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Summary: Your daughter fakes a stomachache to surprise her parents at work on Take Your Kid to Work Day, never realizing the panic it would cause.
Word count: 4.2k+
Warnings: fluff, tiny angst
A/N:
this was co-written with my friend Nora! We actually wrote some other stuff together too, but this is the first fic where she wrote the most of it. She also wants to write fanfics but is a little hesitant. Can’t wait for you to open your own blog and share your talent with tumblr Nora, this one’s you!!!💓
English is not my first language, so I apologize if I made any (grammar) mistakes. Feedback, requests, talks, vents, recommendations or just simple questions are always welcome.
Happy reading xxx
I do NOT give permission for my work to be translated or reposted on here or any other site.
When your daughter Lucy heard about Take Your Kid to Work Day, she came home convinced it was going to be the greatest day of her entire six-year-old life.
Her class had spent nearly a week talking about it. Every morning another child had a new story, another exciting detail to add. Emma was going to help frost cupcakes at her mother's bakery. Noah couldn't stop talking about riding in his dad's garbage truck, proudly announcing to anyone who would listen that he was going to press the "real buttons." Olivia was getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the aquarium where her mom worked. Even little Ben, whose father worked at a bank, marched around the classroom with a paper tie taped around his neck, declaring he would be "approving loans all day." By Thursday afternoon Lucy had listened to enough stories that she'd begun planning her own. She was absolutely certain she would wear one of those little white doctor coats she'd seen in toy stores. She'd carry a clipboard. Maybe even a stethoscope. Everyone would finally get to see how cool her parents' jobs were.
So when you and Jack walked through the front door that evening after a twelve-hour shift, you barely had time to take your shoes off before Lucy came barreling across the living room like an excited puppy.
"Mama!"
She wrapped herself around your legs so tightly you had to catch yourself against the wall to stay upright.
"Daddy!"
Jack wasn't spared either. She launched herself at him next, nearly knocking the backpack from his shoulder.
"Whoa, easy, bug," he laughed, catching her under the arms before she could accidentally headbutt him. "Someone's excited. Where's your grandma?"
"In the kitchen. I have something important to say."
You and Jack exchanged an amused look over the top of her head. Important announcements from Lucy ranged anywhere from losing a tooth to discovering worms in the garden.
"Oh?" Jack asked, setting his bag down.
Lucy nodded so enthusiastically that her ponytail bounced. "It's Take Your Kid to Work Day next Friday."
Her grin stretched so wide it nearly split her face.
"And I get to come with you."
The silence that followed was tiny.
Barely a second.
But it was enough.
Jack's smile faltered first. You watched it happen almost imperceptibly, the corners of his mouth relaxing as his eyes drifted toward yours. The excitement on Lucy's face hadn't dimmed yet. She was already imagining hallways and stethoscopes and showing all her friends pictures afterward.
You felt your heart sink before either of you had even opened your mouths.
Lucy noticed immediately.
Her smile wavered.
"...What's wrong?"
You crouched until you were eye level with her, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear while you searched desperately for words that wouldn't break her heart.
"Oh, sweetheart..."
Jack carefully lowered himself beside you, adjusting his balance before slipping an arm around Lucy's shoulders.
"Our jobs are a little different from everyone else's."
She frowned in confusion.
"But I can still come, right?"
Jack let out the smallest sigh.
"The emergency department isn't really a place for kids."
Her forehead wrinkled.
"Why?"
You looked at Jack for half a second before answering.
"Because the people who come to see us aren't coming for fun." You spoke gently, carefully choosing every word. "They're usually having one of the worst days of their lives. They're very, very sick..."
"Or hurt," Jack added quietly.
"They can look scary sometimes," you continued. "There can be blood. People cry. Sometimes they're frightened, sometimes they're angry, and sometimes they need every doctor and nurse in the room paying attention to them."
Jack nodded. "Our job is making sure they get help as quickly as possible. We can't always stop to explain what's happening, and there are things no six-year-old should have to see."
Lucy listened with surprising seriousness, though it was obvious she still didn't understand.
"But..." she said softly, "I'll be quiet."
Your chest tightened.
"I know you would."
"I could sit in the corner and color."
Jack smiled, though it didn't quite reach his eyes.
"You probably could."
"I wouldn't touch anything."
"We know, sweetheart."
"I wouldn't even talk."
Jack smiled sadly. "You'd probably be the quietest kid in the whole hospital."
For the briefest moment, hope flickered across Lucy's face before reality settled back in. She looked between the two of you, swallowing hard.
"So..." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "...I can't?"
The words were so small they made your chest ache. You reached for her little hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
"No, sweetie. I'm sorry."
Her eyes filled almost instantly.
"But everyone else gets to go to their parents' work."
Jack closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. Every parent hated hearing those words because sometimes there simply wasn't a fair answer. He rubbed his thumb absentmindedly over the back of her tiny hand.
"I know."
"I wanna see where you guys work."
"I know."
"I wanna wear one of those little doctor coats."
Despite the ache in your chest, a smile tugged at your lips. "You would look absolutely adorable."
"I could help."
Jack let out a quiet snort, his expression turning dramatically serious.
"Oh, that's exactly the part I'm worried about."
Lucy blinked. "...Really?"
"Oh, absolutely," he said with a solemn nod. "I think you'd spend the whole day walking around the department telling everyone what to do."
"I would not."
"You absolutely would."
She crossed her arms.
"No."
"No?"
She puffed out her chest, planting both hands on her hips as she deepened her voice into what she apparently believed sounded very authoritative.
"'Okay everybody, one at a time! No pushing! You have to wait your turn!'"
Jack laughed so suddenly and genuinely that it echoed through the house.
"There it is."
You couldn't help laughing too.
"Our little charge nurse."
Lucy dissolved into giggles, pleased she'd made both of you laugh.
The moment was warm.
Light.
Comfortable.
Until it wasn't.
Her smile slowly faded as she remembered why she'd started the conversation in the first place.
"...But I still don't get to come."
Jack's laughter disappeared just as quickly. He opened his arms without saying a word, and Lucy climbed into his lap as naturally as breathing. She tucked her face into the crook of his neck, wrapping her little arms around him with a sigh that sounded much older than six years old.
"No," he admitted quietly, kissing the top of her head. "Not to work."
The room fell silent.
