You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”
Well I see that, and I raise you this:
An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.
And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.
He’s crushed by the competition every single time.
Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker.
There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.
And he wins.
Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something.
The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.
So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.
He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”
There’s an international competition, and Main Character-kun and all his candy-haired rivals/peers/nakama/friends are being housed in the same hotel.
The night before the competition, some ungodly scream sounds from the Naruto-kid’s room. The rest of the cast rush in, flick on the lights, and find Naruto-kid sitting up in bed, his hair completely flat and utterly black, a pair of DIY salon gloves discarded next to his bed. He races to the mirror across the room, hands hovering in shock around his straightened hair, as though unable to recognize the boy staring back at him.
It’s… an unsettling act of personal vandalism, but Naruto-kid seems unhurt. After verifying he’s okay and reporting it to hotel security, most of the kids are content to go back to their own rooms and just double-check their own locks.
Most seem content…. Not all…
The next day, Naruto-kid is eliminated from the competition nigh-instantly. He’s given no chance to monologue about his ambitions, his friends, his hometown. Not even a second spared for a flashback to the bullying that became the formative motivator of his childhood.
No. He’s summarily eliminated by another candy-haired contestant. Naruto-kid, with his suddenly unassuming black hair, is dismissed from the arena. And Main Character-kun is distressed.
There’s a murderer on the loose. Just in no traditional sense. Another kid is shaved bald in the middle of the night, and eliminated from the competition the next day. Colored contact lenses go missing, and suddenly the red-eyed yandere girl doesn’t have a leg to stand on. She’s sent home without the slightest bit of fanfare. Someone funnels bleach into the sprinkler line, and a triggering of the fire alarm leaves a whole arena of contestants doused in the ruinous fluid. Their candy colors melt into brittle, tacky, bleachy off-orange. Not a single one survives that night’s round of eliminations.
Main Character-kun is still pink. He’s still gelled. He’s still dressed in fiery robes and platform sandals with a bandana cinched around his forehead. He hoards hair dye in his room and sleeps with one eye open. He can only watch in silence as this gruesome assassination plot unravels, without a doubt in his mind that he is the real target.
One night, there’s a knock on his door. And the twisting of a key. And the squeak of hinges swinging open. Main Character-boy’s breathing halts. His time has come.
He looks. It’s the blue-haired girl, the quiet one with self-confidence issues. Her hair is tied into twin pigtails. She’s carrying something in her right hand. Main Character boy braces for impact.
She flicks on the lights. He looks. They’re wigs, in her hand. Three of them. Purple Green and Orange, each primmed and poofed and curled to extravagant degrees.
“Here,” she offers, hand extended. “Take whichever you like. They’re extra.”
“Wait. Why…? What’s this–what’s happening?”
She takes a step forward, and she shuts the door behind her. With her free hand, she grips the blue hairline at her scalp, and she pulls back gently, revealing netting. She drops the blue hair to the ground, and pulls the netting free from her forehead, and a loose, unassuming bob of perfectly black, perfectly normal hair falls around her shoulders.
She’s unassuming in every possible regard, mundane in every sense, a girl to blend into the backdrop of millions.
“We’re not going home yet,” she says. “Not you, and not me.”
The Main Character girl wraps her hair back up in the netting and fixes her blue wig back in place. She takes a seat in the nearby desk chair and explains why she’s here. She’s suspected for a while that she and MC-kun are the same, both normal-looking people masquerading in this candy haired world. MC-kun had seemed just a bit too distraught during the Naruto-kid incident. That was when Main Character-chan first noticed him, and when she recognized his shade of candy pink hair by its bottle brand.
MC-chan explains that she had lived a very normal and unassuming life. She did Stage Crew in middle school for the drama club, always the unnoticed extra in the background, sweeping in silently, covertly, under darkness to handle the scene changes and wardrobe transformations. She honed her skills making props and costumes for the drama kids, til she was a master of needle and thread, dyes and combs, and props built from paper and plastic.
She thinks it was that attention-to-detail she cultivated in prop-design that let her finally See what MC-kun had seen—the Candy Haired world around her that constantly overshadowed whatever she did.
One day, she put on the wig. And she never looked back.
But she doesn’t know who the hair assassin is either, any more than MC-kun. There’s still strength in numbers. And she figures if they work together, their odds of survival are greater.
MC-kun agrees.
…
The next day is a free day for the kids competing in this International Competition. The morning passes with most of the contestants montaging through a romp in the city, tasting local cuisine and window-shopping around the market area and getting into Kodak-moment worthy shenanigans.
MC-kun and MC-chan steal away to a quiet park, sitting at a picnic table, putting pink- and blue-heads together to talk through all the info they have, and what options are open to them. They don’t get very far. A glasses-wearing girl appears from behind the bushes and stops them cold.
Glasses Girl is small and wiry, mousy in her frame. She has orange hair that poofs around her head, cropped at chin level, in a way that reminds MC-kun vaguely of a roosting chicken. Her glasses are enormous on her freckled face, and they capture the light, obscuring her eyes behind their glare.
“You two… you’re fakes, aren’t you? Both of you.”
MC-kun stops cold. MC-chan spins around in her seat, wide-eyed. “I don’t… I don’t even know what that means! Go away before we—”
Glasses Girl pulls an immaculate, highly stylized laptop from her bag. She flips it open with one hand, propping it on the table and typing furiously, too fast to even see her fingers. Audio begins to play from the laptop speakers.
“We’re not going home yet. Not you, and not me.”
“I hacked into your phone last night,” GG-chan states simply, head tilted toward MC-kun. “I’ve heard the whole conversation.”
“How?!” MC-kun asks. He holds his phone at a distance, like it’s suddenly venomous.
GG-chan shifts. Suddenly the glare of her glasses is no longer obstructing her eyes. Behind the coke-bottle look is an expression of pure brow-knitted confusion. “I don’t…. I don’t actually know. I just could.”
GG-chan was an art student. A not-very-good-at-all art student. And a very-much-below-average competitor in sculpting competitions. She was plain, and unassuming, and inconspicuous, and jealous of the better-established art students around her with their own flashy styles. Her peers wore giant non-prescription glasses; they dyed their hair bright colors and cropped it short to perfect hipster chique.
GG-chan tried to imitate that. But as a truly-not-fantastic artist, she couldn’t even pull that off. She dyed her hair, picked out glasses, overshot “hipster”, and landed firmly in “geek”.
She landed so firmly in “geek” that internationally-acclaimed hacker abilities spawned with her makeover. Suddenly she could break into anything, override anything, hack or fix or erase anything over a permanent wifi connection that followed her as its hotspot.
Her laptop never loses charge. Her bash scripts never fail. Her glasses always glint in the slightest bit of light and slide down her nose so that she has to keep her middle finger pressed firmly to the bridge at all times.
She’s afraid of being sent home in ruin, sent back to her life as a mediocre art student.
GG-chan wants to join the effort to not be eliminated.
…
A day passes. GG-chan has hacked all the email accounts of the registered contestants and has found nothing suspicious. MC-chan has spent her time crafting shorter-cut wigs to give to MC-kun and GG-chan as backups. MC-kun has been trying his best to understand what he’s gotten into. He bought a few extra obnoxious bandanas to bolster his obnoxious outfit, as if that might help.
They’re sitting quietly at lunch, eating in silence, with no new information to share and no desire to attract unwanted attention from the contestants around them.
“Ohhhhh my what is this? Has this pathetic posse of plebeians formed a little club oh how quaint!”
MC-chan chokes on her noodles. GG-chan startles. MC-kun groans.
The voice belongs to a platinum-blond boy, dressed to the nines, who’s sidled up to the table unannounced. He reeks of ambition and money and arrogance and a very particular high-end cologne, and he laughs heartily at his own joke. He flicks a lock of blond hair from his face, which all but sparkles.
MC-kun recognizes this kid. He was one of the first Candy Haired kids to declare an eternal rivalry with him.
“What’s it to you?” MC-kun challenges, already ticked off.
And the Rich Blond Rival Boy deflates. Comically. Pale and hollow-cheeked and exhausted, suddenly leaning against their lunch table, speaking in a rasp. “Please let me join you. I’ve been wearing this Gucci suit for two weeks straight I don’t have any others.”
No one answers immediately. No one has anything resembling an answer.
“Then buy another suit!” MC-kun says.
“Do I look like I’m made of m o n e y to you?!”
“YES.”
“Ah ha! Yes that is the point, well you see–” and RBR-kun pulls out a soggy PB&J from his bag, slumps into an open seat at the table, his eyes dull and matte, solemnly chewing his lunch. “Can one of you spot me like $1.50 for the bus ride to the competition arena tomorrow? I spent the last of my money on this bread.”
MC-kun: “What?”
RBR-kun: “I don’t have money!”
MC-kun: “Why are you ACTING like a rich boy if you DONT HAVE MONEY”
RBR-kun: “LOOK IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED OKAY.”
MC-kun: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED.”
And well, it just kind of happened. Rich Blond Rival Boy is as fake as they come. He grew up in a modest household, making money over the summer by doing yard work for neighbors. He was fairly frugal and quiet and unassuming, until his grandma bought him a nice tux for the school dance, and he dyed his hair platinum blond on a dare, and suddenly the world was in his pocket.
