pieces in a whole

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

Be real Adrian who do you think you’re fooling

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

Dragons on the wing are vulnerable to being mobbed by smaller, more agile flyers, particularly in your large rear blind spot, like a bird of prey being mobbed by crows. Having a human armed with a long spear perched on your back helps to dissuade anyone from getting any funny ideas.

Breath weapons are impressive enough on the ground, but in flight they're really only good for strafing stationary targets; trying to use your breath weapon in an aerial dogfight is a good way to get fire up your nose. A real fight calls for sterner measures – and, concomitantly, a crew to aim and reload the cannons.

In today's competitive world, it's not enough to devour a flock of sheep and call it a day if you want to keep your edge. You're accompanied at all times by a qualified personal alchemist tasked with carefully regulating your internal furnace to ensure peak performance, and sometimes you even listen to them.

Even when I was “cis” I had an incident where my gf at the time, a drunk cis white woman, literally spent an hour trying to pin me down and rip off my clothes to fuck me as I was trying to care for her, despite repeated refusals. It reached the point I had to leave the room after escaping her and hold the door shut until she gave up, and any time I mentioned it to others back then the concern was not her trying to sexually assault me, but that if she had succeeded I’d have been at fault for being a Black “man” having sex with a drunk white woman.

he told me point blank that if I called the cops, he'd lie and say I was the abuser. we both knew who they would believe. I was more scared of losing my cool and fighting back than I was scared of being hit. I preferred being hit to the screaming.

it didn't start out like that, of course, he started out by guilting me about the fact that I didn't want to fuck him. I didn't fuck him because he was abusive about other things. it's always stuck with me that sex was essentially the last thing he got abusive about before I left, I think it took him that long and had to start slow because he was protecting his image of himself as a victim.

he had to build that protection up before he could try to actually force me to fuck him. he did not, of course, ever threaten me before I said no. that would've made things too clear to ignore, it was always a day or a week later. it always started as "I feel undesirable because you don't want to fuck me".

you understand that this is rape, right? I waited until now to mention that we were both "cis" at the time because "husband beating his wife" is understood differently than if the genders were the other way around, especially for transfems.

i am a trans woman, but i only realized this two or three years ago.

i am a single mother with sole custody of my 7yo daughter.

do whatever bioessentialist math u gotta to parse this situation.

my ex could give classes on ignoring boundaries. i recently saw the movie obsession, and to say it was triggering for me would be an understatement. i was never allowed even a moment to myself. she would hover over me at all times, and every miniscule thing that i did was noted, logged, and tallied against some master formula in her head to determine whether i was being a sufficiently good "boyfriend". failing this metric would lead to bouts of screaming, sleep deprivation, psychological torture, and physical violence. i still have the scars.

the *only* reliable way for me to mitigate the damage being done to me, was to fuck her. at first i could avoid the fights this way. then i could only interrupt them. eventually this became simply a consequence. she would scream at me until i was too dissociated to properly understand my situation, and i would wait for the tone shift that meant i should get ready to... be raped.

and then i discovered in the worst possible way that she had been lying to me for months abt being on birth control

i wasn't given any say in the situation. she ran back to her family some 1500 miles away and told me i could either go with her or have no presence in my child's life. the things i suffered there were worse. it took years of legal action for me to get away from her with my child. this informs my relationships to this day, nearly a decade later.

for years. YEARS. i was unable to understand what happened to me as sexual assault. because trans women aren't oppressed before they come out. because tops can't be assaulted. because the big strong "man" can never be a victim. because there simply isn't vocabulary for these experiences. because because because.

the first time i ever read the phrase "self-inflicted corrective sexual violence" i spent hours sobbing uncontrollably. this doesn't come close to capturing the essence of all my experiences, but it does fit several of them. the idea that not only were such things possible but also that *what happened to me WAS sexual assault* is the only thing that's allowed me to start healing.

THE ONLY THING because not a single person in my life even considered the notion. my mother berated me for not thinking abt the consequences of *my* actions. my friends laughed abt how it was too bad i got "baby trapped". my subsequent relationships constantly pressed for more and more details digging for the part where i must have done something to deserve it. even my therapist at the time suggested that it was "fear of impending fatherhood" that gave rise to these feelings.

none of that is true. i was repeatedly raped, in a way that resulted in a child, that i now am solely responsible for. she's the light of my life, and the best kid i know, and none of this is her fault. i'll do anything to make sure she has a better life than me. that's the only way i'll ever rlly make peace, i think, with the fact that i will never fully recover from this trauma. there's only so much healing to be done. the rest is scars.

so please. please. please understand that just because i was "topping". just because i was "stronger". just because i was a "man". doesn't mean that it could never happen to someone like me.