I write fanfiction sometimes. Mainly Kuroshitsuji and Sebaciel, but also a lot of Kyosato these days. Old fandom noodle rancher. capricious_calcifer on Ao3. Ask me anything about my fics! Adult, They/Them. May post NSFW content.
Finally getting around to making a pinned post. You can call me Calcifer/Cal, and I prefer they/them pronouns. I am on AO3 as capricious_calcifer.
Additional general info can be found under the cut:
Asks:
I love asks! If I missed your ask I promise it's not intentional - please feel free to send me a reminder. Sometimes I forget I drafted half a response.
All previous answers to askbox items can be found under the tag #calcifer answers.
Content:
This is mainly a Kuroshitsuji fanblog, but I do occasionally reblog content from other shows and ships I enjoy. I'll ship pretty much anything, but I do have some favorites. I tend to prefer dark, angsty ships with a lot of jealousy, violent, or possessive elements to explore. For this reason not all content is SFW.
Posts about my main OTP Sebastian/Ciel will be tagged #sebaciel.
Posts about Kyouji/Satomi are tagged #kyosato.
I do also occasionally post about Tom/Harry, those are tagged #tomarry if you would like to avoid it.
If you see something you'd prefer to be tagged, or tagged differently, please let me know. I'm generally happy to accommodate.
Current ongoing series:
Electing Strange Perfections: A century after his death, Ciel Phantomhive awakens in a familiar graveyard. A (very) slow-burn crossover AU with Sebastian/Ciel from the Kuroshitsuji manga, and Tom Riddle/HP from the HP Universe. Tagged: #electing strange perfections
Damned Delicious: A post S2 AU starring anime Sebastian/Ciel. Sebastian teaches Ciel the art of cultivating and eating souls. Full of food metaphors and monsterfucking. Tagged: #damned delicious
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I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
The biggest losers of the dot com bubble were a whole lot of IPOs you probably don’t remember, but here’s a good Reddit thread with some examples. But the bulk of these companies were web portals — for search, for e-commerce, for proto-cryptocurrencies. The bubble was similar to a land grab and when it popped it wasn’t totally different from a housing crash. The tech is different, but the driving force behind our current AI gold rush echoes it pretty closely. Get in early and colonize the internet. Except the internet is, by definition, infinite, which makes any kind of internet real estate pretty worthless. Newer tech companies have realized that what they really need to colonize is attention, but that creates a myriad of other problems, like understanding taste and coolness and the psychology of mass media. Stuff that has, for the bulk of the social media age, been automated by algorithms because rich loser nerds don’t understand it. The (false) process of AI is that it’s finally a way to colonize online real estate as well as attention.
This is a question I keep asking myself about, well, the entire internet lately. “What if this all just doesn’t work this time?” What if AI companies can’t replace search? What if streaming video can’t replace Hollywood? What if short-form video apps can’t replace social media users? What if Silicon Valley can’t brute force their products — and ideology — onto the masses again? To take it even further, what if the dot com crash and the AI crash are actually part of the same 25 years epoch of technological stagnation? I’m not going to lie, I find this line of questioning exhilarating.
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
One of the surprise breakout software products of the early web was Lotus Notes, a kind of primitive precursor to all-in-one office productivity suites like GDocs, Office365, etc. It was so important that its creator, Ray Ozzie, was promoted to Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, succeeding Bill Gates himself:
People who remember Notes tend to deride it for its clunky user interface and demi-functional administrative tools. But what made Notes so central to Microsoft wasn't its polish – it was the fact that Notes represented a brokered peace between IT managers, who wanted mainframe-like control over everything their users could do with business equipment, and the users themselves – workers who kept smuggling internet-based tools into the enterprise network on the very sensible grounds that they had a job to do, and these were the best tools to do it.
The arrival of internet-based tools – especially ones that ran in browsers – represented a major challenge to IT departments, who had been long accustomed to dictating terms to their users. If the IT manager and the compliance department decided that the best way to manage disclosure and leak risks was to block all email attachments for outside users, then that was that: no one could send those attachments.
