subsurface

it's one thing to not be able to completely hide your emotions, but to express a need about them, and even to be in touch with oneself to this extent at all (rather than constant callousness and lashing out or total withdrawal, which are pretty typical in male characters especially), says a lot about the strength of his nature. that is, for someone to have a painful life where they aren't well-supported, the ability to still feel and express as deeply and vulnerably as this isn't easy to hold on to.

so in shipping terms, it makes the most sense to believe he would be totally aware of how he feels and both willing and able to openly discuss it, and have a warm attitude toward human connection, without denial or hostility toward (for example) grace.

tbh if you wanted to say one of them would be "better" at this kind of communication, i would pick simon for his emotional honesty.

grace can teach middle schoolers, but struggles to communicate or set boundaries with adults. he gives up or lashes out but doesn't take the risk or make the effort to reveal anything deeper about his feelings, if he doesn't think they will be "acceptable" to others.

simon doesn't hide his feelings to protect himself or to be polite, so everything he shows is just because that's how he really feels. and again and again in the film we see that how he really feels is empathy, compassion, as well as a sense of his own value as a person worthy of survival and respect just like everyone else.

Mark was talking about Frostpunk2 and how the narrator at the beginning of Iron Lung also played a part in the first Frostpunk game, and then brought up theories on Astrophage causing the ice age in the Frostpunk series... leading some in the chat to suggest this as a Bloodymary setting.

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,

Here are some basic primers. If someone is wearing what look like Meta glasses, they usually have a small circular camera in the outer corners of the lenses, like the one on your phone.

I would also regularly check their own product pages so you're on top of what the models look like. They tend to have larger frames, but come in a variety of shapes and colors.

A new hobbyist developed app warns if people nearby may be wearing smart glasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which stalkers and harassers have repeatedly used to film people without their knowledge or consent. The app scans for smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signatures and sends a push alert if it detects a potential pair of glasses in the local area.

The American Foundation for the Blind has said that "The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are an accessibility tool only by coincidence. That makes them more affordable and, in many ways, unaware of the needs of users with reduced vision" although they do have seemingly positive views on Meta Glasses as a whole. (source 10). It also seems like their marketing push as accessibility devices began last year (source 11).

But to add even more into the nonsense, Meta is now toying around with adding a "limit" to the functionality of their glasses unless their users pay for more access (source 12). AND, as stated above, Meta has officially added facial recognition code in their glasses and only admitted it after being called out, which is basically the death of privacy as we know it (source 13, source 14, source 15). And oh look another lawsuit because of it (source 16) THAT THEY LOST (source 17)!

Long story short: I don't begrudge someone using them as a disability aid overall, but ultimately both their privacy and other people's privacy are being disregarded by Meta and that is not and should not be acceptable by any means.

I understand there is no ethical consumption under capitalism but there is a level of personal responsibility someone has to take when using them if they truly truly need them, such as opting out of sharing information, not filming strangers without permission, not posting footage of strangers online, opting out of facial recognition if possible, etc.

I made Ryland and Simon in Paralives. Am I bananas, or is this normal?

It has been one year since I randomly became obsessed with the character Bucky Barnes and read an absolutely massive amount of fanfiction about him, becoming introduced to fanfiction as an art medium in the process.

After reading so many great fanfictions I had to take a crack at it myself, and i am an exit is what resulted.

Summary

A broken, disillusioned Steve Rogers is afflicted by a delusion that the mysterious assassin who nearly killed him is actually his best friend, who died 70 years ago. SHIELD wants to lock him up and return him to being a perfect, sparkling nationalist symbol as quickly as possible. Sam Wilson, who has wrestled with his own disillusionment and his own ghosts, knows that Steve needs compassion and the support of a true friend, not a forced regime of recovery that takes away what is left of his shattered autonomy. Meanwhile, as Natasha tries to track down the Winter Soldier, her discoveries get more and more disturbing. She uncovers footage of the Soldier being subjected to, and forced to commit, horrific acts to maintain Hydra's cruel hierarchy. What's more, his resemblance to Steve's dead friend is too close to be coincidence. Sam and Natasha grow determined to stop the Soldier from being recaptured by his abusers, but how will Steve react when he learns the true extent of the Soldier's torture, and the true horror of what he was twisted into? Is the Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes? Or is he a thing wearing Bucky Barnes's face? Which of those things is worse?