You watched Jack gently rub circles over Lucy's back while she sat curled against him, neither of them speaking. The disappointment in the room was almost tangible. You knew Jack was feeling it just as sharply as you were. Both of you spent your careers taking care of other people's children, yet this was one of those moments where your own daughter simply had to accept that your jobs came with doors she couldn't walk through.
Finally, you leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
"How about this?"
She peeked up hopefully.
"When we're both off next weekend, we'll take you to the hospital."
Jack immediately caught on.
"We'll show you the cafeteria."
"My locker."
"The ambulance bay."
"If there aren't any helicopters flying, maybe we can see the helipad from outside."
"The empty waiting room."
"My office."
Lucy sniffled, considering the offer with all the seriousness of someone negotiating an international treaty.
"...Can I push a wheelchair?"
Jack looked over at you.
You shrugged.
"If nobody's using it, sure."
She thought for another long moment before giving a tiny nod.
"...Okay."
It wasn't the answer she'd wanted.
It wasn't even close.
But she accepted it with the quiet resilience children somehow managed to find after their hearts had been disappointed. Before long she was asking what was for dinner and whether Grandma was still making pancakes the next morning, and by bedtime she seemed perfectly content again.
You smiled to yourself as you tucked her in that night, smoothing the blankets over her little shoulders.
Children had an incredible ability to move on.
Or so you thought.
Lucy had absolutely no intention of moving on.
She smiled when you tucked her into bed that night. She happily ate pancakes with Grandma the next morning. She colored pictures at the kitchen table, watched cartoons, and talked excitedly about the hospital tour you had promised for the following weekend. If anyone had asked, she seemed to have accepted your answer completely.
She hadn't.
To a six-year-old, "next weekend" felt impossibly far away. Everyone else would get to visit their parents' jobs on Friday. Everyone else would come back to school Monday with stories to tell. Emma would talk about frosting cupcakes. Noah would probably tell everyone he got to honk the garbage truck horn. Olivia would have pictures of fish. And Lucy... Lucy would have to say she stayed home because her mommy and daddy worked somewhere she wasn't allowed to go.
That simply didn't seem fair.
By Wednesday she had the beginning of a plan.
By Thursday she had improved it.
By Friday morning, she was convinced it was foolproof.
Your mother had barely finished pouring herself a cup of coffee when she heard small footsteps padding down the hallway. Lucy appeared in the kitchen doorway still wearing her pajamas, her favorite stuffed rabbit dangling from one hand while the other pressed dramatically against her stomach.
"Grandma..."
Your mother looked up immediately.
"Morning, sweetheart."
Lucy took two slow steps into the kitchen, making sure not to walk too quickly. Sick people probably didn't move very fast.
"I don't feel good."
The smile disappeared from your mother's face at once.
"Oh, sweetheart."
She set her mug down without taking a sip and crouched in front of her granddaughter, brushing a hand over Lucy's messy bed hair.
"What's wrong?"
"My tummy hurts."
"Oh no."
Lucy gave a pitiful little nod.
"It hurts a lot."
Your mother frowned with concern.
"Can you show me where?"
Lucy froze.
That...
She hadn't prepared for.
She looked down at herself, suddenly realizing stomachs had different parts. She'd heard you and Jack ask patients that question before. Daddy always wanted to know exactly where it hurt.
Panic fluttered in her chest for half a second.
"...Everywhere."
Your mother's eyebrows lifted ever so slightly.
"Everywhere?"
Another solemn nod.
"Mhm."
She gently rested both hands on Lucy's shoulders.
"Did you throw up?"
"No."
"Do you feel like you have to?"
Lucy pretended to think about it before giving a hesitant little shrug.
"...Maybe."
"Do you have a fever?"
"I don't know."
"Hmm..."
Your mother pressed the back of her hand against Lucy's forehead before checking again with her palm, the way mothers and grandmothers always seemed to do. Her skin felt perfectly cool.
No fever.
That was reassuring. Still, children didn't always spike a temperature right away. Maybe she'd eaten something that hadn't agreed with her. Maybe a little stomach bug was just beginning.
Lucy watched every expression that crossed her grandmother's face. She could tell she wasn't entirely convinced.
She needed to make it more believable.
So she let out the tiniest little whimper she could manage. Not loud enough to sound dramatic, just enough to make it seem like the pain had returned.
Your mother's face softened immediately.
"Oh, you poor thing."
Lucy leaned instinctively into the comforting touch, a small stab of guilt twisting in her chest before she quickly pushed it aside. She wasn't trying to be naughty. She just wanted to see Mama and Daddy at work like everyone else got to.
After a long pause, she lowered her voice to an almost frightened whisper.
"I think..." She looked up through her lashes with the biggest, saddest eyes she could manage. "...I need the hospital."
Your mother smiled gently as she tucked a strand of hair behind Lucy's ear.
"Oh, honey. I don't think we're there just yet."
Lucy's heart sank.
"...But my tummy really, really hurts."
"I know it does."
"We should go."
Your mother hesitated. Normally she would've waited an hour or two, called you first, given Lucy some water, and seen whether she felt any better after breakfast before rushing to the emergency department.
But abdominal pain in children was one of those things she'd learned never to dismiss completely after watching both you and Jack work in emergency medicine for years. You had both told stories about children who seemed perfectly fine until they suddenly weren't. Appendicitis. Intussusception. Things she'd never heard of before you became a doctor and Jack became a nurse.
She didn't want to overreact.
She also didn't want to ignore something important.
Her eyes lingered on Lucy's face. The little girl looked uncomfortable enough to be believable, even if she wasn't crying. Some children tolerated pain differently.
Your mother sighed softly as she stood.
"Alright."
Lucy's eyes widened before she could stop herself.
Really?
It worked?
Excitement rushed through her so suddenly she almost smiled.
Almost.
She bit the inside of her cheek just in time, quickly lowering her head and pressing a hand dramatically back against her stomach.
"I'll get dressed," your mother said. "Then we'll have one of Mommy's friends take a quick look at you, okay?"
Lucy nodded with all the seriousness she could muster.
"...Okay."
As your mother disappeared upstairs to change, Lucy remained standing in the middle of the kitchen, hugging her stuffed rabbit tightly against her chest.
Her plan had worked.
In just a little while, she'd finally get to see where her mom and dad spent all day.
