to say, don't try to force me. And they've got a point. Part of the process when you buy something from an artist. It’s a kind of anointing, you are giving people love. It’s your choice to give or withhold. You are giving a lot of yourself, besides the money. But in this particular case, without the convention, maybe some people felt like they were robbed of that chance and they have a point. It’s not the only point. These are not bad guys. But now, everybody's a bootlegger, but not as cute, and there are people out there just stealing the stuff and saying don't try to force me to pay. And that act of thieving will become a habit and that’s bad for everything. So we are exchanging the corporate rip off for the public one. Aided by power nerds. Kind of computer Putins. They just wanna get rich and powerful. And now the biggest bands are charging insane ticket prices or giving away music before it can flop, in an effort to stay huge. And there's something in this huge thing that kind of sucks.

Which brings us to Punk. The most punk thing I ever saw in my life was Malcolm McLaren's cardboard box full of dirty old winkle pinkers. It was the first thing I saw walking in the door of Let It Rock in 1972 which was his shop at Worlds End on the Kings Road. It was a huge ugly cardboard bin full of mismatched unpolished dried out winkle pickers without laces at some crazy price like maybe five pounds each. Another 200 yards up the street was Granny Takes a Trip, where they sold proper Rockstar clothes like scarves, velvet jackets, and snake skin platform boy boots. Malcolm's obviously worthless box of shit was like a fire bomb against the status quo because it was saying that these violent shoes have the right idea and they are worth more than your fashion, which serves a false value. This is right out of the French enlightenment.

So is the thieving that big a deal? Ethically, yes, and it destroys people because it's a bad road you take. But I don't think that's the biggest problem for the music biz. I think people are just a little bit bored, and more than a little bit broke. No money. Especially simple working people who have been totally left out, screwed and abandoned. If I had to depend on what I actually get from sales I’d be tending bars between sets. I mean honestly it’s become a patronage system. There’s a lot of corps involved and I don’t fault any of them but it’s not as much fun as playing at the Music Machine in Camden Town in 1977. There is a general atmosphere of resentment, pressure, kind of strange perpetual war, dripping on all the time. And I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship's rabbit. That's how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they’ve been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

If I wanna make music, at this point in my life I'd rather do what I want, and do it for free, which I do, or cheap, if I can afford to. I can. And fund through alternative means, like a film budget, or a fashion website, both of which I've done. Those seem to be turning out better for me than the official rock n roll company albums I struggle through. Sorry. If I wanna make money, well how about selling car insurance? At least I'm honest. It's an ad and that's all it is. Every free media platform I've ever known has been a front for advertising or propaganda or both. And it always colors the content. In other words, you hear crap on the commercial radio. The licensing of music by films, corps, and TV has become a flood, because these people know they're not a hell of a lot of fun so they throw in some music that is. I'm all for that, because that's the way the door opened for me. I got heard on tv before radio would take a chance. But then I was ok. Good. And others too. I notice there are a lot of people, younger and younger, getting their exposure that way. But it's a personal choice. I think it’s an aesthetic one, not an ethical one.

Now with the Internet people can choose to hear stuff and investigate it in their own way. If they want to see me jump around the Manchester Apollo with a horse tail instead of trying to be a proper Rockstar, they can look. Good. Personally I don't worry too much about how much I get paid for any given thing, because I never expected much in the first place and the whole industry has become bloated in its expectations. Look, Howling Wolf would work for a sandwich. This whole thing started in Honky Tonk bars. It's more important to do something important or just make people feel something and then just trust in God. If you're an entertainer your God is the public. They'll take care of you somehow. I want them to hear my music any old which way. Period. There is an unseen hand that turns the pages of existence in ways no one can predict. But while you’re waiting for God to show up and try to find a good entertainment lawyer.

It's good to remember that this is a dream job, whether you're performing or working in broadcasting, or writing or the biz. So dream. Dream. Be generous, don’t be stingy. Please. I can't help but note that it always seems to be the pursuit of the money that coincides with the great art, but not its arrival. It's just kind of a death agent. It kills everything that fails to reflect its own image, so your home turns into money, your friends turn into money, and your music turns into money. No fun, binary code – zero one, zero one - no risk, no nothing. What you gotta do you gotta do, life's a hurly-burly, so I would say try hard to diversify your skills and interests. Stay away from drugs and talent judges. Get organized. Big or little, that helps a lot.

I'd like you to do better than I did. Keep your dreams out of the stinky business, or you'll go crazy, and the money won't help you. Be careful to maintain a spiritual EXIT. Don't live by this game because it's not worth dying for. Hang onto your hopes. You know what they are. They’re private. Because that's who you really are and if you can hang around long enough you should get paid. I hope it makes you happy. It's the ending that counts, and the best things in life really are free.

#iggy pop #idk if anyone posted it here already #I'm just too lazy to look up so #here it is!

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letmetellyouaboutmyfeels · 4 years

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Sometimes I can't help but think that I would absolutely love to be a part of a Pride and Prejudice remake with you at the helm of it. I wanna see what your vision for it would be.

Awww thank you darling, that fills me with delight. I admit I haven’t given a ton of thought to a remake since I love the 2005 version so much, and I feel like at this point every Austen book has gotten a worthy adaptation (the 2009 Emma, 1995 Sense & Sensibility, pick either of the Persuasions they’re both amazing, Love & Friendship was an excellent adaptation of Lady Susan...) and I feel like at this point it would just be playing it safe to redo Austen again instead of writing a whole new Regency-era romance.

However.

If someone said, “hey Mads we need you to redo P&P,” I am not going to say no, because we really, really, really need an Austen adaptation that isn’t fucking white.

Part of my problem with the 2020 Emma is that we’re doing yet another Austen adaptation, when we already have a decent one from the ‘90s, and an amazing one from 2009 as a miniseries, I mean, it was really unnecessary in my opinion. So if you’re going to insist on doing another Emma... why the FUCK did you make it all white AGAIN. We’ve SEEN white Austen heroines fall in love over and over, where the hell is my Claudia Doumit or Letitia Wright as Emma? Where’s my Oscar Isaac as Mr. Knightley? Hmmm? HMMMM?

So anyway if I was going to helm a P&P adaptation I would be casting it with people of color (John Cho would be in there but I’m torn on him as Bingley or Darcy, God, he’d be great at both, why must you be so talented sir) and I would probably choose to adapt it with a modern sensibility lens.

That is - there are a lot of things about Regency times that people simply don’t translate into modern times. There’s a lack of modern sympathy and understanding for conventions and situations of the times. I feel like a lot of people dismiss things or don’t realize the implications of something, or they want to adapt it to make it “sexier” or more “modern” without realizing that the sexy and modern is already there.

For example, a lot of people get down on Austen for the whole “Lizzie likes Darcy after seeing Pemberley” bit. They see it as Lizzie being impressed by his wealth, when what really happens is Lizzie sees that Darcy’s servants love him. It’s like if Lizzie walked into Darcy’s office building at the company he owns and asked his secretary, his coworkers, his receptionist, how he treats them. And they all said, “oh my God he’s the best boss ever, I really love working for him, he gives us paid sick days and lots of vacation time and is always understanding about mental health.”

That’s why Lizzie starts to like him. She realizes that she herself was prejudiced and proud, and that Darcy is a kind and responsible man who looks after those in his care. Austen repeatedly tells us in her work that marrying a man because he’s charming is not the way to go. You can’t survive on ‘charming’. You survive on responsibility, on respect, on common sense. Austen’s heroes are all charming in their own way, I mean, my God, “I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.” That is charming as FUCK, who the hell gave you the right, Wentworth. Henry Tilney is arguably Austen’s most traditionally charming hero, affable and friendly and witty.

But Austen was well acquainted with financial ruin and fear of homelessness and poverty, and she was also well acquainted with the fact that a woman was controlled by her husband. So picking a man who charmed you wasn’t enough. You had to pick a man (if you could) who respected you. Who listened to you. Who was compassionate and thoughtful. Lizzie, in going to Pemberley, sees that she can trust Darcy. He will take care of her and he will respect her.

That’s why she falls for him. Not because he has a big fancy house. If Lizzie was the type to be impressed with wealth she would’ve been impressed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh the way everyone else is, but she’s not, she thinks the lady’s a fucking tosser and stands up to her and doesn’t care how much money or wealth either of them have.

And frankly, I think that’s something we can still find relevant in our modern times. In our capitalist society where we are obsessed with wealth, with celebrities - not just artists or royalty but influencers, people like the Kardashians who do fucking nothing to earn praise or loyalty. They just sit around and exist while looking pretty and being rich. WTF. And people are impressed by it. People are impressed by charming boys who know how to wink and flirt and women still settle for men who yeah, sure, won’t hit you or cheat on you but also won’t do any housework or make dinner or help raise the kids.

I think that if Austen were writing P&P today, she would have Lizzie visit Darcy’s offices and see how he treats his workers. She would notice him being kind to waiters and leaving a large tip. She’d go to a party at the Bingleys and see him in the kitchen doing dishes to help clean up. She’d visit his house and assume he had a housekeeper since it’s clean and neat or that his sister does the chores only to learn that no, Darcy cleans the damn house himself, and wants Georgiana to focus on her university studies. Austen would show us a man who carries his own weight and respects those who are “under” him. A man who doesn’t take advantage of his wealth or privilege.

A lot of recent takes on Austen want to make it for a modern audience so they have ‘darker’ shit going on like cheating and sex and abuse etc. And I get it, some people want that. But there’s kind of this nose-thumbing at Austen implying she was sanitized and all that and frankly I like having a goddamn story that doesn’t include the ‘dark side’ of Regency society like I get it, it wasn’t perfect, but my God, Sanditon, could you shut the fuck up?

I want to give credit to the serious stuff that Austen already put into her story. If you’re reading her stuff thinking “oh this isn’t serious/realistic enough, I want more thrills and drama,” then first of all you’re in the wrong genre and second of all you’re not reading her stuff properly. Stop throwing in drama to make it appealing to modern audiences, guys, it’s already in there!

So yeah. I haven’t thought to myself, oh I want to redo P&P and this is how, but if I were to see any new Austen adaptation, that’s what I want to see. I want to see people of color, and I want to see the adaptation done in a way so that the audience is able to realize just how little things have changed and how similar our needs and societal rules were back then, and I want them to fucking respect Austen because she is my girl and she fucking knew what she was talking about.

EDIT, SINCE I THINK THERE’S SOME CONFUSION:

I am not talking about a modern-day adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I am talking about an adaptation set in Regency times, in that historical setting, but with a cast of color and with an awareness of modern-day audience sensibilities and the modern lens and showcasing that many of our modern-day values and issues were the same in Regency times. Or at least the same to Austen, and something Austen noticed and commented on.

For example, Wickham is a predator. He’s not just an asshole marrying women for money, he preys on younger girls. He preyed on Georgiana and then on Lydia. Part of why he stopped talking to Lizzie was she was too smart for him and would’ve figured him out. And Austen points this out in Lizzie’s horror. It’s part of why Lizzie’s so angry with her father and how she realizes her father isn’t perfect either - his apathy about Lydia led to Lydia not being raised to recognize danger signs.

There are still men like Wickham out there today. They’re the men who only date teenagers or women half their age. Wickham arguably went after Georgiana for her money but he went after Lydia for her youth, because unlike the older Lizzie, Lydia was too young to realize what Wickham was. That is still relevant to us today and is still something we’re concerned about today, and it can and should be shown through a historical lens.

We shouldn’t have to change the setting to a modern one to get people to figure out how fucking brilliant Austen was. I want it in Regency times, showcasing to a modern audience what is already in the book.

#mads answers things #well this got long #whoopsies #handlewithcharacter

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viltrumitesuperboy · 5 years

Text

From Villain to Hero (Peter Parker x Male Reader)

So. This took forever. Lack of motivation and stuff like that. Here’s a real dumb fic. Plot holes and things.

Sorry about the gif, there aren’t any good movie ones cause they all show his face. Peter’s like 17-18 in this one.

