Sushi Tushi

The Illusive Man: "They call him Archangel. He’s been making a lot of noise on Omega, causing problems for the Eclipse, Blue Suns, and Blood Pack."

Commander Shepard: "Why are they all after him?"

The Illusive Man: "Because he’s a tactical genius, Commander. He’s disrupted their operations, cost them millions, and they want him dead. Naturally, I want him on your team."

Everyone SHUT UP she’s TRENDING !!!!

but, due to the fog of the amnesia, then the urgency of the mission plus Rocky's appearance, Grace doesn't fully look through every box until they're on their way to Erid. and that's when Rocky wakes up from sleep to see Grace sobbing over a bunch of letters. students telling him how much they enjoyed his class, actually made learning fun and interesting. got them through tough days. made them feel seen and appreciated. quite a few cite his class as being the spark that got them interested in science as a career. and even those that didn't still consider him the best teacher they ever had. fellow teachers admiring his classroom management and lesson planning, and even so his kindness to every student who walked into his room.

one letter is from the principal. when Dr. Grace's involvement in the Hail Mary Project became public knowledge, there was a push from the community to rename the school after him. after discussions with the school board, there had been a secret agreement to do so, even had a new sign made. they were just waiting for him to be released from the project and return to San Fransisco to surprise him. but, with the recent news of his "noble sacrifice", they'd gone ahead and done it. attached the press release with a picture of the new sign, a bunch of his former students standing around it, beaming. a local artist has been commissioned to add a mural to the front entrance over the summer break. and a final note: "Do your work knowing that it will allow the Dr. Ryland Grace Middle School to continue to educate and inspire students for generations."

bc in no way can be read that she was always gonna send grace on the hail mary, or that she suspected or knew she was going to have to send him.

when she sings, it is absolutely to him, but it's to reassure him that she knows she's going away but that she's coming back. she's telling him to hang in there, that it's going to be hard but that she believes in him and that she will come back when the time is right and they'll meet again somewhere far away from here.

that's the captain of the ship telling her first mate "youre gonna have to run things when im gone but its okay bc i believe in you and youre gonna do fine. I'll be back soon."

she KNOWS she's a scapegoat. she's been planning for her arrest and eventual escape the whole time on the backburner.

and then the disaster happens and she has to send her second in command, her friend, to his death or they all die.

and suddenly there is no more "we'll meet again someday" bc she's never gonna see him again. even if everything goes to plan and she escapes and the beetles arrive with a solution-- she loses grace forever.

It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.

Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.

Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.

The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.

The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.

She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.

She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."

#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma

What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.

Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.

The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.

Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.

The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.

Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)

Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.

...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.

I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.

My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!

She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.

The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.

The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.

Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!

We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:

...wow. I should see if my library has that!

The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.

There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.

Grace (distracted by Skittles): Hold up. Did you just say you like me?

in which garrus vakarian attempts to soft dom shepard, but fails miserably in the process (the highest honor headcanon i can bestow: comes in his pants)

pairing: female shepard/garrus vakarian

rating: explicit

this is for two lovely friends of mine, @thychesters and @garfbin <3 love both of you <3

lil text blurb

Except when she went to straddle him, he stopped her. Put a hand out. Tutted. He tutted her. "Excuse me?" she said incredulously.

He made a swirling motion with his finger. "Turn around."

"Since when do you give out the orders here?"

His hands were on her hips again, forcing her ass down right on top of his lap. The vibrations of his subvocals purred on her back, his touch through her undersuit hot, even through the layers. One hand was firm on her hip flexor, the area of skin just between hip and cunt. The other trailed up her suit. Hip, waist, breast, until finally settling on the curve of her neck.

He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Because you," he murmured in her ear, his voice gravely and smooth, "seem to think that you're not quite human enough to feel anything."

Garrus nibbled at her ear. His breath sent chills down her spine, and when that wasn't enough he bit down the side of her neck. She gasped. In six months— a year— however long they had been together— she didn't once think that Garrus bit her. Maybe he got close, but always stopped just shy of puncturing her skin. It was no matter, she thought, she was no chew toy. But this, it sent a jolt down her spine. She arched into his lap, and when her ass hit where his slit was, he bit down again.

"I— I don't think I quite said that—"

Who grew into this man who stands before him, grief in his eyes and exhaustion in every line of his body. He doesn’t know what he has endured, only snippets of stories shared of this spectre, this famed, dead, disgraced Commander. Most of what Garrus tells him of her doesn’t fully match what they say; he makes her sound like a person, so… human. 

When he comes to him, half of his face missing and a hollowness in his voice that makes him feel as if someone has taken a white hot blade to his keel, he sits on the same spot on the couch that he did when he was six, when he was twelve, and looks at him with the same reservation he did before he left for the Citadel. He has not stood in his family home since, and Castis thinks of the old visor he gifted him, the one he disassembled and then pieced back together; the one he wears now, a last gift from his mother. 

He can feel his son studying him, gauging his reactions, every bit the detective he was and the one he left behind.

He tells him this tale that sounds so far fetched, and he may skirt the truth but his son has never been one to outright lie. He was never any good at it, either, despite all of the times he tried to take the fall for Solana, nor has his imagination always been so wild. Reapers, he says; Collectors, he calls them, and he does not know the exact whereabouts of his son for the past few years, and as sure as Garrus is about this oncoming threat, Castis is sure he will never know the finer details.

Why not just put brownies in your story then? Almost identical effect without all the slavery.

If you wanna make the Malfoys look worse just idk maybe they put a spell on Dobby to bind him to their house and he can’t leave unless the malfoys break the rules and they’re bad to him but don’t technically try to break the rules until Harry tricks them into paying dobby with some clothes.

There. Problem solved. You can have hundreds of brownies living at hogwarts even. And when Hermione misinterprets their situation and tries to thank them and start paying them the brownies start getting offended and leaving and this causes an actual problem for the school. Much easier to make a subplot about not listening to the people that you’re trying to help.