Suddenly he had connections in high places. Suddenly he could have wait staff doting on him at a moment’s notice. Suddenly he could summon helicopters at the snap of his fingers, and have any product imaginable, legal or not, air-lifted to him on a whim. Everyone was his pawn. Everything bent to his will. Ever since then he’s been unstoppable in his ambitions.
He just doesn’t have any of the actual money to maintain this. All his cards are overdrafted. His credit is in the toilet. Several different loan sharks technically own the rights to his immortal soul.
Rich Blond Rival Boy wants in on the League Of Background Characters, because he is utterly afraid of the ruin he faces if he is exposed. If the others get assassinated, they get sent home. If RBR-kun gets assassinated, the debtors will drag him out by his toes.
A scuffle erupts over by the lunch line before anyone can give RBR-kun an answer. It’s over in an instant. A shriek, a clatter, a tray and knife hitting the ground. The biker ruffian boy with the blue mohawk lies on the floor. His shorn-off mohawk spikes lie on the platter, as if being served to the cafeteria at large.
Worried murmurs break out in the crowd.
No one had seen the knife-yielder.
No one had seen anything.
As if the act were committed by someone impossible to even notice.
And the one thing worth noting: MC-chan is now MG-chan, as in Main Girl-chan, to avoid mixing up her name with MC-kun.
Enjoy.
There’s a sustained hush, like a breath held too long. It’s a blooming, crawling, clawing wave of realization that takes the cafeteria captive. Heads turn. Voices falls silent. Clueless candy-hair after clueless candy-hair takes in the murder scene, mohawk spikes presented so curiously, so esoterically plattered, as if part of the lunch selection.
The dish itself is a warning; MG-chan understands that much. She feels the bloodlust in the air. And it’s closer now. She edges her chair away from the table. Her nerves are alight.
“Run,” MG-chan says.
“Sorry?” MC-kun replies.
MG-chan kicks her chair back, lighting to her feet.
“Run!”
And at that moment, a sound like a cannon ball fires, the silence breaking. People startle at the noise, but it’s the boy sitting one table over – directly across from MC-kun – who jolts entirely sideways in his seat. He’s the contestant whose hair has been quaffed perfectly into a cartoon whale, pallid blue and deep ocean undertones brimming through his hairline. He stares forward, as if stunned. The girl next to him asks if he’s okay.
He turns to her slowly, and reveals the entire right half of his face has been consumed in a wad of bubblegum. He raises one shaking hand to his whale-tail, now webbed in gum, and he collapses.
And all hell breaks loose.
MG-chan has MC-kun by the shoulder before he can process it. They’re running. Them and GG-chan and RBR-kun. Them and almost everyone else, a breathing screaming mass of panic as people shove and knee and elbow their way through the crowd.
“Where are we going?” MC-kun asks. He’s stumbling to keep pace with MG-chan, one hand pressed protectively to the bandana on his forehead in danger of slipping off.
“Away from here. Outside.” MG-chan throws her weight against the cafeteria door. It slams open. “Wherever we’re not sitting targets.”
Their feet beat against the linoleum below, into the hotel foyer, but it’s no good. The bloodlust presence doesn’t fade. It does not grow weaker. Instead it gains on them, like heat, like a house fire that lashes out at their heels and trips them with each step. Another two kids go down with the sound of razor blades and a puff of shorn hair, like dandelion fluff blown in the wind.
MG-chan, MC-kun, GG-chan, and RBR-kun all burst out the hotel front doors – RBR-kun with a shriek and a graceful leap over a half-shaved unconscious student on the floor.
“How did he go down?! I didn’t even see him go down?!” RBR-kun shouts, pointing to the kid he vaulted. “Invisibility? Is the murderer invisible?!”
“Maybe super-speed. Really any superpower is possible among these people. We can’t rule anything out.” GG-chan has her laptop out, balanced precariously on the crook of her arm. She types one-handed while she runs. “If I can hack into the security cameras maybe I can activate the infra-red sensors and get a reading on—”
There’s a crack. A gasp. MG, MC, and RBR all look back to find GG-chan frozen in place. Her glasses are shattered, pinned to the wall beside her by a single needle-thin arrow.
“My glasses…” GG-chan blinks, and stares at her laptop like it’s something entirely foreign to her. “What is this? What was I–?”
MG-chan grabs her arm too. “Never mind. Run. Just run.”
In my old house it was bottom right… but my apartment now it’s bottom left because of the layout of my kitchen for some reason. Idk why it changed for me, but the bottom right just doesn’t feel right now.
bottom left because it’s the one that changes size so I never have to change any of my habits for cooking different things
Bottom-right is clearly the best burner, because you don’t have to reach as far and the larger burner size heats the pot more evenly. Bottom-left is okay for boiling pasta and stuff like that, but I’ve *tried* making popcorn on the bottom-left burner and it *doesn’t cook right* because that burner is too small.
(results not applicable to stove designs in which the burners are not of different sizes, or designs where the sizes have a different pattern; possibly also not applicable to people significantly taller than 5′3″ or equivalently shorter stoves)
Tags:
#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post #reply via reblog #meme
fun fact! mirrors reflect each color equally, except for green. if you have ever seen a mirror perfectly aligned in front of another mirror, a.k.a. an infinite mirror, you can look through it and see that it becomes greener and greener. therefore, mirrors are technically green!
If you look edgewise through a sheet of glass you see that it’s green because of iron impurities (Google for it). Reducing the iron reduces the green.
Perfectly aligning mirrors to multiply reflections also multiplies the apparent thickness of the glass, and the green tint becomes more apparent the “deeper” each reflection seems to be.
Science is like history: it was never this interesting at school. :-)
Yep! And this is because – I’m sorry to say – mirrors are not a unique or separate substance with magical properties. Mirrors are silvered glass. They have two colors: the color of the silver, and the color of the glass. The “silver” doesn’t have to be silver, though it usually is because mirrors are traditionally made with silver nitrate, because it’s a whitish metal. You can have mirrors silvered in gold or black or red. You take literally any piece of glass, pour a coating of silver on it, seal it, and call it a mirror.
You have to seal it because otherwise it tarnishes and spots. Even though the glass protects it from air, the silver oxidizes just like any other silver, which is why antique mirrors have that funky age-spotted look.
Mirrors used in science are usually pure clear glass with no impurities (so the glass has no color) and are silvered in gold or aluminum, so they are white or gold. A warm-toned mirror would have a pink glass and would make things have a rose-gold look. Phryne Fisher, in the books, has a mirror with pink glass.
(Mirrors silvered in silver – that is, most mirrors you’ve seen – are probably faintly grey from the silver and faintly green from the cheap glass, but it doesn’t need to concern you at all – even if you noticed a strong color, you’re often so used to looking in them that your brain edits out any discrepancy – like how your nose doesn’t get in the way of your vision even though it’s right in front of your eyes all of the time.)
My grandmother had a mirror that was silvered in gold. It was a little disconcerting. The silver in mirrors is why vampires don’t have reflections. (And why the cutlery at Castle Dracula was made of gold.)
It’s true! (Source is The Journal Of I Read It Somewhere One Time, so take it with a truckload of salt, but I’m pretty sure it was a published book and not the internet, so like, only a pickup truck, not a dump truck.)
Watsonian explanation: Silver as an entity and/or concept was upset about being used to pay Judas, so as some kind of compensation God gave it evil-fighting powers, and this is why vampires don’t have reflections in silvered mirrors as well as why werewolves are killed by silver bullets. (Also works for vampires not showing up on film, because silver nitrate, although obviously that isn’t part of the ~*~original folklore~*~ and also doesn’t explain digital cameras.)
Doylist explanation: A lot of things that are traditionally anti-vampire turn out to have antibacterial properties- the only ones I remember are garlic and silver, but I think there were others- so supposedly when anti-vampire treatments helped somebody out of a decline or whatever they were actually helping fight off an infection.
What about a gold mirror with antibacterial soap or something sprayed on it?
And if it’s the silver in the cameras that made them not show up on film, that means that digital is entirely different (unless they use silver in the manufacturing – which i’m pretty sure they don’t – or if some rich person has a silver encased camera – but that still probably wouldn’t work because the lense couldn’t be encased in silver otherwise it wouldn’t work) so basically we need a modern story where the Vampires are having to come up with clever things to stay out of photos where possible because DIGITAL, but there’s that one vampire who photobombs everything and is famous on the internet for it because he’s literally everywhere.
Fun addition: DSLR digital cameras still use mirrors to flip the image into the viewfinder (and do some fun light flippy shit). The Vampire would not show up when you look through the scope but would appear in your finished photo because the mirror gets flipped out of the way when you take an actual picture. Most digital cameras now are mirrorless (there’s no viewfinder, you look directly at the screen to see what you’re photographing). HOWEVER there are some trace amounts of silver in traditional LCD displays (mostly in the receptor strip… which may impact?) and plasma displays contain a lot of silver so the only way you would be able to see the vampire is if you printed a picture out on paper.
Right. This was supposed to be a DS9 sorting, and it got… a little out of hand.
I blame the very complex @sortinghatchats (not really.) Anyway, their system gets very deep very fast, so I recommend their breakdown of the basics, but basically, their character analysis system gives everyone TWO houses.