Word count: 2823

Much like your best friend Wade Wilson, you had been experimented on. As a PI, you knew how to find him, and you got a little too close. It wasn't fun and it left you both with trauma, but you bonded over your unfortunate times. He took the route of killing people and you didn't. He was kind of an antihero, and you were just trying to look out for yourself, which kind of made you one too. People normally called you the bad guy just because you were trying to survive in this capitalist society.

When you got into the whole "bad guy" business, you didn't want to hurt people and you never hurt anyone. So it was only a little bit of a shock when you had a run-in with Spider-Man.

"You could just put the money down and turn yourself in, you know?" Spider-Man suggested as he shot another web at you. "You're not directly hurting anyone, but you still affect parts of our economy."

"No can do, Spidey," you calmly replied, easily dodging the shot. "I got things to do, people to date, food to buy... and sorry about ruining our wonderful date, so you can put it under my tab. Name's (Y/N)."

You held the bag tight as you made for a quick exit. There was no signature exit because you didn't want people like Spider-Man stopping you once they realised there was a pattern. You squeezed the handle of your weapon and smashed a window. You broke the weapon in half, chucked it towards Spider-Man to distract him, and jumped out of the two-story window.

You disappeared before Spider-Man could catch you. You casually limped onto the subway car with your duffel bag, the bones in your leg definitely out of place. You could hear some of the passengers make sounds of disgust or shifting uncomfortably when you dropped into a seat to snap the bones back in place. You felt less pain, no thanks to the experiments done on you.

You went to yours and Wade's apartment. You dropped the duffel bag, then yourself through the window.

"Hey, kid. What's this?" he asked, going right past you for the duffel bag.

"Hey, I'm a legal adult. And this is our rent, food, and other expenses covered for 2 months," you replied, flipping onto your back and panting from having to climb up. "One and a half if you keep treating Spidey to food when you hang out."

"Whatever. Don't you have that other thing? You sell your bones so people can make weapons and shit?" Wade asked, inspecting the money.

"They're valuable. Not everyone's going to want to pay thousands or close to a million for a single adamantium bone," you explained. "Lower quantity means higher demand. Higher demand means higher price."

"You sound like a fucking capitalist."

"Only way to live in this world, Wade."

He nodded in agreement and tossed the bag into the corner, then grabbed your forearms to help you up.

"Someone called earlier about your PI shit. It's some HR dude who wants to make sure their interviewers aren't criminals. You know, the usual," Wade informed you. "Gave him your email."

You thanked him and grabbed your phone to check the email. You started making food for yourself and waved goodbye at him as he left to find Spider-Man.

The first time you had a civilised conversation with Spider-Man, he called Deadpool and you sat there, tied with his webs, containing your laughter. Of course Wade never mentioned you.

"Spidey, how're the wife and kids?" you asked him, raising an eyebrow.

"Okay, first of all, bold of you to assume I have a wife. Or kids. Or like girls. Second, how are yours and Deadpool's masks so expressive?"

"The eyes. Same eyes I use to look for you just to commit a crime. I also use them to check you out. You have a nice ass."

In an attempt to cover it, he quickly turned his entire body to face you. It took him a moment to recover and he spoke again, sounding flustered.

"Okay, no, stop."

"Aw, c'mon, Spidey. I thought we had something going. I mean we've had like over 10 dates already."

"That's because you committed a crime!"

"Like you've never stolen before. Also, you didn't say they weren't dates."

"They're not. And if you say your heart, I'll drop-kick you right here."

"Hey, Webs. How's- oh," Wade said as he paused once he reached the roof of the building you both were on.

"Deadpool! I got the bad guy, the villain I was telling you about, he has those adamantium weapons. And I was thinking that he was the one buying the weapons online. I found a website and stuff, I'm sure I sent it to you," Spider-Man ranted.

"Spidey-Boy. This is the friend I was telling you about."

Spider-Man stopped and stared at Wade.

"My best friend who is absolutely wonderful, definitely around your age, and has an adamantium skeleton. So Wolverine but he likes me better. He gets money from selling his bones and looks out only for himself and people he cares about. He's like my little brother. And bonus: he doesn't kill."

You offered him an apologetic shrug as Spider-Man seemed to glare at you from behind his mask. After a few silent moments, he hopped off the roof and swung away.

"That could have gone better," you mumbled, breaking the webs with a quick pull.

"Let's get you home."

Over the course of a few months, you started making money off the adamantium once you dropped the price a bit. Turns out you didn't really need to. A certain "Howard Potts" was buying most of them. You knew it was Tony Stark, and you'd probably give it to him for free if he asked (you looked up to him a lot), but you didn't mind the money. Maybe you'd tell him someday.

You only ever suited up to bother Spider-Man. If Wade helped him out, you stood to the side and yelled and jeered at the "bad guys." Wade didn't really care. Spider-Man would always scold you afterwards, but you always had a reply.

"You can't just stand to the side and do nothing!"

"I can do whatever I want. And I can totally ask you out on another date."

"We haven't even been on one."

"That's not what you said last time!"

"Shut up!"

"Not hearing a no."

And you weren't sure if he was getting more flustered or more used to your comments.

"I've been thinking about why you reject me. You dating someone?"

"No.”

"Okay, so why not try out a date with me?"

"Because you're still a vigilante. Bye, Mr. Criminal!"

He took the last bite of the food you were both eating before packing it up and standing to leave.

"Oh, come on. 15th date and you won't even give me a kiss?"

His cheeks began to turn red, and he quickly yanked his mask down. You snickered as he swung away with the plastic bag of food following his movements.

When there was a bigger threat in the city that had to include the Avengers, you finally decided to jump in. You ended up bringing two weapons and wielding them like Deadpool would his katanas. You called and told him the intersection closest to you, and he was there in minutes.

"Okay, so what are this guy's weaknesses?" you asked Spider-Man.

Iron Man tossed you an earpiece which you caught and put it your ear, listening to the others.

"As far as we know, no weaknesses," Black Widow said. "He's just really strong and really good with weapons."

"Hey, you know the story of the Greek warrior Achilles? We got an Achilles' tendon for a reason. I mean, this guy doesn't really need it anyway," you scoffed.

"Kid, shut up," Iron Man said. "You got a name?"

"I would say Crossbones but that's taken. Call me uh... Bone... Breaker?

"Cause he has adamantium bones!" Deadpool suddenly shouted into your ear.

"We know," three voices said.

You ran and jumped on a slab of cement the dude was trying to pick up, stabbing your weapons in to keep it in the ground.

"Buddy, you need a therapist if your problems are that bad."

His already angered expression seemed to get a little angrier and he swung a lamppost at you. You grabbed your weapons back as you jumped clean over it.

"Ooh, are we playing helicopter?" you gasped.

Spider-Man had joined as well to attempt to web the guy down, jumping over the pole as it swung towards him.

"This isn't very family friendly," Spider-Man quipped as he webbed the guy's arms to his body and his legs together. "That won't stop him for very long."

After a brief moment of his struggling, he broke free, and the other avengers stepped in to try and keep him down.

"Get somewhere safe! Bone-whatever, try and get something made of adamantium to keep him down. He's not strong enough to break through."

It all happened in slow motion. From the corner of your eye, you watched Hulk running towards you to fight the guy in front of you at the same time the man pulled one of those (really cool) martial arts moves and leaned onto his arms behind his head and kicked his legs. Not onto the ground, but into your chest to send you flying really high up so you had no idea where you were. There were fucking clouds up here, Jesus Christ. How strong was this guy?

At the angle he kicked you, you were moving in a parabolic direction. Once you hit the highest you could go, you looked down and knew that you wouldn't survive this fall. Everyone else was occupied and didn't know where you were, so there was no one to save you. As you neared the ground, you saw that you would land in a park where there weren't too many people. A miracle, you supposed. Some of them looked up and they started to scramble and run away. Thank god for cloudy days.

The last moments of your life was an attempt to move your weapons so they wouldn't kill you first. That would kind of suck. So they were attached to your legs with the few moments you had left. You closed your eyes and felt yourself get closer to the ground. A brief flash of pain through your entire body, then you felt nothing.

Deadpool, thank FUCK, had supplied weapons. How they were going to stop the dude without Bone Breaker, they didn't really know. But Spider-Man had the wonderful idea of making a net with the (somehow they were rods) adamantium and connecting them with nitinol. Deadpool suggested killing the dude to avoid the trouble, and everyone gave him disapproving looks.

"Wait, Bone Breaker!" Spider-Man exclaimed.

He ran and began to swing uptown, Deadpool following after. He felt something under his arms carrying him, looking up to see Iron Man.

"Mr. Stark, do you think he's okay?" he frantically sputtered out.

"I don't know, kid. That was a hell of a fall."

Deadpool was shouting after them, doing his best to keep up. He fell behind eventually, but Peter knew he would get there quickly.

An entire park that was about 4 blocks long on each side was pretty much gone. Towards one end was the hero's body.

"Oh god, Mr. Stark. Please don't tell me he's..."

"Go check on him, I'll be right here to call for help."

Peter was let down and he sprinted towards the figure he could barely make out. Tears marred his vision and he dropped to his knees next to you. He pulled off your mask, almost breaking down when he saw your bruised face and bleeding skull.

"(Y/N). Please be okay," he blubbered. "You can't- you can't leave me, please. You're one of my only friends, please be okay."

There was no answer and he slowly lifted you under your back and your knees to lay flat on the ground. Your eyes remained closed and your chest unmoving.

"(Y/N), please. We're getting help, come on. You're gonna be okay," Peter gasped out, pulling his mask off as he hunched over you. "You have bones made out of some of the strongest stuff known to humans, how would you not survive that?"

Peter was sobbing at this point, but he heard the sound of people shouting to get back and a vehicle come up close to them. He saw "Stark Industries" printed on the side. At least his identity wouldn't be revealed through his recklessness. But desperate recklessness. He pulled the mask back on and picked your body up, carrying you into the van and placing you down.

"I don't really have ambulances so this is the best I could do," Tony said quietly. "We'll do our best to help him, Peter. I'm-"

"Wait!"

Deadpool barreled straight into the back of the van and shut the doors, motioning for the driver, Black Widow herself, to go. She rolled her eyes but obliged.

"He'll be fine. Just give him a few minutes," Deadpool panted. "Jesus, you guys need to let me come with. I was gonna say that his healing powers are amazing, could even rival mine. Trust me."

Peter yanked his mask off once more and stared into the white eyes of Deadpool's mask.

"How- How good? Like, come back to life good?" he almost whispered.

"Well his bones aren't made of the same material as mine and if he breaks them, he just pushes them back into place — really gross by the way — and then it heals in minutes. I don't think his heart has stopped before but I think if he's anything like me, he'll be okay."

Peter grabbed Deadpool around the waist and hugged him, trapping his arms and all. Tony sighed.

"Okay, no hugging the murderer. If he's right, the most we can do is make (Y/N) comfortable."

A quick drive to the Avengers Tower and a medical room later, Peter could literally hear your bones moving. Honestly it was probably going to be one of the grossest things he's heard in his life an hour from now, but it was the most beautiful sound because he knew you were healing. He occasionally lifted your back to make sure your spine was aligned, and he would push something into place if it wasn't. The doctors didn't stop him, even encouraged it because they knew Spider-Man would have the strength to do this thing.

It felt like hours, but he looked up at the clock and it was only a few minutes. Like, 10 since you were found and placed in this room. That short.

Minutes after, you thought you were physically feeling your entire body turning back on as your brain repaired itself. Your body involuntarily jolted up and your eyes snapped open.

"That felt like I just did heroin and then it wore off and then had whiskey. And I've never had either of those."

Someone suddenly hugged you from the side, and you looked to see Spider-Man.

"Did I die and go to Heaven?"

"No, you died and came right back," Spider-Man sniffled, pulling his arms away.

"Were you... crying?" you asked cautiously.