But after the internet arrived on the corporate desktop, employees who needed to get documents to supply chain partners and customers could treat these IT policies as damage and route around them. Just fire up your Hotmail or Yahoo mail window, or hop on MSN Messenger or ICQ or AIM, or drop the file on an anonymous FTP server and send the link to your counterparty. Job done!
IT managers hated this, and to be fair to them, they weren't (always) wrong. These outside tools came from a variety of untrustworthy sources, including malicious sites that pushed virus-infected versions to their users. Also, by evading firewall rules with these tools, users made it impossible to achieve the compliance goals that IT had been charged with enforcing, and it was IT's asses on the line if the company got in trouble as a result.
Foundationally, IT was being asked to do two irreconcilable things: they were supposed to be enabling workers to get their jobs done, and they were supposed to be stopping those workers from doing things that could harm the business. This can't be done, because the only way to eliminate the possibility that a worker will take an action that harms the business is to gag that worker and lock them in a dungeon. Workers need flexibility and freedom to achieve business goals, and that flexibility and freedom means that those workers might (deliberately or accidentally) thwart the business's goals.
What's more, workers will always run into situations that were not anticipated by policy, and if they are denied any agency or initiative, they will fail to get their jobs done. In work, the exception is the rule, hence the importance of "process knowledge" (all the implicit knowledge shared among workers across the firm and its suppliers and customers, which cannot be captured or recorded):
Indeed, there's a form of labor action called a "work to rule," in which workers only do the things dictated by their rulebooks, without taking any of the routine additional measures dictated by process knowledge. Merely by following every rule to the letter, workers can grind a shop to a halt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
Since the dawn of personal computers, workers and IT departments have come into conflict, as workers literally smuggled technology into the business that could do things the IT department had (often arbitrarily and capriciously) prohibited. When Visicalc emerged as the killer app for the Apple ][+, workers snuck these computers into work and used them to sort spreadsheets in ways that IT had declined to permit. They didn't do this to cheat or steal from the company – the whole point was to do a better job.
So it was with the early web: workers discovered a myriad of new capabilities in the free-to-use world of web-based tools and realized how these tools would make them much more effective at their jobs. The fact that IT wouldn't let them do these things was just more evidence that IT – and the managers who set IT's agenda – didn't understand the business as well as workers.
It didn't help that IT managers' first line of defense was the high-tech version of abstinence-only education: "You only think you need your work computers to do this, but really, you don't, so stop trying":
Abstinence-only education never works, but where "you only think you need this" failed, Lotus Notes succeeded. Lotus Notes provided a whole suite of tools that largely (if imperfectly) replaced the universe of free tools that workers were using to evade their IT departments' edicts, so they could get their jobs done. At the same time, Lotus Notes provided a set of management tools that let IT fine-tune how these tools worked, giving them (some) of the controls they needed to achieve their compliance goals.
Like all brokered peace settlements, Lotus Notes left both sides feeling like they'd made a compromise they could live with, giving up some of their goals, but keeping the things that really mattered to them.
It's impossible to overstate how important Lotus Notes and similar products were, because workers demanded the right to use the web on their work computers, and they made those demands so forcefully that managers had to completely re-do their IT policies, lest those workers treat them as damage and route around them. Back then, the tech press was full of stories about these conflicts, as workers insisted that the new technology that was sweeping the nation was so foundational and transformative that they had to be allowed to use it.
What we never saw back then were stories about how managers had to monitor workers to ensure that they were using the web as much as possible. No one had to force workers to find ways to integrate the web into their workflows.
In other words, the story of the web at work was the opposite of the story of AI at work. Today, you can't turn around without reading a story about bosses who are threatening to fire workers if they don't increase their AI usage:
It's conceivable that over the past quarter-century, bosses have become technophiles while workers have fallen prey to superstitious technophobia, but it hardly seems likely. Historically, workers have always been enthusiastic about tools that let them do a better job – indeed, it's a truism that labor-led automation produces improvements in quality, while capital-driven automation increases throughput (often at the expense of quality).