Your Primary house is your MOTIVATION. It’s why you do what you do
GRYFFINDOR: I do what I feel is right (MORAL)
RAVENCLAW: I do what I decide is correct (LOGICAL)
HUFFLEPUFF: I do what helps my community (PEOPLE MATTER)
SLYTHERIN: I do what helps me/my inner circle (FRIENDS MATTER)
Your Secondary house is your METHOD. It’s your toolbox, how you like to get stuff done;
GRYFFINDOR: Charge! React! Smash the system!
RAVENCLAW: Plan, make tools, gather information.
HUFFLEPUFF: Community-build, grind for points, call in favors
SLYTHERIN: Transform, adapt, find the loophole
So Hermione Granger would be a Gryffindor Primary / Ravenclaw Secondary. She fights for her moral cause by gathering knowledge and learning skills.
Now let’s talk about Elim Garak. What did I get myself into.
Elim Garak wants you to look at him and see a double Slytherin pretending to be a double Hufflepuff. And his Puff performance is really just the thinnest, most pathetic layer possible. Barely enough for plausible deniability. Lots of “Whhhaaa, lil’old ME? A poor simple TAILOR who wants NOTHING MORE than to make BEAUTIFUL CLOTHES for the people of this FINE STATION? That top secret security clearance code was… something I happened to OVERHEAR. While hemming PANTS.”
Yeah. You are supposed to dismiss that immediately, look beneath “plain, simple Garak” and see the Obsidian Order operative. You are supposed to look at Elim Garak and see a suave, dangerous chameleon who is always lying, always looking out for himself, very International-Man-of-Mystery, very classical Slytherin. (And kind of a flattering self-portrait, if we’re being honest.)
But that’s not real either.
When we see Garak’s real Slytherin Secondary – it’s terrifying. Because it’s subtle. When Garak is really lying, really manipulating, you won’t know it until long after the game is played. We see him maneuver Captain Sisko into assassinating an ambassador byfeeding him just the right information at just the right time, ramping up the stakes, giving him space, playing into the sunk-cost fallacy, persuading Sisko to bend the rules just a little bit… and a little bit more…
Garak is a master at this. He gets Julian Bashir to run a dangerous errand in “The Wire” by deliberately pinging his hero tendencies – and dropping the name of the relevant system into the conversation, making it look like the natural slip-up of a sick, dying man. Julian goes after Tain for him, and goes after Dukat for him. Garak once deflected an attempt on his life by planting a second bomb himself.
He’s got one hell of a Ravenclaw secondary too. This is Garak the hacker, Garak the codebreaker, Garak who can re-wire a subspace transmitter under truly adverse conditions. But I think that his Ravenclaw is a tool that’s been trained into him – it’s not close to his identity, it’s not close to his heart. When Garak thinks “Ravenclaw Secondary” he thinks of the borderline omniscient Enabran Tain, and knows that his own Ravenclaw is only a pale imitation. Enabran Tain himself is a surprisingly straightforward Slytherin/Ravenclaw – but Garak’s got such a twisted, messy relationship with him that it’s spilled into the way he relates to Ravenclaw Secondaries in general.
But. Garak is not the Obsidian Order’s best assassin. He’s not their best spy. He’s not their best code-breaker. He is their best interrogator. So what does that mean???
Interrogation styles + Hogwarts Houses
I’ll admit this question lead me down a sort of research rabbit hole. I know all kinds of things about interrogators and interrogation techniques now, and it’ll probably screw up my algorithms for a little bit. But I’ll talk in terms of Hogwarts houses and fictional characters, because that’s the lens I’m looking though.
You can definitely interrogate with all the Secondaries. There’s the Gryffindor approach: just steamroll over your subject with conviction and energy. (Batman, Jack Bauer). There’s the Ravenclaw method: cold, controlled, omniscient, your subject is simply a puzzle, a Rubik’s Cube to be solved. (The Stazi ‘hero’ of The Lives of Others, most villainous interrogators.) There’s even the favored Slytherin approach, where you stage things so the subject doesn’t even know they’re being interrogated. (Gus Fring of Breaking Bad interrogating people under the guise of cooking with them, or explaining a job to them, or serving them food. Marina of The Magicians pretending to be an overwhelmed new recruit in order to vet Julia.)
But the more I read about the very best, most successful real-world interrogators, the more I read about sympathy, empathy, respect, compassion, friendliness. Good interrogators are easy to talk to. They want to understand where you’re coming from. They’ll give you coffee, or scotch. They’ll watch TV with you. “I totally get why you did it, hell, I would have done exactly the same thing in your situation. I want to help you out. You’re not really in trouble. I’m just confused – I think my boss got this one part wrong. Wait, before we get into that, a funny thing happened to me on the way to work.” The current thinking says that star interrogators are Hufflepuffs. Or at least Slytherin Secondaries who are really good at looking like Hufflepuffs. There aren’t too many straightforward fictional examples – Will Graham of Hannibal, maybe?
But this is how Garak interrogates. He prides himself on never touching his subjects – he doesn’t need to. All he needs is a tiny bit of Cardassian threat in the background. When he successfully breaks Odo, it’s because he comes at the situation as a friend. (And the way he justifies it as “just business” matches up with my research.) Garak is charming, and funny, and really good at understanding people. I also think his general look helps him interrogate. Most high-ranking Cardassians look like Dukat: dark hair, dark eyes, tall. It’s probably an “aristocratic” thing: our fascist space lizards definitely messed around with genetic augmentation / eugenics at some point. But compact little Garak? With his bright blue eyes? Lower class. (After all, his mom was a housekeeper.)
I bet Garak leveraged that vibe into approachable and trustworthy, used it to seem more on a level with his Bajoran detainees. Imagine what a relief Garak would be, after talking to Dukat for five hours.
So. Is Garak a Slytherin Secondary with a really good Hufflepuff model, or a Hufflepuff Secondary with a really good Slytherin model? I thought about that one for a while. And I’ve come down on the side of Hufflepuff.
It’s just. He keeps up that Hufflepuff outside the interrogation booth, when it isn’t useful. Garak creates communities, almost involuntarily, even when it’s a bad idea. (Getting close to Julian and Ziyal wasrisky.) It bothers Garak that his friendships are so real. He hates that the dirty looks the Bajorans give him bother him so much. He has a huge network of contacts, still. And his problem-solving fallback is not Slyth transformation, but Puff diligence. Stare at the detainee for four hours. Assassinate the politician by spending six months pruning bushes at the embassy. He’s “a very good tailor” after all. I can’t help but think that a more Slytherin Garak would have at least been tempted to make a quick buck doing odd jobs for Quark. Or apolitical Odo, who he clearly respects. But no – Garak sets himself up with a job that requires a down-to-earth Hufflepuff work ethic.
In “Purgatory’s Shadow” Garak thinks that his life is really, truly threatened. And he responds by asking for help. He does it in an absurdly underhanded Slytherin way, but. When he is in trouble, Garak phones a friend. Watch him. That is always his first instinct.
[The one Secondary Garak just absolutely does not understand is Gryffindor. He respects Gryffindor Secondaries, and he recognizes that people like Kira and Dax have them – and then he just gives those people a lot of space.]
Figuring out Garak’s primary was actually pretty easy. Because before he is anything else, Elim Garak is a Cardassian patriot. That motivation is so clear and so loud that it cuts though everything else no problem. He’d die for Cardassia. He’d let Julian die for Cardassia. He’d commit genocide for Cardassia. And if there was a single Gryffindor bone in Garak’s entire body, he would have felt at least a little guilty about that last one. But Garak seems to distrust the entire concept of morality, the way a lot of Loyalist Primaries do. “A real intelligence agent has no ego, no conscience, no remorse, only a sense of professionalism.” As far as I can figure out, that’s his credo.
But you know what Garak does feel guilty about doing?
Helping the Federation fight Cardassia.
Even though he knows “Cardassia” is a Dominion-controlled puppet state, even though he knows he’s doing what’s best for his planet in the long run, when he’s decrypting messages that help Federation ships kill Cardassian citizens, he gets debilitating panic attacks.
But Garak is not loyal to the Cardassian High Command. He’s not even loyal to the Obsidian Order, not really. He’s loyal to an ideal, to an almost poetic sense of what Cardassia really is, that has more to do with art and literature and tradition than it does with politics. And he is never able to shake this feeling, even though at a certain point I think he could have sold his soul to be a Slytherin Primary, loyal only to Enabran Tain.
Because if you want to talk about Garak, you have to talk about why he is living in exile. He gives Julian three different explanations: he got sloppy, he got lazy, and he sabotaged himself. I’m sure Garak has believed all of these himself, at one point or another. But I think he’s too much of a solid Hufflepuff Secondary to get sloppy or lazy, so I’m going to look at the last one. What happens when the *real* Cardassia shifts too far away from the *ideal* Cardassia that Garak is loyal to? When families like the Dukats gain too much power? I think Garak starts making mistakes, because he can’t reconcile that crack in his Primary. Just like when he makes mistakes later on, forced to fight his Cardassian countrymen.
tl;dr
Garak is a double Hufflepuff, loyal to a sort of ideal Cardassia. He can model one hell of a Ravenclaw secondary, and one hell of a Slytherin secondary, but in the end they are not as close to his soul – not as important to who he is as a person – as that Hufflepuff. But he’s still a spy. So he constructs a very careful performance that he wears… most of the time. And that performance is an exaggerated double Slytherin pretending to be an exaggerated double Hufflepuff.