"I didn't realise that you weren't actually dead but then Deadpool told us that you heal like he does. And that whole thing made me rethink my entire life like 'that criminal (Y/N) seems to like me and he died and I kind of like him so maybe we should date when he’s alive again' kind of thing," Spider-Man said all at once.

"I'm on a hospital bed and I feel like my brain is mush," you complained. "When I'm better we'll talk more."

He pulled his mask off and put his hand holding his mask over yours with a small smile.

“I’m Peter Parker. And I’d like to ask you on a date after you feel better,” Peter said.

You reached to take yours off and noticed there was nothing there.

“They said you should be comfortable so I told them to leave and took your mask off,” Peter continued. “I’ve been setting your bones into place and whatever.”

“Isn’t that like... really gross to you though?” you grimaced.

“Not as long as I know I’m helping you. Go to sleep and then we’ll talk later.”

He slowly pushed you back down to lay on the bed and kissed your forehead. You felt your face heat up just as his began to turn a bit red, and you managed a small laugh before allowing yourself to shut your eyes.

#male reader #peter parker x male reader #peter parker x male!reader #peter parker x reader #peter parker imagine #peter parker #x male reader #male reader insert

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urrone · 4 years

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memememe

Tagged by @swaps55

Tagging . . . . people. @tonysstark @existenceisthis @stumblingoverchaos and anyone else who wants to do it!

Nicknames: my parents call me bird, my favorite coworkers ever called me animal, my current coworkers sometimes call me mama bear but not EVERY time, and I guess you could call Merrin a nickname

Zodiac: Leeeeeeeo baby

Height: 5′10″

Hogwarts house: I have sorted into both the noble house of Slytherin and Ravenclaw. Given the option I generally choose Ravenclaw, but normally refer to myself as a Slytherclaw.

Last thing I googled: I got up out of bed to fill this out right now because I shit you not the last thing I googled was “can a chimpanzee and a human reproduce” only to find out THAT THERE WERE FUCKING EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED BY THE RUSSIONS IN THE 1920S TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THIS VERY QUESTION. (So far the answer seems to be no.)

Song stuck in my head: I don’t have one right now, but the last one was Into the Unknown thanks to my niece.

Amount of sleep: Anywhere from 4 to 6. Maybe one night a week I’ll get 7 or 8, but that’s really rare.

Lucky numbers: 2

Dream job: I don’t have one, I’m not wired that way. I’ve honestly never given a shit who gives me money, as long as my bills are covered. I don’t have some work thing I’m super passionate about. I hate questions about work. The quickest way to make me despise a thing is to start paying me to do it. I’m not saying I hate my job or anything, but I’m there to get paid, not to fulfill some lifelong passion. Questions like this are a symptom of a capitalist society and I am not here for it.

Wearing: A sleeveless cotton dress with Indian style elephants on it.

Favorite instrument: I love listening to bagpipes (could I BE more of a cliche? no.) but I love playing handbells.

Aesthetic: I honestly don’t know. I feel like in person friends could answer this question better than I can. The best way I can describe myself is by saying I love clutter.

Favorite song: It changes as I hear new music, but right now it’s Saturn by Sleeping at Last and has been for a few years.

youtube

Favorite author: Sharon Shinn, Tolkien, NK Jemisin

Favorite animal: elephant (if I’m allowed to go fantasy though it’s 100% unicorns.)

Favorite animal sound: elephant trumpets, cats purring

Random: I only started playing D&D when I moved to Austin 7 years ago, actually it was a little after, about 6 years ago. And I made a decision shortly into the campaign that not only changed the entire campaign but also set up the next campaign. (Cutting because this got hella long.)

See, my group was stuck in a dungeon in the middle of a Forgotten Realms desert. My DM has his own little world that he’s set up with different zones and different rules. He specifically wanted a Forgotten Realms desert so it would have wild magic surges, our wizard was almost useless. Our rogue had moved to Michigan a few months prior and I had taken a level of rogue just to be useful in checking for traps. The rest of my levels were all in ranger. (Also, for reference, this was 4.5 edition.)

There was a vampire in this dungeon, because of course. He couldn’t escape because of the desert and the lack of cover from the sun, so he’d been stuck there for hundreds of years. He took control of our wizard at once point and we almost had a TPK when he made her cast fireball and a wild magic surge made it like 10 times more powerful than it should have been.

After this encounter (we all survived, somehow), I walked very confidently down the hallway after rolling a 1 to check for traps. Friends, there was a trap. It was your traditional pit with spikes at the bottom. One of my traveling companions, maybe the cleric, cast feather fall on me so I didn’t get impaled. And then we got into the period where the dice gods made up for the one by giving me the four best rolls of my goddamn life.

1. A teeming horde of rats was approaching through these tunnels that opened in the sides of the pit. I couldn’t get back out of the pit quickly before the rats would be on me. I asked my DM if I could somersault into one of the tunnels to at least have a defensible position, and rolls a nat 20 on acrobatics to do so. I slid seamlessly into a tunnel about halfway up the pit.

2. As a ranger, I had a lightning longbow and lightning arrows. (This DM has always been REALLY generous with the loot, we were still relatively low level at this point.) As the rats approached, I rolled really well (broke 20 but not nat, I think it was a 19?) on plugging up the hole at my feet with a rat corpse that I made swell by stabbing it with a lightning arrow.

3. To plug up the hole at my head, I pulled out the dagger I’d looted off a corpse earlier in the dungeon, waited for a rat to come slithering by the mouth of my little tunnel, and rolled another nat 20 to stab through it and pull it back toward me to plug the hole at my head.

So now I’m lying here in this tunnel, not a ton of room around me, with dead rat corpses on either end and live rats chewing on the corpses to get at me. And that’s when the vampire appears.

I honestly can’t remember why he appeared, or how our conversation started. What I do remember is that I told him the virtues of letting us traverse the rest of the dungeon unmolested by him, and that if he would just hide himself in my bag of holding (as he was not alive, I confirmed with my DM, the 10 minute rule of staying alive in a bag of holding would not apply to him) I would deliver him to a shady wooded area where he wouldn’t immediately be burned to a crisp upon exiting my bag.

4. My DM asked me to roll a charisma check. Now, I’m sure you know that as a ranger, charisma isn’t ever gonna be one of your highest stats. When you spend a lot of time in the woods and shooting at things from a long distance, it doesn’t really matter if you can make friends or scare people while you do it. I think my charisma modifier was 0 at the time. So I rolled. And friends. It was my third nat 20 of the night. Not only did that vampire happily mist his way into my bag of holding, I didn’t have to give up anything to get him to do it. My friends rescued me from the rats and we made our way out of the dungeon.

Now, what happened with the vampire is an entirely different story, which I will tell if someone wants to know but not tonight because this is already long enough.

#memememememe #about me #17 random things

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canchewread · 3 years

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Author’s note: well, my week has sucked, how about yours?

Right, no rest for the wicked then. So as I mentioned at the tail end of last month, I’m working on a new kind of Recommended Reading blog feature here on Can’t You Read.

The tl;dr is these posts are designed to combine a sharable info graphic (or meme, if you must) with some short burst analysis and an important link to a related and often overlooked story by someone else. Ideally, all of this fits into an 800 or 1,000 word package that actually gives you enough time in your undoubtedly busy day to read the article I’m linking to.

Got it? Good, let’s get cracking.

American Fascism and Networks of Power

Well my friends, the last nauseating funeral gasp of the Trump era is almost over. With the recent news that (soon-to-be) former swine emperor Trump’s own Department of Justice can find no evidence of widespread election fraud, we all appear to be getting collectively closer to the final resolution of the Klepto Kaiser’s “chicken coup” and perhaps, the waning of his political influence even on the reactionary right.

Good riddance to bad rubbish I suppose, but as I’ve repeatedly tried to explain to virtually anyone who would listen, the end of Trump is most certainly not the end of fascism in the larger Pig Empire, or even just American fascism. The reasons for this are of course myriad but a short list might look something like this:

the pre-existing and increasingly normalized strain of ideological white nationalism in our society and ingrained into non-elected portions of the state (think police, ICE, and Trump’s complete transformation of the American judiciary; similar processes are also occurring in places like India, and Brazil of course.)

A weakened incoming, center-right administration (and its “liberal” establishment lackeys) that not only lacks the courage to purge fascists from public service but also attempts to weaponize far right violence against the American left, and regards antifascist street action as being akin to terrorism or crime.

the indefinite survival of an objectively fascist opposition party that probably has a better than even chance of retaining control of the U.S. Senate.

the existence of multiple right wing, mainstream media outlets and personalities that propagate fascist ideology, which are in turn buttressed by a seemingly endless wave of Astroturfed online media and internet psyops funded and controlled by fascist, or at least hyper-capitalist to the point of being reactionary, billionaires and their lobby networks.

the continued existence of violent, reactionary street gangs, far right neo-fascist militias, fascist conspiracy cults, and of course, roughly seventy-four million people who just gleefully voted for an open fascist and in some cases, continue to agitate for what would effectively be a coup.

the need for elite capital to defend itself against social upheaval and acquire soon-to-be scare resources in the face of evidence that capitalism is simply not compatible with avoiding the impending climate apocalypse our current political and economic course is actively ensuring will come to pass.

Naturally, I could have also mentioned the ongoing political, social and economic fallout from the still-raging coronavirus crisis, but I saved that for last because I want to unpack the ways we know many of the above forces function together in action - and as luck would have it, the Covid-19 anti-lockdown protests provide an extremely clear and documented example of what might otherwise look a little bit like a conspiracy theory.

Now as you may well be aware, a concerted and sustained disinformation campaign conducted by not only President Trump, but the larger Republican Party and right wing media has successfully weaponized the response to the coronavirus as a culture war issue in America; and that conflict is rapidly spreading across the entire Pig Empire.

This in turn was combined with a purely Astroturf protest movement, and judicious application of billionaire reactionary funding to literal white nationalist and fascist militias, to churn out thousands of cultists, chuds and other members of the reactionary “Volk” who demanded the economy be “re-opened” no matter how many elderly, marginalized or otherwise compromised people it might kill. Which as we’ve learned the month’s since, is quite a lot.

While each of these groups would vehemently deny it, it’s quite obvious that the billionaires and their media, are working with reactionary politicians in the Republican Party to marshal an aggressive, potentially violent protest movement against their political enemies and policies that threaten their profits. The rich guys get to keep raking in the cash, the politicians (who work for the rich guys anyway) get power and support from the chuds, and the Volk get to disguise a backlash against equality, decolonization and social advances as a battle against tyranny. All of which is wrapped up in a neat little bow under the auspices of covert white supremacy, in a situation that looks a little bit like eugenics, and bears all the hallmarks of historically racist (and obviously, false) attitudes in America about the genetic and more importantly *hygienic* superiority of whites over non-whites.

Of course and as I mentioned above, all of this might sound like a conspiracy theory, but if you’ve been clicking on the links as we go along you know that it’s all true; unfortunately, a bipartisan billionaire-owned media interest in protecting the power and influence of elite capital in the Pig Empire, by and large prevents the mainstream media from presenting all of this information in its proper context. To counter that problem, let’s turn to investigative journalist Alex Kotch, an anti-corruption muckraker of considerable ability and someone who exists at least partially (but not entirely) outside the corporate media sphere.

On October 21st, 2020, Kotch and the Center for Media and Democracy published an extraordinary story that laid bare the inner workings of American fascism (and its capitalist roots) - we’re talking about exposing the direct financial connections between billionaire propaganda networks, fascist chud militias, right wing think tanks, GOP politicians and Astroturfed anti-lockdown protests; dark money meets dirty deeds done dirt cheap in a fake uprising that ends in obstructive lawsuits, partisan impeachment recommendations and a plot to kidnap and maybe even execute the governor of Michigan for... saving lives, apparently.