Workers aren't the only typical early adopters who find AI lacking. As a group, teenagers and young adults hate AI:
That's not what it was like during the early web days. Back then, young people entering the workforce were passionate devotees of the web, to the point where the business press routinely ran articles asking how today's workplaces were going to adapt to the demands of these webbed-up workers.
AI boosters insist that the deficits we see in AI – its lack of profitability, its primitive and error-riddled outputs – are no different from the shakedown problems of the early web (and we know how the web turned out!). But this is a profoundly flawed comparison: the early web and AI are very different from one another.
For one thing, the early web may have lost money, but it had great unit economics. Every new web user brought the web closer to profitability, as did every new use of the web, and every new generation of web technology. By contrast, AI has – in the memorable phrasing of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit economics." Every new AI user makes AI less profitable, as does every new use for AI, and each generation of AI loses more money than the last. AI is the money-losingest endeavor in human history:
In other words, the early web was a technology that grew more profitable every day, which workers and young people had to force on their bosses – and AI is a technology that grows less profitable every day, and bosses have to force it on workers and young people.
Now, it's true that some workers don't have to be forced to use AI. Workers who enjoy a high degree of autonomy (that is to say, workers who are positioned to ignore workplace coercion) can adopt AI in ways that they feel suited to, just as those early web users and Visicalc smugglers did. They can fulfill the maxim that labor-driven automation improves quality, while resisting capital's insistence that automation be used to increase throughput at quality's expense.
They can act as centaurs (workers assisted by technology), not as reverse-centaurs (workers who are recruited to serve as peripherals for machines). As with all technology questions, what the technology does is nowhere near as important as who the tech does it for and who the tech does it to:
And there's another group of workers who adopt AI voluntarily: workers who see that AI can do a lot of work that they view as dull and unimportant for them. These workers might be right – there are plenty of bullshit jobs out there:
But it's also possible that they're wrong, and they're substituting AI for something that really should be done by a person.
But on the plus side, at least no one has to force them to adopt AI.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
"Object permanence" is the ability to understand that even if you can't see something, it still exists. Most toddlers acquire a thorough sense of object permanence by the age of two. But when it comes to technopolitics, object permanence eludes even full-grown lawmakers. These motherfuckers would lose a game of peek-a-boo.
Over and over again, politicians are warned about the ways that their pet policies will a) produce enormous collateral damage, and; b) be easily evaded by the people they're seeking to control, giving rise to a cascade of ever-more extreme measures. And yet, they swallow a spider to catch a fly and then act baffled and hurt when we tell them it's their own damn fault that they now have to swallow a bird to catch the spider:
The foreseeable and foreseen consequences of bad technopolicy are all around us, but in the eternal now of a politics utterly devoid of object permanence, no one is allowed to remember what happened the last time we did something stupid, especially not when we're on the verge of doing that same stupid thing again, only worse:
Technopolitics are defined by Bruce Schneier's "security syllogism," which goes, "Something must be done! There, I've done something." "Something" doesn't have to fix the problem, and "something" doesn't have to anticipate what will happen next. So long as "something" is done, the issue is resolved and the politician can chalk up a win.
This gives rise to some genuinely bizarre consensus hallucinations, in which we pretend that the reality decreed by policy matches up with actual reality. Take "streaming." There is no such thing as "streaming." A "stream" is just "a download that is transmitted to an application that doesn't have a 'Save As…' button":
Once you decree that there is such a thing as a stream, you must bend heaven and earth to ensure that no "Save As…" buttons are added to the "streaming" program. You have to pass laws that make it illegal to inspect code. To modify code. To report on defects in code. To index information about defects in code. To index information about mods. To link to indices that compile defects and mods. You have to swallow the fly, the spider, the bird, the cat, the dog, and the whole damned horse:
Then there's that perennial fave, "bans on working cryptography." To ban working cryptography, you have to outlaw free/open source software. You have to inspect every device that comes into your country. You have to erect a Great Firewall that blocks every site that might carry working cryptography. You make it impossible to reliably update the software in pacemakers, anti-lock brakes and nuclear power plants, and you make it easy for identity thieves, foreign powers and corporate spies to raid your government, your corporations, and your households – and it still won't work!