So yeah. I am saying that Garak is a double Hufflepuff who pretends to be a double Hufflepuff. And I think that would make him smile.
JULIAN: Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t?
GARAK: My dear doctor, they’re all true.
JULIAN: Even the lies?
GARAK: Especially the lies.
Also, thank you @featherquillpen for the charming episode write-ups. They were a source of inspiration.
Tags:
#Star Trek #DS9 #meta #interesting #sorting #long post
both Ray Ban and Donut Mouth are quiet for a long moment. homer takes the opportunity to stretch a little, and to feel the hands on his watch. he wonders what is happening to the rest of them—he knows he wasn’t the only one who got booked.
the stupid part of all this is that homer really hadn’t done anything wrong. he hadn’t even shown up until after the fire, because calliope was teaching him guitar. they were going to start a band. homer was going to write the lyrics and she was going to sing them. thalia and cleo even said they’d join. homer and the muses. it was going to be dope.
“i am just struggling to understand why we never got reports of public disturbance,” Ray Ban mutters. “they fucked that whole café, man.”
homer shrugs. “delphi’s no snitch,” he says. “anyway, she and saph and manny cleaned it up.”
“manny helped?”
“of course manny helped. he made the mess, didn’t he?”
“well, so did paris, and he didn’t help.”
“yeah, so like, you kind of see why everybody wants to beat him up all the time.”
Donut Mouth gives a long sigh. “all right,” he says. “so—what happened after they fought at the oracle?”
“well, word kind of spread to the administration about the whole thing, and they got called in for a disciplinary hearing. i don’t know if they were really in danger of getting kicked out or not but that’s definitely what they told manny, so he was pretty freaked out. i kind of thought he had nothing to worry about, because the head of the disciplinary committee was an alpha sig when he was in undergrad, but—”
“hold up, hold up,” Ray Ban interrupts. “if nobody snitched, how did the disciplinary committee find out?”
homer rolls his eyes. “haven’t you ever heard of twitter?”
—
folks, pals, and readers alike:
many updates this week because, to quote kanye, my life is dope and i do dope shit. i know everyone is always like, “SENIORS RULE” but tbh i was kind of like, w/e about being a senior bc seniority means next year i have to uhhhhh get a job, and wtf kind of job is a disaster like me gonna get? two days ago i tried to make fresh orange juice and i somehow managed to break the burner on the house stove. i didn’t even — you don’t even need the oven to make orange juice?
(don’t worry, i live with athena metis, the goddess of being the best at everything, and she fixed it. i don’t want to embarrass her bc she’s extremely modest (lol) but it was vERY sexy, plaid shirt all rolled up to her elbows. it’s extremely lucky that she hasn’t settled down with a nice boo bc when she does there will be no one to fix my stove. :( i’m going to finally have to learn how to live competently as an adult, which: no thank you!!!!!! what’s that, chief? a hard pass??? a hard pass.)
a n y w a y, did y’all hear that paris got his ass HANDED TO HIM by manny atreus this week? i was there, it is true what they’re saying. please see below a brief collection of the most iconic dunks.
also, if you haven’t seen, whoever runs @ParisTheCoward is like, a deeply mean person but also VERY funny. sorry, paris, but to be fair you did throw like 6 mugs at manny’s head and then my beautiful moonlight girlf-in-the-making had to sweep up all the glass, so. kinda brought it on urself, buddy.
obvi i love the true light of my life, helen spartowski, & value her opinions, but even i gotta admit it was embarrassing behavior, on paris’s part. at least manford stuck around to clean up.
he’s actually like, really sensitive?
ok, that’s all the news. also i wrote this:
31
god must be real and she must love us, to have given us you. across the counter, learning forward with a smile to ask what kind of milk we want with a voice so sweet i forget to ask for sugar.
the way you laugh, it’s my whole heart lighting up. i think you can hear it beating. i take one look at your face and i’m helpless to say anything. i can’t even breathe.
my tongue is heavy in my mouth, silent. my skin is on fire, buzzing, everywhere you look. i can’t see straight. i can’t see at all. there’s a drumming in my ears; my own stupid heart.
you ask again what i want and i can only stand there, trembling. i feel brand-new, and clumsy. i say: “sugar.” i say, “please, give me something sweet.”
ugh, right??? love is unbearable.
TO CONCLUDE:
am i Team Manny Atreus actually???
it’s called “31” bc that’s literally the number of drafts i went through about this GLINT OF STARSHINE but none of them were able to capture the fact that the only explanation for her existence is that there’s at least 1 god and she loves me.
anyway not to BRAG but YA GIRL GOT KISSED BYE
xoxoxoxo
saff
–
“full offense, saff, but what the fuck?” helen asked as soon as sappho picked up the phone. she kicked her feet up onto darius’s lap; he rolled his eyes, but engaged the lock on his wheelchair so that he’d be a stable footrest for her, which was why darius was the best. they were supposed to be actually working on the campaign today, but as per usual they’d all been distracted immediately and hadn’t even begun yet.
not for nothing but sappho was pretty sure they would never manage to leave the village they’d started in, which was a shame because her character would kick ass in battle, nun or no.
“what the fuck what?” sappho returned cheerfully. “are you jealous i finally got delphi to kiss me? because you had your chance. it’s too late now.”
“you’re TEAM MANNY ATREUS?” helen cried, not taking the bait, which indicated she really was upset. there were few things that helen loved talking about more than how much most people loved and adored her, sappho especially. “i can’t believe you put a link to the Coward twitter in a fucking NEWSLETTER.”
“it’s funny, melon.”
“it’s not funny! who runs it?”
“you think if i knew who ran it i wouldn’t have also put that in the newsletter, just for the drama?”
“saffohhhhhhh.”
it was hard to be the most beautiful person in any room. sappho knew this, because she had watched helen stand in line at the DMV and turn down dates from five different people, with steadily decreasing patience. but it meant that she was constantly needing reassurance that sappho did actually love her, helen, as a person, which was fine because sappho loved nothing more than to express her feelings at a very high volume.
still: “babe, you know that i am, in fact, team helen melon. i don’t care if both paris and manny drive off a cliff, i’m just saying that if i had to choose between the two of them, i dunno, i’m feeling kind of swayed by manny’s tears.”
helen was quiet for a second, then said, “he really cried?”
“oh my god, like a fountain,” sappho laughed. “i had to kick him out of the café because he was ruining the vibe i was trying to lay down with delphi.”
“clearly he didn’t ruin it,” helen said slyly, a grin in her voice. “bow-chicka-wow-wow.”
sappho grinned. the rest of the group began to trickle in from the kitchen, hands full of snacks and beer. AC and PK had come with bree, trailing along kind of awkwardly behind her; it was cute. AC was wearing a muscle tee that said BRO DO U EVEN LIFT? with a picture of disney’s mulan carrying buckets of water in her shoulders. sappho had always had kind of a low-grade crush on PK, the kind that meant nothing and was just a pleasant way to daydream during the only class they’d ever shared together, which was in underwater basket-weaving, for an art credit. “don’t be mad,” she cajoled helen. “team melonhead, ride or die.”
“don’t call me melonhead,” scolded helen, but the annoyance in her voice was obviously put on, and sappho had been forgiven. “and leave my love life out of your newsletters.”
“i will not, your love life is the most interesting thing happening on this campus,” sappho laughed. “but i will keep Paris the Coward to retweets only.”
“you’re a fucking menace,” helen sighed, then made a kissy sound and hung up.
emi kicked sappho’s feet off darius’s lap and replaced them with her own. “was that Heavyweight Champion Helen Spartowski?” she asked, a little meanly. “i heard she threw down with manny after paris ran away.”
sappho rolled her eyes. “yeah, she did,” she lied. “one-punch KO. you should have seen it. it would have had you shaking in your timberlands.”
she had never quite been able to get at what was at the heart of emi’s irritation with not just greek life but helen in particular — she thought maybe it had something to do with the increasingly impenetrable relationship between emi and olly, who had come to school attached at the hip and now only saw each other at parties and, presumably, at home. but chrys was kind of dating olly hunter and emi didn’t seem to have a problem with her, so who knew. emi was a mystery.
“she should come to dukes up, then,” emi grinned. “show off a little.”
“i am not allowing helen to join athena’s fucking fight club,” sappho laughed. “fuck off.”
“now that would be a fight worth watching,” heff mused, shouldering his way passed AC with a kind of friendly bullying. “i think you’d be surprised. helen is absolutely the type to fight dirty.”
“there’s no such thing as a clean fight,” emi answered, grinning kind of gleefully.
“anyway at dukes’ the only rule is—”
“don’t call the cops,” everyone chimed in at once.
So, in the teleportation apocalypse world, the magic system involves performing a sequence of mental actions which correspond with, essentially, characters in a magical alphabet which can be chained together into magical programs. Magic is all about instantaneous effects before and after which mundane physics apply as usual; it can’t do things like “make this item magical” or “alert me any time someone enters this room”, but it can do things like “transform this item into a different substance” or “create a tripwire at the entrance to this room”.
