Home of the Eldritch Mage

the color signatures of various elements when ignited

♥ ♥ 📓 ♥ ♥ ԅ (👁 ᴗ 👁ԅ) [esteemed fanfic author] have a new chapter

(づᴗ _ᴗ)づ♥️♥️ !!! ♥️♥️ omg thank u

♥ ♥ 📓 ♥ ♥ ԅ (ꈍ ᴗ ꈍԅ) wait till that diabolical angst hits ooooooo

To 2025:

Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.

They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.

Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?

Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?

Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!

Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!

They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.

Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.

There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.

It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)

When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.

Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

reblog if you believe anon is wrong and writers are writers, no matter what they write about. no matter how they portray these taboo topics.

reblog if you believe art can be about topics that are controversial, taboo or outright disturbing, and artists who create controversial, taboo or outright disturbing art are as valid as artists who create art of conservative values.

First of all, let's dispense with anon's bias against fanfic and the writers who write it. It sounds as if anon considers fanfic, regardless of who writes it, isn't a genre of real writing, maybe because it isn't monetized, and therefore fanfic writers aren't real writers. Both of those biases are bogus - fanfic is real writing, and fanfic writers are real writers. Most writers could be considered fanfic writers because they get their inspiration from others, and so their writing ends up influenced by what they read and see. But anon's condescension to fanfic and fanfic writers isn't my main point.

A writer is a writer regardless of what they write, whether fanfic, other fic, nonfiction, essays, yadda, yadda, yadda. A writer is also a writer regardless of the topics they write about. To wit:

Upton Sinclair wrote about dark and taboo topics (see The Jungle) in the meatpacking industry, which resulted in new regulations to protect the public. He changed the world for the better. But he's not a real writer?

Charles Dickens wrote LOADS about dark and taboo topics such as child labor and illness (see Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, etc.). If memory serves, his description of Smike's tuberculosis was so accurate for the time that the medical community used it as their standard description for some time. Dickens' work brought attention to the terrible conditions that children endured, and improvements came from his attention to their plight. He changed the world for the better, too. But he's not a real writer?

Sophocles wrote about dark and taboo topics such as regicide and incest (see Œdipus Rex), which resulted in a cautionary tale about the heights of hubris. He changed the world for the better. But he's not a real writer?

Anyone who reads can find dozens of other examples of writers whose writings about dark and taboo subjects changed the world for the better, if only to inform people and make them think. So I can only conclude that anon doesn't read, or doesn't pay attention to what anon reads.

Our latest is live! ⚖️ @bookshop reports on the increasing criminalization of creativity around the world—especially queer and/or erotic works, and including fanworks. Recent rulings against an Australian erotica writer and a Russian fic writer, the confirmation that danmei writer Mo Xiang Tong Xiu was imprisoned for her work, and growing repression in the U.S., where many global platforms for creative works are based, are all signals of just how worrying the current climate is:

With a barrage of new and expanded laws plus harsher enforcement of existing ones, governments around the globe are criminalizing more and more forms of creative expression. It’s no longer far-fetched or hyperbolic to say that at any given moment, depending on what country you’re in and what government you’re up against, individual works of fiction—including fanworks—could be criminalized for being queer, or pornographic, or generally deviant.  How far the law typically extends seems to be entirely arbitrary, but in recent years, we’ve seen regressive censorship and punishment nipping at the heels of fanworks. Online platforms and payment processors then often comply with these laws by instituting sweeping content bans, further marginalizing women, queer and trans people, and sex-positive communities—the currents in which fandom flows.

Censorship is a response to fear - fear of new ideas, different world views, different people. If someone's world view changes because they read something beyond their party line, then their party line didn't have much substance to it to begin with.

To stay loyal to Trump and this version of the Republican Party, you have to swallow an entire universe of conspiracies about Democrats that never get proven, never get resolved, and somehow never die. Every loss, every scandal, every uncomfortable fact has to be part of a giant plot, because the alternative would be admitting their guy is exactly who he appears to be.