The latest consensus hallucination to take over our political classes is "age verification," a thing that manifestly does not exist. You can't "verify the age" of an internet user – you can only attempt to attribute every byte that traverses the entire internet to affirmatively identified persons:
This comes at enormous cost. It is a gift to every future dictator, every identity thief, and every would-be sexual exploiter of children, who will have access to the hacked, leaked, and badly secured troves of data that this doomed effort produces.
Yes, doomed. Because even when it comes to kids, "age verification" is just a way of convincing young people to familiarize themselves with VPNs. This was entirely obvious from the very instant that "age verification" was mooted, and yet our policymakers pretended they couldn't hear the chorus of people who pointed it out to them. When cornered on the issue, they were affronted: "Can't you see that something must be done? How dare you attempt to stop me from doing something?"
And now, every single one of these chucklefucks is proposing bans on VPNs, from Utah:
They were warned that this would happen. We told them not to swallow that fly. Now we're telling them not to swallow whole bucketloads of spiders. I fully expect that next year, they'll be telling us that once they swallow this herd of horses, it will all be OK.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
sbcl re:zero/steins;gate au where sebastian keeps getting thrown back in time trying to save ciel from dying, and in every single alternate timeline ciel still dies
I used to have a folder on my phone called “Suspiciously gay official art” I’ve since lost it but that doesn’t stop the fact that there’s a lot of sebaciel fan service (especially in the earlier years) as such, here’s a big post about it!
This was posted on Valentines day! they’re dancing together💕
once again dancing and being cute (have to be extra close because they’re not alone, notice the Seb thigh grab)
wow can you guys stop dancing all the time, its like you’re a couple!
what’s up with the thanksgiving art and Ciel lookin’ like a snac, idk there’s something weird goin’ on there (I feel like it’s too sensual to be a metaphor for Seb eating Ciel’s soul)
okay they’re straight up kissing wtf (I think that’s demon Ciel so season 2 doesn’t count but come on!)
Ciel does not need to hang onto Seb like that, that’s suspicious… suspiciously gay!
They’re always hanging off each other/possessively holding one another!
(sorry for the long post, feel free to add more suspiciously gay official art!)
All of these are stunning, but I especially love the ones of post-S2. So gothic, dark, and sensual. Ciel as a demon looks absolutely amazing, with those black nails and red eyes of his - and the heels! So many versions of his and Sebastian’s dynamic development over the eternity waiting for them.
there’s even more once you start looking more at yana’s sketches…
but guys. there’s actually a straight, platonic justification for every image. it’s not as gay as you might think.
they are CLEARLY just friends or even only acquaintances. i’m sure they’re doing some kind of special handshake here
are you even bros if you won’t sensually take off your bro’s glove for him? (two left hands=two people/two dudes being dudes)
this is how i would spend time with my servants, if i had any,,
i too stand with my platonic acquaintances like this. often in fact. particularly as rose petals fall around us
the cameraman said “do a peace sign if you’re straight!” (don’t ask me how i know this, i just do)
any good bro carries his bro around bridal style, and then holds his bro in his arms in the same way as he sleeps (wait i don’t think he’s sleeping–the straightness levels killed him)
fellas it isn’t gay to get off on your bro’s suffering okay that’s just what us vanilla bros do for one another. it’s a mutual thing. ciel agrees
and then back to official art…
sorry, gay? not in my good christian house! i’ll have you know they said ‘no homo’ before they lay down together surrounded by roses and held hands. sebastian is clearly going to kiss ciel’s hand to seal the no-homo deal
finally, some good straight content! sebastian and his girlfriend are so cute. she’s blushing and his hand is even on her ass they’re clearly dating
the harder you hug somebody to you, the straighter it is. i’m sorry, i don’t make the rules
case in point. also the bro code says that when you’re underwater, no homo is taken as a given, since you can’t say it out loud :\
he’s literally leaning his head against ciel’s ass. idk what you want me to tell you other than that they’re 109% straight.