What it was like to write it

This fic is almost 200k words long. I wrote it in four months. Wow!

I'm convinced that writing this fic was what made all the difference for my final(ish) semester of college. To put it bluntly this was the first semester where I didn't feel like I was dying all the time. It put an end to the longest creative drought of my life and everyone's lovely comments gave me enough joy to carry me through.

I feel like I learned a ton about POV, plotting, and characterization while writing this fic. I'll probably talk about that more in the coming days.

My guiding questions/ideas

I don't really give a fuck about the MCU, but I do give a LOT of fucks about the fanfictional universe that has built around Bucky, and I had several ideas or questions that kept needling at me about this story and what people had done with it.

The whole story of Captain America, where a disabled kid in the 1930's is turned into a physically perfect superhuman, has "eugenics" written all over it. What if I explored that?

It doesn't really make sense that, in the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it seems plausible to everyone that the Winter Soldier is Bucky. I mean, as far as anyone knows he died 70 years ago. What if the other characters assumed Steve was delusional out of grief?

I also really wanted to lean into Bucky/the Winter Soldier as an undead, uncanny-valley monster. A lot of Bucky fics deal with him being dehumanized and treated as a creature or a thing rather than a human, and I wanted to really dig into that, exploring the ways he is a machine and a reanimated corpse and a feral, terrified animal.

I had a craving for more medical horror. Bucky is the perfect character for it but not enough had been written about it thus far that really hit the spot for me.

I read a LOT of fanfictions that portrayed Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence and that compelled me a lot. I wanted to explore this as messily overlapping and entwined with all the other ways his body was invaded and taken away from him (as a lab experiment, living weapon, etc). I also wanted to explore what it would mean if Bucky was forced to commit sexual violence as the Winter Soldier.

What kind of story this is

The most common adjective I get on i am an exit is probably "visceral." I also get "gut-wrenching" a lot.

I do a lot of getting down and dirty with the Horrible Nasty. I went elbow deep digging in the back of my head for the things I don't want to think about.

BUT. I am also really intentional about satisfying softness and healing. The final 1/3 of the fic is the healing/comfort arc and I wrote a lot of self-indulgent fluff. Well, fluff doesn't seem right, because fluff implies something light, and every word is heavy with the horrors, but the healing is real. I was really, really serious about fully and sensitively acknowledging every part of the trauma the characters go through. Think hurt/comfort where both the hurt and the comfort are turned all the way up to the max.

I didn't feel confident writing about any of the canon locations in MCU so I basically sent all my characters to Kentucky.

Due to the person that I am, this fic is full of plants, and the plants are relevant to and intertwined with the plot and characterization. The Appalachian ecology is extremely detailed and realistic and thematically relevant.

Also, Bucky gets a horse.

The MCU doesn't have a lot of female characters, and I got mad about that, so Hawkeye, Thor, and Nick Fury are women in this fic.

I took heavy inspiration from a lot of the common themes and tropes of Bucky fanfiction. The way the narration reflects Bucky's dehumanization is indeed cool, but I can't fully take credit for it because it's a device a lot of fics use.

On content warnings

Each chapter has its own individual content warnings in the beginning notes. There is gore, there is fascism, ableism, and eugenics, there is a lot of medical horror, and there is sexual abuse and rape.

This fic does NOT use the Hydra Trash Party main tag, because the sexual violence is (mostly) "offscreen"/in flashbacks or memories instead of happening in the present in the characters' POV, but the sexual abuse themes are heavy and recurring. I think there are more individual chapters that have a warning for rape, than chapters that don't have that warning.

There is comfort and healing and ultimately a happy ending, but the warnings aren't fucking around.

Conclusion