This is what the fascist alliance of elite capital (DeVos Family, Koch Network,) political power and street violence looks like in direct application; this is why I’m certain American fascism will outlast Trump’s fall - it’s all there in black and white.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone noticed it at the time because the election consumed all of the oxygen in the room; as anything involving Trump is want to do. Let’s not make that mistake again - to check out Kotch’s incredible story, click on the title header below:

GOP Politicians and Conservative Groups Set the Stage for Attempted Kidnapping of Michigan Governor by Alex Kotch

-nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

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gibsonmusicart · 4 years

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Thoughts For the Aspiring Musician

by Christopher Knab

I have been watching, studying, and analyzing why some musicians ‘make it’ and others don’t for a long time, and I have given up trying to come up with some magic formula that every up and coming musician can follow on some imaginary road to success. It doesn’t work out that way. Today more than ever there are countless advisors like myself who offer tips to developing acts and ‘struggling musicians’, and all too often we try to inflict some ‘step by step’ process on musicians that will help them become tomorrow’s superstar. In fact, I think as Americans in general, we are addicted to self-help books and formulas for success. What is missing in our day-to-day lives that demands such lofty goals from us? Is there a difference between the attitude of successful, well known acts and the attitude of upcoming acts? Why do some musicians make it big, while other equally talented people songwriters and musicians never get their music heard by the masses? What specific skills and/or inherent talents do the successful artists embody that so many ‘wannabees’ do not? Is it charisma? That special something that many artists seem to exude the minute they walk into a room? I think that is part of it, but many successful acts have as much charisma as a pitcher of milk, and yet do quite well for themselves. How about a lot of money? Yeah that seems to be the one sure thing behind every star. There are always major labels with deep pockets who know how to spend the money to push their acts into the hearts and minds of the public, right?…well lets talk about that for a moment. Money can only push something out to the public for their acceptance or rejection…that’s all it can do. Nobody reaches into their wallets and purses and spends their hard earned money on anything….unless there is some real value in what is being offered to them. Think about it. Today there is a lot of what some observers call ‘shallow and immature’ lyrics and disposable pop music out there on the charts….and yet, no one who bought that music would cop to that criticism. The people who buy the latest sounds on the pop charts bought that music because it gave them some kind of pleasure. It meant something to them. I think we should look at what sells and what is successful from this standpoint; music fulfills the needs, wants, and desires of any group of fans because they identify with it. And they like a song because they can hum it in the shower. The ONE thing that all successful acts have in common when they cross over to mass appeal is great songs! This is true as well for the more edgy artists who seem to eek out a living from smaller fanbases, they still write compelling songs that touch the hearts and minds of their fans. Whether or not you personally ‘like’ hit songs or not has nothing to do with it. Enough somebodys coughed up $15 each to prove your tastes are not always the most accurate barometer for what other people may enjoy. What other thing is it that successful artists and bands have that separates them from those who struggle. My answer is business savvy. Yup…that’s it. Somebody somewhere in every successful acts history had enough business savvy people behind them to make them the stars that they are or were. NOW….listen up! It isn’t as simple as you think. Historically that business savvy may have been solely the talents and skills of a weasel-like manager, or record label executive. It may have been the unscrupulous business practices of shady lawyers and booking agents, as well as greedy club owners, or money hungry publishers. My point is that no matter what the behavior of a particular music business gatekeeper may have been…they got a certain part of the job done…they broke on through to the other side of the competition, and got their act’s song into the ears of the thousands of music fans. And to do that, I can assure you they had a plan. There are no short cuts to success, and there just isn’t enough room at the top for everyone who makes music to make a living from their music. But there is a balance that can be obtained in ones life. With the tools available on the Internet, and the technology of downloadable music now an every day reality, no musician who writes great songs should have that much problem realizing modest successes with their music. Be careful of the "10 Steps To Musical Success" and the " What every A&R Rep Is Looking For" articles and books. I have written some articles with such titles, only because they are my way of getting the attention of an ever growing group of music star ‘wannabees’. Once I get their attention, I try to give them proven tactics and strategy tips that are time-tested ways that record labels and industry professionals work. In reality, there are no 10 steps to anything! There is the conscious involvement, and commitment to your music and the business of music. That, and relentless dedication to the art of making music. Remember that the world of commercial music is a world of dollars and cents, whether you like it or not. But that does not mean that Art and Commerce cannot walk hand in hand…they must do that. I teach a history of popular music course, and it never ceases to amaze me how often history repeats itself when it comes to the question of artistic achievement and music business savvy. Most ‘artists’ in the truest sense of the world are narrowly focused people who never take no for an answer. No matter what challenge comes their way, they have no recourse but to turn to their creative side and get lost in their music as a way of staying alive, in the truest sense of the term. Then, along comes a business person who either is or is not ethical, but knows the music business inside out, and hears the magic in their music, and does what it takes to get that music heard. More and more as the decades unravel however, those people are becoming the artists themselves. We live in a capitalist, consumer driven society. The successful musicians of tomorrow will be those people who either attract dedicated, knowledgeable business men and women to do the marketing and promotion for them, or take that responsibility on themselves and realize that no artist has to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of their music to make some money with their music. Being a musician/business person means you have to be able to write and perform great songs, and then produce them with a contemporary sound, AND you have to take the time to read Billboard and other music business trades and tipsheets, AND also find time to call club bookers (over and over), read bad and good music reviews, stay in touch with your fans on a regular basis, AND still put on a great show when you're exhausted or sick. Do you know what being a professional musician is really all about?…entertaining people. Entertaining the public as a life commitment involves getting yourself into a deep sense of personal commitment to your art. It seems to me that artists who are able to that have come to grips with the notion that success is more an internal experience, and not necessarily one that will be satisfied by a money-hungry music industry that defines success only in dollars and cents calculations. Looking at the work habits of most big stars, I think they all have an ‘Entertainer’ inside them. That's what allows them to succeed in all areas of the business. That is what keeps them going during the fifth press interview of the day, and all the other crap that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with the business of music marketing. When an upcoming artist finally ‘makes it’, the pressure to keep producing sellable music is huge. So the ‘artist’ has to be healthy and ready to create on demand. You may be asked to hit the road for nine straight months, then make a world-class album immediately following the grueling tour. What it all boils down to is that stars have to be on top of their game, both artistically and business-wise. It is essential to create a balance between music and business early on. First make sure your psyche is in the right place. You know, screw your head on right! Be honest with yourself regarding what things you are and aren't willing to do to be successful with your music. Then, make a plan. Map out how you will improve your skills in both business and art. Put it on paper. Try living the 50% business - 50% music rule. Make sure you honor your business commitments and always act professionally. Make sure you keep your artist side healthy and creative. Take days off, take walks in nature, take time to noodle around that song idea that just popped into your head. Such activities will help keep the artist inside you healthy and able to nourish your creative juices. Being a famous musician is not a "normal" life. To survive and thrive requires a special set of skills. The good news is those skills can be learned and developed. Every bit you learn now will benefit your career plan down the road. Believe in yourself, and never stop improving. Your hard work will pay off, if not at the cash register, at least with a sense of personal satisfaction for having done the best work creatively and business-wise, that you could.

Source: Music-Articles.com

#music career tips #music industry articles #music career advice #music career articles #music business articles #unsigned musicians #unsigned artists #unsigned bands

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meditationsfromthethirdrail · 4 years

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Polarization

There is a widespread perception that the U.S. has become as polarized, politically, as it has ever been. A careful consideration of America history suggests that’s not actually true, but I understand the sentiment and I often feel it myself. Being retired provides me with an inordinate amount of time to ponder this problem and to try to make sense of it. It’s become something of an obsession.

I like to mix it up a bit in social media - primarily Facebook - with persons opining on various social ills and political agendas and especially those blindly sharing fact-challenged propaganda, both from the left and right. I’ve stayed away from Twitter, which by design strictly prohibits posts from being long enough to contain meaningful reasoning. I like to save Instagram for pretty photos of flowers and birds and vacations. But Facebook seems a reasonable forum with enough content flexibility to present ideas with some depth to them. Social problems are inherently complex and nuanced, as evidenced by the fact that most of those problems have persisted, in one form or another, throughout human history. Individually and collectively we often find ourselves in situations where there is no perfect, right answer or solution - certainly not one that can be summarized in a tweet.

Our response to dealing with COVID-19 is a good example. There are enormous difficulties, economic and otherwise, with isolating ourselves from one another, and another set of bad outcomes resulting from not doing that. The tendency, it seems, judging by most of the dialogue we see in social media (and most other media) posts and comments, is for people to take ideological positions, cherry-pick supporting facts (or worse, supporting falsehoods), and promote extreme positions. By “extreme” I mean positions that ignore the truths that are quite often inherent in opposing positions. Again using the debate over proper responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, most people who originate or share political posts on Facebook seem either to be solidly of the opinion that isolation, shut-downs, masks, etc. are good policy, or they’re of the view that all those measures are counterproductive or even unAmerican.

Most people instinctively understand that neither of those views is exclusively correct, but people who are in the middle tend not to weigh in as often, perhaps because their confusion about the solution makes them feel that they don’t have anything meaningful to say. I think those voices should be heard much more often than they are. I feel like I have one of those voices, and that’s why I feel a responsibility to try to make myself heard.

Following is my approach to analyzing sociopolitical issues - that is, issues that can be addressed, at least in part, through government action or some other form of collective action by citizens working towards a common goal. First, I try to understand whether and how the issue can or should be addressed by the government. That question is itself a polarizing one. Conservative ideology contains mistrust of government, especially Federal government, whereas liberal ideology contains high expectations that the government should intervene to address most social ills. Neither of those views is inherently correct. One of the the biggest challenges politicians face, when they’re focused on “doing the right thing” and not just getting elected, is deciding what the best role of government ought to be in tackling specific issues. It should be obvious that the government is not the right institution to deal with some issues (the establishment of religion, for example) but it is the right institution to deal with some other issues (the defense of the nation against an outside military force, for example).

When I attempt to discern the proper role of the government, I avoid starting with the ideological answer. Instead I try to look at it pragmatically. Why is (or is not) the government equipped to deal with the particular issue in question? Can government be effective? Can government be efficient? How will government fund its involvement? What other institutions can or should be involved? What’s the ultimate cost to society, economically and otherwise, to having the government more or less involved? The calculus involved to answer these questions is exceedingly complex; nevertheless that’s what politicians ought to spend their time debating, and their debate should always begin with a careful gathering and consideration of relevant facts, dismissing ideology in favor of rationality and consultation with experts to the fullest extent possible.

One time when I still had an active professional career, I was in Utah to give a presentation to the board of directors of a financial institution. One of the directors was a former U.S. senator from the state, and I happened to be seated next to him when the board convened for lunch. When he learned I resided in Pennsylvania, he asked me what I thought about the reelection chances for a well-known senator from my state who had recently switched his party affiliation. That led to a discussion about certain economic policies, during which the senator delivered the low-tax mantra familiar to anyone who has ever listened to a Republican politician for more than a few minutes. My response to him was that I had never understood why the White House, Congress and the Senate didn’t decide about the appropriate level of income taxes by first deciding a) how much does it cost the government to do the things that everyone agrees it needs to do, and b) what else is the government better equipped to do than is any other institution or group of individuals or companies, and how much does that cost? The answers to those questions, I opined, would inform the government about how much revenue it needs to raise. Cart before horse, as it were. I thought the senator would have a ready answer but he seemed not to have ever thought about it that way. Probably, I surmised, because he was more of an ideologue than a pragmatist. Reducing taxes is Republican dogma if anything is.

Let’s return to the issue of the proper size and scope of government, which is a major bone of contention between conservatives and liberals. I can think of numerous Republican friends whose belief that big government is wasteful, inefficient and disrespectful of individual liberty is perhaps the main driving force (among the forces that involve reason and not just culture, tradition and emotion) behind their party affiliation. A strong preference for low taxes is a closely correlated issue. I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone distrusts the government about some things if not many things. Liberals also believe that big government is a problem, just in different ways - for example, too much spending on the military. That’s a whole other issue in its own right and I don’t want to veer into a tangent here, but the point is that everyone wants limited government, and our Constitution is clearly designed to handcuff government overreach. Where should the lines be drawn, to the extent they aren’t clearly spelled out in the Constitution, as potentially amended?