two bros chilling in the nintendo game 0 feet apart cause they’re not gay
…okay i’m done now that was full homo full sarcasm full sebaciel
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things I would do if you're a nsfw/kink creative now because I've been eerily prescient about every single wave:
a) get a personal site with your own domain you own. now. not a carrd or third party squarespace. not next week. now. get it online with ugly-ass html but get your links there.
b) if you have the money: join one or multiple of eff.org / cbldf.org / freespeechcoalition.com
partly because they're actively fighting this, partly because they have members-only Lawyers You Might Need. Hint. Hint. Canary.
c) Write Down Those Lawyer Contact Numbers in meatspace. phone number of a real human being especially on paper, On You.
I have been in contact with lawyers for a few months now as my doujin circle knows. this should be telling you Many Things.
d) www.ecrater.com is where i'm going to be tentatively testing a shop because i like the fact you can *not* have payment processes and order digital/physical products via purely mail order.
(... be prepared for this to fall through too in the next 1-6 months.)
e) friends and followers of nsfw artists who earn most of their income through it: now's the time to support them. they're going to need the grace and financial flexibility especially mental health wise. domain/shop transfer/refund/therapy bills ain't free.
check in on them, and often.
f) get a VPN, use it daily to acclimatize, have them on your hard drive, several VPN's preferable. this is for the age verification laws coming. Start reading up on secure, privacy-focused infrastructure (prioritize email > website > shop in that order).
eff.org has a *ton* of resources.
g) prepare for discord and tumblr to be hit in the next wave. have alternatives *and actively start using them* if they're mission critical platforms for you.
I've played with matrix though I quite fancy IRC. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I say these things not to fearmonger but to give yourself the maximum amount of time to prepare. the pendulum *will* swing back. it did with the 80's moral panic. it will for this too.
the fun thing about having a mental health crashout in your thirties is that sure yeah you're crashing out, but at the same time there's a part of you standing across the room smoking ben affleck style, going yeah yeah you're crashing out. you crashed out before you will crash out again can we wrap this up yet. and the most annoying part about it is that they're right, and that that does Not stop you from crashing out even a little. love and light on planet earth.
cunt-ass part of my brain swigging whiskey from across the room: yeah yeah you're not real we get it. that's not gonna get the dishes done and the trash taken out tho is it 🤨
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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HR 7661 is the United States censorship bill being called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” This act does nothing to protect children, and is part of ongoing attacks against transgender people in the United States.
Authors Against Book Bans has put together a script for calling your representatives. If you aren’t sure who your representatives are, the script link includes a tool to find them.
If you’re a writer, editor, illustrator, or otherwise involved in book production, you can also join Authors Against Book Bans to access further resources for fighting censorship.
We should all be talking about KOSA. The bill would mean the end of the open internet in the US, and it was just approved by a House committee for a floor vote. The act is ostensibly designed to regulate the age of social media users. However, it actually deanonymizes the internet and allows the government to sue LGBTQ+ websites.
Unsurprisingly, the Heritage Foundation is one of the main lobbying groups behind this push. They have publicly stated they want to use the law to restrict LGBTQ+ and abortion-related content. Blocking children under 16 from accessing the internet means young people will be isolated within their communities. They cannot discuss LGBTQ+ issues with their online peers. They could not request help to access abortion clinics. Senator Marsha Blackburn, who once personally sent the FBI to my doorstep to harass me, admits the law is intended to shield “minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture.”
“The through-line couldn’t be clearer: destroying online anonymity is a way for government to be able to identify ¬— and ultimately punish — dissenters,” explains Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The DHS has already subpoenaed hundreds of anonymous accounts tracking and protesting ICE. KOSA would make it even easier for the government to access your data.
Read the full article in The Intercept!
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