Trump didn’t show up as a serious, thoughtful leader with real ideas. He rode in on a lie. He built his brand on birtherism, pushing the r*cist nonsense that Barack Obama wasn’t really American and faked his birth certificate. A huge chunk of Republicans bought it without ever seeing a shred of credible evidence, and a lot of them still cling to it like gospel.

On top of that, they’ve spent decades convincing themselves that Bill and Hillary Clinton are some kind of mob bosses who “have people k*lled,” despite endless investigations and zero proof of this imaginary body count. Hillary’s emails were treated like the crime of the century right up until the second Trump won in 2016, and then the outrage just evaporated. No big conclusion. No final b*mbshell. Just silence and a quick pivot to the next outrage.

Then there’s 2020. You’re expected to believe the entire election was “rigged and stolen,” and here we are years later with Trump back in office and still no “overwhelming evidence” we were promised. We get speeches, fundraising emails, and cable rants, but nothing that holds up in court. At the same time, they want you to think Joe Biden is somehow both the mastermind of a global crime ring and also too mentally gone to find the podium. He’s a criminal genius when they need a villain and a confused old man when they need a punchline.

And of course, we can’t forget Hunter Biden’s laptop. That laptop was supposed to be the Big One, the thing that proved the “Biden crime family” once and for all. Instead, it turned into this weird security blanket they drag out whenever they’re losing an argument. They keep saying “the laptop” like it’s a magic spell, but never actually connect it to anything that sticks outside their echo chamber. It’s just a prop, not a case.

January 6th is another perfect example. We all watched Trump supporters storm the Capitol in Trump gear, waving Trump flags, doing it after Trump told them to “fight.” Now the story in MAGA world is that it was somehow the FBI, or Antifa, or Democrats. Trump was president. It was his Justice Department. His handpicked FBI director. His supporters on camera. And they still twist themselves into knots trying to blame anyone but the man at the center of it.

To stay in this cult, you also have to believe Democrats are rigging elections in a country where Republicans win all the time. They scream fraud in states with Republican governors, Republican legislatures, and Republican election officials. When Arizona or Georgia don’t go their way, it’s a conspiracy. But when Republicans win Democratic‑run states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, suddenly those elections are completely legit. Funny how that works.

This didn’t start with Trump, either. Under Obama it was FEMA camps supposedly ready to round up conservatives, a routine military exercise called Jade Helm turned into “they’re invading Texas,” and constant fear‑mongering that he was a “secret Muslim” trying to hand the country to the Muslim Brotherhood. Every mass shooting was branded a “false flag” to take their guns. No tragedy was ever allowed to just be what it was.

They rant about “millions” of undocumented immigrants voting, despite never presenting evidence on anything close to that scale. And if that were actually happening, what does it say that Texas and Florida, home to large undocumented populations, keep electing Republicans? Are we supposed to believe all this imaginary cheating somehow still benefits the GOP?

Remember Benghazi? They spent years dragging the country through investigation after investigation, many run by Republicans themselves. Every time they came up empty, they just started over. The point was never the truth. The point was to keep Democrats under permanent suspicion. Same with the Clinton Foundation supposedly being a giant pay‑to‑play operation, while they worship a man whose entire public life is pay‑to‑play, self‑dealing, and outright scams.

Then there’s the truly unhinged stuff that still circulates on the right: Obama supposedly lived under an alias and never really went to the schools he attended. Michelle Obama is “really a man.” Obama tried to use Ebola to wipe out white people. Obama was secretly still running the country while Biden was in office. There is no conspiracy too ridiculous for somebody in this movement to repeat with a straight face.

And when all else fails, there’s always their favorite boogeyman, George Soros. Lose an election? Soros. A protest they don’t like? Soros. A prosecutor who holds a Republican accountable? Soros. Most of them couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, but he is their all‑purpose explanation for anything they don’t understand or don’t want to accept.