She had no idea that before the morning was over, two people who had faced mass casualty incidents, violent trauma, and countless life-or-death emergencies would see her name on the emergency department tracking board and experience a kind of fear neither of them had ever learned to prepare for.
The emergency department had been in controlled chaos since seven that morning.
Every room was occupied. Hallway beds had filled before breakfast. Monitors chimed from every direction, phones rang almost constantly, stretchers rolled past one another with practiced precision, and conversations overlapped until they became little more than background noise. Jack had barely stopped moving since clocking in. He had just finished helping stabilize an elderly patient in respiratory distress and was updating the tracking board when a new name appeared among the incoming pediatric triage patients.
His own last name.
At first his brain didn't process it.
He frowned automatically, assuming it was another family with the same surname. It wasn't uncommon.
Then his eyes shifted to the details beneath it.
Accompanied by: Lucy.
The world seemed to narrow into a single point.
His stomach dropped so violently it almost hurt.
No.
No, no, no.
His mind filled the blanks long before reason had a chance to intervene.
Car accident on the way to school.
She'd fallen from the playground.
An allergic reaction.
A seizure.
Appendicitis.
A ruptured appendix.
Internal bleeding.
She'd stopped breathing.
His chest tightened so sharply that, for one terrifying second, it felt impossible to draw in air.
He was already moving before he'd consciously made the decision.
"Jack?"
Dana looked up from her workstation as he hurried past.
"You okay?"
He didn't answer.
Couldn't.
His prosthetic clicked faster against the floor as he rounded the nurses' station, weaving through stretchers and staff with an urgency that made several people instinctively step aside. Every extra second felt unbearable. His heartbeat pounded so loudly in his ears that he barely registered the voices around him.
Across the department, you were finishing charting after discharging a patient when your own eyes drifted toward the tracking board.
Your last name.
Pediatric triage.
Lucy.
Everything inside you went cold.
"No..."
The word escaped before you realized you'd spoken aloud.
Your pen slipped from your fingers onto the counter.
You didn't bother picking it up.
Someone behind you asked a question you never heard. You abandoned your chart mid-sentence and hurried out of the trauma bay, every rational thought dissolving beneath one singular, suffocating fear.
Not my baby.
Please not my baby.
You'd both spent years watching parents run into emergency departments wearing that exact expression.
The look that silently begged someone to tell them their child was okay.
Now you understood it from the inside.
Jack reached pediatric triage first.
He rounded the corner so quickly he nearly lost his footing, instinctively compensating before his prosthetic could catch awkwardly beneath him.
Then he stopped.
Lucy sat on one of the triage beds beside your mother, happily swinging her legs back and forth as she hugged her stuffed rabbit. She looked perfectly content, completely fascinated by everything happening around her.
The moment she saw him, her entire face lit up.
"Hi, Daddy!"
Jack didn't answer immediately.
He couldn't.
His breathing still hadn't caught up with him. His pulse hammered painfully against his ribs as his eyes swept over her with clinical precision born from years in emergency medicine.
Skin color okay.
Breathing normal.
Alert.
Talking.
No blood.
No bruising.
No obvious deformities.
No signs of respiratory distress.
No altered mental status.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Relief crashed into him so suddenly his knees threatened to buckle.
He had to grip the back of a nearby chair to steady himself.
"Jack?"
Your mother stood immediately, guilt already written across her face.
"I am so, so sorry. I should’ve called."
You arrived only seconds later, breathing almost as hard as Jack.
"Lucy!"
Your daughter beamed.
"Hi, Mama!"
You dropped to your knees in front of her without hesitation, your hands automatically moving through the familiar sequence every parent in emergency medicine knew by instinct. Forehead. Neck. Arms. Wrists. Face.
"What happened?"
Your mother looked apologetic.
"She was perfectly fine this morning. She'd been playing, and then all of a sudden she started holding her stomach and said she was in terrible pain. I didn't know if I should wait or..."
"You absolutely did the right thing," you assured her automatically, even as your attention remained fixed entirely on Lucy.
"Honey?"
Lucy nodded solemnly.
"It hurt."
"Where does it hurt, bug?" Jack asked.
She pointed vaguely toward the center of her stomach.
"...Here."
"How bad?"
She held up eight fingers.
"On a scale of ten..."
"...Eight."
"When did it start?"
"This morning."
"Did you throw up?"
"No."
"Feel sick?"
She hesitated.
"...Maybe."
Jack exchanged the briefest glance with you.
Neither of you relaxed.
Because children lied about vegetables.
They didn't usually lie about pain.
And even when they weren't lying, they were notoriously bad at describing it. Jack had treated smiling children with ruptured appendixes, kids who laughed while walking on fractured ankles, toddlers quietly coloring despite severe dehydration. Looking well meant almost nothing in pediatrics.
You rested a reassuring hand against Lucy's abdomen.
"I'm just going to press a little, okay?"
She nodded.
You gently palpated one quadrant.
"Does this hurt?"
"No."
You moved to another.
"How about here?"
"No."
Lower right.
"No."
Lower left.
"No."
Jack watched every tiny flicker of her expression. Or rather, the complete lack of one. She wasn't tensing beneath your touch. She wasn't guarding her stomach or curling inward instinctively. If anything, she seemed far more interested in everything happening around her than in the examination itself.
Her eyes wandered constantly around the department, following nurses rushing past, patients being wheeled down the hallway, monitors chiming, stretchers rolling by, the ambulance doors sliding open every few minutes. She wasn't frightened by any of it. She looked fascinated.
You noticed it too.
Before either of you could ask another question, Lucy turned back toward Jack, wearing the brightest smile she'd had all morning.
"So..." She tilted her head innocently. "...Can I see where Daddy works now?"
Silence settled over the four of you.
Jack closed his eyes.
Very.
Very slowly.
Your mother frowned, looking between the three of you.
"...Lucy?"
Your daughter's grin only widened.
"It worked."
Jack opened one eye.
"...What worked?"
"My tummy."
Neither you nor Jack said a word.
"It wasn't really hurting." She paused, as though she'd only just realized you weren't reacting the way she'd expected. "I just wanted to come."
For several long seconds, nobody moved.
Jack slowly lowered himself onto the chair beside her, more because his legs suddenly felt weak than because he'd intended to sit.