First I want to say to my liberal friends, it is true that the government is often wasteful and inefficient, and not just in the area of military spending. Who hasn’t complained about long lines or call waiting times at government agencies? Who hasn’t been affected by some kind of government error or bureaucratic hassle? Who hasn’t heard tales of certain government employees and contractors being underworked and (seemingly) overpaid? When my father died and my mother required constant care because she was disabled by Alzheimer’s disease, I spent many, many hours dealing with the Veterans Administration to obtain certain benefits for her, so I know first-hand what a nightmare that can be. Because we experience these things, it’s easy for us to conclude that government is bad, or at best a necessary evil.

But I ask my conservative friends who are particularly inclined to seize on the flaws of government as a reason to dislike government generally, are the alternatives to government necessarily better? Many conservatives and libertarians contend that government ought to be run like a business. Indeed, I used to be a big proponent of that theory. Certainly if government were run like a business, it would be more likely to cut dead weight and strive for cost-effective delivery of services, because that’s how it would survive, fiscally. At some point in mid-life, I heard someone whom I respected say flatly that the role of government is not that of a business. I thought about that and realized my friend was correct.

A business operates not just to provide goods and services to its customers, but foremost to earn money for its owners and managers. That’s the basis of capitalist ideology (more about that in a later blog). The government operates (or should operate) in the interests of its citizens - all of them, or as many as possible. There is no profit motive. If social security, for example, were run as a business, the inevitable result would be that a relatively small group of people would take a sizeable chunk of our FICA taxes for themselves, and everyone else would either receive lower payments or they would pay higher taxes for the same benefits. That’s basically what insurance companies that sell annuities do - they take their cut first. I’m not being critical of insurance companies - annuities have a proper role in the personal finances of many people. But annuities are not affordable for many. The fact that our health care system is operated for profit to a much greater degree than are the health care systems of substantially all other developed nations is a primary reason why U.S. per capita health care costs are so much higher than those of substantially all other developed nations - about double the average, in fact. Again, health care is another polarizing issue, and properly the subject of a separate discussion.

Briefly, another example: let’s say a private enterprise, such as a mining company, turns an area of land into a toxic waste dump affecting water and air quality in the area. One necessary role of government, I would argue, is to prevent that from happening, but it does happen, primarily because of corruption, even if the corruption isn’t always obvious. There is usually no profit motive for anyone to clean up the toxic land and quite often the offending enterprise has conveniently gone out of business. So either the government steps in to repair the damage or we live with the negative consequences.

My point here is that although government has certain flaws, it’s the only prominent, powerful institution that’s designed to provide for the welfare of the people as a whole rather than just those who will profit from running it. Corruption (again, a separate subject for another discussion) is the rot inside government that facilitates the generation of profit for a few at the expense of everyone else, and that’s why it’s extremely important that corruption be rooted out at every possible turn. In a democracy, the act of voting for candidates who demonstrate disdain rather than tolerance for corruption is a critical function of voters. Beyond that, as I said before, we should task our politicians to debate the circumstances and conditions under which government is the best source to provide services to citizens that private enterprise will not or can not. Based on the consensus our elected officials reach, we should be prepared to pay taxes to fund what has been deemed necessary or healthy for the citizenry as a whole.

I believe in having as small and unobtrusive of a government as we can, so I guess that makes me a conservative. I also believe in having a government that provides necessary and appropriate services for the benefit of all citizens, to the extent possible, which I suppose makes me a liberal. The fact is that these labels just muddy the water and cause us to gravitate to extremes. We need to focus on uncovering the best ways to get things done for the benefit of all the people while providing ample incentive and reward to those who make the greatest sacrifices and contributions to getting them done. Those goals are not mutually exclusive - not at all. Indeed, balancing those goals, and the roles of government, private enterprise and charitable organizations in achieving those goals, is the ultimate challenge for those who make the laws of the land.

#polarizationpoliticsconservatismliberalismroleofgovernment

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hozukitofu · 5 years

Text

the kids are doing espionage

He would like to preface everything by a singly stated -

It was Qing's idea.

He is only a simple tech boy, a robotic engineering undergrad, someone who just wants to corrupt enough of the capitalistic system and its funds to fund his recycling robot, to delete the littering problems around campus.

The facts that he happens to know like one bad form of martial arts and by virtue of being a robotics student, great with tools and improvised weapon creation, are irrelevant. Besides the point.

But Qing is deep down, within that core of his questionably existing heart, an opportunist - an investor of assets. She sees potential, she invests in it. That's always how it goes.

Zizhen is eating, simply existing, thinking about robots and redeeming himself at a round of chess with uncle Shao when Qing barges into his absolutely mundane life, waving a USB stick in front of his nose, crowing about how she cracked the capitalism code.

Normally he would care.

"That's great, cool, jie, but -" he doesn't even have time to bat the excited blonde away before a proposition is coerced into his food.

"You! Wanna be an anti-government agent?"

Zizhen almost drops his fork.

"I'm sorry," he blinks, not even bothering with his food any longer because his appetite had taken a nose dive out the processing plants by the back of the college. "What. Did you just say?"

Qing was going to elaborate, but he doesn't let her.

"No, it was rhetorical - jie! I'm not becoming your agent for hire! I'm too soft for killing people!" He denies, vehemently, because look at him! He wears clothes that have to oblige by fluffy and big standard, and his hair cannot be let loose outside of the house if it isn’t wavy and bouncy.

Doctor Wei calls him marshmallow unironically, on top of Romantic Guy, with debatable nuances under the friendly moniker because that’s his life goal, to be as soft and sweet as humanly possible. He is only someone who strives to dismantle the system in the ways he clumsily knows how to, but he always goes back to helping people at the end of the day.

Becoming a hitman for hire is never something he would consider, or ever would.

Qing badgered and wheedled, bombarded him with the benefits, the sheer overwhelming scale of everything good and pure tipping and burying onto his side of the balancing plates, to which he avoids, like one would, if a pack of mosquitoes with malaria starts heading your way. He had blended into the crowd. Worn disguises to avoid this woman's hawkish eyesight. Climbed out a window to avoid persecution and inevitable screeching. Legitimately broke into a dead sprint across the canteen as soon as he spotted Song-Xiao Qing looking for him.

One of these days she will catch up to him, and she will skin him alive, but not today. He weaves around busy college students arriving and leaving their lecture halls, his long arms tucked closely to his chest so that nobody snags them off him. It is a laborious chase that she incurred onto his person, and he dreads the reality where she finally hacks into a computer somewhere and puts a tracker onto him so that she can be two steps ahead of him and then she can beat him into the ground on the basis of him avoiding her like she will personally break all of his robots inside and out.

"Ouyang Zizhen!" He hears a death roar, and runs faster.

Gotta put that threefold authentication code into all of his login devices so that the two steps pre-planning stage doesn't happen. Yes. But run first.

He’s fallen asleep across a horizontal surface - he’s pretty sure that this is the first horizontal surface his eyes park on and his brain immediately decreed that We’re napping. Now. ASAP pronto LOL.

He comes back to the world of living when he is toed awake by a person, voice vaguely threatening and familiar to his ears -

“Ouyang. Ouyang.”

“Noo,” he whines, thinking it to be his father. “Dad I have the day off.”

“Zizhen. You will wake up or I will walk all over your face. Your choice, sweet guy.”

He sits up, immediately awake.

Look, he’s a coward. He has high sensors in-built to detect approaching danger to his person. It’s how he made it beyond high school to go where he does now. It’s nothing to be proud of - surviving, just barely, in this cutthroat world is a goddamn miracle, if he has to say so himself. So what if he’s a coward. He’s still alive. That’s what matters.

Also he has a feeling that if he had keep on sleeping, he will open his eyes in the next life, as a bug. Because he had been horrifically murdered in this life and that death was so bad that a bug’s body is the only viable and painless reincarnation the gods deem fitting for little poor him.

“I’m up,” he wheezes, vertigo slamming onto his head. “I’m physically with you but my brain had just taken a holiday. Please allow it some time to return.”

“I don’t need your brain for this,” Qing beams at him, mouth spreading in a Joker-ish feral look. “I’ve got a favour to ask.”

I’ve got a favour to ask sounds exactly like those questions that ask you for something but if you deny, you will die on sight.

The way his upperclassman is smiling at him gives him all the answers he has.

“What,” he grouses, mouth twisting, pulling his hoodie even more over his forehead and eyes, covering the majority of his freckles. They’re still here despite the lack of hours he spends in active avoidance of the sun and the majority of this goddamn school hates the sight of freckles like they’re something contagious so his instincts mostly had been ‘cover up’.

“Someone took something from me and I need a boy to get it back for Yours Truly,” she smiles, still feral and not the least friendly.

He squints suspiciously at her. “Why a boy. Is this hard even for you, lawbreaker extraordinaire?”

“I need a boy, you stupid robot builder,” she rolls her eyes, throwing a hairband onto the table in front of him. “Because someone from Gusu took my things and on virtue of me being a woman, I can’t enter without the security shooting me on sight.”

He groans out loud and slumps even further onto the table, hoping to become one with the recycled plastic.

“I don’t even go there. They’ll shoot me on sight too. They have stun guns -”

She cuts him up, retying her space buns. He lets out a huff of hysterical air and rethinks back to every wrong decision he had ever taken in this life.

“Which they’re not allowed to use on trespassers, chill. Listen, how you get it isn’t my problem. Get me the thing and I’ll squander all the favours you owe me.”

This sparks his interest. A-Qing is stingy. The stingiest person he has the misfortune of ever running across. She studies economics. She lives on cash alone. Just. Cash. She hoards money and favours and then harvests them like produce of her questionable farm.

Ouyang Zizhen owes Qing a lot of money for the completion of his robotics projects and the launch of his career as a junior lab assistant to the research team of the mechanical engineering department. She did all that, knowing that her investments were wise, and she constantly lords the favour over his head.

It sounds great, to get rid of one Song-Xiao Qing infinitely, but he can’t help but wonder if the catch, beyond You’ll die if you trespass Gusu like the absolute moron that you are. This sounds like it’s much more than just a suicide run. It sounds more like...a test? Of sorts?

“All the favours?” He looks up, hood slipping, his freckles all in glorious sight and judging his upperclassman. “Are you sure?”

Qing-jie grins at him, looking every bit like the crook she is. “Are you?”

“Heck, yes, why do you even ask. But I feel like you’re betting too much on this. How do you know if I’ll come back for you to squander all your favours for me? Seems fishy.”

“You’ll come back,” she waves him away. “I wouldn’t swear on it if I’m not sure. So, what of it, marshmallow? You want in?”

He can’t say no anyways. “You know I can’t say no,” he scowls, and refuses to shake her hand. “If I don’t come back, tell my father to take all my robots. And burn me paper money.”

Qing cackles right at his face. “You’re exaggerating, kid. It’ll be fine. I swear on it.”

“Your words are all lies anyways! Shut up!”

Research on how to get into Gusu? Actually kinda fun.

Actually sneaking into Gusu unscathed? Less fun. Bordering on traumatic.

Technically he knows the blueprints. Technically he knows that the scanning gates at the southern entry can fit an entire person if they just, like, lie down and limbo through the gaps of the plastic closing gates. Technically eight twenty-seven in the night is the time gap that he can safely limbo through without getting zapped by a stun gun. Technically from here he can just jog to the international student’s dorm and scale to the second floor, open the window fourth from the right, slide in, get the thing from under the desk, get out the way he did before, go home, change his name, get plastic surgery, genetically rewrite his fingerprints and DNA makeup, move back to Baling, call it quits.

Technically he knows all of this, but he had just slid through a scanning gate and his heart is trying to punch out of his own ribs. He’s wheezing as if he climbed up a mountain twice for no reason at all. None of this makes sense. Why is he here. He should go home. There’s still time. Father will be tired and disappointed but when is he not.

No, his brain, traitorous, but also wanting to get rid of the human leech Song-Xiao Qing, mutters. No we will get back that bundle for Her Highness and then leave her presence indefinitely. That’s what we’ll do.

