& South is not Down

2. As someone recently doing a lot of strength training how the FUCK much weight are you deadlifting, jfc, I’ve just moved up to the 40 lb kettlebells and I feel like a superhero, what is that, 200 lbs?

Jack likes instagram. He understands the medium of photography, the mechanics and art that go into capturing a moment. It’s the one form of social media that he agrees to use and verifies with the Falconers, the rest can stay on the app store shelves. 

He loves instagram because he can see his friends, their silly videos and candid shots even when he’s not with them. Maybe that’s why he takes Senor Bun from the bed and poses him across the small breakfast table in his hotel room with a muffin and a cup off coffee, takes a few pictures, and finally captions one for instagram; My unexpected roommate isn’t much for conversation. Guess I’m taking care of this guy until I can get him home.

Shitty immediately messages him twenty-seven kissy faces and thirty poop emojis, Lardo follows soon after with a bunny emoji and a blue heart, and Ransom sends a video of Holster tearing up holding his phone whispering “He’s just a soft chicken tender bro. I love this bro so much, dude. He’s so good.”

Holster texts three hours later a simple “It was too fucking early for my emotions to be played like that, dude.”

Eric sends him five separate texts of several lines of hearts and a simple good luck.

Turns out, Tater loves Senor Bun. “He is being so soft.” Tater coos, rubbing a scruffy cheek on the tiny Falconers jersey Bitty had packed in Jack’s bag too. Jack gets it as his second Senor Bun photo. 

@A1Mashikov is #SenorBuns 3rd biggest fan.

It continues like this for the entire extent of the roadie, and his fans seem to enjoy it too, George is beaming about all the good press he’s getting for his Senor Bun photos. The Falconer’s official twitter even tweets his photo of the team with Bun, asking fans what their good luck charm was.

But after being on the road so long and the extra time to Samwell, he’s glad to be home. He beats Bittle to the Haus, climbing the stairs to his room and swapping the little Falconers jersey for the Samwell one on Eric’s desk. He poses Senor Bun in the window, leaning on a pillow. The caption is one word.

Home.

“What is this?” Bitty stares, confused, at the envelope Jack is holding toward him. 

“Money?” Bitty blinks slowly, quirks a brow at the question in Jack’s voice. 

He crosses his arms. “And you’re holding an envelope full of cash out to me why?” 

Jack’s eyebrows raise. “Bits. Bud. It’s for the jam.”

“You and Tater took the jam.” 

“Yeah. Up to the rest of the team and the support staff that ordered it?” 

“Ordered it?” 

Jack narrowed his eyes. “Bitty. You didn’t make all that jam–specific flavours for different people and like three dozen jars of blueberry for Tater alone–to just give to the team.” His voice is flat. 

Bitty catches his eye, brow furrowed in confusion. “Jack, it’s just jam.” 

“It’s…Bittle. It took two cars to haul it all up. It was two cars full of jam.” 

“I told you it just kind of…happened. Like the quiche–”

“On MLK day.” Jack sighs. “Okay, Bits. But, look. This is like how the sin bin here funds pies, right? Just consider this the NHL sin-bin-supply envelope.” He reaches out and places the envelope in the front pocket of Bitty’s bag. Reconsiders as he thinks about the amount and sticks it straight into the bottom of the duffel and zips it up. 

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.

If I say "I am uncomfortable with fandom's tendency to write trans men as feminine and submissive" I do not mean "I think every person who writes feminine submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I don't even mean "any cis-person who writes feminine or submissive trans men should be chased with pitchforks". I mean "I would like writers to seriously think about why this is so common, why they write that, and if it fairly and genuinely engages with what it means to be a trans man, or if they just think it's hot when submissive people have vaginas and didn't want to write omegaverse of m/f".

Similarly, when people say "fandom is systemically less interested in black characters, less willing to give flat black characters rich fanon than flat white characters, and less interested in black characters in ships", the response is not to explain why you, personally, just happen to like popular white guy in that fanon. Your job is to look at yourself and ask if you tend to "just happen to be more interested" in the popular white guy across fandoms, be honest, and start unpacking that. Sometimes it's easier to love the flat character who's already getting 10,000 fics with headcanons and art and meta.

If somebody says "I wish there were more gluten free options at the potluck. I hate always showing up and not finding anything I can eat*", they are not asking you to throw your cake in the trash and weep. They do not want to hear your long speech about how actually this is your grandmother's recipe, and you've tried it with rice flour actually, but it just didn't work. You think about what you can do, and you listen to how they feel.

But when Three says hey I'll go save it if you'll agree to let my clients go safely home, ART doesn't jump on this plan. Heck ART's smart enough to think of manipulating Three into helping but it doesn't. Instead it says you don't have to perform your function for me, I'll return your clients either way.

And then Three says it'll do it anyway and ART asks why. It could jump at the chance but it cares about this newly rogue secunit 2.0 made! It doesn't want to take away its brand new autonomy!

first of all they absolutely rate each others nudes, sometimes they send them not even with the intention to send the nudes so someone else, just for the hell of it, just to have the other saying hell yeah brother looking good, just to boost self esteem

second of all while the idea of them 10/10ing each picture is funny and appealing to me, i had a vision in which i saw the most meticulous earnest constructive criticism in order to help the other achieve absolute perfection

-(a dick pic, full light) move your hand down a bit, will make it seem bigger and maybe turn down the light a bit, give it an aura of mystery

-(navel to mid thigh, a giant hickey right where the pubes line starts) damn roz, who did this to you? (ilya says you should see the other guy. marley doesn’t catch on)

-(mirror selfie, full frontal) marley don’t you have a mirror outside of the bathroom? the toilet in the background is a bit of a buzzkill

-(hands down pants, dick fully erect) love the vibe but there is a giant hole in your boxers, maybe change those

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.