Because his prosthetic leg suddenly felt unsteady beneath him.
He rubbed both hands over his face, forcing out a long, shaky breath before looking back at his daughter.
"You..." His voice was rougher than he intended. "...You faked it?"
Lucy nodded proudly, completely oblivious to the emotional hurricane she'd just unleashed.
"That was the only way Grandma would bring me."
Your mother's mouth fell open.
"Oh my goodness..."
Lucy looked between the two of you with complete sincerity.
"I wanted to see where you work."
Jack let out another slow breath that sounded dangerously close to becoming a laugh. Not because anything about this was funny, but because relief had nowhere else to go.
"You scared ten years off my life."
Her smile faltered.
"...I did?"
Jack swallowed, the image of her name on the tracking board still burned into his mind.
"When I saw your name pop up..." His voice caught unexpectedly, forcing him to pause. He looked away for a moment before gathering himself enough to continue. "I thought something terrible had happened."
You nodded quietly beside him.
"I thought my little girl was hurt."
Lucy's face crumpled almost instantly. The excitement disappeared, replaced by confusion and guilt.
"I..." Her shoulders curled inward. "...I didn't know."
Of course she hadn't.
She was six years old. In her mind, she'd come up with the smartest plan imaginable. Pretend to have a stomachache. Go to the hospital. Surprise Mommy and Daddy. She'd never stopped to think about what it would feel like for two emergency clinicians to suddenly see their own child's name appear on the tracking board.
She looked down at her sneakers, twisting one toe against the floor.
"I'm sorry."
Jack watched her quietly for a long moment. Every ounce of frustration he'd felt dissolved beneath the sight of her trying so hard not to cry. Without another word, he opened his arms.
Lucy climbed into them immediately.
He wrapped her tightly against his chest, closing his eyes as he rested his cheek against her hair.
"I'm not mad."
She looked up uncertainly.
"...You're not?"
He shook his head.
"I'm relieved."
His voice was barely above a whisper.
"So unbelievably relieved."
He held her for another moment before leaning back just enough to meet her eyes.
"But you cannot ever pretend to be sick like this again."
She nodded immediately.
"Okay."
"I need a real promise."
"I promise."
You moved closer until your shoulder rested against Jack's, wrapping an arm around both of them. Almost instinctively, Lucy reached for your hand with her free one.
"I'm sorry, Mama."
You squeezed her little fingers.
"I know."
"I just wanted everyone at school to know my mommy and daddy have cool jobs."
Your heart ached.
"We know, sweetheart."
"They all got to go."
You met Jack's eyes for a brief second. Sometimes the hardest part of parenting wasn't saying no. It was understanding exactly why your child wanted something so badly and still knowing the answer couldn't change.
Jack kissed the top of Lucy's head.
Jack was quiet for a moment before a small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"You know what?"
"What?"
"Since you're already here..." He glanced at you, silently asking the question before either of you spoke.
You smiled back.
"I think our patient has been thoroughly examined."
Jack nodded solemnly.
"I agree."
He looked back at Lucy.
"So I'm officially discharging you."
Her eyes widened.
"You are?"
"Mhm." He reached over and gently tapped the tip of her nose. "No tummy ache. Cleared to go home with Grandma."
She giggled.
"But..." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Before you go home, I think we can spare five minutes."
Lucy's mouth fell open.
"Really?"
"We can show you the nurses' station." He pointed toward the center of the department. "My locker. Maybe the ambulance bay if there isn't anything coming in."
"And the cafeteria," you added with a smile.
Jack nodded.
"But that's it."
"No treatment rooms."
"No sick patients," you said gently.
"And you stay with one of us the entire time."
Lucy threw her arms around his neck so quickly he almost laughed.
"I promise!"
"I know you do." He hugged her back before pulling away just enough to look at her seriously. "But that doesn't change one thing."
"What?"
"If you ever feel left out again, you tell Mommy or me."
She nodded.
"You don't have to scare us to spend time with us."
The smile slipped from her face.
"...Okay."
"I mean it, bug."
"I know."
She leaned forward to hug him again, then reached for you too, nearly pulling the three of you together on the waiting room chair.
Jack caught your eye over the top of Lucy's head.
"I think she inherited our problem-solving skills."
You laughed.
"No."
"Our stubbornness."
Lucy looked up immediately.
"I heard that."
"Oh, we know," Jack said with a grin. "Trust me, we know exactly who you got it from."
"I did not fake being stubborn."
"You absolutely did."
That earned another burst of laughter, loud enough that even your mother laughed through the tears she'd been quietly wiping away.
As Lucy happily slid off Jack's lap, already asking a hundred questions about ambulances and whether nurses really kept candy in the break room, the knot in his chest finally began to loosen. The fear hadn't disappeared entirely. He wasn't sure it ever would. Seeing her name on that tracking board had unlocked a terror he hoped never to feel again.
But as he watched her bounce happily between you, clutching one of your hands and one of his as though the last twenty minutes had never happened, he found himself smiling despite everything.
He would take fake stomachaches, dramatic plans, and six-year-old schemes over seeing his daughter in one of those treatment rooms for real every single day.
AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit
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:
Ed Zitron's a fantastic journalist, capable of turning a close read of AI companies' balance-sheets into an incandescent, exquisitely informed, eye-wateringly profane rant:
That's "Ed, the financial sleuth." But Ed has another persona, one we don't get nearly enough of, which I delight in: "Ed the stunt journalist." For example, in 2024, Ed bought Amazon's bestselling laptop, "a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage" and wrote about the experience of using the internet with this popular, terrible machine:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
It sucked, of course, but it sucked in a way that the median tech-informed web user has never experienced. Not only was this machine dramatically underpowered, but its defaults were set to accept all manner of CPU-consuming, screen-filling ad garbage and bloatware. If you or I had this machine, we would immediately hunt down all those settings and nuke them from orbit, but the kind of person who buys a $238 Acer Aspire from Amazon is unlikely to know how to do any of that and will suffer through it every day, forever.
Normally the "digital divide" refers to access to technology, but as access becomes less and less of an issue, the real divide is between people who know how to defend themselves from the cruel indifference of technology designers and people who are helpless before their enshittificatory gambits.