He swings his feet, nothing short of Spiderman, into the intended room, huffing as it wastes him no effort.

Too easy. Smells exactly like a trap.

It’s nearly curfew, except that people haven’t been rushing back through the easy way in, because he saw people coming out and they pretended to not see him as he came in. Are they stupid. Are they not going to come back for roll call and suffer the wrath of Lan Qiren? Or worse, He Who Must Not Be Named.

He reaches for the bundle, stuffs it under his hoodie, and prepares for take off, when a door swing open and someone walks in, without turning the lights on.

His danger alarms not only went off, but into overtime and exhaustive underpaid labour.

“Ouyang?” He hears, hissed in the dark.

He should have covered his face, because wow he didn’t think he was that popular outside of his own robotics class for setting off that fire alarm back in first year. But. He is digressing from this imminent danger! This voice. That sounds distinctly similar.

“Do we know each other?” He hisses, crouching back in a Spongebob stance, eyes narrowed at the boy in the cats-covered face mask. He can’t make a run for it here but he can try for the knee caps.

“Yes. Oh my god, yes,” the person pulls his face mask down and lo and behold, it’s -

“Lan? Lan Jingyi?” He gapes, while sidestepping a stray tennis ball lobbing at his head. “Why are you here?”

Jingyi shoots back at him - “I go here. Why are you here?”

He throws up one hand, the other preoccupied with the bundle - “Qing-jie!”

“Bad answer, but expected,” Jingyi tuts his tongue, and shoves him out of the way. “You don’t seem the type to engage in trespass and theft.”

“Ha ha, pot calling the kettle black,” he sneers back, tracing back his steps. “Why are you here here. I know you go here, but this isn’t your room. Or anyone else’s room that you are affiliated with. It’s the international student wing. You never answered my question.”

He would not receive any answers because there are footsteps, grave and reverent footsteps, that bring pandemonium outside the corridor and Jingyi, not even thinking twice, shoves him into a wardrobe, finger on his lips.

“Quiet,” the boy hisses. “And when he’s gone, you can scram.”

Zizhen thinks that is the end of it, but somehow his bundle! Had gone missing from under his hoodie! When! And how!

“Lan, give that back!” He hisses, almost lunging and falling out of the closet. Jingyi shushes him even louder, forcing the doors to close in on his nose and shoes.

He grabs onto a wrist, clinging onto the arm stubbornly. Jingyi jostles his shoulder violently like he’s got himself a human-sized limpet that won’t let go and he elects to kicking it back to the depth of the closet, telling him to ‘stay put, come on, don’t make this harder for us’.

Zizhen is shoved back into the darkness of a small enclosed space with hangers falling onto his head and clothes dropping onto his shoulders. The tracking sticker he placed on his fingertip had migrated from him to the inside of Lan Jingyi’s hoodie. Now he waits.

There is a polite knock - because that’s Lans for you, polite even in walking and knocking.

Jingyi answers the door with a soft - “Hello, uncle.”

For a moment Zizhen thought he actually screwed up and somehow stumbled head first into Lan Qiren of all people on the night he attempted trespass and theft, but he listens some more, waiting for the dulcet tones of disapproval that the Lan Headmaster is so famed for dishing out at his relatives slash pupils.

“Jingyi,” he hears, and. Well.

This is worse than Lan Qiren. Somehow he had messed up even worse than Lan Qiren.

Lan Wangji, the Hanguang-Jun, is in the same room as him. The professor reliable for dishing out punishments at Gusu. The resting disappointed man. Doctor Wei’s long-term crush and object of pursuit. He’s caught. He’s gone. They’re going to string his corpse like a disappointing sight from here so that all across the country, people can see what happens when idiot college boys who sneak into prestigious Gusu get as a punishment.

He is suddenly religious. He asks for protection from the Buddha to the corner ghost to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.

“I suggest you return to your own dorm,” Lan Wangji gravely - and flatly - informs Lan Jingyi. “Unless you want to introduce me to your friend?”

Lan Jingyi, for someone doing a theatre degree, is woefully awful at lying. He starts laughing hysterically and like a bloody hyena under noise suppression and the target of at least twenty stun guns and he’s lost all sense of control so now his fight or flight response is to laugh.

Ouyang Zizhen regrets not leaving his father with a dying letter. It’ll be awful and humiliating to find him as a human flag on the top of Gusu’s flagpole.

“What friend, Uncle Wangji? It’s only me here!” Jingyi hacks out hysterically, as footsteps start heading his way, purposeful and brisk.

There goes living through tonight then.

“Hmn, what’s in the closet, Jingyi?” Hanguang-Jun asks, as the doors of the wardrobe rattle and -

promptly stop.

Jingyi, because he’s panicking and somehow is still the greatest and most shocking improvised line under possibly murderous circumstances, blurts out, completely and utterly from nowhere.

“That closet is fine. It has no one in it! Well, not me anymore!”

Zizhen can barely swallow down the wheeze that tries to climb its way out of his nose because what.

To his credit though, Lan Wangji stops his advance onto his hiding place, and promptly takes Lan Jingyi out of the room, so he hopes that he’s not being thrashed thoroughly for well, being gay, but in keeping it and using it as a distraction tactic on their Hanguang-Jun.

Zizhen quickly kicks the doors open and tumbles out, sliding the window up and climbing out, his watch telling him dimly that he has two more minutes before curfew comes and security tightens. He would check on Lan, but he’ll be fine. Hanguang-Jun isn’t a blind rule follower as the people make him out to be - by people, he meant just Doctor Wei, who went through a period of time in his life actively cursing and mooning over Lan Wangji, and it’s entertaining and just embarrassing to bear witness to. No. Bad memories. Let’s forget that and go back and report to Qing-jie.

He’s going to start breaking ankles the next time Lan Yuan asks for a big hang out.

“He took the bundle from you? Without touching you?”

“I snuck in the death place for that stupid bundle and that’s all you cared about?”

“Damn Lan. Anyways, good job, it’s fine, I’m seeing the golden trio in, like, ten hours. We can haggle the bundle back.”

He hears this, but he also has the tracker sticker. Does it work? Does it not work? Unclear. He’s not too sure. He hasn’t been doing this illegal theft and tracking gig for long. He lets Qing-jie and her favours reinstate themselves as constant reminders in his life as he stumbles back to his laptop and kick starts it to see how he’s going to not set a hoodie and a person on fire.

The good news is Lan Jingyi and his Lan Approved Hoodie will not be catching on fire.

The even better news is that he can get rid of Song-Xiao Qing for life now, because he knows where the package is.

The bad news is that the package is in Jin Rulan’s home. His room, to be specific.

Okay, so maybe he met Jin Rulan a few times when he went to archery tournaments to cheer on Lan Yuan, a friend but also practicing archer to become as great as Wen Ning, Olympic-level archer. Maybe he and Jin Rulan had gotten into a few arguments over pointless things in the past, like all stupid middle schoolers do. The point is that since his friend is a friend of Rulan, he has the honour of being flung at, in the face, with the address of his sizable family manor, because Jin Rulan can and will, with no preamble or social niceties, and so now Zizhen knows where he lives.

Not that a simple Google search wouldn’t tell him which place this is, but being reminded with Jin Rulan, a runt then, probably a runt now, he hasn’t seen the kid in like, two years. A-Yuan doesn’t want him to start testing his robots on real life people and everyone who had ever interacted with Zizhen knows who’s first on his list to be humanly pitted (sorry, tested) against his robots.

He bikes to the manor, easily buzzes his way in with a screwdriver and some tinkling with the system, and strolls right through the front door.

He did do research before this. Everyone’s out. Jin Rulan is out. He’ll just take the bundle and leave, and they don’t have to talk about it anymo -

Lan Jingyi tackles him to the floor from behind the door to Jin Rulan’s room, with a distant bark of a guard dog and Jin Rulan’s dulcet tones shrieking the heavens, hard, so that his dead ancestors can rise as zombies in the night and slap Zizhen back to Baling.

“How is he here?” He can hear Rulan yelling distinctly, as he grapples with Jingyi and rips the sticker cleanly from under his sleeve.

Jingyi and him get along okay. When A-Yuan wants people to wait for him after guqin recitals, he has Zizhen and Jingyi wait for him, and they play jianzi as they quiz each other on class things they should know, bickering back and forth. They played soccer together a few times, and Jingyi’s good - Jingyi’s training to be in the under 20′s representative Asian Games in a few months. They get along fine. They love literature and art. Zizhen doesn’t want to set a short-circuiting robot onto him.

Literally there is no reason for Jingyi to wrestle him to the ground like this outside of the context of a soccer match.

“You found us, how,” Jingyi demands, frowning. “Did you put a tracker on me?”

He huffs, bunching up his knees and kicking up, before rolling away with the bundle. “I will neither confirm or deny your accusations. Goodbye.”

Rulan is at the window, slamming it shut, and holding out a hand, snarling rabidly at him. The scuffle he was tackled into had knocked over metal plates and car parts all over the floor, everything looks like it’s a disaster zone, if he was at home then Father would have lost it. The shining mistress of the Jin family snarls at him, forcing him to step away from the window with the sight of his sharp canines alone, eyes narrowing at him and his bundle.

“Give that over,” he frowns. “And then you can scram.”

“I broke into your house to get it back,” he stresses, with hysterical stress. “No.”

“No can’t do, Ouyang,” Jingyi’s voice drifts to him, as his wrist is seized. “We need it.”

“And Qing-jie needs it, but none of y’all are telling me what you need it for -”

The door eases open with a loud creak, like a bow on an erhu string gone wrong, and both boys might as well have screamed in his face because the expressions on their faces are thunderous.

“Uncle!” Jingyi squeaks.

“Uncle!” Rulan also yips, stepping away from the window, and coming over to -

Oh my god he needs to scream.

Doctor Wei and Hanguang-Jun are at the door, brows raised in vague interest at the war zone spilling out all over their socked feet, Doctor Wei humming interestedly at their thunderstruck and mutually devastated faces.

Jin Rulan is almost the same height as his uncle but he’s looking as if somebody ran over his finessed bow. He and Jingyi, who unhands Zizhen quickly, are both standing and arms splaying, kicking and shifting so that the mess of robot parts are somewhat not so obviously sprawling all over the floor.

“A-Zhen!” Doctor Wei beams, and proceeds to squeeze him in a hug until he dies, stuffing his face into a shirtfront with too much Versace sprayed all over it. “You didn’t say you were friends with the kids!”

“We don’t know each other,” he squeezes out, gasping as he’s released.

“Not a friend,” Rulan vehemently denies.

Lan Wangji lifts two unimpressed eyebrows. Rulan swallows back whatever else he was meant to say.

“Occasionally a friend?” Jingyi amends.

He turns and gripes at the Lan boy - “How can someone be occasionally a friend, you lump of spineless potato?”

“His insults are creative,” Doctor Wei notes, half way between an explanation and a praise. “Listen, kids -”

He then gets cut off by Jingyi and Rulan, talking not only over each other, but in synching fragmented sentences.

Jingyi “Uncles, we’re going to pack this up, we know you need the house for guests to come over -”

“ - and we will introduce you and acquaint everyone, but this guy needs to hand over his things first and then everyone can go,” Rulan finishes, hand still reaching out to Zizhen and his bundle.

He tries to step away, but two much taller men - Lan Wangji and Doctor Wei, are in his way, benevolently smiling and stoically staring down at him, and he feels his resolve crumbling. In fear, but also they are educators and they’ve perfectly polished the I’m not angry at you, I’m just disappointed and very very sad.

“Sounds like a party in here,” he hears the dreaded singsong, the sound of the dead coming to collect his soul and putting him through all the levels of hell.

Song-Xiao Qing pokes her head around Lan Wangji’s elbow and beams at him. “Oh you’re here! I thought I had to call for you! You made my job so easy, marshmallow boy.”

“Uh,” he’s still being held captive by Doctor Wei. “Please. Explain.”