The magic system was originally created with the assumption that users would have access to the documentation. The original users all died off millions of years before humans existed, though, and so nobody has access to the documentation. As such, while humans had access to magic, their access was essentially just a matter of noticing by trial and error that particular sequences of mental actions produced weird effects. Notably, since dangerous spells vastly outnumber safe ones, trying to invent new spells was an activity far likelier to end with the inventor dying in a dramatic fashion, and as such, while spell development happened, it was very slow.
For a long time, different societies each had their own distinct collections of the few spells they knew that were (a) safe to use and (b) did things which were useful rather than things like “produce a weird smell briefly”. But over time some travelers started writing compilations of spells from different places, and it eventually became possible to pull together a pretty robust library of the different spells which had been discovered. Still, since spells were generally put together on the basis of more-or-less random combinations of inputs rather than any genuine understanding of the system, while they were sometimes useful (e.g. for setting things on fire, or for creating otherwise-hard-to-acquire materials, or the like), they weren’t generally well-optimized for usefulness.
They were all told to not share their spells around further, and most of them followed that, but the teleportation spell’s recipient nonetheless started sharing the spell around. She gave it to a few friends of hers; they passed it along further; and eventually the spell was more-or-less uncontainably leaked. Its creator tried to hunt down everyone who had it, but gave up once they started wising up to her being after them and scattering to all sorts of different countries, because with the magic system being instantaneous in the way it was there wasn’t really a good way to track them at that point.
And so, all around the world, there started being people with access to an untraceable easy-to-cast long-distance teleportation spell. Word about how to cast it kept spreading throughout populations, with no easy way to curb the spread; and things started breaking. Armies with the spell could pop into enemy rulers’ homes, bypassing all city walls and opposing armies and other defenses, and kill them in their sleep before installing themselves as the new rulers; thieves with the spell could grab piles of valuables and then vanish off into other countries to sell them off and be rich; bandits could steal farmers’ grain out of storage and get away cleanly and untraceably; et cetera. It became generally very easy to engage in and get away with large quantities of antisocial behavior which would otherwise be more difficult and be likely to get one killed. And so, globally, societies started destabilizing and collapsing.
It’s been about two centuries since then, and while society is now more-or-less functional again, it’s very much rebuilt in a manner shaped by the spell. Governments are secretive about their members’ identities and about where they spend their time, for fear of assassins; people are generally very secretive about where they keep their valuables, with any items kept in public assumed to be communal goods that anyone can grab and put wherever is most useful; various organizations attempt to run international law-enforcement firms which keep lists of known criminals and kill them on sight, in order to disincentivize the “act antisocially and then teleport a few countries away”; et cetera.
This last part, the details of what the world is like post-teleportation-apocalypse, is the part I’ve been stuck on for the past several years and which is holding me back from writing stories set in the world. I’ve got a decent big-picture sense of things at this point, but I need to draw in a lot more detail than I currently have before I can really envision the setting in sufficient detail to write in it. But once I’ve got that detail I feel like it’s going to make for a very fun setting for espionage-focused stories of some sort.
Then the magical girls world. This one actually has a whole big multiverse, and the rules of the multiverse-in-general inform the rules of the individual sub-parts thereof, so I’m going to start with that.
There’s a multiverse. It’s arranged in a star structure, with each of about 200 worlds being connected to a single central world but not connected to each other. Each of those 200 worlds, but not the central world, has a gigantic native reservoir of magic, which expresses itself in a fashion that varies on a per-world basis; some have magical creatures like dragons, some have magic be innate to humans, some have magic be external to humans but controllable via appropriate rituals, some have their magic totally inert, et cetera. Magic isn’t consumed on use; it’s just, while being used, unavailable for other uses. So there’s no decay-over-time in worlds with dragons or whatever, there’s just a cap on how many dragons could in theory exist. The per-world magic reservoir is huge enough that that limitation is rarely relevant to anything. Crucially, while the magic’s capabilities are nearly limitless given a sufficient quantity of it thrown at a task, one absolute limit is that it’s impossible for magic to interact with any worlds to which its own housing world isn’t connected; and, furthermore, impossible for it to do anything between worlds except for bridging the spatial disconnect. So transportation between the central world and a noncentral world is possible, as is creation of a stable portal therebetween, but (for example) remotely using magic to bomb out a world is not possible; you’d need to step into the target world for that.
These limitations make the central world a natural chokepoint. Whoever can block it up and make it unsafe to travel through can, in so doing, control every bit of multiversal transportation to go on. So, several millennia ago, an evil queen who stole all the previously-free-floating magic from her homeworld in order to make herself inherently magical to a ridiculously overpowered degree walked into the central world, displaced the trade consortium which had previously been using the place, and turned the world into a hub from which to systematically conquer the multiverse, eventually with the help of her descendants, who she imbued with a small echo of her own magical power. At first, the conquests were performed chiefly through her own overpowered magic; but eventually she started needing to stay in the central world full-time to keep it secure from counter-invasion by anyone in the multiverse who she’d made an enemy of, and so the conquests started falling to her magically-empowered descendants and the dozens of worlds’ resources they could bring to bear against each individual world they attacked.
So this faction, ruled by the evil queen, started invading another world. This particular world’s local magic took two forms: various magical creatures and materials around the place, and humans being able to magically bind things together, keeping the basic shape of one but with significant influence leaking through from the other. This could be used, for example, to merge oneself with a magical creature (gaining access to that creature’s abilities, at the cost of mental scrambling and value drift since one’s mind will be merged with its as well), or to merge a sword with a magical stone to imbue the sword with the stone’s magical properties, or the like. And they used this to fight back against the invading forces, but they were pretty horribly outmatched, and within a few years practically the whole planet had been conquered.
There was a particular kind of magical creature, local to a relatively small region of the world, which could emit a magical effect which, would, if other creatures were exposed to it for an extended time, hijack control of their bodies and minds, as well as magically altering their forms for greater usefulness to tasks such as “help build hives” and “grab and immobilize further creatures for me to turn into my minions”. These creatures weren’t too dangerous to humans generally, since they needed days of blasting magic at something before they got control of it and that required reasonably direct line of effect, but once in a while there would be an incident of one sneaking into somebody’s house, hiding there for a few weeks slowly building up control, and eventually turning them into a warped monster before getting discovered and killed off by the rest of the locals; so it was known that they were capable of dangerousness to humans.
So one particular group in that region decided, in a last-ditch effort to toss the invaders out, to attempt the following scheme: first, one of their members would bind a creature of this sort to themselves. Second, they would bind themselves to the sun, keeping its physical form but retaining their newly-gained magical powers “convert creatures towards which I’ve got reasonably direct line of effect into my minions”. Third, they would grab control of all the invaders they could and force them to either leave or kill each other.
It was a well-intentioned plan, and they even made token efforts towards ensuring that the value-drift issue wouldn’t get in the way (picking the most genuinely altruistic person they could find, and spending a day talking to her after she’d bound herself to the controls-other-creatures creature to make sure she was still herself before she bound herself to the sun), but they weren’t nearly as safety-conscious as they should have been (because their area was in the process of being invaded and they were afraid that, if they took any more time, they’d be caught themselves), and things went wrong as a result. In fact the merger had shifted her priorities, and while she still in some sense was altruistic, her priority had shifted from “help everyone attain happiness and flourishing” to specifically helping creatures she’d taken control of, and even there the goal was less anything resembling the sort of flourishing valued by humans and more about building gigantic elaborate hives to live in and acquiring more creatures for her to take control of.
So, about a week after that, people all over the world (especially in the sunny parts of it) started turning into monsters, grabbing other people, dragging them into sunny regions, and generally rapidly spreading into an out-of-control monstrous force. This successfully repelled the invaders, but it also turned the vast majority of the world’s population into puppets of the sun who were hostile to all life on the planet which didn’t want to become puppets of the sun. Societal collapse ensued.
A bunch of the invaders were caught in the initial wave of people-turning-into-sun-monsters, but overall as a force they were relatively unaffected, because unlike the rest of the world they had access to good global-scale communications and were able to respond to the first few incidents with a general call to retreat from the planet back to the central world. So most of them withdrew at that point. However, a sizable sub-fraction instead went “actually, no, we may have been invading this world but that doesn’t mean we’re okay just leaving all these people to suffer a literal planet-scale apocalypse, we’re going to stay and help”. And so they did. They helped hordes of refugees pile into caves, closed the caves off so that the sun-monsters couldn’t get in, and generally did a lot to help people make it through the disaster. Other bunches of humans did similar things on their own, without assistance from the ex-invaders, albeit with more difficulty.
Over the next few hundred years, most of the entirely-non-magic-assisted groups of humans belowground died off, because getting food without safe access to sunlight turns out to be really hard. But many groups had help from the ex-invader magical girls and their descendants, and many others managed to bind themselves to some variety of magical underground life in order to increase their chances of survival, and things more-or-less stabilized.