Zitron's stunt stuck with me because it's so simple and so apt. Every tech designer should be forced to use a stock configuration Acer Aspire 1 for a minimum of three hours/day, just as every aviation CEO should be required to fly basic coach at least one out of three flights (and one of two long-haul flights).
To that, I will add: every news executive should be forced to consume the news in a stock browser with no adblock, no accessibility plugins, no Reader View, none of the add-ons that make reading the web bearable:
But in all honesty, I fear this would not make much of a difference, because I suspect that the people who oversee the design of modern news sites don't care about the news at all. They don't read the news, they don't consume the news. They hate the news. They view the news as a necessary evil within a wider gambit to deploy adware, malware, pop-ups, and auto-play video.
Rawdogging a Yahoo News article means fighting through a forest of pop-ups, pop-unders, autoplay video, interrupters, consent screens, modal dialogs, modeless dialogs – a blizzard of news-obscuring crapware that oozes contempt for the material it befogs. Irrespective of the words and icons displayed in these DOM objects, they all carry the same message: "The news on this page does not matter."
The owners of news services view the news as a necessary evil. They aren't a news organization: they are an annoying pop-up and cookie-setting factory with an inconvenient, vestigial news entity attached to it. News exists on sufferance, and if it was possible to do away with it altogether, the owners would.
That turns out to be the defining characteristic of work that is turned over to AI. Think of the rapid replacement of customer service call centers with AI. Long before companies shifted their customer service to AI chatbots, they shifted the work to overseas call centers where workers were prohibited from diverging from a script that made it all but impossible to resolve your problems:
These companies didn't want to do customer service in the first place, so they sent the work to India. Then, once it became possible to replace Indian call center workers who weren't allowed to solve your problems with chatbots that couldn't resolve your problems, they fired the Indian call center workers and replaced them with chatbots. Ironically, many of these chatbots turn out to be call center workers pretending to be chatbots (as the Indian tech joke goes, "AI stands for 'Absent Indians'"):
"We used an AI to do this" is increasingly a way of saying, "We didn't want to do this in the first place and we don't care if it's done well." That's why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call:
The Trump administration doesn't want to hear from immigrants who are trying to file their bewildering paperwork correctly. Incorrect immigration paperwork is a feature, not a bug, since it can be refined into a pretext to kidnap someone, imprison them in a gulag long enough to line the pockets of a Beltway Bandit with a no-bid contract to operate an onshore black site, and then deport them to a country they have no connection with, generating a fat payout for another Beltway Bandit with the no-bid contract to fly kidnapped migrants to distant hellholes.
If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole:
So it's no surprise that media bosses are so enthusiastic about replacing writers with chatbots. They hate the news and want it to go away. Outsourcing the writing to AI is just another way of devaluing it, adjacent to the existing enshittification that sees the news buried in popups, autoplays, consent dialogs, interrupters and the eleventy-million horrors that a stock browser with default settings will shove into your eyeballs on behalf of any webpage that demands them:
Remember that summer reading list that Hearst distributed to newspapers around the country, which turned out to be stuffed with "hallucinated" titles? At first, the internet delighted in dunking on Marco Buscaglia, the writer whose byline the list ran under. But as 404 Media's Jason Koebler unearthed, Buscaglia had been set up to fail, tasked with writing most of a 64-page insert that would have normally been the work of dozens of writers, editors and fact checkers, all on his own:
When Hearst hires one freelancer to do the work of dozens, they are saying, "We do not give a shit about the quality of this work." It is literally impossible for any writer to produce something good under those conditions. The purpose of Hearst's syndicated summer guide was to bulk out the newspapers that had been stripmined by their corporate owners, slimmed down to a handful of pages that are mostly ads and wire-service copy. The mere fact that this supplement was handed to a single freelancer blares "Go fuck yourself" long before you clap eyes on the actual words printed on the pages.
The capital class is in the grips of a bizarre form of AI psychosis: the fantasy of a world without people, where any fool idea that pops into a boss's head can be turned into a product without having to negotiate its creation with skilled workers who might point out that your idea is pretty fucking stupid:
For these AI boosters, the point isn't to create an AI that can do the work as well as a person – it's to condition the world to accept the lower-quality work that will come from a chatbot. Rather than reading a summer reading list of actual books, perhaps you could be satisfied with a summer reading list of hallucinated books that are at least statistically probable book-shaped imaginaries?
The bosses dreaming up use-cases for AI start from a posture of profound and proud ignorance of how workers who do useful things operate. They ask themselves, "If I was a ______, how would I do the job?" and then they ask an AI to do that, and declare the job done. They produce utility-shaped statistical artifacts, not utilities.
Take Grammarly, a company that offers statistical inferences about likely errors in your text. Grammar checkers aren't a terrible idea on their face, and I've heard from many people who struggle to express themselves in writing (either because of their communications style, or because they don't speak English as a first language) for whom apps like Grammarly are useful.
But Grammarly has just rolled out an AI tool that is so obviously contemptuous of writing that they might as well have called it "Go fuck yourself, by Grammarly." The new product is called "Expert Review," and it promises to give you writing advice "inspired" by writers whose writing they have ingested. I am one of these virtual "writing teachers" you can pay Grammarly for:
This is not how writing advice works. When I teach the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' workshop, my job isn't to train the students to produce work that is strongly statistically correlated with the sentence structure and word choices in my own writing. My job – the job of any writing teacher – is to try and understand the student's writing style and artistic intent, and to provide advice for developing that style to express that intent.
What Grammarly is offering isn't writing advice, it's stylometry, a computational linguistics technique for evaluating the likelihood that two candidate texts were written by the same person. Stylometry is a very cool discipline (as is adversarial stylometry, a set of techniques to obscure the authorship of a text):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
But stylometry has nothing to do with teaching someone how to write. Even if you want to write a pastiche in the style of some writer you admire (or want to send up), word choices and sentence structure are only incidental to capturing that writer's style. To reduce "style" to "stylometry" is to commit the cardinal sin of technical analysis: namely, incinerating all the squishy qualitative aspects that can't be readily fed into a model and doing math on the resulting dubious quantitative residue:
If you wanted to teach a chatbot to teach writing like a writer, you would – at a minimum – have to train that chatbot on the instruction that writer gives, not the material that writer has published. Nor can you infer how a writer would speak to a student by producing a statistical model of the finished work that writer has published. "Published work" has only an incidental relationship to "pedagogical communication."