Lan Yuan finally emerges, serene, beautiful, refreshing and soft-spoken.

“Many apologies for my family’s treatment of you, Zizhen-xiong. Would you like some tea?”

The gist of it is this -

It was a test. And his gut feelings were correct.

And the test was Would Ouyang Zizhen Make Good Agent. Apparently he passed, because nobody expected him to pursue the bundle all the way to the Jin Manor, along with wrestling with Jingyi so fiercely.

“You -” he looks at Qing-jie, who is sipping chrysanthemum tea so calmly, as if she hadn’t led him on some wild goose chase. “I actually have no words. That was very clever.”

“I have words,” Jin Rulan, apparently part of whatever the hell this is too, whinges from his post at the arm of Lan Wangji’s chair. “Why him?”

“What, besides the obvious?” Jingyi looks at his friend. “He held me off, and snuck into Gusu. Like, impressive?”

“The sticker was a nice touch,” Qing-jie notes. “Although we did make it easy on ya.”

“He’s calm,” A-Yuan smiles at him. “You’re very calm, even though you opposed to this vehemently.”

He gestures broadly, to Everyone Present. “I can’t exactly freak out before this peanut gallery. I want to live past 5 pm today. I have an aunt’s dinner I have to go to. I can’t die before that.”

A-Yuan shrugs like that’s a good answer. It is. He knows. He has a few fire-breathing aunts himself.

“So,” someone prompts. “About this -”

“The answer is still no,” he looks over specifically at Qing-jie, who he knows no doubt will be sending him on more of these trips.

“You did good though,” Jingyi notes. “Considering that you improv like, 9 out of 10 things.”

“Well excuse me for being new at this stuff, how am I supposed to -” he stops his snapping tone as a familiar face walks by, blinking widely as the entourage of idiots who may or may not are influencing a youth in joining the forces to lawbreaking. How is Hanguang-Jun in the middle of this, he just wants to talk. He swallows his caustic words, and cautions a wave to the boy. “Hey, A-Song.”

A-Song bows back to everyone. “Zizhen-xiong -”

“Calling me gege is fine, sheesh, this kid -”

“I’ll see you at tutoring, gege,” A-Song, Jin Rusong, literally the sweetest kid ever, smiles back politely, before he retreats back to where he has to go back to, leaving their Idiot Entourage to their own.

“You know my cousin?” Rulan quirks a judgemental eyebrow.

“Yes,” he replies, tersely. “Can you not pay attention? He said tutoring. I tutor him. Shut up, I’m only mean to you because you’ve an awful personality.”

Nobody is sure who laughed but there is a ripple of a muffled laugh as Rulan screeches that I’ll have your head, Ouyang!

“Our deal is off,” Qing-jie snaps her fingers before his face. “You can go now.”

“Just like that?” He squints, suspicious. “No forcing?”

“No forcing,” Doctor Wei smiles, the same Jiang-Wei smile that put the cardiac arrest in people’s hearts. People being undergraduates. “We’ll win you over one of these days,” Doctor Wei slaps a fist to a palm. “Our doors are always open for you to join, A-Zhen.”

Lan Wangji levels a stare at him. “Hmn.”

He’s not quite sure how Doctor Wei isn’t freaking out in the presence of his beloved Lan-er gege but he’s not going to ask or go there. He has a dinner to go to.

“Well,” he stands, and bows, because he still has manners. “I’ll be taking my leave?”

“I’ll see you off,” Doctor Wei also stands, turning to the four idiot monkeys first. “Here ya go, kids. Don’t be playing hot potato with that now.”

It’s then that he realises that his bundle is gone, yet again, and Doctor Wei had only hugged him once.

“Shall we go?” The Doctor’s eye glints, and he wants to bolt out the door.

“How are you a part of this too?” He hisses to the Good Doctor, the top medical examiner of the goddamn country and youngest biology professor in his college, as he is shown out.

“I’ll tell you when you join,” is the cryptic answer he gets, as the doors close behind him.

Tell me, his Kermit brain says. But then you’ll have to join, his rational robotics brain whispers back.

Zizhen elects to just scream at the door and turns on his heels marching out.

The nerve of some people!

#mdzs #future fic #modern college AU #ouyang zizhen #lan jingyi #a-qing #jin ling #lan sizhui #jin rusong #lan wangji #wei wuxian #there is a universe where people fear lwj more than lan qiren #it is here #spy AU #this is so stupid please love it for me

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ataoufiqmourtachou · 4 years

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"Look at CHALLENGES as OPPORTUNITIES!" Top 10 Rules

if you want to be successful learn from the other people's mistakes don't learn from the successful stories don't hate your competitors respect your competitors learn from him I complain a lot when I was young because I think Bill Gates took odd opportunities for the Microsoft and Steve Jobs all these guys there's no job there's no great big stuff left for us need motivation watch a top 10 would believe nation what's up at seven my one word is believe and I believe in you I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world so let's get your motivation to attend and get you believing in you grab a snack and chew on today's lessons from a man who

went from growing up in China and giving tours to tourists for free for nine years just to learn English to becoming one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of over fifty billion dollars he's Jack Ma and here's my take on his top ten R was a success vol 3 enjoy alright let's kick things off with rule number one learn from the mistakes of others my thinking is that you guys remember if you want to be successful learn from the other people's mistakes don't learn from the successful stories successful stories they make don't listen to that there are a lot of reasons behind it just like god I remember the first time Harvard Business

School came to us say J we want to write a case study for you yes years 2001 a 2000 became the spend one week and they write a report and I read no I said this is not me and this is this is you as a no this is not us is that this is you so they make IV sign and the case study go up and they start to teaching love universities the next five years they invite to need to go to the case study and they always find a competitor of my company and F after every case that case study Ali Papa would die that company will succeed all the students are Greek and actually every five year all the competitive diet ways to survive so how can you study this kind of a success of a star

learn from the mistakes the other people no matter how smart you are you will encounter these mistakes you learn from mistakes not because you will be able to avoid mistakes you were able to when these mistakes come they suffer comes you know how to deal with it how to face it I like the book I want to write if I if I want if I can is a re Bubber 1001 mistake this is the most rational things that in my life in my life is not how much we achieved is how much we go through the tough days and mistakes and this is what you speak if you start to think now would be good rule number 2 focus on quality not size last a century the bigger the better this century the good abandon do the business not because

the size it is not necessary the big size you are the more profit you are you really believe that I believe that's a different we have you know we got a fortune 500 companies you you judge because of the size how many of them are really happy how many of them profit no small companies they're very profitable they're very happy because spend time was the wife and a husband and kids traveling around and first life rule number three be the first dog tried to beat the best be the first be the first to change be the first the chap take the challenge be the first one to overcome the difficulties because the best person there's only one Olympic champion I

don't think I'm lucky enough to be bad but I can always try the new things and don't give I believe it because you you are so unique everybody's unique be yourself is always the key rule number four prepare for the future people like me I was born in a very poor family I never got a great education and I failed all the examinations for what reason I don't know but later I realize I don't have money I don't have technology I don't have a lot of good backgrounds where we have a rich uncle or something no they only that competed with my people then young people is let's compete for ten years later this is what I believe ten years later will be happening so everything I do for that

goal I know 10 years later this thing is going to happen so prepare for that because I know if I compete with him for next Mouse no chance so this is how my message it's up it's a challenge but it's opportunity and it's the opportunity for people like us this world the most difficult of thing is to convincing a successful people wait tell him this is a great opportunity to nananananana forget it right I've been doing this for 30 years but for people like us we're looking for opportunities in order to survive so we will do anything to be creative so this is the message 30 years it's opportunity for us it's a challenge

for those people who are 60 years old if they're 60 years old not discrimination but it is tough for them rule number five respect your competitors who's your most dangerous competitor is it Amazon or is it ten-second well people always think compare us with Emma's Evers a great company I respect I've been seeing them from Al tiny to that big and I think they will continue to grow but we are different we Amazon is an e-commerce company we are not ecommerce company we enable other people to do ecommerce we want to making sure everybody can be Amazon so are you saying $0.10 is the greater course they are great company and you know it's it's

not easy to be that size within only such less than 20 years so innovative and so creative are so different on social technology and they're basting certainly in attention and they are almost every way in China or respect of course we compete but compete does not mean I have to hate them don't hate your competitors respect your competitors learn from him but you know pony and I we've been doing the charity together the Nature Conservancy and protected the or but we compete each other but when we compete each other we should respect each other I respect him I respect him same rule number six see challenges as opportunities this world today's of full of challenges and opportunities 2,000

years ago full of challenges and opportunities and I'm sure 2,000 years later full of challenges and opportunities there's always it's depends on how you look at somebody look at this challenge as opportunity young people we say there's no opportunity I complain a lot when I was young because I think Bill Gates took odd opportunities for the Microsoft Steve Jobs all these guys there's no job there's no great big stuff left for us but I think opportunity always lies in the challenges always lies in the complaints if you can solve the challenge you have there you will be successful

the big challenge you solve the big problem of the the big opportunity you have rule number seven my personal favorite belief in the past 18 years when I do internet in China we got a criticism every day you know something will you believe it a lot of people criticize it but if you really believe continue to do it improve it we were rejected by more than 30 venture capitalists but we are very optimistic we believe in the future we believe in Internet and we believe that if we do not succeed somebody will rule number eight surround yourself with greatness how do I emote to by incentive unlock by by our colleagues you have to find the people

they can mobilize themselves it's impossible to find two to encourage an active person so the people your high that people work together they they have to be oh you cannot we have a 65,000 in price now you cannot hire all of them that positive but at least the people work with me my management leadership several areas they have to be positive they have to know the incentive the others because I cannot accept everybody and making sure the culture so I think it would be very painful for me to talk to my vice president and he need to be incentivized and mobilized every time right this won't work if he is not if he does not know how to incentivize or mobilize his people it's better I

don't think he will be the vice president they should be a good engineer good designer but not good leader a good leader should know how but not by only money most of people incentive lies or move on not because you give them a lot of money you give the respect just appreciation and correct hard to fool advice when it come to my meetings internal meetings you have your shop because we we're not like a lot of other Chinese company the boss they ever listen take notes and going down we are like a war room we make this issue based on whose voice is louder early days you know spider the talk and then making sure everybody speak up right so this is also a way of

mobile life and incentives there are a lot of ways and different people have a different way to send incentive rule number nine live healthy I think life is a journey you come to this world is to enjoy the life to be happy and healthy so the day when you leave the world and say I'm happy in my life my health in this life because if you're not healthy you will not be happy so I believe happy and healthy are the things the human being always looking for and I think next to 30 years because of the technology people the life size is gonna change a lot and people is gonna live longer but we can live longer does not necessarily live healthy so if you're not healthy how can you be happy

if you live longer if you're not happy why you live there and we'll number 10 the last one before the bonus clips have fun now I've got some special jakmob bonus clips for you but before that the question of the day is do you have enough fun in your business should entrepreneurs have fun in their business yes or no and why I'd love to hear from you leave it down the comments below thank you guys so much for watching I believe in you I hope we continue to believe in yourself and whatever you're one where it is much love I'll see you soon and enjoy the bonus clips I found some great leaders in the world they are always positive they never

complained others and never complain and they they look at the things in a different view like normal people so I think people a my company they at the beginning they don't like me because I'll always think about ten years five years and then after we working together for three or five years they find out who you are right then we got the credit rating and as a CEO one of the jobs where everybody's happy you have to see the unhappy things when everybody's unhappy you have to see the happy things so leadership is nature but you have to have a train and learn and I got my leadership sub upgraded in Davos I see so many well you know on the end to financing how many people here know

about Ally pay Thank You Ally pace decision was made here I was thinking about Ally paid you know but I was not a dare to launch a leap it because in China if you do financing with unlicensed you were being jailed at that time so I say I went to the banks can't help us do the e-commerce of transaction no no no no banks would accept it so if there will be no a leap in no financing the e-commerce to go nowhere so I was year 2004 I was here listen to a speech by two state leaders about leadership and this guy's leadership is about responsibility you believe it but don't be that people don't believe it but if you think is so critical you should pay any price to do it so that day change to

my mind I had a call back to my team say let's launch it within one month if somebody else go to the Jill I go to the gym who would be the second we'll follow me if I go you continue and you go to the Jill you go continue that was the called the leadership determination and year 2004 I made a decision here I called back and now today the a leap a launched and it's so big over you know 800 million people today using a leap a bullet this is called I was born a very normal family and poor family six people sure $7 a mouth we can only eat one chicken a year was terrible Nixon visit to my city 1972 China USA signed Mao Zedong Nixon signed the

agreement so China become opened oh my city Hauser was one of the first cities that opened to the west we got a lot of American tourists to visit my city what he would do is he would befriend foreign visitors who came to Hangzhou to walk around the west lake there and I learned English by being the free guide for tour guide you know more than the language Jack was learning about the culture the things I learned from books from China are so different from the things I learned from the American visitors so I start to think differently raise your standard Apple at the core its core value is that we believe that people need passion not one drop of myself work depends on

your it's suppose to mean I don't ever give up I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated hey believe nation if you want to see my all-time favorite top ten most of success I have a very special secret video for you these are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business.