Cut to a few thousand years later. The magical girl who was leading of one of the underground civilizations decided to make an attempt at returning to the surface, as various civilizations occasionally did. Historically, those efforts tended to fail within a few weeks, with the sun-monsters coming down, dismantling whatever sun-protective architecture the aboveground group was using, and proceeding to do their best to get into the underground region the people had come from and grab everyone from there as well. But this one went differently, for two reasons. First, this particular civilization had an exceptionally high population of magical girls, and so was particularly well-equipped to drive off sun-monster incursions. Second, their leader, in specific, had magical power over clouds, and so was able to, instead of relying on protective architecture, set up a layer of eternally-present protective cloud-cover overhead.
So they were able to return aboveground. Once they were stably established there, their leader proceeded to start slowly expanding the layer of cloud cover, using an array of artifacts to bolster her ability to do so since her personal magical ability wasn’t enough to keep things up at that scale. She systematically made contact with every underground civilization whose cave she’d cloud-covered over and told them “hey, it’s safe to come back aboveground now”, and built her small civilization up into a full-on kingdom.
Such is the state of things in the current era. She’s been ruling for about seventy years now, during which the cloud cover has continually expanded, albeit increasingly slowly. As the borders have expanded, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep the place thoroughly defended from sun-monster incursions, but it’s nonetheless done well enough that they only do significant damage once in a while, not regularly. Additionally, sometimes the underground civilizations they discover have had sufficient binding-induced value drift over the course of their survival efforts that their populations aren’t able to get along well with the less-value-drifted humans; they tend to get magically sealed into their caves to continue living in isolation from the aboveground kingdom, but sometimes that fails for one reason or another and a crisis results. This is the status quo when the plot begins.
For this world, unlike the teleportation one, I’ve got a pretty robust plot worked out; I just need to figure out enough character details to be able to write it. To briefly summarize its premise, the plot involves the princess of one of the sealed-for-excessive-value-drift dungeons sneaking out, meeting up with the princess of the aboveground kingdom (daughter of the person who does the cloud-cover stuff), and going “hey, actually we’d be totally able to peacefully be part of human society, sure we devour people’s emotions but we don’t do it in an antisocial way”, and the two of them becoming friends (and eventually girlfriends), fixing the various broken parts of the world both within and outside of the cloud kingdom, and generally having adventures together. I plan them to start out going up against relatively small-scale antagonists, like other local magic-users, but eventually needing to go up against larger-scale threats, including the sun and its forces and, past even that, the multiversal empire whose attempted conquest kicked off this whole sequence of events.
Tags:
#storytime #story ideas I will never write #(kind of on the border between those category tags) #apocalypse cw #long post
Emma: Okay so like. The most fridge horror thing about the triwizard tournament is that they’re like “we added an age restriction!”
Emma: Not “we raised it!” Just “we added one!”
Emma: Which implies that previously, 11 YEAR OLDS COULD ENTER
Emma: Like I doubt they were ever chosen bc someone whose magical repotoir consists solely of “swish and flick” is not the best candidate for their school but what the FUCK
Meghan: AU where the Tournament happens 1st year, the other Champions are the same (17) and throw the whole competition making sure Harry doesn’t fucking die. They even let him take the Cup bc he’s so tiny and adorably earnest…
Meghan: Obviously that backfires, but Cedric isn’t dead at least.
Oh, no, TINY HARRY in the Triwizard Tournament. That’s AWFUL.
I love it.
AU where the Tournament happens in 1st year? I suppose Quirrell is still the DADA prof, but you could actually have him as the Muggle Studies professor still if you wanted Fake!Moody as the DADA prof. I think Scabbers ran away before Percy could give him to Ron as a pet, if you wanted to have Peter also helping Voldemort. (Oh, man, this is a nightmare. It’s great.)
You could only make this work in fanfiction, but I would LOVE to try and combine books 1, 3, and 4. (I don’t think Lucius would have thrown the Diary into the mix of this, so we thankfully don’t have a basilisk slithering around too, and I don’t think Dumbledore would bring the Philosopher’s Stone into this. Although you could add those for the ULTIMATE nightmare scenario.)
I’m thinking like, “Harry, you’re going to wizard school! And you’ve been tossed into a death game where all your competition is 17! And since your photo was in the paper, your mass-murderer godfather escaped prison! And now the dementors have been stationed around the school to keep this Tournament from going even more horribly, horribly wrong!”
I’d love to combine this with the Veela!Viktor & Werewolf!Fleur AU (obvs if Viktor takes Hermione to the Yule Ball, it’s purely so Harry can have friends there). Throw Remus Lupin into the mix as another DADA prof? With Fake!Moody? If you wanted to pull a “give Hogwarts more staff” AU just to add to the chaos, so you can have both (evil!)Quirrell and Burbage as Muggle Studies professors.
Oh man, your readers would be screaming at you the entire time, because tiny Harry would be surrounded by so many danger elements and they would have no idea how everything combined would unfold. Cedric, Viktor, and Fleur would probably be mild audience!inserts for this fic, doing everything they can to keep the littlest Champion safe (because clearly this is a plot to kill the BWL) even though he’s insisting that he can do this himself and doesn’t need help.
“GET THE BABY BOY OUT OF THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO NOW, PLEASE,” says the audience. “Lol, no,” says the author.
Knell you have an evil, evil mind, and I’m dying. (I am laughing over the idea of Victor Krum, international Quidditch star with magical love powers, taking an eleven year old girl who doesn’t care about sports as his date to the Yule ball, as a favor to the tiny eleven year old champion who does care about quidditch. Ron called first dibs as Harry’s date and regrets it.)
Throwing in Sirius is such a terrible awful move. Everyone is talking about the mass murderer who broke out of jail and the sinister omen of death spotted during all the tasks and tongues are waggling like crazy.
Prof, that is absolutely the picture I am going for here. Viktor Krum is the ultimate gentleman to his date (a twelve-year-old girl who has no idea who he is) and is having a great time listening to her chatter about her first-year classes. Veela!Viktor and little!Hermione dancing together is melting my heart.
Can you imagine, Cedric and tiny Harry in front of the Triwizard Cup in the center of the maze, and Sirius Black shows up? (After people have been gossiping like mad, egged on by Skeeter, over the terrible death omens looming over the Boy-Who-Lived.) Let’s say that the Cup was always intended to be a Portkey back to the beginning of the maze, so Sirius overhears this piece of information and realizes that the Cup is the perfect opportunity for something to go terribly wrong. But Harry is obviously not going to listen to “Mass-Murderer Sirius Black” desperately telling him not to take the Cup.
Sirius tries to tackle Harry, but they both end up in the graveyard. (Cedric is panicking back in the maze.) Peter and Sirius recognize each other immediately. Harry has no idea what’s going on.
Then you have to choose how you want the rest of this AU to go. (Voldemort obviously gets to give the Classic HP Final Confrontation Explanation of what’s been going down behind-the-scenes all year.) Does Voldemort get resurrected in Harry’s first year? Or is Voldemort’s resurrection foiled by Harry and Sirius somehow and put off for some future plot?
Either way, I think it’s highly necessary that Sirius punches someone in the face. If Voldemort is resurrected, then it’s definitely Voldemort. If Voldemort isn’t resurrected, then it’s probably Peter. These fists were made for punching and that’s just what they’ll do. “STAY AWAY FROM MY GODSON.” *CRACK*
If Voldemort is resurrected, then Sirius probably gets to witness Harry’s Priori Incantatum with Voldemort! (Would a Priori Incantatum work with Peter if Harry doesn’t get to duel Voldemort? Since Peter used Voldemort’s wand to kill Cedric?) OH MAN, THE DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS PAIN OF SIRIUS BLACK GETTING TO SEE A REMNANT OF JAMES AND LILY POTTER. I WOULD DIE. I would be FACE-DOWN on the FLOOR. People would be poking me like, “LK, are you okay?” And I’d be like, “Absolutely not.”
In either scenario, I think everyone escapes. Peter and Voldemort escape. Sirius picks up Harry and just books it. (Maybe Sirius has Harry’s Firebolt for some reason? Would Sirius still send Harry the Firebolt? I know the Firebolt didn’t come out until 1994, but the idea of an 11-year-old getting a Firebolt is so funny. Hermione has no idea why everyone at the Yule Ball is freaking out over Harry’s new broomstick; it can’t be that good, surely.)
Harry ends up stranded out in the countryside with the godfather who never actually betrayed his parents, getting to know Sirius, and is probably actually really relieved to have an adult handling the situation (Sirius is… not the best adult, but Harry is eleven here) and to get some family. Voldemort might be back and that’s awful, but Harry’s actually kind of having an alright time? He’s away from all the stress of Hogwarts and the Tournament for once.
Meanwhile, Cedric Diggory has alerted everyone back at Hogwarts that Sirius Black has kidnapped Harry Potter and they are LOSING THEIR MINDS.
I love this concept, and I wonder what an equally speedrunny sequel would look like. Books 2 and 5 seem like they’d mash up pretty well?
Harry comes back in September, and no one believes his story about what happened at the end of the last task, because it’s frankly pretty unbelievable. Also he’s apparently a serial killer apologist now? Dumbledore’s backing his story, yeah, but the Prophet’s been saying for months that Dumbledore’s a liar.
And that’s before the petrifications start to happen and it comes out that Harry’s a parselmouth.