Critics of Grammarly are mostly focused on the effrontery of using writers' names without their permission. But I'm not bothered by that, honestly. So long as no one is being tricked into thinking that I endorsed a product or service, you don't need my permission to say that I inspired it (even if I think it's shit).
What I find absolutely offensive about Grammarly is not that they took my name in vain, but rather, that they reduced the complex, important business of teaching writing to a statistical exercise in nudging your work into a word frequency distribution that hews closely to the average of some writer's published corpus. This is Grammarly's fraud: not telling people that they're being "taught by Cory Doctorow," but rather, telling people that they are being "taught" anything.
Reducing "teaching writing" to "statistical comparisons with another writer's published work" is another way of saying "go fuck yourself" – not to the writers whose identities that Grammarly has hijacked, but to the customers they are tricking into using this terrible, substandard, damaging product.
Preying on aspiring writers is a grift as old as the publishing industry. The world is full of dirtbag "story doctors," vanity presses, fake literary agents and other flimflam artists who exploit people's natural desire to be understood to steal from them:
https://writerbeware.blog/
Grammarly is yet another company for whom "AI" is just a way to lower quality in the hopes of lowering expectations. For Grammarly, helping writers with their prose is an irritating adjunct to the company's main business of separating marks from their money.
In business theory, the perfect firm is one that charges infinity for its products and pays zero for its inputs (you know, "scholarly publishing"). For bosses, AI is a way to shift their firm towards this ideal.
In this regard, AI is connected to the long tradition of capitalist innovation, in which new production efficiencies are used to increase quantity at the expense of quality. This has been true since the Luddite uprising, in which skilled technical workers who cared deeply about the textiles they produced using complex machines railed against a new kind of machine that produced manifestly lower quality fabric in much higher volumes:
It's not hard to find credible, skilled people who have stories about using AI to make their work better. Elsewhere, I've called these people "centaurs" – human beings who are assisted by machines. These people are embracing the socialist mode of automation: they are using automation to improve quality, not quantity.
Whenever you hear a skilled practitioner talk about how they are able to hand off a time-consuming, low-value, low-judgment task to a model so they can focus on the part that means the most to them, you are talking to a centaur. Of course, it's possible for skilled practitioners to produce bad work – some of my favorite writers have published some very bad books indeed – but that isn't a function of automation, that's just human fallibility.
A reverse centaur (a person conscripted to act as a peripheral to a machine) is trapped by the capitalist mode of automation: quantity over quality. Machines work faster and longer than humans, and the faster and harder a human can be made to work, the closer the firm can come to the ideal of paying zero for its inputs.
A reverse centaur works for a machine that is set to run at the absolute limit of its human peripheral's capability and endurance. A reverse centaur is expected to produce with the mechanical regularity of a machine, catching every mistake the machine makes. A reverse centaur is the machine's accountability sink and moral crumple-zone:
AI is a normal technology, just another set of automation tools that have some uses for some users. The thing that makes AI signify "go fuck yourself" isn't some intrinsic factor of large language models or transformers. It's the capitalist mode of automation, increasing quantity at the expense of quality. Automation doesn't have to be a way to reduce expectations in the hopes of selling worse things for more money – but without some form of external constraint (unions, regulation, competition), that is inevitably how companies will wield any automation, including and especially AI.
As an Internet Veteran* and a web developer, I have a lot of strong opinions about the Internet and the direction it's going in.
Now I'm gonna allow myself a rant and hopefully convert at least one of you, and then I'll go back to obsessing over imaginary people. Ok? Ok.
*I've been online in one way or other since the late 90s/early 2000s.
Yes, much of the Internet sucks now...
In the beginning, everyone had their own site. Fansites. Art portfolios. Online journals (the word "blog" wasn't invented yet). Lots of weird places you'd stumble upon by link-hopping from site to site.
But of course, as soon as the technology took off, the market noticed. Social media came along and made it easier to create an account on their sites than make something for yourself, so that's what everyone did. And here we are now.
Instead of a million little houses built by passionate individuals and all having streets and pathways linking to each other, we have these massive walled gardens of rented flats built by commercial interest. They're keeping their users like animals in a zoo where everything is an account and a subscription and an ALGORITHM (gods I hate algorithms almost as much as I hate AI) and monetized by taking our data* and using it to show us ever-increasing amounts of ads.
*Collecting more data is all this age verification/chat control nonsense is about btw. I don't believe for a second they're actually interested in "protecting children" or anything of the sort.
...but there's still hope
Good news is, the personal non-monetized Internet is still out there.
It's just been buried under a fuckton of ad-infested garbage and can be tricky to find.
There are still entire communities of people taking pride in making their own personal websites instead of relying solely on social media.
The main reason is of course because it's plain ol' fun, but another big point is to break out of the zoo. To take back some semblance of control over your digital life and contribute to an Internet that is still made by and for regular people, not for corporations.
If we can make websites ourselves, we negate some of the power they hold over us. No need to get quite so devastated when Tumblr/AO3/Meta/etc yet again changes something for the worse if you always have your own site to fall back on.
As neat as it is to have everyone on social media, I wish more people would set aside the time to make their own sites.
We all live online, might as well have your own house. A house you can build however you want and can be taken down and moved somewhere else should the need arise.
"But but but my audience..?"
Yeah, sure, the zoos are useful for meeting people and getting your work seen. I'm here too, aren't I? I understand you want to be where most of the eyes are.
What I'm getting at is: YOU SHOULD HAVE BOTH!
Use whatever to network and find your friends and fans - but don't put all your digital eggs in one corporate basket. Just like you sync your phone to the cloud and back up your hard drive (you are backing up your hard drive, right? Right?!) you should back up your creations and post them somewhere where you have control over them. Somewhere people can see your things without having to sign up for another bloody account.
While I realise I make webweaving sound like some activism thing, it really is a cool hobby.
I can't overstate how fun and rewarding it is to have your own place on the Internet!
❣️ Poking around with the layout and content and learning how it all works under the hood.
❣️ The thrill when you wrangle the browser into submission and get it to work exactly how you want it
❣️ Making friends and trading knowledge with other web-weavers
❣️ Not to mention the pride of showing the link to people like "yeah, I made this. And I made the website it is on too 😎"
It's beyond worth it for the skills you learn and the people you meet! At least think about it, please.