The list of nonsense is endless. You could fill volumes just trying to track all the lies and fantasies Republicans have pumped into their base about Democrats. When one conspiracy runs out of gas, they quietly move on to the next one, no apology, no correction, just more outrage.

And here’s the part that really blows up their whole narrative. If Democrats were truly the all‑powerful, all‑controlling supervillains MAGA imagines, they wouldn’t lose as often as they do. Republicans have won two of the last three presidential elections. Republicans have held one or both chambers of Congress for most of the last few decades. For a party that supposedly rigs everything, Democrats sure spend a lot of time out of power.

So no, I’m not interested in being lectured about “derangement” by people who have to ignore reality every single day to keep defending Trump. Calling out his corruption, incompetence, and lies with facts is not a mental disorder. It’s just paying attention.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

Are you okay?

That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.

Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?

This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.

Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.

Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?

If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.

I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

One of the finest and most beloved Watsons ever to grace the screen has passed away. David Burke was 91 years old, just shy of his 92nd birthday, and he is survived by his wife Anna Calder-Marshall and his son Tom Burke.

By all accounts, he was a gentleman and a wonderful human being. He could have stayed on to play Watson much longer, which would have made many of us very happy, but he chose to leave the show to be nearer to his family, especially since Tom was very young at the time.

His was not the first intelligent and competent Watson, but this version marked a turning point in mainstream depictions, from comedic sidekick to a hero in his own right.

RIP, dear sir. You will be missed. Thank you for everything.

~*~

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

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So if you don't care about the harm being done on moral grounds, care on selfish ones - speak up now and save what's left of your legacy, or remain silent and go down with the rest of the rats. Your choice.

Fanfic is more popular than ever, which means there are more works "competing" for the readers' attention, who take on a passive approach that treats fanworks not as a means to talk to people with similar interests, but as content, as products. [...] Gift cultures thrive not on monetary exchanges, but on the expectation that the gifts freely given will be returned in an unspecified future through emotional and relational means. This used to set fandom apart, but it's slowly being absorbed into the mainstream way capitalism operates. Where does that leave us?

And it's demotivating to see the responses authors get when expressing their grievances with this state of affairs, or how they feel underappreciated. Being called entitled, told to write for themselves, or to promote their work as if writing and posting isn't enough. I write for myself, I post for the community. There are things I want to say about the source material and characters, and I do through storytelling. And I'm grateful about each of the comments I got, no matter how short. It's just that it doesn't feel like there's a community out there when no one talks back. Writers aren't just expected to write, but to do it for the "right reasons", and to also be as pleasant about it as possible, lest they'll be criticized by more people than the amount that's offering them support.

I've seen posts going around on tumblr that have approached this topic as well--that fanworks (particularly fanfic) should be created from the perspective of a perfect vessel that can pour, pour, pour out and never needs to be poured into. You should do it for the "right reasons" and not complain because "no one owes you interaction". But what is fandom if not interaction?

Writing fanfic is one of the most time-consuming labors of love that makes up a fandom. (That's not to say other fanworks aren't labors, time-consuming, or made with love. We're talking about fanfic). Your 300k+ enemies to lovers slowburn porn-with-plot fic that has reshaped the entire way you approach a specific pairing or media has been made with time, effort, for free, with the intention to be shared with you.

And in the state of current fandom, it has been made with the expectation to receive nothing back. Is that fair? Maybe. Silent readers exist and a kudos on Ao3 is at least an acknowledgment that some people read and enjoyed. But does it hurt to leave a comment? Even a heart emoji or an "I loved this, thank you for sharing!" is enough to at least start a dialogue, a conversation, form a connection.

That's not even to mention the isolation of fandom interactions to private Discords; time after time I've heard from fanfic authors who found out that there have been discord servers or twitter groupchats where their fanfic has been discussed, loved, and lauded at length--but never once was the author told this! Ao3 has comments for a reason. Many authors link their tumblr profiles or emails in their bio for people to reach out to them.