The kids close to Harry’s age mostly shun him as evil, but also concerned older Hufflepuffs start to approach him, saying that they don’t know exactly what happened over the summer but Sirius Black is not a person to look up to, and they know Harry’s just a kid but petrifying people to impress your serial killer idol is not okay actually.
On top of all that, Umbridge is the DADA teacher, and she’s a lot more intimidating to a twelve-year-old.
(something DA-like could still happen. Being twelve, Harry’s too young to be teaching it himself, even if people were willing to be taught by the probable Heir of Slytherin. But he talks about Umbridge to Sirius and Sirius talks to Lupin and Lupin knows the castle, he can sneak in if he needs to help these kids that he got attached to last year. And yes, sneaking is required, because Umbridge does not want filthy halfbreeds in her castle.)
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #fanfic #Harry Potter #long post #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
all i am saying is that he would ostensibly be the easiest one to take on in a fight given that he’s like three feet tall and has led a life of (physical) leisure compared to all of the others due to his standing as a gentlehobbit
legolas, aragorn, and gimli are all used to combat, sam works as a gardener, merry and pippin often gallivant off and get into mischief so they have the advantage of experience in whatever it is they’ve gotten up to/would possibly fight dirty, gandalf is gandalf so while weapons are out of the question i suppose that depends on if magic is involved. i don’t think i could take him without magic even if he IS old because he’s a very large guy, but maybe
it would be my knuckles against Frodo’s baby soft poet hands, plus i’ve got the additional height and fighting experience. i just think that he would be the easiest to win against in hand-to-hand combat out of the rest of them. also he isn’t real so he can’t offer a rebuttal to my claim
this has nothing to do with WANTING to fight Frodo, i just think he would be easiest for me to beat in a fight with no weapons. unless he utilized his very large feet, but i think he’s too polite to do that because it’s a fist fight and that would be considered playing dirty
First off, Pippin has it coming, so you won’t be fighting your conscience at the same time.
Secondly, Pippin is a spoiled rich kid. He’s no less gentry than Frodo is, but Frodo works out and is shown to have better stamina, at least at the outset. Pippin is also both the stupidest and the slowest of the hobbits. They both nearly beat one (1) troll, so that’s comparable, but Pippin appears not to have got a single hit in against the orcs that captured them while Merry was cutting off hands like a boss. Pippin also straight-up tell Bergil that he’s not a fighter.
Also there’s a nonzero chance that Frodo will just straight up curse you (if the guilt of fighting Frodo isn’t enough if a curse by itself).
And, of course, if you try to fight Frodo, you will 100% end up fighting Sam, and he will wreck you (and you’ll deserve it, you monster)
Also: if you fight Frodo you’ll have a very angry Sam & possibly also the entire Fellowship to deal with BUT if you fight Pippin they will probably cheer you on.
So here’s the thing – you absolutely DO NOT want to try and fight Frodo or Pippin because they are going to be protected by the rest of the Fellowship, which basically exists to stop asshole Big People from picking on the hobbits. Folk might talk a big game but when the chips are down, you are not going to lay a single hand on any of the hobbits. Either you’ll find yourself immediately fighting all four of them or else you’ll move to land your first hit and suddenly Aragorn will side-tackle you into the trees. And he probably hits like a freight train tbh.
So here’s what you do:
You fight Legolas.
The thing about fist-fighting Legolas of course is that you will lose. This is not a fight you’re gonna win no matter what. But Legolas has his standing competition with Gimli, so once the challenge is issued, he’s not gonna let anyone else step in and fight you either. No one is liable to volunteer on his behalf, either, so you will only end up fighting the one member of the fellowship. If you are lucky he might also take his shirt off. Bonus!
Anyway.
Legolas will mop the floor with you, but he’s also already convinced you’re weaker than him anyway because you’re not an elf, so he’s gonna go kind of easy on you. And when you lose he will be all snide and superior about it, which means everyone in the fellowship is gonna sympathize with you, and Gimli will probably challenge him on your behalf afterwards, but here’s the key thing:
You will have lost a fist-fight to an immortal warrior prince.
That’s a way better loss to cop to than that time you tried to fistfight a pudgy gentlehobbit and got beaten to the point of unconsciousness by his gardener, yeah?
The main reason I ever wanted to write a Hungarian mythology-based urban fantasy is that I needed to see someone do Bread Magic in a mundane modern setting.
Bread Magic shows up in a variety in Hungarian fairytales. It works like this: when someone evil, usually the devil, sometimes a dragon, wants to come into your house and hurt you, usually by taking your children, what you do is put a loaf of bread on the windowsill. It will speak for you.
When evil demands admission, the bread will say: First, they buried me under the ground, and I survived. When I sprouted, they cruelly cut me down with sickles, and I survived. They threshed me with their flails and I survived. They ground me to flour with their millstones and I survived. They put me in a bowl and kneaded me, then they put me in a hot oven to bake me, and I survived. Have you done all these things? Until you do all these things and survive, you have no power here.
This is pretty powerful magic I think, and it makes sense in a country where wheat is the staple crop and bread is the staple food. If you have bread, you are alive, if you have no bread, you are dead, therefore bread is life. It was customary to refer to wheat as “life” well into the twentieth century, and not in high literary circles either: rural seasonal workers negotiated their wages in so and so many sacks of life.
And I totally want someone to do bread magic with a shitty store-bought muffin.
There was a similar Greek fairy tale where narrating the torments of the flax was used as a delay tactic. Like, the parents would be out working in the field and the ogre would come to take the child away, and the clever grandma would say “sure, BUT FIRST, you must let me tell you the passions of the flax”. (As in “the passions of Christ”, meaning the sufferings.) Making cloth out of flax is a hell of a job with many many stages, you dunk it in water for days, you dry it, you shred it, all sorts of things (I don’t actually know what things, I’m a city kid…), so grandma would start droning very slowly and very sadly “they taaaaaaaaake the flaaaaaaaaax, they drowwwwwwn it in waaaaaaaater” and the imagery was out of a medieval torture manual and it sounded like a funeral dirge and it went on for ages, until the ogre couldn’t stand it any more and went “fuck this, I’m out, keep your damn child”.
Folk tales have some Good Takes, such as “brains over brawn” (that’s why they’re so fundamentally roguish – once in a while you’ll get a mighty warrior bashing things, but mostly it’s common peasants tricking the powerful with nothing but wits and sheer nerve), “storytelling will get you a long way”, and “grandmas are awesome”. Which may be a little self-serving (I mean, grandmas tell the tales…), but still: they earned it.
For the torments of anthropomorphised plants see also: John Barleycorn.
There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try And these three men made a solemn vow John Barleycorn must die
They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in Threw clods upon his head And these three men made a solemn vow John Barleycorn was dead
They’ve let him lie for a very long time, ‘til the rains from heaven did fall And little Sir John sprung up his head and so amazed them all
They’ve let him stand ‘til Midsummer’s Day ‘til he looked both pale and wan And little Sir John’s grown a long long beard and so become a man
They’ve hired men with their scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist serving him most barbarously
They’ve hired men with their sharp pitchforks who’ve pricked him to the heart And the loader he has served him worse than that For he’s bound him to the cart
They’ve wheeled him around and around a field ‘til they came unto a barn And there they made a solemn oath on poor John Barleycorn
They’ve hired men with their crabtree sticks to cut him skin from bone And the miller he has served him worse than that For he’s ground him between two stones
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl and his brandy in the glass And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl proved the strongest man at last
The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox nor so loudly to blow his horn And the tinker he can’t mend kettle or pots without a little barleycorn
I HAVE NO IDEA, I remember vaguely the story from when I was a kid, but I can’t remember where I read it (or heard it?), and I didn’t find it online. ‘Cause I searched.
It’s also an expression in greek, though it’s a bit outdated, you can say “that poor man has gone through the passions of the flax”, meaning he’s had a very hard life. Or, if you’re a drama queen, you can say something like “fucking bureaucracy! I went through the torments of the flax to get that bloody permit!”. This makes searching for the fairy tale all the more difficult. I’m sorry. :(
In Swedish, two of the steps in working with flax are called “arguing with the flax” (bråka lin) and “heckling the flax” (häckla lin). That says something about how the fiber is treated…
The concept of companies paying for their employees’ food continues to boggle me, but then my entire family works in food service, so our idea of company-provided food is “the customer changed their mind about wanting the food after I made it, and the boss let me keep it”.
Covering some food during travel is pretty standard, I think, since it’s a business expense and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it. My old roommate worked at best buy (which was by no means a great employer) and even they gave him a per diem which covered (cheap) food.
B: Nah, there are starving children in Africa future selves to think of. We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.
So the question with this is kind of, where does it end? I think if I put my back into it, I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.
And even if you are counting labor costs, you can buy food at the supermarket for $1-2/day. It just gets really boring.
We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.
Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?
>>and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it.<<
I get the justification for paying for the hotels and such because the employee wouldn’t otherwise have needed to buy them, but you have to eat either way. Sure, it’d be *nice* if they paid for it, but I wouldn’t be pissed if they didn’t.