"But I can't code or design, how would I even make a website? It's too much work"
Can you take a prewritten text document and edit it? That's all you need to start.
Can you edit your Tumblr theme? Shit, you're halfway there already.
Creating a simple personal site really doesn't have to be that complicated.
There are boatloads of free ready-made layouts and templates you can edit and free graphics so you don't have to start from scratch. Many websites don't even have graphics at all.
There are also free content management systems that, once set up, allows you to edit most things without any coding at all. Installing, say, WordPress takes 5 minutes if even that.
Not to mention the myriad of very beginner-friendly tutorials and even real live people to ask.
Us personal web enthusiasts are THRILLED whenever someone new wants to join our ranks and most will fall over themselves trying to help. We're here for you. Hell, I'm here for you. My DMs are always open, don't hesitate to give me a shout if you wanna talk websites 🤝 (or previously mentioned imaginary people, I'm not fussy haha)
A few links to get you started:
32bit.cafe is a community of personal web enthusiasts and a great place to start. They have a massive list of resources and you can join the forum or discord if you want to chat with people.
Sadgrl has a lot of guides and resources too.
Pixel Shannon's guide to making your own website
Neocities is a free host and also has some community features
check out the web revival tag right here on Tumblr
More about the personal web movement:
Intro to the web revival by Melon
The IndieWeb community
Hello, world, I have a solution to the Internet problem
Visit MelonLand's Surf Club for loads of examples of personal websites
Now, go build your house. And then send me the link. I'm not joking, I really do want to see what you come up with!
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Sorry to do the screenshot drowning in water thing- it's 7:20am as I'm writing this and I just woke up and I'm lazy if anyone sees op's tags this isn't a direct attack on them (I can't even remember the blog name) I've seen this sentiment echoed across many many many posts and reblogs- (also please xcuse if this is rambly lmao)
So like... do you think 'the elves or tevinter or ferelden or isabela/rivain or the mortalitasi or the qunari or...' exists in a vacuum? Because that's the part that I don't understand. You say you want better writing but then you're fine with an integral part of tbe worldbuilding being thrown in the garbage. Because when people critique Veilguard about the lack of holy knickerweasels, it's not a wish for more pseudo christianity representation (another sentiment I've seen across posts and in the reblog of my own posts) it's a wish for the world to be as deep and textured as the world was in previous games.
I've made this post before but I'll remind everyone again - the first screen you see in Origins, everyone's first introduction to the series - is a black screen with a verse from the Canticle of Threnodies telling us how men entered the Maker's golden city and released a Blight upon the world. It's an excellent introduction. Because we are about to play a Grey Warden who is going to have to end this Blight. Throughout the whole game (in ambient dialogue, in quests, in characters) the Chantry is ever-present. In fact, one origin you can play as is a Circle mage, which means you were trapped in a tower by said Chantry.
I promise I'm going somewhere with this. We meet our companions, all of whom explicitly state in one form of another their beliefs - how they feel about the Chantry - whether this is through banters, personal dialogue we hear as we get to know them, or comments made during personal quests. Even Sten, I mean his whole personal quest only happens *because* he is qunari and this needs to find his sword before he can return home. That's his culture, that is his worldview and religion.
Zevran explains he is very devout - like every Antivan - but through that gives us an insight into his character by explaining how he rationalises this to himself and connects/balances it with being an assassin. Morrigan doesn't care about the Chantry and doesn't believe in the Maker, so she dislikes the Circle and the Circle mages. Wynne is only *alive* because of her faith. Leliana further expands upon all of this by giving her view on what she believes Andrastianism *should* be, and then Oghren introduces us to Paragons and takes away some of the mystery of the Sacred Ashes by talking about the lyrium veins in those mountains.
And how could I not mention Alistair, who doesn't really care either way and doesn't really have an opinion, just like with everything else in his life. (/j)
Do you see what's happening here?
By using this ambient dialogue, these banters and quests, the writers built characters that have opinions, worldviews *about* the world they're in. And not all of these opinions have to be pro-Chantry. I couldn't care less if these characters are actually devout. I've seen people say Leliana and Wynne are actually extremely annoying for the way they interact with Andrastianism, and that's completely fine to think, but that's an opinion! It's a feeling you have about a character and how they fit into the world they are in. It makes the world richer, even if it is ambiently, it gives you more information, it expands the characters and makes them feel real.
Contrast this with Veilguard.
There are a lot of criticisms about the characters being one note and flat and yeah. It's because they're not allowed to have opinions. Do you think these two things exist independently of each other?
The scene that sticks out to me most actually is one early game cutscene with Neve and Bellara where wisps knock some papers off Neve's table and Bellara picks up an Andrastian pendant.
Neve says 'I barely keep the holidays' explains briefly where she got it and then moves on. Later it's explained that it was Brom's but it's never explained within the context of 'faith'. It's never used as a way to explore Neve's struggle with feeling like there's no one there for her - not even a god. It's never used as a way to connect with her, or delve deeper into her character. And that's such a shame, because in real life religion is everywhere. Even if you aren't religious you would still have an opinion on it. I'm not saying that we need a five minute exposition dialogue on what exactly Andrastianism means to Neve Gallus and why she kept that pendant, but the subject matter of the game makes it extremely strange that that part of Neve, and by extension that part of Tevinter, is never explored. Hell, even her extreme hatred of blood magic is a very Andrastian stance to have. I'm not saying we need another Leliana, but Neve obviously desperately *wants* to believe in something. She's friends with Ashur who is obviously devout and friends with Rana who is a templar (the institution is religious by nature) so why not explore the Tevinter Chantry using her battle with her faith in goodness?
I could also go in on the Shadow Dragons and 'bring the Light' (what Light do you think we're talking about here?) but I'll leave that alone for now.
I actually feel the same about Bellara. At the end of Inquisition, we find out the Elven gods are real and they were evil. Ok. Many people have said many things about this, but my main gripe is that we have both Bellara and Davrin and neither of them really... have anything to say about it?