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tervacious · 5 years

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So here is atlasobscura, writing gender non-conforming people, mostly women, mostly lesbians, out of history and deciding to trans them all, en masse.

Excerpt about Nell Pickerel, aka Harry Allen: “This opportunity for reinvention seemed to be particularly available to people assigned female at birth who lived their lives as men. In an 1908 interview with The Seattle Sunday Times, Allen articulated his discomfort with his assigned sex. “I did not like to be a girl; did not feel like a girl, and never did look like a girl,” he said. “So it seemed impossible to make myself a girl and, sick at heart over the thought that I would be an outcast of the feminine gender, I conceived the idea of making myself a man.” Allen’s identity fascinated local papers, which cast it as part of the zeitgeist of the American frontier. One publication framed him among “the scum of the West” for his active career of saloon brawling, bootlegging, bronco busting, and horse stealing. The press gawked at his swagger, foul mouth, and penchant for hard drink. Allen found near-infinite possibility in men’s attire, and worked as a bartender, barber, and longshoreman.” Note there is no mention of her life as a seducer of women. She was absolutely famous/infamous for this, with all kinds of drama attached to her for it, but somehow this article manages to not mention a crucial part of this person’s life. We have no idea how, in the modern era, this woman would see herself. Would she be a trans-identified female? Would she be butch? We do know, she was a lesbian, and this article erases her. So does Wikipedia, btw, and people have the audacity to claim you are “deadnaming” her if you use her female name or quote the papers of the time. She did prefer the name Harry Allen, and apparently did use male pronouns, but a good half of the butches I’ve known have used male names/nicknames and male pronouns and were still not trans.

The article makes a good point about male crossdressers, in that a woman dressing as a man stood a good chance of surviving on the frontier with advantages, better pay, access to better jobs, etc., whereas a man dressing as a woman usually did not have better chances in terms of money and access. Except then the article skips over the fact that historically, most men (not all) who crossdressed were gay, and a solid percentage of them were prostitutes. Boys and men wearing women’s clothing were often mentioned in the context of prostitution (obviously boys were victims of the sex trade and were usually foreign or people of color, and the odds of surviving to adulthood was not high). Every male person mentioned and retroactively transed in this article was gay, every one of them were in relationships with men, often one after the other. Gay men went west in well documented numbers-- there’s a reason San Francisco was a gay Mecca by the turn of the last century. And crossdressing was always part of that culture.

There have always been people who hid out as the opposite sex. In a violently sexist culture it is logical that women would disguise themselves as men to be free, regardless of their sexual orientation. It is logical lesbians would disguise themselves as men. It’s no accident Nell Pickerel was known to be a woman, for example-- it’s not because the papers of the time were busily OUTING her and DEADNAMING her and MISGENDERING her. She was a woman, she candidly discussed being a woman (if we are to believe the notoriously unreliable papers of the day), and discussed how that didn’t work out for her. But to extrapolate trans identity, in the modern sense, from this is bizarre.

Even more interestingly, the upshot of this article makes no sense: “As the West changed, so too did its apparent prevalence of non-conforming dress, which could not coexist with settled, civilized America. “As the frontier closed and the Wild West disappeared, these people who found a life there, found validation there, also disappeared from our history,” Boag says.”

Listen, if there had been a trans identity of any kind on the western frontier it wouldn’t have just magically disappeared. That’s not how things work. Gay men and lesbians didn’t disappear. Crossdressing didn’t stop. Bisexuals continued to be bisexual. In cultures with what we now call “third gender roles”, those continued on as well. Because none of these things were “trans”.

People really don’t want to admit that modern gender ideology is MODERN, and it is a completely ahistorical creation. Gender variance is normal because gender is not a concrete thing. “Third gender” roles are normal. They almost always involved two requirements to exist: extreme patriarchy AND acceptance of homosexuality as natural and inate-- in other words, as something that can’t be changed so you have to find a tidy slot to fit it in to your society.

In the modern era something new happened to create the genderist ideology we see today-- for-profit medicine was the first, followed by technology and technical knowledge and the experience of the last eighty years in plastic surgery. I’m convinced the modern trans movement is entirely a creation of those factors, combined with post modernist bullshit taking over academia. And post modernism has been one of the most insidious capitalist ideologies to appear in recent times. It is brilliant, really, it makes everything unreal and immaterial, it makes people stop thinking clearly, it muddies the waters and pretends everything is up for debate, that there is no history, no concrete science, and no expertise. Add a dash of social media, and you’ve got the modern trans ideology, conveniently built upon the exact same social mores that forced lesbians to live short, violent, unhappy lives, like Nell Pickerel did, and forced women generally to deny their real selves in order to get the bare minimum of freedom.

Bad job, atlasobscura. But congrats, you scored Faux Woke Points with some hipster brocialist somewhere.

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tlirswriting · 5 years

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Between Realms, chapter 3

Maxim threw his long white hair into a bun, put on his boots and gloves, and made sure all his things were in his coat pockets the next morning. Vampire killing tended to get messy, but this one probably wouldn't struggle too much, since she called him herself.

"Go get 'em," Darien said through a mouthful of scrambled eggs, sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator.

"I'll get 'em," Maxim replied with a smile, his hand on the doorknob. "And they're something other than demons this time."

"It's gonna be demons later, though, huh?"

"And the devil pays better than most of my mortal customers are willing to, so at least there's that."

"We're gonna get a house soon," Darien half-sang.

"We're gonna have a vegetable garden and those dumb plastic flamingos, it'll be great."

"And we won't have to listen to our neighbors fuck anymore."

Maxim snorted. "We're in a capitalist dystopia, but it could be worse!"

Darien laughed. "Yeah, it could always be worse."

"Bye honey, I love you."

"I love you too, byeee!"

Maxim stepped out the door, closing it behind him.

"Vampires, huh?" Said the demon from last night, appearing on top of the fridge.

Darien sighed. "Can you please knock?"

"I have no interest in pointless courtesy," The demon said, leaning down to inspect the appliance's contents, hanging at an angle that wouldn't seem quite right had she been bound by the laws of physics. "And, of course, the Lower Division has much more lax regulations."

"Of course you do."

"I don't know how angels put up with all those stupid rules they have to follow. Well, I guess not all of them do, huh? Ooh, what do we have here..." She grabbed a bottle of cheap red wine and started chugging it.

Darien stood. "I, um..." Eye contact with a six-foot-something woman with slit pupils, a wingspan longer than he was tall, and goat horns poking out of her bright red buzzcut was, somehow, worse on Darien's nerves than eye contact with human strangers. "I'd rather you not do that."

"Understandable. Alcohol has no effect on me, by the way; you can't metabolize anything without a vessel, I just like the taste."

"Neat. So does it just...?"

"Things I swallow cease to exist."

"Okay then." Darien shifted his gaze around for a moment. "So, do you want to, like... play checkers or something?"

Maxim knocked on the door of Maria Jackson's apartment, introduced himself when she answered, and stepped inside. Her skin was a dark brown, although it had a grayish tinge to it, as one expects from the technically-dead.

"So, would you like me to dispose of the body, or just leave it?" Maxim asked, as per the usual.

"You can just leave me, I don't want people to waste their time on a missing persons case."

"Fair enough," Maxim pulled a silver dagger from its sheath on the inside of his coat. "That'll be, ah... one-fifty."

"Yup." She handed him the money, a small smile on her face. He held the knife to her throat, but hesitated. The two most effective means of killing vampires were to either severely injure the nervous system — typically by means of beheading — or letting silver fry them from the inside out through a chemical reaction the metal causes with the parasitic fungus infecting the body. Neither were particularly pretty to watch, but Maxim did what he had to do to protect humanity.

It's worth it, he reminded himself. There was a sadness in Maria's sunken eyes that made him less certain. She didn't look like a monster, and she was still young. She wasn't a hundred-year-old rich bastard feeding on the blood of the living, she was a woman who recently got out of college and wanted to make sure she didn't become like her attacker from the night before. Sacrificing her wouldn't be saving anyone.

"I can't do this, I'm sorry." Maxim pulled away, and tossed her cash back at her.

"What do you mean you can't? This is your job, dude, why am I any different from the rest of the things you kill?"

"Because you're innocent. I'm not a hitman, I'm an exorcist who also knows how to deal with vampirism and shit, okay? I kill monsters and I get restless souls out of people's houses because I can see them and I'm not a—"

"Wait wait wait, hold up, you can what?"

Maxim took a deep breath. He didn't normally explain the nature of his existence to people. "I can see them. When a demon crosses over into this realm, they're not tied to our rules; they can choose if you see them, they can shapeshift, they can teleport, whatever. So can ghosts. But I'm kinda... in-between, so invisibility doesn't work."

Maria stared at him for a second, visibly trying to decide whether or not she believed him and whether or not she should be afraid. "What do you mean by that last part?"

"Oh, I'm, ah... I'm an angel. Well, fallen. Technically not an angel anymore, because I quit my job, but um. Yeah."

"This might as well happen," She muttered, probably intended more for herself.

"It's weird, I'm stuck here on Earth, I'm stuck like this — as in, like, my appearance isn't fluid — but I can still see things people aren't supposed to sometimes."

"...Aight."

"But anyway, back to the reason I'm here. You don't have to die."

"Yes I do."

"No you don't. Vampires are only dangerous when they're hungry, so maybe if you keep the parasitic fungus taking over your nervous system fed you won't eat anyone."

"I'm sorry, feed the what?"

"Oh. Yeah, that's how vampires work, I forget it isn't common knowledge sometimes. It's like... have you heard of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis? That fungus that turns ants into zombies?"

"...No?"

"Ah, well, it's very interesting, you should read up on it some time. Anyway, the reason why vampires drink blood is because, rather than being airborne, the spores of the fungus inside you are spread through bodily fluids, primarily saliva, and having it come into contact with an open wound is one of the most efficient courses for it to take. However, aside from reproduction, it also requires higher amounts of protein and iron to survive than people usually have in their diets."

"This is disgusting."

"These things tend to be like that, yeah."

"Wouldn't it be easier if you just blew my brains out and called it a day?"

"Of course, but just because it's the easy way out doesn't mean it's right."

"I'll just do it myself if you don't."

"Listen, I'm not going to let anyone die if it isn't completely necessary. I have been alive for five hundred years, I've watched countless lives end because I wasn't allowed to intervene, my husband got close to being among them—"

"You're gay?"

"Irrelevant. I don't quietly sit by anymore, okay? That's just not what I do. I don't need more blood on my hands."

"I can respect that."

Maxim sighed. "I'm gonna have to go on a business trip of sorts later. Someone left the gates of Hell open again, and I've been asked to help clean up their mess. You can come with me, if you'd like to kill some demons."

"You know what? It's not like I have anything to lose. I'm in."

#my writing #between realms #original writing #writing #writeblr #amwriting #writers on tumblr #long post

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