(I speak from some experience here: my job *did* used to provide some free food each week (but only a small amount, and only from a limited selection of the cheaper menu items), but later switched to an employee-discount system. And every friend or family member who learned about it got angry on my behalf *even though I wasn’t angry about it myself*, and it was really annoying having to try to calm them down and defend against their attempts to instil negative emotions about it in me.)
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>>It just gets really boring.<<
I would be perfectly content to eat peanut-butter-on-a-spoon for lunch every day for years on end. The *occasional* variety in food is nice, but as the exception, not the norm.
(Also I have a low metabolism and an appetite to match, which is helpful.)
I barely even have to try to knock my food budget down to about four USD a day, so in practice I haven’t done that much other than severely cut back on restaurants.
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>>I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.<<
How?
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>>Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?<<
…I am worried by the fact that you started this sentence with “no offense”, because it suggests that there is something offensive about the rest of the sentence that I have overlooked.
(Is it something to do with, like, dignity or some shit?)
Our expenses are already extremely low by developed standards even without going full-on rice-and-beans [link]–a thousand USD per person per month would be enough, with room for a small emergency fund–but underemployment is a big problem.
(Though to be fair, I have a positive amount of money and have never been homeless, which makes me better off than most of my friends. (From multiple social circles, at that.))
I get the justification for paying for the hotels and such because the employee wouldn’t otherwise have needed to buy them, but you have to eat either way.
Sure, but I don’t need to eat out. Compare: eating in the comfort of my home, at supermarket prices, with they company of my lovely girlfriend vs eating at some random nearby restaurant, at corresponding prices, with the company of some random work people (who I happen to like, and may I always be so lucky).
If they want me to keeping doing these kinds of things, they ought to make it minimally bad. My job didn’t involve regular travel (I only did a few times) so I can’t comment on how that works, but while I’m sure the expectations change, I would expect it to change in the direction of more generous compensation for traveling, since traveling kind of sucks.
Sure, it’d be nice if they paid for it, but I wouldn’t be pissed if they didn’t.
I’m going to accuse you of being insufficiently entitled for your own good here. Sure, the expectations should probably with the job, but if I’m doing this for my employer he ought to cover it.
How?
In short, be places where they’re giving out food. Exact options may vary. In nyc you can get roughly a large pizza every night monday thru thursday just from tech meetups, if you’re willing to talk about The Cloud™ and Data Science™. There’s all sorts of things where there’s food and all you gotta do is be around to eat it.
Somewhat less respectably than that, a lot of businesses get rid of extra food. Depending on where you are, there may be organizations that are dedicated to not letting it go to waste. Depending on what you’re after you may in contention with various other indigents but not necessarily – there’s a lot of stuff that’s only good if you have a kitchen and the will to use it.
And at the bottom end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people throw in the trash. Am I above eating some fancy looking, individually wrapped gifty desserts because the container was once adjacent to garbage? No I am not. (totally untouched nice looking garbage is disproportionately gifty looking, presumably because they are perfunctory, unwanted, and quickly disposed of gifts.)
…I am worried by the fact that you started this sentence with “no offense”, because it suggests that there is something offensive about the rest of the sentence that I have overlooked.
Uh I would say I probably said no offense because it’s a combination of: a) slightly prying b) casting some amount of unasked for advice / judgement on a situation which clearly I have spent less time thinking about than the person to whom I am speaking.
And at the bottom end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people throw in the trash. Am I above eating some fancy looking, individually wrapped gifty desserts because the container was once adjacent to garbage? No I am not. (totally untouched nice looking garbage is disproportionately gifty looking, presumably because they are perfunctory, unwanted, and quickly disposed of gifts.)
I suppose I wouldn’t either… but how do you do this in practice without spending a lot of time sorting through nasty garbage?
Luck, mostly? I used to walk past on my way home from work a particular trash can which was usually completely full and often had that kind of thing just sitting out on top or next to it.
I’m not sure why that particular trash can was like that, but it was a popular / touristy area so it must have just been a, uh, blessed trash can in that respect.
I would not recommend actual garbage sorting as a hobby (fun fact: this is very specifically a legally prohibited activity in many public places).
I think people tend to put “nice” stuff off to the side rather than really shoving it in there, anyway.
[reblogging this version mostly for completeness; all of my responses are to the post immediately after my last one]
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>>Sure, but I don’t need to eat out.<<
You don’t need to eat out at a hotel either. I always make sure I know where the local supermarkets are when I’m going to a hotel. Maybe there are hotels where you can reach a restaurant but not a supermarket, but I’ve never had to deal with that.
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>>I’m going to accuse you of being insufficiently entitled for your own good here.<<
I’ve seen what happens to people who don’t accept their lot. I want no part of it.
(I don’t even mean what *other people* do to them, just the way that the resentment makes them miserable, and the way it skews their decision-making: some of them towards risky plans for the chance of a better life, others towards denial, in both cases ending up even worse off than they’d have been if they’d buckled down and dealt with it.)
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>>If they want me to keeping doing these kinds of things, they ought to make it minimally bad.<<
Or else what? You’ll leave? Good luck paying the bills. Hell, you’re *American*: at least my dad was still able to get his broken ankle fixed.
(He was laid off from abovementioned cushy programming job almost thirteen years ago, and has never again made enough to make ends meet. He’s finally back in a position where he can at least make *some* money, just not enough.)
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>>In nyc you can get roughly a large pizza every night monday thru thursday just from tech meetups, if you’re willing to talk about The Cloud™ and Data Science™. There’s all sorts of things where there’s food and all you gotta do is be around to eat it.<<
Who–among the set of people who care enough about how much their food costs to seek out free food, but are not living on the street–can afford to live *that* close to places where they’re giving out food? I’m pretty sure the transportation costs of getting to any place like that would be enough to buy an entire day’s worth of food, and instead you only get one meal out of it.
(Low appetite is a blessing when you’re eating supermarket food and can make the same size of stockpile last longer, but it does mean I suck at exploiting all-you-can-eat situations. I try very hard these days to avoid buffets, because compared to normal restaurants they’re more money for *less* food (in that you don’t get to take home your leftovers).)
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>>Somewhat less respectably than that, a lot of businesses get rid of extra food. Depending on where you are, there may be organizations that are dedicated to not letting it go to waste.<<
We’ve had friends go to food banks, but I think my parents think those are for people more desperate than we are. Hell, they might even be right.
(Though when said friends offer us the bits of a food-bank variety pack they aren’t able to use themselves, we *do* at least accept them. Ate a cookie bar from a food-bank-sourced bake-it-yourself just yesterday.)
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>>And at the bottom end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people throw in the trash. Am I above eating some fancy looking, individually wrapped gifty desserts because the container was once adjacent to garbage? No I am not.<<
I’ve experimented with dumpster diving a few times. Mostly for stuff to sell, but I did once find and redeem a voucher for a free protein bar. (I turned down the spicy ramen cups, though: I dislike pain.)
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>>I probably said no offense because it’s a combination of: a) slightly prying<<
>>b) casting some amount of unasked for advice / judgement on a situation which clearly I have spent less time thinking about than the person to whom I am speaking.<<
I don’t mind people calling it a bad situation, though as you can probably tell from the rest of this reply I have had more than enough [people trying to coerce me into having negative emotions] for one lifetime. (Although usually it’s people trying to get me to perform grief about [death of a relative I was not close to] or anger about [insert latest SJ Discourse topic].)
You don’t need to eat out at a hotel either. I always make sure I know where the local supermarkets are when I’m going to a hotel. Maybe there are hotels where you can reach a restaurant but not a supermarket, but I’ve never had to deal with that.
Most hotels I’ve stayed at have minimal to no cooking facilities available to guests. Also, this massively depends on what you are making but grocery buying often requires buying more of a single ingredient than you’ll use in the course of a single business trip.
I knew my mom (who is in charge of deciding where we stay while travelling) was specifically selecting for places with kitchens, but I hadn’t realised they were *that* rare if you weren’t specifically selecting for them.
Also I’m not sure why so many people seem to be so attached to having a Hot Meal for dinner, even when in situations that aren’t conducive to them.
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rustingbridges: >>I’d say anyone who’s concerned about their ability to budget for decent food at all is probably in the demo for using a foodbank<<
I expect to remain concerned about whether I can afford decent food until and unless I become independently wealthy [link]. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of runway is, empirically, not enough.
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rustingbridges: >>If it’s mine by right I’m just taking it. If someone else wants it they can come get it.<<
You need to try *much* harder to cover your ass, or it is going to get bit.
(Also, the main examples of resentful entitlement I was thinking of are some Uber Eats drivers I am “”friends”“ with who complain (to *me*, *knowing* I can’t do anything about it, just inflicting their negativity on me to no benefit) whenever anyone doesn’t tip them, even though it says right there on the website that customers should not feel obligated to tip, and that was what the drivers signed up for. And the people telling stories from the Good Old Days™, when single blue-collar salaries were large enough to raise five children on and still pay off your mortgage early, and savings accounts gave 5% interest.)
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Serine, I tried to respond to your post, wrote out a whole draft with links and everything. But I can’t help but react to its condescension and hostility, and probably you’re just one of those people who’s naturally splainy [link] and aren’t actually aware that you keep coming across as picking fights with me.
Tags:
#discourse cw #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #food #disordered eating? #long post #death mention
Brinens and Things 