Davrin is all about 'hunting the goddess of monsters' and then doesn't really have anything else to say. Bellara knows a lot of the legends and stories and history, but crucially she never has an opinion on them. By this I mean that after Weisshaupt you can have a conversation with her about her guilt (which is so so so fucking stupid oh my god!!!) and tell her she doesn't have to feel guilty for what her gods are doing. (Fucking duh). But also... why is she feeling guilty? Was she extremely devout before all of this? What was her family like? Did someone tell her these stories about her gods? Is this making her question the wisdom of some other people? Where are her parents? What do they feel about this? Was she training to be a Keeper of her clan? (The Keeper which is called that in Dalish clans because they Keep. The knowledge. Of the Elvhen. Do you see what I mean?)
And we can go on and on. There was such a golden oppertunity to expand about Lucanis's feelings toward the Maker or Andraste when they found Zara in a Chantry. How he doesn't believe anymore or some shit, and that is a character desperately in need of some depth in game. Taash and their journey where you choose between being Rivaini or Qunari but it's sort of treated as choosing between eggs or toast for breakfast.
And don't get me started on Lace. Lace is a very devout Andrastian who was working for an Andrastian organisation for years and then she finds out about the Titans and she doesn't even have a small crisis of faith? She finds out the Maker isn't real and she just... doesn't care? These are earth shattering revelations for these characters but it doesn't matter because they don't have *depth* or opinions or feelings. Where is the feeling?
And honestly? In any other game it wouldn't have been that big of a problem, but Dragon Age as a franchise is so intertwinded with its various religions. Veilguard is built on the Elvhen pantheon, and yet even that isn't ever properly adressed. And the argument of 'oh we're not in the South anymore' is quite frankly horseshit because Tevinter also has a Chantry. The Venatori ( one of the supposedly main villains in this game) are a *religious* cult, not some randos we find on the street. One of the main things that would change with that takeover would be the veneration of the Old Gods instead of Andraste and the Maker - wouldn't that have been so cool to see if you pick Treviso? But instead it just... sort of stays the same.
I don't know. There's a couple of different factors at work here. Imagine Origins Leliana if you had told her the Maker isn't real. Imagine Origins Zevran. Imagine Anders. I just feel like they missed an oppertunity for world and character depth and the reason it needs to be religion specifically is because this is Dragon Age. I'm sorry if *you* don't want to engage with that topic in this game, but (un?)fortunately that is the franchise you're playing. That *is* dragon age. It's a way to show mindsets and cultural differences and beliefs that isn't just straight up looking into the camera and saying something. Idk. Maybe I'm doing too much.
Have you had Nazi propaganda blazed onto your dashboard? Me too.
Its no secret that Tumblr doesn't give a damn about its user base. It's been made abundantly clear to me that not only do they not care. Tumblr is allowing posts with direct links to nazi propaganda and chatroom sites to be blazed!
The only reason I found this post? Because Tumblr put it in front of my face on my dashboard.
In the notes of this post there were dozens of reblogs with things like "is this an ARG?" "Oh whats this, save for later". One comment that said "tempting".
This is a neo nazi trying to recruit you.
Report this immediately. Do not click links. Email [email protected] telling them that you don't want neo nazis paying them to show us this garbage.
If you want to know how I figured out what this was in more detail, I'll put it under a read more so that everyone can be a little safer and a little smarter out there.
First: I went to the persons blog.
This one in particular is clever enough to have an ask about palestinian donations as their first post. The second is the one screenshot above.
I kept scrolling. Most are youtube links posted with 0 notes or interaction. This is another link to the same site here.
If you scroll far enough, you'll see they've reblogged an original post.
If you directly copy and paste this text into google, you'll find exactly one result. A PDF in Bulgarian hosted on a website named aobg.org.
Sounds legit, right?
Its the official website for the Bulgarian Society of Anthroposophy. A 'new age spiritual movement based on German idealism'. A cult.
As soon as I made the connection, I knew that clicking the original link would lead me to something similar. I felt confident enough to click it safely (DO NOT TRY AT HOME), and was launched into the shittiest little pro Nazi website with a live chatroom on the side.
There are always signs, always queues. Do not be stupid out there. These are NOT ARGs. If you aren't sure, block and move on.
Welcome to Warmclan, a casual non-comic style ClanGen blog. This blog is run by @rooted-clangen !! There is no set story, and updates will be both visual and written. Style inspired by @fallenclan and @branchclangen.
Content/trigger warnings for... sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, assault (all types), and possible grooming. They're not good cats.
THIS BLOG IS INTERACTIVE! ASKS ARE TREATED AS CHARACTERS SO FEEL FREE TO ATTACH REFS.
They'd finally made it out.
When the humans had come again with their cars and kennels, they had known it was their only chance to escape being under the control of owners again- several of them had come from the shelters and did not wish to return there to sit and wait for who knew how long, just to perhaps end up in a similar situation. Tucked amongst the rubbish and layers of garbage and papers, they waited... a door opened, the people spoke, windows cracked open. Charlie bolted, and the others followed. Some got grabbed, some hesitated, some realized they feared outside more than the humans.
In the end, 8 of them met up in the midday light under the shrubs and caught their breath- freedom. Don laughed in relief but Charles cut him off with a sharp look. "We're not in the clear yet," The black and white tom warned, "We're out of the house but we still need food, water, a place to sleep." The group shuffled their paws and murmured agreements. Cherry, a huge tom with spiked cream and sandy brown fur spoke up, calm and collected. "We could join the wildcats- the clans I they call themselves? I know they usually accept fresh blood." When cast questioning glances he continued, "I used to speak with a few of 'em, through the window."
Charlie's fur bristled at the mere idea of being under the orders of another. "No." His tone was sharp and final, "No, why join them when we can make our own? True freedom. Follow me, and we'll be safe."
With nowhere else to go, the group of cats travelled away from the suburbs and towards the hills and farmlands. After a few days they had found an old hare warren that gave them a place to settle and moors to hunt and explore. To the south, in the shrublands, was Heatwaveclan. To the west, in the farm fields, were the kittypets that called themselves Chinchillaclan. To the north, in the sparse forest and brambles, was Shrikeclan.
Settled in the flower fields and rolling hills, Warmclan was created.
Charlie names himself Charlockstar and appoints Don, now Divingruff, his deputy. Cherry is dubbed Cherryear and appoints himself the healer of the group. The rest take new names as warriors, apprentices, and kits: Beans to Trenchgleam, Hot Sauce to Barkchill, Sweater to Burntpaw, Truffle to Shatterkit, and lastly Soot Sprite to Driftkit.
