icarusdescending

ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.

ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.

ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Wednesday. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.

They are targeting hospitals and clinics. Patients are scared and are cancelling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.

They are smashing windows in cars and homes.

ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans—again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.

They are arresting and beating legal observers. A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.) I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later. But the community is fighting back.

Protests are happening every day.

Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.

Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.

Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.

Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait for my takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.

Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.

Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.

Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.

Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.

When people say Simon “Ghost” Riley has blue eyes.

see below, an example of 09 Ghost without his glasses lens 🩵

vs comic ghost, who has brown eyes (these first two are supposedly the same Ghost)

with 22 reboot ghost for ref

22 Ghost is technically not the same ghost as 09 and comic Ghost, but since he lacks any lore, a lot of fans choose to merge them one and the same. I also think the blue eye thing is likely to be a result of MaskTok, where most of those cosplayers run the “piercing blue eyes” aesthetic.

ALSO

theres so much potential there do you guys realize how much potential we have for fallout x cod.

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ghost who grew up in the upper seats of the pitt operation, his dad a raider slaver and his mother a slave, him being whisked away to learn the cruelties of the pitt. his voice raw and rumbling, that of a ghoul, from years of breathing in the toxic, polluted air of the ruins of pittsburgh, its a miracle he hasnt become a trog. it causing him problems when he escapes, wearing his mask, because everyone thinks he's a ghoul.

soap whose family came from a decimated land shortly after the war concluded, setting in the midwest with land-rich american farmers who take advantage of his family, forcing them to work their lands if they want to live. generations going by. soap wanting more. hes not the first to think that. he is the first to escape. blood soaked brow, he forges his own path, the american way. the wastelanders way.

Your best friend Johnny

Part 1

You don’t remember the world before Johnny.

Your earliest clear memory is of a plastic shovel, a badly tilted sandcastle, and a little boy with wild hair, dirty knees and the brightest, most mischievous blue eyes you’ve ever seen, staring at you like you’d just stolen his entire empire.

“Hey!” he’d said, hands on his hips, Scottish accent already there, only smaller and squeakier. “That’s my wall.”

You’d looked at the crooked line of sand between you.

Then at him.

Then calmly dumped another pile of sand on “his” wall.

“It’s our wall now,” you’d replied.

He’d blinked.

Then grinned - big and sudden and full of missing teeth.

And just like that, he was yours.

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

Not a hot take, but I HEAVILY prefer ugly ghost designs over random white men with scars drawn on

like maybe perhaps perchance we don't want it scanning our children's faces to do age verification because we don't know what it's going to do with those scans down the line. maybe we shouldn't be using it like a therapy machine and telling it our deepest, most painful things. maybe we shouldn't be giving it a dossier of our detailed medical information, especially in a world (in the us) where things like not being able to hold pre-existing conditions against someone for insurance is increasingly threatened. perhaps we shouldn't be scanning our faces for funny little short videos into something that can also generate porn on demand with all of the data it's collected.

My take on ghost x food insecurity reader. Plus anxiety. The whole can't do it for myself, but someone else needs the thing. Suddenly, I'm superhuman.

Retired ghost whose therapist told him to talk to at least one person a day, only the phone tower is down, so he can't call any of the boys like normal, and he doesn't know anyone who lives nearby.

Ghost who views self-care as missions. He is not about to fail a mission. So he does what he has seen in movies and "makes too much food" to have a reason to talk to the neighbor that he saw when he first moved in.

Only when the neighbor opens the door, they look like they have lost 40 pounds since the last time he saw them. Only when they open the door, their eyes never meet his. A flicker of an emotion he can't name but recognizes from his own youth passes over his neighbor's face.

He leaves after having his daily conversation and giving them the container of food with a whole new mission. He knows from experience that even if someone is starving, they'll deny help, seeing it as pity. So the next day, he goes to IKEA and buys a bedframe. Atrocious and too complicated for his taste, but whatever serves its purpose. He may or may not have hidden some pieces to make it harder to put together.

He knocks on the neighbor's door, doing his best to act embarrassed, explaining that he needs someone with a gentler touch to try to put it together because military instructions are much different, and that he'll treat them to dinner as thanks. He manages to stretch the bed thing for three days. Feeding his neighbor and sending them home with his suspiciously new-looking Tupperware.

Then he needed help with furniture in the living room. Before long, his once bare apartment is fully furnished, and he's having the neighbor pick out decorations lest his friends tease him when they visit. Then he simply can't figure out this recipe. Could you help him? Oh, it's meant for a family meal. Here, take a few containers home? Oh, you want to thank me. How about you make this (high-end food) for me? Of course, I'll supply the ingredients, just come over after you get off work tomorrow.

Now, Neighbor and Ghost have dinner at his house together every day. Ghost makes sure the neighbor gets plenty of nutrients and nice foods. Ghost realizes one day that he's living in a home instead of a crash pad with a beautiful person in his kitchen, and he just blue screens because what? The? Hell? Did? He? Do?

They seem content with the situation, even happy. They never questioned his mask or anything. He had been viewing this as a mission, and suddenly, he was too close to the sun.

Then the neighbor falls asleep on his couch. Since when did he have a fancy couch? He leans down to wake them up, but he feels the heat through their clothes as he touches their shoulder. They are delirious when he wakes them, but he manages to get them to drink some water and take some cold meds. He ends up taking them to his bedroom and putting them in the bed.

He hovers all night, checking on their fever and staring around his house, his home. He's never had a home. Not like this. Not something his own that's not at risk 24/7. He needed his neighbor. This was because of his neighbor.

The next morning, when you are crying, missing work and bills, while actively throwing up. He curses, then offers to pay, then fumbles when he realizes how that sounds. Before blurting out that it was just because he didn't want you to feel pressured to move in with him. Fumbles again, realizing he didn't get the chance to offer, and promptly facepalms.

But his neighbor smiles for the first time since getting sick and goes, "I'd like that too." You spend the next week too sick to take care of yourself and just never leave.

Simon sends a picture of a ring in his hand, you cooking with your back to him in the background, to the 141 group chat, followed by "Is it too soon?" Not a single one of them knows who you are. This results in them preparing an intervention because What? The? Hell? Did? He? Do? Is this person using him? He has an impressive retirement.

Soap managed to get a plane ticket first and heads to where he knows Ghost lives. He's alarmed when you open the door. Even more so when you recognize him. "Oh, you must be Johnny! Simon will be so happy to see you! He's on a grocery run, but come in." Then you lead him to the couch. Since when does Ghost believe in couches? Soap can't help but look around. He sees pictures on the wall of him and the team. You sit down in what's clearly your spot on the end of the couch, like you've always been there, and start telling him about how well Simon is doing. How He's been going to every therapy session and took up cooking as a hobby, and started different little self-improvement goals each week. You seem so proud. Soap is just flabbergasted because you seem nice enough, but how did you even meet Ghost? He grills Simon about it while you're cooking dinner.

Like… are you kidding me? Em dashes have existed longer than half the people making that complaint have been alive. They’ve been in literature, essays, newspapers, journals, letters, and basically every written medium since punctuation became a thing humans fought about.

And I actually tried to ignore this whole topic for the longest time. I told myself, “Just let people be wrong on the internet. It’s not worth the energy.” But there comes a point where enough is enough, where the ignorance just gets so loud and so confidently stupid that you cannot stay silent anymore.

I’m truly, deeply sorry that I want to articulate my thoughts in a way that actually reflects how a human brain jumps, pivots, interrupts itself, and wanders. There is nothing ‘unnatural’ about that. That is literally how people think and speak.

And if you genuinely believe that em dashes are some proof of ‘inhuman writing,’ then my dear, you have never actually read a single book. Because ninety-nine percent of traditionally published authors use them. Classics. Fantasy authors. Romance authors. Literary authors. Modern authors. Old authors.

And sure, yes, obviously no one should use sixty em dashes in a 200-word paragraph. That looks like a punctuation stampede. But refusing to use them at all? Acting like they are some kind of forbidden, suspicious punctuation mark? Absolutely not.

I love em dashes. And I’m going to keep using them forever.

So stop accusing writers of “fakeness” because of punctuation. Stop pretending your personal punctuation preferences are some moral high ground. Stop acting like you’re the gatekeeper of real writing when you clearly haven’t read widely enough to know how real writing actually looks.

And honestly, EVEN if someone does misuse punctuation, even if they sprinkle em dashes everywhere or barely know how a comma works, it is still NOT your business. Take care of your own stuff instead of policing someone else’s creativity.